Taomeow

Actually, these are postulates of Obsolete Physics. Modern Physics asserts photons are shadows of antiphotons that derive their existence from antimatter and antienergy which account for most of the main events taking place in the universe as we speak. That's "events," not "objects." Ever seen a picture of Minkovsky's space of events? It typically starts with one photon, and all the subsequent events fall into a cone spreading out into infinity where each event could have interacted with this one photon -- and this cone of events lies amidst an immeasurably larger infinity of events that could not have been influenced by this photon. You know of course if you ever dabbled in the algebra of sets (a branch of calculus) that infinities are measurable and differ in size considerably. E.g., the infinity of irrational numbers is infinitely greater than the infinity of the rational ones. So, basically, the same is true for light and shadow: the infinity of events in the universe with any light in them is infinitely smaller than the infinity of events with no light in them, which still do take place -- go check out the nearest black hole if you don't believe me.

What exists is a relationship between light and shadow. Neither one exists by itself. Modern physics says so.

Get a couple of those ubiquitous Chinese musical balls and make a habit of playing with them whenever you're doing nothing else with your hands. Become proficient. Get a set with instructions for various exercises you can do in addition to the simple rotations. Flick your hand open-close open-close a hundred times as fast as you can. (You won't be able to do a hundred repetitions right away, it's the goal for later. Later, do a thousand!) Learn and practice the mudras (yoga for the hands). Make sure you are getting enough magnesium and B vitamins in your diet.

A shadow is actually "something." According to Don Juan of Castaneda's writings, it even has free will and can act independently of the person who's casting it. Then again, there's a Russian play called The Shadow where the shadow of a relatively nice guy becomes separated from him and, in this independent, shadowy capacity, grabs and abuses political power! Then there's Jungian shadows... and the Japanese thing-no-thing... and the annoying vitreous floaters (which can range from insignificant to overwhelming) whose shadows have far greater impact on the affected person's life than the actual "real" object behind them... and, last but not least, I can cause my shadow to wiggle its toes without wiggling my own!

Thanks for your thoughts, Freeform. So, whether "why" can be useful, and how so? The "why" I was talking about, the "feeling why," the "systemic why," is a bit like classical taoist definitions of all things systemic, nonlinear, "all things process" -- which can be described in terms of what they "do" but can't be defined in terms of what they "are" -- except in a roundabout way, e.g. by stating what they are "not." Just like Laozi's "non-definitions" of tao: "The tao that can be told is NOT the eternal tao... The name that can be named is NOT the eternal name..." The "feeling systemic why" is NOT a linear question that can be asked head-on. Rather, it is the roundabout outcome of an insight you emerge with upon diving deep into your developmental history. It's a "that's why" containing precise answers, not to one question but to a whole scintillating field of meanings, events, patterns, lots and lots of things you do in you life, with your life -- you emerge with a matching field of understanding "why" you do the things you do the way you do them, and it's unimpeacheable, this kind of "that's why" -- it's absolute knowledge, not relative information that can be obtained from others. You were talking about a white dot on your (generically speaking) face that only another can alert you to if you don't have a mirror? Another can see the white dot, but can't know its origin and the extent of its significance in your life. Now suppose you descend into your own lost, repressed, unconscious early memory and discover that you were smacked by your father when you were two years old and your mother applied some make-up to cover up the bruise. Suppose you have repressed the memory but have retained the unconscious pattern you learned this way: "whenever I hurt, I must cover it up." Suppose the white dot on your face NOW is something you applied yourself this morning, without knowing WHY you did -- you're just in the habit of applying some zinc ointment (e.g.) to your face from time to time. Get to the feeling memory of the original event and now you know why. Now you have your "that's why." You loathed going to work today, knowing your boss is in a bitchy mood from yesterday and will be picking on you, and that's why you have a white dot on your face. And that's why you dislike women who use make-up. And that's why you never show your feelings when you hurt. And that's why you feel angry around anyone who does -- they have the luxury you don't, they are free to show how they feel while you must wear the cover-up make-up. That's why you broke up with your wife. That's why you have tension in your shoulders which a chiropractor can't mend -- your muscles are still clenched, thrity or forty or sixty years later, from wanting with all your being to hit your father back and never being allowed to feel it, let alone do it. And so on... That's the inner "why" of the white dot on your face. How can another possibly know?...

What do you mean yuck? Caviar! Is yum!! Nettle infusion is also good but the ancients never traveled thousands of miles to get it -- for caviar, they did.

Thanks, Sean, you're not too shabby yourself!

