Taomeow

Kudos. It is the right way to do the full lotus, is what it is. Of course you can then release the hands and keep them in any mudra you like for the practice, but the correct position of the legs in full lotus is arrived at via the bound lotus maneuver. I can only do it when I practice diligently (unlike "just any" full lotus which I can do whether I practice or not.) Moreover, a bound lotus is, to me, a personal indicator of a balanced or unbalanced state I'm in in general (one side will be easy and the other side will be difficult). So, as all good practices, it's a body-mind-spirit owner's manual accurately describing the goings-on in your life... you learn to read as you go.

I agree -- check for possible physical problems (including anemia). If these are excluded, acknowledge the feeling as a very early somatosensory memory unblocked by whatever practices or emotions can reach deep and partially connect something of the entirety of your life's experience stored therein. I say "partially" because a complete connection eliminates the unresolved feeling, in my experience. I had a very similar thing going on a bunch of years ago, when my unconscious memories started kicking in and intruding into consciousness (for reasons I won't go into here). The jolts, in particular, started happening many times a day and driving me nuts -- I called them "private earthquakes" -- they were every bit as unsettling as "public" ones, more so because I was alone in the tectonic zone. OK, so after some deep feeling work, the memory connected and the feeling was gone permanently. The memory turned out to have been WAY early. My mother fell on her butt once when she was pregnant with me. I asked her later and she confirmed it, accurately describing the outer circumstances of what I experienced from the inside. She was shaken, scared and upset -- which is why I got all these feelings transmitted to me (there's a direct exchange of stress hormones between the mother and the fetus) and the sensation of the jolt was therefore always accompanied by these emotions. I'm not saying this is what happened in your case. Everybody has their own early real-life events imprinted in their systemic memory. Some babies were dropped. Some were pushed, shaken, turned upside down and slapped as soon as they were born, the list of possibilities is very long. Everybody remembers, few know they do... Practices that activate some latent, dormant systems and functions can activate some latent, hidden memories embedded in these systems and functions. Most will produce only sensations and ideation to explain them away. Few will produce systemic conscious connections. Many legends and myths of humanity are based on this peculiar phenomenon...

Turkeys do that too.

Hi Simple Girl, thank you for introducing yourself. Let me do likewise: I'm a complicated woman. I like sunflowers and rain except when sunflowers are sprayed with pesticides and rain is mixed with oil and Corexit. I like coffee at all times, and I make it in a cezve -- it's simpler than a coffee maker but you may have to look it up. I choose the quietest fan for my room but any fan is always too loud. I understand most of this site, but when I first arrived here I didn't. I love my family and I love me and the whole world is everything and nothing has nothing to do with anything. My name is not me. But I am me.

It's too complicated to drink anything at all. For one thing, it's dangerous... you have to learn to swallow just so or else you can drown! And it means you have to actually pay some attention to your body, what a drag! The body, ugh... which according to the foremost pop spiritual authorities is a figment of your mind's imagination to begin with! And then you have to perpetuate this useless nonexistent illusion by messing with all those wells, faucets, bottles, glasses, cups, it's so materialistic, so unenlightened, and sooooo complicated!

Um... what about zen buddhist koans? The I Ching deals with phenomena of space and time. These are neither linear nor straight. The I Ching mirrirs Reality in all its complexity. However, complexity, to a taoist, arises from simplicity -- "the way of Heaven is easy and the way of the Earth is simple," as Ta Chuan, The Great Treatise on the Changes, opens its elucidations. So in order to understand what is happening on the level of complexity, i.e. in a current situation predicated on the whole history of the universe, both actual and projected into the future, an I Ching diviner must understand which basic simple steps have come together to lead to this point. This is usually doable if you start from the very basics and move on step by step. If you don't, the I Ching is incomprehensible. I mean generic "you," not you personally. It's crystal clear in hind sight, of course, but the original reading merely suggested that there will be obstacles to its actualization, which will disappear if your behaivor is correct. To cancel the trip, causing all these obstacles to "go extinct," as in a phenomenon that is no longer there at all rather than one fraught with difficulties, is one possible resolution of the situation. However, now that ONE prong of a fork in the road (or rather, in the events horizon) has been taken, one possibility actualized (that's what you did with your free will), the other possible developments stemming from that fork fade into the virtual domain of possibilities where they are indistinguishable from non-happenings, like all potentials not realized. (I could spill my coffee on my keyboard right now and all possibilities of finishing this message would disappear into that realim. I don't take this road. I handle my cup carefully. So the possible/potential configuration of space-time where my keyboard stops functioning right now fade into nonexistence.) The I Ching usually supplies such a fork by way of an answer: take this prong and this is the likely outcome, take that one and some other outcome is to be expected. Then you, personally, decide how to act based on this projection. That's what I meant by "interplay of destiny and free will."

