Taomeow

That's VERY taoist.

I'm probably not that smart after all, bro... I don't understand the simplest things. E.g., can someone explain to me why something nature/god/tao makes can be called "drugs?" Tao is a drug dealer? God is a drug pusher? Nature is a drug lady? I just sincerely don't get it. So, OK, I'd like to hear your definition of "drugs" and I'd like to see examples of substances or experiences qualifying as "addictive drugs" just because they are "powerful." As for ayahuasca, it takes tremendous courage of the kind most people simply don't have to face her for the second time. Most who chance to do it once will never, ever, ever do it again. So "addictive" is out of the question -- unless one is addicted to courage, but that's not a controlled substance, last I checked.

Oy back, 5ET... ... um... I might have to half agree, although there's no way in hell anyone can possibly "abuse" ayahuasca anymore than anyone could get addicted to and abuse brain surgery. But I do believe the experience has to be, ideally, in context. I happen to believe the same thing about sex, by the way. Or rock-n-roll. Also, I'm not a big fan of the "analogs" anymore than I like any substitutes that are "almost but not exactly..." and as the result "not even close" -- I'm a sucker for the real thing -- but that's personal preferences, the fact that Drew didn't confess using any drugs still stands. I'm not the one who first discovered the skewed semantics of the linguistic use of "drugs" sleight-of-handed into social consciousness. A party as knowledgeable as he is eloquent and meticulously aware of language and all its intricate soul-shaping phenomena, Terrence McKenna, did it first. Listen to what he has to say sometime... chances are your views might converge closer with mine as a result... maybe not... but I think there's a chance, his logic is impeccable and his expertise, unimpeacheable.

A buddha is born. Born blind, she sees in the dark, shrugs, yawns, licks her paw.

Yeah, and I recall you don't eat much at all anyway, but you would still be fully equipped to react to the real teachers shown if they were shown -- you do drink water, right? No laughing matter, actually. Have you ever seen Mayan and Inca and pre- both-of-them art in any significant amounts? I went to a museum of same in Lima when I returned from the rain forest, and there, in clay, on tapestries, in pounded gold, in carvings into precious and semi-precious and ordinary and meteorite stones, I saw portraits of the teachers She showed me... and being not of this world, they do something to your mind that the mind refuses to process, whereupon it tells your bladder, um, YOU deal with it, I don't know how! 5ET, ayahuasca is not a drug. Ayahuasca analogs are not drugs either. I've never taken drugs in my life. I don't even take aspirin. I don't know about Drew, but if he took an ayahuasca analog and you tell him he's taking drugs, that's really uncalled for. Drugs are degraded petrochemicals designed to close one's mind and degrade one's soul. Sacred plants are natural inhabitants of this planet, chronologically predating our species by billions of years and ontologically responsible for our evolution, designed by god to open our mind and humanize our soul. It is the very heart of darkness where one is substituted for the other for the specific purpose of devolving our kind so that their kind can reign supreme. I would never touch any of their abominable creations, and I sincerely hope neither would Drew. He is unusual -- too unusual for most I'm guessing -- beyond that I don't know what to think. Unusual would have been bad if our "normal" was all that great. Is it?..

