Taomeow

The "rumor" is based on Max's volunteering the information. He said they studied him. He has pictures of his brain scans to show for it. I've seen them. They are far out, but then, what about Max isn't?

It's a view shared by my taiji teacher, so you have strong back-up here. He believes what you believe. I guess it's a matter of personal sturdiness... He has never been sick in his life, has been doing taiji for what looks like a minimum of eight hours daily for forty years, so he might not relate to the health concerns of mere mortals like me. I know that cultivation has strengthened me in many ways, including physically, but I also know that I don't have the benefit of an unbreakable base line to have started from, far from it, and the other part of what has strengthened me was learning to be mindful of what weakens me, and trying to avoid it. I am not surrounded by butter lamps either, I'm not that prehistoric -- but I do what I can... just do what I can. Methinks it's a personal decision in every case, how much one "can" and how much one "needs" to do to stay on the safe side of the tracks. For me, cultivation without environmental awareness wouldn't have been enough. I can't sleep if the computer in the adjacent room isn't turned off. I can't use a cell phone. On the other hand, I haven't visited a doctor in fifteen years, except for an ER shipment after a car accident. We all have to choose our idiosyncratic health hazards... I know it's ridiculous to fret about the fluorescent bulbs while driving seventy mph over the speed limit... ...but health hazards deliberately designed as such I try to deliberately avoid, to the best of my ability. I don't do it in any on-a-mission fashion, don't get fanatical, purist, and so on... but head-in-the-sand obliviousness is not my chosen alternative either. As the song goes, whatever gets you through the night...

I may have over-generalized a bit, sorry... "anyone" and "anything" is a bit too sweeping... but anyway... of course, artificial light sucks compared to what tao has created, but fluorescent takes the cake in terms of sucking... for starters, everybody looks just a tiny bit dead in it... I wonder why?... A yogi once told me that for any meditation on a flame, the ideal source is a ghee-burning oil lamp, due to a special mild, soothing, balancing vibrational frequency of this source. A candle of natural beeswax would be a second choice. A paraffin candle... forget it. Of course this might seem like unnecessary nit-picking, but it is empirically true for me -- the feel from the flame of burning ghee is "buttery," it soothes the soul and steadies the mind and takes you way deeper, way smoother. Holy cow! Spirits and gods are said to be rather particular about the kind of flame they want to see... There's a whole branch of esoteric taoist sciences dealing with these preferences of theirs. E.g., if you want to see spirits, the otherwise invisible entities, with your own two eyes, certain substances must be added to the flame of your candle or oil lamp. These can get funky -- one I know of is powdered rhinoceros horn...

It wasn't just one study that I saw -- there's tons... if you punch in "fluorescent and health" you'll see pages upon pages... about the stuff I was talking about but also about abnormal UV levels emitted by compact fluorescent bulbs, mercury from the same source, and on and on. Here's what I came across in relation to eye health problems alone (animal and human studies): 1. Chen, E. (1993). Inhibition of cytochrome oxidase and blue-light damage in rat retina. Graefe's Archive for Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology, 231(7), 416-423. 2. Fedorovich, I. B., Zak, P. P., & Ostrovskii, M. A. (1994). Enhanced transmission of UV light by human eye lens in early childhood and age-related yellowing of the lens. Doklady Biological Sciences, 336(1), 204-206. 3. Ham, W. T., Jr. (1983). Ocular hazards of light sources: review of current knowledge. Journal of Occupational Medicine, 25(2), 101-103. 4. Ham, W. T., Jr., Ruffolo, J. J., Jr., Mueller, H. A., & Guerry, D., III. (1980). The nature of retinal radiation damage: dependence on wavelength, power level and exposure time; the quantitative dimensions of intense light damage as obtained from animal studies, Section II. Applied Research, 20, 1005-1111. 5. Hao, W., & Fong, H. K. (1996). Blue and ultraviolet light-absorbing opsin from the retinal pigment epithelium. Biochemistry, 35, 6251-6256. 6. Hightower, K. R. (1995). The role of the lens epithelium in development of UV cataract. Current Eye Research, 14, 71-78. 7. Pautler, E. L., Morita, M., & Beezley, D. (1989). Reversible and irreversible blue light damage to the isolated, mammalian pigment epithelium. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Retinal Degeneration (pp. 555-567). New York: Liss. 8. Rapp, L. M. & Smith, S. C. (1992). Morphologic comparisons between rhodopsin-mediated and short-wavelength classes of retinal light damage. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 33, 3367-3377. 9. Rozanowska, M., Wessels, J., Boulton, M., Burke, J. M., Rodgers, M. A., Truscott, T. G., & Sarna, T. (1998). Blue light-induced singlet oxygen generation by retinal lipofuscin in non-polar media. Free Radical Biology and Medicine, 24, 1107-1112. 10. Sliney, D. H. (1983). Biohazards of ultraviolet, visible and infrared radiation. Journal of Occupational Medicine, 25(3), 203-206. 11. Yegorova, E. V., Babizhayev, M. A., Ivanina, T. A., Zuyeva, M. V., & Ioshin, I. E. (1988). Spectral characteristics of intraocluar lenses and damage to the retina by visible light. Biophysics, 33(6), 1108-1114. There's good books on the subject of light and its impact on health, on life itself and all its workings -- John Ott's are extraordinary, also check out Jacob Lieberman's... Ordinary visible light-darkness interplay is the primary signaling system for all life on earth, any interference, however seemingly minor, has far-reaching impact... John Ott bumped into this knowledge by accident, and then began studying the phenomena involved. It all began when he was doing time lapse photography for Disney's Cinderella, and he needed to grow a pumpkin... I won't reveal what happened, it's one of the most fascinating books I've ever read (but of course I don't remember the title, but I think it's easy to retrieve). Oh, and Lieberman's is "Light: Medicine of the Future" if I remember correctly.

