Taomeow

I've studied NLP. To my knowledge, it never concerns itself with memory, let alone unconscious, repressed memory. What use is asking a question if the answer is held by the early you who didn't have the language yet, didn't even have a fully developed neocortex?.. And most answers to the "why" question are smack there, in the pre-verbal, formative past that shaped 95% of who you are today. Love, consciousness, and the tao are all the same thing -- you're right -- and this thing is called memory. No continuity in your memory, no love, consciousness, or tao. (I mean a generic "you," not you personally.) That's what the sages mean when they say that in the human world tao has been destroyed. We have gaps in our memory, and whatever is going on there unbeknown to us, sealed away in the "unconscious," is not consciousness, not love, and not tao. Not just NLP but any other modality that seeks to bypass these gaps one way or the other is, to me, a useless pursuit. The Way is what goes smack into them and through them. You have to connect to yourself in order to be whole -- not an imaginary "self" of this or that religion or philosophy but the live human child who really, really existed. Know him or her -- and you know everything. Don't know him or her -- and it's anybody's guess what the neocortex (which wasn't there to begin with when those developmental things were happening to you that it's now speculating about with such confidence) -- neocortex the perjurer, the false witness who wasn't there! -- might cook up to fill in the blanks. But the only real way to fill in those blank is to fill them in with you, the real earlier you -- the part you don't remember. That's what the "unconscious" is made of, and the only way to become conscious is to remember. Memory is everything, everything is memory...

Key word "subconscious." I don't want anything in me to be subconscious, I am after systemic consciousness. If you see the pattern but don't see WHY you have it, you can't remove it. Not with NLP, not with anything short of consciousness. All you can do is f... with its surface, exchange this pattern for that: alcoholism for born-again religious sentiment, fear for counterphobic behaviors (which mean fear is still there but you got a better handle on hiding it not just from others but from yourself -- pushing it deeper, where it will do somatic damage), craziness of the mind for craziness of the cellular functions, and so on. True love conquers all, I agree... key word "true." Do you know what true love is? Consciously? Systemically? Tip: it's not in the mind, not in the body, not in the heart...

I don't like NLP because it doesn't concern itself with the only question I want answered: not "whether" something works, and not "how" it works, but WHY it works. NLP assumes it doesn't matter. To me, it's the only thing that matters.

Well, I haven't but I don't want to discourage anyone else. Me, I'm a bit different from an "average" bum in that I study the basics to begin with, and Fuxi is my all-time hero, so it doesn't matter what I practice as long as I practice: everything works -- it's just a matter of doing it. I don't have a single practice that doesn't work, because I don't practice anything that is not Fuxi-based. If it doesn't work, it means I'm not practicing, it's that simple.

I don't think the legal definition is news to Yoda or anyone else -- what I was driving at (and what Little1 and Yoda grokked I think) is that corporations are a receptacle for a particular kind of energies and entities. Say, if the devil wanted to manifest as a tangible physical process, not as an abstraction, not as some "dark shadow" with no material counterpart, and not as an old-fashioned sulfur-reeking monster with horns and hooves (too innocuous and trite to be really evil) -- how would he go about it? What would he incarnate (incorporate) into? A flower? Hardly. A man? No one person is big enough to incorporate the devil, to provide the body for evil of this magnitude. A... corporation?.. A global-influence, tangibly active, meddling, soul-snatching, polluting, poisoning, corrupting, lying, deceiving, murdering evil power no one can stand up to?.. Yeah. That would work. A corporation would definitely be big enough and comfy enough to incorporate the devil. A big one for the big boss, smaller ones for his lesser brothers. Take Monsanto. Is it big enough to accommodate the devil? Sure is. And what does the devil do when he manifests as Monsanto? Corporate business. Meaning, material, tangible, with direct impact on the physical world. That's what a corporation is for. Acquiring a presence in the material world, an evil entity acquires power over people's physical being, not just their metaphysical being. That's what I meant. When we see a "corporation," we see exactly this -- a spirit seeping into bodies, millions, billions of bodies, working through them. Human bodies, machine bodies, building bodies, it doesn't matter. What matters is, a corporation acquires physicality in our world through all of the above and more.

