Taomeow

Seadog, I dunno -- I read a female researcher's account, you probably read a male researcher's interpretation, and quite possibly both are wrong or both are right, because aboriginal stories are usually multilayered and nonlinear, and besides, they don't believe in telling the same story the same way twice, they always, always change it. I can dig up a reference if you like, someone posted an interview with an aboriginal shaman at Empirical Taoism not long ago.

Well, I don't have the power to relieve the ignorance of a couple thousand years' standing, all I can do is offer a fact here, a fact there... here's a few tidbits (there's plenty more where these come from, but I -- see the opening line of this particular paragraph): the very word being used freely -- that's an accomplishment of feminist effort of the past few decades; for hundreds of years before that, it was unmentionable. Women weren't allowed to say it in any context -- they were supposed to have a "headache" or some such if they needed to make any reference to their period; the Pope of Rome can't be a woman, according to the Catholic church's rules (and there's 1.3 BILLION catholics in the world, of which about half are women...) specifically because if a drop of menstrual blood were to accidentally fall on the seat of papal power, it would invalidate it and cause Christian faith to collapse -- I'm not kidding, it's in the book of rules; In the East, they didn't allow women to ride on the second floor of the double-decker buses, because it was believed that a drop of menstrual blood that might fall on a man's head would take all his power away and give it back to the woman; Australian aboriginals collect it in a special vial carried by the healer of the tribe and use as the medicine of utmost power for something serious -- it is not used for minor problems; in witchcraft traditions throughout the world, menstrual blood is considered the most powerful alchemical substance on earth; all Indo-European traditions designate a woman as "unclean" during this period, while all shamanic ones, as "sacred," "holy"; native women, and even modern Asian women, don't know what PMS is, and don't know that menopause is supposed to be accompanied by any unpleasant symptoms -- these are not part of natural menstruation nor of its cessation; these are a few facts that you may or may not have known -- I didn't when I was 13, when I should have been told -- but instead I was taught a bunch of euphemisms -- "this thing" it was usually called in my language, every woman used to call it "this thing" to tell another woman about, well, this thing... and no one told anything to any MEN about this thing. So there's progress, now that I'm telling you, per your request. Should I go on? Weren't men conditioned to be disgusted by the very topic, let alone the phenomenon? (That's your "culture at war with nature" in a nutshell!) Weren't YOU?.. Care to think back to who, how, in what tone of voice, in what context, first educated you about "this thing?.."

My Tibetan Yungdrung Bon flag is always out. You know, Tibetan Buddhism hijacked this one, the earlier Tibetan spirituality, but that's OK -- Yungdrung Bon did the same thing earlier -- it also hijacked Tibet, coming from a land that no longer exists, Zhang-Zhung, part of which is now part of western Tibet. It used to be a huge country, and enlightened Yungdrung Bon teachers from this land went everywhere spreading their teachings -- and they went to Tibet too, which had none at the time and was known as The Dark Land. That was 3,000 years ago. Looks like Tibet is no stranger to change... The originator of Yungdrung Bon, Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche, most folks here probably haven't even heard about -- but the Bon people maintain that Sakyamuni who brought Buddhism from India later, whom they call Tonpa Shakyamuni, was Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche's reincarnation, is all he was. I wonder whose reincarnation Mao Zedong might transpire into a thousand years from now...