Cutting down on human health, is what's wrong with it in this particular case. I don't get it, folks, anyone who practices anything is equipped to feel it... don't you feel what fluorescent light does to you?.. Well, one thing it does is, it causes gross vitamin A deficiency, because it pulsates in the on-off rhythm, fast enough for the average uncultivated eye not to notice, not fast enough for the brain not to notice. The brain gets this on-off, light-dark-lignt-dark signals from the retina under the fluorescent light continuously. What it does is activates the rodes, the cones, the rodes, the cones, the rodes, the cones in response to this nonstop on-off stimulus continuously. Every time it does, it needs to use a portion of rhodopsin, the pigment used by the retina for the light-dark switching process. This is synthesized with ample amounts of vitamin A. A few minutes under a fluorescent light bulb deplete an average dietary amount one has down to zero. With failing rhodopsin production in response to this kind of demand, next thing in the pipeline is all manner of "age-related" eye disorders. Except they aren't age-related at all. They are artificially manufactured in this manner. To say nothing about what chronic vitamin A deficiency does to all other organs and systems that need it. To say nothing about what this unphysiological frequency of on-off hypothalamus-pituitary-pineal involvement does to the normal electrical activity in the brain -- and to all the hormonal systems that depend on that axis for their proper production and function. To say nothing about these hypnotic pulsations being CNS suppressors of the dumbing-down kind. To say nothing about it all triggering epilepsy in the sensitive, ADD and migraines in the somewhat less sensitive, and all manner of intractable fatigue/low-energy goodies in the rest of us. To say nothing about, as Smile asserted in the initial post with 100% accuracy, forget about cultivation under this light bulb. It's not cultivation, it's spiritual malnutrition, is all you're getting. That's the tip of the iceberg of what's wrong with it, the topmost inch or two...

You are so right, brother... unfortunately. There was a study that uprooted an interesting fact of our cultural reality. A group of people who are clinically depressed and a group of happy-happy-joy-joy optimists were each asked to make certain predictions about the near-future events -- economy, crime, wars, ecology, climate, health, family, whatever -- things that could be checked and verified as to the accuracy of the predictions in a short while. Turned out people who are depressed come up with predictions of the future that prove 85% accurate, as opposed to only 15% accuracy of the optimists' predictions. So... if one wants to know the future, if one really needs to be able to plan for the future (e.g., for the sake of one's kids... or someone else's kids for that matter, which is not an altogether useless pursuit, IMHO)... ...the first thing one needs to cultivate is courage, the second, honesty, the third, getting rid of just one attachment: an attachment to wishful thinking.

