Taomeow

:)

Um... back to the original question? "Non-ordinary and real" experiences I had caused me to start looking for an "ordinary and rational" explanation. I found it in taoism and was ever so happy when I did. I danced and danced! The non-ordinary thingie turned out to have a name -- qi. It turned out to have properties, qualities, directions, behaviors well explored and documented thousands of years before I was born. I danced when I discovered that! Before I did, I was trying to document and analyze my experiences the left-brain way (the way I was trained to) -- drawing diagrams, arrows pointing here, arrows pointing there, words struggling to express perceptions, words like "incoming force" and "outgoing acceptance" and "sideways rejection" and "cyclic flare-ups" -- and pictures of numbers coming alive, a zero compressed on both sides turning into a 1, a 1 pushed sideways by a "right-left interaction" turning into a 2, a 2 turned upside down by the "upside-downing force" giving a 5... I had pages and pages of these attempts to reinvent taoist sciences of yin-yang, qi, wuxing, bagua, ganying... and then I discovered it's all been done, I don't have to do it from scratch, it's there, it's real, non-ordinary and well-explored by the "non-ordinarinauts" who went before. Oh boy. I was soooo happy.

Hi Pat, I once had a chance to ask a very amazing FS master, a traditionalist who doesn't write books, has trained only a total of ten students in thirty years, and makes her living as a FS adviser to Asian governments, the same question -- what's the most important aspect to maintain? She said, Unclutter and keep your house clean. The colors you mentioned are the least of your concerns. This year, place a piece of red paper in the NW corner of your house, and that's as far as you need to go with color remedies. If you want to research FS from books, try avoiding Lilian Too, Lin Yun, Sarah Rossbach and all their clones and anyone who calls their feng shui Black Hat Buddhist or Black Sect Buddhist. There's no buddhists aware of such a sect, and definitely no genuine FS masters. However, these guys are the ones who brought "instant McFeng Shui" to the West, and since the West always falls for the get-rich-fast, get-enlightened-faster scams while having no patience with the real thing, that's what 95% of all "feng shui" out there is about. Caveat emptor. Eva Wong has written a good FS guide but it is rather dry and may be somewhat difficult for a beginner. An unexpectedly decent source under a sadly lousy name, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Feng Shui," second edition, by Elizabeth Moran and Val Biktashev, would be a good start. Val Biktashev, my Altai compatriot, is one of those Asian Russians who look Chinese but are actually descendants of the Siberian peoples the Chinese are descended from. Far as I can tell, his knowledge may be from some ancient lineage, it feels solid...

The universe is fussy. Feng shui emulates that. Here's a true story for you to ponder. My husband was looking for a new job. He got three offers. The financially best one was someplace where I figured, with my FS calculations, it would be absolutely disastrous. I placed some FS remedies in his room, against his disbelief and resistance. The best-offer people suddenly lost their enthusiasm to have him and started dragging their feet. So instead of going to work with them, he took another, "second-best" offer. The first-choice place was located on one of the top floors of the World Trade Center, and the events took place a few days before 9-11. "Real" FS is very complicated, pop FS is not worth bothering with, since it is quite completely bogus and useless. Since real FS deals in space-time aspects of qi, I view it as the rocket science of taoism -- something it's not worth having "opinions" about. Either study it (making damn sure you haven't been saddled with one of the pop FS versions, which sadly but predictably constitute 95% of "everything out there"), or don't -- but approach it as something that merits an opinion roughly to the same extent quantum mechanics merits an opinion: i.e. you don't ask an accountant or a lawyer, or your hairdresser, or a random pedestrian in the street. You ask a physicist, preferably one who's been tweaking with it for a few decades. And then if you don't believe what she tells you, study it yourself to see whether she's right or wrong. You either take the expert's word, or become one yourself -- either one would be the only reason for having an opinion on the subject. That's the deal with FS too, far as I've been able to discern.

No, no, no! You didn't! The ones who remain stuck with the illusion of an accomplishment, of "having arrived," are the only ones who fail. Rethinking your path is the step in the right direction -- having the honesty and courage to abandon it despite "all the hard work" if it proved to be a dead end is another one -- and it happened to the best, I am not aware of even one true sage who didn't have his or her moments, days, months, years of doubt and disillusionment. On a smaller-than-true-sage scale, my humble experience has been exactly the same. You can't begin to imagine how many times I was utterly convinced of "the way" only to exclaim, a few years down the road, "what an idiot I have been!" Long as you can do that, you never fail. Tao smiles and shows you... a hint, a clue... she gives none to the "I'm good enough no matter what I do and no matter what I believe" folks, only to the ones who go, "where did I go wrong?" 'cause, you know, if one is satisfied "as is," she won't bother helping, it's the NEED FOR TRUTH that resonates (ganying) with tao's offering of same... not this very second, usually, not "on demand" -- but eventually... she does. At least that's what she typically did for me sometime after another "what an idiot I was" entry I'd file in her database for kind consideration... She would go, "yeah, that's exactly right, you were an idiot..." ...and help.

