Taomeow

no

Feeling the draft when there isn't one?.. This might mean you bed is positioned on a Killer Line and it's very bad. Do you have a compass? If you do, let me know the compass degree toward which the head of the bed points. If it's a Killer Line, move the bed immediately. Excluding that, still move it if necessary to position it so it is compatible with your and your wife's personal gua, so that the top of your head is pointing to one of your beneficial directions. If your gua and your wife's gua are opposite groups, you and her might have to sleep with your heads to opposite directions... let's hope they aren't. I'm sure you'll find how to calculate your personal gua somewhere online, go to a good form-and-compass FS site or check a book if you have any on the subject, or ask me.

Let me insert a P.S. on top -- I've re-read what I've just written below and hasten to add a disclaimer: wherever I use "you," "yours," etc., I don't mean you personally, Ninpo, it's a generic "you," I just went a-rambling and a-ranting on a catalyst, is all... Lol, a thousand identical mice? But that's the taoist ideal! You don't want mice the size of elephants nor the size of gnats, you don't want glowing mice, skunk-stinking mice, man-eating mice... you want just mice, perfect at being just that. You plant seeds, you want all the sprouts to come out at the same time, grow at the same rate, none too short, none too tall, none bearing fruit too soon, none too late, all the same... and... gasp... this is only possible when all of them are perfectly healthy, normal, natural, and so is their environment and all their circumstances! A horrifying picture from the perspective of a society that is supposedly into "diversity." But we only have what we call diversity (including any and all pathology into the category while we're at it) because we can't possibly have health, normalcy, naturalness for most, let alone all. Let alone perfection. And if we could... diversity would show itself for what it really is -- abnormality, whatever deviates from whatever is perfect. In an extreme scenario, that's what cancer cells exhibit: extreme diversity. They are bent on freedom of expression -- their own. They don't want to follow any rules the body has established for the benefit of the whole -- cell division rate, metabolic rate, which types of cells are produced where and when and so on. Nah. They do it their own way, they believe they are ready to do better than just follow the rules. I have practiced Chinese calligraphy a bit. You do the same four bamboo strokes four million times. You can't possibly do it right even once even if you do it four trillion times though -- unless... ...and that's where the real heart of the matter lies. Unless you realize that your freedom of doing it any which way gets you nowhere because there's no such thing -- there's only one right way to do it, the perfect, normal, healthy, natural way -- and you do it right or you screw it up, and calling the screw-up individual artistic expression sugar-coats the pill and everybody is addicted to sugar... but you have to spend years to learn to hold your forearm horizontally, parallel to the surface of the table, and until you can and it's easy and spontaneous, all you can really express is your limitations. And that's on the gross anatomy level -- and there's more, much more... you start finding out that your head, your neck, your eye, your spleen -- your mind -- your breath -- your life -- have to be aligned a certain way too, and you aren't used to having any of that aligned any which way but "the way I please," and the way he pleases is, in the case of a modern civilized artificially raised human being, wrong. Just plain incompetent at being fully human. Now you master that, being competent at being fully human, and that's when and only then can those four strokes be done the right way (the way tao does it when she paints bamboo on the rice paper of manifestations, no less). By the time you're there you can do anything -- use an acupuncture needle or a sword perfectly, paint perfectly, have a perfectly balanced body, mind, spirit, life, afterlife -- you get to embody tao. That's the idea. Taoist artistic freedom is understood as freedom from error. You do things a certain way till you are so perfect that any which way you do them will be the perfect way. If you are at a stage where your self-expression is spontaneously free from error and perfect, then it's the right time to self-express. Sooner than that is too soon. Few westerners will believe that until they start a practice with a demanding traditional teacher and, to their horror, begin discovering that what they thought of as freedom of expression -- in any which area -- was in reality the outcome of a mere lack of exposure to what freedom really is like. People are used to expressing themselves freely under circumstances that don't require them to venture into areas of their incompetence -- physical, mental, spiritual -- and a good teacher will gently nudge or roughly push one smack into that... I've seen it happen, e.g., when a cocky TKD black belt who "doesn't believe in soft MA" came to check out what my taiji teacher has to show, and was thrown across the room with one finger on every approach. You should have seen the face of the guy the moment he became enlightened.

