Taomeow

You need to rotate the hip (and the hip joint has to be loose enough) in order to get into full lotus. If you put your feet on your thighs you're not moving toward this goal at all -- the hip joints will still be tight, the qua "semi"- or completely locked, and the knees will be pressured on by some tight fascia while tendons supporting the knee which need to be supple will slacken. It's like in taijiquan -- the knees need to be aligned just so, they are vulnerable to misalignments more than any other joints of ours and are quite easy to throw off with misapplied pressure and/or incorrect rotation, and quite difficult to mend. There was a good tutorial someone (Smile?) posted here a while ago teaching the correct ways to gradually ease your body into the full lotus. Look it up in the archives. It's all about the hips!

I haven't finished reading this thread yet so maybe someone already said it, in which case thanks! -- but if no one did, I gotta: for chrissake people, don't do what the pic designates as the "semi-full" -- ever -- you'll ruin your knees. A semi-lotus is a different position, not this one. What is depicted as "full" is correct and not to be replaced with physiologically unsound feet-on-thighs position which is akin to crossing the abyss in two steps. The feet must rest in the qua. Or farther beyond if your qua is flexible enough. But not on the thighs, ever.

Mitochondria, adenosine triphosphate, wet chemistry's Way oh, did we post simultaneously, apepch7? well, let the next guy/gal tackle your line starting with an "or" -- I desist

Diamond in the rough, the king of haiku, Issa, weeps dew drops, and yet--

..

Held down and buzz-ted, my trusty coffee grinder purrs so happily

There's physical and mental signs that someone might do this -- risk factors in one's makeup worth considering. A 19th century study linked suicide to the narrowing of the aorta (and consequent poor blood flow to the brain). A 20th century one, to low cholesterol (sic!). Most shockingly, the rate of suicide among poets has been, historically, 18 times that of the general population, according to British statistics. People who are parasympathetic-dominant (yang-deficient) will use a fade-out method (pills or some form of suffocation or strangulation or drowning or starvation) while sympathetic-dominant ones (yin-deficient) will use a blast-out method (bullets or sharp objects or machinery or jumping from a high place). A very agitated psychotic I read about in a book on psychiatry killed himself by delivering over a hundred ax wounds to his own head. That's as yin-deficient as it gets. So the first thing I would suggest to anyone thinking of suicide would be to determine exactly what kind of fantasies he or she is having (fade-out or blast-out ones), and this way pinpoint the rough major problem -- yin or yang deficiency -- and try to work on correcting that. Chances are, once it's corrected, suicide won't seem anywhere near as attractive.

Very much agree with everything except the oral transmission part -- now don't get me wrong, I am a card-carrying oral transmission aficionado and it's official, but far as the I Ching is concerned -- now this is one book you CAN learn from if there ever was one -- and it sure can be but was not originally intended to be transmitted orally: it is transmitted visually -- I would say she transmits herself visually (to me this book is not an "it" but a "she," speaking in a female voice, but this is how she speaks to me, not necessarily to everybody) -- have you seen the Circular I Ching? and the "secret sequence?" These are to meditate on, not to talk about. I've a hunch the prerequisite for getting the transmission is to establish a sincere relationship with her, and divination is one good method, though not the only one -- she is, as you have rightfully pointed out, "all" taoist sciences, you can go from any angle at it. But divination, aka awareness of a larger part of space-time configuration than the immediate moment encompasses, is what she's primarily for, no doubt about it. It's what activates her, what causes her to wake up... it's her proprietary stomping ground, she might not wake up for anything less than that, anything other than sincere divination. (Forget "researching" her, it bores her into eternal slumber. ) Once you wake her up, if she's willing to teach you, she will find a way... if not, you won't find a way. Here's a story of one of my earlier, neophyte encounters with her. I had a big problem to solve at that point... the biggest ever. For starters, I tried something I had high hopes for that the I Ching, however, told me wouldn't work. I was bent on trying anyway (by now I know better than to go against her pronouncement, but that was then, I didn't know any better -- I do now!) So... "trying" involved going to another country for a while. It so happened that a friend of mine decided to send me some stuff there and included a book she'd just finished and enjoyed and wanted me to read. I got it out, it was a novel by Douglas Adams (not the Hitchhiker's Guide, something else, forget the name), I decided to take a look at it later, tossed it on my bed and went about my business. When later that day I came back, I saw that the book on my bed was opened to a page that contained an I Ching hexagram (part of the novel's plot, as it transpired), the one I got before my departure -- reiterating exactly the same message I didn't heed the first time. Which by then was still not yet clear to me... so the I Ching went to all this trouble (somehow causing my friend?.. to stumble upon and read the only novel in existence that has this and only this particular one hexagram embedded in the text?.. and to send it to me?.. to randomly open to this particular page and no other, out of hundreds, when I carelessly tossed it on the bed?..) ...Needless to say the I Ching was right and what I "tried" wound up not working, just as she said it would. Cost me a lot of trouble and a lot of money too.

