Taomeow

That's interesting, and probably true. I've read some scientific paper or other asserting that while modern people are overwhelmingly "visual," getting 85% of all their information through the eyes (that are indeed governed by the upper dantien, incidentally), our "prehistoric" ancestors were 85% kinesthetic, getting most of their information through touch, motion (and non-motion), internal and external visceral senses -- communicating with, first and foremost, their children this way (for children were carried on the mother's body pretty much at all times before they could walk), gravity, magnetic fields, temperature gradients, each other, and "the way things feel." Information was feeling and feeling was information... learning, competence, truth... Perhaps one reason I feel "prehistoric" and have all the spiritual leanings of a cave woman is that, according to NLP, I am primarily kinesthetic. (I usually remember directions for getting somewhere where I've driven by car in the following manner: "flat ground, pothole, pothole, left turn, flat ground, uphill, scraped road surface, right turn, downhill, bump, big bump, left turn, long downward slope, bump, here we are." Except all of these I register as somatosensory instructions, not verbal.) The Hindu cosmology has its eight yugas, cosmic periods, which they calculate based on our planet's proximity to (first and foremost) the sun but also other stuff in our immediate galaxy and beyond. This way they determine the kind of time we're in. So according to this system, currently we're in a dark ascending yuga, if I remember correctly. Whew. The second worst. Could have been worse. Could have been the dark descending one. In any event, a dark ascending yuga is no golden age, according to their calculations. The earliest dawn of the next golden age, should we make it there, is about seven thousand years away... Taoist time investigations are a separate topic for some future time I guess...

Yeah, I thought about getting it from a farmer or something, then decided against it. The cows are still required by law to be injected with all kinds of "vaccines" which permanently mess up their immune and endocrine system, and still are fed corn which mother nature never meant for these obligatory grass grazers to be able to digest properly, and the corn is still GM and heavily sprayed with toxic stuff. So they all have chronic endocrine disorders, chronic digestive tract diseases, and chronic udder inflammation resulting in pus in the milk (believe it or not there's legal guidelines on the books as to how much pus in the milk is acceptable), and so the mere fact that it's raw, when milk is coming from a chronically unwell cow, doesn't outweigh the overall poor nutritional value of the deal. Sadly, they don't mess up our food supply in one specific way (like pasteurization or some such), it's done in hundreds, thousands of ways... from the soil up and to the epidemic of never-quite-well, always-something-wrong-with-them populations globally. .

What they call milk today has about as much in common with the real thing as gasoline has in common with strawberries it once used to be. Yes, it was edible when it was strawberries, some six hundred million years ago. Yes, milk was an Indo-European staple for a bunch of thousand years. Then they started to produce it pharm-factory style, and it turned to poison. They shouldn't be calling it milk anymore, 'cause it isn't. I know what the real thing tastes like, and how it behaves... e.g., when left on the counter overnight, for two days, it sours into yummy "spontaneous yogurt," and then you heat it up slowly and get your wonderful cottage cheese. The "milk" one buys today doesn't ever sour -- it rots. Even the "raw" scam, which they import from New Zealand in powdered form and then dilute with water and sell as "raw organic milk" (I read an article where a Horizon Organics representative explained to the journalist that there's just not enough organic farmers and organic cows in the country to do it any other way. Duh. So then why do it at all? Oh... so they can charge four times more for the "raw organic" scam than for the "usual milk scam." In any event, it rots every bit as readily as the rest.) I buy almond powder for almond milk (made in Taiwan) at an Asian store.