Thanks for the link. Not impressed, sorry... from the looks of it, we're dealing with some simplified astrology method that isn't traditional. Calculations according to the real solilunar date (and I don't mean two different calendars, solar and lunar, I mean the structure of the Chinese calendar with leap months built in -- which IS solilunar, but don't take my word for it, do some research... I'm quite rusty on the subject, studied it years and years ago and forgot quite a bit of the how-to that went into the making of the Chinese calendar, but remember the bottom line well: use it. Don't doubt it. ) -- -- as I was saying, real astrological calculations are laborious, so the master you cite, for reasons best known to herself but in all likelihood commercial, chooses to use a fixed date for each new year and ignore the lunar energy altogether. Makes it easier on the astrologer, I bet... By the way, did I miss it or does she indeed never mention which school of FS she's talking about? There's so much "generic feng shui" out there, and it's so funky sometimes... I mean, most of the time...

Gopi Krishna defines kundalini energy as "evolutionary energy." Which is similar to the concept of "gong," as in, e.g., qi gong, far as I can tell. Kundalini or qi gong, we're facilitating our evolution by means of qi cultivation. Now kunlun energy is something else and the stage I'm at clearly indicates to me that it isn't something that "is" but something that "does" and what it does is, it unblocks the energy of yi -- as in Yi Jing, aka the I Ching, the energy of irregular changes. (We are changed from our evolutionary blueprint, we are not what we would be if we were fully what we are... I don't mean "fully" as something metaphysical, I mean, as human beings. We aren't fully human due to irregular changes that happened to us and/or were perpetrated by us, or by someone/something else who molested our collective and/or individual destiny, or all of the above.) Which is different from regular changes of tao that are business-as-usual, the law and nature of tao-in-motion -- cyclic, seasonal, cosmic-seasonal (conception, growth, fruition, consummation in the grand scheme of things), eternal and so on. Yi of the Yi Jing refers to changes in the human being and the human society that are locally-irregular and at odds with the universally-regular changes. That's what the Yi Jing/I Ching navigates one's mind through, and that's what kunlun navigates one's body through before getting elsewhere. The energy of this elsewhere is the energy of tao-as-business-as-usual regular. (Or, to put it differently, meaningful at all times.) It is the energy of "what tao does," and it can't really be defined in terms of what it "is." It isn't an "is," is what it is. So... kunlun will unblock the irregular changes that have occurred in someone, these will release tremendous energy, this energy will be gone, outta here, no need for the energy of repression anymore, thank you, let go, let's go elsewhere. Elsewhere... that's where things start getting interesting. The caveat of the quick-quick path being that people who aren't "elsewhere" AT ALL yet tend to jump the gun, believing they "already" are. Which may result in great confusion... a grand delusion... but these are dangers of ANY powerful practice, they are not kunlun-specific. "The path is steep and narrow and sharp as the razor's blade."

Um... beg to differ. Four Pillars uses the solilunar calendar, not the solar one. The "real" Chinese new year is solilunar and is calculated accordingly. I follow the Chinese calendar all year round using a taoist almanac; these are solilunar too. How a solilunar calendar is created is a matter of a separate investigation, but that's what the "real" Chinese calendar is -- and I'm not aware of a special Chinese calendar "for laymen" as opposed to "for astrologers" -- Chinese astrologers use the Chinese calendar, solilunar and "real" at that; so do taoists; and "laymen" may or may not use it if they like, but there's no separate "Chinese calendar for laymen" in existence. Here's the solilunar Chinese New Year table for years past and years to come: 2000 February 5 Dragon 2001 January 24 Snake 2002 February 12 Horse 2003 February 1 Sheep 2004 January 22 Monkey 2005 February 9 Rooster 2006 January 29 Dog 2007 February 18 Pig 2008 February 7 Rat 2009 January 26 Ox 2010 February 14 Tiger 2011 February 3 Rabbit 2012 January 23 Dragon 2013 February 10 Snake 2014 January 31 Horse 2015 February 19 Sheep 2016 February 8 Monkey 2017 January 28 Rooster 2018 February 16 Dog 2019 February 5 Pig

The lesson of/for the body: pay attention! The lesson of/for the mind: backstabbers are, shockingly enough, more common than you thought they were. The lesson of/for the spirit: buy an ax, buy a bucket and a cauldron and some matches, chop the wood, carry the water, start the fire, fill the cauldron with water and put it over the fire, throw in the magic, stir, sit back and wait for when it's ready.

Fu sheng wu liang tianzun.

