Taomeow

Nice name -- and since you're enlightened AND use this name, could you please elaborate on the following statement from the Vedas: In the heaven of Indra .................................................................... there's a string of pearls .................................................................... so arranged .................................................................... that each one of them .................................................................... reflects each and every one of the other ones ....................................................................

The next/coming full moon is a taoist holiday, Lady Moon's birthday. Lady Moon lives in a palace of fragrant (cinnamon?) wood, with an Alchemical Rabbit for her sole companion and servant. The rabbit grinds the elixir of immortality with a mortar and pestle. Lady Moon grants a secret wish once a year, on her birthday, if you meditate on the moon and tell her about it sincerely, from the heart.

From a feng shui perspective. Clean your house, pay your taxes. Approach it as a spiritual task. It is SUPPOSED to be difficult when you're spent and exhausted and unwell -- many spiritual tasks worth bothering with are difficult. Do it anyway and as it gets done, you are likely to start feeling better. Fix what needs fixing. As a witch you probably know the "as above so below" maxim -- "as outside so inside" applies as well. Electrical things that don't work drain your energy -- discard, replace, or fix. Clogged plumbing hurts your digestion. Even a cup with a crack or a chip injures your spirit -- throw all damaged things away. Old clothes and shoes you no longer wear accumulate old, tired qi that makes your own qi feel sluggish and spent. If you don't know what's where in your house, you don't know what's what in your mind. Do it one room at a time, don't overwhelm yourself. Once it's done in one place, perform a ritual -- smudge, chant, clear the space energetically using whatever methods you use. (I like a gourd rattle with dry beans -- to expel unwanted energies -- then one with little quartz crystals to energize the space.) This kind of work is not glamorous anymore than bathroom regularity, but without either one nothing can bring lasting joy. Have you ever seen on "Cops" how they would enter a troubled home with something violent or crazy or just plain stupid going on? Invariably such a house is a mess -- garbage everywhere, nobody gives a shit. As outside so inside...

I've no idea what the goal of the practice of "most people here" is. The way "some" go about it, however, is by starting out with the idea in the head of what a "self" is and isn't. Far as I'm concerned, this merely installs a particular new type of filter in the head, is all it does. In the process I describe, "the real self" is not an issue at stake, just a by-product of systemic normalization. It's like... your eyes start hurting and you feel something pressing on them, and realize it was always like that but this is the first time you feel it... and once you feel it for what it really is -- simply pain -- you simply cry, and suddenly the world bursts out in colors and shapes you've never seen before -- and a pair of color-filtering, distorting lenses fall out of your eyes and you realize they were growing on your eyeballs, blocking the tears, blocking the pain, blocking the light -- and you didn't know they were there -- and now you remember who, when, how put them there -- remember precisely, not as an idea in your head but as a memory of what happened to you-- so you throw them in the dumpster, and keep seeing the real colors and shapes from then on, and can cry when you're sad rather than quote some scriptures to explain that sadness is a phenomenon of samsara, and that there's nobody there to feel the pain to begin with, and so on. So anyone comes to you and talks about self this and self that in a language of beliefs, reality this and reality that, and you see that pair of color-filtering (or self-filtering) lenses growing on his eyeballs, you just know what's going on... but you won't be believed, not for a second, until the wearer of this particular filter finds it himself. And when he does, he'll forget all about you, because the "you" he saw before he took them off was not real (he couldn't see anything real, including you), and is therefore an irrelevance. And what he will notice now that he's seeing a different world... who knows?..