I couldn't agree more. Hence my mantra, chanted at various times at various forums on assorted occasions and almost invariably to the chagrin of a sizable percentage of practitioners and non-practitioners alike: teacher! lineage! the real thing! from scratch! nothing out of context! no "creativity" till later (years later or decades later!) when the basics have been repaired! don't play with fire until you know where the fire extinguisher is stored, don't play with water until you have grown gills, don't play with wood until you have learned to absorb nutrients through your roots, don't play with earth until you can spin at her exact pace! Don't play with tao until she invites you to play... don't force your games on her... she's not interested. This said, taoist practice is taoist practice, and the mere fact that pop taoists (most of whom are really new agers and/or Christians in Laozi's or Zhuangzi's sheepskin) have a tendency to mess it up doesn't invalidate the fact that taoism IS, and has always been, a practice. The idea to approach it as a "philosophy" is a new agey idea that has never been around in the six thousand years of taoism's prior existence. Well, it is now. Welcome to the creative world of "anything goes as long as I say so." The most popular belief system, the most popular philosophy and practice of them all... (A hissing cat hisses to cleanse her Liver, for 'tis the Healing Sound for the Liver, is all, no offense meant to anyone personally.)

Yes but do you get carded when you buy booze?

Fatherpaul, I've seen many alchemical sources that read TTC as a coded internal-alchemical text -- the latest I've held in my hands was by Chia, but he is not alone in this reading by any stretch of imagination. Some chapters are outright how-to manuals... it's just that no translation gives you this, you have to read "around it" and practice "with it" to understand the alchemical meaning of its terms like "mysterious female" and "valley spirit" and "know the white but keep the black" and "careful like ice about to melt" and "being comes from nonbeing" and so on. Far as its "thought," it's a simple message to the socially powerful admonishing them to not abuse their power. Far as its "practice," it's a complex message to the alchemist about getting out of the powerless state and accumulating true power (the only sensible translation of the title is The Way And Its Power or, even better and closer, The Way Of Power) regardless of what the socially powerful are going to do with theirs. Taoist "practice" is never limited to the body and never leaves the body out, far as I've been able to discern. Taoist "thought" is therefore an oxymoron.

I shop at Asian markets all the time, and talk to people all the time. The short answer is, whoever knows, knows, and whoever doesn't, doesn't... but you can find pretty much everything you read about in the Materia Medica of TCM in pretty much every good Chinese herbal shop, and at least half that, in every good grocery shop in Chinatown. Guys, if anyone lives in NYC and has never been to Kamwo Tea And Herb Company on Grand street... please go, see what Chinese medicine IS! See how alive and well it is, and how stunning, and how wonderful it smells! When I buy herbs, minerals and animals at a Chinese place I usually try to say at least something in my limited Chinese so as to let people know that I'm truly interested in "their thing," and then I get all kinds of interesting input. A woman about my age sees me grab some Dong Quai roots and goes, No, you don't need this! Why not? You're not old enough to take this, she says. My mother takes it, my grandmother takes this, they put it in a stew... but not for me, I'm not old enough to take it! You never hear this kind of "folk expertise" from certified and licensed non-members of the tradition. I do the same thing at Indian groceries. Zero in on someone in the know and pick their minds. I used to go to an Indian place whose owner was a wealth of Ayurvedic wisdom, none of which I've ever read in any Ayurvedic books -- strictly folk stuff, experiential, oral and empirical tradition. Once he knew I was interested he made a habit of lecturing me at length, pointing out all the stuff on his shelves and explaining what to combine with what and how towards what effect. I gladly endured his horrible English for the many pearls of true nutritional competence shining among his impossible grammatical monsters. I cured a friend of diabetes with one of his recipes (guess what -- one of the ingredients in his healing combo was -- gasp -- sugar! But not the supermarket sugar... a dried lump of cane juice, sticky, messy, full of trace minerals, and not even remotely reminiscent even of the "raw cane sugar" they sell at "health food stores..." ...but I digress.) Yoda, to your original question. The single most important vitamin is B-17. That's because it's the least available one in modern diets (unlike C et al) and it happens to prevent cancer, or rather, according to some researchers, its deficiency tends to promote cancer in the same manner vitamin C deficiency promotes scurvy.

