Taomeow

Keep in mind that Chinese words have different tones. We're talking first tone jīng (精; essence), which can (but shouldn't) be confused with a few related and a few unrelated words also of the first tone. Once you know both the character and the pronunciation, you don't confuse it (as martialists and qigongsters occasionally do) with a related but distinctly different word that means "power," jin, or some such.

The trouble with terms, Little1 et al, is that they "transform" (or should I say distort) time-sensitive processes into time-insensitive definitions. Jing, qi and shen are not nouns, not definitions -- they are descriptions of particular types of time and events associated with this kind of time. Western minds, as well as thoroughly Westernized in their cognitive practice modern Chinese ones, invariably have trouble grasping them and can't be blamed for it -- the language of our discourse is time-insensitive, things are named "once and for all" -- whereas no such once-and-for-all things exist in reality. The best time-sensitive language I know is the I Ching (not the static version that you can read but the dynamic one, the movement of the lines obtained when you introduce a time "prhaze" by throwing the coins or dividing yarrow stalks.) To understand the core notions of taoism, one can't use ANY static language. One has to introduce practice -- otherwise it all, as Alan Watts put it, boils down to "studying birdsong from a collection of stuffed nightingales." Some of my musings on jing from an alchemist's perspective can be found here if anyone is interested: http://www.skymountain.net/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=831

It's been my experience that most people who throw the terms around are transforming terms into terms, words into words, is all. In a normal everyday life scenario, jing spontaneously converts into qi, and qi into shen. One can enhance or speed up or slow down this process via qigong, taiji and other non-alchemical practices. In the alchemical process, one can go backward, against the flow, and convert shen into qi and qi into jing. There's no non-alchemical processes that convert qi into jing. Think of it this way. A gardener who facilitates the growth of a seed into a tree, tending to it, watering, pruning, fertilizing, etc., is converting its jing into qi under the most favorable conditions. However, even with the best care he can't convert the tree back into the seed. Now a gardener who can get the tree to contract into a seed is indeed converting qi into jing. The former is a master; the latter, a wizard. Jing-to-qi conversions are ordinary processes that can, however, take place at a low, medium, or high level of mastery or intent. Qi-to-jing conversions are magical processes that involve a measure of control over destiny, time, and even tao. Whoever can convert qi to jing is playing with gods in their playground.

Actually, Yoga For Beauty was the first yoga book I ever came across, and it had plenty of strenuous face exercises. As I was 14 at the time, I didn't pay much attention to the part about erasing wrinkles, but I did pick up some neck and chin exercises to prevent developing a double chin ever in my life, or a sagging neck. Nothing works better than prevention. The chin exercise: lower your head, then slowly lift an imaginary weight with your chin, impossibly heavy. Repeat. If you're doing it correctly, you will feel the pull all the way in your chest muscles. The neck: tilt your head to one shoulder so that your ear is parallel to the floor, slowly move the head to the frontmost position while still keeping the ear parallel to the floor, then to the rearmost position. Slowly and carefully. Repeat a bunch of times. Another one for the neck and chin: hold a pencil with your teeth and write the chakra symbols (or the letters of your native tongue's alphabet, this works too) in the air, beginning at the far left and moving to the far right, then in the opposite direction. Make the letters as big as you possibly can. Visualize them in color, light, fire in the sky.

Thanks, that was interesting. Who's General God? -- maybe it's Grand Duke Jupiter, whose office is indeed occupied by a military commander this year? He lords over loud noise, among other things. Then again, as a Wen-tzu story goes, a court composer asked by the emperor to evaluate a piece of modern music of some new style that was gaining popularity burst into tears and said, "your majesty, weep with me -- this is the sound of the destruction of the empire."

