Taomeow

DO NOT ABUSE POWER

quote (Wayfarer) courage is needed Yes, exactly! If as 5ET says gods are all within, courage to "know thyself" is needed. If they are both within and without as I think they are, courage to "know thyself and accept that others are different" is needed. If they are all outside... well, this is the only scenario that can be faith-based rather than courage-based, and this one I don't subscribe to. So a popular Western interpretation of taoism -- all is tao, therefore it doesn't matter what you do with yourself, you can trust the tao to do all the right things anyway, and whatever you yourself come up with is just "ego" (not a taoist concept to begin with, by the way) -- is a symptom of disconnection from the tao, IMO. The Way is Power. Taoism is a teaching/art/science/practice of how to use and not abuse power, not a teaching of non-use. Looks like this is the single most difficult task there is -- to have power and not abuse it. Mostly, those who have any abuse it, and those who don't want to abuse it surrender it and have none. Just to be on the safe side. Which circles back to what Wayfarer said about courage. Courage is not being on the safe side. Tao is not about being afraid of power. It is about using power without abusing it. If I were to give a definition of tao, taoism, taoists the real thing, that would be it. Gods of taoism are varieties of power tao has. Ones that know how to use power without abusing it become gods. Ones who have power and abuse it become demons. Ones who don't use power because they're afraid to do something wrong become cowards, and tao has zero use for cowards. Ones who don't have power and say no one should are hypocrites, and tao has zero use for these too. IMHO of course.

This is one condition where acupuncture shines.

When I went to court to dispute a speeding ticket (unsuccessfully of course, they have sticky fingers, you can't peel your money off them once it's stuck), the judge referred to that blindfolded statue adorning every court, Justicia the Roman goddess of justice, as Lady Justice (the public can't be expected to keep track of the names and peculiarities of the gods set up to decide their fates, right?..) He told me that she can't possibly take any of my "emergency" explanations into account because, well, as you can see, she is blind. I wanted to point out to him that she's supposed to be blind to social status, gender, race, creed, etc., not to the facts of the case -- that's blind, not deaf. I didn't though, the fine was high enough without risking additional "contempt of court" charges. Knowing what our gods are really about is empowering, which is why the public is kept ignorant -- why add to the power of those who aren't supposed to have any?.. "Just go with the flow.... just go with the flow... you're getting sleepy... just go with the flow..."

Chinese folk religion thinks no such thing! It is Chinese folk religion that has introduced Nuwa, the goddess creatress of humans, who is venerated but not prayed to because what's there to pray about? -- what's done is done! However, the most popular buddha of China and Japan, Amitaba, the Buddha of the Pure Land, is exactly the benevolent sky-fairy who responds to faith and need and nothing else. It took centuries, and political action, to enforce other Buddhas on the Chinese and other Southeast Asians. The last people to accept them were taoists, and far, far from "all of them" at that. Source: Lin Yutang, "My Country and My People."

not "more" so much as "different ways" to keep track of things. You do keep track of the weather and don't wear flip-flops when it's snowing, nor ski boots to the beach, etc.? You keep track of the speed limit when driving (I used to not to till the fines got astronomical), of when it's time to pay your bills, of your body temperature if you get the flu, may you be blessed with never getting it? -- we all keep track of things mundane as best we can, lots and lots of them. Keeping track of taoist gods makes it easier, not harder. Many taoist gods are about timeliness and efficiency of actions undertaken, which are ways to facilitate harmony, peace and a serene heart. One could say that timeliness and competence are the god of taoist gods.

She said "see you next year," which people usually say before going away for Christmas vacations?..

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Yup. Unless one or more of the gods should show up in your kitchen and empty a bucketful of shrimp over your head, and then smack you with a heavy bag of rice, and then toss a bottle of sesame oil at you, and stomp down on a clove of garlic so that the earth shakes, and crush a chili pepper with a bolt of thunder, and light the fire in your stove with a lightning from the sky, and then tell you, in a most authoritative voice, what it is they want you to do with the wok. Then you'll have to do the cooking the elaborate way whether you like it or not. thanks, and may you soar high!

