Taomeow

That's how I first came to taoism -- by discovering that it just happened to provide "names that can be named" for things I experienced way before, and completely independently, of knowing any of those "names." I didn't know anyone else in the world had ever been "hit" by any similar phenomena till I found out there's a whole world unbeknown to the cultures I've been steeped in that did get "hit," big time -- thousands of years of recorded history of such "hits" -- and provided not just "names" -- good usable names like ganying, qi, wuxing -- but also a coherent, non-contradictory, self-congruent (ziran) structure for exploring these phenomena. Which, well, you can damn well choose to call something if you're going to communicate with other people experiencing, or working with, or towards, similar ones or the same ones. And what you're gonna call it only matters when you communicate with other "users" -- as a taoist physicist who formulated a dynamic version of Newton's laws some 1,200 years before Newton put it, "an object in motion will remain in motion unless hindered, and it's as true as that a horse is not an ox." A different way to express the process of cognition -- a different tradition of "how" to say things -- but what he said is every bit as true as those much more "reputable" formulas that I so hated memorizing in seventh grade, and really don't remember at all by now, unlike the "horse is not an ox" bit which is impossible to forget -- and which essentially constitutes what in "our" scientific language we would have to call some impressively non-colloquial name (e.g., an "axiom") -- well, the taoist physicist just chooses to call it something colloquial and not contemptuous of common sense. Thus summarily ditching "our" scientific jargon's obligation to be conceited, self-important at all times, flaunting a superiority complex (to cover up the scientist's real feelings of profound inadequacy for the task) and boring to tears in order to sound respectable...

I watched it and got a very good feel for who the detractors were, what they were. Anyone studied NLP, mind control, Ericksonian, or any other psychophysiological observation tricks for telling when someone is lying?.. I did. The detractors were lying. That's not the only things that's wrong with them, but it's a start. The whole presentation too... what a trip. Castaneda "really meant" some other tribe, the one his jealous colleague said he did, the one he himself never once mentioned for any purposes?.. on top of never doing any field work anywhere, just reading books and plagiarizing, according to another detractor?.. So which one is it -- he didn't do any work, or he did it but with some tribe which he never, ever mentioned... or maybe he did it with a Yaqui teacher, not with the Yaqui tribe, just like he said he did?.. Don Juan wasn't a tribal man, and a friend of mine who is a full-blooded Yaqui Indian soon to run for mayor in an Oregon town, who does refer to himself as a "tribal man" out of sheer pride, didn't grow up in a tribal culture either -- instead he had to work in the fields since he was five years old, his parents were migrant farm workers and whose fault is that -- Castaneda's? That Native American lives were derailed and seldom look like what they were "supposed" to be like, or "expected" to be like based on Hollywood movies, the source of the bulk of many an anthropologist's ideation, is Castaneda's fault, according to this program. The authorities wouldn't bust Indians if it wasn't for the hippies, their impeccably logical construct goes, and there wouldn't be any hippies if it wasn't for Castaneda. Brilliant. My Yaqui friend, when he wasn't doing back-breaking work as a child, was being raised by his grandmother who was a bruja, not a "shaman" but a sorceress (just like Don Juan wasn't a shaman, now they say Castaneda made him up because a "normal shaman" doesn't behave like that, well, it's very true that a shaman's activities are quite a bit -- quite a lot -- different, but haven't they noticed Castaneda never asserted Don Juan was a "shaman" to begin with? He asserted Don Juan was a "sorcerer," a brujo. Quite a different occupation.) So, OK, I asked my friend about Castaneda and he said Castaneda had a rich imagination. I asked, so, do you mean he lied? He said, I don't know one way or the other, all I know is, that's not what my grandmother was like. And proceeded to describe his grandmother. And, honest to god, I thought he was talking about an incarnation of Don Juan all over again. A female Don Juan under five feet tall, with fourteen children and countless grandchildren, who died at the age of 107 -- that's where differences ended and uncanny similarities began. But my friend doesn't like being marginalized as a figment of someone's imagination raised by a person who is not supposed to exist, he's an ambitious politically minded guy into mainstream functioning, and from him I got yet another perspective of how and why a Yaqui might be not terribly happy about people yapping about what remains of his culture demolished by the same characters with whom they are now trying to be on an even keel... accepting "mainstream values" for lack of a chance in hell to have theirs validated, or left unmolested, or allowed to survive the second there's the slightest exposure. So... was Castaneda telling the truth? The detractors are such incredibly disgusting, fubar people that it's really hard to tell. The motivation behind discrediting him is so rife with ulterior motives that it adds zero credibility to the nay sayers' cause. The very fact the opposition is what it is constitutes a credibility vote in his favor I think. As Jonathan Swift (who could spin a tale like nobody's business) said a long time ago (I'm quoting from memory), "you can tell that a great man has appeared in your midst by the fact that all the dunces are in conspiracy against him."