LOL, I've never used this word, but it fits perfectly! There's a taoist metaphor describing a transformation -- the mountains are no longer mountains, and then the mountains are again just mountains, anyone remember this poem? This happened to me twice, the Western way and the Eastern way, each disassembling "the mountains" more thoroughly than the previous one -- but then I had to put them back together, and once again the mountains are just mountains. So, the first time it happened, one of the mountains that disappeared was this idea that I have to be a writer. Everything I was "supposed" or "expected" to be turned out to have been implants, particularly ironic because I "always" thought those things were "my very own ideas," something I "wanted" myself. Turned out what I really wanted (or, rather, was forced to want) was to prove to mom and dad (and, by extension, the world as a stand-off for mom and dad) that I have a right to exist... and the terms on which it was to be proved were implanted so early that I didn't know it wasn't part of the real me. Well, the real me found out she has nothing to prove to anybody by any method, she has a right to exist because she exists. End of ambition, end of creativity! But then after a while the mountains are again just mountains (but my very own landscape this time, not an induced hallucination), and writing a book is just writing a book... though without a "should" it's not as strong a drive... but it's not a bad way to make a living if one gets lucky, so maybe I still "should" !

Someone close to me had to get a couple of blood transfusions (in a critical situation, for which modern Western medicine is not equipped with non-Western non-modern methods and which real medicine is not even allowed to touch, train, certify, legalize, practice, or preach). So, OK, it all went well, he needed it and it was a good thing he got it, out of all options available. I take him home from the hospital and he sees everything as strange and unfamiliar, as though for the first time. Then he sees a Carl's Junior, and goes, oh I'm so hungry for a hamburger, and a coke, and some french fries, let's stop there get some food! The punch line being that this person is a healthy eater who hadn't eaten in a place like that in years. Alright, we get a "carlsburger" or whatever, he gobbles it up, gets another, washes it down with a soda (something he never drinks), and three hours later, wants more of the same! This went on for two weeks, he craved all kinds of junk and nothing else. Then gradually it subsided, and one day he bites into the same hamburger and bun, makes a face and says, jeez, this is awful, it's like cardboard, there's no life in it, no taste, no juice, no nutrition, how could I ever want to eat something like this? And I tell him, hey, you're back! And that was the end of the junk food rampage, no desire for it anymore, back to normal. So we figured... we figured what happened was, as we were explained, when you get a "unit" of blood it's not all coming from one donor, it's mixed and the source of one unit is at least forty or fifty different people. He gets two units, that's blood from eighty to one hundred different people. And most of them are junk food eaters. So he was getting all their cravings and what-not with their blood. And god only knows what else!.. (He did a major fast later, unrelated to the transfusion and its aftermath -- but hopefully it took care of the repercussions of that too.)

I'm much like that too, Cat, would you believe I secretly bend my fingers when I count? It's not on google, it's part of the indigenous tradition from Eastern Siberia, Altai and Manchuria, and it picked up some taoist and buddhist influences (and terms) over the centuries. The people who used it were there before taoism and fed into it, then perhaps vice versa; later some of them were converted first to buddhism, then (by force) to christianity, then to communism -- now back to buddhism, far as I know -- but not all of them. Some remained what they have always been -- a shamanic culture dating back a staggering 80,000 years, maybe more. In more recent times, most shamans of this tradition were killed, about three hundred years ago, in a disastrous "council" where all the elders of all the tribes were invited to negotiate and settle their "differences" with the dominant baboon (Russian Orthodox church), locked in a wooden house where they gathered, and set on fire. The legend has it that when the house burned down to the ground, nine of the shamans emerged from the flames and walked away, not to be seen ever again. When things that happened in that part of the world are discussed by people whose ancestors have always lived there, it is done with great mistrust and reluctance, and a lot of the knowledge is hidden for a damn good reason. I chanced upon a little (I come from Altai), and the only reason I was taught anything was... dunno, just lucky. The closest thing to the practice that I know of that can be googled is perhaps the classic Viprassana, which a practitioner starts out with at least ten days of sensory deprivation -- no human contact, no distractions of any kind. In Shuairan, a practitioner (a shaman, or rather "kam," which is the local word) does it for you instantly, turns off all your habitual distractions (of yourself from yourself) and then works with you by facilitating your ability to perceive "what is, as is" while blocking your ability to reason and rationalize. It can get very scary. However, once your rational mind returns (and it does), it is your very own now, it emerges from your own inner truth instead of being superimposed by external conditioning. It becomes very easy to tell which parts of you are the "real snake," the connected you, and which parts were "inserted," constructed by society, parents or other "caretakers," teachers, doctors, priests, cops, whoever. It can be terrifying to find out in the process that not much of whatever you thought of as you is really you, that all your proprietary inner space is "developed" by some spiritual, emotional, even physical "real estate" that simply encroached on your proprietary territory and set up its own business where "you" should have grown instead. So you wind up tearing down a lot of those "developments," then cleaning up the mess... It can take a while, or a long time, but once you know how, you can keep the process going. It's not a good "do-it-yourself" practice initially though, because there's methods used that require a knowledgeable facilitator and a safe space.