I read them all, except for Florinda's. A lot of it has parallels in proto-taoist shamanic practices I'm into. This world would be classified as a 'petty tyrant' in Don Juan's terms, and the nonordinary reality, as a 'great tyrant.' No one can handle the great tyrant who hasn't mastered the petty tyrant, and no one can get to freedom who hasn't mastered the great tyrant. So, to Don Juan and early taoist classics, the point about any "ultimate reality" is absolutely moot for all practical purposes -- no one will experience it who hasn't mastered what they so hastily discard as "illusion," Maya, and so on. Mastering this "illlusion" is a prerequisite. Don't discard it in anticipation of a "bigger better more real" one, because if you do, you are discarding the "bigger better more real" -- and according to Don Juan and some very reputable taoist sources (e.g. the immortals Lu and Ch'ang), irreversibly. Freedom and reality ain't no freebies... step carefully inside this illusion, your footprints may seem illusory to you but they do penetrate all the way to the fabric of reality and can shape your way into it -- or away from it. Don Juan insisted on wearing impeccable tailor-made suits in public. Ask yourself why! This "impeccability" he keeps insisting on harkens to the taoist Three Treasures of Perfection, Nondecay, Immortality. They are not just three treasures -- they are a sequence of steps to follow... Impeccability, perfection, is the first step. The non-taking of this step equals no access to the other two.

So... would you like your mother, father, child to be exhibited like that? Would you like to be an exhibit of this kind yourself once you die? Very educational indeed. The public is being trained in becoming very acceptive of the wonderful, beautiful dehumanization. Playful corpses on display -- how very cute! Corpses are cute after all, now that we're educated well enough to finally notice! Not like all those countless generations of our uneducated, silly ancestors who thought one's dead body was one's private property. We now know that one's dead body is really a product for public consumption that should be making money for some other body, some owner or other... just like the live body was. Why take exception with the dead body? OK, lampshades made out of human skin (another technologically superior German invention) and soap rendered from human fat went out of style circa 1945, so it's time to find new, improved uses for the dead human body if we want to make it into a product for public consumption... something tasteful... well, if we say it's "educational," the public will have no objections -- anything educational is tasteful by default, right?.. Besides, someone who has visited such an exhibition will have an overall better tolerance of dead human bodies here and there -- a useful trait to cultivate in the population just in case some kind of extermination might become necessary again -- -- so better have people properly prepared, properly desensitized to dehumanization well in advance. Cultivate the taste for the decay till it becomes second nature to smile instead of throwing up. What government wouldn't want its constituents to smile happily no matter what they're looking at?.. Most useful educational tool ever.

To "own a pet" and "be owned by a cat" are different practices. I've never "owned" a cat but I've been owned by a succession of cats since early childhood and consider them my first taoist teachers. My grandmother's cat who was older than me (she was five when I was born) was definitely a major sifu. She was a scholar warrior and taught me about love and war. My next cat was an intellectual and a player, a whimsical, delightfully unpredictable master with much love and much mischief in him; he's who and what I think of when I think "the power of innocence" and "uninhibited spontaneity." Then I lived with a dumb cat, an obtuse sage who did everything the stupid way, literally walking backwards -- and he walked into paradise on earth, the best life a cat can possibly have. He taught me about the limitations of intellect for purposes of happiness. My current cat has been with me a long time, she is humble, meek, very talkative in a meaningful way, and thinks of herself as a human being. She is quite old (18) and yet as slender, healthy and agile as she was when she was a young kitty, and her lessons are about conserving energy -- and of course love, as usual. Cats are great taoist teachers provided you don't "own" them (i.e. don't mess them up the human way, with vaccinations and junk food and restrictions on their freedom.)

Reminded me of an American Dad episode where Stan uses a code phrase to activate a secret CIA brainwashed-robot-Manchurian-candidate program in his daughter Meg. The creators of the program had to make sure the trigger phrase is unique and won't occur spontaneously in everyday life under any circumstances. The phrase was, "I'm getting fed up with this orgasm!" So my question would be, have any of the clients ever said that?

