Taomeow

Who and what are they? According to reptinologists like David Icke, an ancient race whose representatives ('bloodlines') have been secretly ruling our world for thousands of years. Where do they primarily reside? Somehow they're supposed to reside in the fourth spacial dimension, which, of course, to a spacially 3D race like ours, is incomprehensible. What is their physiology - primarily physical, spiritual, both? Same as ours, but much older (hundreds of millions of years older, just like our ordinary reptiles are much older than primates) and consequently much farther evolved in their ability to use and transform energy. How do they live (eat, reproduce, etc) and what is their typical behavior? Cold-blooded. Take it from there. Where are they from and what is their history? From wherever everybody else comes from. Their history is successful competition with other species for survival and control of whatever environment they find themselves in. They are a slowly ever-expanding presence in the universe. What are they known as in different cultures and religions? Dragons, serpents, gods, angels, demons, illuminati. What is their relation to us? Overlord to slave, shepherd to sheep. What is their modus operandi now? Climate change toward much hotter (to suit a cold-blooded race); change of gaseous composition of Earth's atmosphere (to suit a species requiring much less oxygen, etc.; useful for lizards and increasingly hostile to mammals. Our "technological civilization," which is of their making to begin with, is really set up to accomplish this particular goal. They are definitely succeeding.) Are some to help or harm us? Harmful to the core. What all did Max say about them? This I don't know. Have fun...

They are absolutely correct. In a normal healthy scenario, Qi Moves Blood. If you "get the blood pumping and if blood is moving so is qi," you are "forcing" your blood to move by using li (crude muscular strength or "dumb force" of taiji classics) and going against your qi. Qi can be damaged by force, spent, used up, burned -- and moved in all the wrong ways. In the right way it can only be moved by yi, its 'superior,' not by blood its subordinate; and increased by increasing jing, not li. Look at it this way... jing is your savings account, qi is your checking account, li is your expenditures. If you increase li, your expenditures, you do get your checking account "moving," and eventually your savings account too. But in which direction? "Cardio" simply means writing a lot of checks against whatever jing and qi you have, spending them. As the cartoon version of Bill Gates in The Simpsons put it, "I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks!"

You can't look it up but it's very easy to calculate with Chinese numerology. Here's one formula (for a male -- a female has to use a different formula because yin qi and yang qi flow in opposite directions): 1. Add the digits in your birth year. E.g., if you're born in 1965: 1+9+6+5=25 2. Divide the sum by 9. 25:9=18, remainder 7. 3. Subtract the remainder from 11. 11-7= 4 The resulting number is your trigram. If, however, the resulting number is greater than 9, you would have to subtract 9 from the resulting number to get the number of your trigram. If the remainder is 0, use the number 9 instead. If your resulting number is 5, your personal trigram is 2. Then of course you need to know how the eight trigrams are numbered and which sequence to use -- Earlier Heaven or Later Heaven. This you can look up somewhere, but I don't have a bookmark for where, sorry -- for an in-depth treatment, use The Great Treatise on the Changes, or Ta Chuan. You mean you were born in a Red/Fire Rooster year? This doesn't make you a rooster or a fire sign (this is all pop astrology for entertainment purposes, nothing to do with the real thing) -- this gives you info about one animal sign out of six that govern your destiny (conception, year, month, day, hour, life). I have a Rooster in my chart too, and plenty of fire, but if you go by the most important one, that's the Month animal, and this makes me a Green/Wood Snake! -- but there's also a Tiger there and a what-not, a whole zoo. Then you have to consider your yin-yang patterns and your wuxing (Five Phases) qi... it gets complicated. Chinese astrology is bottomless... the "year animal" is a contributor to the picture, but its role is quite limited. However, your personal trigram gives you quite a bit of info to go on if you know where to take it. This knowledge comes gradually (in my experience), and every new piece of the puzzle that falls into place is a thrill. A worthy pursuit, AFAIK.

