Taomeow

Ah, it gets complicated. The earliest excavated version of DDJ has a different word in that spot -- 恒, heng. 常 chang, a synonym (with somewhat different shades of meaning) appeared later. Here's how: In modern Chinese, the common meanings of chang 常 are "ordinary," "usual." The word has undergone a number of permutations -- the earliest meaning was "skirt," "undergarment.'" From there social norms and rituals were later inferred -- skirts as a sine qua non element of ceremonial dress. Therefore it became associated with "constancy," "regular propriety," "permanence" as opposed to "fashion trends" if you will. It existed in this context for a while -- not in the DDJ though -- but then 常 was substituted. That's because Heng happened to be the name of Emperor Liu Heng (劉恆), and using the emperor's name was taboo. So, to avoid writing the emperor's personal name character 恒 heng, scribes systematically replaced it with 常 chang in copied texts, including the DDJ. Thus, the version that has been standard for the last 2,000 years uses 常 chang, but with the meaning of 恒 heng. Eternal, constant, unchanging. That chang is therefore interpreted as heng, while it doesn't exactly mean the same thing. Chang is not about things eternal as much as things "accepted," "proper," apropos.

The point Deng Ming-Dao was making and I agree with is, anyone who claims a better understanding of DDJ solely on the merit of being fluent in Chinese, or being a respected Sinologist, or even a lineage taoist, is ultimately in the same boat as a native English speaker dealing with Beowulf, only a bigger one. I.e. knowing the modern version of the language, by itself, or knowing the culture and traditions, or their development through the ages, is still nowhere near enough to make claims about presenting "the correct version." Even the meaning of the very first line, which became a meme of sorts, is the product of interpretations rather than of Laozi's calligraphy brush -- which produced only this opening: "Tao can be told, tao is not eternal." So one has to superimpose the kind of grammar (absent from the original) that will allow to ascribe to Laozi a statement that not only was never made by him but is the opposite of what he actually wrote verbatim. And then just repeat it for two and a half thousand years. That beats Lewis Carrol's "what I tell you three times is true" with a vengeance. But what if we don't do that? What if we take those words for face value instead? Then this line can be read as, say, the opening manifesto of a writer who asserts his right to write about tao. Tao can be told. I, Laozi, can tell you about it. I can tell about it here and now. I am not an eternal being, and so I'm not tackling an eternal subject -- just the here-and-now tao which is what I can tell you about. How's that?

Yeah, and then there's hyperoxia, a life-threatening medical condition caused by too much oxygen. Oxygen toxicity is a well-known phenomenon, symptoms include pleuritic chest pain, coughing, dyspnea, tracheobronchitis and pulmonary edema, to name a few. Whereas there is no amount of qi in the human body that is toxic to the human body. A wonderful taoist rule of thumb: do not define something via what it "is," describe it via what it isn't. Wield that Occam's razor with a firm hand. If too much "something" can do things to the body which no amount of qi can do to the body, that "something" isn't qi. Be it oxygen, chocolate, ice cream, electricity, or what have you. Qi is not interchangeable with anything at all. Understanding qi only starts (sic!) when one stops equating it to something else they happen to be familiar with. There is no something else that "is" qi. Just like there is no other gas that can replace oxygen in the blood, there is no other phenomenon that can replace qi in the taoist paradigm. Oxygen is oxygen. Qi is qi. Every traditionally trained and educated (key word every word in italics) taoist practitioner has heard of "qi leads blood," "qi is the general of blood" in this or that context, whether medical, martial or magical. Blood is what carries oxygen to the organs and systems of the body, but to get oxygen into the blood, one has to have qi to lead and guide it. The general and the army are connected, but most definitely they aren't the same entity. The general leads, the army follows. Qi leads, oxygen follows. Unless one is dealing with a rebellious general starting a coup -- aka "rebellious qi," the term for some pretty nasty health disorders, including mental disorders.

