Taomeow

There's no holy cows. And not seeing them doesn't necessarily mean "denigrating a beautiful tradition." Beautiful is in the eye of the beholder, right? To a Hindu, a cow is beautiful and sacred. To an average Christian, it is steak. To a Buddhist vegetarian, it is "something we're all better off without." To a taoist, it is just a cow. In the presence of a cow, he remains himself even if this cow is sacred to someone else. If he happens to dislike cows, he might say so, or keep it to himself. But he won't play games and won't pretend he sees a holy cow if he doesn't. So there's nothing beautiful and sacred to SJ about Buddhism. You think it's immature? Well, then consider the top taoist immortals Chung and Lu among the immature ones too, because they designated Buddhism as the dead end of spirituality, key word "dead." I'm not making it up, read "The Tao of Health, Longevity, and Immortality: The Teachings of Immortals Chung and Lu," translated by Eva Wong. Here's a quote: "Chung said: 'The ghost immortal is the lowest class of immortal. Ghost immortals are beings who have attained immortality in the realm of the dead. Their spirit is dim and they have neither name nor title. Although they are not forced to be reborn, they are not able to enter the Peng-lai lands of immortality. They wander about in limbo between the realms of the living and the dead, and their existence comes to an end if they choose to be reborn into the human realm. (...)People become ghost immortals when they try to cultivate but do not understand the Tao. Wanting to make fast progress, they take shortcuts in their training. As a result, their bodies are brittle as dry wood and their minds are as dead as cold ashes. (...) Although these beings are classed as immortals, they are really ghosts with no substance. Practitioners who claim to be Buddhist (...)usually end up as this type of immortal."

On the other hand, Desmond Morris of The Naked Ape asserts that laughter is crying in disguise, and that humans use exactly the same muscles to laugh as they use when they cry. (There's no other two activities for which we use exactly the same muscles -- except laughing and crying.) The first experience of laughter for a baby is when something pretends to be scary but really isn't -- dad going "boo" in jest or some such. There's this moment of decision for the baby -- get scared, cry? -- this "boo" thing can hurt me? -- but no, it's dad, familiar and safe... so, cry the way you cry when you know the dangerous thing is not going to hurt you? -- an as-if bad thing, and I respond with an as-if crying. And the baby discovers laughter. The as-if mode. Have you noticed that 99.9% of all jokes, if you focus your awareness on the situation described rather than the "funny" factor, are about something going very wrong for someone? About someone being hurt?..

And away we go... A road of ten thousand li begins with one step.

Tarzan dives from vines into blue forget-me-nots chasing hummingbirds

What's "the real thing?.." Different things are real on different terms. A live dinosaur is real but there's no immediate sensory access to one -- we are not intersecting in time. A dragon is also real but there's no immediate sensory access to one either -- we are not intersecting in the rate of perceptions. Motion in a movie is not real, but appears to us as really happening -- again due to our rate of perceptions which the frames of a film match while a dragon does not. An electron is real but there's no sensory method to directly verify it -- you can only visualize it in order to notice it. At the same time, it would be mighty idiotic of me to visualize my morning coffee instead of making it. And it would be equally without merit to look for Lady Chang-O walking on the moon through a telescope. If she's there, she will manifest her presence by using her own proprietary methods, and that's how I will know. But I do have to visualize her in order to contact her, or else she simply won't notice me. Just like my synapses won't notice any coffee if I don't interact with them on their own terms, i.e. by actually drinking it, instead of trying to do it on some "higher spiritual" terms which they don't buy. To each his/her/its own.

I've seen a study where they measured blood flow to the visual cortex under ordinary conditions and in the course of visualizations. Guess what -- visualizations increased the blood flow to the area ninefold. Yi moves qi, qi moves blood. It didn't create more energy, rather it created a command for the flow of internal events telling them where to go, what to do there. Some of the goals of visualization, just like some of the goals of ordinary external vision, are "homing," "zeroing in," "navigation." Plenty of energy is good, plenty of good ways to make good use of it is better. When you drive a car, having more than enough gas to get where you want to go is no guarantee of getting there -- you also need to look at the road. A blindfolded driver may not live to regret having had a full tank.