Here's a little illustration of yang ascending... don't forget to turn the speakers on... http://funlist.funpic.hu/?page=archive&amp...5&did=11270

A young girl is more yang than an old woman. She is not as yang as a young man, but she is more yang than an older version of herself. And when she was a child, she was even more yang. Growth is yang; yin is settled. Activity, motion, changeability are all yang compared to set-in-one's-ways ways, slowing down, gaining "heng" (stability, predictability, being oneself for a length of time without changing much, or abruptly, or drastically). Then again there's recurrent "waves" of more yin/more yang in one's life. You grow, change, take on new things (yang), then you settle down (yin), then you get restless (midlife crisis? just a wave of yang -- in both sexes), then you seek peace and quiet again (yin), then you suddenly feel like someone new with retirement, start traveling, seeking adventures (yang), then you slow down for good (yin)... These recurrent waves are fairly healthy, but if one's health is out of balance, over- or under-manifestation of either yin or yang can occur at any age, of course.

In the human body, whatever happens in the head is more yang than whatever happens elsewhere in the body: yang is the topmost, the lightest (thought), it ascends, and the brain is yang compared to, say, the liver, and within the brain, the lower brain is yin compared to the neocortex, and the neocortex is the source of ultimate human yang, "higher thought." The neocortex does the pondering. Pondering is yang, meditation is yin; doing is yang, getting things done is yin. "Doing nothing, accomplishing everything" is the Great Yin, "taiyin"; "doing everything, accomplishing nothing" is the Great Yang, "taiyang." Thinking "there's something to accomplish" is yang, feeling accomplished is yin.

And for foods, try Chinese Food Cures by Henry C. Lu. The best way to understand yin and yang is via direct observation/meditation/contemplation of the behavior of entities and energies around you and within you. You basically do it by making a habit out of discerning whether anything you perceive is yin or yang compared to something else. NB, NB, NB! -- yin and yang are not absolutes, whatever is "yin" is merely "more yin" than something else, and this something else is then "more yang" to that "more yin" thing or event or process or quality, etc.. If you keep this in mind, the world turns into a fun study of yin-yang interactions of assorted phenomena. I just remembered... There was a question someone blew on Jeopardy: which one is the heaviest, a gallon of water, a gallon of crude oil, or a gallon of olive oil? I knew the answer right away because of this yin-yang picture I immediately formed of their interactions. Which one is going to float on top, on the surface, if you mix them? The one that's more yang. And when you have equal amounts of something yin and something yang, whatever is yin is heavier. So I said "water" and the contestant said "crude oil" and I said "bleep!" and so did the bleep-making thingie they use for such occasions. You will often google up all manner of lists comparing yin to yang, but they are likely to omit the time aspect, which is crucial for understanding them, and the "how it feels compared to something else of a similar function" aspect -- here's some examples: comfortable things are more yin (a pair of your favorite old sneakers is more yin now that it has adapted itself thoroughly to your foot; a recliner is more yin than an office chair; a path in the woods is more yin than the highway); new, recent things are more yang (a man of twenty-seven is much more yang than he will be at seventy; the latest movie is more yang than it will be a year from now -- then it will be sitting quietly on the shelf at Blockbuster's, now it's flying off the shelf, moving fast, going here and there and everywhere; a culture that is 200 years old is way more yang than a culture that is 2000 years old); things that have a future are more yang, things that have a past are more yin, and things that are "right now" are one or the other depending on whether they ignore what went before (these are yang) or what lies ahead (these are yin).