In the taoist tradition, however, there's many, many ways to be immortal, and one of them is to be a gui, "hungry ghost." Which is why life is viewed as a very responsible affair, ditto death. Neither one we would really want to screw up on the assumption that it will all "somehow" work out just because energy is infinite and capable of infinite transformations. Yes, it is -- but just like right now you personally don't have enough to lift your house with your little finger no matter what you believe, so in eternity you may have eternal unlimited energy all around you -- but if the way you lived your life naturally and inevitably directed you towards being a gui next, you won't have the ability to partake of any except what you can suck off living beings. Whereas a different life will result in becoming a Celestial Realm immortal, with, indeed, unlimited resources at your service. Personhood, being human, is not a preface to "the real book" you can skim over without paying attention -- it IS part of the real book. Everything is real. Life is real. Death is real. Eternity is real. Immortality is real. The only thing that isn't real is whatever anyone comes up with when death is tackled by the living; or when life is administered by the dead; or when the eternal is discussed by the temporal. As the Yuan Dao put it (quoting from memory), "you don't talk winter to summer insects, because their life span is too short. You don't talk the ocean to the fishes living in a well, because their view is too limited. You don't talk eternal tao to people indoctrinated in their beliefs, because their experience is nonexistent." So in the taoist tradition, for things to unfold harmoniously, the business of the living is supposed to be life, the business of the dead is expected to be death, and the business of the immortals is immortality -- and you don't "graduate" to life eternal by screwing up life temporal anymore than you graduate with a Ph.D. in mathematics by failing kindergarten arithmetics. This is the view of the leader of the Eight Immortals, Ancestor Lu, which I take on faith, for lack of personal experience.

Another Donnie Darko fan here! And I watched it twice, and understood it better the second time, though the shock value was greater the first time. I was shocked by the depth of it -- didn't expect it of a movie (of all things) at all, don't know of another one that tackles time so boldly and so "taoistically."

um... del for now

I don't dismiss it at all, I have tremendous reverence for Laozi in general (see below) and for popularizing some important aspects of the overall taoist cognitive paradigm in this little book in particular. However, Tao Te Ching is neither the source of taoism nor a sine qua non of taoism, because even the written documents of taoism-the-source are at least four thousand years older than this book, let alone the oral tradition whose beginning disappears well into prehistory. It so happened that I first read TTC when I was already a practicing taoist with a teacher, who (the latter) either failed to mention this book or did it in passing so that it didn't register, or deliberately chose not to mention it to me. So when I finally read it, I liked it very much but it left me dissatisfied -- because of a sense of foreign/extraneous agendas in all translations I've seen. I mentioned that I read fast; so I took the trouble to read over seventy (sic) translations of TTC into English and a few into Russian, and the sense of dissatisfaction kept growing. What the book talked about, I already knew from my practice and from other books that either predate it or have expressed the same taoist paradigm more or less simultaneously (e.g., the Yuan Dao and the Wen-tzu). In other words, it could have been a revelation if it was what started it all for me, but it so happened that it wasn't, so it wasn't. (Although the whole taoist paradigm was indeed a revelation, mostly because it offered a language and a formal framework for things that obssessed me without me knowing anyone else in history was ever obssessed with them. What a great relief it was to find out that I'm not alone and not nuts after all! just a "taoist," is all! ) So, if there's anything I must credit TTC with, it's the inspiration to start learning Chinese -- because of all the frustrated feelings over all the translations. Tao works in mysterious ways, you know... By the way, TTC, to me, is neither the main nor the most interesting contribution to taoism by Laozi, he did other things too... e.g., taught a few immortals-to-be in person (long after he himself moved to the celestial realm, he visited our world on a few occasions, for this specific purpose). And of course the Wen-tzu, a more detailed version of his oral teachings than the cursory TTC, and one that takes guts to grasp... not intellect, not even wisdom... courage. TTC is milder. Kinder, gentler. Wen-tzu is merciless. But that's what truth is like, alas... takes honesty and courage to deal with (two of the virtues I value above all else, incidentally, and aspire to cultivate...) Anyway... thanks for a stimulating exchange. I don't have you pegged either, you know. You're too colorful for that!