Catching up a bit... was away from my computer. Freeform, always enjoy talking to you, even if we disagree! I would have to write way too much to explain why I'm with those classics who assert that "in the human society tao has been destroyed," and not with those slave-owners who have come up with a way to placate the slaves by convincing them they are free and happy courtesy of techno progress. But in a nutshell, I know what "natural life" means because I remember. Not in my mind, in my every cell. Natural is a feeling, not a concept. What's the difference between hair color one is born with and hair color one gets at a salon or off a drug store shelf? One is natural, the other one is not. Your eye (and everybody else's) may be fooled, your senses may be fooled, but a level of you that knows, knows. You won't see it in the mirror, you won't see it in other people's eyes, but your every cell knows you're a brunette, not a blonde. Some people occasionally get in touch with THIS level of knowledge about self and the world. It is from this level that I assert a dyed age, in every "now" moment, is not a "natural" age, its every moment is dyed... intoxicated, muddled, messed up, poisoned, confused, electro- over-stimulated, sun-moon-stars-seasons-under- stimulated, injected, fumigated, deprived, overloaded... too much and not enough, too much carving on Laozi's "uncarved block" from before birth! -- what do you think a diet of chemicals of a pregnant woman is carving on the "natural" baby? Oh... all sorts of things that have little to do with "natural life." Rosy spectacles?.. No -- the age when no one needed any, because everybody's eyes were those of tigers and falcons in human form! An age before "recorded history" (for "recorded history" starts when natural life ends)... I wonder what a six-year-old in India put to work at a matches-making factory fourteen hours a day (with sulphur fumes in the air and no "now" moment different from any other "now" moment of inhaling them) or some such, of whom there are about a hundred and twenty million I am told, knows about the joys of natural living. Or ever will. I wonder what an American two-year-old with toxins of eighteen kinds of diseases from around the world of time and space swimming in her blood on a forever basis knows about what it feels like to NOT have them in her blood. To compare anything to anything, one needs a frame of reference, one needs to be able to compare his or her "modern as-is state" to any other state he or she ISN'T in before asserting it's "natural" or "unnatural," "normal" or "abnormal." So... what's yours? How do you know you're living a "natural life" -- which part of you thinks that?

'tis true, but there's another reason for that. It is specifically the peoples influenced by Genghis Khan's endeavours who never lost the tradition of familial record-keeping and have often viewed it as the single most important thing to do with one's own history. They never forgot their lineage and never lost track of where they're coming from, regardless of whether they were royalty or peasants, literate record-keepers or illiterate oral transmitters, legitimate heirs or out-of-wedlock illegitimate offspring. That's how they still know... they never broke the chain of lineage awareness. Matter of fact, with the exception of the culturally European-derived (and currently prevailing elsewhere too) disdain for one's ancestral lineage, all peoples on Earth used to keep accurate track at all times. For instance, in Somalia, as recently as until the devastation of the last war, every tribe taught every child his or her complete familial affiliations (with all uncles, aunts, cousins, second, third, fourth... up to the tenth cousin!) beginning at the age of four. This was considered the most important part of the child's education. By six, they were supposed to know by heart, forever. By the time they were to marry, they were supposed to know who in what neighboring tribe is related to them and how, so as not to marry the wrong person. Beyond the tenth cousin (sic!) they could, but closer, they couldn't. Similarly, Buryats, who kept accurate familial records since before the times of Genghis Khan, used to know exactly who they were and weren't related to throughout history. And, similarly, students of ancient arts and sciences were after "the real thing," the ancient thing. It used to be universally accepted (as I mentioned in some other thread I think) that we're in the period of degradation, deterioration, devolving from a "golden age" (a 100% universal belief till German educators began revising it some 150 years ago), and so in order to gain wisdom, one must seek ancient knowledge, not "innovation and creativity." Most modern people were raised to firmly believe in the latter. I, however, am on the same wavelength as the former. I'm after old, OLD stuff... the older the better. And a "lineage" simply offers some "warranty" of sorts to anyone who is not after innovation and creativity but is after tradition and authenticity instead. A matter of personal preference, is all...

