Taomeow

Yes, I would also define taoist practices as "pattern recognition" kind of training. A pale ghost of this approach is, e.g., the IQ test which addresses one narrow aspect of the overall "pattern recognition" ability. The topmost layer of the mind doing that with greater or lesser efficiency can be roughly measured this way in comparison to other minds. The whole person, however, is as "intelligent" in space and time as his or her body, mind and spirit are intelligent at recognizing (and harmonizing with, and therefore having a measure of conscious control over) patterns of creation, which of course are not limited to the patterns recognized by "specialists" in any one field by any stretch of anyone's imagination, however elastic. That's the kind of intelligence we probably used to be born with some seventy thousand years ago. Today, we need to "cultivate" it if we want to have it. Ancient taoist tools are among the best available, far as I'm concerned, but of course there's other tools out there. One has to choose a set... you can't paint a cameo and a mural with the same set of brushes. Yes, it's not a moral distinction, more a pragmatic one. In a sense, you create your destination by going there, you affect the pattern by perceiving it... but at the same time you don't create it "out of nothing," the prior patterns have to be phased in, and the border between "what is" and "what can be" is always shifting, oscillating... I just came across a parable that seems to have some relevance -- here goes: One cold winter morning, a snail started climbing up a cherry tree. As he goes, a beetle sticks out his head from one of the cracks in the trunk and tells him, "Hey, buddy, you're wasting your time. There's no cherries up there." The snail nods pensively and responds, "Yes, I know. But there will be by the time I get there."

Thank you, White Tiger I can share some of my meditations, but I was already an experienced meditatior when I met my teacher, and she mostly wanted me to "stop it' instead of start something additional. I had to retrace my steps and return to square one, forgetting all the "advanced" practices I used to know. One of the things she taught me is Time of the ancient science, Time you study the way you would study space if you were to arrive in an unfamiliar land governed by unknown rulers, inhabited by unknown tribes. You need maps for that, an idea of the kinds of transportation available, where you want to go and why, and so on. Gifts that will appeal to your guides. Weapons to ward of thieves. At least a few words to express yourself so you're understood. An idea of what to wear so as not to offend anyone. A goal and a destination (unlike on vacation as a tourist, you are not really allowed to just wander about aimlessly gaping at whatever you might bump into.) (Believe it or not, acupuncture is originally a spin-off of this science -- the needle connects a point of here-now, of the time where you're ailing, where the problem is focused and condensed, with a point in time where you're whole, and draws down its configuration to modify the present. This point whose configuration is that of health can lie in your past, your future, or your "absolute time" that has no past, present or future, and a precise placement of the needle is like an antenna that captures this particular signal and tunes in. This is forgotten by modern acupuncturists, mostly, the fact that theirs is a time science. Meditations can be used as such "antennae" too, you need to choose a point and "pierce" it with your intent, connecting it to any temporal or eternal aspect of you that you intend to contact. ) Another course of study is finer and finer yin-yang distinctions between phenomena. You could start by grasping the idea of their relative nature -- nothing is yin and nothing is yang by itself, only in comparison with something else. You can spend a whole day meditating on your immediate surroundings, your room or your backyard, looking into the yin-yang nature of things therein. Once you're good at it, focus on one thing only -- say, a plant growing in your backyard -- and spend a day on its yin-yang dynamics, from the crude to the most subtle. At the end of the day (or a hundred days, different for different folks), you may find that you know your own internal dynamics -- where and how your own yin-yang phenomena are taking place and how they interact with each other. Then you match it to the yin-yang dynamics of the cosmos and begin to grasp the nature of the sun and the moon, the wind and rain, the Triple Realm itself (heaven, earth, humanity). You can go anywhere you want with this; so if I want to go into taoist magic (e.g.), I know instinctively by the time I light my candles which one to light first and won't start out with a mistake that cancels the whole deal (magic doesn't work if you don't know "which button to push!") But if you want to take it altogether elsewhere, you can...

Help is on the way! Oh thank you Kuan Ti, thank you! I waited so long.

Her reasoning: no one can know the middle who doesn't know the extremes. Simple (but sacred) geometry. Think about it, it's tres profound. The middle of what exactly are you at when you think you're in the middle? Remember how Gautama went to extremes of wealth and poverty, indulgence and asceticism, trying to do it all and trying to do nothing at all? -- that was his way to find the middle. It is everyone's way in fact, but few have the guts. I am not allowed to discuss her family situation. She is not a public person. I really don't want to discuss her lineages either, I know it may seem suspicious but if I do it would sound like bragging, and then someone will ask for "proof" and I'm, like, damned if I do and damn if I don't "prove it." I don't know how to address it to avoid this. Personally, I've nothing to brag about, she's taught me "the tip of the iceberg" so far -- all I know is she's the real deal and even a crumb from her spiritual feast can sustain me for a very long time.