There's thousands of gods in taoism, and you don't pray to any of them the way you pray in other modalities. You do it by performing certain actions and, to a greater extent, by avoiding certain actions. E.g., every star of the Big Dipper has/is a resident god, and you would have to find out more about them before attempting to be heard -- for instance, what color they govern, what foods they like (so you can offer them), who of the lesser gods has their ear (because you don't get to talk to the boss just because you want to, the boss is usually busy), what offends them (so you take measures not to offend them), and so on. To get the Jade Emperor to view you and your requests favorably, you might want to follow a no-grains diet (because the Grain Monsters that live inside you report to him once a month and spill all the beans about all your wrongdoings, not just dietary but moral and ethical failures and intellectual blunders too -- in other words, if they tell him you're being stupid, he won't want to listen to you because he is offended by stupidity.) To get a god/goddess to behave more like those of other religions, they had to borrow a few from other religions -- e.g., Quan Yin, a Buddhist boddhisattva promoted to a taoist goddess, can be prayed to in the ordinary manner, but the subject matter of your prayer has to fall into the area of her primary interests -- family, children, female health, protection of women and children, forgiveness, stuff like that. If you want to win a conflict, you might want to contact Quan Di who will help provided your cause is just; if it isn't, better not. If you want to contact Laozi (also promoted to one of the leading deities, not merely a writer), clearly state your purpose (usually of spiritual nature) or he will ignore you. Not as easy as it sounds, because once you start digging for the true purpose of your prayer, you discover it's an onion of many layers... you have to find out what you really need, not what you happen to want at the moment. You can't really pray to a god you don't know anything about, and to know things about taoist gods, you have to learn. Unless you are a future taoist priest in training, you learn these things best indirectly, via practices -- you don't even find out that you've been doing a practice dedicated to a particular god until you master it at least on the student's level. Example: when I started learning feng shui, I merely did what I was told -- this year the Grand Duke is in the southwest, so don't face that direction, don't do any renovations, hammering, loud music in that area, etc.. But why? Well, eventually you find out that the Grand Duke, Jupiter, is not so much one deity as an office of the deity, and 64 gods take the office in succession, each with his personality and peculiarities. A temple dedicated to this deity will have statues of all 64. You start getting into the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching and you gradually discover what those 64 gods' personalities are like. You find out about the current one and what his personality is, you can predict what the year will be like. If he is a military commander, there will be war, if his successor is also a general, the war will go on. Gods of taoism are both persons and energies, cosmic forces AND people with personalities, stars and planets and former mortals who cultivated themselves into stars and planets and gods... they are a colorful bunch. You need a professional (a taoist priest) to help you with contacting them, just like in shamanism, lay people don't normally communicate with other planes directly, the shaman is their messenger and go-between. The feel-good soothing rites of other religions where you pray based on "faith" are used by some taoist sects (the ones the farthest removed from shamanism and the closest-tied with buddhism), but taoism being a mysterious science rather than a faith-based need-based religion, you can get more mileage out of learning and practicing than out of wanting and asking.

Here's a story I heard in Peru. Now the interesting thing about some remote places there is that Christianity, superimposed over earlier local belief systems, differs from Christianity of Europe or North America or elsewhere not only because of this mix-and-match superimposition (which is quite common everywhere) but because, due to the remoteness of some places and very limited interactions with the outside world for centuries, it can still be found in the shape and form it was introduced by the first padres there. Some Christian celebrations have been carried out in exactly the same manner for the past 500 years, longer than anywhere else Christianity is practiced, and are quite peculiar to a modern eye that only sees the new and improved and PC versions... E.g., they celebrate the Death of Christ in Ayacucho, it's a three-day affair when every devout Christian engages in heavy drinking, orgiastic sex, and violent behavior, because supposedly god is dead at this time and no one is watching, and any sins committed during this period will go unrecorded and unpunished. Anyway, to my story... This one I heard in Iquitos, the largest town on Earth not reachable by road. A rich man and a poor man died and went to heaven. God looked at them both and said, whoa, we have a place of purity and balance here, and you two... hmm... let's see... He turns to the poor man and says, I see your life was total shit, you spent its every moment shoveling shit, so here's what you look like to me... -- and he orders his angels to cover the poor man in a thick layer of shit, head to toe. Then he turns to the rich man and says, I see your life was sweet as honey, you spent every moment of it enjoying the sweetness of your privileged position, so here's what you look like to me... and he orders his angels to cover the man in honey, head to toe. "And now," god concludes, "before you can get to a place of purity and balance, you two have to lick each other clean. Get to work!"