Little1, I'd like to hear you use "very dirty language!" I am predominantly kinesthetic, which means I relate to space itself with more ease than to "stuff" in space (any stuff you can see, touch, smell, or hear). A no-visualization meditation is a no-brainer for me. If I don't remember how to spell a word, I never "close my eyes and see it," instead I let my hand feel how I would write it in longhand -- it's instantaneous but if I were to translate it into verbal, it's something like, "down to the left in a curve from upper corner to the lower -- then from 3/4 the height, a bit up and then down in a left-ward curve again, then sharply straight up, down, curve to the right -- then from 1 and 1/3 the height straight down, and a right-ward curve, and cross horizontally... C-A-T.) However, I spent some time in the past meticulously developing and honing my visualization skills, which didn't come naturally but which I knew I needed for certain purposes. I used to be so bad at it! And now I'm pretty good! I started with the simplest most basic images. An egg. A white egg, what can be easier to visualize? Took me a while. Then when I got it I gave it little chicken legs and made it dance a bit. Then I dressed it in a yellow polka-dot bikini. Then I got it to crack and let the Big Dipper emerge from it. And so on. For cultivation work, one can't settle on just being this way or that way -- it's a mistake to think that such separation into preferred modes of functioning is "natural," while in fact it's the outcome of early unnatural conditioning; in the real natural state, we are supposed to be equally good at "all of the above" -- visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and so on, and flexible and free to use either one -- or all of them simultaneously. So anyone who is heavily a certain way would benefit from cultivating specifically the opposite skills, focusing on perfecting what they "normally" suck at.

I used to think that people who deny selfhood, individuality, personal responsibility are on an escapist trip running away from the harsh reality of who they know very well they are underneath all the denial. I now believe that while many of them are indeed victims of self-identity theft, some of them are also puppets manipulated by for-profit strings. It's easier to send to war, to slavery, to cold-blooded mass extermination of life on earth a population that has been brainwashed sufficiently to believe that nobody really exists and therefore nobody really matters and you can do anything to anybody with impunity, since they are "illusions" to begin with. Which is why I don't simply "disagree" with such ideas -- I feel that they are purposefully and meticulously dehumanizing towards an agenda of cheapening human blood, human suffering, human aliveness for someone's profit. Who am I? I know it because I remember, it's that simple. I was born a little girl, a live, feeling human being, and until and unless I disown her, pretend she never happened, never mattered, was never real, I will never lose track of who I am. That little girl grew up cutting off all the strings they've been relentlessly trying to equip her with so as to make her into yet another puppet. I love her and I'm proud of what she did so as not to let them.

Eva Wong's "Shambala Guide to Taoism," our book club selection for March, has it. You're right, it's fascinating...

Reside at the core like a piece of albacore in a sushi roll

These "shoulds" may apply to a good teacher, but a true taoist master... hmmm.... A true taoist master is usually whimsical as hell. Unpredictable, incomprehensible. Weird. Sometimes appearing crazy. Sometimes blending into the environment, invisible, "just one of the guys/gals." Sometimes eccentric, and sometimes outrageous. Sometimes just plain, normal, colorless. You can never tell until he or she "shows you" his/her true colors. Here's one story I can tell, a secondary one (I can't tell the main one). I was herb shopping in Chinatown in NYC, headed on foot for the biggest and the best, Kamwo Tea and Herb Company. I stopped at the red light waiting to cross the street. An elderly, small, unremarkable Chinese woman was waiting with me. She said, look at all these cars, isn't it crazy? I said, yeah, definitely. She said, it's a good thing you took the subway. I said, yeah, absolutely. She said, then again, your right front tire... buy some moxa for that. I said, pardon me? The light changed to green, and the woman got going without paying any attention to me anymore. Now the punch line. I wasn't aware of anything out of the ordinary while we were talking, then realized we weren't really talking -- not in English, most definitely, and not in Chinese, which I don't know anywhere near well enough for such a lively exchange. Moreover, soon as we parted company I realized I never opened my mouth at all and neither did she. Then again, how could she possibly know I took the subway? And how could she possibly know that my car was sitting in New Jersey with a flat right front tire? And worst of all -- moxa?! But she knew I would figure out the connection between the right front tire and moxa, and that's why she spoke with me. Just having fun with me... And I did figure it out. And that's the way it usually happens, far as I know. A taoist master can get inside your head, that's the surest sign of the real thing... And if she finds nothing of interest to her there, she won't tell you she's been there, and you will never know.