Interesting... What does "negative" mean to him? To a taoist, "negative" doesn't mean "bad," and "positive" doesn't mean "good." "Negative" means yin, and "positive" means yang. So... 1-3 pm. Hour of the Sheep. Most negative? No, it's only the beginning hour of the negative, yin part of the daily cycle, immediately following its yangmost, "most positive" Hour of the Horse, 11am-1pm. Yin is still young (pun forgivable I hope) in the Hour of the Sheep. It starts here, and from here yin will only keep growing: downward with the sun that has passed its yangmost peak, the hours of the day will keep growing yinward, negative-ward, till the hour of the most nocturnal, yinmost animal, Hour of the Rat, 11pm--1am. This, The Hour of Tzu, is indeed the most negative hour of the day, with yin at its maximum growth point from which yang will start slowly rebuilding itself again. This is the hour of magic, spell-casting, talisman-writing, prayer and meditation, this most negative, most sacred hour. So, Yoda, the desire to take a nap at this time of the day has to do with your own ultradian rhythms, and with the organ-function-system governed by this hour -- the Kidneys. Healthy Kidneys thrive on this hour; however, any weakness will manifest itself at this time more readily, because Kidneys are the body's focus then. Kidneys in TCM are not reducible to the Western organ, rather it's the whole hypothalamic-pituitary-reproductive axis with all its metabolic, hormonal, and energetic functions, in addition to the organs proper. It is a major system, and even minor disturbances therein (exceedingly common these days) may have perceptible (and far-reaching) effects. In terms of a "negative" in the sense "bad" hour, there's no such thing -- there's unfavorable hours in every day, some universal, some strictly individual, but none of them are permanently set as "bad" or "unfavorable" -- they always keep changing. Thats' why there's a different almanac calculated for each new year to spot and address such hours. Of course if you know your own idiosyncratic unfavorable hours (related to the workings of one's own organs governed by a particular hour, not to the nature of the hour by itself), this will overrule all other considerations. I.e., if your Kidneys don't like this hour, they will always keep not liking it until/unless something changes about the Kidneys themselves -- and then they might start liking it, thriving on its energy. It all depends.

"Alchemy" is a word derived from Arabic, meaning "Allah's chemistry." The Arabs learned it from the Chinese taoists, then taught us Europeans (source: "Lost Discoveries," by Dick Teresi). "Allah" is simply "god" to them, so alchemy is "god's chemistry." Now god's chemistry is biophysics. If you can do that, you can do alchemy. It's not something that's happening "in the mind," it's not a "state of mind," it's a state of energies of the world. Manipulating them deliberately and expertly is alchemy; just watching them being manipulated by whatever influences -- your state of mind, your practice, substances taken, other people, crude (human) chemistry -- is not. Example: you meet someone who turns you on, there's "chemistry" between the two of you -- that's just god's chemistry, al-chemie, working on you. Altertnaively: you mix sulphur, three kinds of artemisia, and a drop of blood from your middle finger under the full moon, with approppriate incantations, throw it on charcoal, observe the smoke and look for an image of the heart of the person you have chosen to influence so as to get their "chemistry" going; once it appears, inhale it into yours. If the process has been done correctly, it will work towards whatever purpose you've intended. This will have been your practice in god's chemistry, al-chemie, worked by you. So... the difference between alchemy and non-alchemy is whether you do it or just observe it being done to you. God (or, in the original it was derived from by a one-god-bent culture interacting with taoism, the tao) doesn't submit to being "worked on" -- it "works," and if you "work like the tao," you are doing alchemy, while if you are being "worked on by the tao," you are not. My humble, of course.

Yeah!! as in, North, Southwest, East, Southeast, Center, Northwest, West, Southeast, South. The most natural thing in the world. If one can feel well enough to get the above inside one's own body, he or she can't execute a non-spiraling Chinese martial move anymore than most people can bite off their own ears.

Tao designed us as a hunter-gatherer, chewer-swallower, digester-eliminator species. Domestic animals and cultivated plants is a lifestyle of a parasitic species. What's wrong with us is not that we eat meat (since we are fully equipped to hunt for it and digest it, similarly to animals like rats and baboons and plants like the Venus fly trap or Carnivora, and quite unlike a cow, rabbit, or a rose bush). What's really wrong is that we live the lifestyle of a parasitic species vis a vis both animals and plants, which is an evolutionary dead end for all involved parties. A species that is not naturally parasitic that adopts a parasitic lifestyle can only deplete all resources it uses to extinction, because to be an efficient parasite that doesn't ultimately demolish its environment, you have to have been designed as such by tao, like intestinal flukes, mistletoe, or tree fungi. Our parasitic lifestyle is a creation of the human mind, not the mind of tao. Whatever we do in order to tweak this way and that way with ways to perpetuate this deadly evolutionary mistake we've made is bound to fail in the long run, and vegetarianism is not the answer by any stretch of imagination -- we can't parasitize successfully on plant foods anymore than on animal foods. As self-appointed parasites, we plant for monocultures, supporting only plants we want to eat and killing all the rest; this kills animals that are supposed to feed off those plants of no interest to us that we've killed, and then animals who'd feed off the plant-eating ones; the cycle of murder is getting wider and wider in overlapping concentric circles spreading from each corn field to the irreversible extinction of 150 species of plants and animals daily. If a vegetarian advocate will step forward and explain to me how this is harmless compared to eating an individual animal (the way our ancestors did for nearly a million years) without eliminating from existence another 150 species in the process, I'm all ears.