Little1, I know less than nothing about more than everything, and about David, the only thing I know is that WL's long-term senior student of my acquaintance has referred to him as a "newbie" when we discussed the matter, and stated that David has attended, relatively recently (compared to some people who've been at it since the '80s) some WL seminars, like hundreds of others, and that's about it. Sapientis sat. Clearly uninformed?.. The Eranos I Ching?.. Or the Duke of Zhou?.. A little helping of hypocrisy... thanks, I pass.

Well, that's fairly obvious from the scope of your input that you don't see the relevance of the first canonized and the single most important original taoist text to taoism. The relevance of "my" translation consists in the fact that the term jun zi is left untranslated in this version (by far the best of them all, and like I said, a historic-linguistic work rather than a mere translation), as used by the Duke of Zhou to mean what it meant to the author of this little irrelevant un-taoist book (in your book ) originally. Long before Confucius. Long before social structures of enslavement of women. Long before everything you have cut off from the main trunk to wave about as "your" "taoism." I don't go online to do homework, by the way, it bores me... but if it thrills you to uproot all the irrelevant and poorly informed "proof" and splash about in the ever-enticing but seldom clean "research" bathwater from which the actual baby has been thrown out, be my guest. Haven't you figured out by now I'm a moving target your shooting skills don't quite match? Why don't you practice some more first by trying them on someone easier to shoot down? It's the only thing you're ever here for, so why not do it well?.. With me you invariably wind up embarrassing yourself...

YMWrong. I refer you to the best-referenced occurrence of the term and the linguistic/historic justification of its use as signifying "a MAN or WOMAN of TAO" in "The Original I Ching Oracle: The Pure and Complete Texts with Concordance," translated under the auspices of the Eranos Foundation by Rudolf Ritsema and Shantena Augusto Sabbadini. This work, which is my daily breath (sic), presents fields of meanings that were EVER associated in Chinese with any and all terms it uses, EVER uprooted by historians and linguists for each and every one of them, including this one, with exhaustive diligence you might find enviable and worthy of reverence if not emulation. Cocky ain't educated. Educated ain't conceited. Conceited ain't jun zi, and jun zi is a man or woman of tao per authority greater than yours. Soooo sorry. Very nice, Little1! Yes, the "ultimate" taoist is tao, and I like this definition, from Ta Chuan: "the sage comes like the spring, benefitting all beings." Those of us who pay attention to the behavior of the spring might get a clue as to the behavior of a taoist sage... in particular notice that spring comes INTO the world, not away from it.