Those were the times when only poverty (alas, the standard condition of most people most of the time anywhere "civilized") could prevent one from getting stellar nutrition of the kind that isn't within our reach today. Even if we don't go as far as the times of the "ancients..." ...why even my own great-grandparents, in central Europe, ate, on a regular seasonal basis, some twelve varieties of wild forrest berries and about as many garden-cultivated ones, about twenty varieties of wild mushrooms, apples of fifteen different kinds, pears of a dozen different kinds, freshwater fish of two dozen kinds, not just poultry and game and domestic animals meat but their organ meats and marrow bones, bread from grains grown in mineral-rich soils without carcinogenic chemicals, fermented/pickled vegetables from wooden barrels with all their beneficial critters alive and well, and so on. I wish, after years of yoga and martial arts, that I could hold my spine as erect as my great-grandmother does in a picture taken circa the beginning of the 20th century where she's surrounded by her ten kids. This kind of posture comes from bioavailable calcium since birth -- e.g., real milk from real cows (neither exist anymore, at least for most people most of the time), homemade ice cream made with cream that is one hour old mixed with wild strawberries, and of course unpolluted atmosphere that allows enough sunlight year round for vitamin D to be made in the body and help deposit all that calcium in the bones rather than in the toilet... all these and more resulting in the regal posture of a woman who, after ten pregnancies and breastfeeding all her kids, not only didn't have any osteoporosis but in fact had nothing going on with her health that would prevent her from climbing trees at 87 (cherry-picking). That was then, this is now... Now we need all the help we can get from things we eat and drink. So I would encourage everyone, taoist or not, to get friendly with herbal potions. Don't know if it's going to conserve my jing, but modern degenerative diseases brought about by multiple nutritional deficiencies is something I can definitely do without.

Way to go! There IS an inherent paradox in this, definitely, that of yin-yang duality being born of yin-type nonduality rather than of anything devoid of both yin and yang attributes. I've seen a far out dissertation by a taoist researcher (not "researcher of taoism" but a "researching practitioner") that basically proves, with extensive references to dozens of authentic ancient taoist scriptures, that Laozi in his immortal deity capacity (and he IS attributed this capacity in all major taoist sects, not just that of a mere-mortal author of a book) is proved beyond a reasonable doubt to have been his own mother. I kid you not. If I find the bookmark, I'll post the reference. Did you study David Twicken's feng shui? He's not the source of what I was talking about but I know him for a useful and to-the-point author, one of those I would definitely tell a beginner to study so as to get the overall picture. In particular, the genesis-related stuff he presents is very clear -- tao's very own family tree in plain view, right from the very beginning of time and non-beginning of non-time.

Never before have I heard of Laozi being called a feminist, but if you so choose... who am I to blow against the wind? He didn't "substitute" "mother" for "father" though, he just happened to notice how reality works and describe it accurately. "Yin," my friend, is not a "gender," it's an "attribute of reality." That it happens to intersect with what taoism sees as "the female principle" ain't no coincidence and ain't no artificial notion concocted by a human mind, whether feminist or male chauvinist. E.g., a "vortex" naturally and spontaneously has the properties of yin, as opposed to a "peak" that naturally and spontaneously has the properties of yang. Your name is a yin name, and you gave it to yourself, no big bad feminist did it to you. You just chose the yin principle to express yourself, for reasons best known to yourself. This doesn't make you a woman, right? or a feminist? Yin is yin. Wuji, while it "precedes" duality (a precarious statement in and of itself, since "time" is not an attribute of wuji and nothing precedes or antecedes anything in it), possesses certain attributes that the classics describe as "tao-in-stillness" or "Earlier Heaven" or "the world of the unmanifest." If you consider the attributes of yang -- motion, Later Heaven, the manifest phenomena, you will have no trouble understanding why Laozi sees the "mother" and not the "father" of all things in the progenitor tao. (Tip: the egg just sits there in the dark stillness doing nothing, accomplishing everything; the sperm run the race to get somewhere so as to manifest something. Remember? It happened to you in this-here life, surely you should remember what wuji is, after all that's where you come from, like every other good little boy?! )

Please welcome, and please consider: your suggestion that "when we simply experience..., etc." we sort of get it right on autopilot follows the translation version that asserts, "The Way that can be experienced is not true" -- have you noticed?.. Looks like you might want to pick one. Either we simply experience, and it's the true Way. Or we simply experience, and it's not the true Way. Either one is fine by me, but you can't really have it both ways, what d'you reckon? By the way, as an experiencer of the Way whose experiencing most certainly includes, but by no means is limited to, the reading, writing and speaking of taoist philosophemes, I submit that only the Way that is experienced is true. I believe that's what Laozi meant too when he said what he really said: the name of the experience is not the experience, the map of the territory is not the territory, the Way is not the philosophy of the Way.