I know a few systems, my favorite is Su Jok, Korean folk reflexology. It appears to be very ancient, and uses "the system of the insect" as well as "the fish" and "the mammal." For the thumb, there's also a Chinese "fish" counterpart used in acupuncture -- the whole base of the thumb looks like the body of a fish if viewed from the side of the palm, and then the sticking-out part is the tail -- take a look! -- it can also move in a quite fish-like fashion. In Su Jok, you can find "organs" of the fish with ease that correspond to your own. Try it -- if you've been staring at the computer screen for quite a while now, wear glasses, etc,. press deep into where the fish would have "eyes" and feel the mighty ouch! In Su Jok, you can ultimately find one point to work on (like the "one grain of qi" in high-level taiji on which everything else pivots) -- but it has to be the point. I've seen it done. A woman was being treated for infertility. The practitioner found a point on the nail of her middle finger and used an ordinary pencil to press its tip into that point. I didn't see any excessive force applied but the patient (who was warned that the correct point is notorious for hurting out of this world) fainted. However, a month later she was pregnant -- after twelve years of unsuccessful attempts.

There's some antibiotics that cause ligament atrophy -- the one used for the anthrax scare, e.g., has an unpleasant side effect of torn leg muscles due to snapped ligaments in some users. I forget what it's called for the moment, but they prescribe it for common infections too occasionally. If you know which one you've been taking, this might narrow down your problem to a "side effect." (Ever wondered which "side" of the body is supposed to be ignored when "effects" take place there?..) Mullein-garlic ear drops available at HFSs are more efficient for ear infections, in my experience. Also, a simple measure of sleeping with a loosely (sic) inserted cotton ball in your ear (to create long term mild warmth) is also surprisingly helpful. If you want to do it the Native American way, have a smoker blow tobacco smoke in your ear. Ask him/her not to inhale while at it.

That's just not sushi if it doesn't jump on your plate screaming for mercy

The tongue can be (and is supposed to be) extended on purpose in serious yoga practices, which predate Buddhism by thousands of years. The rationale behind the practice is the holographic correspondence between the tongue and the whole body. A very pliable tongue translates into a very soft and supple (sung, in Chinese terms) body -- and a matching personality. Some yogis roll it over a stick daily and pull gently (or not) to gradually lengthen it. There's taoist practices for the tongue as well, e.g. rolling it in a spiral against the upper palate to replicate the fetal position of the body with the tongue, and "reach to heaven" (the upper palate is thought of as the "celestial" part of the mouth, and the usual position of the tip of the tongue right behind the upper teeth in meditation practices of many traditions is meant to, among other things, connect the earthly and heavenly aspects of the individual). I once met a very old, very healthy and vigorous man who told me the upward spiral rolling of the tongue was his secret. I have a book published in China on tongue diagnostics, with hundreds of photographs of all kinds of things that can go wrong with the tongue and explanations as to what they mean for the whole body and what to do about them. Many unwell tongues in this book are short, stubby, chubby, tense, dense, swollen, asymmetrical, and so on, but not one of them is "too long." So, all things considered, I don't think Buddha would be deformed if he had a long, mobile, pliable tongue.

Pass the broccoli, parsley, sage, rosemary and dog Korean style

During the witch hunts in medieval Europe, cats were designated by the fathers of inquisition as witches' accomplices, accused of black magic, outlawed, and sentenced to death, all of them. After a while, Europe's millions of cats disappeared and became all but extinct. The next thing that happened was an exponential growth of the rodent population. Primates' ancient competitors for food who won the battle some 2.6 million years earlier on the North American continent, causing extinction of all primate species native to the continent (some 120 of them), were now making a spectacular comeback to power in Europe due to one primate species, and one gender of it at that, working tirelessly for the rodent cause, for reasons best known to the devil. Famines became rampant and routine; then, on the backs of the rats, came the Black Plague. It killed over 2/3 of Europe's human population. The cat didn't resort to this act of natural karmic magic until severely provoked. In the 19th century, European "scientists" and "archaeologists" were "studying" Egyptian civilization (mostly via pillage and plunder.) Among other things, they discovered vast cemeteries of millions of mummified cats. In Egypt, cats were thought of as incarnations of Bastet, the cat-headed goddess of fertility, femininity, love, and prosperity. Killing a cat was a crime punishable by death; if a cat died of natural causes, it was mummified and buried at the designated cat cemetery for about two thousand years, the years of Egyptian civilization's power and glory. European "scientists" found the custom without merit, and entrepreneurs following the "archaeological research" bought the cats, dug them all out, and sold for fertilizer at an agricultural auction in England. Thousands of tons of cat mummies were ground up and sold to farmers in the US to fertilize the land from sea to shining sea. There's hardly anyone living in this country today who doesn't have an eating disorder. Bastet didn't resort to this act of natural karmic magic until severely provoked.