Thanks, Xeno, by this definition that you gave, 'tis true. Todd, I don't ever chop any heads off for questions, only, occasionally, for answers. How do I know she's telling me the truth? When you are shopping for a pair of shoes and try a few pairs on and make this judgment call every time -- too small, too big, just right -- how do you know your feet are telling you the truth?.. She is a bit like the I Ching: never answers the question you've asked at the moment, always the question you should have asked at the moment whether you know it or not. It's useless to ask her without the question being impossible for me to answer myself. She knows what I can and cannot learn on my own, and the former, she doesn't bother teaching me. So about laughter, I learned on my own. The thing is, people are allowed to laugh "all the way" but not cry "all the way" -- especially adults, especially men -- so laughter is like an umbrella under which everyone will rush at first opportunity so as to release whatever you're not allowed to release any other way -- and have actually lost the skill, and would have to be taught from scratch how to discern, own, and adequately express your own feelings. The world is full of stiff wooden people -- numbed out physically, emotionally, intellectually -- because of that. Laughter, one of the vanishingly few modes of expression still available, only releases as much of the genuine feeling as the very tip of its humongous iceberg just sitting there forever blocking everything. Tears would melt much more of it in many situations. And a whole-body complete genuine reaction, all of it. But who has the luxury to have that? Replacements, as-if modes and as-if ideations, abound -- but their power is limited to the tip of the iceberg. It's not as noticeable from a personally good comfy place in life -- but most lives visit those comfy places only temporarily. Sooner or later everybody has to face the music. Dance? Yeah... Everybody dances. To me, the sign that there's something wrong with the dance we're dancing though (a collective we, the "humanity" we) is that everybody keeps stepping on everybody else's toes... I know a harmonious dance when I see it, and I'm yet to see it in the civilized human world.

Snow falls on brown earth, each snowflake's perfection smashed by togetherness

Be one with Buddha, two with taiyin and xiaoyang, three with pyramids

Well, animals do without, except for apes and hyenas. And -- NB -- shed no tears, except for the crocodile who doesn't shed them out of sadness but, rather, to aid his digestion. To me, one of the main attractions of genuine (pre-Confucian and pre-Buddhist) taoism is that, like all shamanic traditions, it doesn't set man apart from nature as a superior creature, and is free of speciesm. There's schools based on learning from animals -- e.g., turtle practices of longevity (very precisely imitating the ways of the turtle that can live for hundreds and even thousands of years). There's a branch of Magical Taoism that focuses exclusively on cultivating and refining the human sense of smell to match that of animals. A common house moth, that little flimsy pale thing that causes you to clap your hands trying to smash it when it suddenly appears in slow fluttering flight between you and your sitcom on TV, can smell its mate from the distance of eleven miles and head straight to a party in response to this message, which all humans would see as a supernatural ability if any one of them could exhibit it. Immortals don't emulate mortals in their ways, and don't get their kicks from the same sources of amusement as we do. The inner world of a "big M" master may well be as incomprehensible to an ordinary human as that of an ant. What is it to you looking from the outside -- "primitive?" But it's been around for eight hundred million years to our 1/800.000.000th of the time -- so maybe it knows something we don't?.. The virtue of tao which the most noteworthy classics talk about, "endurance, staying power," "heng" -- well it doesn't seem to bore tao to practice it... and doesn't seem to bore animals who go on and on and on for hundreds of millions of years without trying to annihilate themselves and all other species every five minutes just for the kicks and giggles. Maybe something in non-human ways is not all bad and unattractive after all?.. Maybe it's not necessarily an "inferior" mode of functioning just because it's not like ours?..

I'm guessing the immortals are laughing that 0.1% kind of laughter I was talking about that mortals don't.

I think in our time there was only one man who responded correctly to this question when the answer arose spontaneously in response to an event that shook him to the core -- it took a nuclear blast for the answer to emerge for Robert Oppenheimer, but then when it did, it left no room for doubt whatsoever. "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," he said.