Cam, do you happen to know what your proprietary/birth trigram is? 'cause if it happens to be Zhen the Arousing, Thunder, or its child Li, Fire/Lightning, it might explain why this particular practice resonates so well with you personally. Out of the eight trigrams, Zhen is "special" in that it is the one that gives the whole world of manifestations its first impulse toward being, the first stirring that sets the whole enchilada in motion, transforming wuji into taiji, Earlier Heaven into Later Heaven, tao-in-stillness into tao-in-motion, nonchange into change, and so on. The reason Thunder comes before Lightning in tao (unlike in an observable thunderstorm) is that Zhen is a different kind of Thunder from just "thunder" -- it is the "primordial sound," the vibration of creation -- not unlike Om of the Hindu tradition or Logos of our Western one, the "word that was god" -- where "god," "word," "sound," "know-how (logos)," "creation" and "manifestation" are all more or less equal to the taoist concept of Zhen-the-Arousing-Thunder, the thunder of Fu Xi and King Wen and the Duke of Zhou, the primal impulse toward being as discerned by ancient/classical taoism. It's such a tricky trigram to master... it's like a wild stallion with thundering hooves and earth-shaking temper, you get kicked and thrown many, many times before you learn to ride it... but once you do... once you do, the rest of creation is your oyster.

Thanks for your kind words, Rain! Harry, do you happen to remember the source of info re LH being a student of Liping's?

Anyone who learned history (even "official" history as taught in Europe, don't know what they teach here but have a feeling that, um, hardly anything) -- as I was saying, anyone who learned history realizes that "civilized" history has always been made via nothing but conspiracies (and actions decided upon by the conspirators with enough power to act on their conspiracies). The opposite view of conspiracies as something unreal, something that "never happened," and especially "isn't happening now," is the outcome of successful (and always ongoing) brainwashing that causes the brainwashed masses to have this knee-jerk response to anything that is not the official version -- bah humbug, conspiracy theories! -- and to feel gratifyingly superior to anyone in disagreement with the syndicated media's prolefeed (Orwell's term for planned disinformation of the masses). Once you spit out the prolefeed, conspiracies become, alas, our current reality to the same extent they have always been, rather than some paranoid fantasy or the outcome of the "theorist's" ignorance and gullibility. "Not believing in conspiracies" is only possible if one hasn't been paying attention to history as it actually happened.

I'd say the main thing in the taoist health code is the prohibition on any type of voluntary self-mutilation (including by dietary means) and careless handling of one's body in general. This doesn't translate into specific prohibitions -- e.g., many taoists drink (some have written exquisite poetry on the subject and others have invented "drunken" martial styles), smoke, and even experiment with consciousness-expanding external-alchemical substances (not "drugs" in the Western sense though and not for "recreational puropses.") However, if any of these practices are affecting one's health adversely, they will be abandoned. The thing is, fifteen minutes of taiji detoxes a cup of any stimulant (e.g., coffee) out of the system, and an hour antidotes a pack-a-day smoking habit, so the same rules don't apply to cultivators of taoist arts as to non-cultivators. I've heard of a qigong master who smokes and tells his students not to; when questioned, he inhales on a cigarette, blows the smoke out of his fingertips, and tells them, "as soon as you can do that, you can smoke with impunity too." I've also met a master myself (who was featured in Alternative Health magazine a few years ago for his double blind placebo-controlled experiment treating cancer in mice with external qigong -- successfully) who smokes like a chimney. As for vegetarianism -- historically, very few Chinese have ever been vegetarians except out of poverty; some taoists are vegetarians but few are persistent vegetarians, i.e. there's practices that require short- or long-term vegetarian diets but most don't. It's all very individualized and can get colorful... taoism is very human, and can also be very whimsical... Some taoists cultivate extremes rather than "balance" or "the middle way" -- e.g., extreme yin or extreme Gen or some such -- for reasons that are best known to themselves (for instance, karmic). For some good beginner's info on the subject, I recommend "Scholar Warrior" by Deng Ming-Dao. Complete with some basic recipes of specifically taoist (jing-nourishing) soups (with animals in them, all of them) which I made many times. Yum.

