Taomeow

I like your enthusiasm, I used to get mesmerized by all things taiji when I was first discovering it too, and still am. Where do you live? come to SoCal learn from my taiji teacher -- here's a sample:

no, biologically speaking, this is incorrect. An egg can start to divide and successfully develop to term via parthenogenesis. True it's not common in humans, but it's common in many other species, and there's absolutely no natural prohibition on this happening to a human egg under the right circumstances (I remember high concentrations of UV radiation and salt water as some of the likely conditions to jump-start parthenogenesis in higher primates.) The sperm is absolutely optional -- it is merely the most common way to fertilize an egg but not the sine qua non. Of course an egg fertilized by parthenogenesis will develop into a female, a copy of the mother, so the function of the sperm is to introduce variety, or what McKenna calls "novelty," into the process. But that's all it does -- it doesn't create life, it only modulates life once it has been created -- by a female. Interestingly, all the religious stories about a virgin begetting a god (there's many of these besides, and before, the Virgin Mary story) are biologically non-viable because a god conceived immaculately can only be a female. In which case the story would be rather realistic.

true and encouraging. The whole gender opposition thing is unnatural, far as I can tell. I have twins, a boy and a girl. It has been discovered "scientifically" that in these rare (for our species) cases the mother bonds with them one at a time, so interestingly, I "bonded" with my son instantly and with my daughter only a few days later -- and it still shows, I find it much easier to communicate with the male kid of mine... so we aren't designed for a gender-based preference, in my case the kid who was born weaker was instinctively favored until he got stronger... the way it should be regardless of gender.

oh, I agree. The persecuted ones were all women and all real normal men, the persecutions were creatively installed by the abnormal men, and where these came from I have no idea, for the bulk of our history (till some 8--10 thousand years ago) they never called the shots and chances are didn't even occur. It may have been genetic manipulations by reptilians after all.

Thanks, Witch, I'll check out the movie! I think we are facing a coin with two sides when we encounter thinking along the lines of what's been exhibited here by a few but is shared in our sick society by many. One, they don't teach history where these guys went to school in any life-relevant shape or form. They were taught that creativity is about machines, concrete and steel structures, and weapons, that whoever makes these is a "creator." They were taught the political, religious, and scientific machines are run by men; concrete and steel structures designed by men are wonderful and their absence, awful; and weapons, ever more deadly, ever creatively improved on, add to our overall creative glory. The other side of the coin is the absence of understanding of the present based on a surreal, mutilated picture of the past installed in their heads. The reason they are taught in this manner (side 1) is they are supposed to have exactly such a picture of reality in their heads (side 2). And only men (and women who are considered creative only when they undertake to "create" on men's terms, i.e. male-style female scientists, male-style female artists, male-style female politicians -- women who are really "honorary males," the only women who can sometimes get ahead in society) write those history books driven by the same agenda. So their very definition of "creativity" is full of blind spots -- they were blindfolded to reality in order to put together such a picture. The real picture is much more interesting. In the past two thousand years, men and only men creatively invented