Thanks for the clarifications. Um... this didn't quite go the way I expected it to. I have no clue why you thought I was giving you a lecture on methodology when I was merely juxtaposing my understanding vs. yours, but I assure you I meant no harm. I had very limited success when I did try to present a lecture on methodology a while back in another I Ching discussion. I had a Chinese friend translate that for me, the methodology that is, from the guidelines used by his friend who is the I Ching adviser to the president of Hong Kong. The moment I made a peep about the "proper" way to address the I Ching based on that document, I got shot down by someone or other who "despises ritual" the way the majority in the here-now despise any formal infringements on their freedom to do as they please with things they believe they have under their thumb anyway. "Why bother with ritual and 'the proper way' when there's no daddy standing over my shoulder telling me to?" kind of freedom. A proud feeling, sure. That's the prevalent approach. However, the traditional approach to the I Ching is highly ritualized, I follow it because I choose to follow any genuine tradition I might come in contact with rather than modify it as I please, but I'm fully aware that traditionalists like me are more the exception than the rule these days, so I do believe I don't share "methodology" anymore, for lack of takers. So I was surprised to hear from you that I still do. Really? Maybe I did something inadvertently that wasn't my intent? If so, I apologize, it wasn't my intent.

I believe what you meant was the opposite of what I mean. You are trying to get an "objective" something or other by partially removing yourself from the inquiry. I assert this is not doable. I also assert it's not doable not as a result of something missing from the I Ching's validity but as a result of something missing from the minds of "objective scientists" conditioned to pretend they aren't there when they question reality: to wit, obligatory subjectivity. It is obligatory because reality is based on relationships. Once you exist, you affect whatever you interact with. The I Ching is affected by you not because she "can't be objective" but because she isn't interested in being dishonest. Since we're exchanging stories, here's one of my favorite Simpsons exchanges (quoting from memory): Bart: Mom, I just saw Sideshow Bob! Marge: Yes, dear, you saw him in your mind... Bart: No! I really saw him on the street! Marge: Of course. You really saw him. On the street in your mind... I believe any and all "objective studies" are the ones conducted on the street in someone's mind...

A question you ask that "isn't affected by you" is impossible to ask. I second that.

Classics to the rescue! "Heaven above, thirty-two. Earth below, thirty-two." You are a walking talking I Ching, did you know that?.. Measure your above and below in kuns, body inches, which are your very own, not generic. Your kun is -- OK, bend your index finger, you see a V formed by the folds between the first and second joints? The distance between the tips of this V is your kun. You are as tall as 32 of these above the dantien plus 32 below... and where it is exactly depends on your personal proportions. Some people have long legs, some, short necks... so where the lower dantien falls on the individual body varies. But it is always smack in the middle between heaven and earth... until of course you are alchemically savvy enough to move heaven and earth, and then the lower dantien will skidaddle and you might start spotting it in all the unlikely places all over the body.

No such thing exists, yet the sun sinks with a hiss: Pacccccific sssssunssssset

Reminds me of a task routinely given to protagonists of Russian folk tales: "pojdi tuda, ne znaju kuda, prinesi to, ne zhaju chto" ("go there, I don't know where, bring me that, I don't know what.") The I Ching, when consistently used for divination, tells you the tale of your own life, with all its twists and turns, ups and down, tasks and challenges, possibilities and improbabilities. If you ask a "how can I go there I don't know where" question, in all likelihood you'll get a "get lost" answer. I simply can't interest her enough in the plot of my life's story if I ask her a question that doesn't interest me enough, much less if I don't actually know it! So what might be a more useful strategy for approaching her fruitfully than "testing" her is testing yourself first. Try to find out with more focused precision what it is you're actually doing when divining -- asking because you really need to know, or asking because you're bored, or want to prove or disprove something about the method itself, or asking with interest but with no trust in your heart, and so on?.. In my experience, the more you are into your own life, the more she is, and the more she is interested, the more precise she will be. To the point that some of the answers I get are not to the questions I ask but to the questions I failed to ask that are on her mind, not mine (e.g. about situations she is aware of and I'm not that are to unfold in my life.) Those will invariably later show themselves as THE questions I should have asked to begin with, because the answers will become clear as her creative/artistic moves aimed at guiding the plot away from some unworkable pitfalls (which bore her -- she likes action and meaning in a story, just like everybody else), and toward some useful developments (of the plot, the character, or both.)