She is a descendant of Genghis Khan (who half-converted to taoism upon conquering China), most of her lineage is Tibet-educated and later Russian-educated Buryats from Eastern Siberia; one of her ancestors was the teacher to the Dalai Lama in the early 20th century. (The fact that essentially shaped Tibet's political and spiritual affiliations for decades.) Most people in her lineage who were prominent were killed circa 1937, while some of those who kept things quiet survived. I am not allowed to talk about her in detail. Sorry... So, like with master Ni, I'm talking something I "can't prove," except the difference is I don't "officially claim" a lineage from this teacher and he does claim one from some lineage or other he doesn't care to prove. I dunno... the sheer math when he cites an unbroken lineage of seventy-plus generations seems WAY off... but in case I'm wrong again, can you please refer me to the page (if in existence) where his lineage is spelled out with names and dates? If you can't because HE can't, it's hearsay with no way for anyone to know whether it's true. Maybe it's true. Or maybe he made it up. Unless he can show who his teacher was and who his teacher's teacher was and so on, it's better not to claim lineage at all. My taijiquan/qigong teacher is the 19th generation in his lineage -- a documented one. This I can prove, because he can and his teacher can and his teacher's teacher can, and trace it all the way back to Chang San Feng. It's a big deal to some, no big deal to others. I'm still as good as I'm good, and no better, lineage or no lineage... So is master Ni. So are you, my friend.

I don't know that. I asked you. It was my impression that he didn't because he doesn't sound competent when he talks about these matters. I have studied and practiced it for a number of years, and while far from claiming competence in the arts, I do claim competence in what is or isn't of interest to me personally. That was my only "assumption" -- that master Ni has nothing to offer to me personally for an in-depth study. I never said he has nothing to offer to you! Correspond with him? Why would I want to correspond with someone of no interest to me? I'm dying to correspond with my main teacher but she is so elusive... and not even computer literate.

So I'm not the only one who does that! I'm an amateur artist, not a pro, and largely self-taught (interestingly enough, artisitc abilities kicked in "ziran" when I started practicing taoist arts, I used to have none), and the first couple of years were dedicated largely to figuring out why I do "too much" to every painting and miss the point where it's "complete" by "improving" some more... and ruining it as the final outcome. This inability to stop in time, not noticing that something needs no further improvements, is a disease of civilization, I believe, civilization in general and the American way especially. Everything is always excessive, and everything crucial and essential is lost in the noise of this excess. They write books like that all the time -- huge volumes that are "novels" or "nonfiction" that actually have enough of a story for a nice two-page short story but are blown up to eight hundred pages instead... And magazine articles -- enough story for one paragraph is turned into ten pages of yapping... And lo! politicians talking and talking without saying anything real about anything real AT ALL! And the so-called "news!" Ugh!! So I guess we are accultured, all the time, subtly and not-so-subtly, towards meaningless noisy excess, which is a form of deficiency in disguise... deficiency of straightforward concentrated "real thing," replaced by an excess of artificially overcomplicated, overdone unreal ones. I believe it's true for sex issues as well... our recent "serious offer" thread is a good illustration. Does it make a woman a better lover if she posts her topless pictures on the internet? has a hundred partners, a thousand? A million?.. Well let me tell you... Sex is ruined by "over-sexing" it every bit as much as a soup is ruined by oversalting it. Our current "culture" throwing in everybody's face all that "sexy" non-sex, all that sexy unreality to replace the concentrated reality of the really worthwhile, essential and quintessential sex that is missing... all that porn, all those "revealing" poses and clothes (what they reveal to a competent eye is an unfeeling body and an absentee soul, alas) to compensate for the deficiency of a true ability to feel (the only thing worth having sex-wise and soup-wise and art-wise alike) is sooo saaaad... sorry, got me a-ramblin'...