and widely used several thousand types of devices for the specific purpose of torture. They invented special wheels with pulleys of many types to pull limb away from limb. They invented impaling and crucifiction. They invented iron boxes with spikes inside to close on a human being. They invented bone-crushing "Spanish Boots." They invented the guillotine and the gallows and on and on -- lots of gimmicks. All of these were first used on women to get the message across. What message? That women don't own property, nor their own bodies. That women shouldn't attempt to enter into any lucrative or educated professions. That women can and should be beaten, raped and even killed if men happen to choose to beat, rape and kill them, and any objections will result in the use of one or a few of those gimmicks. You may have heard of the "witch hunts" in Europe but I actually read the Mallet of Witches, the document that was "created" to justify and guide the process. Well, to qualify as a witch and to qualify for torture and death, you had to meet one requirement only: you had to be a woman whom someone denounces as a witch. That's sufficient proof. You may not have heard of South American tribes that punished refusal of sex by wife to a husband by death -- the method was to place the woman on the ground, put a stick across her throat, and have the husband stand on the stick gradually increasing pressure till her neck snaps. You may not have heard of African tribes that practice genital mutilation of women to this day, all girls are subjected to this rite at about age 6, on the basis of their future fidelity to their husbands since genital-mutilated women are guaranteed to have no sexual feelings. You may have heard of Islamic countries where punishment for a woman who hasn't covered herself head to toe and shows as much as an elbow in public is stoning to death, whereas in other countries this will be done if she is caught wearing lipstick, and still others, she has to go as far as talk to a man who is not her husband. You may have heard of foot binding in China -- this was going on for over a thousand years, and used on hundreds of millions of women who were supposed to be crippled like that or they couldn't marry, and if they couldn't marry they had no way to survive because all ways whereby one could survive were reserved for men. You may have heard of American women activists who won their right to vote (very recently), but you may have heard it wrong -- the first thing that happened to them when they first made a peep and showed up in the streets with slogans and reasoning was, they were all thrown in jail and gang-raped. You may or may not have heard that today, of the 1000 wealthiest people in America, only one (ONE) is a woman (Oprah, incidentally, a honorary male) and 999 are men. You may not have heard that my own IQ is not measurable because it is off the male-created IQ chart (over 185) and so is my mother's who worked all her life as an engineer (an honorary male) and had a few dozen men to report to her who respected her tremendously because she was so competent and knowledgeable in her field no one could touch it -- but the real reason to respect a woman could easily be something entirely else if she were to apply this innate intelligence to making sure every child of hers is created and raised healthy, happy and whole?.. Well, this task is not creative enough... so every child, male or female, is created by a woman who is either nothing or a honorary male in our current set-up. With dire, DIRE consequences for both sexes. Every baby boy born to every mother who is the outcome of this kind of history whether she knows it or not swallows the bitterness of her milk (today, the carcinogenicity of male-created soy formula, more often), with results reverberating through every second of all of his subsequent life -- through centuries and millennia. That's what karma really is...