Only some are burned, not all of them. It all depends on the task. Some are worn on the body, of these, there's the ones that are concealed and the ones that are revealed. Some are displayed in the house. Some go into the car! Talismans are often rather specialized. It's a technology, you can't use the same tool for all tasks. The ones that are burned are usually cleansing and medicinal. They are used post factum, when the disease or possession is already present in the body or in the home. They aren't used for prevention, to my knowledge. But of course I don't know "all" about them. No, it's a different technology. Messages to gods and spirits are burned so as to de-materialize (spirits are not material in this dimension, so means of communication with them need to be brought to their own dimension.) But when you burn a talisman, you want to create a fractal of action (ganying) to cover different scales -- from gross to molecular to subatomic and beyond. And you dissolve the ashes in water for action much like that of a homeopathic remedy. Even a respected TCM doctor's prescription written in his own hand was used much the same way -- it went into the pot together with the herbs it prescribed! A good TCM practitioner trained in an authentic lineage would learn to write prescriptions in a talismanic fashion, not mechanically. The above describes a generic method of taoist magic. It may or may not have anything to do with talismans. When you do a taoist magical ritual, you communicate with gods and spirits in writing, among other things. Such a ritual may have any purpose whatsoever, e.g. it can precede the actual writing of a talisman and constitute a request to facilitate the task. The script moves gods if gods are moved by what you're doing -- no god of any consequence is any magician's busboy (or girl). To my knowledge, you don't command gods in taoist magic until very, very late in the game (a thousand years is a minimum investment of schooling time) -- you establish communication. Of course one can always command lesser spirits, demons, etc., especially the servile/self-serving ones (a servile attitude is always full of ulterior motives). These are fond of dropping in on a ritual to see if there's anything in it for them. This is one reason I would advise against dabbling in taoist magic. You need to know the rules of engagement and engage only what/who you intend to engage. Mistakes are common, repercussions are dire. It's both.

I once consummated an all-important relationship to this song, and "happiness is a warm gun" has always had many meanings for me ever since. I was looking for something on youtube to illustrate some of them, but when I came across this one interpretation, I thought, whoa, there's more meanings therein than I ever considered... so I posted it to get someone else to scratch their head and go, hmmm... happiness... what is happiness?.. "Happiness is a warm gun" means, it is charged, dynamic, full of potential... also, dangerous... also, safe... I love this line.

Oh, so now I understand why "its extinction, its extinction!" was given with an exclamation mark, twice, and why this particular term was used (instead of the more typical or expected "elimination," "removal" or "dissolution" of obstruction.) To cancel a trip that involves an obstruction is the only way to "extinction" of same -- no one's path is obstructed by a dinosaur! This is the interplay of free will and destiny the I Ching knows everything about -- it's always interesting to look at a reading post factum, an "aha" invariably follows.

