Taomeow

Man, very perceptive again! Yes. Among other things, these days act as traps -- they lure you into undertaking stuff.

Astute perception, Ian! February 6th was one of the 13 "Master Killing Days" of the year, which are rather important to keep track of in authentic feng shui. I keep the list of all these next to a wall calendar so that I know when NOT to schedule anything important. The most important things not to do on one of these days are "big" and "new" ones with lasting consequences (i.e., don't get married, don't start a business, don't move to a new home, don't make investments, close deals, sign contracts, start construction, etc.). Small things can get slightly screwed up too -- you might get blisters if you wear a new pair of shoes, you might get into a delay from hell if you travel by air -- but that's not as important as knowing to avoid doing the "big and new" stuff. I might post a list of the Master Killing Days for 2007 when I have the time to calculate them or else ask someone knowledgeable. (If anyone already has it and can spare me the math and/or the leg work, please share!)

Thanks for all the input, guys, and, Craig, SJ, I will look into shaking too, been meaning to... but I feel that I specifically need something good and energizing that is done "to me" and "for me" rather than "more things I have to do" The past four years, I've been doing "a helluva lot" rather than "not enough." There was a serious illness in the family, and that's where much of my qi and most of my life's energy and all of its focus went, mending it. My acupuncturist kept telling me that I "need things for myself," shaking his head and asserting I'm "using up more than I have." So anything that generates qi without my having to dip into the (already running low) pool of zhi is welcome in my life right now. That's how I try to design my practices of the moment -- the I Ching way, "the easy and the simple." (Of course my definition of "easy and simple" is not the same as someone else's, but the Qi machine is definitely in this category for anyone -- except I would still use the dantien focus or some other meditation mode when using it. I do it when getting acupuncture too, and even when swimming, and even when loading the dishwasher )

Interesting question! Sincerity is not one of the virtues of tao, far as I've been able to discern. (One of my favorite sources, the Ta Chuan or Great Treatise on the Changes, does go into "virtues of tao" in some detail.) Looks like "spontaneous, sincere lying" is part of how things seem to work in nature. E.g., there's a whole huge class of biological phenomena known as mimicry, which is used by thousands of species in an attempt to fool other species into believing they are what they really aren't. In appearance and in behavior, they lie and lie -- an insect pretending it's a dry leaf, a pair of butterfly wings pretending they're the eyes of an own, an ears-flattening hissing cat pretending she's a snake, a virus that tricks a cell into believing it's part of its natural milieu by simulating the kind of chemical signals to which the cell wall that is supposed to stop the alien invader responds like to an open-sesame... there's literally thousands of examples of this "lying game" in nature. And besides mimicry, there's thousands more ways natural things fool other natural things. Psychomimetic substances in plants that the brain mistakes for its own neurohormones. All creatures who make a living by arranging traps for other creatures -- the spider being a familiar example. Are any of them being "sincere" or not?.. Looks like "sincerity" is a concern of "the human mind," not of "the mind of tao." Integrity, on the other hand, is what all these creatures and humans alike need to have in order to be exactly what they are, no more, no less (that's another shade of meaning of "de" -- "true to self"). This "exactly what they are" seems to include, all across the natural spectrum, the ability to be insincere on occasion. So it looks like there's only one kind of insincerity that's not compatible with integrity and with te: lying to oneself!.. A hissing cat who pretends she's a snake still knows in her heart she's a cat. A butterfly with wings painted to imitate a staring owl's eyes, who scares away a hungry swallow by pretending to be something that can swallow the swallow, still knows he's a butterfly (unlike Zhuangzi who seems to be unable to decide whether he's man or butterfly in an often-quoted fable that, to me, illustrates the confused state of man in general, not of Zhuangzi specifically). So it looks to me as though "fooling oneself" is the kind of insincerity that would clash with "integrity," while "fooling others" for a good cause is not off limits... or at least to tao it isn't.

There's an English word that contains the concept and implications of Te in its entirety: INTEGRITY. It's not something that "happens," you either "are" it or aren't, "have it" or don't, it's the way you are organized, or not. Sean's "sincerity" is close, but also closer to the surface. "Sincerity" is an attitude of the mind, which one can take or leave, have today, change tomorrow, display to some people, refuse to approach others with; while "integrity" is the organizational principle of the body-mind-spirit as a whole that is (or isn't) present at all times and is not contingent on the particular attitude of the moment. That's what te is -- the way you are when you are whole.

