Taomeow

Cool thread! I am pretty sensitive to voices esthetically and emotionally. There's several types that affect me the most: 1. Positively -- very low, deep, resonant male voices. (A perfect example: Leonard Cohen.) They seem to smooth out my own qi and induce serenity and peace of mind. 2. Negatively -- high-pitched, chirping, childish voices in adult women. In general voices that are not congruent with age... but little-girl-emulating adult women are the hardest on my ears. Their voices feel like sha' arrows. 3. Positively -- strong, calm, singsong female voices. They energize me and make me optimistic and confident. 4. Negatively -- "tough" authoritative male voices with drama-queen exaggerated modulations. (Drill sergeant type.) They infuriate and depress me. I can "fall in love at first sound" rather than "at first sight." What does it say about me?

Good for you. I played the piano as a kid... I'm sure it would have been beneficial to breathe properly while doing that too, but nobody taught me. At every natural breath, and not forceful at all for this purpose, but simply long enough -- twice as long as the inhale. Counting can help in the beginning. Whatever the duration of one's natural inhale, a mindful exhale should follow, twice as long. In most cases, yes. But we're talking natural breathing with mindfulness added on the exhale, this is safe enough if "don't force it" is remembered. Of course there's scores of breathing techniques that can make one pretty loopy. (A psychedelic experience can be induced by the Seven Locks technique, e.g., and fast -- within a couple of minutes. This is an example of a "don't try it without a teacher" method.)

Not "good for you" but very different from what we all know from a few decades of nothing but anti- propaganda. For a more historically and scientifically accurate picture, check out "Tobacco: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World," by Iain Gately. Oh, and it wasn't a dentist who told me, giving the info secretly, whispering it in my ear as a present at a party celebrating my 16th birthday, it was a prominent neurosurgeon, my parents' friend. (Who is still working full time today, at age 80, although he had to become a plastic surgeon after immigrating to another country, poor thing -- couldn't do brains in a language he only started learning in his 60s. Awesome memory you have none the less!) I don't want to go into it in depth because experience has taught me that unless I have all the time in the world to make a case against something people had been taught all their lives, it is invariably followed by vehement indignation and someone brings up a relative with lung cancer (although I can bring up millions of non-smokers getting same -- it's currently the second leading cancer in American women, with rates in this non-smoking generation WAY higher than they had ever been in the smoking ones that went before...) and, as Krusty the Clown put it "when asked for comments," "This, I don't need." The Genghis Khan book is "Genghis Khan: Conqueror of the World," by I.B.Tauris. It is super detailed and more suitable for people deep into historic literature -- frankly, I got bored midway, not because it's boring but because it's a bit too scholarly for my purpose which was sheer entertainment, or maybe because the story started repeating itself: he came, he saw, he conquered... he came, he saw, he conquered... he came... etc., with no surprises anymore and with the only diversion supplied by his "seeing the light of tao" in his 50s.

Didgeridoo... why?

The classic taoist technique is to click your teeth together 32 times, then brush them with your tongue and swallow the saliva. Yogic: visualize a heavy weight attached to your chin and slowly lift it. Russian: chew a tablespoon of sunflower oil for 15 minutes. Do not swallow. Ayurvedic: brush with Vajradanti, an herbal tooth powder.

From a trustworthy teacher: most people don't EXHALE properly, i.e. completely. Most problems, and more serious ones, arise from improper exhale. His advice: learn to exhale completely before attempting any other breath control moves.

