Taomeow

OK, I got your point. However, I object to the "flaw" part, since it is projected and not my doing: I didn't make a peep about causation, I presented a fact, not its interpretation. The source of this fact is not the US of A where what you're talking about probably applies, but, rather, worldwide statistics that include countries where ALL men are poor and where (this part I know from living elsewhere) being in poor health has never been a serious obstacle for a male of reasonable age in finding a wife. The stigma of being unmarried is a very strong factor, chiefly reserved for women but occasionally men too, in more traditional societies, so whoever could get married, usually did. Of course all these reasons to get married are fubar -- economic, social, legal, etc.. The main reason has been, for hundreds of thousands of years, biological: merely the fact that the human child is born absolutely immature and unprepared to fend for herself for a longer period of her life than offspring of any other species. In all species where the baby requires an extended period of care (e.g., higher primates -- five to eight years, elephants -- twelve years), the institute of marriage (without the church and the vows) naturally exists. Sometimes a marriage is a harem-like arrangement with an extended family of uncles, aunts, etc., caring for the young -- e.g., among large felines; and sometimes it is mostly, or exclusively, monogamous -- e.g., among wolves and large birds of prey. But the arrangement seems to be predicated entirely on the needs of the offspring. Sharks, snakes, frogs and any other species whose little ones are born mature enough to take care of themselves don't marry and maintain no families. I think humans today are more shark-like in their mentality, but alas not in their biology -- so children are not nurtured because adults prefer shark-like activities, but human babies are still born as dependent and needy as they did a million years ago, and everything they miss out on comes back to haunt them -- and then gets transmitted to the next generation of developmentally frustrated humans. And that's where all our troubles begin and end up, and begin and end up again.

One consideration though that might be of interest to cultivators: committed bachelors' life span is an average of ten years shorter than that of married men (regardless of whether the marriage is subjectively perceived as "happy") and five years shorter than that of men who were married but divorced. Being married seems to prolong a man's life more efficiently than any practice he may take on. Alas, this is not true for women. Being married does nothing for our longevity. Old maidens, divorcees and happily married women still finish together, statistically speaking. However, there's other considerations of some interest. Having had no fewer than one and no more than four children prolongs a woman's life considerably. Having breastfed them cuts her chances of getting breast cancer to a fraction of what they are otherwise. Having had her first child between the ages of 18 and 23 cuts her chances of getting most other female disorders to a fraction of what they are otherwise. Looks like nature has her own answer to the question posed in the thread. However, the world today is set up in such family-hostile, anti-child fashion that I can only commiserate with people who have the sense of the natural pull toward normalcy going strong, since everything is pitched against them, is designed to defeat them and their healthy instincts. I wouldn't blame anyone deciding to bail out of the battle for normalcy today, because it is so incredibly lost already, to so many. I guess I'm not optimistic about either option -- no use knocking down a wall only to break into the adjacent prison cell. Screwed if you do, screwed if you don't. Do something about the world we're living in, I would tell anyone ISO a "spiritual" path. For starters, take a long hard look at it and get informed about how people are living in it and why and who has "chosen" this for them, and toward what purpose. Then of course anyone may choose to drop out -- but I would try to drop out wisely... if there is such a thing.

And if you haven't mastered either yourself or your life... that's when the temptation to consider yourself a master is the strongest.

Nice to see you too, Cat! He called her "Mother," at least before Primal therapy he did, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't after. Interestingly, Yoko "adopted" him after losing her own daughter to a hostile divorce. John's Plastic Ono Band album is full of revelations, by the way, brought about by his primal expedition. Love is Real, Real is Love is the truth. Children, don't do what I have done is another one. I don't believe in Jesus, etc... -- another one. Mother!! -- THE truth. It's really sad and strange how certain people who are, by virtue of their position in life, equipped to make a dent, somehow die as soon as they find out what the truth is about. Sometimes I suspect foul play -- often -- but not always... Have you ever read The Bridge of St. Louis Rey (I have to doublecheck the wording of the title, it was long ago), by Thornton Wilder? A bridge collapses, killing a bunch of travelers who happened to be on it at that time. The life story of each one of them follows -- up to the ending point when this person has found himself or herself on the bridge. Each story leads to an unavoidable conclusion that the protagonist, after much conflict, confusion, false starts, pain, mistakes, loss, etc., has found the truth, some kind of personal truth, some meaning and peace inside. And even though it was an accident, once you know all the stories, it becomes clear it wasn't, all their missions happened to have been accomplished -- nothing else of much importance to understand in THIS life. I often thought of John this way, as someone who died on a similar kind of bridge, at a similar moment, for a similar reason.