Hi mantis, thanks! I'll keep your request for a diet thread in mind. As for grains: I advocate a diet of no gluten-containing grains and no corn. The rest of the complex carbs are wonderful in most cases for most people (of course the ideal diet is always individualized, but for now, just the general principles). Eat plenty, but don't eat them completely away from oils and fats. The grains to avoid (and all products made of same) would be wheat, rye, barley, oats, corn, but you have to keep in mind that 99% of everything you can buy as a ready-made product is either wheat or corn, or both. You would have to give up on all pasta, bread, cereal, cookies, pastries, pies, muffins... are you up to the challenge? Eventually you would find replacements made of some of the OK carbs I'll list below, but it's going to be an adventure. Many of the replacements, even if you find them, are chock-full of other unwanted stuff (like xanthan gum and what not) and are a whole new world to venture into. You might have to explore an Asian market. Or just give all that stuff up and cook from scratch -- the way I do (with the exception of pasta, which is easy to find in its rice incarnation at any HFS, and in its tapioca, mung bean, but also mostly rice versions at an Asian market.) So -- you do need carbs or you will be always fiending. Rice is wonderful and versatile, I would suggest you learn to cook many dishes with it, don't eat penitentiary bland bowlfuls of rice alone, it gets boring fast... Brown rice is usually touted, and it's really good, but many people are finding it hard to acquire a taste for it and really really enjoy it (food must be enjoyable or else it's not healthy). So -- white rice would be my first choice if you want a carb staple that is not much inferior (provided you have other sources of B vitamins in your diet and don't try to subside on white rice alone) yet much more versatile and easier and faster to prepare and all-around practical. Next, include buckwheat (it behaves like a grain but isn't, it's actually related to cabbage -- and the name doesn't mean it has "wheat" in it, it doesn't), quinoa, millet, rotate, experiment, find out what you like and what you don't. Remember these and buy them for your carbs, and you should see benefits... which benefits, you tell me after you've tried it, I've seen all kinds in many people! OK, oils and fats will be the next entry sometime... please stay tuned.

The person who says there's exchange of energy between them may want to define "energy" before I could answer that. In the Earlier Heaven sequence, there's "opening and closing" within each trigram, matched by "closing and opening" of an opposite trigram. Imagine a door that is being open from one side and closed with equal "energy" from the other side. Is there motion in the door in this position? Experiment and tell me what you think! "Opening and closing" are traditional translations (Wilhelm) for yin and yang, but they can also be understood as "up and down," "heavy and light," "pulling in and pushing out," "going back and going forward," any number of opposing balancing forces. If they are balanced perfectly, there's no motion. If there's no motion, there's no energy flow. If there's no energy flow, tao is in stillness. Yet -- importantly, very very importantly (because other modalities have superimposed their very different view on this process more than once), it is never separate from tao in motion. It's not step one followed by step two, stillness followed by motion ISO return once and for all to stillness. Nothing of the kind in the taoist model. It's both steps simultaneously taking place at all times in all places and at all non-times in all non-places. "Therefore they called the closing of the gates the Receptive, and the opening of the gates the Creative. The alternation between closing and opening they called change. The going forward and backward without ceasing they called penetration. What manifests itself visibly they called an image; what has bodily form they called a tool. What is established in usage they called a pattern. That which furthers on going out and coming in, that which all men live by, they called the divine." -- Ta Chuan (with Wilhelm's obligatory "man" replacing the original's "person." ) So what is present is called "that which," not "energy," because "the divine" is not "energy flow," it's "that which" is useful to mediate on but hard to articulate. Stillness in motion and motion in stillness -- "a flow that doesn't flow, a non-flowing that flows," stillness is not really, motion is not really, all reality is thereby real... stillness is motion, motion is stillness... and words give up. Try the images, and try meditating on them. Me, that's how I got it, to the extent I got it.

didn't she show you the real ones?.. just as well... would've been hard to change your pants in full lotus.

A victory flag over their heads, and raw meat under their saddles (been reading Genghis Khan's biography -- they tenderized their meat this way)

Agreed we were supposed to get all that fish oil (and other animal fats!) naturally, but the same can be argued for many substances currently used as "supplements." Linus Pauling asserted it is normal to have 10 g (sic) of vitamin C daily in the human diet from natural sources, it's just that even 1/100th of that amount is problematic for most people to get from food today. And animal fats have been bad-mouthed by the media prompted by the pharma ISO new diseases to disseminate in the population to the extent that many won't touch them and make a face at the very mention, though in reality their benefits are just about as common as Tuesday. Fish is not thought of as an animal by an urbanite, fortunately. If you told them that a slab of pork lard will complement their fish oil diet nicely, providing much of what they're missing and no, not clogging their pathetically misguided arteries, they'd laugh at you or recoil in horror. Take heart, my trusty prostaglandins! Your time will come. Every kid in Russia had to swallow an obligatory daily spoonful of fish oil for general health when I was growing up, and in my medically slanted family, also three spoonfuls of rose hip syrup (a megadose of bioavailable vitamin C). The yuck of the former and the yum of the latter is a childhood memory many of us share. Much of cutting edge nutrition being "discovered" by nutritional "dissidents" here and now is "old school" elsewhere...

