Taomeow

Being ordinary and blending in, being invisible -- that's ninja tactics, very good! I use that too. Advanced protection -- yes, of course. If you're not a slacker like me, who will forget. I need something continuous that I don't have to think, do, maintain, manage in any way. Something ziran. Funny you should mention protecting yourself from Max -- I never saw this side of him, though god knows I've heard about it here plenty. Just illustrates my point -- power goes both ways, the scalpel can heal or kill. I felt and still feel tremendous protective energy from Max, even though I put the practice on hold quite a long time ago because I had two new (and somewhat conflicting) things to learn last year. There's a story I might tell someday... anyway, don't let me ramble.

I started out psychologizing demons, the way we do in the west, and wound up demonizing psychological problems, the way they do in the east, but then I found (or rather, was shown) some middle ground where, just like fiveelements says, they're the same. I've seen that many a demon is created by the person himself/herself and many a demon is introduced from the outside and is someone else's creation -- there's all kinds. Many traditions of the world have whole classifications of demons -- e.g., in India they have the generic name, balas, and then specify the type of the bala -- jaljogini, pichalpairi, sirkata, bhutna, and so on. Much like you can have an infectious disease or an autoimmune one, a lousy mood that's your very own or a perfectly fine mood spoiled by someone else who, as the Japanese put it, disturbs your wa. So, Witch, how do you protect yourself in general, not in this specific case but on a regular basis, from people and entities whose energy disturbs your wa? The flip-side of being energy-sensitive is being energy-affected not only when you want to be... communication goes both ways, someone with thick walls around her and with ironclad defenses is neither empathic nor particularly in danger of being affected by any kind of external energy, positive or negative, but in the opposite case, one needs to think protection. Here's a few of the methods I use: wear protection (I have things like a tiger tooth triple-charged with protective energies by masters of three different traditions, obsidian arrowheads, stuff like that); install protection (I use a human-sized iron bucket that I don't hesitate to mentally lower over someone's head, whether a person's or an entity's, enclosing his/her/its whole body. If he/she/it behaves I will remove it); cleanse (after visiting or being in the vicinity of a hospital, a cemetery, a bureacratic institution dealing in human misery like a church, DMV, or a pharmaceutical company's headquarters); divine (ask the I Ching what's going on and what to do about it), to name a few. I am, like you, in continuous need of protection (like all people interacting with the other side whether by choice or by destiny) so protection should be continuous, no slacking!

Yoda, thanks for the corroboration! Um... yes, that's exactly what I was saying. "The Goddess" is just the title of the book, not the refutation of the fact. And the fact that female-administered rites and rituals of the Goddess worship dating back at least 75,000 years of archeologically documented evidence (and quite likely far farther back than that) is well established, though not well liked by male-dominated religious and scientific institutions of today. Same archeological evidence has no male authority figures to show among its findings of the period -- these don't appear on the scene till a bit over 10,000 years ago (some say 10 to 15, but definitely none earlier). The advent of patriarchy was simultaneous with the introduction of agriculture, slave labor, pyramid building and all that jazz. We didn't live like that for 99.9% of our overall history on this planet at all. The Goddess book I referenced is mostly pictures -- and one of them is pretty interesting because it is a fully fledged taiji symbol (yin-yang) dating back 45,000 years, found at an archeological site in Europe, and associated with shamanic traditions of the Goddess served by female "embodiments." Laozi was of the same opinion, incidentally. So much so that in some esoteric schools of taoist thought, in order to prove that Laozi was legit, they have written treatises showing that Laozi was his own mother. Don't ask, I don't understand it myself... I mean, I dare not understand... there's a level where I do though...

Here's two you might enjoy: The Woman in the Shaman's Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine, by Barbara Tedlock, Ph.D. The Language of the Goddess, by Marija Gimbutas (professor of archeology at UCLA)

They should call it Wisdom Teeth instead. You need to grow them at one point -- that's how you mature -- and then you use them to tear things apart, separating this from that, reality from illusion, in particular. But then you grow some more and age as you go till your Wisdom Teeth decay from the effort and get pulled and leave you either toothless (reality) or with dentures, implants, veneers (illusion) -- and you carry your inability to "separate reality from illusion" in your very own mouth but you don't notice... because you are not looking inside your every real-unreal tooth to see the joke... This inability is always hidden, whatever layer you're looking at is a layer that prevents you from seeing the next one, and if you get to the next one, this too is a veil. I know it for a fact. Reality herself, cara madre mia, SHE showed me how she is arranged, made of layers upon layers of unreality all the way through, there's no penetrating anywhere where it isn't so because it is so everywhere and every-when.