Yen Hui -- I grocery shop next door to a Barns and Noble bookstore, so I'm in the habit of, while at it, checking out the book shelves pertaining to "anything taoist" nearly as often as I buy eggs. Whatever appeared there over the years that I wanted to study in depth, I bought. Every single book I did buy, I did study in depth. Master Ni is represented on those Barns and Noble shelves by a dozen books which I saw many times, held in my hands, flipped through the pages, then stopped doing it, and never bought one of them. Does this count as "studying his writings in depth?" You know the proverb -- "recognize the lion by his claws?" Put it this way -- I saw enough of the claws to be pretty sure they are not a lion's claws, I don't need the whole mane and hide to make that determination. Taoist alchemical arts interest me only pragmatically. I want to study and practice them, and do. What someone thinks "about" them I don't bother my lil' brain with. Master Ni offers plenty opinions and zero instruction. Master Chia, e.g., whose latest Cosmic Healing book was my latest acquisition off those shelves, offers few opinions and plenty instruction, so he's in, and master Ni is out. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you assert he (the latter) has a "profound grasp" of the arts he doesn't practice?.. This kind of grasp is exactly what I call "tao of the mouth." Not my cup of elixir...

Sorry if I was too hard on Master Ni. I don't feel that strongly about him personally, but I usually have a bone or two to pick with anyone who puts down taoist magic under whatever pretex... which (taoist magic) I, personally, admire as the greatest science (sic) of them all. To substitute arbitrary moralizing for study and practice (master Ni style) is easy... anyone can do that, anywhere -- and the outcome is, generally, not good. I recall in Europe they roasted Jordano Bruno on an inquisition's fire for wizardry and heresy when he announced the Earth rotates around the Sun, not vice versa. (Something a taoist astronomer figured out some 1,300 years earlier if memory serves... but they still don't teach this in schools, and probably never will.) So master Ni may be relatively harmless long as he's not in the position of power... but once someone like that is, they tend to enforce moral, religious and scientific orthodoxy with deadly repressions of all dissenting views. Taoist magic and its practitioners, aka taoist science and its researchers, vere victims of this scenraio more than once...

Yes, that's also true. The trigram for "mountain" is Ken, "keeping still," it looks like this: __ - - - - One yang line on top of two yin lines, i.e. a stabilized, yin foundation underneath the active yang manifestations on the surface. So a taoist wizard is someone very active externally, very stable internally. My kind of guy/gal.

Right!!! What does 4w5 mean? I'm rusty...

Gamarjoba, genazvale! I took the test a bunch of years ago. In fact, several versions thereof. Anyone care to guess my enneagram? -- we are disproportionately represented among eighty- and ninety-year-old rock-climbers and skuba-divers, and when we're good, we're very, very good, but when we're bad, we do ourselves in with sex, drugs and rock-n-roll.