Thanks, Steve F! Alas, my Chinese is very beginner-level, but the very reason I started learning it was that I looked at over 70 translations of TTC and they left me profoundly dissatisfied -- although I could sense the (what I perceived as) truths in the subtext resonating with my taoist practices but not with the translators' opinions. E.g., I read Chapter 15 as a superb taijiquan instructions manual, and it can't possibly be read this way by a translator who has no tjq training. Likewise, there's tons of alchemy embedded in the text, but a translator who doesn't practice that wouldn't notice. As usual, integration is the key. I would suggest that anyone who wants to get Laozi'a "philosophy" throw the Wen-tzu on the reading list, supposedly his oral teachings written down by a student. It's like an extended in-depth commentary on the lapidary statements of TTC. You are correct thinking that TTC had predecessors -- the Yuandao is definitely one major source -- but I'm not sure about multiple authors. A crowd is always dumber than the smartest guy/gal in that crowd. It only takes one to get the ten thousand going. Having divine affiliations helps too.

The width it was before worked far better for me. My screen is wide as it is, and being a fast reader, I almost give myself lateral whiplash reading the new version if I go at the usual speed, or else I have to slow down considerably and then my eyes get tired.

Great thread! Thank you, in no particular order, butterflies, bumblebees, grasshoppers, the red "soldier bugs," beetles, dragonflies, frogs, and all the rest of you for playing with me and giving me the bliss and wonder of knowing you when the grasses you call home were taller than me Murka, Barsik, Lola the cats the monk the Chief the Huntress Art the merciless petty tyrant Shuairan the Snake and her human counterpart Li the Chinese and Lee the Irish master Ho Jesse Max Carlos the first and Carlos the second ayahuasca and her singers Wang Liping the fern teacher the Eagle-faced teacher of Time Fuxi, King Wen, Duke of Zhou and all the rest of the giants on whose shoulders I found my footing, THANK YOU

My sister-in-law (MD working in pharmacology) swears by hard liquor -- apparently the benefits are even greater, it's a potent telomerase inhibitor. Telomerase is an enzyme that facilitates telomere shortening. The lay term for "telomere shortening" is "death." Long as you don't "need" a drink, all is good. If you "need" it, don't drink. If you don't, remind yourself how good it is for you. I have to remind myself, because I have no natural desire for alcohol, but I try to remember to have something with my dinner. (I don't believe in drinking anything on an empty stomach, by the way. The benefits might be canceled by too-fast absorption into the bloodstream and that's hard on the brain and the liver.)

Oops... forgot to mention that l-lysine has to be added to the formula if people have or suspect they might have the dormant herpes virus. In fact, one of the orthomolecular protocols to eliminate it is to use large doses of arginine to bring it out into an acute flare-up, then zap it for good with large doses of l-lysine. The protocol is not "pills," it's a version of the natural approach ('natural substances in unnatural amounts,' something you would use with an herbal formula too), e.g. vitamin C becomes a "natural drug" in doses way above anything you can get from food, and at these dosages eliminates the common cold within 3 hours or the flu within 24, something a healthy diet can't accomplish. Witch's fish oil for sexual enhancement is another example. Besides, what passes for a healthy diet these days is usually the latest fad, a party line, or a knee-jerk reaction to a snippet of a fragment of information. A healthy diet is, in reality, an individualized diet. There's absolutely no one diet fits all deals out there, these are designed to sell books.