My brother-in-law also has arms that reach to his knees, and could always sit in full lotus with no cultivation whatsoever. He's a very nice guy though, a heart of rare purity -- naturally. But he does look a bit like a very well-educated gorilla because of those arms (covered with thick fur to boot, although it never occurred to me to check whether those hairs grow "one per pore" as Buddha specs require. )

Number nine might mean balance -- he can stand on one foot in order to rub his knee without bending? By the way, Cognitive Enhancement/Life Extension people have their own set of "biomarkers of aging" that include the time you can stand on one foot with your eyes closed without falling over. If you can stand like that with perfect stability for over a minute, your biological age is in the 20s, and if you can do no more than 10 seconds, in the 70s, regardless of your calendar age. This is definitely cultivation material -- a taiji buff (e.g.) will find it quite easy to accomplish. Number twelve is also used in homeopathy -- a whole host of disorders can be pinpointed in people who get dirty easily (particularly kids) regardless of how little actual contact with dirty objects they have and no matter how much they wash. Skin, nails and hair that tend to retain dirt are indicative of poor defense mechanisms in general and weak immunity in particular. If you're interested in these things, look into taoist face reading practices -- the face is an open book, if you know what you're looking at... You know about torsions! I only read Russian research on torsion fields -- is that what you're referring to, or something else?

There's actually about forty "external signs of buddhahood," if I remember correctly. You are supposed to be born with them if you're destined for buddhahood. Among them: hair growing in a certain direction (clockwise from the top, not counterclockwise), "wheels under feet" (apparently high arches? no flat-footed buddhas?), and a whole bunch of specific proportions to the body that might have something to do with the golden ratio. And specific birthmarks on the body and on the head that people in the know would recognize as the required signs. I think the best method to cultivate those earlobes would be to wear extra heavy earrings, the way Gautama did in his millionaire's son happy days. Very chunky, very large, very obnoxious. If you can afford them and aren't too shy about wearing them persistently, I'm pretty sure you might get similar results.

I'm lost in the pulse lower closer comes the drill I bite the dentist

thanks for the bump, I was moving to a new house and am still swamped with boxes and was internetless for a while -- I want a closer look at your messages when I have a good chunk of time to think before I speak. How are you supposed to demonstrate what you feel on TV? I was always under the impression that whether an orgasm is an orgasm is only demonstrable to the ogasmee... ? Cat, thanks so much for the references -- sounds fascinating, I'll check it all out when I'm out of the boxes.

This will cleanse our soul: blood, sweat, tears, blood, sweat, tears, blood, sweat, tears, blood, sweat, tears.

I can usually tell an information-seeking question from a trick question from a rhetoric question (to which the questioning party already knows, or believes he/she knows, the answer) from someone's genuine interest in what's on my mind from someone's genuine desire to slam me no matter what's on my mind, and so on. Whichever of the above is your inquiry in your opinion, Taoist81? Anyway... how about starting here: http://www.forces.org/evidence/evid/therap.htm

Life and death are one, one gives birth to two and three, don't pretend it doesn't!