Balut -- is that what it's called? I occasionally had it when I was little, but not recently. My grandmother used to start her chicken dishes with a live chicken, and would give me a full lecture on vertebrates anatomy as she opened the chicken, producing all its internal organs and explaining their functions. At the age of perhaps 2 or 3, I was put in charge of some of the chicken tasks, one of them being to check and announce if there's any -- hmm, Balut! -- inside. I was excited when there were. Another task I had was to clean out all the little pebbles from the chicken's stomach (chickens swallow them to help grind the grains they eat) in preparation for what would become a "gizzard" when separated from the tough yellow inner lining. (That's how I know that the inside of the chicken's stomach is made of the same kind of tough leathery material as the outside of the chicken's feet.) Removing the lining was something I was allowed to do only later, at 5 or so when I was thought old enough to responsibly handle a sharp knife. Yes, you're right about turtles... they are not animals in the ordinary sense, they're something else... in any event, I'm sure it's OK for an animal (including the human animal) to eat another animal, but I'm not so sure it's OK for an animal to eat a something else.

Yup, with vast philosophical implications. E.g., the human heart is a textbook strange attractor -- its regularity arises from irregular, slightly "off" rhythms all gravitating toward a certain "average" central rate, strength, amplitude, systolic-diastolic interplay and so on. In a healthy heart these rhythms are not "very" off unlike in arrhythmia, but never machine-regular. In fact, experienced doctors know that when this chaotic strange-attractor behavior disappears and the heart of a patient starts beating in a very regular, exact, mechanical fashion, this is one condition which, regardless of the underlying cause, means death within 24 hours in 100% of cases regardless of any medical interventions or lack thereof. I believe there's vast sociophilosophical implications inherent in this little-known medical fact... I've read about it in a book on fractals. There was a picture of a graph built by fluctuations of rhythms of a healthy heart -- the graph looked like a star, some rays longer, some shorter, there and back, a bit off and back, more and back, less and back... that's a self-regulating live system for you. And then there was a graph of a perfectly rhythmical heart of someone who died later that day. It looked like a cog. A gear. A part of some machine. That's uniformity and lack of self-regulation, lack of self-adjustment of a doomed overcontrolled undersensitive system. It's actually terrifying, sociophilosophically speaking, to live in a society whose ideal is exactly this -- overcontrolled deprived of self-regulation predicament for one and all. I wish I lived in a strange attractor instead...

Cool stuff. On the level of the human being, that's the answer to the "no real self" idea -- you've heard it, right? -- the argument goes something like, all cells in your body get replaced over the 7-year period by new ones, so not one of the cells that comprise "you" today was in existence 7 years ago and not one of the current ones will be in existence 7 years from now. Yeah but... but the coherent structure they adhere to when coming in and going out of existence -- THAT was there 7 years ago, and most of it was there 7 million years ago too. (About 99.7% of it all was there then, can you imagine?..) That's "your real self." Your real self is a pattern, and that's pretty stable in time though pretty unstable in space. Just the way those Lagrangian structures are. Which is why, on a personal note, I chose taoism to begin with -- it is concerned with stability in time to a much greater extent than with instability in space. The taoist term for stability in time is heng. It is classically defined as "the main virtue of tao."

believe it or not, I can. I buy it at a local Asian market when I feel adventurous. It can stink up the house (I burn incense when I cut it) but the yum factor is worth it. I'm an adventurous eater in general, I almost bought a shish kabob of grubs in a rainforest market in Peru, but the horror in my companion's eyes stopped me... Sigh... it smelled so good, even though it looked like an Indiana Jones horror-feast episode. I've seen things eaten that a normal supermarket shopper can't begin to imagine, and I ate some though not all of them. I ate fried cow brains in Mexico, though I couldn't stop thinking prions, mad cow disease... but I couldn't refuse, it was supposed to be a special treat, I was specifically invited to try something genuine... One taoist thing I can't do is eat a turtle. Many times I almost bought one in Chinatown because they are supposed to nourish your Kidneys and your Liver and your jing and what-not and improve your eyesight and your third eye sight and rejuvenate you and the list goes on and on. But they look so damn sentient. You try to buy one, he makes eye contact with you and transmits a "hell no" right into your cerebellum. Guess I'll never get past that...