Great question. Choosing a lineage is like choosing a subspecies to belong to. If you follow the seagull lineage, and someone else, the whale lineage, you shouldn't bother teaching him how to lay eggs properly, where to fly to take shelter from the storm, and how to maintain down-and-feather hygiene. Human masters do it all the time though. How many rabbits I've heard preach to the tiger about vegetarianism, I can't begin telling you. How many black widows, while munching on their mate, will explain to you that true love means becoming one with your loved one in exactly this manner and no other, I've lost count. How many online taoists... you catch my drift, right?

I believe we are dealing with an illustration of the workings of the Godwin's Law in this case... just one example of how mercilessly we are ruled by natural laws unknown to us when we think we are exercising free will. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_Law

If you write a FU on a tile, what you get is FU-tile.

La cucaracha, la cucaracha Ya no puede caminar Porque no tiene, porque le falta Marijuana que FUMAR.

Thanks for asking! There's several ways the human mind can organize itself to reflect reality -- several billion, to be closer to the truth. We (the generic modern "we") are currently using one that has come to be promoted and socially/culturally/intellectually enforced. It is sequential (based on the idea of linear time), deterministic (based on the idea of cause and effect), materialistic (based on the idea of reality being only manipulable mechanically, by what we can manhandle, and inert to intent), and non-experiential (based entirely on hearsay -- we "know" "scientific facts" because we were told they are scientific facts by someone else, we don't get them directly from our own somatosensory processes). This is a system of organizing reality that excludes magic from the domain of "science" by default. It is entirely left-brain, yang-skewed, and drastically limited in its ability to tackle live phenomena. It is very good for "technologies," non-live things, which are the only ones that easily meet its established criteria for "truth" or "falseness." A machine works in exact congruence with these; so the main -- I would submit the only -- achievement of this mode of organizing reality is a drastic proliferation of machines, the only things truly benefiting from such an approach; and as a side effect, step-by-step mechanical programming and robotization of human beings and human interactions. However, for the overwhelming majority of our time on this planet, humans organized reality on entirely different principles. These were non-sequential (based on the idea of nonlinear time, which allowed for the "past" and the "future" to be coaxed into the "present" -- hence phenomena like communication with the dead, clairvoyance, etc.); non-deterministic/stochastic (i.e. based on probabilities rather than certainties, and on analogies rather than cause-effect interactions; i.e. on fractals rather than highways, so to speak); spiritual (based on the idea of physical reality being responsive to nonphysical procedures, e.g. focused intent); and experiential (based entirely on first-hand knowledge -- e.g., you were offered the entheogenic brew of your tribe in order to study the history of your tribe, evolution of your species, cosmology, ethics, physics, whatever... and took that rather than someone's word for it). This is a system of organizing reality that equates magic with science -- one IS the other, no other science is possible if you're using your whole brain to process reality. It is not technology-friendly, but it is great at tackling live phenomena. The world is magical. It is not a sequential, logical, step-by-step, cause-effect process. What's the cause of water?.. In this system, no one is interested. Everybody is interested in its analogies though -- things that behave "like water." You discover qi this way, e.g.. You discover humbleness this way. You discover whole rich, fruitful worlds of analogies... but you ignore the "cause" completely. That's magical thinking. The real kind. That's magical sciences. The real ones. This, very very briefly, covers what I've been trying to tackle every which nonlinear way for quite a while. Oh, and by the way, since Mak Tin Si "provoked" this discussion... I have no idea if his fu are the real thing, but I do declare the real thing exists. Quite independently of whether anyone "believes" in it. Beliefs are a form of subtle energy -- not the only one, not the most potent one... So in your example with cancer, yes, the energy of "belief" was responsible for events that took place, but I worked with cancer patients and the only common denominator I've discerned is this -- if someone "believes" he or she will die, he or she will. This one belief seems to be strong enough to overcome any treatment... But it's not like that with other beliefs. There's as many beliefs as there's people, and most of them fail to deliver. Belief, in and of itself, is not very strong medicine...