The question "who am I" is only fruitful when asked by someone who has mastered time, memory, context. Otherwise "I am an egoless nonduality" and "I am John Winterbottom, esquire" are equally useless answers to come up with. No one is reducible to the answer to any question. "I am the third best dentist in town" may be a true answer, "I am Mary Jane's second cousin" is also true, and even "I am the guy they will bury in the North Park cemetery on December 3, 2040." Which is THE answer that "truly" qualifies? None -- because the question you asked wasn't THE question. Who am I WHEN and TO WHOM are the questions. Who am I to the three-year-old who is also me? Who am I to my daughter when she bursts out of the room crying in response to my words? Who am I to the woman who thinks she loves me -- does she love ME, or am I, to her, the father she needed but never had? -- and if so, does she really love me, does she even know I exist?... And so on. Sitting in meditation getting a "non-human," "bigger-better-than-human" response to this question is invariably a trick your mind will play on you unless "dentist" and "a figment of someone's imagination" and "the bully drunk on power over someone weaker" and "the baby whose helplessness and dependency I must never again experience, must avoid feeling at all costs" have all been integrated. If one leaves any part of it out of the "who am I" continuum, the "I" he or she comes up with is incomplete, and therefore ultimately unreal. Moreover, all it is is defensive self-aggrandizing BS unless it's "everything" you "are" -- including things you don't want to accept as "you," things you were in the past, will be in the future, and things you are to other people, and were in the past and will be in the future. The entity encompassing them all -- that's you. Forget someone or something, skip a step -- and your answer will be an amnesiac's answer, her best guess when she wakes up with no memory of who she is and the doctors go, do you know who you are? and she goes, hmm, good question...

Thanks for remembering and reminding me! You asked (about my teachers), "I wonder whether you'd think that the following description applies to both: They are positive beyond reason." Good question. We would have to start by finding a common definition of "positive." To me, positive is yang and negative is yin, but yang vs. yin isn't "good" vs. "not so good" and therefore positive vs. negative isn't either. An example of what I mean: place two lenses side by side and compare -- positive is convex and negative is concave; look at a landscape -- positive is the mountain and negative is the valley; put a t-shirt on -- positive is the outside of it which the world sees and negative is its inside that touches your body. Neither one is better or worse... each serves its own purpose -- as well as the purpose of creating its opposite! So if you mean that both are positive in the sense the word is used in English (which is a wrong way to use it far as I'm concerned, and there's a not-so-good historic reason for such usage... but I won't go there now) -- i.e. in the sense "optimistic, affirming, seeing good in everyone and everything" -- the answer has to be no. My taiji teacher indeed has this kind of personality, easygoing and cheerful -- or at least I have never seen him in any other mood and have reasons to believe he is very genuinely content and truly feels deeply good when he acts it (which seems like pretty much always). My taoist teacher, however, is impossible to read in any simple terms, and is quite easy to misinterpret. She does seem like one of those masters to whom ordinary people are "straw dogs" (TTC). She is demanding, impatient, has a short fuse, and makes me feel stupid and inadequate. The thing is, whenever she does, she is one hundred percent right -- and I wouldn't accept it coming from anyone else, so she's my only chance to face my own inadequacies without bullshitting myself about my "level" of this and that. If it wasn't for her, who knows -- I could wind up fancying myself a great master like so many do just because there's no one there to smack them. Overall they're as different as... OK, it's like that Simpsons quote from an episode where the Simpsons enter a Japanese game show: "Our Japanese game shows are a little different from your American ones. In America, you reward knowledge... In Japan, we punish ignorance!!" Now if you meant positive-negative in the yin-yang sense, then the answer is also no. My taiji teacher is very yin-yang-balanced -- an embodiment of the middle way. My taoist teacher alternates between extreme yang and extreme yin and avoids the middle way like the plague. I could tell stories if I could tell stories... So, Xeno, what do you make of it?

I recommend Gopi Krishna's book "Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man."

What's ThetaHealing? No, I mean the shadow government. And no, I don't call myself a "conspiracy theorist," I call myself an "alternative historian." But let's not steal Sean and Leslie's show.

May you keep dancing with ease and grace. Do find some all-natural tobacco in Costa Rica. I don't expect American Spirits to be available where you are now? It's the additives that's the devil. Aids comes from above. You know who we have above, right? (No, I don't mean god.)

No, it's a diphthong (a monosyllabic double sound) -- check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong. I smirked.

Thanks for clarifying, I read too sloppily. However, it was still something going wrong. Not terribly wrong, just wrong. A mistake. A not-right. A deviation. A sink was for little boys to wash their hands, not for big men to pee into. You can't find a humorous situation that isn't about a shade of wrong, tiny to huge. And when someone else laughs just watching you laugh, that's because we have mirror neurons in the brain that cause us to mimic other people's behavior and emotions and even things like coughing or yawning. Try it in a movie theater -- cough a few times, someone will always respond with a cough of his or her own. Yawn a few times -- and someone will yawn in response. Laugh -- and you'll make someone else laugh. But the original seed of laughter is still what I said it is in 99.9% of cases... remember, incidentally, that's the number I used originally... not 100%... I leave some room for the kind of laughter I've never encountered in real life, I leave it room to exist, but I don't expect anyone to be able to come up with an example -- with even one joke, funny story, funny situation that, stripped down to bare facts, to "what actually happened," isn't about "something wrong happened."