Indeed. My all-time favorite description of "the practice of separating reality from illusion" has been given in a poem I reproduce below. Monologue for an Onion by Suji Kwock Kim I don't mean to make you cry. I mean nothing, but this has not kept you From peeling away my body, layer by layer, The tears clouding your eyes as the table fills With husks, cut flesh, all the debris of pursuit. Poor deluded human: you seek my heart. Hunt all you want. Beneath each skin of mine Lies another skin: I am pure onion--pure union Of outside and in, surface and secret core. Look at you, chopping and weeping. Idiot. Is this the way you go through life, your mind A stopless knife, driven by your fantasy of truth, Of lasting union--slashing away skin after skin From things, ruin and tears your only signs Of progress? Enough is enough. You must not grieve that the world is glimpsed Through veils. How else can it be seen? How will you rip away the veil of the eye, the veil That you are, you who want to grasp the heart Of things, hungry to know where meaning Lies. Taste what you hold in your hands: onion-juice, Yellow peels, my stinging shreds. You are the one In pieces. Whatever you meant to love, in meaning to You changed yourself: you are not who you are, Your soul cut moment to moment by a blade Of fresh desire, the ground sown with abandoned skins. And at your inmost circle, what? A core that is Not one. Poor fool, you are divided at the heart, Lost in its maze of chambers, blood, and love, A heart that will one day beat you to death.

OK, here goes. The lesser shens are primarily responsible for particular "virtues." The major difference between traditional taoist and our current (as well as historic) understanding of "virtue" is that in the taoist system, having particular human "virtues" exhibited in one's natural spontaneous behavior is basically a sign of health, of realization of one's human potential. Whereas an absence or a distortion (developmental aberration) of certain "virtues" is viewed as an unhealthy condition, both the cause and the outcome of an assortment of disharmonies in one's overall "arrangement." These can be physical, mental, emotional, or all of the above. So a shen that is faltering might start out as an organic liver impairment yet manifest as a deficiency of purely psychological human qualities -- e.g., kindness. By the same token, an absence, due to, e.g., peculiarities of upbringing and conditioning, of a natural inclination toward kindness can, and will, cause organic liver damage down the road. So the shens that govern these "virtues" are neither "all spirit' nor "all matter," they are both and neither like all of taoist reality and unlike all of Christian, Buddhist, or contemporary-scientific reality. So -- definitions (or rather, descriptions) and organ-system-function associations: 1. Yi -- sometimes translated as thought or consciousness, I like Ted Kaptchuk's translation -- "consciousness of potentials." It is the spirit of considering and deciding upon what is likely, what is real, what is possible. Has much to do with motivation and creativity. Has something to do with intent based on a deep understanding of the needs of situations and people rather than on some willful "I want." The Virtues of Yi are loyalty, sincerity (xin), and facilitating new manifestations to come into being. Yi helps one understand oneself and others. It is introspective but its inner work results in action in the outside world. An ailing or deformed Yi may manifest as sticky, stifling loyalty, fanatical beliefs, excessive sentimentality, anxiety, and disproportionate generosity and self-sacrifice at some point, but once this point is passed (burnout) it will manifest as indifference, boredom, lack of interest and motivation. I don't remember its organ association but I will recall it as I go. Please stay tuned.

The interesting thing about breathing, compared to any other major life-sustaining function of the body, is that it has double controls -- in the lower brain and in the neocortex -- which means you are dealing with a function that can be involuntary or voluntary depending on which system you are using, the autopilot or the "manual" control. (It is not like that with, e.g., your liver or kidneys functions that don't have voluntary controls in the neocortex... not that these can't be created by alchemical cultivation, you can connect your brain beyond your wildest dreams and gain voluntary control over any organ-system-function... but "just naturally," they aren't there. The opposite example is one's ability to lie: there's controls for this in the neocortex, which Antonio Damasio the cognitive neuroscientist calls the "as-if loops," but not in the lower brain, where these loops don't reach -- they begin and terminate in the neocortex -- so one can voluntarily lie to other people and to one's own mind but not to one's own body.) So your problem seems to be that your observing of a lower-brain-controlled mode of breathing interferes with this function, it's as though your brain decides, OK, he's watching, so he must be in control, so I can give up the autopilot mode... but then you don't pick up the "manual control" because you're just watching, and a miscommunication occurs between the lower and upper regions of your brain as to who's going to do the job. To prevent this from happening, try a taoist mindfulness meditation instead of viprassana for a while. It is dual, yin-yang style, just the way natural breath is, and goes, "rest your mind on your breath, and rest your breath on your mind." Meditate on this line because I can't explain it further, then try doing it. This should eliminate the problem. Good luck!