and why the condescending tone pray tell?.. I read "studies" when I have nothing better to do with my time or when I need to learn what the common-denominator status of a particular field of study is today -- but on the subjects that really interest me, whenever these happen to be ones I can't learn about "from family anecdotes," I read books. Occasionally by cutting edge (and occasionally controversial precisely because of that) authorities. Occasionally on the subject of buying, selling, and bartering "peer reviewed studies" and the consequent near-zero relevance of same to the actual value of any work done by any researcher. And occasionally on the subject of paleoanthropology. The latter was the source of the information I presented -- e.g., it can be found in HOW THE HUMAN BEING EMERGED FROM THE CATACLYSMIC HISTORY OF THE EARTH, By NOEL T. BOAZ, Ph.D. So that's me. What about you -- where do you learn what you believe to be true? Could it be you were taught by salaried "repeaters" who were taught by other salaried "repeaters" to repeat what they were told to repeat? Many, many people mistake a bunch of things they were conditioned to repeat for "science." As one Lewis Carrol's character put it, "what I tell you three times is true." Surely what they tell you three hundred thousand times must be three hundred thousand times more true! But is it?.. Most "scientists" of anything life-related are "repeaters." Most repeaters-for-hire are repeaters of lies. Most lay repeaters of those repeated lies have no clue how what they're repeating was concocted, and when, and by whom, and why, and what for. Learning how to stop that sh.t, how to stop being one of the repeaters taught by other repeaters to repeat what you're told to repeat and believe it just because you were told to believe it three hundred thousand times or more is as good as enlightenment, I tell ya... transforms a parrot into a human, for starters... really, really cool to wake up and tell all of the repeaters to take a hike. Beats nirvana.

depends on what period in history we look at. We've been taught the system of "history" invented in Germany about 150 years ago that postulated "progress" and "improvement" of the human condition (without any scientific proof, incidentally -- it was just decided that people need to be taught that their lives are getting better and better, they are much easier to manipulate if they are told that whatever is done to them is making their lives better and longer) -- --however, the well-informed (and the non-sold-out) among paleoanthropologists assert the opposite: prehistoric humans lived long healthy lives, and were equally good at caring for the young and the old (e.g., skeletons were found with evidence of disabling injuries that happened at least thirty years prior to the individual's death -- which means someone cared for the prehistoric disabled person during all this time.) The skeletons they loved to date as those of 25-year-olds (asserting that's the average prehistoric life span) on closer examination proved to be those of 75-year-olds free of modern disease... It ain't for nothing that the main mantra of taoism is "return," not "advancement." They knew... Oh sister... yeah, it's one huge banana peel spread underfoot -- every generation slips at exactly the same spot.

Where I come from the ob/gyns had a special professional term for women over 25 expecting their first child: "oldster-labor." In large enough cities accordingly equipped, "oldster-labor" cases were placed in special high-risk birthing facilities, because all kinds of complications in this age group were well known to be the norm more than the exception. Statistically, the ideal age, in terms of the baby's and mother's health shining rather than failing (right away as well as for the rest of their respective lives), was found to be between 18 and 23. As for emotional readiness, I don't know many modern people who are ready to be real parents in any age group. That's because nearly all were brought up by parents just like themselves, i.e. parents who were unconsciously trying to get from their children what they didn't get from their parents. Energetic/emotional vampire parents. Or the toxic-dumping parents. Or the "I'm-too-busy-to-be-bothered-by-your-problems (so don't you dare have any)" parents. Or the "now that you're here, you'll have to work real hard to prove to me that you deserve to exist" parents. Or... I could go on and on, the list is infinitely long and exceedingly bleak. Parenting is supposed to be about giving, not getting. This has been screwed up in civilized societies for a bunch of thousand years, and I believe that's what's wrong at the core of everything that ever went wrong. This, far as I've been able to discern, is the root of not some but all evil in our world.