I don't know of any one source, here's a few that went into my conclusions: 1. Contemplating the Circular I Ching and meditating on it. (If you have never seen the Circular I Ching, click on the link in my sig, you'll get to a forum whose left corner is adorned with the picture of same.) 2. Full-lotus meditation, wuwei style 3. Full-lotus meditation, eyes open, "soft gaze," awareness in the eyes 4. The book "DNA and the I Ching," by Francis F. Yan, Ph. D. (I hope I didn't screw up his name, this awesome book was borrowed from me by another Ph.D. biochemist and he never returned it, probably had a heart attack over what he found there, he's a hard core biomechanical fundamentalist...) 5. "Science and Civilization in China" by Joseph Needham, Ph.D. 6. Two body-inclusive memory-retrieving practices, one Western, one Altai/Manchu/Siberian (I'm guessing, but I don't know for sure) 7. A formal Soul Retrieval journey undertaken on my behalf by a shaman 8. Female alchemical practices 9. A personal frame of reference (pregnancy vs. immortal fetus) 10. Assorted publications on stem cell research in Europe Sorry if it's too much or not enough, but I never learn anything from just one source, I like integrating stuff -- in fact I have to because ten thousand pieces of the puzzle are scattered all over the place... have been for quite a while. "Ralphie, if your nose starts bleeding, it means you're picking it too much... or not enough." --Chief Wiggum, The Simpsons

I am pretty sure that the immortal fetus is the outcome of taoist research into stem cells. Adults retain some (a recent discovery) but in a "normal" adult they are dormant ("silenced") because the program that tells them "go" is turned off, and the program that tells them "standby" is on instead, at all times. There is no "modern" method to cancel the "standby" program. There's ancient taoist methods though, and the efficient ones are aimed at replicating the overall fetal conditions for the whole body and the whole consciousness. If these conditions are "on," their totality signals "go" to the stem cells. Now then. Unless you are a pregnant woman, the "fetus" in the abdomen is a metaphor; the reality is a retrieved somatosensory memory of yourself being one, of how to be one. If you focus on remembering what it's like to be eating a lemon, your salivary glands might get activated... remember?.. sour... so sour your whole face contorts... eeeeeech... sour... ugh... lemon... shudder... lemon... so sour... and your saliva starts flowing... close your eyes, you have a lemon in your hand, so sour... you bite into it, chew... chew... keep chewing... and saliva starts flowing... did it? Mine certainly did. But I wasn't actually biting into a lemon, I was merely activating a somatosensory memory -- and it was enough to cause tangible physical events, the ones corresponding to the actual past reality of what the memory was about. Now then... With the immortal fetus, things you have to remember are much earlier, much deeper... but if you get that memory right, you are it. Your stem cells, just like your salivary glands, only need the right memory accessed with enough precision to get going. You can function like the immortal fetus -- you can be new again, forever new. Long as you remember, you have immortality ahead of you. Forgetting is a two-fold program: first "standby" and then "die." Nothing conquers mortality but memory... Also sprach Taomeow.

Yay! It's our governator! whose every day is a Misjudgment Day!

I feel my center as a hard diamond axis --nothing makes a dent.

Any practice that restores pliability to the muscles of the mid-section and conductivity to its organs can result in an improved flow of internal events in their entirety, from the crude (blood and lymph flow, bile flow, intestinal motility, liver enzymes activation, etc.) to the subtle (electrochemical conductivity, neuronal communication -- we have nearly as many of those in the gut as in the brain), to the subtlest (memory flow, the body remembering its own developmental history -- both philogenic and ontogenic, i.e. one's own and that of the whole species and that of all life forms in existence). So, yes, I do think that either this, or whatever similar practice is key, but a practice is just a tool, if applied without a clear and realistic intent, and towards a misdirected, erroneous goal, it can do harm untold. The same practice can be very beneficial if the intent is integration (of the fragmented body-mind-spirit into a unified whole) and one is prepared to integrate "anything" such flow may dislodge from the numb, frozen, repressed, unconscious pool of one's own physiology, psychology, and early personal history. Most people are not prepared for this and would be better off avoiding such practices. But once the groundwork is completed (by whatever means -- and the means toward this goal are rare and precious indeed), it's sheer freedom. It's like swimming... can anyone say if it's "good" or "bad," "safe" or "dangerous" without first asking quickly, "to whom?" To me it is safe under most normal conditions, I'm a good swimmer, you can throw me into the ocean off board a cruise ship and if the weather is reasonably calm and the water is reasonably warm and there's no sharks around, nothing bad will happen to me. But if someone never learned how to swim, it is very dangerous, and shortly deadly. So what I do with my practice is not aimed at awakening Kundalini because I am after a different configuration of philogenic and ontogenic energies and events. But if someone is after that, then yes, midsection flow is key. Sometimes people disturb Kundalini accidentally while they're all blocked solid all the way above the lower spine. That's recipe for cultivation psychosis, a reliable one.