Cat, really appreciate your take, and am glad to make sense. Wayfarer, for me it's the same... also, my "gut-reactive" and my "intellectual" are "one snake." "A snake named Shuairan lives on Mount Heng. If you strike its tail, the head comes, if you strike its head, the tail comes, and if you strike its middle, both the head and the tail come." -- Sun Tzu Shuairan is a rare practice I've been trained in and might feel ready to teach some day, maybe a few, maybe many moons from now... It's the art of eliminating the disconnection between "intellectual/logical/rational" and "instinctive/gut-reactive/systemic." This disconnection is not normal. The fact that Shuairan can use its head, can think well (and read and write too), doesn't in and of itself paralyze its tail. By the same token, just because it can sense the whole electromagnetic spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet with its tail, or the impending thunderbolt or an earthquake thousands of miles and hundreds of hours away, also with its tail, doesn't in and of itself render it unable to use its head, i.e. deaf, dumb, blind, or intellectually impotent. And if its middle is consciously connected to BOTH its head and its tail, simultaneously at all times, what's left there that Shuairan can't perceive and process and respond to as it sees fit -- instinctively, intellectually, or using both, or neither?.. Also sprach Shuairan.

Yes, this is my understanding too. However, the difference I see between taoism and buddhism is, to me, not superficial, not a mere terminological discrepancy. To buddhism, life itself is a state of "fall from grace." If you are born, it proves you have fallen. To taoism, life IS grace, life as it was before "tao has been destroyed" (the classic taoist term for "ignorance" and more.) It's life unconscious, fragmented, disconnected (from the inner personal self and outer greater process alike) that is suffering, not life per se, not life as a phenomenon. Taoism doesn't see life as a source of suffering -- it's "abnormal" life that is a source of suffering. To eliminate suffering, buddhism basically proposes eliminating life. Life, to a buddhist, is false (samsara), and ultimate reality is "free of desires," "free of birth and death" -- which essentially means "free of life," sterilized with some spiritual Chlorox or other. Taoism, to eliminate suffering, proposes normalizing life rather than extinguishing it. Gautama Buddha's mother died upon giving birth to him, maybe that's why his teachings are death-inspired. Buddhism is permeated with this imprint of the disappearance of life (of self, of desires, of "ego," of manifestation, you name it) as the "ideal" state -- because that's what greeted its newborn founder in this-here world, the disappearance into death of the only world he knew before birth -- his mother. The only reason buddhism is what it is is the inventor's imperative to replicate the bliss of his unborn existence, which ended so cruelly when he was born. Ah but that wasn't "normal." A "normal" human being will have the continuation and amplification of bliss once he or she is normally born to a normal life complete with normal presence and normal love of a normal mom and a normal dad. Taoism is after getting the norm to be the norm. Buddhism is after elevating an unfortunate abnormality to a status of "the ultimate liberation." So sad...