Hi Little1, please take a look at what I once had to say about qi based on my understanding of taoist classics and practice: http://www.skymountain.net/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=148

It's true, I am limiting my spiritual development, but not out of fear -- out of discipline. I consciously avoid cavalry attacks on the spiritual world that are not backed up by sufficient resources -- of time, focus, dedication, guidance, understanding, and so on. I'm a spiritual strategist, an explorer with a clear idea of what it is I want to explore, and what for... not a tourist in the land of the mysterious who will gape at anything she might bump into and take snapshots here and there so as to impress friends and relatives back home. To me, spiritual growth of a cultivator (regardless of her biological age) is not unlike a child's natural growth in the ordinary world: you want to grow up gradually, and (most importantly) harmoniously, you don't want to get ahead of yourself. (As John Lennon put it, "Children,/ Don't do / What I have done: / I couldn't walk --/ and I tried to run.../") So I just observe the same basic rules for spiritual growth as I did for natural spontaneous growth. Don't sign up for calculus till you are comfortable with arithmetics. Don't eat candy for dinner. Don't talk to strangers, and especially don't get in stranger's cars just because you've been invited. Don't drop out of school and run away with the traveling circus. Stuff like that...

A while ago, I walked in a restroom at a large Asian supermarket and was thrilled to understand my first bit of conversational Chinese in real life rather than in a textbook. A woman with a little girl of about four walked in and the little girl kept repeating, with great urgency and conviction, Wo yao pipi! I think if she was divisible into an "observer" and "observed" (which I don't believe is the case, but then I'm no Buddhist), they would both agree on the authenticity of her desire, and neither one would require that she lose her "attachment" to using restrooms instead of wetting her pants. One problem I see with the whole concept of "attachments" in Buddhism is that it is so arbitrary, so tweakable with. Where do legitimate needs end and false attachments begin? Ask a hundred people and you will get a hundred demarcation lines all drawn in different places, from total negation of all things human to total acceptance thereof, with all in-betweens. You may say all human needs are false attachments. I may say all human needs are normal and natural, and become abnormal and unnatural only when the normal and natural ones aren't met (that's when symbolic ones come to take their place, and that's what one might want to lose in order to cultivate the true self: all symbolic needs. No need to lose the real ones like "wo yao pipi" or "wo yao nide ai." )

Ego is the Latin word for "me," coined into a term of psychoanalysis and used in this context by Freud, then picked up by multiple clones of this modality and the media, then trickling down to the masses, re-interpreted many times any way anyone wants to interpret it, and applied freely to modalities that never had the term or the concept to begin with -- e.g., to taoism. Taoism, in the meantime, has discovered, thousands of years ago, assorted "shen disharmonies" a human might be afflicted with, of either the Greater Shen or any one of the Lesser Shens (or all of them) and explored them exhaustively, both theoretically and pragmatically. These disharmonies are diagnostically accessible, and specific corrective actions are prescribed on a case by case individual basis depending on the precise nature of the disharmony. Finger-pointing, either at others or at oneself, aimed at pinning down an "ego" and attributing any and all spiritual disharmonies, thoughts, words or actions to its purported workings, has never been part of this practice. If anyone is aware of an authentic taoist text, whether religious or scientific or philosophical, that contains the diagnosis of "ego" or a prescription for "dispelling," "diminishing" or "eliminating" same, please let me know, I'll be happy to revise my information. (But please make sure the translator hasn't slipped in the E word where in the original it never existed.)

