Taomeow

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Everything posted by Taomeow

  1. Everyone post some favorite quotes!

    ”In the future, we will eliminate the soul with medicine. Under the pretext of a ‘healthy point of view’, there will be a vaccine by which the human body will be treated as soon as possible directly at birth, so that the human being cannot develop the thought of the existence of soul and Spirit. To materialistic doctors, will be entrusted the task of removing the soul of humanity. As today, people are vaccinated against this disease or that disease, so in the future, children will be vaccinated with a substance that can be produced precisely in such a way that people, thanks to this vaccination, will be immune to being subjected to the “madness” of spiritual life. He would be extremely smart, but he would not develop a conscience, and that is the true goal of some materialistic circles. With such a vaccine, you can easily make the etheric body loose in the physical body. Once the etheric body is detached, the relationship between the universe and the etheric body would become extremely unstable, and man would become an automaton, for the physical body of man must be polished on this Earth by spiritual will. So, the vaccine becomes a kind of arymanique force; man can no longer get rid of a given materialistic feeling. He becomes materialistic of constitution and can no longer rise to the spiritual “. -- Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925)
  2. The dog and the lion

    There's an old Chinese proverb: If you throw a stick to the dog, the dog will look at the stick. If you throw a stick to the lion, the lion will look at who threw the stick. I find it to be one of the most practical, pragmatically sound and philosophically sane teachings to internalize and be guided by. Don't just react to whatever is thrown your way. Don't spend your life chasing sticks. Look for the source. Look like a lion (or lioness). Don't sniff the stick, don't fetch the stick, don't chew on the stick before you find out who threw it -- or ever, if it's not in your nature to play with every stick thrown your way. Examine and determine the source. Who threw the stick. Their intent, their motives for throwing it at you, what they stand to gain or lose from throwing it, what you stand to gain or lose if you chase the stick. Are they playing with you? Luring you into a cage? Trying to distract you with the stick while their collaborators are aiming guns at you? Do they mistake you for a dog and expect you to fetch? And if you oblige and fetch, will they beat you with that stick? Will they put you on a leash, on a chain, send you to a zoo, to a vivisection facility, to your death? Will they own you? Does the idea of being owned by them excite or disgust you? Who threw the stick? Who are they? Once you know, you can look at the stick if it makes sense to look at the stick once you know who threw it and their true intent. Or you will run as fast as you can from the stick. Or fight for your life. Or for your dinner, whichever applies. Meanwhile, the dog is still looking at the stick, mesmerized, excited. Wow! Bow wow! A stick! A stick for me! How wonderful!
  3. The dog and the lion

    I could give you many examples. If it's a politician, I want to know what corporate interests exactly finance and/or endorse his or her campaign (who throws the stick) rather than listen to what he or she proclaims, denounces or promises (the stick they throw to me). If it's a medical study, same thing -- who threw that stick (endorsement, finances, grants, history of the stick-throwing party and where they got what they have to throw and how exactly). Their socioeconomic genealogy, their track record, their record of wrongdoings (if possible to get to the bottom of) -- before I'll ever consider whatever they present as accurate or true no matter how many times they swear on their mothers' graves it is. If I can't figure it out, I'll ignore the stick in its entirety. But if I can, I'll know if it's trustworthy at all and whether I want to play with that stick. If it's a social cause, trend, campaign, meme, call to get enlisted under this or that banner -- same thing. Who and what are the actual sources? What are they trying to accomplish for themselves when they tell me they're trying to do it for me or for we the people or them the people or whatever other sticks they throw every time their lips move and their prints print and their screens flash? And until I know for sure, I'll ignore it. I won't look at that stick. By itself it tells me nothing about what it's really for. But once I've figured out its real source (nearly always hiding in shadows), it tells me everything. Everything. No need to look at every individual stick if you know who cut down the tree from whose flesh they keep carving millions of those sticks -- while we the people pay them to.
  4. Oh look, I got covid

    Luckily, she's back to her regular self since the lockdowns have been lifted. All she needs in her regular state is a lot of yapping (she patrols the neighborhood for people to accost and engage in a conversation), and two hours daily of swimming in the swimming-pool -- at least on the surface of it, and I'm not qualified to address her deeper needs. So, the demonic effects were all about being cut off from both opportunities. I know what you mean about being English. My primal therapy guru Art Janov in LA used "your problem is, you're English" as one of his diagnostic verdicts for some of his patients (there was a good outcropping of your compatriots in that community). They invariably came back with "your problem is, you're Jewish." Which was one way to look away from their problem... luckily, Art was many things but bashful wasn't one of them, so the disguise or blessing or blessing in disguise of being English would get addressed sooner or later. Apologies to the OP for the tangent.
  5. Oh look, I got covid