BKT, scientific (magical) taoism is not rooted in rationalizing. It is rooted in ganying. Ganying is a fact. When I say my practice is fact-based rather than faith-based, I mean I'm a practicing (pragmatic) taoist, I don't have (nor need) a particularly rich imagination, I have my hands quite full of facts to work with: jing, chi, shen, fluids, blood, viscera, bones, marrow, skin, brain, emotions, motion, stillness, dreams, wakefulness, causal body, acausal body, the body of tao, the human mind, the mind of tao -- to name a few. I work with these -- all of these -- as taught by my teacher -- on the fundamental taoist principles of ganying, yin-yang, wuxing, Hetu, Luoshu, bagua, I Ching. These are all fact-based, rather than faith-based. I don't have much use for Tao Te Ching, a well-meaning instruction manual for a benevolent feudal warlord, because I am not one. Laozi suggests ruling a large country like one would fry a small fish; since I'm no ruler of a large country, I have other fish to fry. If you think mixing oil of sandalwood with dragon's blood and ashes of wormwood for ink to write a counterclockwise talisman of unmanifestation so as to turn a dangerous wildfire threatening hundreds of homes into a small fox is "rationalizing," you must know something about rationalizing I don't. Magical taoism is the work of assisting the gods, is what it is. Is all it is... But, of course, you know better, as usual, you know what I'm up to far better than I do, right? 'cause you've got me pegged, don't you?

Beancurdturtle, what do you know about scientific (magical) taoism and the way it is practiced? Please share. Lin Ai Wei, this was the question I was responding to. The "bragging" about teachers and teachings was not happening, contrary to what your illuminated no-self, no-ego, or whatever it is that participates in forum discussions using your sig, has derived from my response. Nor was I questioning your teachers and teachings, obviously. I was simply answering forestofsouls question, honoring his (her?) desire to stay away from whoever it is that taught me. I may have mixed him (her?) up with you as the source of the question -- hope you don't mind, you don't have a self or an ego to mind anyway, right?

Do they mean "showing off my Chinese?" I think I mentioned the woefully early stage of my Chinese studies (and what about others who haven't done any?) -- I am fluent in several languages though, would you like to continue in the ones I know and you don't? just to even out the playground?

"Who is teaching Buddhism the way I perceive it?" Well, as a great Russian tongue-in-cheek guru, Koz'ma Prutkov, put it a couple centuries ago, "If anyone says one can embrace the infinite, spit him in the eye!" So obviously I'm not going to assert I've learned all of buddhism from everybody who ever taught it... have you, Lin Ai Wei? If you said yes, I'd have to follow the funny guru's suggestion (albeit virtually). If you said no, then I'd have to ask this... so then, why exactly do you think whoever taught you buddhism the way you perceive it has done a better job than whoever taught me? Because you're currently into it and I'm not? Well, how about... as the outcome of what I've learned I've killed the buddha, just as the Buddha himself said I should... while you're still attached... how about that? Maybe whoever taught me did do a decent buddhist job after all, what d'you reckon? If you seriously want to know, however... My first teacher was the first Westerner ever accepted as a monk to a Dzogchen (Tibetan Buddhist) monastery. He spent twelve years there (and three years before that, at the door, trying to get admitted and being turned down every day. They finally took him because he proved he meant business by not being discouraged by a thousand rejections.) He was a compassionate -- and passionate (surprise surprise!) -- and totally unique person. He was the one I heard the word "tao" from for the first time (although he wasn't a taoist -- but he was a scholar, among other things, and also perceptive enough to understand he must mention this word to me, specifically. I didn't have a clue. I asked him what tao was like. His response I will never forget: "Tao is like you." Didn't mean anything to me then, meant a lot a few years later.) By the way, you know what ultimately turned me off buddhism? I'm a fairly thorough investigator of subjects that interest me, also a Speedy Gonzalez of reading (three books in as many hours is quite realistic for me), so at some point I read pretty much everything on buddhism I could lay my hands on, and all the classics ever translated of course, and this one interesting word, "ignorance," kept being offered as the ultimate cause of everything we all know and love as the human condition. "Ignorance" seemed to be the true almighty god of buddhism, the creator of worlds, the destroyer of reality. However, for something this powerful, something that winds up being credited with acting as the cause of everything that ever happened in human history, its own origins seem a bit obscure. Who, and why, has put Ignorance in charge of the whole process of life? There's assorted creation myths I'm familiar with, Hindu to Zoroastrian to Babylonian to folk Chinese (which differ from scholarly taoist "uncreated" ones) to Judeo-Christian to modern scientific (Big Bang and all that jazz), and they all have someone, something, some event or entity or process, for the "main event" that has shaped reality as we now know it. Well, I looked high and low, and in Buddhism, this main event, process, entity, whatever it is, the Creator of All and the General Theory of Everything, is Ignorance. With no explanations offered as to the source of Ignorance itself and of Ignorance's omnipotence, only with prescriptions as to methods to overcome it. But this totally makes no sense to me. I am supposed to overcome a state that is just offered as a "given" without any rhyme or reason to it? You're Ignorant, they say, and everything you are is the outcome of Ignorance. Fine. But what the hell is Ignorance the Almighty, my creator and everybody else's, the outcome of? Huh?.. If I ever meet a Buddhist who has a good answer to this question, I'll take a second look at the rest of the deal. So any missionaries out there... here's your chance! Explain to me why the world (a funky place, have you noticed?.. and not all that simple and obvious, have you been paying attention?..) has been created by Ignorance of all things, and I might accept the rest of it... just please don't offer any demagogic or righteously-indignant sermons... an honest Ignorance Sutra an average Ignorant taoist mind like mine can grasp will do. Game anyone?