Yup -- as Taoist81 said, it's about the proper use of YOUR body, not some "generic" body. Taoist masters, generally, don't run marathons either (although there's several esoteric techniques that make it a piece of cake -- one is taught by Max, another by WLP). They are just not that into that. A marathon runner, on the other hand, has never kicked anyone's ass, to my knowledge. To each their own. When "western" people start thinking about what makes Tarahumara or this or that athlete superhealthy, they look at the diet and lifestyle and unconsciously edit out what they don't think of as part of a healthy lifestyle while failing to phase in what is there that they don't have and can't have that is part of a healthy lifestyle. So they start eating vegan, e.g., ignoring the get-drunk-every-three-days and smoke part of the lifestyle, thinking that Tarahumara are superhealthy "despite of" doing these things, not thinking "because of" -- but "despite" or "because" is in the eye of the beholder, the simple fact remains that they actually do these things as part of their lifestyle. (Been reading Genghis Khan's biography and discovered that his warriors, another superhealthy breed of humans, didn't believe in being sober at all -- ever -- a real man was supposed to be always drunk, at all times. No impact on motor control in their case, they were legendary riders who never fell off their horses.) What is not looked at in these cases is usually the water these people drink -- the mountain water Tarahumara have access to can be 40,000 times more "energized" than our tap or bottled water, e.g.. People in the Caucasus Mountains who are also famous for their combo of longevity and agility in old age assert that it's because of the water... no one listens. Another factor is community. A sense of belonging, a sense of being part of your tribe, no alienation (the biggest health-busting factor in the civilized folks, unnoticed by "science" and relentlessly destructive to, yes, the body, not just the spirit -- there's no spirit unaffected by what the body is going through, and vice versa.) So a book on the Okinawan diet (Okinawans are the longest-lived and healthiest among "civilized" people) mentions in passing that they maintain lifelong friendships, strong family ties, ancestor veneration and the like, but fails to acknowledge that these factors may weigh in as more significant than what they eat or don't eat. To be superhealthy, one needs one simple thing: to be fully human. THIS part is not available from dietary sources alone. The old woman in the video I posted looks cheerful, spunky, spirited and spontaneous like few teenagers I meet in sunny California on a daily basis. I wonder why.

How about 80?

Here's how Ukrainian tribesmen do it: http://www.youtube.c...feature=related

Huang Pu Zheng's poem about Lu Yu (author of Cha Jing, The Classic of Tea; the translation appears to be literal and the lines are not really arranged grammatically, but I think they give nice snapshots) Saw Lu Yu off to Pick Tea Thousand mountains greeted my departing friend When spring tea blossoming again With in-depth knowledge in picking tea Through morning mist or crimson evening clouds His solitary journey is my envy Rendezvous in a temple of a remote mountain We enjoyed picnic by a clear pebble fountain In this silent night Lit up a candle light I knocked a marble bell for chime While deep in thought for old time.

I feel a bit guilty evading direct questions about Master Wang's teachings... but there's a good reason for this... Have you ever seen those classic Chinese paintings of Dragons in Clouds that show you pretty much a skyfull of clouds, nothing more, and only if you look very closely do you notice a claw sticking out from behind one of them, a tip of the tail showing through another?.. and that's all you see of the dragon. I've been showing glimpses of Master Wang in this manner because... well, for one thing, I myself haven't seen the WHOLE dragon, though I've seen some... and for another, this very style of showing that he's there... showing glimpses through the clouds... is traditional-taoist enough for me to try to emulate.

I used to alternate between a sauna and a cold shower (or a cold swimming pool when I lived near one that had one), it's a huge shock and you do feel great afterwards -- make it blissed out, sublime -- especially with the hot sauna/cold swimming pool combo when the sauna was really hot (you won't believe it if I tell you how hot, these figures are illegal in this country -- but we baked apples on the upper shelf while baking ourselves on the lower!) and the swimming pool, very cold. There used to be (maybe still is) a winter resort in upstate New York owned by a Finnish couple (the sauna is a Finnish invention, though its many versions existed everywhere of course -- sweat lodges etc.) and they encourage diving into the snow right from the sauna, then back, and so on. But I think one must choose one's shocks wisely... I've had enough, I've explored many, many extremes in order to be ready for the middle ground that lies in between. (How else would one know what balance is if she doesn't know where the extremes are?..) So, like all else, I think it's individual -- someone who "hasn't felt enough" might want to go for a few shocks, someone who has "felt too much" might quit. I quit.

and a friend sleeping astral-projects for a bite into my cake dream

My mother-in-law did the polar bear swim (in an opening made in the ice on a frozen body of water in winter) two or three times a week for decades, into her 70s. It didn't make her healthy, but we don't have a control group -- who knows what her health would be like if she didn't do it? or if she did something else too (this had always been her only practice.) She does have the benefit of never getting any colds or the flu. Polar bears and all polar animals store huge amounts of fat to protect them from cold; my mother-in-law is fat and I think that's one thing that helped her with the practice -- or maybe vice versa, the practice contributed to weight gain?.. I absolutely hate cold water, this includes cold drinks taken internally. And I don't gain weight.

Paul, god knows I share what I can and what I know willingly, perhaps more than some people want to hear from this particular source! -- but I'm not really authorized to do that with WLP's material. There's many reasons why information from the seminar given to regular practitioners with some training and understanding in the tradition of this particular school should not randomly enter public circulation in this manner, one of them being that much of it is intimately intertwined with the practice itself and will be useless or even harmful if extracted and separated from it. There's things that I don't see as posing a great danger of misapplication (as the above brief entry re food guidelines), but I don't think I should be picking and choosing, I might just go wrong and I don't want to go wrong here.