A guru of mine used to say that whenever people say "always," "never," "everybody," "nobody," they are referring to the feeling they are stuck in. In any event... What the solution is?.. Well, to refer to something I learned recently, Wang Liping dedicated one of his lectures (lectures always preceded the practice during the workshop) to natural body cycles to follow so as to be at one's most productive and most creative at the most appropriate times. He used the 28-day female cycle, explaining what should be done on every particular day of this period and why. Then someone in the audience asked, well, what about men, what are we, chopped liver?.. do men have cycles they could abide by? He said, well, men have cycles too, but they are neither as precise nor as easly to learn to perceive subjectively, and most men today are deaf, dumb and blind to their own energies and are better off not trying to be guided by them. Men, he said, are way WAY better off following the woman's cycles, and following women in general, and obeying women. He said, in China, men are thought of as the smartest and most prudent -- and tend to be the most successful -- who are actually afraid of their wives. I for one, he said, am afraid of mine (bowing in her direction -- with timing uncanny she was coming in just at that moment), see, she walks into the room and already I don't know what to say... How do you like this idea from this source?..

I'm bound to disappoint from time to time! sorry, I guess it was a private joke between me and me (I just didn't feel like taking the subject on with any seriousness, I figured someone else will... bows ) but let me try to explain the punch line... and also give you a reference for if/when you have the time/inclination: "The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge," by Jeremy Narby, Ph.D. He is an anthropologist who met the female entity I was talking about and spent the next fifteen years pondering what she showed him. He came to the same conclusion I did -- to wit: that the universe itself is female, that it expresses its creative imperative through creating life, that life is governed by DNA in any and all of its dimensions, that ayahuasca is the interdimensional connecting cable that plugs you into the DNA database of all universes in all dimensions, no less, all times and all spaces and all the timeless places... and -- now the punch line -- that in all of this universe of universes, the real and ONLY Power is the power of the mother over her baby, and all the rest of existence plays out this creatress-creation relationship. I've said it in one line here but She took the first 18 hours of the first intro nonstop to show me, among billions other things, the single most important thing: exactly why humans are so puny, so not calling the shots in the grand scheme of things, in the universe of universes. We can't create shit on any scale that matters, we, the rejects among peoples that create galaxies and play their games of gods with them, precisely because we don't understand The Power. We are the village idiots of creation, the joke of ages, because of that. Well, I can't explain here what 18 hours of "Lesson 1: Power" encompassed (I too will need the next 15 years should gods grant them to me to integrate at least some of that). I can just try to explain why it is that the title of Agape's post -- "women create nothing but babies" -- resonated with this knowledge of mine in a funny way... And besides funny, the hair-raising part was... well... I just know She has a temper, oh my god of gods, cara madre mia has a temper you or me or any other woman who is less than Power Herself will never have... shudder.... so I imagined what She would tell him, and how... (and I call her cara madre mia because she told me to call her that, against my objections that I speak no Spanish -- She said, well, all people here do and so you'll have to -- and snap -- unsilenced that silenced part of my DNA where complete and eloquent Spanish I never learned is stored, by removing a SIR 2-P enzyme ring -- she showed me how -- ... THAT was fun.) ...did I redeem myself a bit yet, or did I only make it worse?

...forgotten summer... ...blue dragonflies... ...apricots... ...a German boyfriend...

I'm turning weird, verily. I skimmed through Agape's post and of all reactions I could possibly have, I suddenly saw what ayahuasca would do to him. What She, cara madre mia, would do to one of Her wayward sons if She cared to redeem him. I'm still ROFL but my hair stands on end!

True. Fa Shen is part of classical training. A very good explanation of how to work on the method is written up in Miyamoto Musashi's "The Book of Five Rings." Musashi is considered to be the greatest swordsman Japan ever had. His "fa shen" tactics center on the eyes, the way you look, the kind of intent you put into your gaze... Example: you don't look at the opponent, he is transparent to you, you look through him as though he's less than insignificant -- he's actually invisible to you, because what you're already looking at as you look through him is your future where he simply doesn't exist -- because he's dead. THAT kind of a look. From my own humble experience, fa shen can be easily projected in a verbal conflict simply by entering the latter in a subtle, mostly inner, taiji stance. A body language that spells relaxed un-intimidateable confidence is picked up by the opponent's unconscious, this is how most animal fights are resolved -- there's not much fighting in real animal world (unlike on Discovery Channel portraying nature as vicious and selecting a rare occurrence of a fight to masquerade as business as usual. Business as usual is, instead, a stand-off with subtle, or not-so-subtle, exchange of spiritual intent.) Anyone who lived for a length of time close to lots of feral cats (the way I did) knows that two cats who hate each other's guts will stand and look at each other for an hour, meowing the shivers down each other's spine, stepping half an inch forward, half an inch back, mixing their whiskers while looking each other square in the eye, display fa shen every which way -- and in 9 cases out of 10, the fight itself will never happen, one cat will be victorious and the other one defeated without any fur off either one's nose. The cat with the stronger shen and/or a better skill of projecting it will win every time. My grandmother had a cat like that, a female, who terrorized all competition for 18 years without ever once fighting an actual tooth-and-claw fight. That's a fa shen warrior for you. "Study the cat, Saihung. Everything you need to learn, she knows already." -- Deng Ming-dao

You crack me up guys!

I'm sorry you're having difficulty communicating with me. The problem might be that you're trying to communicate respectfully with someone you don't actually respect? Then again, you might just be a challenge to my own communication skills, a lesson in their inadequacy. tsai yoshto yoshto... tsai yoshto yoshto... bumbaclaat, it's not working!