There's also a third way to use words. The shamanic way, tsai yoshto-yoshto, "language twisting-twisting." The way you use it is not unlike the way you use taiji -- you don't use/expend your own energy in any direct way to get things to happen, and similarly, you don't use your "exact" language and your "personal" experience. When you name things directly, it's like bumping into them, colliding with them, there's impact (normally people don't see or perceive it but I was in a shamanic situation where I did see it --) -- it's like banging your head into a wall while screaming, "Wall!.." It's like banging your fists directly into a door and kicking it with your feet -- Door, Door Door, Open, Open Door! -- instead of using the key (the indirect, hidden, perfectly energy-efficient way to open the door.) And the stronger the energy of the subject matter, the stronger the impact of the words used directly to collide with it. Sex is at the core of things vital, so running into that subject head-on is going to be energetically significant. And if you're running into things not merely referring to sex but referring to your own experiences, so much more so. And to a large open audience where every "bang" resonates -- more so. Why, you must have felt it with your TV exposure -- you must have (I'm guessing, correct me if I'm wrong) felt drained, not really refreshed by the experience?.. Taoist traditionalists will talk about sex, oh my, will they ever. But they won't talk any other way but circling around and around and never naming names. They will talk about the Jade Stalk and the Crimson Palace. They will talk about Polishing Mirrors. They will talk about Precious Dew. On and on, language twisting-twisting, around and around and never running smack into what they're talking about. So a sexually active adult will understand immediately what they're talking about, but an innocent child may be present during the conversation and innocence won't be violated because no direct blows to reality have been delivered, instead a dance took place, a verbal dance around and around, twisting, twisting, and you have to know that the dance is symbolic of something else to know it's about something else. It's not because they are shy -- even prostitutes in China would use the language of sex poetically and indirectly, at least the not-the-cheapest ones. Sacred matters have been spoken of in this manner for thousands of years. All peoples that retain some oldest written text or other can still read in them all those countless "figures of speech" -- figures of the dance. Some vague ways to use the language this way are still present in modern speech, although in modern speech they usually reek of hypocrisy rather than respect and understanding of the energetics of language (my absolute un-favorite is when they say "put to sleep" to signify they've taken an animal to a vet to be killed, to die and be dead, which if said directly sounds a bit too shocking -- "put to death." This is indirect symbolic use all right, but it never works when it is used this way in order to avoid facing the truth, to lie to oneself and/or others. Whereas calling something you love and want to express admiration and appreciation for a Precious Jade Stalk is absolutely different. It is indirect without being dishonest.) So -- to your question how else you would teach women -- well, you are you and you teach them any way you like, but if I were to teach something like that, that's how I would go about it. The traditional way (as usual... ) No, of course not. In this case, I was using the language quite directly. I had been put to a test that could result in my -- to switch to the indirect tsai yoshto-yoshto -- leaving this plane of existence right then and there if I made a wrong move. (Shit, "leaving this plane of existence" used by all those new age super sages... I so despise it when this is done not out of grokking the energetics of the process but out of cowardice, self-importance, a desire to impart significance to one's pronouncements and so on... fake shit... I hate this inflated language of pop-spiritual discourse! sorry, I hope I haven't offended any afficionadoes thereof, and what I just said was definitely too direct... well, I"m sure I've just run smack into something... or someone... by doing this, so consider it an illustration.) So, to return to what I was talking about before the brackets, I could go either way from that test spot, into life or into death, and whatever I did, said, or thought resulted in my actually taking a step either in one direction, or the other. So I had to learn which path is which by stepping this way, then that way, and seeing the immediate results. Every word and every thought tangibly and visibly and, if I were to persevere, irreversibly... so I had to pay attention. And that's how I know. Thank you, likewise -- and much love to you! maybe then we'll pick up the shred of this thread this particular cat is willing and able to play with in public.