Very, very nice! Thank you! Where did all the little swirly thingies go -- did the big mothership on top pull them all in? (Was gonna smile or wink and realized the emoticons are gone too?..) "Whoa, did you see that?.. that rat-lookin' thing just got hisself ate! Damn, nature, you scary!" -- Family Guy

Which ones -- the morale boosters, one small step for a man, one huge step for the mankind kind -- or the bases we have there since the 1960s manned by thousands of people and a few alien collaborators, or the routine trips there from Montauk via the reverse-engineered chair, or the Pegasus Project's trips via the stargate to the moon a few years removed to the future to store sensitive data so it can't be stolen, or what?.. (Ducks under the table and sits quietly like a mouse... )

Your red herring thinks he can tell a white elephant from a blue whale, while my pink panther eats yellow chickens for breakfast. There's a tradition of using certain animals metaphorically in Chinese culture, and the ones already taken couldn't serve the purpose. Ducks are symbols of love. Horses, of strength. Flowers, of medicine, sprouts, of alchemy, trees, of wisdom. Pigs and fishes, of successful procreation, gain, wealth and sexual gratification (unlike what Wilhelm thought, whose comment offers "stupidity," revealing his ignorance in the symbolic meaning of these animals. By the way "pigs and fishes" is not what the line of the I Ching translated as such by everybody and his brother means either, it means "pig-fish," a dolphin common to the Yellow river at the time and till a few years ago when it went extinct.) Dogs and grass, to my knowledge, don't have such narrow traditional symbolic meaning attached to them. Which is why they could be, quite within reason, used to mean what they actually mean, even though one of the things they could mean (not the first, not the second and not the third on the list of possibilities) could be, but wasn't necessarily, straw dogs. Straw dogs, actually, don't make sense in the context at all. Sages don't use humans for sacrificial purposes. They just don't. Dogs and grass make sense. Straw dogs make about as much sense as the biblical rich man who would have to crawl through the eye of a needle to get to heaven. In the original, it was "gamal," the word meaning "a very thick rope," not "camal" meaning "camel," and it makes sense that the metaphor would refer to the difficulty of pulling a thick rope through the eye of a needle, yet everybody is stuck with the ridiculous camel with his perplexing eye-of-needle-crawling behavior never seen by anyone anywhere under any circumstances for two thousand years. A red herring, in my family, means a cold appetizer of baked beets, potatoes and mayo over boneless herring. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Um... I know what ceremonial straw dogs are and how they are used, my whole point was, there's nothing in Laozi's context to finalize this reading of "dogs and grass." Not in the context and not in the reasoning. The whole book is dedicated to pretty much one major assertion: that the human way has become different from nature's way and the sages' way, and that generally speaking, it's not a very bright idea. So a passage that asserts that nature and the sage don't do something the human way doesn't contradict this main premise, IMO. Or did you read TTC as glorification of how humans are wonderfully in accord with tao? It was read as a political pamphlet by many of its contemporaries, not as a work of philosophy at all. A proposed alternative choice of social behavior, revolutionary in its attempts to talk to the ruler rather than to the ruled. Laozi talks to the emperor, king, sovereign, father, man of power and authority, not to the powerless -- have you noticed?.. To understand what "not human" means to Laozi, one needs to consider what "human" means to him. A pat on the shoulder, an encouragement to do things the way we already do them? Hardly...

This line has been the one debated the most for close to two thousand years by Laozi scholars, and "straw dogs" is apparently just one understanding that prevailed in the course of these debates. The original characters actually mean "dogs and grass" -- in many contexts it would mean "straw dogs" but Laozi's context contains no indications that that's the case. (Chinese is nothing if not context-dependent.) So "dogs and grass" are treated by nature, and by the sage emulating nature, a certain way. Which way is that? "Inhumane," "not the human way." What's the human way to treat dogs and grass?.. What's the nature's way to treat dogs and grass? Which way is closer to the sage's heart, the nature's way to treat them or the human way to treat them? I would translate the line as follows: Nature's behavior is not modeled on human behavior; it treats humans the way it treats dogs and grass. Likewise, the sage's behavior is not modeled on human behavior; she treats humans the way she treats dogs and grass. Let's recall that human behavior toward dogs is to subjugate them, turn them into servants or toys, and in China, as in many other parts of Asia, also eat them. Grass undergoes grassicide at human hands as a matter of routine, is divided into foods and weeds and conquered, and preferentially monocultured or exterminated. What is so wonderful about what humans do to dogs and grass that nature doesn't do to them? Nothing. What is wrong with the sage treating humans the way nature treats dogs and grass? Nothing.