Much love out there is not real, IMO, and here's how you can tell: if it's a child who is getting love from Heaven instead of love from mom and dad, it's not real; if it's a man who's giving love to Heaven instead of to wife and kids, it's not real; if it's a woman who's giving love to a man who isn't giving love to her it's not real; if it's a student who's giving love to teacher instead of dad it's not real; and so on. Real love is very simple -- and the hardest thing to find in Kali Yuga period we're currently stuck in, if you want to go Hindu on the explanations. If it's fancy, it isn't where it's at. Love... it's not an agenda, it's a feeling. It's some normal status quo when you have it, you don't even have to be old enough to know the word to know whether you have it or not -- just like you spontaneously know that you walk on the floor with more natural ease than on the ceiling. Alas, many are forced to take a walk on the ceiling (or Heaven, whatever) in search of it -- just because the kind that's underfoot, that used to be ubiquitous, is presently extinct. As John Lennon put it, "how can I give love if love is something I never had?" He was referring to not having been given it by mom and dad, of course. If you don't get, you have none to give, it's as simple as money in the bank.

Well, smelling and tasting qi is actually very common if you have some training in TCM. I can tell which meridians a food item's qi is going into from its taste, e.g.. I can also tell whether it's cool, warm, or hot, damp or dry... most people can, at least with some things (others are not obvious without having been pointed out first and assessed with proper awareness), but they don't think of it as qi -- however what else is it that "cools" your mouth when you munch on an Altoid, or brush your teeth? The temperature of the Altoid or your mint toothpaste is the same as that of a donut kept at room temperature -- it's the qi of mint that is cool, and that's what you feel. As for seeing -- I see it. Learned how to many years ago, didn't know the word "qi" then, knew the word "orgone," from a foray into Wilhelm Reich's work. There were instructions in one of the books as to how to look at stuff to notice it. "Orgone" is not something new that he discovered, IMO, it's Reich's take on jing and qi, methinks. If only he ever got any taoist exposure, I think he'd know right away. He even discerned the shape of primordial qi (it does shape things rich in it a certain way -- that's another way you can see it), and had a couple of illustrations that looked like halves of the taiji symbol... though he didn't know any qi or taiji or anything like that, far as I know. There's different ways to "see." Palm readers, face readers, tongue diagnosticians, form/compass feng shui masters, etc., are all looking at qi, or rather its "signatures" ("the shape of the mountains reveals the shape of the wind..."). You don't necessarily look at "auras" and "colors" and "lights" and "fogs" when you're "seeing" qi -- these special effects are not qi, they are one possible (not mandatory) side effect of its various manifestations.

When I was practicing TKD, we had an assistant to the master, a young Latino guy who told me stories about his pre-TKD life. He used to be small for his age and big bad guys beat him up just because that was what he was good for in their book, and then came that moment when his training paid off for the first time, and he pummeled one of them and proceeded to pummel the rest of them one by one and was left alone forever. His fear was freely admitted by him and completely legitimate -- rough environment, rough handling not his fantasies but his real life -- and martial training was the remedy. Many others don't know what they fear but they fear. A father might have been intimidating, but fantasies about teaching him a lesson never reach the conscious mind explicitly (too forbidden), instead they get redirected, projected onto someone else. I'll show him/her/them! Yes, a scared little boy is plotting his revenge inside every "brutal and effective" warrior, I've no doubt in my mind. Chinese MA are different, at least for some, in that the immediate or expected opponent is a bigger kind of tyrant. Poor health, aging ungracefully, loss of a sense of physical excitement from the sheer process of living, this kind of opponent. Not a thug who might give you a beating in a dark alley. A thug that can invade your liver, give a beating to your reflection in the mirror, snatch a "purse" where you keep your self-identity as an able-bodied, able-spirited, sturdy piece of work. The only reason I would want to study something brutal and effective would be to use it against the actual brutal and effective enemies -- and these, of course, are different for different people. Mindless Inertia is the name I call my own biggest and most brutal one. And Chinese MA can beat him to a bloody pulp.

Gurdjieff you say? I'm an Enneagram Seven -- sex, drugs, rhythm and blues.

Haiku is about discipline -- just like good DNA. If you think civilization is crap, an opinion I share, then the only thing we have to counteract its effects is a discipline of our own. Free energy is rampant in a bottle of chlorinated water, in a violent movie, in malathion, in Round-up, in VLF electromagnetic pollution... civilization dumps random disorganized energy at you with every breath it offers. It's disciplined energy that's hard to get to. The kind that is found in, e.g., water that is water and that's all it is, no more, no less, not free-style water with whatever random pollutants by the thousand. Haiku, or anything else that is not 'anything goes,' the habit itself of declining the 'anything goes' offerings ("no thanks, dear doctor, teacher, preacher, general, politician, corporation, institution, I'll keep YOUR substance outta MY form, thank you"), is the only thing we have to fall back on. I love Homer Simpson and his free-energy ways, but when his head was examined in order to find out what he's thinking about, a cow playing a ukulele was revealed. Not that you remind me of him or anything...