Oh, I just realized something, QiDr -- you probably mean electroacupuncture machines which you compared to needles? The machine I was talking about is the one described above by Ian, the one that moves your legs vigorously (and the whole body, sublty) from side to side in a specific fish-tail-like fashion. (The makers of the Sun Ancon machine assert other brands fail to create the correct pattern of "primal" movement, but whether they are telling the truth I don't know. The Japanese guy who invented the machine was inspired, predictably, by his goldfish.)

Speaking of which, what do you think about using acupuncture on oneself? The three Chinese acupuncturists whose treatments I used at different times all said "no, not good," the two non-Chinese ones whom I asked the same question said, "sure, I do it on myself whenever I need it." I don't do acupuncture on myself (although I know enough of it to be able to) because it "feels unnatural." So I was trying to compare the Qi machine to other self-treatments, not to treatments of self by others. Do you do acupuncture on yourself?

I have Cleary's "Taoist I Ching" (a bit of an oxymoron there, this title! ), which is a translation of Liu I-Ming's version, and Liu I-Ming was a Buddhist till his old wise age when he converted to taoism, so the fact that he was a Buddhist thinker first is all over his interpretations of taoist concepts -- is this the version you had in mind, or is there another book that's called "Buddhist I Ching?" If there is, I don't have it, sorry. If you mean Liu I-Ming's version, I'll be happy to summarize how it tackles Hexagram 31.

Interesting, we seem to have similar bookshelves, Yen Hui! I have Wong Kiew Kit's books too, and Wilhelm-Baynes is the version I prefer to the ten others I have, although currently I don't read the commentaries much (beyond those of the Duke of Zhou), contemplating the images instead... Funny how different people can look at the same sources and draw quite different conclusions. Have you noticed that Confucius is concerned with having the child obey the parent, while Laozi, with trying to convince the parent to let the child be?.. And how buddhism assumes that "attraction," aka "attachment," is bound to cause suffering -- a view taoism never had? in particular, in the quotes you posted about "attraction" and "attachment" between heaven and earth being a natural law? Of course it is possible to reconcile the differences by fragmenting one's own consciousness, but a whole, unbroken, or else successfully unified consciousness notices that you can only have it all three ways at once if neither one communicates with the other two at any given point. E.g., you can be a taoist and study and practice, among other things, the magnificent natural laws of attraction of opposites (which include laws of repulsion, by the way -- taoism actually started as the discovery of magnetic forces, which tangibly go both ways). Or you can be a buddhist and study all those magnificent ways to pretend these forces don't exist, i.e. learning to "rid yourself of attachments." Or you can be a Confucian and just make sure the peasants don't rebel against the landowners, the women take a submissive position towards men for all purposes everywhere in society, and the children obey the parents regardless of whether they are being loved or abused, nurtured or violated. But to be all three all at once, one needs to be fragmented and not whole. The non-fragmented whole can't be put together ouf of parts that simply don't fit together... or as a Chinese proverb goes, "you can't get far traveling the river in two boats simultaneously by placing one foot in each." Let alone in THREE boats... My humble, of course.

Thank you, Ian. Yes, that's the name of the author, but the book I had in mind is "Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism." She must have written another one since (or before) that one.

Yes, her ideas came from watching non-cooperating cows suffer a lot more before they die, and feeling what they felt. Since it was not in her power to eliminate factory farming, she did the thing that WAS in her power -- helped eliminate the additional and excessive suffering of the doomed animals. She couldn't kill the industry, but to kill the overkill, which is what occurred to her, didn't occur to "normal" people who designed the equipment that was in place before her modifications. She also designed equipment for herself to alleviate her own suffering (she was in pain most of the time for most of her life, and on all known painkillers and antidepressants, which didn't do much), a "squeeze tube" to apply even, gentle but firm pressure to the whole body. She made it for other autistic people too, and for some, it was the first and only thing that ever helped. Now something that didn't occur to her but it did to me -- I think this "squeeze tube" of hers is designed to emulate the natural sensations of natural birth, which is a kind of necessary normal developmental stimulation -- not "too much," not "too little" -- "just enough" to serve, as mother nature intended it to, as the first and most imporant pattern of signals for the whole system to switch gears smoothly from prenatal to postnatal existence. Many autistic people (and many less severely affected ones) miss out on this "just enough" pattern in modern birth, and a lot of signals get scrambled for life.