Malnourished? -- far from it. Quite robust, and the weird thing is, his weight seemed to fluctuate from day to day, but it must have been qi, not weight, in the belly -- now it's there, now it isn't. On the last day, after the seminar, I was seeing the whole departing group off and WLP looked slender -- not thin, just "in good shape" -- but during the seminar he seemed more massive... Very peculiar. About his personal diet he said that while he was in training with his teachers he was a vegetarian, but coming into the world one must take on the ways of the world for balance, so he does eat a little meat now. (I susupect -- just my impression of course, I don't really know -- that he's one of those wise men who will eat what the wife cooks, with no qualms. Unlike Confucius, whose wife left him because he was always complaining about the food!) He had specific instructions for the phases of the practice when one must abstain from meat, but this was related to things that, if/when they start happening, signal this. When a certain phase is reached, all so-called "blood foods" must be avoided for a number of days and these include all animal-derived foods -- meat, fish, seafood, all dairy, eggs, a few vegetables that "act like meat in the body" (not available outside some regions of China anyway), and certain fruits. He said nothing at all about tofu, or if he did, it wasn't translated as such. (The lectures were being simultaneously translated into Russian, and the word "tofu" was never mentioned, but then I don't know if the word has entered the Russian language at all -- there was no tofu in Russia when I was growing up, and I don't think most people there know what it is even today.) For regular lifestyles, he asserted that a taoist practitioner mustn't eat to be full and the regulating principle is hunger -- at each meal, you eat about 70% of what your "total" hunger "wants" you to eat. There's fasts and semi-fasts (liquid foods -- e.g. herbal decoctions) administered at particular times with certain stages of practice or therapeutically, but regular undereating below 70-75% is discouraged as unproductive.