    At the height of the lockdown last year, I did think a neighbor of mine got possessed by a bona fide demon, or else flat out gone insane, which in many traditions is the same thing. The demon was weird -- it had her talk to herself at the top of her voice outside my window, sing little children's songs (she was a kindergarten teacher and knew many), position herself across from my door and shriek in mock terror every time the door opened asserting I startled her -- or, alternatively, hide behind hers and jump out at me with a deafening "Hi!" startling me and then laughing like a lunatic, stuff like that. She threw a birthday party when it was illegal in our parts, inviting everybody who believed in the cake more than in social distancing or masks, and chased me with a piece of that cake, which I imagined having been coughed and sneezed at by all the superspreaders -- I could practically see little spiky balls crawling all over it -- I had to slam my door in her face to avoid being forced to eat that cake. In general, she insisted on doing me favors I didn't need -- offering things like planting pots or potted plants, or monstrously huge wind chimes she thought I would enjoy hanging over my door or "do whatever you want with it but make sure I don't hear it," and the like. So, a demon with offerings, rather than in need of offerings. What would you do about such entity?..
  6. Caduceus - staff of Hermes

    Strangely, FB just fed this ad into my feed: AI is getting loopy.
  7. The TM rabbit hole

    Yes, there's a difference between TM™ and TM the abbreviation (which I never thought of or anticipated when years ago I took my virtual taoist name -- and was shocked when someone used the abbreviation for the first time -- but then got used to it). My only exposure to TM™ was via a friend who was one of the early practitioners. He later moved on to the original source, advaita, and was into that hook, line and sinker. I remember finding it somewhat peculiar, since he was Japanese American and an expert on traditional Japanese cuisine, of which I was (and remain) an aficionado -- yet completely uninterested in either zen or shinto (let alone taoism) whose principles are built thereinto. On second thought, it wasn't peculiar at all, considering my own food preferences don't necessarily reflect my spiritual leanings (and if they did have to align, I'd probably convert to something like Russian-Islamic Shintoism.) I remember him telling me of how the hopping on the butt in TM™ was practiced with the goal of learning to hover... fake it till you make it sort of thing. It was funny to envision a whole group of people butt-hopping toward enlightenment, I regret never having seen it first hand.
  8. Caduceus - staff of Hermes

    Nah, when it gets tired unpacking the knot it just bites through it and spits out the stubborn part. True story.
  9. Caduceus - staff of Hermes

    In the Hindu tradition (at least the one I had some limited exposure to) it is the mudra counterpart of the mantra "ong namo gurudev namo" -- "I bow to my inner teacher."
  10. Caduceus - staff of Hermes

    About knots, what immediately came to mind is DNA knotting. I've always associated the caduceus with the ancient knowledge of the Great Cosmic Serpent, the DNA, and the knots in those depictions add a twist (no pun intended) that demonstrates the knowledge may have been deep. In "our" science, DNA knotting is a fairly recent discovery (1981). An intro to DNA and knot theory: http://www.tiem.utk.edu/~gross/bioed/webmodules/DNAknot.html Someday I'll try to find the time to look closer at DNA gyrase, an enzyme possessing the unique ability to catalyze the introduction of negative superhelical turns into closed-circuit double-stranded DNA and untie the knots. I sense a connection to some funky magic therein...
  11. Haiku Chain

    Temple Street, Hong Kong, Saint Germain des Pres, Paris, all things human... bye.
  12. Teaching authentic neigong

    小梦想, thanks for offering an interesting course. I've a couple of questions if you don't mind: 1. Have you ever taught this course for free, just to alpha test it, before making it into a paid service? In my experience, knowing things and teaching things are not the same by a long shot. One might want to start with freebies just to learn about one's own strengths and weaknesses as a teacher, about what to expect of different kinds of students besides/in addition to/in excess of the money (some will pleasantly and some, unpleasantly surprise you), hone one's teaching and troubleshooting skills, catch the bugs and do one's best to eliminate them, get one's teacher's (or teachers') encouragement and endorsement -- they might have an idea of whether you are ready to teach regardless of how good you are at learning. 2. Have you ever taught this course to females? Are you aware of any female practitioners? Of any contraindications, special considerations, modifications, etc.?
  13. Retro Tech