I started seeing pi as a landscape (to use a very inadequate word for the experience) after a period of intense qigong and Chinese astrology pracitces. Since I'm not autistic, I plan to put these things into words someday, but it is a monumentally difficult task to find words for experiences that defy left-brain step-by-step linear arrangements. I can draw some of the experience though... but I'm still looking for a way to draw it just so that it is "obvious" to a "normal" eye. (When I try, I feel a profound need to have a hundred arms and hands like the goddess Kali in order to simultaneously draw some things I SEE simultaneously, not "one after the other...") Parts of our consciousness have to be separated from other parts (e.g., sight from sound) in order for our whole system to be able to decide, once and for all, on a certain limited way to perceive reality (e.g., to be able to "taste" an apple instead of "hearing" it). This enables us to "function" properly as members of a certain specific species. Neither "taste" nor "sound" of an apple are absolutes, a bat "hears" it but can't "taste" it, a dog can "smell" it but not "color-code" it, and so on. What allows for such selective perceptions is "neural gates" and genetic "silencers" on certain potentially possible but "counterproductive" perceptions. In autism, these gates are damaged (by traumatic fetal development, traumatic birth, vaccinations in infancy -- or, very rarely, something else), things that were supposed to be well-defined and separated by "gates" and "silencers" never separate properly and keep interfering with each other. Selecting "what" to perceive and "how" to perceive becomes difficult or impossible. They are aware of more (sometimes infinitely more) going on inside themselves than it is possible to integrate -- all at once. They feel things too strongly (that's why a loud sound is a torturous pain to many of them), out of sync with each other (e.g., the sound the left ear perceives comes first, and the input from the right one is delayed, so human speech can get garbled by interference and turn into meaningless and maddening noise... In some autistics, the thing that will make them able to communicate is as simple as to whisper quietly in ONE ear so there's no interference from the other.) To an outside observer (most of the time a dumb one), they appear "dumb," while the real problem is, they are too indiscriminately and chaotically brilliant -- blinded by the light, too much light shining on everything too strongly and with too few rest-giving shadows. It's a rather horrible way to be, in fact, this inborn enlightenment... There's another autistic who managed to "build the bridge," I read her book quite a while ago. She actually became a multimillionaire designing industrial agricultural equipment that was found to be the best in the world -- in her book she explains in detail how she came up with her designs because she "understands the cows" and can feel "exactly the way the cow feels." The book was called "Thinking In Pictures" I seem to recall. A very elucidating "insider's" view into the world of an autistic.

Good stuff, Yen Hui, thank you. I've learned a few things from Eva Wong too, and keep her Feng Shui guide on "the" shelf reserved for improtant books (the first one on that shelf is the I Ching, of course! ) I wonder though how many of those who were exposed to Buddhism in its "gerenic" form (as most people in the West were) are aware of the "secret Buddhist practices for cultivating the body?" I know that in Tibet, in the Dzogchen tradition (Buddhism-closest-to-taoism tradition, just like Complete Reality is Taoism-closest-to-buddhism), they kept those practices secret for hundreds of years... I saw a documentary, "The yogis of Tibet," where one of the monks agreed to give a demo... Boy oh boy. All those "quietly just sitting" Buddhists don't know what they're missing! It was like taoist "animal" practices but perhaps even more ancient, the monk wasn't emulating "higher" animals -- he was jumping like a flea, expanding and contracting like an amoeba, even growing and propagating like a virus! -- and all of it with the kind of fajin (explosive energy releases) usually associated with martial arts rather than meditation... but he WAS meditating like that! Which shows he didn't mistake "mind" for the stuff in one's head... he knew that "body" is not "non-mind" and mind is not "non-body." I wish people who think that Buddhism is about "transcending" the body saw that bit...

Welcome, Yen Hui! What is it that attracts you specifically to the Complete Reality School's teachings and (or) practices? I find it quite compelling too, and tried to learn as much about it as I could in the first years of my taoist endeavours, but a bit later, I decided that the fairly strong Buddhist influences on its development are not quite "my" way, and shifted more towards the earliest taoist and proto-taoist (bordering on shamanic) ways. Of course these aren't forgotten by CRS either, but I found out eventually that it's only "taoism proper" that gets a resonant "yes, this is it!" from all my shens, whereas whenever any of them go, "really? Oh... OK," the part to which they respond with this detached indifference transpires as a later/Buddhist acquisition. What about you? Are you looking for "taoism proper in taoism" or are you enjoying the blend?