If we consider Laozi's "know the white but keep the black" as an instruction as to how to differentiate between privatives and non-privatives, the non-privative appears to be black. "Know the male but keep the female" is another way he puts it. All that exists is a privative; while all nonexistence, the limitless potential from which all existence comes, is real. "Being comes from non-being." Enlightenment is a privative; reality is endarkenment. Wuji is not hermaphroditic, it is essentially yin, the "true yin" of the classics. That it gives birth to yang is part of the way true yin works. This crucial step is often overlooked by the seekers of the true yang. Tao-in-stillness, aka wuji, unlike "father in heaven" of all Indo-European religions, appears to be a girl. "Mother of all things," according to Laozi, not "father of all things" and not "hermaphrodite of all things." And, yes, I do believe that whoever thinks he's smarter than Laozi is a privative.

No, technology is usually a male thingie, not a bitch at all. More like a bunch of phallic dreams -- a tank, a cannon, a gun, a bulldozer, a rocket... talk about penis envy, ever heard of a woman inventing a machine that resembles a penis? Nope, only guys are interested in making machines that can do what their inventor wishes HE could... Artificial womb, huh? Wouldn't they need artificial sperm to insert into that -- men are running out, remember? Scientists -- I mean, male scientists (and of course women who, if they want to advance in society as "scientists," are forced to function as men, not as women, for lack of a socially rewarding role for a woman functioning as a woman) are always "on their way" to radically and spectacularly solve all our problems -- like cancer, or the common cold. It's always just around the corner. Don't hold your breath. The womb exists. No need to wait for a male scientist to invent it. Could be a long wait, you know, guys are FAR better at inventing penis-like contraptions, in our collective historic experience.

True. I don't see what's going on with men as "feminization" though. De-masculinization, yes. But a cow who's lost some weight doesn't turn into a gazelle, and a man who has lost some masculinity doesn't turn into a "feminized" phenomenon. He merely becomes exceedingly lousy at being a man, at even having the first idea of what a "real man" is about (alas, the above discussion has provided ample evidence). Not because he has become feminized -- but because he has become, um... physically limited, emotionally flattened, intellectually empoverished, and sexually devastated (you better believe it... nine out of ten men today have abnormally low sperm counts, with whatever sperm they do have providing half-dead low quality samples -- coupled with all manner of erectile dysfunctions that are currently more prevalent than the norm). No wonder the neurotic de-masculinized man is looking for who to blame. No wonder he blames who he's always blamed -- the woman, of course. Is she really at fault? Oh, absolutely. Like I said in my very first entry in this thread, a mother can do a lot of damage. The enslavement of women has this interesting flip side -- no one but a woman can produce a SON, and there's only one place where an enslaved woman is powerful: by the infant's crib. Don't you realize that if you take ALL other power away from her, this is where ALL her power will be acted out, all her control, all her "I'm the boss, I do as I please?" Seriously... do you think women in harems, women not allowed to show their faces, women not allowed to walk in the street without male supervision, and so on, have no power? They have pent-up, frustrated, usurped power -- and only one place in the world to act it out. Don't you think they do?.. You can bet your afterlife on it. So, the woman-know-her-place folks, that's right... the woman knows her place. Her place of power. Her womb that will make YOU. Her freedom or enslavement, her natural or unnatural situation, her normal or abnormal life -- her body knows which one it is in. And this knowledge translates, on the level of the "material and immaterial" alike, into the kind of man she will make YOU. So why don't you cut the crap, kneel before her, kiss her hand, and beg for mercy and forgiveness... before ALL your sperm dies in a generation or two. (Women don't actually need men to reproduce if it happens, did you know that? Partenogenesis it's called, we can have daughters ad infinitum via this mechanism when the last sperm keels over. Step carefully, guys...)