True. Some other attachments I meticulously cultivate. E.g., attachment to a regular taijiquan practice, to my cup of coffee, to the taoist Triple Treasure of Perfection, Nondecay, Immortality, to name a few. I like attachments. In fact, I call them something else. I call them connections. Relationships. The Glorious Glue that holds reality together. It's all a matter of choosing them wisely to me, not severing them indiscriminately. I still can't get over having sold a Chinese bracelet I got as a gift and was deeply attached to till one dark day someone who thought I could do without it talked me into selling it. It was years ago and I still regret having disattached myself from a friend, and still feel incomplete without its cool, caressing weight on my wrist. It's losing attachments sloppily and unconsciously, or else sacrificing them (counterintuitively) on the altar of a man-made ideology, religion, dogma, that I see as a problem, not gaining them assertively and cultivating them in full awareness. People you used to be close with and no longer are. Places where you were happy that you will never see again. Biodiversity on Earth. Your own tears shed for someone who wasn't worth it. As a John Lennon song goes, "in my life, I've loved them all."

Oh, I never watched it for years, I started when a family member was very ill and couldn't do much else. I just kept him company. For myself, I never turn it on (no attachment! )

For a good kiss, I'd join you in that armchair, baby. Online flirting over and out. Thanks for elucidating on your stance, I appreciate the effort and respect the overall picture. No TV? You ARE special. Even I have one.

Yes, of course. Buddhism is much bigger than what I know about it, wider, deeper, oh of course, infinitely so. Yet, like anyone else who has an "opinion" about it, whatever it is based on, so too am I quite capable of having an opinion, of gleaning a picture for myself from reading, doing, and talking to others who have done, have read, have followed, have spoken "about" it. If my picture is different from that of others, it's not because it's not humble enough I don't think -- it's because it's mine, and it is what it is. I don't like buddhism. You can tell me I don't like it because I don't know it, don't know all of it, don't know enough of it, and it may well be true. But here and now, in the here-now moment, knowing what I know, having heard and read what I have heard and read, and having experienced what I have experienced, I don't like it. This can't be changed, guys, so please just let me feel what I feel, OK? I'm not inviting anyone to feel the same way about buddhism, and I respectfully decline any and all invitations to feel the way someone else feels about buddhism. I feel about buddhism much the way one of my favorite authors, a radical environmentalist named Derrick Jensen, feels about buddhism. He lectures quite a bit, talking to very different audiences, right, left, young, old, poor, wealthy, powerless, powerful... and usually his message, which can shred anyone's belief system to pieces, is accepted no matter how unorthodox his approach is, with the exception, he asserts, of only two sacred cows he can't touch without alienating the audience -- any audience: buddhism and porn. These two subjects he learned to leave well alone, because any non-liking is off limits, the audience turns immediately hostile. I should leave it well alone too I guess. But before I do, let me say it once again. I don't like buddhism. I don't extend this attitude to any resident buddhists personally, so please nobody take it personally. It's not you I don't like. It's just buddhism...