Thanks, SJ, yeah, let me see what you're up to... You think the blissful energy before sleep is the premier method? Qi machine I had to specifically NOT use right before bedtime because blissful energy it did generate but sleep it busted. Also, I would put a CD of Chinese classical music on (to cover up for the sound the machine's mechanical parts make which, though not terribly loud or annoying by itself, is absolutely out of sync with the wave frequency the machine generates -- the qi waves in the feet are about twice as fast as that clicking sound while the ones going up the legs to the body, about three times slower!) -- where was I? -- oh, and Chinese music always amplifies whatever state I'm in -- I'd say it has the value of 9 for me (feng-shui-wise speaking), so if I'm sleepy to begin with, one peep of the pipa or the bamboo flute will knock me out, but if I'm over-energized, the same one peep will turn into a whole CD and then another one and l'd be listening to them with a mixed feeling... how's blissfully pissed for a feeling?

Michael, There's no mats in taiji... other than that, I think what you said is quite true. My taiji teacher has no time to socialize though. He will invite students to his home a couple times a year to celebrate this or that, but the rest of the time, he's either working (most of the time) or practicing or being a father to his kids and a cook to his scientist wife and a host to his Chinese-only speaking visitors. I get a big kick out of the fact that he was so poor in maoist China he couldn't afford a bicycle, and now he has a couple millions' worth beautiful home and drives a luxury car and horseback rides for fun and plays golf, that his life is that of an affluent American now and yet he's one of the very few real taoists I've been lucky to meet. This "going with the flow" is something he doesn't have to talk about -- he IS the flow. He works so hard and finds it so easy! I've never seen him in any other state than that of an abundance of healthy creative energy, nothing ever ails him, he doesn't have any "moods," though his feelings are strong, fast, and obvious -- he's an open book, he's got nothing to hide. I admire him greatly, and besides taiji, I'm learning this "being the flow instead of going with the flow" from him, being the change, being the happening, not the "who things happen to." Other than that, the secret of practice is practice... just doing it enough times for enough lengths of time every time. I'm not great at that, but I'm pretty sure that's where it's at. Of course one has to have done some homework in choosing the "right" practice (there's so much crap out there...)... but once that's taken care of, the biggest secret is, do the leg work... and the heart work will follow.

What is denied is tangible daily 24/7 human membership in this theorized "oneness." People are born to be people, not emptiness, and are better off behaving like who they are (that's the real meaning of ziran, 'spontaneously natural') in taoism's cognitive paradigm -- in order to be fully human (ren), in order to have integrity (de), not in order to score points for some "empty state" of this or that philosophy. I'm talking about buddhism being interested in things taoism is not interested in, and vice versa. E.g., "desire is the cause of suffering" is a view taoism never had. The cause of suffering in taoism is lack of spontaneous naturalness, lack of integrity, also known as "fragmentation of consciousness." So taosim is concerned with unifying the fragmented, un-whole body, mind, and spirit into a coherent conscious whole. A lot of it is concerned with this and only this, in this-here life, and might take it from there towards any subsequent ones (in which not all taoist sects believe to begin with) only after the main task is accomplished. As for "dualistic" vision, what can be more dualistic than the mind-body split? And where in Buddhism is it NOT perpetuated? You are supposed to "discard" the body -- nice, where's the universal dumpster for things that don't matter, like living, feeling bodies of live, feeling people, and how does it make it non-dualistic to have such a dumpster distinct and separate from the purported unity of "the rest of it?" But in any event, why don't you share the poem?

Yeah, all one needs to do is pretend six thousand years of Chinese cultural history never happened, and then of course there's no such thing. Poor Fu Xi and the clueless King Wen and the hapless Duke of Zhow would never have bothered putting together a useless 'ism' if only they could be as lucky as we are and have access to mister Tolle's celestial revelations.