I agree -- Ayurveda is fascinating, these are both powerful and complete systems, and the reason I prefer TCM is not because it is "better" but because it is not as difficult for a solo lay practitioner to implement. Pop Ayurveda as given to the Westerners seems easy enough, but the real thing (e.g., as taught in Maya Tiwari's Secrets of Ayurvedic Healing) is sooo complex... "techniques" abound, and many procedures are more technically involved than acupuncture by several orders of magnitude. Ayurveda is to TCM what yoga is to taijiquan -- both are strongly efficient, but the former is way more "convoluted" than the latter. Similarly, the Hindu religion (and everything it spilled into buddhism in the course of cross-polination) is, compared to taoism, very complicated. The same applies to cooking... I tried to read a cooking encyclopedia written by a professional Ayurvedic chef and she starts out by explaining that you need three or four of your sisters, daughters, nieces to help in the kitchen, but then adds bluntly, "in order to do real Ayurvedic food preparation, you need to have servants in the kitchen!" A few principles to start out with (and I got a confirmation that they are a living tradition during my recent trip to China) -- 1. Most preparation is done before cooking begins -- the cleaver rules! Everything is shredded into small pieces. Meats come in thin transparent strips, vegetables are cut uniformly into small morsels or thin slices or straw-like bits no thicker than vermicelli. 2. Then rapid stir-frying or grilling takes only a few minutes. Very short term, very high temperature cooking is typical. Vegetables aren't eaten raw but are never overcooked to mushy conditions. The color of a cooked vegetable is brighter than that of its raw version -- the moment the color intensifies is when the stir-frying stops. 3. If they eat it raw, they think of it as a fruit. Tomatoes and cucumbers are in this category. I've seen people bite into a cucumber in Xi'an many times, the way we bite into an apple. (Don't try it with a supermarket cucumber, it tastes like nothing.) 4. Awareness of food's energetics is part of the culture -- you find entries on restaurant menus like "soup to moisten the lungs," "kidney qi strengthening congee" and the like. This of course is just the tip of the iceberg... TCM is huge and equipped to customize an individual diet with much precision if necessary or desired -- for any purposes, physical or spiritual or social. (You eat certain things because there's a festival during which they are traditionally eaten -- for a few days you eat the same thing a billion others are eating simultaneously with you -- and have been doing this for thousands of years -- that should do something interesting to the "spirit of unity")

Well... I AM all over this discussion and I never eat breakfast either. (doesn't mean I don't know what I would eat if I did.) It has always surprised me that so many people somehow manage to wake up hungry. I know the "breakfast is the most important meal" blah blah drill... but I simply never wake up hungry, ever. And I have this policy, I don't eat if I'm not hungry. I have night munchies. I know the drill too... it's just that I can never go to sleep hungry. Tried "breaking" myself to conform to conventional thought in this regard many times. Doesn't work! So now that I'm reading up on Native American nutrition, I've discovered they didn't eat breakfast either. In fact, they didn't eat the first meal of the day till they did something physically strenuous -- if there was nothing urgent to do, they played games. Late night meals, however, were common. Hmmm...

That's not a bad diet, but I believe you could make it better. It's true that a lot of fatty meat was by far the most important food source for all early cultures -- they didn't go for rabbit or chicken, they went for the largest, fattest animal in their habitat -- whatever they had that was the biggest and the fattest, that's what they hunted for -- mammoth, bison, buffalo, whale, walrus... the fatter the better. But I've been gathering information on the eating habits of Native Americans (perusing early books on the subject, later ones have a lot of stuff made up... like, 95%), since they were eating the closest to what's natural for humans as recently as only a few hundred years ago, and some records survive. So according to my sources, they had vegetable gardens they tended to, planted fruit trees, ate lots and lots of greens, and in general the whole diet was about a huge variety... they ate everything in good season, and things they wouldn't normally eat in bad season. This, too, was typical of all peoples on earth before the advent of monoculture agricultures, selective breeding, GM, factory farming and other bats from hell: they not just thoroughly but exhaustively explored their habitat for ALL its edibles. Scientist -- biologists, botanists, agricultural specialists, etc. -- who came later were never, ever able to discover a single edible plant growing anywhere that local populations didn't know was edible and didn't eat. As Freddie Mercury almost sang, We are the omnivores, my friend/And we'll keep on biting till the end... ...sorry, getting silly, I'm outta here.

Allies... You mean puppets on the same string? Absolutely. The puppeteer can make it appear that the puppets are fighting. The show must go on...

By the way, Matt Simmons was found dead last week. At first they reported "drowning," then "heart attack," then "drowning in his bath tub." Happens a lot to people who make waves... they drown. Or otherwise succumb to a sudden death following a failure to cure them of whistleblowing.

DC, you got two changing lines in the primary hexagram, and they are a direct answer to your question, while the rest paints the landscape against which they are activated. They are indicative of some initial difficulties with your plan followed by success if you handle the obstruction "firmly and correctly." The Eranos I Ching offers "obstruction," then "its extinction!" in the fifth line, and "before obstruction, afterward joy" in the sixth. These are the projected "most likely" dynamics of your plan. Also, looking at the rulers of the primary hexagram, the 2nd and 5th lines, we notice that they are in their proper places, the yin line in the yin place and the yang line in the yang place. This is not inauspicious but it is a static (blocked, obstructed) situation (yin below, yang above, business as usual). Luckily, the change introduces movement in the 5th line, so obstruction will dissolve. Overall meaning: if the rest of the world holds up, enjoy your vacation!