Um, my Chinese is still quite rudimentary, but according to my studies to date, "just be" as something that doesn't constitute a "doing" of some sort is only possible to formulate in English and other Indo-European languages, but not in a process-oriented language like Chinese. The grammar of a process-oriented language prohibits a petrified "just being" -- everything is a flow, everything is a doing (including the non-doing of the taoist kind which is famous for its very special ability to "do nothing yet accomplish everything." However, the ocean, which is one good example of this modus operandi of things in complete harmony with tao, does accomplish something while doing nothing... whereas an armchair philosopher who now smokes pot, now watches TV, and now reads Tao Te Ching, is also doing nothing -- but accomplishes, also nothing. Nothing for self, nothing for others.) That's why one can say "I am a philosophical taoist" in English, but not in Chinese (not within the structure of accepted grammar anyway, although of course awkward literal translations of foreign concepts are always possible.) In grammatically correct classical Chinese, you can only say "I do taoism," or "I don't do taoism." Which is exactly my point re "philosophical taoism" -- it simply "can't be done," except in the mind of an Indo-European speaker. Good comments indeed, with the exception of your comment re my "chauvinistic" something or other. Name-calling is a good example of something you "do" occasionally without necessarily "being" a "name-caller." Right? Just because you "just do it" on occasion doesn't reduce you to "just being it" -- thank god!

All similarities between taoism and buddhism disappear if one realizes that buddhism ultimately sees life, the live process following birth, as wrong, and the only "right" way to be, as never being born, never "falling" (from the grace of emptiness and nothingness) into the world of manifestations. Supposedly, once you manifest, you're already screwed! And it's all your fault!! You should work on stopping that or else. So emptiness is a preferred, "right," "good" state to a buddhist. To a taoist, it is nothing of the kind. Emptiness and manifestation is a cycle, and to the same extent that "being is rooted in nonbeing," the opposite is every bit as true -- "nonbeing is rooted in being." Taoism, in other words, is isomorphic (you can go either way between emptiness and the ten thousand things, both directions are normal and natural, and neither direction is "wrong"); whereas buddhism is anisomorphic -- to a buddhist, there's only one "right" direction, towards nonbeing, emptiness, away from being, manifestation. But like I said in the very first post entered above, it doesn't yield to words easily, if at all, but I've an experiential frame of reference. I did buddhism before I discovered taoism. I was following all the prescriptive and prohibitive moves -- right thoughts, right actions, right words, yada yada. Meditations were wonderful and took me out of my body and into emptiness... and eventually my body rebelled and retaliated. Taoist meditations were difficult and painful and extracted me from emptiness (which, when accessed via taoist practices, turned out to be dynamic and creative albeit empty, unlike buddhist emptiness that was lethargic and unimaginative), and put me back into my body and taught my mind to stay put in my body and do the housecleaning. So it did. And when it did, the meaning of the I Ching's hexagram "Difficulty In The Beginning," which is understood as the inevitabe filling of the space between heaven and earth with individualized beings, became clear to me. It became clear that seekers of emptiness who would clean the space between heaven and earth of the process of individuation of beings are basically hostile to life on earth-- what Laozi calls "the followers of Death." Buddhist emptiness is not compatible with life -- one must transcend life in order to "get there." Taoist emptiness is a tool I use in taiji, e.g., and for ten thousand other things too... It's cool... It's alive.

