Taomeow

Does your sect practice establishing home altars and offering food to your ancestors on a regular basis?

Granted. Earth is now covered with forests once again -- 6.5 billion people have turned into trees. I wish deforestation never happened.

Granted. You're catatonic. I wish California was as green as Siberia.

Items you bought you mean? Granted. A teleport hacker intervening on your purchase of a new Taobums Rule! T-shirt, unaware of the fact that you're already wearing it since it arrived instantly and you put it on right away, teleports you to Fargo in the process of stealing the T-shirt. Oops... Welcome to America, dude, he says apologetically as you show up in his living-room. Wish I knew how to send you back, the program I'm using only teleports things toward me, not away from me... Wanna beer or something?.. I wish all the sci-fi books in my head had already been written by me.

I wish I could stop wishing.

It usually signifies magnesium deficiency.

I think it's a great idea because it serves a useful purpose of revealing the immature, careless, irresponsible and often blind nature of our (generic "our," not taobums specifically) desires, wishes, wants, hopes and dreams. We are bent on wanting things but we don't think through what else our wants, should they be granted, might entail that we've simply overlooked. I think one of the more useful meditations is to meditate on a wish... Place a wish of yours in front of you and spend as much time with all possible outcomes of it having been granted as you can. Someone who's after "dissolving all desires" might be surprised by how a desire dissolves from mere attention to its ALL aspects. So, Mak Tin Si, it's not a bad thing we're doing here. To illuminate the blind labyrinth of "I want" with the light of awareness that can show you that what you "want" is frivolous, immature, irresponsible, perhaps not worth fighting for, perhaps not worth "wanting" to begin with... that's not a bad thing at all.

Granted. The mutli-trillion-dollar Big Pharma promptly pays for the laws that turn all farming into pharming. Since no one needs medications anymore but the Big Pharma still needs its profits, not just herbs and supplements but ALL food and water too, everything anyone might want to put in their bodies, is now classified as "drugs." You can get a carrot by prescription, a hundred bucks a bite. If you get it without a prescription, you are a "drug user," and if you sell it without being a medical doctor, you are a "drug dealer." Eating without authorization becomes THE crime. War on drugs rages on, taking untold millions of perfectly healthy lives year after year. I wish I was Buddha Maitreya.

It's all in the book... read it and find out! You don't "know" you're going to win until you've done your homework -- sometimes decades of homework, sometimes centuries. You are taught how to avoid conflict you're not prepared for, and how to prepare for conflict you want to engage in so as to accomplish whatever it is you intend to accomplish. E.g., to put yourself in a position where you won't be attacked by someone seeking conflict with you. If your goal is to avoid conflict, sometimes you can only accomplish this goal of not being attacked via initiating the attack, according to Sun Tzu. Para pace, para bellum, as they put it in Rome -- "if you want peace, get ready for war." This is not nice from any noble but unrealistic peace-brings-peace perspective, but historically realistic and accurate... in human history, in the past ten thousand years at least, no one has ever been granted peace without fighting for it. Not for a second...

Well, in my experience, it wasn't very energy-efficient -- I actually felt tired afterwards, almost ill for about an hour after the "show." The guy in the video also complains of being tired, by the way. Incidentally, now that I know a bit about how the Five Phases work, and the fact I'm of the Wood phase with too much Fire, this explains a thing or two to me -- e.g., why some people are naturally equipped to learn something like this, perhaps to widely varying extents, and why at least some of them shouldn't do it. For me it would have been a really stupid idea to perfect this skill. (Most things that come easy to anyone are red flags of qi-squandering along the path of the least resistance: if a phase that is over-represented is feeding off your proprietary one, it's both easy and devastating to get good at whatever it supports. Many a genius would avoid dying young if he or she knew it... As Zhuangzi put it, "a sage has qi but doesn't let it run errands, has shen but doesn't exploit it." This is one thing a "double-blind placebo-controlled study" will never be able to phase in: the best of the best simply won't do it. If it is being demoed in order to entertain, "prove," or otherwise exploit the skill, it's not top of the line to begin with.) Anyway, I do appreciate the goodwill of all the money-making and money-saving tips! And are portable enough to conceal in one's sleeve?

in other words, either a life of crime, or a life of crazy adventure would be my only options. I rest my case.