Here's a taoist legend for you: When the Jade Emperor decided to put twelve animals in charge of the twelve Earthly Branches, he announced a race -- the animals were to compete for their place in the calendar. In those ancient times, the Cat and the Rat were friends, and the Rat told the Cat that it could safely take a nap before the race -- I'll wake you up in time, don't worry. And then the cunning rodent tiptoed away... and didn't. So the Cat who had every chance to win the race (remember, the fastest animal on Earth, the cheetah, is a cat) overslept. By the time it was done napping the race was over, and the treacherous Rat won, becoming the number one animal in the cycle of twelve. Ack, you're too late, the Jade Emperor told the Cat, no spots left in the calendar. Sorry. Go get that treacherous friend of yours, nothing else I can suggest at this point. And unlike in Casablanca, that was the end of a beautiful friendship. In Vietnam, however, they kicked out the Rabbit and have the Cat in its place in their version of the calendar. Some say that's because they mixed up the characters, but in thousands of years they would have figured it out... yet the Cat stayed. To justify its inclusion they pointed out that the Cat was a worthy and useful animal for hunting mice and rats, while the Rabbit was only of culinary interest.

It wouldn't occur to me, but I don't remember either all that well. Flatliners was about a memory of a trauma Kiefer Sutherland inflicted on someone else as I recall? -- the movie creator's dream of a remorseful perpetrator? Alas, memories of trauma buried deep in the unconscious are usually uniquely personal and concern the trauma inflicted on us... if we survive it that is. Perpetrators, even those who are capable of remorse, seldom get traumatized on the unconscious level, hurting someone else doesn't rewire one's neurophysiology -- in most cases they either feel nothing in particular (no mirroring neurons operational, so they can't relate to the feelings of those they hurt) or actually enjoy it (10% of the population, aka the sociopaths). But like I said, my memory of the movie is rather dim. And from Travels I only remember that Crichton hated medicine and his father, both for a good reason.

Have you ever watched "Altered states?" It's a 1980 sci-fi/horror movie, which starts out as a great and unusual sci-fi and then devolves into a trite and unimaginative horror one. But up to that unfortunate commercial plot twist, it's cool and even somewhat plausible.

About stuff that strikes one as stranger than average. Anything. I don't remember which season I stopped at but I loved the series at first and then it started jumping the shark with evil Russians, so I abandoned it. Not saying there are no evil Russians, but the Hollywood version is invariably stranger than a normal evil Russian.

This is a koala's paw. As you can see, it has not one but two opposable thumbs. Perhaps our problem, as a species, is not that we built our lifestyle around the fact of having the opposable thumb that allowed us to mess with things. Perhaps the problem is we don't have two of them. If we did, it would make climbing trees so easy and enjoyable that maybe we wouldn't ever get down and start messing with things on the ground.

I am not sure it's all that realistic, I was just reacting to the that hijacked this topic. Maybe it's too late in the TDB day for quality control. It was being controlled for something else for too long, through no fault of the current mod team I should add, not their fault at all.

你真是太懂我了！Nǐ zhēnshi tài dǒng wǒle! შენ ჩემს აზრებს კითხულობ! Shen chems azrebs k’itkhulob! Ты прочёл мои мысли! Ty prochyol moyi mysli! You have read my thoughts! /ju hæv rɛd maɪ θɔts/ The second line of the above is in Georgian. I don't know the language but I do know the alphabet. Me and my girlfriends at school learned it from a Georgian classmate circa the 6th grade in order to exchange coded messages during lessons by transliterating them into that alphabet. The motives were strictly pragmatic -- so that classmates who passed little pieces of paper with messages along, or the teachers should they intercept them, wouldn't be able to read them. Now I wonder... what purpose does it serve to use a writing system here guaranteed to not be understood by nearly everyone on the forum. Just curious.