There's no visualizations in falun gong, you're doing it in a wuwei state. The movements are not very different from those of any good qigong with the exception of one where you hold a static position with your hands raised way above your head. I've heard at least two qigong masters object to this, but I'm not sure why. Subjectively, falun gong feels hard when you do it (I mean the static positions if you hold them for a long time, the way you are supposed to; the movements are easy), but you do get to feel wonderful afterwards. Falun gong meditations are supposed to be done in full lotus, and for a long time, and with rather difficult (suspended, some of them) arm positions. Ideologically, it is a Buddhist school of cultivation, according to Li Hongzi its founder, with some (not many) taoist elements and ideas blended in. Socially, it is a controversial deal -- a classic fundamentalist cult on one hand and a classic persecuted martyrdom on the other. One of the requirements of the school is that you do not practice anything else, absolutely nothing. So for the eclectically minded, the martially minded, the free-will minded, it is not a good fit. However, for someone seeking spiritual growth centered around devotional practices, higher authority, etc., for someone generally comfortable with carved-in-stone dogma, it's ideal. Intellectually, it's not acceptable for anyone who is used to independent thinking; experientially, however, it is quite powerful, for reasons I don't know.

Heartfelt greetings, I've a bicoastal duality going, with two lives on two coasts, of which I will have to choose one at some point soon and fold the other. While the pros and cons of either choice are too numerous to bother anyone with, one of the considerations I might want to work into the equasion is something I'd like to run by you, venerable bums. I don't know any live tao-minded people on the East Coast; I know only a few on the West coast. I think it's almost time to change this. So... my question is, if I were to try to face some of you in person, for whatever tao-minded get-together, where would I be more likely to find you -- here or there? or altogether elsewhere? -------------------------------------- Altogether elsewhere, vast herds of reindeer run across miles and miles of golden moss silently, and very fast. --W. H. Auden

Laozi was a new kid on the block when taoism was already thousands of years in existence. Chinese dragons are definitely not a modern invention, and are unlikely to be just a fantasy. Perceiving them is a special ability (like many other perceptions that require cultivation in order to kick in and manifest), but those who have learned to perceive them have discovered that they are multiple and ubiquitous. Some are smaller than worms -- they might hide in the folds of your clothes! -- while others are thousands of miles long, and still others, of human scale, have served emperors as advisers and even held official posts as ministers, governors and the like. The Chinese actually call themselves "the people of the dragon." There's many layers of meaning to this statement -- just like the dragon itself is comprised of many different parts of widely dissimilar animals -- this symbolizes, among other things, the unified China that was put together out of widely dissimilar parts that ultimately fit into a dragon-like empire. The emperor is also thought of as a dragon. The mountains -- they are definitely dragons, and most unfortunate events in China's history are traceable to a road, a major construction, and the Great Wall especially, "breaking the spine" of some of these dragons. "Dragon force" is all kinds of things... Chinese dragons are like people (or cats) in that no two of them are exactly alike. There's "dragon force" that some Chen stylists, e.g., will equate with "peng," the spiral force of good taijiquan. There's also dragon force similar to the evolutionary aspects of Kundalini, the energy of spiritual mutations. There's dragon force that will cause your rice to fail to cook properly if you upset the Kitchen Dragon. Oh, it's truly inexhaustible... I love this subject.

Thanks for the information, Freesun. Could you please verify the name of the avenue in the address-- looks like "Barromgtpm" but really is... ..?

.

Oooh, so very true. What's shengong?

Yeah, the world is full of meditation masters who don't need their physical eyes. Although for some strange reason, most of them seem to need physical glasses. Even the Dalai Lama.