Invisible laser?.. Do they even exist? When I was in my teens and loved to cut school, I would raise my temperature in one selected spot (where I come from we take the temperature under the armpit rather than in the mouth) -- usually took about ten minutes to "run a high fever" -- just enough to convince my parents and then the doctor that I was sick, and enjoy my freedom for a couple of days. No one taught me the method, I invented it (necessity is the mother of invention, right? ) I would imagine a small but fierce fire burning all around the thermometer, almost melting it... melt it didn't, but jump into the fever range it did -- every time. If I ever practiced perfecting this particular skill, maybe I'd learn how to melt it... but what the ef for?..

Spectrum, are you conducting an experiment to see if I'll apply Sun Tzu under attack? "Foolish words" is an attack. Followed by "It's never a good idea to attack," it's a joke, right? When King Wen and his son the Duke of Zhou, authors of the I Ching, attacked the tyrant of Shang, killing him and establishing a new dynasty, someone who was shocked by these developments asked, "You killed a king?" The response was, "we demoted a tyrant." Shang's rule was marked by extraordinary cruelty toward his people, many of whom starved to death or were executed for the slightest offense or for no reason other than the tyrant wanted their property. In the eyes of the I Ching authors, this behavior had taken the "mandate of Heaven" away from the king and they weren't committing a crime, they were in fact reinstalling the divine -- via violence because there was no other way. Confucius the peacenik approved! Anyway... you illustrated my very point beautifully, thank you!

Sun Tzu of course offers the most famous taoist approach to conflict. Contrary to popular belief, the War Classic doesn't make a single peep anywhere about defense being a good strategy, an acceptable strategy, or even a poor strategy to resort to in dire circumstances. It is entirely offense/attack-oriented! The main idea is, if you've put yourself in a position where you are being attacked without your having intended this to happen, you're doing something very wrong. You do your best to avoid being attacked, it says, unless you've deliberately and secretly set yourself up to be attacked so as to trap the attacking party -- simulate weakness while being, on the contrary, fully prepared and then some. As for attacking others, in Sun Tzu's view, you avoid it only if there's the slightest possibility of losing. No suicidal attacks please. "You attack only when you've already won before you've started." Difficult as hell, taoist conflict resolution strategy according to the greatest expert in history to ever have left a written account. A lot to learn... and much more difficult to learn than the "don't attack" and "defend-only" flower power ideas that have seeped into our collective mind in the guise of some "generic taoist" wisdom. Which I haven't seen even one person follow in real life, by the way... let alone in virtual life. (Yes, sarcasm counts too, incidentally... people who never attack others openly but resort to much-worked-on, honed to perfection sarcastic jabs instead are bona fide aggressors, attackers... although this particular strategy is the dumbest of them all, IMO, since it doesn't win anything for the aggressor and doesn't do much damage to his or her opponent either... a very trivial and altogether pointless pursuit, this let's-pretend-I'm-not-attacking-you kind of attack. I've seen a few veritable generals of this tactic... but I haven't seen them win much with it, not from me anyway... although if someone was abused as a kid by a parent being mercilessly sarcastic -- a less common but no less painful kind of abuse -- they might later be stuck with doing it to others as an unconscious defense mechanism... but unconscious defenses aren't the best strategies in almost any conflict... considering what Sun Tzu advocates is conscious offenses! ) There's been only very few instances so far when I deliberately applied Sun Tzu to conflict. It required much preparation and a lot of focused awareness and total elimination of every trace of wishful thinking. Those few instances were the ones when I did in fact instigate a conflict deliberately, fully prepared, with not a trace of doubt in my mind as to the victorious outcome. (For some reason, although it's a different source altogether and the quote talks about "man" in the sense "human," which I, generally speaking, dislike, I'm reminded of a Don Juan bit of wisdom: "A man goes to knowledge as a man goes to war: with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and someone who makes this mistake may not live to regret it.")

watch?v=WSdzewxGSYs

Guys, please do not ingest boric acid. It was used as a folk cockroach killer where I come from -- successfully. Better than any pesticide. It was mixed into a raw egg and the critters were offered a meal of it, ate it, and then whoever survived told everybody else to stop eating in this house if you care for your health and life itself, and off they went. Keep in mind that it's much harder to kill a cockroach with food than a human. It was also used as a topical disinfectant but a study showed it easily penetrates through the skin and accumulates in the body (much like fluoride you're trying to counteract) and the toxic effects are cumulative.