I'd say the "real" trouble with jun zi is that you can't really pin them down and classify them by saying what they do or don't do. If you successfully put her in a box of your choice, if you pinned her down with a definition/specs to meet/expectations to match, she is not a jun zi ! There's the two great taoist traditions one might want to consider when addressing these matters. The names for these more or less mean "abandoning/forsaking/leaving behind the world" and "returning/entering/going into the world" (the secular society, that is.) We are familiar with stories of taoists who "leave the world" to be hermits in the mountains, but those same hermits, when the time is right ("a sage grasps time by the tail, not letting it pass by, and values an inch of time over a foot of jade"), abandon the cave and go "into the world," into the hustle and bustle, both to benefit the people and to hone and temper their own art with the challenges of human mundanity. Many of them served at imperial courts, and one of them, an adviser to an emperor, turned out to be an immortal in the actual state of stardom -- i.e. when he was born, astronomers noted the disappearance of a particular star from a known constellation, and when he told the emperor his task was complete and left, the star reappeared that very night. While in service, the guy was notorious for his dissipated lifestyle, with drinking, sex, outrageous luxuries, and nonstop bragging. (A star is a star is a star! ) The story can be found in Eva Wong's "Tales of the Taoist Immortals." But closer to home... A teacher will go public if her teacher says so. This is the case with Wang Liping, e.g.. This is the case with my taiji teacher, as another example -- whose teacher gave him a written order to bring the art of taijiquan to the world. So just because someone goes public means... exactly nothing in terms of his or her level of attainment. Nothing at all!

In what was not there tao made a dent and filled it with ten thousand things

The thing with civilizations is, they are, historically, sudden. Be it Maya or Egypt, they just appear boom, out of nowhere, and proceed to build huge pyramids using mass slave labor. Out of nowhere, out of hundreds of thousands of peaceful hunting-gathering years -- suddenly this. A hunter-gatherer "worked" an average of 18 hours a week (a little over two hours a day), and "work" was indistinguishable from "pleasure," "aliveness," "fun." Suddenly he works eighteen hours a day (a slave is worked to death de riguer, and not in ancient Egypt only -- the average time lapse between being hired and dying for women and children laboring in the coal mines in 18th century England was two years -- less than that for labor camps in Siberia and nazi camps in Europe in the 20th century) -- so successful it is, civilization is, for those who own the fruits of this labor, and for them alone. Who are they?.. Is it "us?" But who do we exclude when we think of the beneficiaries of civilization as "us?" A starving child in Africa? All of them? A soldier blown to pieces in Iraq? All of them? On "their" side only, or on "our" side too? If this boy blown to pieces is "us," is it fair to say civilization has served "us" well? And if he isn't, who is he?.. Isn't all of civilization about marginalizing its victims and pretending that we have accomplished something great provided we don't count those -- peoples, wolves, whales, rivers, forests, all their life great and small? There used to be 15,000 languages spoken on the North American continent, a rich tapestry of tribes and traditions spanning long peaceful millennia, all different, none "civilized" by our standard. Now everybody speaks English and has pretty much exactly the same life. This, too, has happened to "them" suddenly, out of the blue. Now everybody is civilized. Suddenly. Why?..

That's the thing... there's no "sure" about the future, but there's a bunch of "sures" about the past and present, and a photon particles future doesn't seem to flow naturally out of these -- it requires a leap of faith and a lot of hope. Hope is dope. Hope is the most bodymind-numbing drug there is, one that causes people to do nothing about anything, just get the next fix of hope for the better, and the next, and the next, and the next. Just hope for the better. Or better yet, believe. Or better yet, believe in a fundamentalist fashion, no doubt allowed. Very fishy, the whole faith-hope-based deal. If I was an enslaving mastermind behind an evil plot, hope and faith would be the first things I would program into my subjects to keep them comfortably manipulable.

Good question (and great name! ) I don't know. I'm trying to figure it out... The mastermind scenario is looking more and more plausible... I had a vision, see... a major major major one, in an authentic shamanic ceremony in the rain forest... but it's not something I would be able to "prove" -- even to myself, my intellectual part -- so I'm looking at all the "forbidden sciences" for proof (that can go either way of course...) ...and, yes, using my brain too, not just my gut. The gut screams foul play, the brain is undecided at this point... so I'll let them sort out their differences by feeding both -- the brain, information, the gut, meditation, and ultimately, integration.