Thank you, Matthew, that's good advice, but my "why" was actually addressed to the author of the original bumble bee question, as in, "why do you want to know?" Why I panicked I know very well. Because that entity trespassed uninvited and I'm opposed to trespassers regardless of whether they encroach on physical or spiritual territory. And also because that entity was not part of the tradition I am trained in. And in this tradition, I am taught to avoid any and all spiritual encounters that I don't initiate, ask for, or hope for. I thought the spirit world knew and respected my position on this issue. To have the most well-meaning of spirits visit in this manner is like an authoritarian telling you, "there, I know better than you do what it is you really need, let me decide what to do for you without asking your opinion, I know what I'm doing..." I don't accept being approached like that by anybody except for those whom I explicitly ask to teach, heal, or morally or energetically guide me. So why would I make an exception for a giant bumble bee I hadn't even been introduced to? I panicked because I should have, it was a legitimate response to discovering a breach in my intent, which indeed it was (I was under tremendous stress at the time...) And a breach in a cultivator's intent is a legitimate emergency.

Hi Arnquist, you may want to look up "holier-than-thou" in the dictionary. I have in the past, and intend to in the future, express many opinions that are very non-mainstream. That's the word you were really looking for. Lockpaw, most people who didn't believe that what I cultivate is taoist sorcery have already been turned into assorted insects, toads, or protozoa. Do you have a favorite bug? You can place a special order while I'm in the mood. A butterfly maybe? Yes, I'm thinking a butterfly is what you should really be, what with your beautiful elegant strokes here and there, your never-failing grace and lightness...

It woke me up one night after a lot of qigong right before bedtime, and it was not just the sound but the whole bumble bee -- the size of a cat -- that somehow got under my blanket and was buzzing into my lower dantien. I didn't see it, I just woke up with exactly this idea of the sensation and the sound: a giant, humongous bumble bee. I panicked and rolled the blanket over it and threw it across the room. Nothing like that ever happened before or after. Four years later, I found a description of a whole bunch of spirits in the Maya tradition who will start out establishing their relationship with you in exactly this manner. You are supposed to meet them in stillness even if they rock your bed so that you feel as though you're going to fall out. If you panic, they will immediately leave. If you don't... well, I don't know what happens if you don't, 'cause I did. Why?

Todd, thank you for the "places your mind goes with this." Cool places! If I don't respond soon (gotta run... chasing the tail of Time as Wen-tzu suggests), I'll try to later. Here's a thought from Talmud though: "...you say time is running out? Time stands still. You are running out."

So do you think she should have told the great demon Mahakala, "get lost, you're just a superstition, a creation of cheap mysticism?" Would it work to make him disappear? What about Dick Cheney? Would he disappear if I said, "you're just a pertoleum vapor" ("vapors" and "winds" are the prevalent words for "spirits" in many languages -- and even "smells" in some... by far the majority of all spirits are not available to visual perceptions, i.e. aren't the classic "ghosts" that haunt Gothic castles or "apparitions" that show up in Catholic churches... but it doesn't mean they aren't available to other senses -- or even the intellect). Would the demons of the underworld brought to the surface by oil and gas industries be less destructive if they were brought to the surface by a shamanic incantation, a subtle vibration of dark magic? You're right that awareness answers lots of questions (including the ones we never thought to ask) -- so what if someone becomes aware, by whatever means, of a larger "spirit" (vapor, smell, energy that shapes events and destinies) than the exhaust of one car -- the great "Demon of the Ancient Dead Wood of the Underworld" that calls itself something else -- e.g., Exxon? -- and notices him precisely because of his tangible actions, not as a direct "apparition" but as a cascade of effects of which he is the cause, the source -- and notices that this particular demon indeed rules the people he has captured and they are his and live to serve him, and serve him daily by burning, not incense but toxic petrochemicals -- would stopping to burn this "demonic incense" stop the demon? Make him disappear? Most probably. Looks like there's nothing cheap and superstitious about knowing that. But what if a scientist-by-other-means, a shaman, kam, h'men, zhuoyi, daoshi, ayahuasquero, etc. -- has technologies for making demons and spirits appear and disappear beyond the drilling and digging, beyond the crude li technologies? What if knowledge is only superstition to those who don't know... and to those who do, it is the process of co-creation, a joint venture between the scientist-magician and the spiritual entity? You won't get a lunch appointment with Bill Gates just because you feel like telling him a thing or two... likewise, a lay person won't get an "appointment" with the spirit of the Yellow River or with the Jade Emperor just because he or she wants to... but if you substantiate your intent with competence of the level sufficient to communicate or negotiate on that level, it's another story altogether. Bill Gates will talk to Dick Cheney, in other words... and I'm sure Mahakala meets them both for lunch on a regular basis.