Hi Yen Hui, thanks for your thoughts! Of course I didn't mean that "everybody" who embraces "everything" does so in order to "conceal something." On second thought... yes, this must be it. OK, not everybody who does it does it on purpose or even consciously. Unconsciously this "embrace every path" must be chosen by anyone for whom "something to conceal" is his or her own feelings. People who have given up on their natural needs and were forced to learn to numb out so as not to feel how devastating it is may proceed to learn (sic) how to feel and how not to feel from books and masters and ideologies, because the inner teacher who knows has been silenced. In this case they can, of course, embrace everything and anything -- long as it serves the purpose of distracting them from the real problem: not knowing what they really feel! Good old disconnection from self by yet another set of means. In a disconnected state, one doesn't mind embracing contradicting and even mutually exclusive views. In a connected (feeling) state, one can't possibly agree that cultivating the body is good AND binding womens' legs to permanently cripple them (for over a thousand years!) is also good. One cannot agree that "attachments are bad" and build a humongous Buddha statue to pray to on the top of the mountain. One cannot believe that "there is no sufferer" and go see a doctor when he or she personally does suffer. And so on... So, yes, some people embrace all paths except for one: the path of reconnecting one's own person to one's own developmental history and re-learning what every infant and every animal knows how to do: own one's own feelings, KNOW what one really feels... The ones who have chosen THIS venue will of necessity have to ignore everything that isn't conductive to the task, everything that teaches them "how to feel" and "how not to feel" instead of teaching them how to feel exactly what they feel... For one thing, master Ni is a dud. For another, what he says is in direct contradiction to all of taoist tradition, the tradition of wizard-making. Alchemical arts (internal and external) that lie at the root of taoist cultivation produce taoist wizards by default, all taoist immortals and celestial masters started out as tao wizards. This is not the "final outcome" of cultivation, just a stage, not an early one, not the highest one. Master Ni is a useless blabbermouth if you ask me who didn't even bother to study taoist history, or even taoist folklore, looks like. Let alone taoist cultivation. His "tao of the mouth" is without merit. As for what "buddha" who is "human not" means... interesting interpretations! I've been studying Mandarin for a short enough time to be unable to claim any proficiency yet (and I mostly emphasize learning to speak and understand spoken Chinese, reading and writing have been lagging a bit behind), but what fascinates me when I "dismantle" the meaning of components of a word is the straightforward literal meaning, the first thing that occurs to one before intellectualizing and re-interpreting. All Chinese words are fuzzy, meanings are layered and can be translated and interpreted this way and that way... but the very first one jumps out at you from the picture, and that's the one I usually go with, at least for now. So to me it simply means that "buddha is someone or something who is not a human being." Which makes a buddha out of a blade of grass, out of a dog, out of a non-human entity... but not of a man or a woman. This also explains the meaning of one of my favorite Chinese proverbs: "One walks knee-deep in buddhas!" "Wizard" and "mountain human," to me, mean simply that taoist wizards were traditionally "made" in the mountains. Taoist monasteries were built in the mountains too. And that's where a classic taoist wanderer is always encountering taoist sages, with a few exceptions (exceptions, however, only visit towns and villages, while their permanent residence is still in the mountains). Must have something to do with the qi of the mountains that is rather special...

Throw in the fifth: he lived in Communist China since 1947 and got along with maoism and maoists. You just do what you gotta do as your public persona. His private persona, however, was that of a taoist, secret leader of a secretive taoist sect that managed to survive the times when so many didn't. I believe the guiding principle here was the I Ching's line I sometimes think of as the single most important one: "Conceal your light." Taoists who "reconcile" and "unify" other paths do just that... follow the "party line" of their original book of canon, the I Ching, and conceal their light. The taoist path has been precarious and often perilous for hundreds of years. More often than not it was a forbidden path, then there were times when it was allowed only if it was careful not to run counter to the imperially sanctioned ones of buddhism and Confucianism. You could be a taoist on the side and that was OK; if you challenged with your taoist stance any of the other ones, you were in big trouble. You simply weren't in the position to be a "taoist taoist" and survive under many, many historic circumstances. Hence the compromise and the broad acceptance of "whatever path is approved by the powers that be." Inside this acceptance, however, there always survived a taoist taoist (hidden and secret) practice and the taoist taoist (hidden and secret) person. Some of the taoist immortals and even some of the taoist gods had chosen this path, notably immortal females who were seldom in the position to openly practice taoism when they were still mere mortals. The history of taoism is full of stories of women who risked their lives practicing taoism in secret of the (buddhist or confucian) husband who would simply kill them if he found out, and a few stories of taoist powers developed through such practice kicking in in the nick of time and saving the tao gal just when the husband DID find out and saw only one "pefectly correct" response -- murder. Yeah... to understand why something is the way it is, one must first and foremost find out what it's been up against historically, what was it that made it "accept" or "not accept" any conditions for its existence. As one of my teachers put it, "look for answers in the river underneath the river... in the night within the night." I have a question to you too, Yen Hui. The Chinese character for "buddha" is comprized of two radicals, one meaning "human," and the other one meaning "not." What's your interpretation of this interesting original way to translate the idea of buddha into Chinese (to which it is not native)? In "taoist taoism," we have "wizards," not "buddhas." The Chinese character for "wizard" is comprized of two radicals, one meaning "human" and the other one meaning "mountain." What do you make of it?