I was just reading a book by the Grateful Dead's Phil Lesh who describes the sequence of events with a jade fertility egg his mom gave him when he and his wife were trying to have a baby and she (the wife, not mom) was miscarrying (which, after all the drugs they'd taken, is no surprise). The egg worked right away, and they had their first son. A married couple who were close friends and couldn't conceive either heard the story, and borrowed the egg for shits and giggles; the woman became pregnant immediately. They passed the egg on to another couple of friends ISO a baby; the baby was immediately produced. The egg went into circulation this way, never once failing, Lesh gives an account of a whole bunch of its "doings" for his friends and friends of friends. He owned it briefly again when someone returned it, and he and his wife had their second son, whereupon they gave the egg to someone else in need again and asked to never return it to them, since they didn't want any more children. So the egg went on doing its magic for others. Things like that can be a real bummer to prove or disprove. Magic is experiential, things happen or don't happen, but once they happen, you can't really prove with any ease they happened because of magic, and once they don't you can't prove they didn't because magic is not real either -- it may have been for an assortment of other reasons, last but not least the magician may have been inept, or outright bogus. However, magic is not a matter of belief, anymore than your digestion is. There was a French scientist, forget his name, who almost got the Nobel prize for the work that proved metabolic transmutation of elements, the alchemical-magical staple, in the course of digestion. (Which explains, among other things, why people might be free of nutritional deficiencies on the poorest diets -- a known fact -- homeless beggars in Calcutta were shown in one study to have far better metabolic/nutritional profiles than upper middle class American teenagers, being overwhelmingly free of nutritional deficiencies our best-fed kids suffer from.) The Nobel folks chickened out though, the work was so in the face of everything our science "assumes" about the workings of biophysical energies that it was promptly shushed. If it wasn't, magic of the alchemical kind would have been our scientific fact by now, and rightfully so... but we're too far gone in our assumptions, so all the facts that don't match them are being routinely dismissed, silenced, or reinterpreted to fit our current party-line scientific paradigm. Fu magic is absolutely real, for reasons that are scientific, believe it or not. It's just that our idea of what "scientific" is isn't really scientific. Not on the terms of the live human experience of the prior one million years or so anyway. It's only "scientific" on the terms established by decree some 150 years ago. That's when magic was officially removed from the domain of science -- not via a scientific investigation, but by acts of authoritarian enforcement. Which is why I don't care much for this enforced paradigm's opinions about things it never investigated to begin with.

Validated -- with a smile.

Ingrain, dear: for lunch I always dress sharp, and you wear socks that don't match.

blush... thanks!

A possession is a very broad diagnosis and its application depends on the school/sect/master. Some will consider all untoward psychological and/or physical symptoms demonic in their origin (even things like fatigue, absent-mindedness, or laziness are thought of as demons by some masters). Others will limit this diagnosis to a tangible entity that can be seen with a trained eye, or coaxed out of the person by a special procedure. One of my teachers used a rolling-egg method of diagnosing possessions and curses very broadly -- basically you get a yes or a no, remove some of the sick energy (or all of it if the problem is minor), and get an idea of the depth and strength of the affliction (the extent of the demon's power). Here's the method: get a fresh white egg from a naturally living, spotless white hen (no supermarket eggs please -- find a private source); have the person under treatment sit quietly with her eyes closed; roll the (raw) egg gently and slowly all over her body, top to bottom. If there's a problem spot close enough to the surface, the egg will feel magnetized all of a sudden and will stick to that place -- let it, and keep it there for as long as it sticks, which is usually between a couple of minutes to about half an hour. Then, when it no longer sticks to that spot, keep rolling. Once you're done, take a white bowl, carefully break the egg, pour the contents into the bowl and examine. A demonic possession or a curse will manifest as cloudy, ugly-looking, dark or even black contents, or specks of black, spots of blood, sometimes extremely offensive smell. Discard the egg in the toilet, make sure no one touches it! Wash the bowl under running water for a few minutes. Your hands, ditto. This is part diagnostic part therapeutic, like I said, and the treatment can be repeated a number of times, but if the egg looks very sick, other methods will be necessary.