Dear Kathy, thank you very much. I'm sure "some crazy guys" owe you an apology, but even if it is not forthcoming, we will do our best to dissuade them from "returning the bad for the good" in the future.

Thank you, Senseikarma. The main reason I discontinued it was (...was self-edited on second thought.) It just happens with practices. A few stick with one, most eventually try something new. People are fickle. Or they get curious about something else. Or seduced. Or it's their destiny to wind up altogether elsewhere. In my case, whatever I ever practiced, I wouldn't take back. It's all good long as you practice (by "you" in this context I mean "me." ) Oh, and what's this with "entities" and "possessions" again (in the quotes you found and some current entries) -- didn't we have enough of that with kunlun? For chrissake. Research. There's not a single ancient culture that didn't discover the falun. It is as much an "entity" as the "lower dantien" or "MCO" or "yin-yang symbol." P-lease. I collect superstitions of the world as a hobby, and I've discovered that the biggest bad-assest demon of them all has always and everywhere been the Demon of Witch Hunting. If you're possessed by this one, you're doomed! Doooooooomed I tell ya! Oh, OK. Like I said, I don't remember exactly all the details, not only because it was a while ago but because I started practicing with a group that was mostly Chinese and I didn't understand more than 1/10 of what I was told in the first couple of sessions. Then I did read the book, but it was long ago... so I'm not going to argue.

This is a very interesting substance, one of the two my own world of nutrition and supplementation revolves around (the other one being dopamine). I researched a while back. Here's a brief summary of what I learned way back then (mostly from Japanese and Russian studies rehashed here and there): predominance of a particular choice of stress-mediating hormones in an individual body is genetically linked to one's blood type antigen; types A and AB produce more cortisol than other types for the purpose; type O, more adrenaline than other types; and type B runs on nitric oxide for the purpose, producing less cortisol and less adrenaline but more NO and utilizing it for the same tasks extra cortisol is used by As/ABs and extra adrenaline by Os. Practical outcome: if you blood type is B, go for it, it's all-around beneficial since you'll be supplementing your first line defense against stress; if it isn't, exercise caution -- you might be stressing out the system beyond its capacity to cope, since you're hard-wired for lower levels of NO. The classic muscle-building-without-steroids protocol that was developed earlier than the blood type research doesn't mention whether it will increase NO and is designed to release HGH (the real muscle builder), but I know at least two type As who had dizzy spells and lowered mood on it, so caution is advised. This one I experimented with when I wanted to tone up but didn't feel like working out. It works like a charm (and is very useful if one has an injury to heal too), but I wouldn't recommend it as a continuous lifestyle for reasons too numerous to go into. For a short/temporary boost, here it is: arginine/glutathione 4:1 or arginine/NAC (n-acetyl-cysteine, NOT cystine)/l-glutamine 2:1:1, starting low (500 mg arginine) and gradually increasing the dosage every 3-6 days (you can go very high if you like but very gradually -- I never went over 6 g of arginine but 20 is not unheard of) and throw in some antioxidants accordingly (you can go high with these too but gradually) to clean up the metabolites -- notably vitamins A, C, D, E, the complete B group, beta-carotene, selenium and zinc. Other stuff is useful too but costs start building up, besides it's better to rotate your antioxidants than to take the same things all the time. Never discontinue vitamin C abruptly -- climb off gradually. (That's because your metabolism will be set on higher rates of elimination if you take high doses, and if you drop it suddenly, the body won't have a chance to adjust accordingly and you might wind up with mild scurvy!) In my experience, it is cheaper to put together your own formula and modify it from time to time than buy a ready-made one. I learned this stuff years ago from Cognitive Enhancement Research Institute and Life Extension Foundation. There's been a few changes to their basic drill over the years, but the main rule still stands -- you use arginine or ornithine (the latter costs more and works marginally better) plus either glutathione or what converts into it that will supply mitochondrial energy. Pure glutathione is pricey, but NAC/L-glutamine convert nicely. Importantly, take this away from protein meals.

(a humble bow) thank you!