Thanks for the reading recommendations. Alas, you can't walk into the same river twice... my chance to become deeply involved with Ayurveda was taken out of my hands by the very first TCM book that landed therein. After this... no turning back for me. I didn't read your buddhist threads, sorry, I don't read buddhist threads at all unless they get reported to the mod squad. Your last sentence is a good illustration as to why. (sorry other buddhists who would never say something like this, I don't mean "all of you," only "those of you who are fond of saying things of this kind" and you know who you are.)

Thank you, Ramon! How do you do your paleolithic diet -- Price-Pottenger style or something else?

I'll try. Unlike all Indo-European systems, taoism is not predicated on a divorce between matter and spirit. There's no dichotomy, there's no demarcation line, there's no conflict, there's no opposition. There's no "matter animated by spirit," "spirit degrading into matter," none of these goodies. What do we have instead in taoism? Phases of the same process, aspects of the same flow... "to and fro goes the way." Tao in motion manifests as matter AND spirit; tao in stillness is unmanifested; being comes from nonbeing; nonbeing is therefore mother of spirit and matter alike, but also their child, because the road is isotropic, it goes both ways -- at all times. Tao is what tao does. Tao is what tao doesn't do. Doing equals being equals nonbeing equals non-doing. Therefore, spirit and matter are aspects of the same phenomenon, tao. Therefore there are no spiritual lineages in taoism. A spiritual lineage would mean something different and separate from a "material" lineage of your teacher. This is not possible in taoism. Even if your teacher is a spiritual entity, he or she became that after having been a human being. E.g., the Eight Immortals are all spiritual beings but they all started out as human beings. If a spiritual entity didn't start out as a human being, it started out as an animal, plant, mineral -- but in every case material, and can go back to being that if it so desired. There's many taoist stories about a star descending on earth to live as a human being and serve as an emperor's adviser, then ascending back to heaven. Stories of powerful dragons living happily as house pets for a while. Stories of people being material in this dimension and spirits in some other, and vice versa. So all lineages in taoism are materio-spiritual, none are purely one or purely the other. Nagas, according to my sources, are progenitors of the human race. Their spiritual aspect is the DNA. Their material aspect on earth is supposed to be the civilization they are supposed to have founded on the continent of Mu. When THAT disappeared, they migrated, to start lineages in India, Yucatan and where-not. I am not familiar with all of them, I only know the Naga-Maya lineage. The Naga-Mayas are likely to have started the taoist lineages. I will have to doublecheck when I finish sorting out my library and my memory. Also sprach Taomeow.

The reason for bigu as explained in taoist sources is, there are three monsters in the human body that feed on grains. They are sometimes called "the three worms," but depicted graphically as monsters. They get nourishment from no other source but the grains you eat, and if you don't eat any grains, you starve them. The three monsters are, effectively, provocateurs in the taoist tradition: they cause you to misbehave and overstep all sorts of moral and ethical boundaries, then snitch on you to the Jade Emperor! What would this correspond to in Western scientific terms, what d'you reckon?

That might well be the healthiest (and ancient) way to eat, but it's hard to pull off under current conditions. For starters, I would (almost did, except for occasional relapses) eliminate all gluten-containing grains -- wheat, rye, barley, oats, spelt, amaranth, and also corn (they can't decide whether it's gluten-containing but it behaves as a major immune system confuser anyway.) Gluten is very close in its molecular structure to certain ancient viruses (so much so that it is rather mind-bogglingly possible that these grains were genetically spliced with the virus by aliens who introduced agriculture as a prerequisite for human enslavement -- freedom and agriculture don't mix.) Human immune systems mistake gluten for this virus and attack it on a daily basis for as long as one eats these grains. So our immune systems wage a pointless war all our grain-eating life, exhausting their resources and making more and more mistakes, just like a country constantly at war against an artificially created enemy. I'm pretty sure other grains have a very dark side too, but I would start eliminating them all gradually, beginning with the more virulent ones. Currently, by way of grains I try to eat only rice, some millet and quinoa, and -- though it's not a grain, it looks and behaves in cooking like one -- buckwheat (related to cabbage rather than to wheat despite its name). Buckwheat can stay, but the rest might eventually go. I'm convinced grain-eating is very addictive and very unnatural. I was a peculiar kid -- I didn't want any grains in my diet, nor any sweets made with refined sugar... only meat, veggies, fruit, period. I was force-fed even chocolate! to say nothing of milk and bread and the like... So if I find my "original self," a taoist pursuit if there ever was one, I think the remaining grains will just drop off. Or maybe it's vice versa?... work in progress...