Agreed, and cool that you've noticed that process language is fuzzy like reality ! Fuzzy logic is still logic, not reality itself, yet it does tend to take one closer to reality than the linear kind... As Mehti Zadeh the father of the mathematical theory of fuzzy logic put it, "When complexity strikes, meaningful statements lose precision and precise statements lose meaning." And, to revert to the original context of the thread (sex among taoists, was it? ), another quote: "Doctors know much more about the anatomy of sex than do Pacific Islanders, but this doesn't make them better lovers -- in fact I suspect they are much, much worse." -- Neil of the Summerhill I'm no philosopher either, I'm a pragmatist to the bone -- to me, tao is what tao does, and isn't what she doesn't do. To revisit the Mexican food vs. non-Mexican food analogy, there's lots and lots of things tao chooses not to do -- much like a good cook knows where to stop, knows how to set the limits, not just how to do things but also how not to mess them up with anything excessive, superfluous, or random. Tao, like a good cook, chooses not to be erratic, inconsistent, unpredictable... and that's why your kids or mine are born human, not ostrich or oyster or something random and "creative..." She chooses not to replace the Sun with Bethelgeuse as our main gravitational attractor every other Thursday, and for this I'm profoundly grateful. She lets me go to bed as a woman and wake up a woman still, not an anthill, a wide screen TV, or a man for that matter. I love her for things she has the taste and tact and wisdom NOT to do as much as for doing things she does do. Taoist sages are said to emulate that...

You were trying to define the tao of Mexican food. Now a more interesting thing with tao of anything (or tao of nothing at all for that matter) than the well-known fact that it "can't be named" is that it can be described. Can't be defined but can be described. That's because tao is a process, not a "thing." Processes can be described; "things" can be named, defined, pinned down. So when we are trying to understand what the tao of "authentic Mexican food" is we can go about it indirectly -- best of all by cooking it, next best, by simply describing what you use (and how) and omitting whatever ingredients you don't use (and whatever methods you don't use). E.g., you omit garam masala, black fungus, sushi rice wrapped in seaweed... You omit tandoori oven, Red Cooking, the art of slicing raw fish against the grain... You may notice that the first entry (both with ingredients and with methods) points indirectly to "authentic Indian," the second, "authentic Chinese," and the third, "authentic Japanese" cuisine. I haven't defined either, but I pointed in the general direction of each one respectively... That's the traditional way to go about tackling tao as well -- don't define it but point, describe, mention, show signs... I point out "borscht and latkes" on the menu and it's enough to give a general idea of "hardly any Mexican food here" -- then I mention "carnitos, burritos, quesadilla" and it is quite, quite likely to mean "Mexican food" -- indefinitely Mexican perhaps but definitely "not" Jamaican, Polish or Samoan. Did I guess your intentions correctly?

Thanks! It is, Neijia. We never forget anything we lived through -- the body that "was there done that" doesn't forget, the feeling consciousness stores the feeling, the soul... don't even get me started... the genes, the jing, the lower brain, the cells, the connections -- none of it ever disappears. The neocortex is the only organ equipped to "forget;" in fact, modern research reveals that 30% of what our brains are doing at any given moment is policing the remaining 70% and forcing it to keep quiet about what it remembers!.. -- forcing us to "forget." I don't for a second believe it is normal... it is a sign of a very lousy state of affairs with our species if you ask me... this global epidemic amnesia. Memory is, to me, the most fascinating subject on earth and beyond. I've studied it from every possible ange -- hey, how about this, the biochemical one: there's a protein called Sir2P, a "silencer" by its function, that looks like a rubber band around an area of the DNA that is not supposed to be working, either because it's not currently needed or because we're so overwhelmed with "current" stuff that we keep "filing away" more and more parts of ourselves this way. Somewhere among those rubber-band-secured files is eternal youth (for we have genes for that -- the very same ones that cause a lobster or an alligator to never die of old age, only of accidents -- because they have a "rubber band" around a different gene instead, the one that causes all human cells to eventually commit programmed suicide via shortening their telomeres with each division -- well, with lobsters it's the other way around, they have this one silenced and the one that allows indefinite division and indefinite renewal, fully operational instead!) Somewhere else is the ability to produce superoxide dismutase in the same amounts the little critter called bacterium radiodurans does, which allows it to live inside nuclear reactors, repairing all the damage from horrendous oxidation caused by such lifestyle faster than it happens. If we were to unblock the memory of how to do that, to remove the rubber band from that particular gene, we would effectively render ourselves immune to radiation and lots of other nasty things. Well, anyway... the trick is to handle memory with care, and consciously, and to step carefully -- and courageously. Carefully and courageously...