but chemicals -- over 100 000 new ones every year, with less than 1% ever tested for impact on live things -- thrown upon life on Earth in the amount of billions of tons every year -- that's not coming from the Milky Way, that's man-made. Are they causing the global warming, among other interesting things they're doing to life on Earth? Maybe. If they didn't, would I still feel the same about them? I would. How do I feel about them? Like a cat with a long tail in a room full of rocking chairs.

A "corporation" is a magical concept to begin with -- literally it means an "incarnaiton," "acquisition of a material body by an immaterial entity."

Well, we know a thing or two about cooling things, but mostly vodka -- you do have to chill it if you want to freeze that nasty taste and smell and get the umph without the yuck out of it. (Ice cubes added to room-temperature vodka won't do that. It's similar to what I think the deal with the global warming is: you have to chill the, well, everything. Not just the climate. The politics. The power mongering. The minds of the Fire worshippers. Religions and ideologies and technologies that are upward-progress-hierarchy-pyramid-Fire-like. The climate would chill out by itself then. We're looking at a major Wuxing imbalance, not just a climate problem... But that's me, and I don't ever put ice cubes in my vodka...) My parents used to work for the oil and gas industries in Russia. My father headed a scientific lab studying combustion processes. I'll ask him. My mother designed pipelines to transport natural gas from the remote Arctic regions. Methane was always a big problem, a contaminant they had to remove, and a lot of technologies were designed to deal specifically with that. I don't know what to believe when it comes to all the oil and gas research and information because there's so many ulterior motives mixed into the deal. I don't know if global warming is any different from anything else people make fake names in science out of. Do you know that there's Russian research, at least a large chunk of it, that denies the "fossil fuel" model of what oil is to begin with, both theoretically and empirically? Some scientists assert that Russia doesn't have any more oil than any other randomly selected place, it's just that they use a different model for where to look for deposits, the non-fossil model, and that's why they're finding so much more than the fossil-model geologists elsewhere. How do you like the idea of "everything we ever learned in kindergarten, high school, or college was BS?" That's a model I always take into account when dealing with "common-knowledge knowledge..."

I believe death is sloppiness, and an outcome of a sloppy life. If I die, I will despise myself for having failed to take advantage of the immortality option offered every taoist. I don't want to go "up and forward," I want to go "back." My ideal is life on Earth between one hundred and one hundred fifty thousand years ago. Since taoist sciences don't believe in linear time, and instead are studies into real time, which is cyclic, circular, spiraling, loopy, etc., getting to my place... um, time... of preference is every bit as realistic an outcome of cultivation (provided that's your goal and destination) as any other. If I get there, I will mess the hell outta everybody's civilized "future," I will try to prevent it, I will try to send history on a different loop altogether. So when civilization you all know and love dissipates like mist, like fog, like smoke screens and mirrors blown away with one gust of the Great Wind over the Valley of the Mysterious Female, and in the sparkling blue morning air fragrant with ten thousand blooms you hear the Valley Spirit laugh -- ...that's how you will know I did what I meant to do.

Help does not exclude informed help. Ask me to help doing something I see as harmful and I will refuse to help. Ask me to help doing something I see as inefficient and I may do it to humor you, half-heartedly. Ask me to help with something I passionately support to begin with and the magic will be at its strongest. Helping without investing your heart into it is the weakest kind of magic, and generally, it tends to fail.