Right, tho' I was merely referring to Susan's post-kundalini grammar issues. Max has similar ones -- have you noticed his stream-of-consciousness writing style? As for me, I've always stored grammar kinesthetically (in my native tongue, which isn't English, I am physically unable to misspell a word, doing so causes stomach pain.) So it's not only more than visual for me, it's not visual at all. The rest of the thread is way too jing-depleting for my taste. I remain of the conviction that women (and men ISO jing accumulation) only store it if they don't talk about it too much. Talking of sex transfoms jing into shen, and taoist alchemical ways of my liking go in the opposite direction. On a different level of consciousness which I've visited, let's call it the void, I saw (not with my eyes) two paths, one of them death, the other one life, and the death path was paved with words. I'm not kidding.

If you read the statement below fast you will know why. (Don't read it slowly till you've read it fast.) "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

Sorry, my comment was perhaps out of place. I just compared the #5 to hindu push-ups and saw how the former was playing with the mingmen -- open, close, open, close, open -- and the latter, close, close, close, close, close. Of course if you have other routines to follow on its heels that will unlock the mingmen, it's not a problem. I'd try, e.g., the ordinary cat posture, which is like an easy version of #5, you stand on all fours and arch your back, then lower, then arch... and so on. And the real Snake asana from hatha, sarpasana. This one rotates rather than compresses the vertebrae, and I like it for its back-conditioning magic.

Qin Ling wasn't teaching, she was assisting. You were supposed to sit in any cross-legged position in which you can sit without changing the position at all for two hours. If you could do it in full lotus, you were welcome to, but nobody could. By not moving at all I mean at all -- not a quarter of an inch -- and in complete silence, and no audible breathing, burping, yawning, blowing your nose should it start running, etc.. I asked about the full lotus -- yes, they said, if you can freeze the frame for two hours, that's the best. If not, do it at home, don't do it here, otherwise you switch your legs, you disturb everybody's unified energy. And me causing all the above-mentioned disturbances with my American ideas of freedom of blowing your nose (mine started running on top of involuntary yawning, a cleansing reaction) caught some heat from a couple energy-disturbed individuals for that, so I didn't dare do the lotus, just in case I can't pull it off for the whole practice. Complete immobility is hard...

Johnny Tight Lips ain't sayin' nothin'!

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My book also says 21 but I felt compelled to correct it out of sacred-geometrical considerations.

The traditional way to do the Tibetans -- 3 daily reps of 5x24 to a total of 360. I was thinking "this is the fifth Tibetan gone wrong" when I looked at the "Hindu push-ups." Poor mingmen. So much strength-building stuff out there locks the Gate of Life and throws away the key... gotta be careful.

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No, that's not what I mean, I don't know what system Chia uses. I use Four Pillars, and you can find 4P sites online but don't do it this way, it will mostly be BS. Just let's put it off for a bit. Theoretical math, cool -- maybe we could collaborate someday on something I have discovered in meditation (I used to get maddeningly complex mathematical visions in meditation, and I don't have any math training to speak of! I once described one of those to someone who is a math genius and he said that it is a vision of Minkovsky space of events in 4D... which didn't help much!) -- as I was saying, discovered something that looks like an irrefutable refutation of a cornerstone axiom, with dire consequences to science-as-we-know-it ... but I don't have enough math to express it. This, also for later, the I Ching told me not to touch it for the time being (the last time I did, the world did change... the last time was on 9/10/01). Which of your creative pursuits feels like destiny to you?

And I bow back. My teacher says he won't do it this way when he's old, only for now that he's young and strong and feels expressive and exuberant (he's 53). But then, one of HIS teachers was staying at his place visiting from China, and he complained that the old man (89) exhausted him with an exuberance and enthusiasm greater than his own, wanting to push hands all the time, he said they were always late visiting friends and family because the moment they would finish a practice and go to the parking garage to go somewhere, the guest would jump of joy and go, oh, there's so much space here, much more space than in your living-room, let's do some push-hands! Chen Bing said something that fits in well with what BKF says: "You don't serve taiji. Taiji serves you."