Thank you! About that torture table... Ah, metaphors. So succinct, so poetic, so often misguiding. I have great respect for BKF (is he the "Bruce" you meant?)-- so maybe you could ask him if/when you have a chance... What if getting off the torture table only results in whoever is torturing you getting you back ON the table and strapping you down? Again and again?.. And suppose you don't even see his or her face, you just end up on the torture table every time no matter what you do -- and suppose you don't even feel his or her touch, you just end up on the table without knowing how and why you end up on the table? again and again? What good is it to get off the table if "why am I on the table to begin with" remains unknown? But it gets worse. What if the torture table is not outside -- what if it's inside you? How do you get off it? Would you ask a doctor to surgically remove it or something? They can do the next best thing, you know, they can give you a pill that will keep you insensitive to the torture -- the torture will go on but for a bunch of hours every day you won't be feeling it. You won't be feeling much of anything else of course, and some people think it's a good enough price to pay for not feeling the torture table inside. No torture, no joy. Comfortably numb. But wouldn't it be better to really get off it for good, or get it removed from inside you for good? and doesn't this "how to get off it" depend on finding out "how and why did a torture table of this particular design get inside me to begin with?" As for developmental history... ...Suppose you have a little sharp stone in your shoe. Suppose you got it in your shoe when you fell off the cliff and hit your head on a rock and got knocked out. You wake up surprisingly OK and, aside from a minor headache, feeling normal... but the trauma happens to have knocked out a piece of your consciousness out of you, it happens to have interrupted the continuity of your perception of yourself. So now you don't know that a few events and concepts are missing from your consciousness (well, how can you know that they're missing -- they are, well, missing!) You happen to not know what a "shoe" is, what a "sharp stone" is, what a "stone in the shoe hurting the foot" is. And so you take an aspirin for the headache and get going about your normal day -- limping, for some inexplicable reason. You automatically accept it as "the state of your being" that you are someone who walks like that, it's normal and natural, you don't know any other way, you walk the way you walk and you also don't know any other way to feel. It's not a great way to feel but you may call it great if you like, who's to stop you? -- you don't remember feeling any other way, and so you may assume this default state you're currently in to be not merely normal but great, perfect, enlightened -- whatever you like to think about it. You have nothing in your feeling memory to compare it to. Now later in the day you meet a friend who goes, hey, you're limping, what happened? What do you mean what happened, you respond. Nothing happened. But why are you limping? What do you mean limping? I naturally walk like that, you say. It's a special enlightened walk of an enlightened sage, you say. No no no, the friend says, there's probably something in your shoe... let me see. What's a shoe? This! This thing on your foot -- is a shoe! No no no, you say, it's my natural enlightened leg, it's like that because it is the leg of a kind and compassionate man. Nonsense, the friend says, let's take the shoe off and see what's bothering you. Nothing is bothering me, you protest, but she ignores your protests, grabs your foot, unties the laces, removes it, and shakes out the sharp little stone. See, she says. That's what it was. How on earth did it get there? Why didn't you shake it out? I don't know how it got there, I don't remember... I didn't know it was there, I didn't know there was something to shake out that didn't belong, something that wasn't part of the real me... Ahh, this feels good.... Oh my god, now I really know what feeling good feels like... Gosh, I had no idea... Well, your friend says, so since the moment your got this thing in your shoe without knowing you did, every step you ever took was being determined by it , but you weren't conscious of it. You were walking the way it made you walk and you thought you were just doing it because you choose to? Silly you... So, Pietro, working with "developmental history" is finding out what in your current make-up is, and has developed from the start, as "the real you," and what is, alternatively, a little stone in the shoe that you mistake for a part of the real you because you don't remember it being any other way, that really isn't. Or, in other words, it's your systemic (not in the head alone!!!) memory of yourself from the beginning of this-here life. From the moment you put the shoes on, your very first pair, and beyond. From the moment you were too young to wear shoes, from the moment you were too young to walk, from the moment you were too young to crawl... but never, at no point in the past, were you too young to feel! So if something happened that caused you to forget the feeling, to lose the feeling memory, to lose the ability to itemize your own life from the start and tell that everything that you know as you is really you and nothing but you -- if you can't remember, it means this thing that happened was a stone you had to encapsulate "outside your consciousness" so as not to feel it -- because it was hurting you and you had no other way to deal with it but to go comfortably numb in that area. And that area. And that and that and that area... So when you're older and stronger and DO have other ways to deal with things that hurt you and never went away (and they never go away until you lose the numbness, find they ARE there to begin with, and shake them out) -- that's when revisiting your developmental history, your very own way to have come to wherever you're at right now, and checking it for anything and everything that doesn't belong, might be a very good idea.