Sounds more like an anti-toastist. I used to see an acupuncturist who thought sushi is the food of the barbarians. And those were the times when I frequented an amazing sushi place (they don't make them like that anymore... everything gets corrupted once it gains popularity/profitability). He would ask me about my weekend and if I mentioned eating at a sushi place, he would always make a face and go, "eeewww... Well, at least you didn't eat any raw fish there, did you?" Affirmative. I did. "How could you?!."

Probably, but it may be hard to find. Even neigong the real deal is something that is mostly taught in private, one on one, for all kinds of reasons. E.g. "pearls before the swine" is avoided, "teacher tell all, go hungry" is another consideration, persecution of taoists that repeated many times throughout history (communists didn't invent it, emperors did long before them) and what not. The culture has always been big on "family secrets," "secret skills," "secret manuals," "secret formulas,' "secret transmissions" and so on, from neidan to porcelain to herbal formulas to martial styles, it was more common than not to not tell everything, and often tell nothing outside the family or school. This is not just history, this is also true in our time. Even though a lot of Chinese movies and Jin Yong's novels are centered around the pursuit of such secrets , all of it has a real-life cultural counterpart. If the private forum materializes, I might tell a story or two... can't share in a public space, so for now they are secret.

The CPC is known to have insisted on the "out with the old, in with the new" approach most decisively for decades. Traditional arts and sciences were condemned, taoist temples burned to the ground, practitioners publicly humiliated, sent to "reeducation camps" and so on. The legacy lingers -- although later they took a somewhat different stance and the pendulum started moving toward "restoration." They realized that all those things they used to condemn can be turned into tourist attractions and marketable trinkets. So it's not unusual to encounter views in people influenced by this sort of education that glorify things traditional at the cost of the tradition itself, by reformulating it in "modern" quasi-scientific terms. Instead of forbidding all things cultivation they try to give them Western style respectability. This is a very simplified picture of course...

@Sanity Check Didn't understand your cryptic statement -- are you sure you meant it for me? I am not an admin/mod who can do or not do it, and I've no clue which "basic facts" you're referring to that I "can't get straight." ???

Nope, the idea was not an elitist club, anymore than a tennis club that wants its members to be tennis players rather than football players bent on preaching to them about the correct shape of the ball they should be playing with. Or a football club that tries to stop tennis players from running around the field swinging their racquets at the goalkeeper. TBH that idea was born out of sheer frustration... a pipe dream... something along the lines of that tree house rule:

You fared better than me. I got arrested first, then nothing, then beer. The "nothing" proved somewhat prophetic -- my son sent me a gift he got from Amazon and Amazon happily delivered a freaking empty package where six bottle of Diamine fountain pen inks should have been. (They promised a replacement once I complained but so far... nothing.)

I read your comment as "on first fake." Which reminded me of that visual game someone posted a few days ago... I didn't fare all that well... would you give it a try, see what you see?

Yes, this is not unlike what I proposed. Name your teacher, name your lineage, and then which part of that practice you are going to discuss. This would be great to apply to qigong, neigong, taiji discussions as well. The first tip I got from a fellow practitioner back in the day: start with a very limited volume. Don't breathe in the whole expanse of the universe, don't breathe out the ocean and the sky. Practice in a small room. When you can pore breathe reliably the volume of air wall to wall, ceiling to floor, then move on to larger volumes. Precision trumps ambition.

Yes, that too.

20 or 200 or 2000, I don't think it will help. What might help would be applying a special rule to that forum: only those who could reference their neidan teacher and lineage would be qualified to post. Pipe dream of course. But what passes for neidan discussions otherwise is akin to a plumber teaching a neurosurgeon that the internal carotid arteries supplying blood to the brain should be tackled exactly like the water pipes supplying water to the toilet. After all both carry fluid (or as the case may be in current neidan discussions on the board, "breath"), and therefore there's absolutely no reason to call a neurosurgeon when one needs to regulate blood supply to the brain -- a plumber is fully qualified.