No haha, Smile! I seem to recall it was Prince Shotoku (574-622), the first Japanese ruler to take buddhism seriously (it was popular before him too, but perceived more as a set of magic tricks than moral imperatives.) He established the Constitution of Seventeen Clauses in which he emphasized peace and harmony within the state and nonviolence and obedience on the individual level. To this end, however, he promoted buddhist violence against "enemies of buddhism." He was of the "general buddhist" opinion that human beings are imperfect by default, that buddhism could improve human beings and help them create a peaceful and harmonious society, and he firmly believed it could be done by force.

I'm just a cat whose digestion is good -- Oh Lord, please don't let me be deprived of food...

I've read somewhere that Zen Buddhists in Japan were allowed to kill people on the 1st and 15th of the lunar month, but not on any other days.

Knew or felt true sex when mother ocean made love to father hard rock

Taomeow = Miaodao

actually yes washing machines do eat socks mysteriously

If you google "gluten and cognitive impairment," "gluten and CNS," "gluten and neurological disorders," you'll find hundreds of articles. Here's one: http://www.nutramed.com/celiac/celiacbrain.htm

Wow! You train for this one by doing the "single whip" under the table! I'm not kidding!

popcorn and candy drive SUVs, go to church, salute to the flag

This guy is either the answer to my prayers or I don't know how to pray. I have been praying for a physicist/mathematician to do what I've been trying to do with my limited physics/math access. To wit, debunk "mainstream modern science" scientifically, incorporate fractals in doing so, link in the I Ching, other taoist and ancient systems of tackling reality, bring the live real observer (the scientist himself/herself) back into the picture whence he or she has been kicked out by "mainstream modern science" to observe "objectively" (where's that objective galaxy not connected to anything in the universe that they all have to go to in order to achieve the feat?..) and so on. Nassim Haramein, who is a physicist in good peer reviewed standing, has done all of the above and more. There's many hours of his lectures for lay people out there on the youtube, and they are golden. Take a look whoever is interested. Highly recommended. Very far out. Too much fun. He was born in Switzerland but his dad is Iranian and his granddad was a professional guide for pilgrims visiting Mecca and lived to be 128. I sense a lineage sage, kids...

deep in the mountains mushrooms on long crooked stems many moons ago

Thank you, Witch. I am still trying to figure out how many zodiac signs there "should" be -- you know that Western astrology is derived/borrowed/reworked from taoist astrology, right? -- so, in taoist astrology, if you go by the zodiac signs, 12 it is ("zodiac" is the Greek for "circle of animals" -- remember those 12 Chinese animals arranged in a circle, ruling 12-year cycles of time and 12 2-hour cycles of the day and so on?.. Animals are metaphors, what they really mean is the 12 stems--10 branches interactions of the heavenly and earthly qi, that's what shapes a particular period of time... Western astrology left out the stems-branches qi when borrowing this system and so got hopelessly confused.) However, there's an altogether different, truly stars- and planets-based taoist astrological system (several in fact) and it might concern itself with 13 heavenly bodies because of a fractal correspondence to the number of the yearly cycles of the moon (the number of days in the lunar cycle, a bit over 28, times 13, equals the number of days in the year.) Western astrology somehow intermixed these two separate systems of assessing celestial influences on terrestrial events, so I don't know what it knows and what it doesn't, really. I know Arachne is supposed to be a hoax, I thought maybe you knew something about why it was called Arachne in relation to "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" and what the author of the hoax may have known or intuited about the other system of original astrology when introducing the 13th sign. Wiki is hopelessly biased, by the way. Sitchin is supposed to be the foremost linguistic authority on Sumerian, and if his is "poor," that's still the best Sumerian this planet has today anyway.