Well, ejaculation in women is not about being capable, it's about the Wuxing phase they belong to. Only Water women ejaculate. Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal women don't. Water women are roughly 20% of the population, and about half of them (like about half of women of any other phase) are sexually inhibited (for reasons entirely pathological, either physically or socially or both), so ten percent is probably accurate, but the figure could "ideally" reach 20% if ALL women were sexually competent, and never more than that, since women of other Wuxing phases are organized differently and their sexuality doesn't express itself the way Water does, it uses their own proprietary venues. E.g., healthy Wood women are masters of expansive whole-body orgasms -- because Wood qi expands. Healthy Fire women excite and are excited easily -- a spark is enough to start a fire. Healthy Earth women are slow to excite, slow to stop -- they keep going like the Energizer bunny. Healthy Metal women make the best courtesans, transforming jing into money! So we all have our proprietary tricks. Now about menstruation -- our society's (I mean post-shamanic society globally, not Western specifically) attitude is described by a Native American woman shaman who also holds a Ph.D. in anthropology, Barbara Tedlock, as "culture at war with nature." Don't even go there, guys... and guys-educated gals. Moon-educated women might have a valid opinion as to what it's all about, but anyone whose cycles aren't in sync with the moon... or who, by virtue of being male, doesn't know menstruation to begin with... just forget it. (Australian aboriginal tribes practiced surgically creating a fake vagina on a man's penis and opening the wound with a thorn once a month -- that's the length they went to in order to try to understand menstruation. They were doing it for at least twenty thousand years, according to some accounts -- and still they don't get it! )

Next time you see him, would you please tell him that a reader of his book named Taomeow respectfully disagrees. The best fortuneteller in the world is the I Ching.

This one is a good intro -- concise but detailed enough: "Mian Xiang: the Chinese Art of Face Reading," by Henning Hai Lee Yang. He traces his family history a thousand years to Yang Chiun Pun, one of China's most famous fortune tellers. He was educated as a business economist and a marine engineer, but ultimately chose to devote himself exclusively to his family tradition of fortune-telling. I have found a lot of interesting information on the subject in a book published in China, "Book of Changes and Traditional Chinese Medicine," by Yang Li. She is professor of TCM and a well-known I Ching expert in China. This book, written in the 1990s, has won a whole bunch of Chinese awards, including the "Prize for Outstanding Books on Science and Technology," but unfortunately, it was translated so poorly (and so inconsistently, since at least twenty translators worked on it and they don't seem to have communicated with each other much, if at all) that much of it is as mysterious as an ancient alchemical text, and some of it is as hilarious as only a poor translation can be. But it is the most complete integration of taoist sciences into a modern "presentation" I'm aware of, so it might be worth the effort -- if you can find it. There's several other books on face reading out there that I've seen that I'm not crazy about. The macrobiotic guru, Michio Kushi, wrote one. I hated it, like everything else coming from this popular-bogus source. Lilian Too of the bogus feng shui fame wrote one, unless I'm confused and am thinking of a chapter in one of her other books. I hated that one too.

That was interesting -- the composite right-right and left-left faces reveal the very yin-yang imbalances which I said I didn't notice in WL's face. (The picture I was looking at wasn't completely front-view, so I did the best I could with what I could see.) Instead of "private" and "public" persona as in the segment you posted, in Mian Xiang they would be talking about the yin and yang sides of the face. Interestingly, they start by reading the left side for the male face and the right side for the female face, i.e. with "the public persona" of the woman and "the private persona" for the man. I can only speculate why. Perhaps because in the patriarchy no one was particularly interested in the woman's inner world, it was more important how she behaves in public?.. Keep in mind that the de riguer visit to a face reader would be undertaken when considering marriage -- the prospective husband (or, more often, the prospective in-laws) would seek the face reader's opinion as to whether the girl being considered for a bride is suitable. It was very common, far as I know. Many traits in a woman's face that today would be considered her good points were viewed quite differently in feudal China -- e.g., she was supposed to have a small mouth, full but very small, the smaller the better -- so as not to eat too much, not to talk too much, and never, ever to talk back! A pretty girl by today's standards was headed for spinsterhood if she had one of those jaws that today plastic surgeons might even implant artificially because they are part of the modern idea of beauty -- you know, the strong kind (Kathy Ireland or Jennifer Garner come to mind as prominent examples of the kind of lower jaw I'm talking about) -- because, well, it did indicate strength of character, an unwanted trait, women with such jaws were thought of as "man-eaters" and avoided.