Am not. You quoted my feng shui entry in its entirety and responded to that, didn't you? This looked for every purpose like a standard forum way to juxtapose approaches. Was it not? Not even a question mark, huh? U sure I'm "defensive?" I prefer to call my attitude "informed and opinionated." Here's why: if there's anyone or anything I was defending, it's Chinese culture, the art and science of feng shui in particular, and taoist practices in general. This doesn't make me "defensive," since the meaning of the word, aside from being only usable either in a professional psychotherapeutic setting or in a passive-aggressive attack, is not "defending what you respect when someone fails or refuses to see its merits" at all. Fu sheng wu liang tianzun. (May you be blessed without measure by the countless taoist deities.)

Yeah, apparently poor unsteady taoist masters had to make do with whatever their lil' unsteady minds had learned from their uncentered immortal sages, while real wisdom was centered altogether elsewhere. Some call it cultural colonialism. I do, for one. What's your name for "feeling a priori superior to a complex system of traditional knowledge you don't bother to learn?"

Nice. So... classic feng shui is six thousand years of useless pursuits by the uncentered and the unsteady?

I use the form/compass feng shui. Assessing a landscape, a building, or a room for all its energies instantly and precisely (down to the "killer lines" which are only half a degree wide) is a no-brainer if you know your gua, have a luopan, remember what Heavenly Stem and Earthly Branch we're currently in, know the Pillars of the month, day and hour, the current Flying Stars, the whereabouts of the Grand Duke Jupiter and what kind of a ruler he is this year... and have studied and practiced for a minimum of a bunch of years, which has scratched the surface of it ever so slightly. I meet the above requirements and therefore I usually know the best spot to pick, whether for taiji or at a restaurant or on the face of the Earth... provided it's available. Now a higher skill is to "make it available" -- but by then one might be a realized enough being to just give it to someone else...

I would start out by getting a superior quality steak. If you've been abstaining from meat all these years, take just a little bit of it for starters, take it with some proteolytic digestive enzymes, and keep doing it till your body remembers how to produce them again. You will feel enlightened in a week -- or in an hour if that's in your destiny. I've seen it happen. I've MADE it happen. I'd love to do it for you too. Don't fast, the time is not right -- you shouldn't do it in late spring, only early spring. Find out what taoist alchemy really is. I recommend to start from scratch by studying the works of Joseph Needham, the most trustworthy authority on the subject of Chinese civilization the English-speaking world has ever produced. Don't do anything "someone told you to do" -- except for the steak! Good luck!

No, it's not the same conditions, ever. Birth is the greatest learning experience of a lifetime, and even twins (like my son and daughter) had different-conditions births. Since it's the first, and most important, life-and-death event that systemically teaches the whole person how to survive an extreme life-and-death stress, the very process that succeeded, whatever it was, will be imprinted as THE response to any future stressful events. In emergency, or in what is subjectively perceived as an emergency, the brain is designed to scan its own history for a solution, for a successful "been there done that, survived it this way, so this way is the way to do it again." (That's the reason people have "all their lives flash before their eyes" in an extreme life-threatening situation.) So whatever one's birth was like will be re-interpreted by "higher" consciousness later but the model, the blueprint, will remain intact, the rest will morph itself to this pattern. So no two children in the same family are ever "like that for no reason" -- there's always a reason. Karma is reality's memory. And reality, no matter what else can be said about it, has never suffered from amnesia -- unlike proponents of assorted ideologies who seem to unconsciously believe they have started existing only at some later date, later than their birth, infancy, and early childhood... perhaps they were made already grown up and "a certain way for no reason" on some assembly line on Mars and launched to Earth in this condition? -- or else how can they possibly explain their flat refusal to seek answers to their assorted existential questions in their own developmental history?..