But that's in Buddhism. In taoism, there IS a self. "Qi blowing on ten thousand things so each can be itself " (Zhuangzi). Not "so each can be nothing," not "so each can be everything," but "so each can be exactly what it is instead of trying hard to be what it isn't." A "real human" of taoism is a self, a unique personality, not the kind made on some cosmic assembly line of pointless illusions but the kind shaped into a unique being like no other being in the universe, by qi blowing just on him, just on her,just so, just like that, the way it doesn't on anyone or anything else. That's the individual of taoist classics, not some amorphous refugee from personal to universal (because personal fails to satisfy, being what one is fails to satisfy, applications are sent to the universal buddhist-zen-hindu INS for citizenship in some no-self universality... and, as a matter of routine, denied on a case by case basis, have you noticed?..) The self of taoist psychophysiology is comprized of levels of consciousness that are present all at once but are invisible from a fragmented (not whole) perspective of each of its parts severed from its other parts, and taoist cultivation is about restoring links between parts of the fragmented self and, at a higher level, between the re-united self and tao. However, a self re-united with tao is not "nonexistent," it is still "itself," only harmoniously aligned with the rest of reality instead of clogging same with its broken bits and pieces.

El Tortugo, I don't know what "they" say but I say it's right on. Consciousness is only a mystery to those who "study" someone else's consciousness. To those whose mantra is "know thyself," it's as clear as a shot of Smirnoff's. "Mystery" is just another word for "poor memory." And memory is poor when the bulk of its developmental history is repressed. And it is repressed only when it is traumatic. And this is why dabblers and "professionals" in "someone else's consciousness" alike don't go there. For if they were to go there, they'd find out why they don't remember, and then they would remember, and then they would shit in their diapers... um, pants. Take the lower brain and the midbrain, e.g., the ones that were there when your neocortex wasn't fully developed yet. Meaning during gestation, birth, infancy, and the first five years of your life. Your neocortex is a late afterthought, both in evolution and in personal development. Everything has already happened, you are complete as a feeling, conscious being long, long before your neocortex comes into the picture. Ah but the moment it comes, it starts telling the rest of you what to feel and what to think, and the rest of you complies because the neocortex is the boss in a crisis, and your life IS a crisis since before birth, civilization has made it so. In a crisis, the boss tells you, "forget everything you've experienced so far, forget how it made you feel, forget all you know, now I'm going to be telling you what to know and what to forget, what to feel and how to intellectualize it away, and what not to feel under any circumstances, numb out forever -- or else we go crazy, how's that for a plan for the rest of your life?" And you shit in your pants and comply. That's how modern consciousness works. No mysteries...

After I mastered the techniques, I abandoned the practice but retained the skill (like my other example of having learned to ride a bicycle -- once it's done, it's part of me, I have it "always"). So now if I happen to get a lucid dream, I get it spontaneously, and it is never useless, it invariably serves a purpose of affecting something in my waking life. Examples: I invented a couple of nifty devices in a lucid dream, when I woke up all I had to do was put them together. I internally resolved my relationship with my father, a lifelong issue, in a lucid dream; when I woke up, it was "done," and remained resolved. Most importantly, my taoist magic teacher visits me this way... I met her in real life long ago, since then she paid a few (rare) dream visits when I needed her, and always helped tremendously. Lucid dreams are not the ones that "feel real," they are the ones that ARE real, in that they tangibly affect one's waking life. If they don't, they aren't. One of the authors who wrote on the subject asserts that when he was a kid he used to find a dollar in his waking jeans after dreaming he had one. It happened to him every time he wanted some innocent childhood pleasure real bad and his stingy parents wouldn't give him any money. I'm still looking for that majestic pearl I found in a lucid dream and then lost in same...

I've first come across this idea in the writings of a taoist philosopher whose name eludes me at the moment, unfortunately, and found it pretty striking. His main argument: "the present" doesn't exist, "now" doesn't exist, it's the ultimate man-made illusion of them all. His reasoning: you can never have a "now" because it immediately turns into "back then," it always reverts to what's behind you, split it into milliseconds and still not one of these milliseconds can last enough to become a "now," it is a "back then" before you have a chance to grasp it... split the millisecond a million times and each part is still the same, not a "now" but a "back then." The static man-made idea of "now" has no counterpart in reality, it only exists in our imagination. The "present," unlike the past and the future, i.e. unlike where things have been and where they are headed, constitutes something that doesn't occur in reality -- a stop, a pause, an interruption in the flow. In reality, there's no such stops, no place in the flow of reality is a frozen "right now" place, they are all behind us or in front of us, but the very spot we occupy is taken -- not by a "now" but by a past-to-future transformation that never, ever pauses to create any stops in between. This is a dynamic picture of Hou Tian, tao-in-motion. The static picture, Xian Tian, tao-in-stillness, is devoid not only of the "now" but also of the "past" and "future," it exists outside time and any developments that are time-sensitive (like a cause-effect relationship, e.g.) are impossible in it, since nothing is its cause and everything, its effect, but they are freely interchangeable -- e.g., everything combined would yield tao-in-stillness and nothing at all, its ultimate manifestation.