Right, let's stay focused! I wanted to start a new thread with it but couldn't embed a good picture, so here's a link to one: http://www.dao-meditation.com/Wang_Liping.html OK, the art of face reading, Mian Xiang, is, like all taoist arts, inexhaustible, huge, and has many schools and branches that might tackle the same task in all kinds of different ways. I'm no great expert, mind you, but here's a very VERY cursory sketch of how it's done... You start with evaluating the overall shape of the face. I haven't seen any yin-yang imbalances in WL's face. Next, the Five Phases affiliation of the whole face is determined, and features of personality, auspicious seasons, colors, moral values and health of particular organs derived from these. WL's face is close to the Earth phase. Next, ten patterns of faces are discerned. A very balanced one, Tien, is what WL has. Tien people tend to be very successful in everything they undertake. Tien people with dark complexion are very healthy, while Tien people with pale skin are fragile. WL's face is clearly of the first type. Then the real fun begins. We go over the Four Regions of the face, the Hundred Positions of the Floating Year, the Five Mountains and the Planetary Points. To be continued...

All right... Here's a thought. I believe our new friend here is being paid to do what he's doing here. Like, you know, Steve Barrett of Quackwatch et al. I think I mentioned this before... they have a few hired hands to generate squabbles and smear campaigns as soon as something/someone of real and therefore threatening unconventional value shows up on the horizon. What d'you reckon?,,

Which one of these teachers' suggestion was it to call an opponent in an online discussion a moron, the way you did? and what kind of merit are you supposed to gain via the practice? Just curious. You mention your Maoshan interests in your profile -- do these include talismanic sorcery? And if they do, can you write an active talisman? And if you can, do you give it away for free?.. after a week of meditation and prayers, fasting and cleansing -- after years of practicing talismanic script -- which required mastery of qigong before you could charge your writing -- to name a few things, out of many -- and still you give it away for free? Wow. Few professionals do, since they don't have any time to hold a second job and they do have to eat and occasionally feed their dependants too... Amateurs might do this for free, I'm sure -- but their ability to help others exists only in their imagination. So... please share how YOU do it! -- and do feel free to call me whatever name your teachers have told you to in order to gain merit, I'm all for merit! MiaoTao, the Sword of Tao

Wow, Smile, what a story! I don't think it's that simple... Plants are the depository of cosmic memory (as all ancient traditions know, notably Ayurveda that contains elaborate treatises on the nature of plant consciousness among its written treasures), and therefore are imbued with knowledge and wisdom that went before our species ever appeared -- way before, billions of years before! I respect ancient (close-to-source) knowledge more than anything else in the world, so I think the opposite is the case: don't touch plants of the gods frivolously, don't touch them until you are ready... but once you are ready -- like, really ready -- then you're ready. Then there's no human teacher who can teach you what a plant teacher can teach you. There's even a taoist saying to this effect: "a mediocre student finds a mediocre master to learn from, a good student finds a great master to learn from, and the best student learns from plants."

Damn, you ate the mukhomor? You must have been insanely brave and better educated than me too! I was taught "all about mushrooms" since an early age, in assorted Eastern European forests (knew dozens of them at five -- kids learn instantly if it's show-tell in a natural setting), and this one I wasn't allowed to even come close to, let alone touch -- it was supposed to jump and bite my fingers off or something. I believed it too. Well, I've read about its real cultural history later -- the whole of Greek civilization, among other things, comes from this mushroom and its teachings -- except for the parts they borrowed from China via their Mediterranean liaisons of course -- I guess there's teachers who never need to repeat their lessons, and plants of this nature can't possibly be used "recreationally." I learned a profound and brutal lesson from belladonna in my early 20s. Half a century of university courses couldn't come close. What she taught me blew my mind, I never forgot, took me years to understand and process... but the lesson was spot on, the cat's meow of what I needed to know about the world and my position in it. I would never repeat that either -- it was horrible -- nor have I ever regretted having learned what I learned, it was necessary. The "recreational" crowd I can't really blame either. Real (not mechanical) joys are so rare in their lives, the depth of feeling so unavailable to them by natural means (due to blunted overall senses and sensitivities), they gotta do "something" to feel alive every now and then... If they felt alive as a matter of course (which was supposed to be their birthright... sigh), they wouldn't need that shit...

krasivo zhit' ne zapretish'