Have to agree here, but think carefully... which people when? are capable? of shaping? YOU? by the very way they relate to you?.. Only mom and dad, and only very very early. Why? Because the window of opportunity for forming any patterns for any relationships with anyone or anything in the world is open till you are five years old, and most of it gets imprinted by the age of six months -- 90% of all "relationship-related" connections are hardwired by then; and another 5% get hardwired between the ages of six months and five years; and only 5% constitute "software" that you are going to add on top of that between the ages of five years and the rest of your life. A hard fact of cognitive neuroscience. Other species have it even worse. If a dog doesn't lick her newborn puppies within thirty minutes of birth, they die, in one hundred percent of cases -- and no amount of licking LATER is going to change it, nor any other interventions, any other "relationships." So what happens in the earliest relationship, or fails to happen, is it. The rest will be a bunch of repeat performances by different means -- same old, different wrapper, always unconscious of the underlying early program. (Unless consciousness is restored and the condition cured.) As for the rest of what you tried... I have to applaud your spirit of empirical hands-on experiment, that's the best way to go... but, sorry, you've used a rather useless technique. (You can't invent a good technique for this anymore than you can invent your liver metabolism or Chen style taijiquan -- you have to find out "how" to do it, it's not on the surface at all, otherwise way more people would be tweaking with their hangovers by ordering their livers about, and my taiji teacher would be jobless after forty years of earning qualifications for the job -- why bother if anyone can just invent it?..) The "feeling why" is not "in the dantien," you are not your dantien. You are you. The "feeling why" is YOUR feeling, not your dantien's feeling, and not a bunch of "thoughts about feelings" in your head coupled with "sensations in various body parts." Feelings are not thoughts, and thoughts about feelings aren't feelings. Sensations aren't feelings either, believe it or not. Feelings are what the whole of you consciously experiences, not what this or that anatomical part of you senses nor what your head thinks about it. E.g., love is a feeling, pain is a sensation; the pain of losing love is a feeling, the pain of stubbing your toe is a sensation... got the picture? ;-) Similarly, "she doesn't love me" is a thought; while the combined total of your heart rate, blood pressure, core body temperature, metabolic rate, immune functions, hormonal output, etc., as affected directly by feeling unloved, knowing she doesn't love you, and being in pain because of that -- in their integral systemic totality constitute a "feeling." The total systemic feeling of being unloved, in this particular devastating case. So in order to start working with feelings at all, before moving on to the "why" level, it's always a good idea to find out what they are and what they aren't. I hope if you experiment with ways to determine what is and what isn't a feeling, you won't find it boring. Oh, and by the way, another rule of thumb. If it's boring, it's not a feeling. ;-)

Freeform, 1. I agree, Armenian coffee is the best even though I've drank it as made by Turks, Greeks and Cypriots, as well as Arabs, Austrians and Brazilians. 2. I used to live in the country now known as "the former Soviet Union" and Armenia was part of it then. Now don't blush or anything but I have to say this -- the best-looking guys anywhere in the world hands down, not just the best coffee, is my clearest memory of a vacation once spent there -- and this cat did get around quite a bit in some, though not all, of her nine lives. 3. The question "why" is useless only if you seek a mental , intellectual, ideational, etc., "explanation." Yep, that's useless all right. It is, however, the single most important question to ask when you seek to understand yourself systemically and, most importantly, not to just accept "I feel a certain way" as a given but to find out why you feel the way you feel. Of all my experiences, this one, finding out what it is that makes me tick on the feeling level, has been the single most enlightening one -- nothing comes close. To know yourself is not to know "how you work," it's to know "why you work the way you work." I see it as the only (sorry everybody, I mean "I, me, see it this way," of course) -- the only path that leads to freedom. You can only be free if you are equipped to choose your own behaviors consciously. If you aren't, you wind up running programs in response to buttons pushed, while knowing nothing about the programs, the whoever wrote them for you, the how exactly and when exactly, nor of your status as a piece of unconscious-button-operated machinery of which you yourself ain't no master. Only obtaining a precise and systemic response to "why" gives you a choice to respond or not respond to those programs, to retain or dismantle the buttons, to have control over yourself -- which is the only thing I understand as "freedom." So, basically, "know thyself" is another way to say "know why you are the way you are," and whoever doesn't know and won't know has effectively agreed to be a slave of whatever or whoever "makes them" the way they are. The kind of "why" I mean is the sword that cuts the chains.

