Taomeow

'til you drink your dream, fast for three days and three nights, pray, sing, chant, laugh, cry

Alright. Thanks for trusting my opinion, and please forgive the bursting of the test bubble. The test is put together out of symptoms of the five organs imbalances associated with the corresponding phases of qi (the infamous "elements"). "Element 1" of the test is a bunch of symptoms of Liver qi imbalance, "Element 2" of Kidneys, and so on -- Heart, Lungs, Spleen-Stomach. This kind of questionnaire would be helpful if a blind TCM practitioner with no sense of touch was assessing a patient's symptoms and could only rely on verbal descriptions. In other words, it is very imprecise and merely points in the general direction of a possible imbalance, without revealing the actual picture of the Five Phases in the person's make-up. If you score very high or very low on one particular "element" you might want to invest some effort into bringing that particular organ into balance with diet, herbs, and lifestyle changes. But I wouldn't get too upset even if that's the case, because, like I said, the test is very very imprecise and might reveal something clinically meaningful perhaps only in extreme cases. It shows nothing astrologically/destiny-wise meaningful, this is not the right way to determine one's innate wuxing phases and their "weight." I gotta write that book that was my New Year's resolution... there's always Chinese New Year for slackers like me to renew our slacking resolutions.

Here's the classic Zener Cards test -- you can check yourself for ESP powers here: http://www.psychicscience.org/esp3.aspx

http://www.youtube.c...feature=related

Left in lost luggage, right in poppy fields of dawn, I call it my brain

JackRunner, I keep getting upset for being misread in this thread, and I will abandon it, but before I do: who told you I have no field experience with kunlun? I never offer opinions about things I have no experience with. I've never said a single word about Spring Forest, KAP, Winn, Chang, anyone or anything I can't base on experience. Chill yourself, you're too good-looking to need a high hat!

OK, I'll try to be more careful. It wasn't my intention to defeat anyone. Cats pounce to play. If my cat plays too roughly I go "ouch" and she stops. Consider the "ouch" heard and taken into consideration.

I mean lack of knowledge, erratic energy, and a bad control trip engaged in. My guess is, they became facilitators too soon, and the inner voice that was saying "you're not ready" was promptly hushed by "but I want to." The process has stages. Some of these stages are haywire stages. It's normal, every powerful practice will have haywire stages, if it doesn't it's just going through the motions, skimming the surface... that's a firm conviction of mine. Ideally, no one would be teaching anybody anything until those obligatory haywire stages are safely well in the past and properly integrated. But the world seems to be in a hurry these days, it's not something specific to kunlun, it's all over the place -- people start jumping on board all kinds of ships, throwing their captains overboard and bravely navigating the ship toward the nearest iceberg -- crew and passengers and all. I don't have a problem with that either because, well, I do have a sense of urgency about everything currently going on everywhere, so this tactic might at least save whoever can swim, and whoever can't, the ship and the captain who had spent twenty years becoming qualified would have avoided the iceberg only to be torpedoed, that might be even worse, no one swims. But whenever someone goes on a control trip on the merit of having hijacked the ship he doesn't actually know jackshit about, that's when I start having a problem. (I don't mean anyone personally of the present parties, of course.)

Nope, it's the other way around: my knowledge in general is modest, but I know kunlun and am a habitual integrator of whatever I know and can apply one to the other. The simplified view of TCM's term "jing" would be DNA. It's impossible to further simplify something that if extracted from your body and straightened out would stretch from Earth to the Sun five million times with every nanometer of it meaningful, and meaningful in a way that can't be reduced to the substances the meaning is put together out of. It's not my desire to overcomplicate things, it's just that they happen to be naturally complex. Haven't heard Max say what you're saying anyway, so I either missed something, or you?.. I reiterate: certification in kunlun is not required for a practitioner of same to understand same and get the practice right. It is useful if one wants to undertake teaching others hands-on. If one doesn't, it doesn't kill her ability to practice or understand or even -- gasp -- have an opinion. D'accord?

um... this one you might want to unlearn as fast as you learned it, jing does not refer to the material substance of the body except on the street in some minds. Jing is memory of genesis, pattern of becoming. Most of it is cosmic, some of it is species-specific, some more is personal-hereditary, and then a fraction of that is carried by some agents in the body (without being them though). Jing, like qi, is a pattern followed by a process, not a "thing." That online forums have spread the idea of jing as a material substance -- enough to be even equated with "sperm" left and right -- is both funny and sad. Sad and hilarious. It's like saying that tao resides in the body exclusively in sperm, or better yet, that what isn't sperm isn't tao. Jing is the closest thing to tao, the vehicle of its manifest-unmanifest machinery. Oh, and there's no definition. Can be described, can't be defined. If it's defined, it's fubarred. Interesting about certification having fu! I didn't think about that... Well, I've met at least two facilitaors who were full of crap. Guess the fu didn't take.

welcome out into the cold, brother.