    My personal take: unnecessary manmade risks -- and there's hardly any other kinds left -- are undertaken by people who have been starved since childhood for exploring and gradually learning to master the natural ones. For a million years or more, people lived in their ecological niches and mastered them just as successfully as any animal masters its natural habitat. Children were held very close early on -- which is no longer the case -- spending a lot of time on the mother's body while she went about her normal life-sustaining tasks -- and were internalizing gravity, balance, distribution of forces in motion, eye-brain and eye-body and hand-brain and brain-body coordination etc., developing faculties that would serve them for a lifetime --naturally, without going to a teacher of this or that movement art or sport. For developing these faculties to the fullest there's no other method, and the window of acquisition is narrow -- they can never fully develop in anyone kept alone in a crib for most of their infancy, the window closes. Later, children who didn't miss out on this acquisition of natural mastery of their bodies in the environment never had to be supervised as closely and shielded form mishaps as vigorously as modern "civilized" people are forced to supervise theirs -- because our children are, generally, equally developmentally incompetent ('learned helplessness") in natural environments and in unnatural ones. Besides, for unnatural environments there's no evolutionary/genetic memory as to how to handle them with innate competence. Anyone who had children remembers (unless they were an absentee parent) how much of a death trap an ordinary modern home is for a toddler who doesn't know and can't possibly know about electricity and what it does if you stick a pin in the outlet or try biting through a yummy-looking wire, drugs in the medical cabinet and Drano under the sink, furniture that doesn't grow firmly into the floor like trees do and can overturn when you climb it, pots of boiling water on the stove above your head so interesting to pull down to investigate, glass coffee tables so inviting to jump onto from the sofa, and so on. It's an incessant stream of "no, honey, don't touch that/go there/run/jump/hit/eat" and so on -- and the exploration hunger grows, only to manifest later in life in all kinds of reactive ways. What those ways might manifest as -- fear of everything or mindless dangerous risk-taking, or a counterphobic combo of both -- is anyone's guess.
  14. Wild cats

    I don't bite unless they bite first. Cool idea! The book I envision would have nice illustrations. E.g. for Hexagram 1 I immediately had a few images: Line 1. Hidden dragon. Line 2. Dragon appearing in the field. Line 3. The position is dangerous, but there will be no mistake. Line 4. Wavering flight over the depth. Line 5. Dragon flying in the heavens. Line 6. Arrogant dragon will have cause to repent.
  15. Wild cats

    Been looking myself. The only taoist classic I've seen that may be of interest to cats is this book: Don't know how good it is though, my new kitten can't read yet. (Except for toilet paper -- the other day she apparently studied a scroll... I mean, a roll... cover to cover, judging by its frayed condition.)
  16. Wild cats

    Siberian tiger. Hexagram 63, Mission Accomplished. "Soaking one's tail, no trouble."
  17. SHILAJIT

    I'm very familiar with it. Its primary area of application where it truly shows what it can do is in healing broken bones. Also all kinds of joint problems -- arthritis, assorted inflammations of the bone/cartilage, things like that. For everything else, it is a supplement that might contribute to overall health by supplying what tends to be deficient in our diets (it has half the periodic table in its composition), and it is indeed useful when recovering after an illness. It doesn't generally help with sleep -- on the contrary, you are not supposed to take it in the second part of the day because it is a mild "upper"/energizer and may disrupt sleep in some people. The dose is about the size of a grain of rice (or two if you're dealing with a broken bone), three times a day, dissolved in a spoonful of milk. Back off and decrease the dose if you have any signs of mental over-excitation. (This is rare and has been reported only in cases where people take it for a very long time.)
  18. Oh look, I got covid