To me it looks like xeno is expertly using an NLP/Ericksonian trance-inducing method -- technically known as "the triple spiral" -- where you start making a statement, break it off, start making another statement, break it off, start a third one, implant a suggestion inside it, finish the third one, finish the second one, finish the first one. By the time the subject is done reading (or listening -- it works far better in person, in conjunction with a few other tricks), her conscious mind is perplexed enough to give up trying to figure out what it's all about, and while it sits there in hypnotic stupor, the suggestion sneaks past its guard and sinks into the unconscious, unbeknownst to the subject. In the above statement, the suggestion seems to be "CCO." Neat!

A neighbor who was selling her house in the recent real estate heydays kept urging me to sell mine, which I wasn't planning on, by using exactly the same pattern of persuasion: "I'm so happy and wise to be doing what I'm doing, but it makes me so sad to see you not do it! And the shining example of me is right in front of you all along but you're not taking advantage of it! Oh, it makes me so sad!" More to the point: I don't want a CCO. It could make a lively exchange to ask me why I don't want it. Telling me that I'm supposed/expected to want it or else I'm a human and spiritual failure is so not where it's at for me that I'm thinking, if a CCO can cause this kind of ideation (or at least won't do anything to prevent and/or eliminate it), that's one more reason for me to not want it. This is a male practice, by the way. A taoist alchemical female will have an O between her breasts instead if she chooses to. Or anywhere else she chooses to for that matter.

My mother-in-law has been a winter swimmer for many years (and still is, in her 70s). She would immerse completely in a hole in the ice in a frozen lake, just like that, no jacuzzi, no running, no athletics of any kind. The practice is well-known in Russia and there's a special name for people doing that, the Walruses. (When John Lennon sang "I am the Walrus" he obviously didn't know what he was talking about! ) Well, the Walrus is a fat, fat animal, you need to store fat to insulate your organs if you're going to splash about in icy cold water. Perhaps if you combine it with exercise, you will convert the would-be fat into muscles, who knows -- but my mother-in-law never exercised, so she's fat. No diet ever helped her lose any weight, not even complete fasting. Perhaps the body got the message to hold on to that fat real tight as the result of the practice. She is very shut down and numb emotionally, so I guess it's her way to feel something -- it has to be this intense to get through her thick skin and all that fat. I believe very involved athletes, bodybuilders, etc., are more often than not people of the same predicament, in need of intense stimuli so as to feel something because subtle ones are not getting through. Healthwise, this practice pretty much eliminates one's ability to catch a cold and in general primes one's immune system against External Pernicious Influences to the max. It doesn't do anything for chronic, degenerative, deep-seated Yin disorders. The Kidneys hate cold. Chinese medicine in general frowns on many Western athletic and "healthy" practices, not just this one, specifically because most of them deplete the Kidneys. Here's doctor Stephen Chang's example: each Kidney has a pulse that normally corresponds to half that of the heart rate, i.e. if your heart rate is 64, your kidneys each do 32 beats per minute, taking turns, to a total of 64 to match the heart. When you do "aerobic exercise" or go jogging or some such, you raise your heart rate considerably but the Kidneys can't keep up, and the inner harmony and organ cooperation is busted. You effectively "exercise" your heart muscle at the expense of your Kidneys, which means your kidneys proper, your reproductive system, hypothalamus, pituitary, and all their hormonal and metabolic functions. In the Wuxing cycle, the Kidneys are the "grandmother" of the Heart, so it's like taking your grandmother jogging with you on a leash to force her to keep up. Neither one of you will ultimately benefit, even if you do grow big muscles as a result of running while dragging your grandmother on a leash! An alternative scenario is drinking the "minimum of 8 glasses of water" Western practitioners are so fond of suggesting to everybody and his dog. Your Kidneys are supposed to know how much water they need; if you enforce a higher intake, you will make them work harder and pulse faster -- then the Heart can't keep up and the pulses are again mismatched. So you drink that water and think you're "detoxing," but in fact you are creating another unhealthy imbalance. It is never wise to ignore the overall relationships in the body no matter what you do. The beauty of "internal" arts like taijiquan (e.g.) is that you get all your organs and systems to work at a higher energy level without taking this energy from one organ to divert it to another. I can never stop marveling at the fact that after a practice I'm flushed crimson and drenched in sweat as though I've been running for an hour -- but my heart rate and respiration rate are the same as when I've started, as though I've been sitting in a comfortable chair knitting or something. That's the kind of sweat that really detoxifies! and I have never seen my teacher carry a water bottle around, or drink anything during the practice for that matter. Students rush to drink every time there's a break, he doesn't... so I don't either, monkey see monkey do.