Let's imagine something far out. You are born. Now let's see. What influences you at that moment? Who or what is in charge of you? And are the influences coming your way from whoever or whatever is in charge relevant at all for who you are going to be later? Let's mentally experiment a bit. Say, you are born to a mother who doesn't want you. She throws you in the dumpster and leaves. In the morning, having learned, with all your being, with everything you are, your first lesson about what life is about, you are found, half dead, frozen, shut down. They patch you up and place you in an orphanage. You are never held, spoken to, or loved. You are fed and drugged, and you survive. Fast forward 20, 30, 60 years. Has the beginning of your life influenced you at all? What d'you reckon? OK, here's another scenario. Your mom adores you from the second you're conceived, and as soon as you're born you're bathed in love and acceptance. An hour later, the bombs start falling. One of them hits your little house. Your mom is killed, you're miraculously unharmed. You are found by some soldiers and placed in a family that has twelve kids of their own and kind hearts, one more won't make a difference they say, we'll take him. They take you but no one has the time, the resources, the food, the incentives to give you more than 1/13th of anything you might need. And some of your adopted brothers and sisters really would prefer you weren't there. They let you know that. Always. Fast forward 20, 30, 60 years. Has what happened to you at birth influenced you at all? Another one. You are born in a good hospital, bright lights, big city. Your mom is worried about the possibility of stretch marks on her breasts, so she decides she won't breastfeed. You get your soy formula, you develop allergies, eventually the become severe, you're going to still design your life around them 20, 30, 60 years later. Has what happened to you at birth contributed? And now the universal one. You are born. Things happened before you were born. Many, many things, billions of years of all kinds of things happening. Stars were born and billions of them exploded and collapsed and sent showers of cosmic particles your way. Meteors hit and changed the climate of your planet, warm to cold to hot to freezing to mellow. Jupiter turned this way and that way, pulling on the electromagnetic field of your planet, now stronger, now weaker, making a dent in the gravitational net, now deep, now shallow. The moon caused all water on earth to swell up, then to recede, the ebb and tide of the ocean you can notice, the mirroring ebb and tide in your very own cells that are mostly water, in your own blood that is mostly water, you don't notice. But it matters! All of it matters. The precise configuration of all energies of the world, personal, impersonal, current, ancient -- all of it matters. All of it will make you into who you are going to become. You're in it, you can't NOT be shaped by it. Ah but what is this "it?" The great "all of it" that will shape you that is impossible to notice because it's too fathomless, too subtle -- or too huge and overwhelming -- to relate to your own private life? "It" has been noticed, observed, studied, recorded, mastered by the sages of old, the ancient astrologers. They had the time and patience, the awareness and the senses, the rhyme and reason to notice your mom and dad and your doctor and teacher as well as your village and country, your forest and ocean, your moon and sun, your cosmos and stars, your ruling phases of qi. Hundreds of thousands of times they noticed that there's no cut-off spot where it might all get fragmented into parts "independent" from other parts, there's no separate babies not affected by what Jupiter is up to, anymore than there's separate babies not affected by what mom and dad are up to. There's no such thing as not being influenced by the cosmic happenings -- and the earlier the moment you notice as the moment of immersion in these forces, the more accurate your prediction as to what they're going to do with you, for you, or against you. Birth is just about as early as you can notice; conception was a more crucial moment, with more implications for who you were going to be, because it came earlier. It decided whether you're going to be a boy or a girl, e.g., and what all of your genetic make-up is going to be... what species you were going to be, for starters... things bigger than what's decided at birth. But the ones that are decided at birth, the ones fully dependent on the overall configuration of the universe at that particular moment, are big enough too. So ancient astrologers focused on discerning, disentangling, and understanding as many of those forces as they could. The more they were able to discern and understand, the better they knew what kind of cosmic current you were born into -- or against. They created and maintained calendars that took this cosmic activity into account. Ours was copied on theirs, with the real stuff omitted -- the real stuff being its ability to mirror what's going on on the planet and above it at all times -- accurately. Ours is mere accounting; theirs was a mirror of reality. When plants bloom and when they wither and die, it knew. When animals give birth to healthy offspring and when, to untimely, sickly ones that won't make it through the winter, it knew. When to fix the boat and when to pull it out of the water before the lake freezes over, it knew. When spirits smile at men and women and when they frown, and when they pounce in rage and kill, it knew. When humans give birth to kings and healers and farmers and beauties and when, to scoundrels and thieves and murderers, it knew... Now people who, without thinking twice, repeat (as taught by other repeaters) that they "don't believe in astrology" and "don't believe in birth dates" and "don't believe in all this BS" and so on -- -- what they're actually saying is, they don't believe they're real. For the only way to not be influenced by the phase of the moon, and the flares of the sun, and phases of qi of Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches if you take a look a bit deeper and farther, is by being a figment of someone's imagination. And our "modern science" has imagined exactly such a creature for a human being, and convinced nearly everybody that that's what they are -- these imaginary creatures that don't believe they were really born, or if they do believe they were, still think that it never mattered exactly how, exactly when, and exactly what the implications might have been for later. Sigh. Verily, this is the age of the Valley Of The Dolls... kali yuga.

They are grammatically correct, those sentences of mine, but if you mean they would better serve their purpose if they were shorter... well, perhaps. I do much of that chop-up work behind the scenes anyway, originally it's usually just one sentence! -- something reflective of the peculiarities of my cognitive process, not of my grammatical impairment. (English is my third language but I'm bent on freedom therein. Wanna be the queen of that castle someday, the way I am of my native one.) OK, to the point... "Forced?" no, it's "deep"! Deep I tell ya! -- and effortless at that. All right, I'll try going slower. 1. To understand whether something is yin or yang one must keep in mind at all times that there's no absolutes and something is yin or yang only compared to something else, not by itself. So you need to first memorize, and then apply empirically, and then learn to discern on autopilot, what constitutes the "properties of yang" compared to the "properties of yin." (Just don't fall for one of those misguided lists floating on the internet that have it all backwards -- or one of those that pile together what they think of as "good" and call it yang, vs. all they think of as "bad" and call it yin. These are bogus. I can't recommend a source of a good "list" off the top of my head -- maybe someone will help out?) Soooo... OK, let's look at some of these properties in comparison. "Up" compared to "down" is yang. "Light" compared to "heavy" is yang. "Fast" compared to "slow" is yang. "External" compared to "internal" is yang. "Hard" compared to "soft" is yang. (Think an egg. The outer shell, hard, dry, superficial, visible, is yang compared to the inner part of the egg -- soft, internal, moist, hidden... yin.) Nothing is "pure yin" or "pure yang" for "all" purposes -- only in comparison with something else. Thus "egg white" compared to "egg yolk" is yang. (It's closer to the surface compared to the yolk, and less condensed.) A hard-boiled egg is more "yang" than a fresh one. (Heat did it -- heat is yang compared to cold.) An egg sitting in your refrigerator is more "yin" than an egg a hen is sitting on. How am I doing so far? If I made this part clear enough, I'll move on.