Oh, I agree. Anything can be misused, abused, turned to harmful, serve evil. But we don't outlaw water even though thousands of people drown in it every year. (Not yet anyway.) We don't outlaw food just because people can give themselves obesity and diabetes and heart attacks misusing it, as tens of millions do every year. We don't outlaw language even though people use it to hurt other people, even though in a certain context a word can kill! We don't outlaw love even though people are hurt by love on a daily basis, we don't outlaw marriage even though every second one turns into a court battle, we don't outlaw life just because it can be abused, misused, made self-destructive. Not yet anyway, but "they" are working on just that -- to outlaw one's right to learn from own mistakes rather than from daddy-state's punishments is a step in this very direction. Young people who do damage to themselves with plants-used-as-drugs are ignorant, and they are not educated, they are mis-educated, misled, misguided, lied to. They don't believe "anything" the world of authority might tell them, as things stand now, because the world of authority lies to them so much -- telling the truth in the overwhelming context of lies doesn't help, truth gets lost somewhere there. At the same time, unconsciously they believe "everything" -- including the message that they are destroying themselves with plants as soon as these are named drugs, it becomes an expectation, a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a motivation for use to begin with, an erroneous one. You get what you expect to get, sort of. What you are programmed to get.

Rain, your holographic thought-patterns never cease to amaze me. I have seldom encountered a "train of thought" that is capable of chasing its own tail like a playful kitten. Stepfather, right, I forgot. Doesn't matter, I wouldn't take it anyway -- have you seen the Shulgins on youtube? -- they look old and decrepit, theirs ain't no body-mind-spirit cultivation tools, the body is left out of the quest and therefore I'm not interested. Now Plants Of The Gods has, among its many illustrations, photographs of holy men in India looking like Vishnu, the patron of ganja, smoking away, the way their scriptures tell them to (one-third of all sutras in the Vedic literature are either direct hymns to the sacred plants or a reference to same). You will see pictures of the Mazaltec shaman-healer-saint Maria Sabina, who combined Catholic saints with sacred mushrooms to arrive at her powers and has healed thousands of people. I do hate it when the same people who make our drugs for us (drugs, not plants) tell us how to feel about plants (plants, not drugs) -- plants that are actually responsible for our evolution itself, plants that gave us brain receptors we never needed for bananas and carrots, our true forefathers and teachers -- plants that would compete so successfully with their chemical dish-outs that they had to outlaw them, taking opium out of the doctor's hand and giving him morphine instead, demonizing tobacco and adding two thousand drugs to it while at it, with a sleight-of-hand trick that turns it into another drug, the one that addicts the recipient not to the tobacco plant but to chemicals in his/her cigarette, chemical drugs in general that rewire the brain permanently (Prozac to the rescue!), rooting out hemp industries and planting petrochemicals-based textiles instead -- that I can never sing to the "drugs are bad for you" tune until people learn to tell the difference between cannibal-industries-made drugs and tao-made plants. Yes, drugs are bad for you, and plants are tao for you, and they treat you exactly the way you treat her... and if they treat you badly, it means...

If you want to know everything there is to know about man-made entheogens without having to try every single one of them, get Tihkal and Pihkal, two highly enlightening books on the subject, by Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin. These, among other things, will give you scores of "experiences" by a dedicated group of researchers who collaborated with Shulgin for decades by offering themselves as guinea pigs for dozens of first-hand experiments with amines-based goodies in a controlled setting. Their detailed accounts are included in the books. (Shulgin is the creator of over two hundred of these goodies, notably Ecstasy. The caveats are all there, buyer beware and so on.) If you want to know about some of the most important nature-made entheogens, get Plants Of The Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers, by R. E. Schultes, A. Hoffman and C. Ratsch, three prominent German researchers into the matter. Personally, I would never touch a man-made, lab-made entheogen, and would only do a nature-made one under shamanic supervision. But when plants are called "drugs," while patented designer molecules never encountered in nature, let alone in the human brain, are called "medication," I suffer from a deep cognitive dissonance.... Most people don't notice, just the way they were programmed not to notice, how brutally they've been had on the cognitive level in order to accept these definitions.