Spirits and gods are real, that's why. Biomechanical fundamentalism (or, to use the term popular in the former Communist block, "scientific materialism") is just another religion, one that postulates the absence of gods and spirits on the basis of nonbelief in anything and everything it can't incorporate into its own man-made theoretical model and/or exploit/profit from with linear predictability. Nonbelief is a form of belief. Hard evidence for nonexistence of gods and spirits can only be obtained by omniscience, something our science isn't. And if it was, its manifestations would be indistinguishable from those of gods and spirits, magic and miracles, the universe itself, tao itself. Is our science the universe itself, tao itself? Nah... The view I take is that magic is science whose theoretical basis is gods and spirits and whose practical applications are living, lasting miracles. I don't consider myself religious, I consider myself scientifically minded -- just on different terms than what's been offered by biomechanical fundamentalism, an obsolete reductionist religion of no interest to me. What is science anyway?.. The way I see it, it is the kind of know-how that suffices to create a worm out of nothing, rather than the kind that can clone, ad nauseam, a worm already in existence, or a cell already alive for three billion years with no help from any Ph.D. Our "modern science" can't create a worm -- or a living cell -- or a loving heart -- or a happy couple -- or a galaxy -- which means it is not engaged in anything of any interest to the mind of tao. Sure it can exterminate worms and wolves and human beings... it can extinguish a loving heart, scientifically define "happy" as "upper middle class," or talk about galaxies and particles and space-time through a voice box attached to a body in a wheelchair ravaged by disease (and apparently ignored in its predicament by the very galaxies it studies -- like a student forever ignored by the teacher, like a child forever trying to understand an infinitely distant mom who refuses to approach him unless dragged in by force--) -- if that's "bigger-better" than gods and spirits... Well, I dunno...

'tis true. In fact, it doesn't even matter what to call the whole eternal time thing -- "now" or "the past" or "the future" (eternal time is just like eternal tao in this respect: whatever name one might call it is not the eternal name)-- names aside, it's still a unity, it's all of it at once but also all of it step by step, and the steps go both ways at all times simultaneously, back, forward, nowhere, everywhere and everyWHEN. As one of my TCM books put it, it's easy to grasp how a seed expands into a tree, but to understand jing (the closest thing to "time" in its behavior, and more readily available for direct perception... just like water is the closest thing to qi in its behavior, and if no one teaches how to understand qi by empirically studying the behavior of water, it means the biggest secret of them all is out in the open free for the taking! ) -- where was I? -- oh, OK... in order to understand jing, the closest thing to "time" available to a mere mortal's perceptions, one needs to grasp how a tree contracts into a seed. And that's where "the power of now" as commonly understood by quite a few live-in-the-present sloganeers is very likely to fail. It is impossible to grasp if "now" is severed from "before now" and "after now."

You can read, right? Is it because you learned to read just now? or because your past (which, let me point out real quick, is not a "thing" but a "process") contains learning how to read, among other things? If your past in which you learned how to read wasn't real, you would still be unable to read at any which given "now" moment. Only with the past that contains the process of shaping you into someone who can read can you get the kind of "now" where you can read. What if I write something in a language you didn't learn in your past? Ty uveren, chto ty smozhesh' pryamo seichas eto ponyat'? You're reading the above sentence "right now," right? -- but it doesn't work, because this "now" when you're reading it is merely a function of your real past, the past in which you never learned this language. No way around it... if it isn't real in your past, it can't be real in your "now." That's because, as taoist (not buddhist, not hindu, not new age -- but taoist) classics put it, "the way of tao is motion and the pattern of this motion is return." Meaning there's only return: tao-in-motion doesn't move in any other way, and tao-in-stillness is called Return with a capital R, and there's nothing else out there, just tao-in-motion returning to tao-in-stillness (actually, it goes both ways but it's still "return," not a "brand new start.") For tao, there is no "now." Just "back then" and "back again" and "always" and "forever" -- in cycles of repeated "have always been there have always done that" processes with no "creator," and therefore no beginning and no end, and most certainly no "real now" opposing any "unreal past." It's all one snake.