If you're after the older originals (good move!), here's some of the beginner's basics to include: Sun Tzu Yuan Dao Wilhelm/Baynes I Ching (don't bother with other translations) Ta Chuan Sun Tzu, the Art of War, is available in a new translation that is based on the archeological discovery of the Linyi documents. The Linyi text predates the versions translated before by about a thousand years and is infinitely more accurate. The Yuan Dao is older than Tao Te Ching and looks like one of the latter's sources. Wilhelm had the advantage of a personal taoist teacher of a genuine lineage, something none of the other translators had. Ta Chuan, The Great Treatise On The Changes, is an eye-opening guide not only to the I Ching but to taoism in general, and mustn't be overlooked by anyone trying to grasp the taoist basics. Happy explorations!

A grateful bow to Fatherpaul and Freeform.

Good question. "I" am a follower of the taoist paradigm of "I." In the taoist anatomy and physiology of an entity, there's levels of "I" all of which a unified consciousness perceives as "I," while a split consciousness perceives only two or three levels -- e.g., those of the material body, emotional body, and mental/thinking body. But then if you are practicing to unify your "I," you might start perceiving your body of qi, and ideally gain as much unity with it as you hopefully have with your material body, i.e. you can raise your arm when you want to, likewise you can raise your qi if you want to, you can dress up your physical body in a cotton shirt and your fingers are yours enough to be able to button it, and likewise your qi will be yours enough for you to be able to "button" and "unbutton" your Liver qi or your Five Shens. These are all phenomena of the Lower of the Triple Realms. But then there's the Middle Realm where you causal body dwells, and a unified consciousness that gets in touch with THAT can "button" and "unbutton" the past and the future and the personal and universal reasons for same. This one is in communication with, e.g., not just a cat but CAT, the universal power manifesting in the lower realm as scores of ordinary cats (that's where the most powerful shamans go for their animal spirit helpers -- a true spirit animal is a collective causal consciousness of this whole species, not an individual critter; and that's what Rupert Sheldrake who stumbled upon some out-of-context phenomena from the causal-body realm and tried to tackle "scientifically" calls "morphogenetic fields.") But then there's the Higher Realm and the body of tao... which is also yours, but won't let you button its shirt until and unless your lower-level bodies are proficient enough. (This is why I always laugh when people talk about their being "always in touch with tao" as some universal inevitability requiring no cultivation. Yeah right. Come like the spring, benefitting all beings, THEN you're tao. Blow like the wind so ten thousand things can arise and be themselves, THEN you're tao. Having read Tao Te Ching doesn't tao make...) The body of tao is a force of nature, a force behind nature! -- and it is also "I," but only accessible to the lower levels of "I" when these are properly integrated... This is why traditional taoist cultivation never, ever ignores or neglects the physical body, the "lowly" world of ordinary human feelings, the refinement of the thinking, artistic, scientific, philosophical, intellectual mind -- they ALL matter, and none of them are "discarded" from the whole "I" because its wholeness depends on a proper connectedness of all its levels in all realms -- lower, middle, higher. That's the paradigm within which "I" is as real to me as it gets.