"Metal is just a form of earth" -- very good, but it's a distinctly next phase, much like "fire is just a form of wood" and "wood is just a form of water." The translator of the "elements" you quote did what western thinking causes many to do -- to wit, to stop the processes of change (flow down, expand, rise up, rotate, condense) to come up with "elements" (liquid, solid, plasma, gas, "element of thought"). Once this stopwatch approach is superimposed on a system describing processes, you've killed it (the generic you, of course, not you specifically ), you can call anything any name and it still won't pulsate with life. They are not "elements" at all any of them, even though "elements" which you can observe in everyday life are manifestations of each phase -- a small part of each qi phase's spectrum is visible as a corresponding "element," but it's just one frame of each phase's infinite movie! You have to phase in time to see that metal the process, not metal the "element," describes both air (via "what it does" rather than some "what it is" or other -- and what it does is, e.g., oxidate -- this is what it manifests when you breathe... your blood is capable of carrying oxygen because your every iron molecule in each and every one of your hemoglobin cells grabs a molecule of oxygen as you inhale -- and this iron-oxygen part of the metal process is your "air phase," your breath, a bit simplified... and a lot -- every bit -- part of the metal phase!) as well as a knife, again a metal process whereby you can execute its "destructive" phase vis a vis wood (plants are the wood phase and animals and humans are a form of the wood phase, a modification of plants enabling the rapid-yang part of the wood phase) as well as mercury (an aspect of the moon process, the alchemical yin) as well as gold (an aspect of the sun process, the alchemical yang) as well as the lungs (whose ability to compress-decompress is a manifestation of the innate properties of the metal phase, air being the "decompress" part of the phase -- phases pulsate...)

Thanks for keeping things on track -- just a quickie re your illuminati/movies entry -- you're right, that's one way to trivialize an issue, just put it in the movies and make it cheesy, unreal, entertaining, banal, trite... make it Hollywood and no one will ever believe anything else about it, the meme has been installed... I suspect they did the same thing with Maoshan (and magical taoism in general) in China/Taiwan/Hong Kong/Singapore... OK, back on track. WLP gave lectures before practices, on a whole bunch of fascinating subjects. They were short and to the point, and I was writing notes like a machine. So one lecture was on food. I may have written about it here before. Let me get back to this message later, gotta go... please stay tuned.

"Sherlock Holmes"... ...which, in this new and Hollywoodized version, had a black magician for the bad guy, Dr. Watson for a kung fu action hero, alchemical labs and sorcerers' dens, illuminati rituals and conspiracies, and last but not least, Sherlock Holmes handcuffed and ankle-shackled to a bed spread-eagle, naked, with a pillow covering his private parts and a sacramental pronouncement to a maid who walked in on the situation -- "The key to my release lies beneath this pillow." Scary enough for you?

Dissatisfaction, Ignite a revolution, Let me be the spark!

I worked with a similar machine, my business partner at the time was selling it to TCM practitioners and taught me while at it. It used the Japanese system of pulse taking, Ryodoraku. Work done in Japan, Germany and Russia went into its design. It was very amazing in the skilled hands. You had to understand what you're looking at of course, and interpret it correctly. But it did indeed "see" things that blew your mind. My skeptical husband "challenged" my partner to find out what happened to him a year before. She said (upon consulting the graph built by the machine), you were hiking or climbing, lost your footing, landed on your right knee, but now the knee doesn't bother you as much as the heel, so you don't think it's related, but it is. Everything absolutely true. I treated his knee at the time of the accident, but he didn't do the two weeks I wanted and stopped after a few days once the pain was gone, but then almost a year later his heel started aching... which he attributed to playing tennis and didn't connect with the earlier trauma... The machine "knew" the past and the future, because everything that happens leaves its mark -- and what you see "right now" is a block of past-present-future, not a mere "present" disconnected from "way back when" and "where it's headed." Everything is connected, you can't extract a "pure present moment" out of all the "impure past moments" because the "present" IS the "past" and it's aimed at a particular "future" with the certainty of a bullet in flight toward a particular spot it will hit -- THAT spot, and no other, unless the wind changes enough to throw it off. I wish every "live in the moment" aficionado got acquainted with a doctor like the one described in this thread, or at least the machine... this would blow the cover off this particularly popular in-the-head philosophy quite promptly.

Fireflies everywhere, and the fool on two legs asks, what's enlightenment?..