Neither did the fathers of the church who got rid of all the witches -- and everybody else whose property looked good to seize -- today they use a different term of course, not "war on witches," something else... ...but the desire to affect the external environment with magic is not western, it's invented by tao. "The sage comes like the spring, benefitting all beings." That's how magic works in taoism and in all other (demolished) traditions alike. That's what our Witch here is trying to accomplish. I have a different objection... Global warming is a peripheral problem compared to global fascism. The latter, incidentally, freely uses magic (the malevolent kind) among its other tools, but of course does not limit its operations to casting spells. Magic alone, not backed up by money and power, is the weapon of the disenfranchised, of the socially powerless. The powerful have faster and dirtier ways to affect the environment -- e.g. with any which laws they choose to enforce. If THAT is not dispelled, by magical or any other means, we may have global cooling and yet the level of global misery will keep increasing the way it is increasing right now -- exponentially. To do nothing about it does not mean non-interference Laozi style, it means aiding and abetting, facilitating and enabling -- quite different from what Laozi meant I believe. According to Wen-tzu, the student who recorded his oral teachings (and one of my favorite sources of taoist wisdom not diluted into some feckless benevolence of a hippie easy on a western mind, the way all our translations of TTC are), Laozi had the strongest objections against damage to the environment caused by human actions (physical, not magical) and derived his assertion that in the human-managed world "tao has been destroyed" from these actions. Inaction in response to these actions wasn't seen as tao-like at all. Tao responds to a wound by healing. Non-acknowledgment of the wound, and the consequent doing nothing about it, is not healing, it's festering. Laozi never advocated that.

Thank you for answering my earlier question re lineage. Now this diagram -- OK, the miaodao is spelled out instead of implied... if we were talking taijiquan, e.g., I'd say this symbol compared to the usual version of taiji is like Chen Xinjia compared to Chen Laojia: in xinjia, the internal is made visible, is explicitly shown externally. This doesn't make the more hidden version less "real" though. Likewise, the usual way to draw the taiji symbol is no less real, it's merely less obvious. Wouldn't you think so?.. But the main question is, do you happen to know why exactly does your teacher places yin on top and yang on the bottom in his diagram?..

I practiced it a lot, years ago when I was into Reich and neo-Reichian orgone research. It works. I don't believe in orgone anymore as a separate phenomenon from qi though, but then I didn't know it, and now I do. I believe anyone with some experience of focusing awareness into a single point (there's hosts of meditations that teach this of course) can get it to work if they choose the method consistent with their predominant Wuxing phase. E.g., if you're Metal, "pierce" the cloud repeatedly with your sharpened gaze as you would with a sword. If you're Fire, evaporate it. If you're Water, flush it away. If you're Wood, absorb it. If you're Earth, pull it down.

Hi Li Jiong, could you please post a link to your lineage? If it's in Chinese that's all right, I will ask a Chinese friend for help, and if it's in English, even better. Thanks!

Hi Findley, thanks for trusting my humble opinion! As synchronicity (ganying) would have it, I have just responded to this very question at another forum a couple of days ago. (The link is in my sig.) It was brief vis a vis the magnitude of the subject, but let me copy/paste, tell me if this begins to answer your question: A million dollar question! You need to look at Hetu and Luoshu for the answer. The Earlier Heaven and Later Heaven sequence of trigrams are derived from them. In the Earlier Heaven sequence, they are perfectly balanced -- and so nothing moves! This is your wuji -- the world of the unmanifest. Only people who don't bother with taoist basics mistake it for 'emptiness,' 'nothingness,' 'void' and so on. Uh-uh, it ain't! It's everything -- but everything so counterweighed by everything else to a balanced perfection that stillness is the natural outcome. Perfect balance, tao-in-stillness, has no manifestations, for the flow the balance has to be upset somehow. And that's what happens with the first creative, generative, manifestation-bound impulse, which they somehow know first arises from the third trigram (how exactly, I haven't seen in taoist literature, but in books on chaos and fractals and power laws, and in my own meditations, I did see it. If I get to that article sometime, remind me to try illustrating the "how" of it -- don't know if I will succeed, but I will try.) So, OK, when the balance is upset -- look at the Later Heaven diagram -- the trigrams have shifted from their proprietary places and the race "back to balance" begins -- this will generate cyclic motion, the way of tao is motion and the pattern of this motion is return. The force that arises with this motion, qi, is now like this -- expanding, now like that -- ascending, it has become colorful, it has direction, fortitude, and a tendency to transform as it manifests into a qi of a different, next, nature and quality, also known as "phase" and also stubbornly translated as "element." So these phases of its motion -- that's the Wuxing. You get your dance of patterns between the eight trigrams (also forces, really, directions, tendencies, drives toward "original places") and the Five Phases, and of course yin-yang is the choreographer of the dance, it's the yang impulse of 3 that starts it all...