The peach tree was transformed into Eden's apple tree in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and its ability to bestow immortality, into the "knowledge of good and evil," but it's the same tree, which early proto-Christian mystics (the Essenes? -- I recall reading that the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to prove Jesus was a member) had adopted and adapted to their own interpretation. Like its later apple tree offshot, the peach tree of immortality is guarded by gods and is off limits to mere mortals -- with a few notable historic exceptions. A mortal can get a peach off that tree as a crowning gift of cultivation, once in a blue moon -- the peaches ripen only once in ten thousand years -- or get it by accident, as two unremarkable boys once did simply because they got exceptionally lucky. They met a guy who had worked on his gong for ten thousand years to get to that tree, and as he was carrying his peaches in a very nice mood, he gave one to the boys. This is one of my favorite legends because it phases in the probabilistic nature of taoist cosmology which, apart from things written in the stars and things left to free will, has room for things left to pure chance ("luck" in taoist astrology's terms, "good" or "bad" or even "dumb" in human terms). When the two boys ate the peach and immediately showed up at the palace of the Celestial Immortals, the Jade Emperor goes, who the hell are they? One of his assistant gods checks up on the boys in the book of destiny and, indeed, it predicts that around this day, two unremarkable boys chance upon an immortal who might, on a whim, give them one of the divine peaches and so they are destined to become Celestial Immortals. The Jade Emperor then shrugs his shoulders: you lucky bastards, no cultivation, no quest, no merits, not even any money to buy a peach, the old man just gave it to you? What has he been smoking? Now even I can't overrule the book of destiny, for even my own destiny is left to its chances, to an extent. OK then, make yourselves at home, you've got an eternity to idle away... And that's how I chanced upon my peach sword too. The day I decided I needed it, I went to an antique store and it was just sitting there waiting for me, in a bucket full of antique canes and umbrellas and suchlike. I guess it was written in the book of destiny that I was supposed to get it the moment I wanted it. Its handle is carved as one of those immortals' heads with the egg-shaped cranium; the ritual I follow calls for writing my own talismans on it, with special ink (which I also have to make myself), and then doing a few more things, depending on what I want to use it for.

Online interactions are frustrating by default -- quite unnatural if you thinks about it -- disembodied and therefore unrealistic. In real life, someone new may come to your home and talk in a way that would earn him or her a cup of tea and a slice of cake right on the spot, and a dinner invitation for Saturday, and you'd be proud to introduce this new friend to your family and your friends, and you wouldn't be ashamed if your mom and dad or your kids knew that that's who you hang out with, and your cat would purr, and your dog would wag its tail, and your "milk of human kindness" (Shakespeare) wouldn't go sour from that person's sheer breath. Someone a bit different -- OK, a lot different -- would come to your home and behave the way they routinely do online, he or she would promptly get thrown out, no questions asked. By the enlightened and unenlightened alike. As Buddha told his student when he wanted to take a bath and the student was reluctant to kill the bugs crawling therein on the basis of Buddha's own teachings of nonviolence, "I told you to prepare my bath, not to teach me how to follow my own teachings. Now get to work and kill those bugs or be dismissed and get lost!" For me, the excuse is that my lifestyle is not the same here as it used to be elsewhere. I had many hand-picked friends living within fifteen minutes' walking distance from me for 3/5 of my life. Now they are scattered all over the globe. Now if I want to talk to like-minded people, I have to do it the modern disembodied way much of the time. So the choice is between taking my chances on the internet and having to serve that tea and cake only virtually to many, while trying to take care not to take a virtual bath with nasty bugs crawling all over it, or staying out of it altogether. If the bugs multiply beyond what I deem acceptable, I leave. One or two, I see as a price to pay for resorting to this unnatural way of communication. Which I resort to instead of doing what I would really like to do -- something that would work toward restoring real, non-disembodied human communities. So in a sense, "all" my internet interactions are karmic, because deep down I despise the method itself yet haven't personally done anything about it. Pero, to some of us "enlightened" simply means "fully human," no more, no less.

The only pleasure I could discern is getting the benefit of your elegant analysis. But, in my case, I'm not really guilty of engaging him, I simply don't know how to convince him to disengage. He keeps following me like a bad penny. That's the problem with borderline personalities -- once they engage themselves bullying someone, they are relentless. Do you get The Simpsons in the UK? There was an episode where Lisa invented a bully repellent spray. She figured out, correctly, that what sets off a bully is a chemical reaction -- they are engaged and enraged by pheromones generated by someone's mind activity, to which they are violently allergic. So that's why talking to them not only fails to convince them of anything, but invariably agitates them further -- the better your argument, the more mind activity pheromones you produce, the more it enrages the bully! I just wish I had Lisa's repellent spray in an online form.

As if you don't know. Now you're his concubine!

I am not alone with the moon and my shadow and Li Po's drunk ghost This in commemoration of the following by Li Po (701--762 AD), a taoist poet and drunk: I take my wine jug out among the flowers to drink alone, without friends. I raise my cup to entice the moon. That, and my shadow, makes us three. But the moon doesn't drink, and my shadow silently follows. I will travel with moon and shadow, happy to the end of spring. When I sing, the moon dances. When I dance, my shadow dances, too. We share life's joys when sober. Drunk, each goes a separate way. Constant friends, although we wander, we'll meet again in the Milky Way.