OK, agree about environment interplaying with nutrition -- the sunnier it is, the less meat one can get away with eating. I've never met whole enclaves of vegetarians when I lived on the East Coast but they are ubiquitous here in California. Which only confirms my assertion (while refuting the opposite one) that meat is very yang. So is the sun. If you have plenty of one, you can get away with not having plenty of the other. This is also seasonal-individual -- I'm a far more voracious meat eater in winter (even in CA) than in summer. I've read Dr. Vasant Lad's books as my first intro to Ayurveda, years ago. The book on the subject that persisted on my reference shelf is by Maya Tiwari... here's a reference back at you! I've studied many (most major and scores of minor) nutritional traditions of the world over the years, my current preferences and understanding are the integrated outcome of this endeavor, and this understanding is still not carved in stone... interacting with food is easily one of the most challenging and exciting endeavors of a lifetime... has been since the dawn of time.

Excellent catch, Kate. I'm sure being grilled by a "medical professional" at the critical moment when consciousness can be made or broken doesn't help one bit. A frightened soul might recall all those traumatic tests and exams of its childhood and recognize the place it has arrived at as difficult, emotionally bu-ren (numb) and even hostile. I'm sure there's many, many cases where the soul/consciousness promptly decides, OK, I"m outta here, THIS, I don't need. Why the difference? Well, the emergency soul-healing procedure I've described was created by people who believe people actually have a soul... Our medical emergency procedures were devised by people who don't. The ear-pulling -- for body awareness, to draw vital force into body awareness, to counteract the paralyzing numbness accompanying soul loss. The ear is a reflexological model of the whole body, in acupuncture it can be used as such (auriculoacupnctue, where only the ears are treated as a stand-off for the body). They are easier to handle in emergency than trying to stimulate the whole body all at once, and yet efficient enough. A recent Chinese Shamanism thread has pretty good lectures posted (I haven't finished listening and I found very little shamanism in the parts I have heard, but a lot of good solid taoist thought instead), and the author asserts, rightfully, that spirit must fully incarnate for there to be wholeness. Disease is the state where parts of the body are separated from parts of the spirit, incarnation is incomplete. (In an extreme case we have a zombie, incarnation largely absent, i.e. the body is functional because vital centers are intact but the will is gone, i.e. one or more of the shens are completely missing, are not incarnated in this body.) So pulling the ears physically is an aid to re-incarnation, in this case of parts of the soul that may have fled the horror rather than the whole soul as in the case of a death and rebirth.

In China, these entities are known as the Sitting Gui. They are considered very dangerous. A family member needs to be taught a procedure to use whenever something like this (or other frightening visitations) happens to someone in the family. They should pull the sufferer's both ears, strongly and painfully, and keep repeating, many times, "Your name is such and such. Your mother's name is this and this, your father's... son's... girlfriend's... (whoever the close people are, they should be brought up and their names clearly stated and repeated.) You live in (full home address, beginning with country, state, etc.). This is where you live. You are happy here. You want to stay here. Come home. Come home. Come back home. You are loved here. You are safe here. " This is done to assure that parts of the soul frightened away by the entity return instead of getting permanently lost. This is an emergency procedure, very efficient if used right away. If a Sitting Gui is just one episode, hopefully it has left. If it keeps happening, the room should never be slept in. (They are heavy and seldom move from room to room.)

I'm just following the Chinese taoist tradition as established by Laozi who consistently and repeatedly refers to tao as "The Great Mother." (When he brings up a food metaphor, e.g., he says, "I nourish at the Great Mother's breast.") It has been well established that mothers are, generally, female. Mine is. I'm pretty sure so is yours. So is tao, "the great mother" to taoist traditionalists.