WT, I never promised to make my every post entertaining. If I did, I'd gain some bad karma by boring you. But since I didn't, you've gained some by being rude for no good reason. Calling people names for no good reason and without any provocation always results in some additional karmic load. Boring but true. You want me to tackle karma with heavier guns? In my tradition, they are so heavy I'm reluctant to talk about it here. OK, I'll mention one thing to you to give you a taste of what it's like. In addition to personal karma, humans have earned permanent "generic," species-specific karma by doing what they've been doing the past few thousand years. This manifests as three monsters that get trapped inside the human body when we're born, known as the Three Worms or the Three Skulls. They reside in the head, in the torso, and in the abdomen, respectively. Their goal is to shorten the human life, because the host's death is the only way they can get released and return to their place of origin, eternity (unless they are dealing with a skilled cultivator, holy man/woman, sage, or sorcerer/sorceress of considerable power). So they prompt the human to do all sorts of bad things. Not only that, but on certain specific dates they report to the Jade Emperor and other gods on the misconduct of the host, acting as provocateurs and snitches. They hope their reports would cause the wrath of the gods who might then shorten the life of the guilty individual, terminating it sooner than was originally intended. At the same time, unwise, unwholesome behaviors of the host resulting from the Worms' provocations are also shortening the host's life while darkening his or her karma. This belief is shared by all authentic taoist sects, to my knowledge, and various methods have been devised for ridding the live body and mind of the Worms. Abstaining from grains, one such practice, is aimed at starving them, since they grow fatter off grains specifically. (I do believe this shows original taoists knew that agriculture was the human species' undoing, the worst curse in the guise of a blessing. Hunter-gatherers didn't accumulate any karma -- and didn't eat any grains. Growing crops means the beginning of the kind of interference tao can't tolerate -- everything else that follows, follows thence.) Still boring?.. Or am I getting at something you might be interested in exploring further?.. If the former... sorry. If the latter... sorry again, you'll have to find other sources -- I am forbidden, for the moment, from teaching anybody anything, and that's one reason you don't feel I"m being helpful to you. Another one is, you are in the habit of being rude to me in the same post where you include compliments -- perhaps to make rudeness easier to swallow? Well, my friend, I actually need neither. Please do me a favor and stick to the point if you will, not to my personality, d'accord?..

Thanks for asking! A bit later...

Of course taoism is concerned with karma, but understands it differently from Hinduism (or Buddhism). Let me illustrate... In some Magical Taoism traditions, e.g., it is assumed that odds in life are stacked against winning, just like they are in any chance-based game. You are much more likely to lose than win at lottery, blackjack, or the roulette. There's much more poor people than wealthy ones, unwell than perfectly healthy, depressed than euphoric. You are more likely to be unjustly incarcerated than accidentally released from prison. You are more likely to get in an accident and get hurt than to accidentally tap into special healing powers, or even become an ER physician for that matter. (An ER is a place where the odds are as visible as at a casino: two healthy, wealthy doctors per two hundred hurt patients who are about to go broke on top of, and because of, having been hurt -- and every day it's like that! That's karma: make a wrong move -- and the next move is going to be wrong too. Make a right move -- and chances are the next one will still be wrong. That's because we've made so many moves against the flow already that the flow itself is stirred up, turbulent. When I used to do a lot of Chinese astrological charts, I have never, ever seen a single one that was problem-free and "lucky" without any if's and but's. But let me illustrate with a lighter example. The neighbors' fat black cat started coming to our door for extra food on a daily basis, but never let me or my son (who inherited benevolence toward cats from me) stroke him, pet him, play with him, or get him to accept the invitation of the open door. The cat would meow for food, in a demanding tone of voice, get it, and leave. Next time you see him, he won't even acknowledge you. All getting, no giving. OK, fine. So eventually we got ourselves a little kitten. The cutest thing in the world, playful, smart, stunning, all the good things a nine-week-old kitten can be. The neighbors' cat saw him through the window! Got agitated, came running to our door, meowing, let me in, I want to play! Stood in the doorway behind the screen, begging, purring, rolling on the ground... I've repented, he seemed to say, I'll do anything -- just don't turn away from me now! So my son comes to the door, looks the cat square in the eye, and tells him, "Well, who needs YOU now?!" I was in awe when I saw my own kid act as karma... 'cause that's how karma acts, it's important to understand that karma doesn't merely "work," it "acts," it has free will -- but no special agenda to be "good to everybody at all times," far from it...