Diagnose this, quack! My ancestors haunt my dreams, luminous, laughing.

absolutely -- but no cuter than you!

You're living in a dream world, Neo.

By the way, in real life, I've learned to assume the taijiquan posture when there's a verbal conflict -- and occasionally a "nonphysical fight" -- e.g., when my son was in the hospital and the doctor was pulling a power trip on us, refusing to do what needed to be done and peddling a whole bunch of stuff we didn't want done instead, with extreme aggression (screaming, threatening, blackmailing, you name it) -- instead of getting pulled into a screaming match with him, as he surely hoped I would, I just kept telling myself, "drop the shoulders," "listen to the back," "tail bone down," "loosen," "unlock," "open" and so on -- and from this place, I was arguing my point -- calmly, without a smithereen of tension/anxiety in my body language, in my voice -- and I confused the hell out of the bully (who is like that habitually, as the nurses explained to me, and usually intimidates the hell out of everybody). He wound up backing off and doing exactly what I wanted. With profound apologies at that. Thanks, taijiquan-for-combat!

Depends on what you call "science." If you mean the fodder we've been offered by our educational system as the only legitimate way to have a human experience, then the answer is no. If you mean everything people learned about our world in order to survive and thrive in it the prior one million years or so, before the current education system was invented (about 150 years ago), then the answer is yes. In all shamanic traditions (which existed for hundreds of thousands of years before having been dismantled by our current overlords), direct transmissions were not "one of the ways" but the ONLY way to get knowledge beyond everyday practicalities. What was transmitted was a state of being in the knowledge, and such transmissions turned one into "one who knows" (a term used in all cultures, whether African or Siberian, to describe a recipient of a transmission). So... no, no science available from institutionalized sources today has room for something like this, since its meta-goal has nothing to do with turning anyone into "one who knows." Its meta-goal, and its main accomplishment to date, is to promote obedience, to have people believe in, and be satisfied with, the kind of human experience made available by the powerful regardless of what this experience is reduced to. And to comply with absolutely everything dispensed from higher up the hierarchical ladder regardless of the shape and form it is offered in. No science that serves any other purpose is taking place. "One who knows" would surely object to his or her human experience being molested this way, and would certainly have absolutely nothing to prove to this kind of science.

Rain, sorry about your falling off your chair -- hope it was painless -- and hugs back! Not at all, you're begging to be introduced to a real teacher. Now you didn't want any stories about "worshipped" teachers, well how else can someone with a few years of taiji relate the combat efficiency of 40 years of taiji?.. I can't do what I've seen my teacher do, but it doesn't mean I made him up, nor that he "fakes" whatever I've seen... I've seen high-level non-cooperating warriors of other styles come to our class to "prove" hands-on exactly what you're trying to prove verbally. They failed. I've seen it, and I'm not making it up. The thing is, taiji is not immediately efficient in combat, it's not a cup of instant coffee, is all. It is not a fast food treat. It is not martially efficient after ten self-defense lessons. It's like something organic that takes its time to grow... like an oak tree which you can uproot with utmost ease when it's five years old, and which you can't uproot with anything short of a bomb when it's 50 years old, and not even with that if it's 500 years old. There's things in this world that take time to grow -- children, some art forms -- e.g., unlike poetry, journalism, or bestsellers that last a season or two, all the great classical novels in history, the ones that survive for decades or even centuries, were written by people over 50 -- so someone who wants to create a masterpiece in this genre has to allow quite a lot of time to let the art mature. Likewise, the virtue of taiji is not that it's a quick-fix type of "martialization" of one's skill; the virtue of taiji is "heng," the ability to grow stronger rather than weaker with time. There's phenomena like that in the world; taiji is one of them, whereas neither jogging, skiing, weightlifting, boxing, football, nor hard MA are in this category. We are generally used to things being at their peak efficiency early on, there's an "expiration date" on everything, we don't believe in heng. Vis a vis taiji, it's a mistake. When you see all those videos where a frail old man sends young studs flying, you are convinced they are bogus -- but consider another possibility: that same frail old man couldn't do this when he was a young stud, his taiji wasn't mature enough then... hard to believe, but do find a real teacher and you won't have to take anyone's word for it, you'll know...