Perhaps not simple enough for me, because I don't get it -- except from some residual Christian perspective where if you're not ordained your opinions about Jesus are nil and void. Could there be some transference/projection going on here, of one tradition, the one most westerners are used to, onto another?.. I thought not seeing the point in debating the issue is expressed by not debating it. Again I seem to fail to follow your logic. I don't insist on a debate, but if you debate it while saying you're not interested in debating it, I'm confused. Do you mean you're not interested in hearing my opinion? That's fine. But it's different from negating mine, offering yours, and then saying you're not interested in debating. Just nitpicking... do forgive that.

Ask the I Ching. I resolve all my "confused" and "don't know which way to go" issues with her help. If you don't know how, look up a thread from sometime in the past, it has some pointers (including from me if I remember correctly.)

I've met facilitators who became facilitators after fulfilling the requirements, in a very short time and with no prior taoist practices or theory or anything at all in their personal developmental history. Certification made them qualified to help newbies start practicing, it's absolutely correct. It didn't, however, by itself, make them more knowledgeable or experienced than anyone who is not a certified facilitator. I am certified to teach certain Longmen Pai practices. I won't teach them though because I don't feel I've had enough experience and I know I lack the knowledge yet. No one told me that; I told myself. When/if that changes, I might reconsider. Certification is not magic, Scotty. It's just a business contract. I'm not saying these are useless -- they are very useful -- I'm just saying that they are what they are and they aren't what they aren't -- and what they aren't is a substitute for the leg work, mind work, soul work, life living, integrity, creativity, compassion, talent, studiousness, any number of "not certifiable" qualities useful in a cultivator.

Sounds pretty good. A few more suggestions: don't choose chicken over red meat, the latter is another innocent victim of bad PR -- our ancestors only ate chicken when they ran out of bison, boar or mutton. If they're both organic, red meat is vastly superior to chicken or turkey; if both aren't, they are equally screwed... hard to tell which one is screwed worse; rotate what you eat periodically, try to stay away from eating the same things over and over again; variety prevents deficiencies and a build-up of toxicities should a food item have something wrong with it due to the way it was produced or for whatever reason; also rotating foods keeps all your digestive enzymes activated nicely, while if you eat monotonously, many of them will shut down so you won't digest something occasionally new properly; don't overlook root vegetables and squashes -- particularly if you lift weights -- and especially in winter -- these will give you endurance (they are "slow yin" and "rooting") and cardiovascular health (coenzyme Q10 in the yellow squashes, pumpkins and yam, blood-cleansing and blood-building goodies in beets, etc.); and if you learn to cook some soups, consider yourself covered on all sides. Studies that don't know why but know their statistics have shown that people who eat soup regularly are overall healthier than people who don't, all other dietary factors being equal.

Yup, his stuff is very good. But, as often is the case with anything top notch AND made public, it becomes "controversial" whenever the master is alive and well and behaving a certain way, which someone will always have a problem with. BKF has been challenged on the merits of lineage, on his martial tactics (rough and with less control than most students are used to), and at least one high-level TJQ guy I know calls him "crazy." (But the guy, I mean my friend not BKF, is a republican himself, and that's crazy enough in and of itself in some people's book... please no republicans take offense, I'm an equal opportunity offender, I don't think democrats are all that sane either. )

Too true. I'm being inspired to restart my practice, I was doing other stuff for a while (Longmen pai) -- which the teacher said is not incompatible unless you do both on the same day -- so I'll see how it goes, don't know yet. Where I left off, I was having experiences with kunlun I don't expect to be inactivated -- communication with DNA. (I can't say "my DNA" because it's an inaccurate way to attribute possession, just like "my god" or "my tao" would be ).

For the second or third day in a row, my logo in the upper left corner says "IP Board" instead of "The Tao Bums." Is it normal? is it still being worked on, or am I stuck with some earlier version for some reason while everyone has moved on?

. Jing? No. That's blockages being released. Blockages are dead jing/dead qi/ghost shen conglomerates. All modern people have them in abundance, but choose to believe they are working with "pure" energies. Nope. No such luck. If you were born at a hospital, not breastfed or not breastfed on demand, not carried on the mother's body for most of the first 2 years of your life, and so on, you have dead jing in abundance even if nothing worse ever happened to you. If you sat in classroom, immobilized for hours for years every day, and then in front of the TV, and then ate from the supermarket fare, you have dead qi even if nothing worse ever happened to you. If you were taught to suppress all your real feelings to the extent you lost the ability to know what you really feel, and intellectualize and rationalize them instead, disconnecting your thought process from your body process, you have ghost shen even if nothing worse ever happened to you. Now what kunlun does first, before it does anything else, is it hits those formations (which sometimes manifest as leg shaking and sometimes as "entities," depending on what kind of stuff has gone into making them to begin with) and unblocks and releases them. For most, the first stages are not alchemical and that's great, because alchemy in a contaminated system is hell's kitchen. Lu Dongbin the patriarch of my kind of alchemy strongly disagrees.