http://www.nuclearnrg.com/manwoman.bmp

With smiles to Smile and Xeno, Ian, I'm glad we're in agreement on a point I see as crucially important -- as for arguing with positions that I happen to see as hopelessly off (in some other threads of late, e.g), I think I've learned by now to "just drop it" -- who am I to blow against the wind?.. As for your question -- wow meow, I could spend the rest of my life talking about how I experience self-knowledge and bore you and everyone else stiff pretty soon -- so I'll try to be at least relatively brief. You say, to you it is always physical, not "knowledge in words." I say, to me the experience of self-knowledge is the experience of integration of all parts and aspects of the entity I know as "me" in the continuity of its existence in space-time (first and foremost, key word "continuity") and beyond (later, when the space-time aspects have "all" been integrated properly). The main tool of integration is systemic feeling, and the main tool of systemic feeling is access to systemic (not mental or verbal) memory. Self-knowledge is systemic, i.e. physical is meaningful, physical IS knowledge. Words matter when they can accurately reflect some aspect of feeling, words matter when they are part of me as much as emotions and sensations, and they don't when they aren't, when they are "empty sound" and not an integral part of "me." Words are high above the main action of self-knowledge (not hierarchically above, more like anatomically... for words and thoughts are physically "higher" in my body than the bulk of emothons and physical sensations: thoughts that can be expressed in words arise from below and end up being formulated way on top of the neocortex, the topmost layer of my brain; and words that express these thoughts travel anatomically high too, ending up at the tip of the tongue; and I don't live there but I don't disown these parts of me either -- I mean, I'm not my neocortex and I'm not my tongue, but both are parts of me and self-knowledge includes, though is by no means limited to, what they're up to) -- so, I'll give you an example of what I mean by "self-knowledge via integration." I like coffee. This is part of self-knowledge, right? I just know I like it, and don't need someone else to tell me that I do -- this is knowledge based on physical feeling. But what if someone ("me," e.g.) asks, "why?" Why do you like coffee? This is where self-knowledge based on integration begins. Because I like to keep my dopaminergic system in good repair. Because I'm Wood with too much Fire in my chart in Chinese astrology, and coffee gives some food to my Fire without depleting my proprietary Wood. Because it improves communication between the left and right hemispheres and facilitates connections, it's a beverage that aids integration. Because it is a natural sunscreen and I live in a sunny climate and don't like chemical sunscreens. Because of all the scientific papers I read about coffee's propensity to prevent several types of cancer, diabetes, neuromuscular disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinsons, and keep basal metabolism at a level younger than one's biological age. Because I don't like puritannical denial of yummy harmless stimulants. Because nothing smells better in the morning. Because I've been taught by a cool guy how to make the best coffee in the world when I was a teenager serial-dating in Armenia one bright summer many moons ago and the memory is cool and I'm proud of the way I make my coffee -- still the best in the world. Because my lower dantien grumbles if I don't drink it. And so on. It could go on and on, and it's one tiny little aspect of "me" -- but once you start digging deeper into "why" -- "why me, why now, why this" -- an interesting thing transpires. No aspect of "me" is smaller than any other, they all tie in together into my developmental history and into who I am today and into everything it entails. This I believe is what the classics mean when they assert a sage can know the world without leaving her room, this is what "as above so below" means, this is self-knowledge equal to Knowledge, and to have an accurate "theory of me" means to have an accurate "general theory of everything." Key word "accurate..." "Why" do I need to pay attention to my dopaminergic system? Because I was born slighty premature and it is, as a result, slightly immature, which means additional difficulty in handling stress. Why was I born slightly premature? Because my mother never had patience with me. How do I know? I remember. Not in my head... I remember with my whole being what it feels like when your mother "has no patience with you." And so on... Self-knowledge is integration of everything that ever happened to "me" into everything that I will ever know as "me." "Everything" doesn't exclude anything...