OfStrangeEons, I really enjoyed your take -- and I think you're one of the few people among those I know to have seen the movie who got the same idea of "choice" out of it that I did. I play with "loopy time" all the time... and every time I do this, I get to a bifurcated place no matter where I go, a place from which there's this but not that way to proceed, or that but not this -- a Choice looming large, you have to make it... and once you've made it, what happens to the other side of the fork in the road, the one you haven't taken? Once you start thinking about it, you realize that you create and destroy worlds this way every moment, or at least often, way often. I have a niece who, the second she graduated from high school, married a Native American she met on the internet, who currently takes good care of their two cats... and this whole arrangement is a house of cards I inadvertently put together, for the niece exists only because once upon a time I introduced my high school girlfriend to my boyfriend's brother... and what would happen to those two Oklahoma kittens if I didn't throw that party many moons ago, thousands of miles away?.. Thanks for noticing! The first three are classics, I didn't make them up. The fourth is my creation, the idea came in a dream...

I would if I could, but I only use a mental image of it now -- however, it helps to have been there done that to get the image right... I had two muddy encounters in the past, one, getting lost in the Bryansk Forest, Belarus, and somehow surrounding myself with a swamp in every direction and spending some six hours there. As a Paul Simon song goes, "I should be depressed, my life is a mess, but I'm having a good time..." -- that's how I felt. The second one, I have pictures of, covered with Dead Sea mud head to toe and wearing nothing but... too bad I had too decent an upbringing to post them! Outdoors without a tent, I wouldn't recommend, not in the wilderness in any event. If you're in the wilderness, there's animals, nocturnal hunters... and mosquitoes... and primordial urge for shelter. I've slept in a tent in the wilderness many times, but never had the desire to abandon it... this would be bad feng shui, far as I know. Of course if someone is after being shaken up in some unexpected and possibly scary way, this could be the way to go.

Speaking of movies/dreams, has anyone/everyone/ no one seen "Donnie Darko?" If you haven't, please do... I'd love to hear what taobums would think of it.

I practice deep, complete, dreamless yet conscious sleep, which is a form of meditaion. I have several techniques for this, to wit: 1. taoist: you start out by meditating on mud every night. The trick is to get comfortable mixing yourself with the yielding. Mud offers no resistance... and no support. It takes you to a place of self-reliance, which turns out to be devoid of dreams, and impenetrably dark. 2. yogic: you start out by practicing raja yoga, deep tenacious contemplation of any which subject you choose. The trick is to stay with this one subject, not let your mind drift on onto anything else. Think all you like, but think about just one thing at a time -- to exhaustion. 3. buddhist-hindu: you lie on your back and grow a lotus out of each of your big toes, a buddha is sitting in the center of each, a lotus grows out of each of her big toes, a buddha is sitting in each, a lotus grows... etc. This way your awareness grows upward, with extreme-yang focus on unstoppable upward dispersion and multiplication -- till extreme yang spontaneously flips over into yin and all the buddhas, lotuses and toes disappear into darkness whence they came. 4. shamanic: I take a "virtual potion." I start out by gathering the virtual herbs and minerals for it, then brewing them in a virtual pot, then telling everybody who is anybody exactly this: "If this world still needs me, someone or something will find a way to bring me back." Whereupon I drink the virtual potion of nonexistence, and cease to exist for the duration of the night.

Why of course. If he or she practices internal alchemy, why not? However, the first thing that would happen to an evolving taoist paraplegic would be mastery of qi that would end paraplegia. Bruce Kumar Frantzis is a good example -- he broke his spine in a car accident, and healed himself with taoist practice. I wonder where the idea that taoist practice is "body practice" comes from. Taoist practice is a body-mind-spirit-lifestyle deal... nothing is left out. You leave out the body, you automatically leave out the mind of tao -- for in the taoist paradigm, thought is shen, born of qi, born of jing, born of the body. It translates into "no way to have the mind of tao in the non-tao body." Even a body sick with a common cold can't have the mind of tao. Tao is immune to disease... Interestingly enough, the classic concept of unity with tao is "ti tao" -- which means "to emBODY tao," not to "enMIND." But there's no difference between the mind of tao and the body of tao, really. Between the human mind and the human body, there is. Eliminating this difference is what taoist practice is about... not about "adding" or "eliminating" the body! Hatred of the body is an Indo-European tradition, of which taoism is not part.

Think as though your every thought is carved in fire in the sky for everyone to see, for in Reality, it is. -- Gautama Tell me, my friend, tell me, my friend, tell me the law of the earth that you have learned. I won't tell you, my friend, I won't tell you. If I told you the law of the earth, you would fall on your face and weep. -- Gilgamesh A movement is accomplished in six stages, and the seventh brings return. The seven is the number of the young light, it forms when darkness is increased by one. -- Pink Floyd/Syd Barrett channeling the I Ching, Chapter 24

Stupidity is the Sin against the Holy Ghost. -- T.H. White

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.