Define it in words? Sure. Adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine: life.

Ha! I know one of the people in the video -- Leutenant Colonel Stubblebine, he was General Stubblebine when I met him. I'm happy to report that he married a dissident doctor (Rima Laibow, MD) and was working as her assistant at an alternative clinic in New York (Dr. Schachter's) at the time I met him. He was exceedingly humble. Love conquers everything.

Bows back to Trunk. How does this work? Via a process that can be defined in three words summing up a "civilized" human being: fragmentation of consciousness. Why is it so? Because being a "civilized" human being is traumatic. Trauma is separation of parts that shouldn't be separated. You cut your finger, that's a trauma of separation, of a bunch of tissues that should be together into parts that are not. They cut your umbilical cord the moment you are born (only done by "civilized" people, mind you), they separate you from what you've come to know as "the whole world," your mother -- abruptly, long before you are ready -- so that's something that fragments your consciousness into "me" and "the world" right from the start. You are disconnected. We all are. (People who are not civilized never disconnect like that -- the umbilical cord dries up and falls off by itself in some seven days, plenty of time to establish new connections to the world, but first and foremost to your own circulatory system. If it is abruptly turned on without having established the connections that require those seven days, you are disconnected from your own blood -- for the rest of your life. We all are.) Then the world proceeds to disconnect you from itself by all means at its disposal. They jab you with a syringe while behaving as though they aren't attacking you, as though they are doing something good for you, so you disconnect from your ability to tell pain from pleasure. They put you on schedule feeding so you disconnect from your ability to understand your own hunger. They actually don't do anything other than things that disconnect you from your own senses, emotions, truths -- until you are confused into forever seeking what you should naturally avoid and avoiding what you should naturally seek. You're lucky if you understand that that's what's happened to you thirty or forty years down the road, and take matters into your own hands in search of reconnection. Most people never do. They just fragment further and further. First consciousness itself, then the shens, then organs of the body, then cellular metabolism, the mind, relationships, everything... till they face the sum total of a life lived the civilized way -- a pile of meaningless fragments of what might have been a whole human being. (I know what you're thinking by now! -- morbid TM going into Weltschmertz over a soft-porn video! ) Exactly. Postnatal conditioning... even prenatal, by the way. If you get a pregnant lab rat addicted to something -- say, sugar -- little lab ratties are born already addicted to that too. A human mom addicted to crack cocaine... same deal. A human mom addicted to misery... likewise. Conditioned to be fragmented... that's inheritable too. Well, "lesser" and "greater" are not value-based qualifiers, they are more like fractal dimensions of the overall shen -- the "greater" of the whole resonating into the "lesser" of the separate organ-system-function shens via ganying. "Lesser" shens are "like the greater" but at the same time "like themselves," not the same as each other nor quite the same as the whole, the way all things fractal are. So Hun and Po are not supposed to be in conflict anymore than your hands and your feet are supposed to be in conflict, even though they have different tasks, do different things, often opposite things, and look different... yet they are ultimately the same and not, you and not not-you and yet not the-whole-of-you... and so on. However, in a society that would condition you to believe, e.g., that it's OK to have hands but it's shameful to have feet, or that it's OK to have a mind but it's not OK to have a body, or that it's OK to have a body but it's not OK to have genitals... and so on... Maktub.

What Trunk means is to illustrate, with a funny extreme case, the common condition of the human spirit. The Greater Shen is comprised of five Lesser Shens -- Hun, Po, Zhi, Yi, and Heart Shen. In a balanced individual, these are aware of each other and communicate harmoniously. That's "spiritual harmony." In most people, however, they don't communicate all that well, so you wind up having parts of you wanting things that other parts want no part of. In the posted example, husband and wife both have their Hun trying hard to repress their Po. The moment Po is aroused on cue, however, it momentarily suppresses Hun, overpowers and overthrows it. This is a typical situation for people whose Zhi is weak so that neither Hun nor Po can follow its orders because they don't hear them. The result is a disturbed Heart Shen and a confused Yi that doesn't know what anyone (any one) of the Shens really wants and what the Greater Shen, the spirit of the whole person, should do moment to moment. So that's what the Shen connection of the video is.