    There's many reasons people don't have a uniform opinion about this. It may not make you feel better to understand where they might be coming from, but just in case it does... please consider what their reasons may be: 1. Simple confirmation bias. So far, nothing serious has happened to them personally or to anyone they know, so they believe that's the case for everybody at all times for all purposes. Confirmation bias is one of the strongest forces of human psyche. Under normal circumstances it's beneficial in many situations, counteracting knee-jerk reactivity to any new events or information, anxiety over every change, panic over every novelty in their environment, continuous stress brought about by feelings of unpredictability, unreliability, loss of control, etc.. At other times, it is counterproductive -- it lulls and dulls the senses and sensibilities, makes people less perceptive, less alert to changes in the environment they ought to be taking seriously, and may be conductive to the kind of ignorance that ain't bliss. 2. Personal experience in the past. Some people have suffered from illnesses; some, from doctors doctoring these illnesses (known as iatrogenic -- doctor-made -- disease); some have had both experiences and it's a matter of deciding which ones were more damaging to them personally or their loved ones; some observed effects of certain interventions in family members (disastrous in some cases, and also disaster-avoiding or mitigating in others, occasionally due to their using their own best judgment rather than "following orders" whatever the orders may have been -- do this, or don't do that, or do nothing). 3. The outrageously fishy politics of handling the whole thing top to bottom and sideways -- nearly everywhere in the same one-size-fits-all dubious, suspect, inefficient, dishonest, authoritarian, knee-jerk, misguided, falsified, misleading, misrepresenting, you name it... fashion -- nearly everywhere the same and nearly everywhere in lockstep, to quote Mr. Rockefeller. Some people haven't had the illness nor know anyone who did -- yet they are relentlessly bombarded with narratives that negate what they observe in their very real real life so aggressively that they might well end up throwing the baby with bathwater. I for one would probably have trouble separating the wheat from the chaff in this mess without both extensive research, as-deep-as-I-can-go integration, and first hand experience. Just because it was so blatantly used (by the powerful against the powerless at that) for so many things that have nothing whatsoever to do with anyone's health and well-being (to put it mildly) that it makes it very easy, for at least those who happen to see the forest and not be blinded to its presence by the trees, to wind up getting very suspicious over everything virus-related -- including the virus itself. Add to this the supremely idiotic left-right divide over it -- people flock to wherever they're already at politically, and if their prior conditioning says "anything the right (for some) or left (for others) support is good" or, alternatively, "is shit," no matter what it is, they happily extend this stance to things that should never have been thrown into the mix of political strife. I can't begin telling you how many sound viable babies were thrown out with this filthy bathwater. From efficient medications to efficient measures to avoidance of inefficient measures that only exacerbate the situation... I can't begin telling you how much the bed has been shat left and right. And anyone who thinks it was only shat on the right or only on the left has contributed a turd to the overall layer of shit. 4. So, forgive thy neighbor if only because you can't afford to waste your energy and your coping power on wherever they're at, let them be wherever they're at -- not your job to straighten them out -- and focus on what's best for your health. Your worst enemy is the virus at this point. Fist things first. Wishing you a decisive victory over the nasty adversary.
  19. Retro Tech

    Me too. In my entirely unsafe unsupervised play endeavors as a kid, the most popular playgrounds were massive construction sites nearby. It's true that I have a scar above my knee from miscalculating a jump across a wide trench, falling in and slashing my leg on a sharp end of some steel reinforcement rod. But it was no big deal, just a couple of stitches and a lot of pride for taking it in stride. Whereas the worst trauma of my childhood was caused by a poorly coordinated and very overweight teenage boy running in the street and tripping and falling on me.
  20. Retro Tech

    Children's playgrounds were quite interesting back in the day
  21. Retro Tech

    LG Stylo. I bought it in 2018 and the option of writing messages in longhand with the built-in stylus was the selling point for me. 'cause I am also lo-tech and the idea was to at least slightly defy the new technology with those old school skills. I think I was the last person on Earth to get my first smart phone to begin with. I remember still not having one when there were pictures in magazines of Mongolian shepherds and African nomads using them. But eventually this particular colony of the Borg assimilated me too.
  22. Retro Tech

    I have a Stylo cell phone with a built-in stylus. All it took was to sharpen it a bit. I actually do prefer handwriting messages on my phone to typing them, but then I use my finger rather than the stylus -- it's faster this way (though not necessarily prettier.) Another bonus of having endured, in 1st grade, teacher's sarcastic outbursts -- e.g. when she looked at my painstaking line of 2 2 2 2 2 2 2... and yelled, "I told you to practice writing the figure 2, not to draw three rows of little rocket men!!"
  23. “we need a mirror” Solaris (1972)

    Yeah, I found Katla rather mediocre, but I also thought it was a strange synchronicity that this thread about Solaris appeared the very next day after I announced (in my home that is), "hey, they're ripping off Solaris!"
  24. Retro Tech

    In my time/place of learning to write, they made us practice. Made a big deal of it too. In some cases, practice made perfect. And everyone had to learn the hard way: It added endless frustration to all things school -- and also a good chunk of extra brain power, due to continuous formation of new neural connections which fine motor skills in the hand are so good at facilitating.