"When a wise man hears about the tao, he follows it. When an average man hears about the tao, he ignores it. When a fool hears about the tao, he laughs. If he doesn't laugh, it's not the tao." -- Laozi I guess the message to take away was that you're a wise man! The source of initial exposure didn't matter, even if it only contained an inch of the guiding thread sticking out of a pile of garbabe... if you were destined to follow the tao as soon as you hear about it -- from any source -- you just had to grab that thread, and then it would lead you out of the pile of BS and to the Way. If it was meant to be. For me it was even funnier. My body heard about the tao before my mind ever did. So any book that would name anything -- qi, yin-yang, bagua -- was destined to be a revelation. I don't even remember which one it was. Of course I'd laugh at it today. If I didn't laugh, it wouldn't have been the tao that I found in it! Now the question is... these three people Laozi talks about -- are they three different people? for if they are aspects of the same person rather than three different people, this person is a new ager. A bit of wisdom, a bit of mediocrity, a bit of stupidity, all mixed together.

Here's two of my favorite bumper stickers: " Vegetarian: the Native American for 'bad hunter.' " " I am a vegetarian. Not because I love animals. But because I hate plants! "

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4zGqnIWUiU

Of course, and I'm happy to elaborate a bit. So... New Qi. One way to see it, out of many possible ways. Goes to the heart of the matter, new qi does. As we all know and as few understand (I'm not claiming to be one of the few, just one of those who like to meditate on/with this particular focus in mind), primordial tao is thought of as wuji, represented by an empty circle which symbolizes oneness and unity of all being and non-being. If you look at a circle, however, you'll notice it has a top and a bottom, which means it contains the seeds of yin and yang, so the natural and inevitable separation is a built-in potential of wuji, not a flaw (as advaita folks et al were told to believe) but a natural part of its perfection. So tao is set in motion because stillness has a top and a bottom, a yin seed and a yang seed to it. Yin sinks to the bottom and yang flows to the top, and voila -- wuji is alive with the first life-giving impulse and spins into taiji! Now taiji, mother of yin and yang, begets more children -- yin begets taiyin and shaoyang, and yang begets shaoyin and taiyang. These will spin off further to mother and father the Eight Trigrams. The Eight Trigrams will give rise to the 64 hexagrams. (The Circular I Ching is a visual aid that might help one see how exactly it happens.) Beyond the 64 hexagrams, all processes of creation and destruction would lose meaning and become sheer fragmentation, a chaotic soup -- which is what we observe in our current science, religion, ideology, psychology, medicine, social state, etc., which have split into more derivatives and fragments than necessary. Unity is not possible to trace one's way back to if the division goes too far, this far, let alone any further; 64 universal situations is the cut-off limit of separation beyond which the Way, the way back to unity, is lost. So... if we don't lose the Way, we are in the domain of 64 possible universal situations, with the potential of renewal and re-creation implicit in the cycle. The cycle goes through four universal stages of existence and nonexistence -- Conception, Growth, Fruition, Consummation. Whereupon it starts anew. The phase of the cycle where qi starts it anew is the domain of New Qi. The closer the situation is to where it has started anew, the richer it is in New Qi. The farther it is from this point, the more it accumulates Old Qi. Old Qi is bound to lose its status, its situation in the world, no matter how powerful it is. New Qi has the potential to gain power in the cosmic cycle, to keep getting stronger. This potential is a tremendous mover and shaker of galaxies. A nova is a good example. But you can see this power of New Qi everywhere... sunrise, the new sun of the day, promises a steady increase of the sun's "status" in the day, the sun gains and gains power when it starts out at dawn, while at sunset, it is full of Old Qi of the Day already, and will decline and decline -- and be gone. The New Qi that comes to take its place is the New Qi of the Night, and the night will keep growing and deepening... till it's qi, in its turn, turns Old. And so it goes. New, growing, unused-up things are full of New Qi. They are tender, soft, supple, juicy, and inevitable. They are coming into the beginning of the universal cycle equipped to unfold and complete it -- equipped with the great power of New Qi. In a nutshell...