By the way, butterflies have light receptors in their private parts. To Darwinist-twisted scientists, this is mysterious because they can't imagine how this light that no one can see is helpful for the survival of the fittest butterfly. (Of course they never phase in love and pleasure as forces that have something important to do with survival of either the species or the specimen, so if no one gets eaten as the result of a phenomenon, the phenomenon first "baffles" them and then gets ignored.) They should have asked Zhuangzi, who in his butterfly incarnation must have enjoyed the inner fireworks.

I can think of several reasons. I can also think of several reasons why people are resentful of the idea of secret knowledge kept from them. OK, why masters keep secrets: On the level of qi transformations, masters keep secrets because it's the way of yin to keep itself secret. Yin is hidden; yang is on the surface. To share the innermost secret is to violate yin's natural principles. It's like Cesarean birth undertaken when the doctor is ready instead of natural birth when the baby is ready. When the secret is ready, when yin is ready to transform into yang, the master knows, and the student will be informed. This is why so many secrets are revealed "on deathbed" -- spirit that is about to depart is yang, and whatever yin remains inside needs to be transformed so it can do so with lightness -- so confessions to a priest or revelations of buried treasures or of past transgressions or of secret knowledge, the innermost yin of the person, is brought to the surface by the spiritually yang-bound process of death. So if a master feels pretty perky and feels she still has a lot of life to live in her, she won't turn all her secret yin into yang by telling all. Besides, there's a Chinese proverb I heard somewhere, "teacher tell, go hungry." Someone who feels alive enough to envision the need for a "stash" that can be turned into cash if necessary to provide nourishment in the future will stash away a secret or two. I would. I do. Then there's situations when a secret would be wasted on a student who won't get it, so why waste it? Take the frequent full lotus discussion here. It is no secret, it's in the open, and yet its meaning is wasted on whoever is ready to believe something else instead, something less involved or more, well, secret, whatever. So it's one example but there's hundreds of such open secrets students who aren't into that simply don't notice. Another Chinese proverb goes, "one walks knee deep in Buddhas." Do you notice? I do. Oh, and the reason people resent secrets being kept from them is that the power to hold on to a secret is abused since they are little by people who shouldn't keep secrets from them, things are kept from them that should be rightfully theirs, offered freely (e.g., "I love you" from a dad who may or may not show it, tell it, or act it -- is a big secret: does he love me, or does he not?.. I resent not knowing!) To say nothing of the secret governments and their secret agendas. Even those who "don't believe" in "such things" pretty damn well feel, on some level, that this is what is really going on. They are being treated like mushrooms that is. To wit, kept in the dark and fed shit. They rightfully resent it and either dig for the truth or go into denial and assert they already know all the truth there is to know. Which one do you do -- deny, or dig? I dig.

Some of us are decently versed in the language of King Wen. Here's the translation: The Bound: stopping indeed. The season stopping, by consequence stopping. The season moving, by consequence moving. Stirring-up, stilling, not letting-go one's season. One's dao: shining brightness. The Bound: one's stopping. Stopping at one's place indeed.

Hagar, thanks, likewise! I studied De Saussure way back at the university and remember next to nothing (I wasn't a very diligent student and partied too much...), and the only thing I know about semiotics is something or other from Umberto Eco... so, no expert here. (Please share your own expertize and/or interest in the above though, I'm interested!) Expression and expressed, sign and signifier -- is it something like Rene Magritte's "This is not a pipe" caption under his painting of a pipe?.. Yes, I'm very much into paying attention to what it is in the real world that a linguistic unit is used to refer to and how it is used exactly, and how exactly it is misused, and who does it and toward what end, and whether it's conscious or unconscious use or misuse, and so on. I'll tell you what interests me the most about language... I'm a student of its power. It is a tremendously powerful phenomenon, perhaps THE most powerful of them all (considering that all existence is relationships and all relationships are based on some form of language or other. The DNA is a language and all life not only on this planet but looks like all life in the universe uses this particular one... so this gives one an idea of what tremendous power is contained in Logos.) More specifically, I study tsai yoshto-yoshto, a shamanic technique (literally "language twisting-twisting") -- perhaps for another thread sometime with this one?..