Can't see the image on my screen at all... boohoo.

But Mythmaker, your example fits in perfectly with my premise that it is always about "something going wrong." Wasn't it a wrong thing for someone to wash his hands in your piss? It doesn't matter that you didn't "mean it" and didn't do it "on purpose." The outcome was still "something going wrong for somebody," wasn't it? Well now that's funny. If you're a she why were you peeing in a boys' bathroom?.. Something wrong again... Wayfarer, my cyberlove, I'm not humorless. I have people in stitches when I'm in the mood, and laugh easily myself, I'm really easy to amuse. But it only means I'm not a realized master -- to me it's one of the sure signs. Not that there's no other signs of that of course. My taiji teacher laughs a lot and can be very funny, delightfully so, and is quite taoist in his leanings and lifestyle and cognitive preferences, but he isn't what they refer to as a "Real Human" or a "realized being" or a "holy sage" in taoist classics. My taoist teacher, however, never laughs. Never gets bored either... ever. Never needs to be amused, entertained, noticed... She's really hard to understand on everyday human terms. The part I understand though is that her state is what they call "more advanced" (whatever it's supposed to mean) than any 'normal' human state anyone can imagine.

One more syllable though... Hear hear the tao meow! -- The tao that can, and does, meow is eternal tao.

When touched by The King of Bad Taste, people mistake Elvis for music

Um... serves me right for bringing up an "unconscious defense mechanism" to the verbal level without a chance to reach the level of buried consciousness in the addressee. Stupid of me, really. Mythmaker -- so what would be an example of "real humor," in your opinion? Wayfarer -- did I ever mention I really like you? -- so with this in mind, please forgive me if I say you fare way off with this one. Sorry for me? I spend my life trying to not feel sorry for everybody else. Nothing beats being real, trust me. No freakin' thing feels better -- even when you feel sad, even when you feel pain, the real you feeling your real feeling instead of an as-if one... the only thing worth living for, the only thing worth dying for. But I won't be able to explain. Verbal level... doesn't scratch the surface. Witch -- researchers are among the most heavily defended people on earth. There's two reasons people do research in our time: because a)someone with a special interest/ulterior motive has paid for it, or b)because they are trying to prove to themselves "scientifically" that there's nothing wrong with them personally. I bow out of this hopeless thread knowing I can't possibly convince anyone of anything. Like I said, it was stupid of me to try.

A sense of humor is a sense of "something not right" combined with a sense of "I have to do something about it" combined with "I have to do something defensive about it, something that circumvents compassion, empathy, pain, embarrassment, shame, a sense of inadequacy in me or the other -- something that covers up the not-right feeling." A sense of humor fits the bill. It is a defense mechanism. My father used to get very sarcastic when I failed to see humor in situations he perceived as humorous, and "you have no sense of humor" was a put-down he used on such occasions. So I was conditioned early on to have a sense of humor. To the point that in lower grades in school I assumed the class clown role -- whenever someone said or did something stupid, a teacher or a student, everybody turned to me in anticipation of a wiseass comment and then I delivered and everybody cracked up. I started doubting it all when one day my best girlfriend slipped and fell down some stairs in a rather comical fashion, you know how people sometimes fall looking mighty ridiculous. Hilarious. I was really terrified because it looked like she may have dislocated or broken something, it was a pretty nasty fall, but all I could do was stand there and laugh -- it was as though laughter paralyzed my compassion, instead of rushing to help her I simply couldn't move, just stood there laughing like an idiot. But I didn't "grok" it then either, it was much later that I got an insight into the real nature of laughter -- it was like a bit of "enlightenment" on this one issue, suddenly I knew "everything" about it. No, there's no different kinds of laughter, only one kind... There's different ways to smile though... indeed ten thousand ways. There's ten thousand pleasures, ways for things to be right and good, but only one way for them to be wrong and bad. One, in many disguises... Also sprach Taomeow.

Good observations, guys... but my point was along the same lines as in that Heinlein sci-fi classic, Stranger In A Strange Land, where a martian-raised human was trying to understand and feel (grok) humans and, being very smart and extra sensitive, got most of it except for laughter. He simply didn't get it till the middle of this extra large book. Then one day he finally laughed. And after he did, he exclaimed: "Now I understand why people laugh. It's because it hurts so much." Vis a vis the original question, I meant that a true taoist master doesn't laugh, because she is a "real human" and real humans smile when they feel pleasure, cry when they feel pain, but don't laugh. Laughter is an as-if mode. Smiling and crying are real. Pleasure and pain are straightforward, smiling and crying are straightforward responses; while responding to pain with pleasure is convoluted. A taoist master doesn't lose the smile and doesn't lose the tears, but she loses the laughter. I know it's hard to believe...