It so happened that I spent some time with a Kundalini yoga practitioner yesterday discussing and comparing our practices over a cup of tea. He is a student of Gurum's, you can find her videos on youtube and compare their practice to what you're doing. I noticed they do at least one thing quite similar to what I do in my qigong. They sit in half lotus and rotate their bodies in large circles from the waist, pretty vigorously. I sit in full lotus and write the yin-yang symbol with my whole body, also rotating from the waist, also vigorously. Kundalini doesn't completely overlap with any one taoist concept, although some aspects of it are very close to jing and others, to zhi. Because it is more of an organizing principle than anything else, it is not an "energy," it is, rather, a configuration of events. It is a way for certain energies and meanings to manifest themselves that is different from the business-as-usual way they exist. The practice essentially re-configures some internal events just so that it can create a different set of functions without changing the structure. To "awaken the Kundalini" is like switching to another channel on your TV -- you don't change your TV yet all of a sudden you're watching a different movie. (Except of course if your TV was alive, intellingent, and emotional, the way you are, it could react emotionally, intellectually, and even physically to the very movie it is running, to the fact that it has been switched to something else, to the plot, the artistic merits and drawbacks, and maybe even to the personal message it could find there -- what if it was a movie that glorifies TV sets? suddenly switched to a movie that condemns them??? It could watch itself run this movie and be deeply affected by it... Not to the extent that it would turn into a washing machine, of course... but it could become "a different kind of TV.")

My favorite word, "judgmental." In linguistics, such words, rare in all languages, are known as "self-embodying" (there's a more technical term which I forget). E.g., the word "English" is an English word that means "English," and is an example of a self-embodying word -- unlike the word "French" which is an English word that means "French." "A noun" IS a noun and means "a noun," and is therefore a self-embodying word; whereas "a verb" is a noun that means "a verb." The word "typed," when it is typed, is self-embodying, whereas when it is handwritten, carved in stone, or shouted, it isn't. The word "judgmental," when referring to "these silly judgmental posts," is... you've guessed it, right? That's what I love about it. It is impossible to use without embodying it. In taoist texts it is called "ti." I wish it was this easy to "ti taiji," embody taiji, as it is to "ti judgmental..."

Life as usual: a winged dragon takes a nap in my blue suede shoe.

No haha-- you're right. As for higher doses than what naturally occurs in good unmolested foods, they are notoriously toxic. Lithium used as a psychiatric drug helps over 70 percent of MDP sufferers but individual doses are very tricky (an extremely narrow margin between therapeutic and toxic), and liver functions must be monitored weekly or it will be damaged in no time. This is old school psychiatry, way back when they didn't think twice about using molecules that occur naturally and therefore can't be patented. It doesn't matter how useful omega-3s are, until someone modifies them and owns them, they won't be 'prescribed.' The modified version never works as well but the unmolested one never brings billions in profits, so... Viagra is the answer to the question 'how do I get more bang out of my jing' and heavy duty antipsychotics, to the question of the meaning of life.

MDP is multifactorial as most human disturbances, but a lithium deficiency is almost as strongly linked to it as vitamin C deficiency to scruvy. Source: "Nutritional Influences on Psychiatric Illness," author forgotten (I read it ten years ago), a large, fascinating tome of info. Where people still eat local foods, MDP is endemic to the areas that are the farthest from the ocean, and rare closer to the coast -- due to the content of lithium in the soil, low in the former, high in the latter. Dopamine is player number one among neurochemicals that determine how the brain, the nervous system, the muscles, and the mind cope with stress, but it is never the only factor. All monoamines have a say in it -- but nutrition, while a huge factor, is not always the solution to the problem. E.g., if someone was born premature, the dopaminergic system will be lifelong deficient in its output, because it fully matures in -- gasp -- the last seven days of gestation. So even one week too early is too early for it to be fully competent -- throughout life. Considering modern moms are led to believe that they can schedule the birth of the baby on a convenient date, that labor-forcing interventions or Cesarean sections are like hairdresser appointments... Most things done early (not "by you" but "to you") most people will never fix. This is what everybody finds so hard to accept that it isn't even considered: helplessness. All kinds of practices give an illusion of control. But the really useful ones teach one about helplessness, not about power. It's much more difficult to incorporate into your consciousness than any which kind of power, but if this isn't done, everything else has to dislocate itself to create a bypass around the truth -- that's how people wind up with dislocated minds. I do admire your optimism though. Cutting is about endorphins though, not dopamine. But consider that a sense of "pressure of the void" is also an idea, not just a chemical event... There IS a void where natural developmental experiences should have been in most people.