I remember a passage from Opening The Dragon's Gate where Wang Liping is being taught how to handle mental chatter. Once a thought arises, immediately pass a judgement on it. Declare it right, declare it wrong, or declare "this is as far as it goes." I've tried it. Works like a charm. This technique is subtly but significantly different from assuming that "it's all false," in that some of your thoughts are indeed false but others are not false at all, in fact they are quite true; while still others are a problem not because they are false or genuine but because they are just opening lines that are dragging you into more of the story when you weren't planning to "go there." So this simple technique -- giving each thought the benefit of an assessment for "this thought specifically and no other," this non-lumping them all together into an indistingushable mass of "false stuff," seems to offer one's thinking mind some respect and recognition -- and a normal mind does want some respect, believe it or not, for its workings -- so if you offer it the benefit of aware respect, then it's likely to be satisfied and prepared to shut up (if getting it to shut up is the goal of the moment). It's as though you're dealing with a child -- ignoring whatever she has to say on the assumption it's a priori all without merit will maybe cause her to shut up, sulkingly, but it won't cause her to feel peaceful knowing she's had a fair chance to say all she had to say... so even if she shuts up, 'tis not in peace, it's in resentment and hurt feelings and a sense of being unresolved. Another trick I used to apply was to personify my every thought -- see it as a girl of a particular age, or a woman, animal, even machine -- a person with a personality or an object with a "behavior." They would all talk and talk competing for the limelight, and then I would bring one lovely lady to the foreground who would call out in a musical voice, "Please be quiet, everybody, and listen to me!" "Oh yeah? Why should we listen to you, who do you think you are?!" "I am the goddess of harmony," she would tell them, "I'm here to organize you all just so that everybody helps everybody else and no one is left out." That would instantly calm them all down, and she would get to work. She would undertake grouping and regrouping all my thoughts into compatible, non-antagonistic teams. You know, the thought who is really an infant with her incessant "I want, I need, I want, I need..." would get the thought that is a deity with her "I give, I'm generous, I'm rich, I've got everything" to mother her... The thought that is a warrior that goes "kill kill kill" would get a thought that is a suicidal teenager to put out of her misery... and so on. No one was left behind without a noble task, and they all loved the goddess of harmony...

I said, "personally, I believe..." -- which means my statement is based on "my experience" and "my understanding," which always and for all purposes suffice for "me" to have and express a "my opinion." I didn't present is as an "authoritative" opinion, and while I may or may not be entitled to an authoritative opinion, I am, at all times, entitled to "my opinion," and if I don't fail to specify it's "my opinion," I believe I'm off the hook. However, if you mean to ask what exactly my experience is that causes me to have such an opinion: for some three years in the past, I worked with clients who have been physically, emotionally, and/or mentally damaged by all manner of new age endeavours. I have seen the damage, have listened to stories of how it came about, and have helped people undo the damage. Maybe. Here in Southern California, I see more people who, at one point or another in their lives, or currently, did or do this or that type of meditation, than anywhere else. However, after having lived on three continents, I submit they are "en masse" the most shallow, superficial, and spiritually fast-asleep bunch I've ever encountered anywhere. Maybe. Taoists (or at least those who don't belie the name) believe in the absolute relevance, every step of the way, of something I call developmental history, both personal and universal. Buddhists may or may not believe that their "self is entirely false," but I know for a fact that eliminating from consciousness things you don't know about yourself (by separating your "self" from some purported "non-self" that is bigger-better and throwing it into some universal garbage bin for "discarded selves" -- which I am yet to understand where they put exactly in their cosmology) is a ubiquitous defense mechanism , and it doesn't matter whether people resorting to it call themselves Buddhists or Christians or atheists or taoists -- in every case, the only "entirely false" identity or non-identity, self or non-self, is one put together by means of defensive ideation. The motivation for "discarding the self without knowing it" may seem philosophically wise or morally noble, but the true reason for the denial of "self" is mortal fear of knowing how exactly one's developmental history has shaped one into what one is or "isn't" today. The Way is the way of courage though, not of escapist denial, not of running scared from who you are on the basis of this entity's "unreality." "Know thyself" is a call for courage, not for self-aggrandation. Tao Te Ching is "The Way of Power," and true power needs no props from self-aggrandation of a "false self" -- but it is the powerful way of courageous self-knowledge, not the escape route to some blissful self-ignorance. At least that's what I've been able to discern so far.

I recommend the book by Deng Ming-Dao titled The Wandering Taoist. The protagonist's early years in a traditional setting of a rigorous monastic taoist school could give you an idea of "what to do when" in your own cultivation. He is shown being trained in physical, martial, and academic disciplines for several years, getting his body and his mind in a strong and supple shape before he is allowed to undertake his first-ever meditation. Personally, I believe it is the only right way to go about it. Meditation is a high level cultivation skill which has been sold to the public only recently as something simple and available to everyone at any time. Most people who think they mediate are really using various "relaxation techniques," which is not a bad thing of course but is just about as relevant for true meditation (that can only happen to a prepared, healed and strengthened bodymind) as being able to climb a flight of stairs is to being able to climb Mount Everest. Meditation is this level of skill; mistaking it for a relaxing stroll into "a peaceful mind" is common, and overwhelmingly irrelevant. For some reason, people who would never think they can scale Mount Everest without years of thorough preparation of the body and the mind often believe they are perfectly ready to scale a much higher summit, that of spiritual "otherworldliness," "enlightenment," "perfection-nondecay-immortality" anytime they have a few minutes to spare. Far out. So my advice, should you care to consider it, would be to concentrate your every effort on procuring an impeccably healthy, strong, supple body and an academically unsurpassed, competent mind at this time in your life, and forget all about other kinds of cultivation -- these are for later, when your will and your inner strength have been seasoned to a truly meditation-worthy shape. Do not sacrifice sleep; try to make the healthiest nutritional choices you can under the circumstances; temper your yi (reality-shaping intent) and learn to be guided by conscious intent in everything you do, focusing it on exactly the thing you are doing. Don't try to tie down your mind, something a great martial hero of 16th century Japan, Munenori, likened to "chaining a cat, a most horrible thing to do." Let it roam free... there's things for it to explore, the main one being yourself. Know thyself. Know who you are before you set out to modify this entity, know who you really are before attempting to become someone else. Good luck!