I would put it in different terms though: fundamentalist sentiment "inspired by" taoist exposures is no different from fundamentalist stances of any other religion, philosophy, atheism or agnosticism. On the surface, the only thing that distinguishes fundamentalism from traditionalism coupled with experiential knowledge is actually stylistic, no more than that. A fundamentalist's style is passion about his personal rightness and everybody else's wrongness. Whereas a traditionalist's, experiential initiate's style is passion about the subject matter itself. In other words, a fundamentalist comes from "it is so because I tell you so, backed up by such and such authorities, and if you don't believe me and my authorities you are ignorant and bad and wrong and inferior." Whereas a traditionalist or an experiential initiate comes from "it is so because it is universally human, and since both you and I are human, if you do it just so, the way I do it, you will get what I got! -- an inner truth that's your very own, for which you don't have to take my word or anyone else's." So on the surface one might not even notice the difference... but it's the difference between abuse and love! -- not so subtle at all if you see through it and to the bottom of it. A fundamentalist may or may not be a follower of religious taoism or alchemical taoism; ditto a traditionalist. What really sets them apart is what they want from you! The former wants bowing to his and his authorities' authority, submissiveness, obedience, abolition of your own judgment; the latter, to share the thrill of discovery, to give you the tools so you can! Big, big difference... very useful to discern in every single case... but, alas, most people seldom bother to look through it and to the bottom of it. Which is the reason they wind up embracing, firmly and tenaciously, what they should really avoid, and avoiding what they would benefit tremendously from embracing.

Sour cream, no sugar is the snow here -- Take me back, oh California!

Well, you probably haven't dealt with more traditional teachers. E.g., a traditionally cultivated zen master is as likely as not to respond to a student's question with a whack in the head. Read Suzuki if you don't believe me. Viktor Siao, Wang Liping's student since the 80s and the organizer of his Moscow seminars, told me that Master Wang started out by walking around with a stick and answering questions and correcting postures by tapping students with that stick on various body parts. The crowd raised objections to this procedure, which they thought was interfering with their dignity (ego?..) or something. Master Wang shrugged and abandoned the stick, regretfully. Masters who let students teach them how to teach are either insecure, or not really traditional. Traditional masters did as they pleased. Left to their own devices, they still do. My TKD teacher used to tell stories about how he himself was trained as a kid, in Korea. The only way it would be defined here is "brutal child abuse." Yet he loves his merciless master to pieces to this day. He didn't get love and compassion, attention and caring, answers and elaborations from his teacher (that's his mommy's job and the teacher didn't ever attempt to perform it.) What he did get was lifelong stellar health, superb skill, and tiger-like courage. Enough gifts, methinks. A master doesn't answer any and all questions a student might generate? Back in kindergarten, it would have been unforgivable! In taoist cultivation, you might have to spend twenty years trying to "get" something that your teacher could clarify for you in twenty seconds -- yet he or she won't, for reasons that can be as profound or as insignificant as the reasons for being you rather than an alligator, me rather than the tower of Babel, this world rather than its antimatter counterpart. Taoism is mysterious! Taoist teachers emulate that. The real deal is very likely to be occasionally mysterious, often incomprehensible... or else underqualified.

There's two right/best/traditional ways to make tea I've learned growing up in a tea-drinking culture that sadly lost its samovar to the hectic modern pace but retained simpler tea habits influenced by both China and India but not Japan (hence no widespread green tea habit where I come from, and "boiled broom," the general consensus on its taste value). The procedures are different for the black tea and the green tea, respectively. For black tea, practice the following perfect drill: 1. Bring water to a boil but don't let it sit boiling; turn the kettle off the second it whistles. 2. Use a splash of it to warm the pot you're going to make your tea in; swirl about; discard. 3. Put as many heaping t of high quality tea leaves in the warmed-up pot as your intended number of cups of tea, plus one. Example: if you're going for 3 cups of tea, use 4 t of tea leaves. 4. Do all of the above fast and immediately pour water that has just now come to a boil but didn't sit boiling over the tea leaves so as to fill your pot to 2/3. This is important! -- you need to leave room above the level of the water for alchemical processes. Stir or not, this is optional. Good tea will sink to the bottom anyway. Bad tea that takes too long to soak through might not all of it sink, stirring helps it do so. Cover the pot with the lid. 5. Let the pot sit steeping for a minimum of 8 minutes and a maximum of 24 hours. 6. Warm up your kettle to a boiling point but again don't let it sit boiling, and make your cup of tea with the concentrated brew from the pot mixed with as much freshly boiled water as you like -- some will make their tea strong and others, weak, no rules here. You can use the concentrated brew from the pot throughout the day and the next day this way, but not the third day. For green tea: you do bring water to a boil, but don't let it sit boiling; once it has come to a boil, immediately turn the kettle off, let it sit cooling off for some 3 minutes; then repeat the black tea steps. With green tea, it is important to choose wisely, and there's no substitute for expensive, high quality Japanese teas if you want something that tastes memorable... everything else I've tried is indeed boiled broom.