Your use of the verb "to insinuate" is not in my dictionary, so I'm not sure what you mean. No, I'm not saying that everyone should start going to class to meet a teacher in the flesh to learn such practices. I'm saying that my teacher is real rather than a disappearing made-up story. Yes, I was saying this to Orb specifically, in response to his entry that was a response to mine. The one about the dummies and stuff. No, I wasn't aware you were part of the conversation, I didn't read the whole thread. More power to you.

Well, it's an interesting skill in cats, in that half of all the cats know it innately and will catch mice on instinct regardless of whether they were taught by their mother how to do it or not; while the other half will only know how to do it if they were taught. So your cat might be in that second category. So unless you are prepared to act as her surrogate mother and catch a mouse or two yourself and show her how it's done, she won't figure it out. Source: Desmond Morris, Catwatching

Um... I replied to a specific assertion with a specific example, is all. The only guy who disappeared, in my personal experience, was the guy who punched the dummy. The reason I was impressed at the time was, I didn't know any taiji then, hadn't seen nor experienced stuff like that in real life before, so I witnessed it but didn't know what to make of it. Now the guy who actually teaches me how to fajin don't disappear none. He's there every week, quite in the flesh and looking like nothing special after 45 years of 4 to 8 hours of taiji daily -- but you wouldn't know what that invisibly transformed flesh knows and can do from just looking, nor from talking "about" it, and the only way I can learn some of that is go to class and feel my own body learn it. Every week. For years. And then practice. Which is what I do. If there was no need for that, if someone could just explain it all to me in plain English upon asking around on a forum, I wouldn't go to class, nor practice. Why bother?..

I've seen it used on a TKD kicking dummy. A guy I didn't know came in one day, spoke briefly with our master, and left. On the way out, he passed the dummy and punched it. Nothing happened for a minute. Then the dummy started vibrating. Greater and greater amplitude. Whoosh! -- all the way to the floor and back.

It's one-way... you choose to drive through the "WRONG WAY" sign muttering, "yeah right..."

Thank you! Well, the psychic among us can figure out which one is me. By the way, there was no talking WLP into placing himself to occupy the center of the picture even though people tried hard. Very characteristic.

thanks!

MCO may be overemphasized and the Five Tibetans may be underestimated. For all its simplicity, this little routine "has it all." Except devotion and letting go -- which are as physical as all things spiritual -- this I might add with tibetan-style prostrations before a deity of choice (it can be a quartz crystal or the Three Pure Ones or whoever I want to contact), basically you just throw yourself flat on the ground from the standing position and not too gently either, arms outstretched, do it on a rug and protect your elbows (carpet burn) and you have a complete body-mind-spirit routine in a five-minute nutshell. Extend it to fifteen minutes three times daily and expect miracles. MCO shouldn't be underestimated in alchemy though. Just running it is like running your car motor without going anywhere. But alchemically, you don't focus on what you're running to get places, anymore than you focus on your car engine running when you drive. You don't focus on what runs the engine and how, you focus on where you're going and how, you pay attention to many things at once -- your speed, but you don't focus on that... other cars, but you don't focus on that... steering, but you don't focus on the steering wheel... you pay attention to braking when necessary but you don't focus on the brakes... and so on. The moment you over-focus, over-meditate on any one thing out of the whole picture, this one thing turns into an obstacle you run into -- or into something that prevents you from seeing the obstacle you're about to run into. I was surprised to hear that Tiger Woods, as physically spirited as he is, had run his car into a tree the other day. But then I found out he was focusing on something other than where he's going (on a fight with his wife, in this particular case), and had an aha moment.

Cool! In China? You know Chinese? Can you tell me what would be the Pinyin rendition of Линбао-бифа, Чжун-Люй чуань дао цзи, and Да дао чжи чжи? -- I learned and practice them but I don't know how to say it in English, since instruction by WLP in Moscow was simultaneously translated into Russian and I have no idea how to romanize Cyrillic Mandarin.

Everywhere, nowhere creatures of the night whisper into dawn's pink ear

Hi Kathy, I believe it. In Moscow, at Wang Liping's Secong Russian Seminar I took part in. You trained with WLP?

hear hear...