I was just gonna...

In any event, as a student of Chinese face reading I submit it's an awesome face to have -- "good beginning, good end."

Um... "different" does not imply either "superior" or "inferior" in my world. An elephant is different from a rose. This is not a statement of superiority, inferiority, or "separation." This is a statement of common sense. I like getting a bouquet of roses. No one has ever presented me with a bouquet of elephants. Maybe I would like it too, but it would sure be different. I only said I'm different in that I've chosen to study the basics to begin with, a number of years ago, so I might not benefit from a course in Fuxi 101 to the same extent as someone who didn't spend a few years with Hetu and Luoshu might benefit from it. I didn't say I'm a master of the basics, I said I'm an aficionado of this approach. I like to start from the beginning. It's different from starting with breathing or the MCO or manipulating qi or what have you. The beginning is Fuxi. I do believe starting from a random wherever place is like arranging elephants into a bouquet though. It's not an inferior practice, it's just... different. I don't practice elephants till I've mastered roses. Just a personal choice. Oh, and I deflect all calls for unity which my Fuxiesque common sense cannot process. I have a special bounceback device for this in my mind. As soon as someone says, "we are all one, we are all the same, no one is different from anyone else," it goes ping... See, I believe what I perceive, and I perceive Hou Tian, and in Hou Tian, nothing is the same as anything else. But then, Hou Tian is also Fuxi, so if you aren't into that, you might not believe me. Which is fine. But since I am, I can't possibly pretend I am in Xian Tian when I manifest a post. In fact, anyone who manifests a post against manifestations cracks me up... Regardless... I guess the best answer I can give you about Li Jiong's course is the simplest one: I haven't seen it, so I don't know. Sorry.

thanks, jaloo! Fair enough. By the same token, someone who is not delusional and whose practice is not worthless does not necessarily want to teach, and even if they do want to teach, they might be very picky as to who they want to teach -- nothing personal, it's just about whether the relationship is what they call "predestined" or not; and even if they want to teach everybody... um, no, it's impossible to teach everybody, there's people who can't and there's people who shouldn't be taught, and a real master can often tell who they are. But if it so happens that there's someone who wants to teach you out there, they will let you know they're the real thing. They will let you, personally, know, not "everybody." And once they do, you aren't going to be in the position to doubt them. There's an episode where Ram Dass describes his first meeting with his to-be guru. He was, at the time, an accomplished Ph.D., professor at a top university, and he didn't believe in any of "that stuff." So, at their first meeting, the future teacher didn't show him any magic tricks. Instead, he told him, "yesterday late at night you were alone in the open, looking at the stars and thinking about your mother. Your mother died recently, of a spleen disease." Something to this effect. The interesting part being that his mother did die thousands of miles away at a US hospital, and that it was a spleen disease -- Ram Dass knew he had never mentioned it to anyone, never spoke of his mother to anyone in India, but most importantly, the night before the conversation he was indeed outside (in another town!), looking at the stars and thinking of his mother. He fell to his knees before the guru, and was never disappointed ever since. That's pretty typical, actually. A similar thing happened to me -- when someone tells you something that the only way they can possibly know is by knowing how to be you... this kind of magic trick you don't doubt.