Oh, cool. I didn't sign up because I don't have enough information yet as to whether my money would be well spent if I bought what Li Jiong is selling. What is it? I buy cats in bags only when they're very cheap. $49 -- I would want to see the cat first. Fuxi's material and its derivatives is something I've been playing with for years, so I would have to know if there's anything there to know that I don't and would want to know, before taking a monetary plunge. For a beginner in things taoist, however, it might be worth it if indeed it provides a convenient shortcut to taoist basics (provided it treats them as such without superimposing this or that master's agenda), which is the only sensible place to start. The overwhelming majority miss this crucial step and wind up inventing and reinventing so many lopsided wheels... That's where I started too, when I didn't know any better: trying to understand the middle and achieve this or that end without knowing the foundation. Which is impossible.

Science. (Not "a science.") Here's its first axiom: 492 357 816 This is Hetu. The second axiom is Luoshu. They are taoism. All the rest is fringe benefits. Qigong, ice cream, Laozi, gunpowder, printing, silk, civilization. Alchemy, chemistry, biophysics, immortality. Jade Emperor, bedchamber arts, calligraphy, humanitarianism. Quan Di, acupuncture, the art of cooking, the Mysterious Female. Wen-tzu, political dissidence, Genghis Khan's respect for nothing else in the world. Expeditions around the world without conquest, for the study of animals of the world. Blue robes with scarlet clouds. Mastery of Time. I could go on and on for ten thousand li. Taoism is the biggest baddest science of life, and to refuse to learn it is to paint oneself into the dullest dustiest corner of the universe -- quite possibly forever. Now tao is not taoism. Tao is what taoism studies. When you watch TV, you're looking at tao, believe it or not; but taoism is what enables you to see it. Unlike the human movie you're watching, tao's movie can only be seen with everything you are, not with your eyes and not with your mind and not with your heart and not with any other part. The whole point is, it's not a part of anything. You are it but for all practical purposes it doesn't matter. Tao is irrelevant. Taoism is what civilized humans do with it, there's nothing else that can be done or not done with it by a civilized human. Tao is normal; taoism is the how-to of normalizing yourself. Once YOU are normal, tao is you, you are tao, there's nothing to talk about, nothing to practice, contemplate, aim for, do or not do. You know tao when you're whole. If you're ever whole. And a big "if" it is for a civilized human. Taoism is the know-how of normal, is all it is, is everything it is. Other ways is ten thousand ways of processing an abnormal state; while taoism is ten thousand ways to normalize.

Um... we're talking apples and oranges, Steve. My fault too -- some charged points shouldn't be made in passing... I was just hoping that the I Ching's authority might back up what I'm trying to express... guess not... well, never mind then. An orphaned refugee or the abbot? You only say what they "are," but superior/inferior is not about what they "are," it's about what they "do" and how it makes them feel and how it makes others feel and what it causes others to "do." What do they do?.. How does it feel?.. Is all the orphan doing is feeling low, suffering? That's definitely not his fault and yet he finds himself in an "inferior" state -- or would you go as far as to not distinguish the state of suffering from the state of pleasure as "inferior" vs. "superior?" If they're all the same, it shouldn't, technically, matter which one to choose, right? Yet how come all people (except for some of the insane ones), all animals, all plants and even all unicellular organisms consistently seek pleasure and avoid pain? Isn't there something about one state being "superior" to the other? Isn't there something that makes life itself choose? Isn't it normal to be able to tell pain from pleasure... wait, there's Pink Floyd in my head all of a sudden... "heaven from hell... can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail, a smile from a veil, do you think you can tell?.." Of course if one believes in Maya it renders any point anyone might make about anything quite moot. What a convenient prop, maya is. A back door outta any and all life-related issues. I don't use it though.