Hear hear! 'tis the truth. This is exactly why Laoists (and all "real," not pop, taoists are ideologically Laoists, Tao Te Ching being the ONLY taoist source of "ideological correctness" equally recognized and revered by ALL taoist schools and sects) -- this is exactly why they start out by recognizing the existence of this ancient imbalance already all-pervasive in the human "civilized" world, and focus on ways to correct it. "Know the male but keep the female." "I nourish at the Great Mother's breast" (not the Father In Heaven's barren nipple that nourishes Indo-European yang-skewed religions and ideologies). Our pop taoists are mostly Christians gone bad, but not so bad as to abandon the false-yang ideation they sucked in as infants with Father's imaginary "ideal," aka male, milk. Authentic taoism was, for millennia, the only ideology that had nothing bad to say about the woman and didn't discriminate against her either in ideation or in application. A taoist abbess who invented the martial art known today as Wing Chun or a taoist immortal female Sun Bu-er who invented dantien breathing are every bit as revered today by "real taoists" as they are ignored by "pop taoists" (who actually still haven't outgrown Father In Heaven's tit if you ask me...)

Pietro, if you want recipes, start a thread, I'll contribute. And no, I don't feel attacked, anymore than when I stub my toe chancing upon a brick in the dark alley. Nor do I feel like attacking, although a brief temptation was there... attacking not you, of course! -- but the demon of dumbing-down, heart-removing, penis-softening old-fashioned misogynistic machismo that possesses a few perfectly nice guys stuck in a loving embrace with him in a closet -- wherefrom I would liberate them by meticulously tearing the demon limb from twitching limb and leaving the cold demonic corpse behind in the dark abandoned closet where it belongs while letting the poor imprisoned guy out into the light -- if I had the time. Which alas I don't, so I'll have to leave it all at the recipes level, see you there!

Um... I'm sure men, being all-around superior, can cook on the internet, but my poor lil' dumb-redhead Mensa IQ is not enough to figure out how. If only I had those extra 4 points Vortex says could be mine if I was a man! Sigh... Oh, and I thought I was only supposed to have penis envy, I forgot about the IQ envy! Now with the penis it's really easy, all I need to do is remember to envy about 50% of earth's population who are all blessed with one while the other 50% to which I shamefully belong are cursed with none. This one is a no-brainer, even for a dumb redhead. But the IQ thing is crushing my neocortex! Let's see... if I score in the top 0.2% of the earth's population, am a woman, and am therefore supposed to score lower than 50% of the said population... no, it's reeeeeally too much for my inferior cognitive abilities. Help, O ye mighty Knights In Shining Armor! Damsel in distress!! Then again, I can send you a sample of a non-perishable culinary masterpiece via snail mail -- do you like Glass Strawberries? the ones that retain their shape but turn into luminous rubies in a preserve I learned to make from... oh no, from my grandmother, a woman! no, this won't work, because if you find it's really good you'll probably say a man cooked it and I'm lying to you that I did. So... no snail mail either... Now what am I to do?.. Maybe I can transmit my Wild Mushrooms-stuffed potatoes via my Fragrance-Emitting Qigong in the form of pure qi, can you open your meridians to receive it? I'll be sending a few items down the Stomach meridian, one up the Heart meridian, one up the Lungs meridian and one to circle the Spleen, and please let me know if you want a warming, cooling, neutral, or fiery-hot version. This will only work if you set your Digestive Fire on "high" and align the mingmen point with the North Pole Star and offer a bite to the Jade Emperor. If the Jade Emperor can taste my cooking and approves of it, he will nod three times, and then you will be able to taste it too. OK... if he doesn't nod... what am I gonna do?.. Go down in history as a TV dinner eater and a liar. Mercy me!