My friend is fairly clueless about meditation, the only side of it she's seen is the flip side -- which you may not have seen at ashrams. I didn't say every fire-drill meditator will go nuts. I said the ones who work on it hard enough. A week's ashram retreat once a year won't do it to them, and under a "real" teacher (but who provides the criteria?..) it's much safer (I suppose, or much more dangerous, depending on the teacher one runs into) -- among my friend's patients whose unraveling was triggered by spiritual practices (I don't believe it was "caused" by the practice, the practice is more of an enabler, the material to go off the rocker on is equally available to most modern people if you dig a tad deeper than the surface "normality") -- among her patients most were at it with zeal and occasionally fanaticism for some time, while others were just doing it with enough regularity for a long enough time. Typical example: 2 to 12 years of meditation that gives a spiritual "high" and a sense of well-being and profound insights and what have you; followed by that one "bad trip" -- a door opens, can't be closed, all manner of demons start slipping through, and there's no pushing them back. So then they bring to my friend's ward the outcome: e.g., a lovely woman who has cut herself in about three hundred places, deep, to "relieve the pressure of the void." Or a middle-aged family man who's been refusing to open his eyes -- ever again! -- for the past three months, on the basis of the "illusory nature" of whatever he might see if he removes the duck tape from his eyelids. So what d'you reckon she's supposed to do with the "symptom?" Ignore it? You'll be relieved to find out she does. The rest is beyond her power to change, she has a Medical Standard to adhere to which she didn't implement but which she must be slovenly to or lose her license. Anyway, this is beside the point. Can you do me a favor? Try an entry without an ad hominem jab, just to see if you can? at all? Just curious if it is in your power... a simple test of your Xin Jin, the kind that allows people to issue forth benevolent communication with other people?..

Mal, 'twas a random quote from a random place, it's not THE what's wrong with the book, like I said in an early entry on the subject, there's hundreds of things that I see wrong with it on every page. It was just an example, not the first, not the worst, simply because I happened to flip the book to that page rather than some other page. Like I said, I wouldn't practice anything from this book under any circumstances. What I like about BKF's approach (which I don't need to use myself because I've done what it does by two other methods before I ever heard of his existence) is that it is indeed a Water method, top-to-bottom directed, and indeed it is (to my knowledge) unique in this respect among practices that gained common circulation in the West, which are almost invariably upward-drawing Fire drills. From the point of view of several systems I've been exposed to, there's hardly anyone who can benefit from an upward-directed method today, because if you do succeed in busting all the defenses a lifetime of distorted, repressed, numbed out experiences has installed in you systemically so as to protect you from the onslaught of consciousness spelling out the truth, you will be flooded with all of it or much of it all at once, without the slightest chance of being equipped to make sense of it or process it in any way whatsoever. I submit the only people who escape cultivation psychosis using such methods are the ones who don't work hard enough on it. A friend of mine is a doctor at a psychiatric hospital who's been telling me meditation tales of dozens of her patients for years. They are all alike.

Jasmine scent lingers over calligraphy scrolls, red silk, New Year's moon

Yeah, an old TCM staple -- treat poison with poison. They used saltpeter and arsenic and poisonous insects (centipede, scorpion) for tumors two thousand years ago. Now "cutting-edge" researchers are finding the "active factors" in these goodies -- arsenic is part of standard treatment for some blood-based cancers in China (endorsed by Mao who disliked TCM but didn't ban it, thank god, explaining his stance in a famous statement, "we don't care if it's a black cat or a white cat as long as it catches mice.") Scorpion poison is so medicinally invaluable that it sells for about 50 times the price of gold and no one can afford it but the large pharmaceutical companies... In Africa, they've known for centuries that some types of lymphoma disappear if a patient happens to contract malaria. Now anthrax. Yeah, but I'm not holding my breath. No one is interested in a "cure," repeat business is the foundation of commercial success and cancer is the biggest industry after the military. Yes, even bigger than oil.