Nah. Not much combat going on around, it's a nice neighborhood. Wish I knew some MA when I was a little girl growing up in a tough one, and getting into fights on a regular basis, regardless of whether I was going to win or lose. In the highly unlikely case of "combat" in real life today, and in the highly unlikely scenario where I would be limited to my bare hands in the choice of weapons, I wouldn't rely on taiji either, my level of proficiency isn't high enough. Instead I would consider some of the methods of imperial assassins, who were overwhelmingly taoist females. Hope this helps.

Lots of taoist breathing techniques, yes. Bandhas -- well, techniques with much similarity are used in female internal alchemy, dunno about the male ones. Your description of the ujai technique is different from what I've been taught, but then, like with most things, it needs to be shown, not told. It's a powerful practice indeed. There's similar ones in taoist breathing ways, the position of the tongue, e.g. -- on the border of the soft and hard palate -- is used for correcting certain imbalances. The thing with taoist breathing techniques is, the best ones are not "one size fits all" -- they are chosen based on the yin-yang/Five Phases principles (for starters) to suit individual needs. E.g., what you describe -- ujai with bandhas -- would be used to generate not just heat but steam, "hot Water," and help expel Dampness. However, someone with a Dryness imbalance would want to produce Water but not expel it, so ujai would be done without bandhas. Taoist approach to cultivation is first and foremost individualized... whoever teaches whatever technique or method or practice the same way to everyone is taking a commercial shortcut that "cuts" many benefits to pieces... sometimes most.

Rooting is an internal MA skill that can be developed through practice. Words and ideas can't root you, nor help understand what "rooted" feels like, because they are, to continue the tree metaphor above, leaves at the very top of the "human tree." Leaves can rustle, but they can't root. Grounding is taking yourself out of your head and into your body. To continue the tree metaphor, out of your leaves and into your trunk. Leaves -- words and thoughts -- aren't the trunk, they can rustle about the trunk but they aren't it. So, again, grounding is a practice and a feeling of the "human tree," not a rustle of thoughts and ideas "about" and "around" it.

You are very right, Spectrum. In fact, my teacher likes to show how a Chen move "translates" into another style move, how it's hidden there, not visible on the surface but still happening inwardly. On the other end of the... hmmm... spectrum , even xinjia can be internal (probably not the Olympic kind though, which might well be all for show... not sure, just a hunch). But what I love about Chen laojia is -- here's that word again -- balance, the perfect balance between how much is visible on the surface and how much is hidden. Yang style hides so well... xinjia shows everything... while laojia is smack on the Middle Path... down to being led by the pericardium meridian terminating in the middle finger!

Chen and only Chen. Laojia and only laojia. Yi lu so far, with er lu dangling its carrot (or should I say its Cannon Fist) in front of me, beckoning...

sure, if there's no Chen place to go where you are... BTW, Darin, I've studied sacred geometry and I submit your assertion that yoga isn't based on it holds no water. It most certainly is.

The only objection that can be raised against yoga is that you can't kick anyone's ass with it. It is exceptionally healthy to do -- asanas in any event, I would add many caveats to all internal yoga practices though -- and exceptionally safe compared to many other things you can do if you want to take your body out of the couch potato range of motion into something a bit more challenging. There's no such thing as one hundred percent safe motion, by the way, people get hurt in their bathroom about ten times more often than in the gym I'm told (probably older folks but still...) A friend of mine who, like me, came to taiji from a yoga background and, like me, still does it on the side, showed me a horrible scar on his leg that he got from doing yoga. (He was standing on his head in his living-room, lost his balance, crashed into a glass coffee table... ouch.) Accidents happen, poor judgment happens (and that's when people overstretch their ligaments and so on), but heart attacks happen when people just sit there doing nothing... whatcha gonna do, we're none of us invincible no matter what we practice, or fail to practice. I am a big fan of yoga, and find it helpful in anything else I do. If I don't do it for a while I start losing the effortless flexibility it generates which, when I do maintain even a very short but regular yoga routine, adds to a sense of well-being under many circumstances. Just feels good. Try it and your body will tell you whether it's healthy for you. And for a bit of inspiration... This is not exactly yoga, but a nice illustration of human flexibility's true potential... Behold Chaikovsky in Chinese: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOqxSaW05p4

An empty shell will resonate with every wind and sing the song the wind has chosen to dictate: it will tune in and sing along... An empty shell... She may be stunned by silence if the wind should die, or panic when the setting sun spills all his blood across the sky-- But songs and fears will subside... A shell contains no wind, no sun unless a pearl should grow inside and say, Protect me, we are one. My only castle by the sea, my only shelter from the storm! I long to be, I'm meant to be -- Don't crack, don't crush me or deform -- and keep me warm... ©1996

Under deep blue skies the sounds of Stones' Paint It Black materialize