I guess whenever people ask for "proof for proof's sake" of any abilities, "eastern" or "western," they operate on the assumption that a dare is reason enough for anyone to perform on demand, that as soon as someone (typically someone not merely skeptical but more often than not dismissive, disrespectful, or outright hostile) cares to install a hoop, scores of eager masters and witches and sorcerers will line up to jump. And if you install a hoop and they refuse to jump, it means they can't do it. When I was five years old, it was a fair assumption among my kindergarten peers. However, the very first commandment of the Witches' of England, according to a rather fascinating book written in the 50s, Witchcraft Today, goes, "Never brag, never threaten." To demo those abilities on demand would amount to violating the first rule. You can rest assured that a witch or a sorceress who brags or threatens the use of special abilities does so in jest, simply because she isn't taking her audience seriously enough to be serious about it. Not unlike a taijiquan teacher, not my main one but a guy who taught me some hostile applications, would tell me, "I'm going to kill you by doing this," or "it's all over, you're done for" while showing a move -- knowing full well that he could make it true, knowing full well he never would! Similarly, a witch or a sorceress will say it only if she isn't going to do it, and she will demo it only in such a way as to cause it to "fail" because she wants it to fail. (My friend wanted his killer moves to fail at all times -- or he wouldn't be showing them to someone he wasn't going to kill!) Trivializing magical words in a non-magical mundane context dispels and disperses their power. Performing magical acts on demand like a trained monkey does way more of the same. Personally, I would only use a demo or even a promise of a demo in order to bust some dangerous energy that I feel brewing within myself which I don't want to turn into action because of moral or karmic considerations, which are a strong deterrent for some. The most difficult thing for "the real thing" is to control herself... not others. If she really wants to do it, and to hell with karmic complications -- then she will show, not tell. It will happen, but she won't be the one being held responsible, uh-uh. She will never show for show's sake, anymore than she will have sex with you for the sole purpose of proving she can.

Freeform, my methods also interrupt the pattern but in a different way and for a different purpose. The last thing I want to know is the "story" on the surface. "Why are you angry?" is not what I want answered off the top of anyone's head, because the top of anyone's head is the shallow part, whatever floats there is driven by something way deeper... I don't care about the splinter floating on the surface of the ocean -- a surface feeling expressed with surface words. I want to know what the ocean is like. "Stop being angry," however, is not what I want to accomplish when I interrupt the pattern. "Stop feeling whatever you're feeling and start feeling something else" -- equally superficial and equally unconscious -- is not what I'm after. This is about as useful as removing the splinter from the surface of the ocean and thinking you've taken care of the pollution problem the ocean is suffering from. This splinter, OK, you interrupt the pattern of telling its story and it doesn't matter anymore, but what about the next one and the next one, and what about that false-rainbow oil spill -- there's a spot, and there's another, and there's some dead seagulls with oil stuck to their wings... a few hundred thousand of them in fact... and what about the lower-than-normal oxygenation of the water only an inch deeper, and what about its temperature that is three degrees higher than normal, and what about the death of several thousand species of ocean creatures that used to live here, and what about the mutations of the ones that still do, and what about the shrinking vegetation all along the shore, the relentless erosion, and what about that volcano at the bottom, what about that tsunami brewing deep down -- what about the destiny of this ocean, this person?.. Of course I didn't expect you to be concerned with that when you didn't let your colleague tell the "story," but if he was not your colleague but you -- and not for purposes of "right now" but for purposes of mastering your destiny -- wouldn't you really like to know?.. The kind of "why" I mean is the kind of "why" that lets you know that, but just directly asking it is useless, no real answers can be scooped up from the surface. It's... you need to dive, and when you see -- actually see with your two eyes -- the erupting volcano on the bottom, and feel the shock wave that throws and tumbles you, and feel the heat and see the magnificent fury -- that's when you get a spontaneous "that's why": that's why there's a tsunami. That's why. And if instead of the volcano you see a HAARP earthquake machine, you get a different "that's why": that's why there's a tsunami! And if instead of this, you see Poseidon stirring the water with his trident in divine anger caused by the Exxon oil spill, and he tells you, "I'm gonna get you for this, bastards" -- that's another kind of "that's why": that's why there's a tsunami! So... whatever is really going on deep inside -- not deep inside the mind, deep inside your personal history! -- deep inside "what really happened to you!" -- that's the source of a spontaneous answer to the "why" question -- that, and not the asking of the question. That's what I meant...