Kunlun doesn't transform jing to qi to shen, it goes in the opposite direction. Shen to qi to jing to --?.. "void" some say, but if you're at the jing level, you have choices. Jing level is the great switchboard, you go where you want if you master that. And I'm not sure that "void" is where "everyone" wants to go. Laozi, e.g., went to the celestial realm instead, and so did countless tianzun (deities and immortals of taoism).

Do you have a HFS nearby? they always have quinoa. Fruit -- no problem for most people. With IBS or ulcers or colitis or any kind of stomach upset, it's better to use cooked fruit, not raw. With diabetes or weight issues, watch out for the sugar -- most fruits on the market had been selectively bred for high sugar content. The pop nutrition idea that it's bad with yeast infections is w/o merit though. Dried fruit is incompatible with MAOI. I eat only green apples (Granny Smith) because the rest of those currently available are too sweet for me. I always eat apples, and rotate the rest of the fruit. Dairy -- mostly horrible, but not inherently horrible, if you have a cow or a goat who have never been injected with anything and milk them yourself, that's wonderful... but if you don't, even what they label "organic" or even "raw" at a HFS, on top of costing an arm and a leg doesn't behave like real milk (I know real milk -- if you don't refrigerate it, it sours, turning into an edible and delicious product, but if you don't refrigerate the store-bought kind, it rots!) Fermented organic dairy is somewhat better -- kefir or yogurt -- and goat and sheep products better than cow products (no offense, CowTao). Never go for fat-free or low-fat varieties (calcium in natural unmolested dairy is made bioavailable in the body in the presence of fat and fat-soluble vitamins A and D, without fat it behaves like a handful of sand sprinkled over your kidneys and clogs the body with calcium deposits everywhere, arteries to brain to joints. I don't think there's anything more conductive to chronic degenerative disease, with the exception of perhaps wheat selectively bred for high gluten content -- an immune system scrambler -- and of course chemicals.) Organic clarified butter (aka ghee) is wonderful. The offending parts (proteins) have been removed, which makes it fine to eat even for "lactose intolerant" individuals. It's an Ayurvedic staple, they think of it as the most beneficial food good for most people at most times. I use a combo of ghee and coconut oil for cooking (don't use olive oil for that, by the way, use it for salads but only heat saturated fats and oils -- a ghee-coconut combo is perfect, and the secret of world-famous French chefs too. )

:lol:

Don't worry, I won't even say you're being "defensive" when you "know when you're being lured down a dead and dark alley..." -- but please, if you can help it, don't use this "defensive" bit with me -- I believe "defensive" is paternalistic and I honesty refuse to be condescended to. I assure you I can have strong opinions without being "defensive." I have a strong opinion without a personal agenda... wow, what a concept! If you don't want this subject revisited, stop initiating it?.. I never do, I just object when you do. You think it's fishy? Abnormal? A sing of something I have to hide? Duh...

The first taoist book I ever read was Scholar Warrior by Deng Ming-Dao, and I was blown away by his proposition that taoists know subjects they're amateurs in better than specialists in the field. After a while spent with taoist arts, sciences and practices I realize they know not necessarily "more" but definitely "better" -- if you have the master key, the locked doors are there only if you choose not to unlock them. Anytime you want to, you can. Including the doors "specialists" don't have keys to, or don't even suspect exist. So I would encourage anyone to aim for "specialist" in taoist subjects and especially practices -- as many as possible. They are all connected, knowledge and experience gained in one of them is transferable to others. That's why some taoists practiced the sword and others, calligraphy -- then switched and found themselves proficient in the seemingly (but not really) unrelated art. Some wrote poetry only to find they've written alchemical treatises -- and vice versa. (The classic instructions in taijiquan are "Songs" -- of considerable beauty.) Some Chinese doctors treated their patients with feng shui, because they were able to trace "dampness" as a symptom in the patient's body to a damp basement and a clogged sewer in his house. (When I was staying at a friend's house a few years ago, I noticed that she constantly and obsessively cleaned her stove, trying to keep it pristine and shiny, while generally not paying much attention to the condition of the rest of the house. I suspected a Toxic Fire disturbance, which I thought she sensed inside but was trying to remedy outside -- with no expertise as to how to do it, just going on an unconscious feeling that "the place of fire needs attention." Several years later she developed MS, a Toxic Heat condition.)