It is useful primarily as a blood thinner. If you need a blood thinner, for whatever reason, this is a good choice. Better than the toxic prescription ones like warfarin. Better than aspirin because it won't cause or aggravate digestive trouble which aspirin might. If you really, really need a blood thinner, you have to take nattokinase twice daily on a regular basis because it gets removed from the body within 12 hours. The rest of the effects it is "supposed" to have are mostly hype, but the blood-thinning one is real.

Right... also you can come back simply to enjoy earthly stuff in the flesh and help others do likewise. A prime example of this behavior is god Krishna's habit of sending 16,000 of his incarnations back to the world to make love to 16,000 milkmaids. (That's why some Krishnaits, male ones, dress like milkmaids! Who knows what they're trying to accomplish... and whether they actually succeed. I never had a chance to ask one. I'm relying on Ram Dass's account.) In the taoist tradition, an accomplished master can choose to neither die nor ever leave to begin with, becoming an "earthly immortal" instead of a celestial one. (Of course celestial ones may choose to visit earth in the flesh too, and sometimes do -- usually to teach a promising newbie.) Earthly immortals are part of the overall fabric of Chinese civilization and are believed to have lived in the mountains for millennia and to have taught everybody who's anybody everything worth anything. The classics refer to them (in Wilhelm/Baynes translation, e.g.) as "the holy sages" or (in Cleary's) "the real humans."

In Ramayana, there's an episode where Rama meets some monks who ask him for a mantra so they can meditate, because apparently they are plagued by some anti-meditation demons that interfere with their practice. Rama, a god in reality but a young swinger in this particular incarnation, tells them that he has to go ask his guru. So he goes to his guru. The guru sees a god approaching and falls flat on his face before him. Rama sees his guru and falls flat on his face to honor him. So they lie on the ground honoring each other, and then Rama asks the guru about the mantra to expel the demons to help the monks, and the guru goes, hey, you're a god, you can make any mantra you like and make it work, you can eliminate the demons with a snap of your fingers, you can create or destroy the monks themselves, and me for that matter... no, wait a minute... hold on... oh, OK, now I get it. You're a god and all that in the ultimate reality, but in this-here life you're a clueless seventeen-year-old and I'm your guru, much older and much much wiser, so I'm supposed to honor this incarnation of yours, not something beyond that I can see but am not supposed to allow to interfere with the current incarnation... sorry, my bad. He gets up, and treats Rama as a human student, the way he knows he should. And Rama humbly accepts the teaching and goes off with the mantra he came for. Does that answer your question?

Witch, thank you, it was very interesting in many lights. There's reflections of other pearls in this one of course -- e.g., Venus is my Western planetary sign, which corresponds to Snake in Chinese astrology, Cat (the feline goddess Bastet of fertility and femininity) in Egyptian, Cat-Snake-Venus in most shamanic traditions, Cat in some Buddhist schools (one popular in Thailand, for instance... there's a great big cat-snake-Venus denial in others though -- the patently paternalistic ones... something for a later entry I guess.) So... do you do astrological readings? I used to do Chinese ones in my spare time, but alas, I have no spare time to speak of currently...

Here's a link: http://mid-autumn-fest.blogspot.com/2004/09/handout.html