"Heaven is high, the Earth is low; according to this, superior and inferior places are established." That's the opening of Ta Chuan that starts out by tackling the whole matter of superiority-inferiority embedded in the I Ching. The I Ching addresses two types of people, "superior" and "inferior," with different pronouncements. "Superiority" and "inferiority" are described as courses of action people take, as forces of transformation they are exposed to that reveal and shape their superior or inferior nature and are, at the same time, shaped by it. E.g.: "A superior person changes like a tiger; an inferior person molts in the face." Or: "For the superior person, this is humiliating; for the inferior person, no blame." Or: "Dispersion is followed by accumulation; inferior people don't understand this." There's dozens of lines juxtaposing superior-inferior positions, and they do not offer judgments as to what's "better" or "worse," they just clearly state a different effect of the events of the world on their recipients and participants. I believe intuitively we all know who "superior" and "inferior" people are, but we are used to turning away as quickly as possible from this knowledge -- especially if we glimpse it in the mirror. Both scenarios are very scary, actually, regardless of what you glimpse, greatness or pettiness, don't you think? That's why it's such a popular stance to deny the difference. A homogenous porridge of "it's all good and it's all one" is baby food though. A superior person "bites into dry old meat and bones, hits poison, hits yellow gold." An inferior one is fed the homogenized formula. Yummy... sweet, sugary, unoffensive... and false.

Hi Li Jiong, I am a follower of Fuxi and would be interested in anything you have to say about your school.

Witch, do protect your computer, or rather both of you (the clash is mutual-impact), by installing a copper something between you -- a copper plate, or better yet, hang a copper coil from the ceiling above it.

The "you" who's asking and his subtle body-- taiji puts them in touch. If the you who's asking is not resisting the connection. It doesn't seem to do it for everyone -- I've met some high level taiji folks who are remarkably out of touch with their subtle bodies, I think they manage to maintain the separation via a certain preconceived set of ideas that sabotage their chances of reconnecting themselves on more levels than just the physical. But in the absence of such blockages, the process unfolds naturally. May take a while though, and every new connection makes you more aware, not of what you've accomplished but of more and more blockages, disconnections, inadequacies! Taiji can be frustrating this way -- the better you get, the more obvious your various failings become to you and the harsher you judge yourself (if you're honest of course). I sometimes think I'm a glutton for punishment doing this to myself -- before I started, my own idea of the way I am, physically, mentally and subtly, was way more flattering! Now it's nothing but a nonstop unfolding of awareness of all the "needs more work" areas, all the mismatches between the physical and the subtle, the intended and the actual, the theoretically understood and the empirically available. So that's another thing taiji can do to your subtle body: it can make it spontaneously humble. Or at least a tad humbler than it was before. Again, if you're honest with yourself. The first inklings of your getting in touch with your subtle body may be merely physical sensations of the kind not available before. E.g., one of my first connections, which I remember well because it was one of the first ones, was fingertips to fingertips in a Single Whip connecting not mentally but actually, turning my arms, shoulders, top of the upper back and bottom of the neck into a single unit with a life of its own, a snake with its clear and awesome tangibility distinct and separate from that of its parts. It was like a glimpse into a different dimension where my body is organized on totally different principles, where things I'm used to in the ordinary dimension -- flesh, bones, skin, sensations, motion range, motion pattern, etc. -- simply don't count, some different physiology kicks in, a different yet completely distinct "alternative physicality." I'm sure I'm not making much sense. But when it starts happening for you, you'll understand!