CowTao, thanks! Scotty... Language is a medium of manifestations wide open to use and abuse. One can manifest truth or falsehood, integrity or dishonesty, wisdom or idiocy, kindness or callousness using nothing but grammar, style, even punctuation marks toward this end. ("Royal pardon! No execution!" is a different command to the henchman than "Royal pardon?.. No! Execution!") Multiple meanings of words in the dictionary is not where it's at. A dictionary is an object; language is a process. I was giving one example of how different rules of engagement apply to objects and processes and how grammar can lie to us on a very deep level when we use it to pretend processes are objects. On the level of manifestations it can lie to the very core of our being, because once we construct a phrase like "the meaning of life" we proceed to live as though whatever is "life" is somehow separate from whatever is "its meaning." But it's not the case. Nothing in one's life is "its meaning" separate from the process of living it. So the original question, "what's the point," should ideally be answered by giving the point's coordinates in space-time. E.g.: "what's the point of doing taiji?" -- "The point is Thursday at seven, with teacher Hong, Chen Laojia style, at such and such location, with such and such classmates, for such and such duration of time, with such and such physical, mental, emotional effects noticed, and such and such aimed for, and..." and so on, ad infinitum. Points are infinite. Pinpointing "the point" of anything is another grammatical illusion with no counterpart in real life. I may be doing taiji because I'm in love with teacher Hong, or with one of the classmates. I may be doing it because I have nothing better to do. I may be doing it because I hope to kick someone's ass someday. And so on. What's the point? An infinity of points to choose from. And no one can choose "THE" point for someone else. Whatever is the point for me at such and such space-time coordinates is the point, and no one and nothing else occupies THIS point in space-time, so what's the point examining some generic point which isn't there?.. Language is tricky, and I made it a quest of mine to see through all its tricks, one by tricky one, because once you do... Ah, my friend... once you do...

"The meaning of life" is a linguistic construct. Some languages are better equipped to fabricate such artificial constructs than others. To create such a construct, one has to place "meaning" and "life" in such a grammatical relation to each other that one becomes a separable attribute of the other. These separating/fragmenting grammatical attributions work well when we are dealing with objects that have shape in space (i.e. are more or less "solid" from the POV of direct human perception, not on any philosophical or quantum level but on the level of direct and immediate human senses). These grammatical structures help us separate solid objects into distinct "sub-objects," parts, pieces that can be viewed as different from each other though embedded within the same shape. E.g., "the yolk of the egg," "the pit of the cherry," the back of the chair," "the claws of the cat." This works well with objects that have shape in space. Now when we apply this grammatical construction to processes that don't have shape in space -- life, love, faith, anger, orgasm, intelligence, wisdom, stupidity, terrorism, etc. -- we create a false object in order to apply the imaginary cut-off of the "of" to its imaginary boundaries separating it from its imaginary something else -- e.g. "meaning." "The meaning of life" would be possible the way "the pit of the cherry" is possible if "meaning" was a separate object embedded in another object, "life." Then we could use the imaginary knife of the "of" (or the spoon, as the spoon taoists would prefer) to cut one off from the other, or scoop one out of the other, as the case may be. This is only possible due to peculiarities of Indo-European languages whose grammar does not prevent handling a process that has no shape as an object that does. But just because this is something that's happening in a language doesn't mean it can be happening anywhere else. In actuality, it can't. The grammar of objectifying processes lies. No need to even consider such constructs, really, because they express nothing in particular, they express a figment of grammatically facilitated unreality. Neither "life" nor "meaning" are objects with one embedded into the other. When we present them as such via a grammatical relationship expressed in "the meaning of life" combo, we are pretending they are, and then split hairs about something that doesn't even exist?.. No need, really. Life and meaning are never in the "of" relationship anymore than "the claws of the egg" or "the cherry of hair."

Never to return, toothpaste crawls out of the tube, briefly a worm... Bye...

Definitely east? -- not on the border of east-northeast or east-southeast? not two degrees each way from that border?.. 'cause that's where trouble lurks...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jWYy4SUAa4

that was my introduction too, years ago, and I'm still grateful.

When the great czar Peter the First came to visit a city or town they fired cannons to salute his approach, as a matter of routine etiquette. Now he arrives in a little remote town to inspect some military installations there and there's no salute. The angry czar demands an explanation of the town authorities. The guys in charge fall on their knees trembling and begin explaining. Your majesty, there's exactly sixteen reasons why the cannons didn't fire. Number one, we have no gunpowder... The czar interrupts them with a laugh and says, "that's one reason that makes it unnecessary for me to find out about the other fifteen."