You know, WF, this argument, which I'm sure is coming from the goodness of your heart and, usually, from the goodness of other hearts warmed up by it, is as old as tao herself: "anyone can follow the way in his or her unique way." So... since this is easily the most popular (and really nice... it's always hard to argue with nice, you know...) view out there and I happen to disagree with it, I think I might owe everyone (no, not everyone, but at least some of the bums) an explanation as to why. So here goes. Laozi is said to have spent two years in his mother's womb (hence his nickname Laozi, "old boy"). He is believed to have grown into a wise sage precisely because of that, because of that initial advantage. The Chinese believe that the most important time of one's life, the determining, path-setting time, is spent in the womb (in the Earlier Heaven), before birth. They believe the difference between one life and the other is largely the outcome of what happened then and there. So... why don't we compare notes and see whether the part of Laozi's path that is traditionally viewed as the most important one is the same, or even similar, to ours. This can give us a good idea as to whether our paths are, or can ever be, parallel, close, similar -- --or if, alternatively, they will diverge so far and wide from the start that "following Laozi's path" can only be a "verbal possibility," i.e. something one can "say" or "think," but not a realistic systemic possibility, not something that can take place in reality. So let's examine the path where it starts systemically in real life (rather than in someone's head). Laozi's mother took no artificial, empty, or toxic food substitutes while she was pregnant. No chemicals, no frankenfoods, no prescription drugs, nada. She didn't sit in traffic breathing petroleum fumes and assorted carcinogens while pregnant. She didn't polish her nails with brain-blood barrier-piercing neurotoxic solvents and didn't wash her hair with same. She didn't follow a man-made schedule of sleep and wakefulness that wrecks havoc in a woman's hormonal and overall metabolism (all of the messed-up hormones going straight to the baby via the umbilical cord and orchestrating its development in their transmorgified image and likeness). She wasn't partaking of any antidepressants and CNS suppressors like fluoride with her drinking water, so Laozi didn't get any either. She didn't have to yo-yo between a career and her pregnancy, she didn't have to think of her female, pregnant state as a nuisance, as an annoying interference into some "normal" state prescribed by society which treats womanhood, pregnancy, breastfeeding, etc., as an embarrassing and shameful disability, somewhat more stigmatizing than alcoholism and somewhat less than an out-of-control crack cocaine addiction. She never took any crack cocaine either, incidentally. She was producing normal rather than abnormal levels of cortizol and adrenaline because her overall level of stress was human, normal, situational -- rather than chronic and mechanical and induced nonstop by everything at all times (electromagnetic fields, VLF fields, elevated background radioactivity, depleted ozone layer, global warming, not to mention the cumulative effects of the presence in the invisible environment of hundreds of millions of lost souls from all the wars and holocausts still to come, on a scale not only unknown in her time but simply unimaginable). She herself didn't undergo degenerative thymus involution by age five brought about by childhood vaccinations, because she didn't get any, so her immune system and her Protective Qi were working mighty fine, so no autoimmune or chronic degenerative disease was threatening her little boy. She didn't suffer from depression because it's hard to suffer from depression when you are not being repressed in your basic life functions, so her fetus didn't get his monoamines-processing neural pathways rewired before birth by sketchy levels of those of his mother. This, basically, is the very first few inches of the iceberg I would be willing and able to expose in its entirety, all the kilometers-thick mass of it, but I'm going to stop now at the level of these first two inches and assert the following: this iceberg, in its entirety, is in your way in your WAY. (I mean a generic "you," not anyone specifically.) This iceberg is between you and the Way, blocking your Way. This iceberg blocks your access to tao. It was much smaller in Laozi's time, but even then, taoism was invented for the specific purpose of removing it from the way, breaking through the blockage. And today, when it has grown exponentially bigger... anyone tells me it's not there... anyone tells me it's not there I call Captain Titanic. And that's the tip of the iceberg of my personal reasons to believe that natural, spontaneous, unimpeded access to tao "any which way" is a thing of the past, long, long gone past. And that's why I am paying close attention to what people knew about tao who lived in that long gone past, and not much to what people think they know about her now. Because I don't think Captain Titanic knew about the iceberg, or he would have chosen a "very different path" instead of the "any which way" one. Also sprach Taomeow.

I don't think anyone can be ready for what the fable describes -- I mean, the master boasts of forgetting specific things, which he has to remember in order to boast he forgot them to begin with. It's like the old joke about not thinking of the white monkey. Sit down and think of anything you wish, and you will become enlightened provided you don't think of the white monkey -- not once! Perhaps what he means is wei wuwei, an advanced practice indeed -- which dissolves the mind around the white monkey -- so one can remember the white monkey at all times, but never think of it. However, the moment he says to someone, "I did indeed forget the white monkey," 'tis the end of it, he has forgotten to forget about the white monkey and snapped out of the mind of tao right back into the ordinary human mind! Tricky, tricky!