Hey Soundhunter, OK, here's the thoughts: I think your diet is pretty good, I wouldn't mess with it to any great extent at all, except I would add some Slow Yin and Jing foods. If you have a chance, get the book titled "Chinese Food Cures," by Henry C. Lu, you'll be able to figure out what it is exactly that you need to add/subtract. And, yes, sleep is the bee's knees with your deal, and I know everything you're talking about empirically, having raised twins. The first six months, I didn't think I was going to make it, I was so exhausted... I ate like a horse cross-bred with a tiger, weighed next to nothing, and slept -- never. My mind was gone and forgotten. Foggy? Try nonexistent. No big deal, it comes back in its own sweet time! Try rehydrating nonstop, by the way. The Russian way I was taught calls for black tea with cream and sugar -- I used to drink a gallon of that in the course of 14 feedings, actually I always felt thirsty, so it was easy. Of course cream was of the natural variety, I don't know if it's available here and now, I don't drink any milk in the US, having discovered that my body simply refuses to recognize it as such. So if you don't have access to a clean-living cow, I'd try something else milky -- coconut milk, soy milk... Hang in there, it gets easier soon as you can pull off a bunch of hours of uninterrupted sleep!

Don't be. Noticed and appreciated. Love sanity, can't get enough of it! Thank you.

ahem back... we're having a linguistic dispute, looks like. "Lose" in the context of the question means "drain," "deplete," which is not necessarily the outcome of "losing" in the sense "giving (something) away," parting with something without implications of permanency. Yes, of course, qi flows to the baby, but have you ever breast-fed? -- qi also flows back to the mother from the baby, New Qi, the most powerful energy in the universe. So it's not a loss of qi in a physiologically sound scenario at all. It's actually renewal... natural alchemy.

Wow, you're a hero! Scotty is absolutely correct. Women lose no qi with physiological loss of fluids. There's male alchemists who assert otherwise; their karmic punishment is reincarnating as women for the next ten thousand lives. Of course artificial manipulations of female physiology drain the woman -- e.g., the Pill kills Kidney Qi and Kidney Yin Fluids. Breastfeeding is associated with much lower rates of all manner of reproductive disorders later in life, notably breast cancer (a Qi Stagnation disorder in most cases.) Women who have more than ten children, however, are at a higher risk than those with fewer than ten, almost approaching the risk levels of the non-breastfeeding ones. Moreover, women who have ten or more children back to back, with one- to two-year intervals only, are in the same risk group as nuns, i.e. very high. So you get an idea of what you need to do in order to get "drained." Another caveat: your own nutrition while nursing has to be stellar, otherwise you will indeed tap into your own energy resources, primarily your Kidney Qi (and lose calcium from the bones and teeth, which it governs, to get enough into the milk.)

Amazing indeed! Love it when things of this nature cross-reference like that. This kind of independent validation beats double-blind placebo-controlled make-believe games hands down. The primal origins of all moon magic are shamanic, far as I know. There was a time when not "some" but "all" human cultures without a single exceptions were shamanic, and the sun, moon, and stars were the players in every case, of course. So it doesn't surprise me that you learned in China what I learned in Eastern Ukraine -- the older the "medium" of magic (and the moon is one of the oldest, obviously), the more "coincidences" will be encountered no matter where on the globe you look. It's when things start approaching our recent history and diverging into Zen and Calvinism and Zoroastrianism and so on that identical ideas and practices vanish; the earliest and/or still-intact ones invariably meet on some common ground or other. That's because their knowledge is not man-made, it's heaven-sent.