Yuk that's a gross clue! The "M" over a diner means McDonald's... yuk!

Most civilized people neither think nor feel in any conscious sense. Instead they run programs, like all domesticated animals whose natural range of perception and expression has been eliminated and replaced with obedience training. The only thing we have too much of is obedience training, and the only thing we have not enough of is consciousness. Whether we did this to ourselves is debatable, I'm currently looking closely at all those theories that posit an extraneous intervention -- genetic modification of our species, enforcement of civilization for purposes of enslavement, the planet as a labor camp, its inhabitants programmed with physical features and mental indoctrination to accommodate this function and eliminate the bulk of other functions -- love, compassion, intelligence, independent thinking, freedom instinct, all the things that typically allow a species to adapt to whatever climate it finds itself in and thrive for hundreds of millions of years. We've been around for an evolutionary second and already we're so screwed en masse (most people alive today are starving, did you know that? and have always been in the history of civilization?) and have screwed up our environment to extinction and have swelled up in numbers while shrinking in qualities. What could a plausible explanation be?.. This I find plausible: a slave is not supposed to need to feel or think, is supposed to do the job and die. Is in a natural course? "Natural" would have to be defined, maybe aliens enslaving a planet for profit are as natural as Fernando Cortez enslaving a continent for profit. As above, so below. Or maybe as unnatural as a species of animals born with such a large neocortex -- that's us -- that the period of helplessness and dependency lasts for years before it matures, unlike in all other species where once you're born, you're soon enough ready for life, rather than for years and years of obedience training. Who knows.

So, truth in humor? "Humor," in Latin "umor," means "body fluid."

Oh man, that's priceless. Anyone disagrees with durkhrod chogori, they are on the bad guys' payroll! How else could they?.. Most of human damage to the climate happened via deforestation, civilization's way to do things, long before oil and gas companies. If you want zero impact on the climate, you can't possibly do civilization because no matter what you do, you do harm. Once you're past the settlement of a maximum of 120 people, once you start doing agriculture on a mass scale, it's all over. Sit back and enjoy the ride, your ticket is one-way.

Don't mind the stitches -- it's still the same strings that pull Bush and Obama

Stillness in real time: a snake stuffed with a rabbit, a man stuffed with zen

Well, the evening meditation at the monastery must have been a lousy one to begin with, or the cat would join in. They always do, on a good meditation. When I meditate in the open, so do squirrels, an occasional wild rabbit, and even insects. The monks should have paid attention to the cat's protests and figure out what was wrong with their practice instead of tying down the cat. Typical, too, for all figures of authority to tie down the protester instead of cleaning up their own act. There's a monastery in India where a resident cat is bowed to by all the monks and saluted to by the guards at the gate as he goes on his evening stroll, because they'd determined and officially recognized that the cat is the reincarnation of the former head of the monastery. When the latter died, they noticed that a new cat showed up shortly who would take a walk around the premises every evening -- following exactly the path the former religious leader used to take for many years, at exactly the same pace, stopping at exactly the same spots, etc.. The cat was watched for other peculiarities and found to be the new body of the old man's spirit, and consequently treated as such. If this cat dies and a new one shows up who still behaves in the same fashion, he will be recognized too. (A human body outlasts a cat's body, so several cats might need to successively harbor the same person's spirit. The spirit in the cat's body may be way older and wiser than the cat itself.) "Study the cat, Saihung. Everything you need to learn, she knows already." --Deng Ming-dao, "The Wandering Taoist"

Nice pics, Joeblast. It's not what they say, it's not how they say it, it's not what they say it about... it's what they say it for, what they practically do about it, whatever "it" happens to be... what the actual outcome of the problem-reaction-solution chain is... that always reveals the truth. Global warming junk science is custom-ordered to get the public to swallow the impending CO2 tax with gusto, smack their collective lips, and ask for the seconds. Life on Earth is carbon-based. Whoever or whatever wants to tax that is not its biggest champion, nor necessarily carbon-based itself.