I'm enjoying it too, Wayfarer... and thanks to all for thoughts and feelings shared! And, Michael, thanks for your "great truth!" Here's what I meant by sleep-walking. I was learning how to lucid-dream at one point and since I had no one to teach me this particular skill in person, I read all I could on the subject (that's how I usually read when a subject interests me -- total immersion for a while, then let all the red -- um, black -- dust settle for a while... and then what settles usually contains what I need... alas, it often means the names of authors and titles of books have completely dissolved! ) -- so, what I gleaned from the best-presenting sources was that the way to learn to lucid-dream with intent that will make it possible to affect the waking reality from inside the dream is to become very aware of one's physicality and reality in the waking state. This seems to be the prerequisite, THE door that can help one take one's tangible reality into one's dream and back without losing touch with it, instead of drifting aimlessly in a dream world you can't call your own because you don't maintain a home there, have no lasting relationships there, and can't deliberately make things happen "here" by acting "there." So... there was this French guy who researched and then practiced and then taught lucid dreaming for a long time, and he suggested the following practice. Every time you pass through a door, any door -- another room, in or out the house, the bathroom, the classroom, the office, the supermarket, the car -- pause, touch the passage with your hand, feel your hand, feel the passage, feel your whole body -- and ask yourself a clear question: "AM I DREAMING?.." This helps one catch oneself "sleep-walking" through parts of his or her life... if not all of it... all the passages, changes, transformations... doors we don't notice... this is one technique, out of a few good ones, that teaches one to notice... and wake up. So then when you can, first and foremost, tell the difference between when you're dreaming and when you're awake, this makes you "more real" in BOTH states... for they are different realities and mustn't be de-differentiated unconscously. By the way, in one of Castaneda's books, he asserts that Don Juan taught him to remain conscious in his dreams by continuously looking at his hands with his mind's eye when going to sleep. Again this seems to be about taking one's physicality into the dream state in order to be able to consciously act there. (By the way, it is very difficult to do...) So, basically, I meant that I touch doors and catch myself before I drift outta my body without noticing. If I do want to enter a space-time where the whole of my physical body can't follow, I at least try to make as much of it follow as I possibly can (e.g., the vital signs I mentioned -- they will match where my mind is taking my body, and I will be aware of it. More often, though, it's vice versa, i.e. my body can take my mind elsewhere in space-time... the smell of burning moxa does it to me every time, e.g. ...and a whole bunch of other physical things.)

Well, I specifically avoid any and all practices that disconnect the mind from the body. I don't astral-project and don't sleep-walk and don't meditate without setting up a "be aware or bust" conditions for the body too (full lotus, e.g., not a comfy chair), and don't let my mind be in the book without knowing at all times where my body is and how it feels. That's why I'm not afraid to "intellectualize" -- unlike the in-the-head intellectuals who get permanently confined to a lifetime imprisonment in the left brain hemisphere, I have invested a bunch of time, effort, and systemic body-inclusive learning into connecting my body-mind-spirit into a unified whole. So when I "intellectualize," I do it with my whole body, and when I'm being physical to the max, I do it with my mind on what I'm doing. I was discussing something "intellectual" the other day and a friend told me, "If I was deaf I'd think you're Italian." Meaning I use my hands (and body language in general) when I talk, all the time. I can't intellectualize without my body participating... physically unable to disconnect my head from my hands and my belly from my neocortex...

Don't be hard on yourself, Nobody knows! Meditation-wise, I'm perhaps a bit different from most people I know in that I've been doing it for thirty years, and the nature and quality of the meditation experience "now" is radically different from what it was when I started. And it is different "now" because the past thirty years of doing it is what shapes what it's like in any which "now." If I just started today for the first time, my "now" would have been quite a bit deficient compared to the "now" informed by "all this time." The current me, the "now" person following her breath, can "rest her breath on her mind and rest her mind on her breath" simultaneously, as the immortal Sun Bu-er has instructed. Meaning, she can remember she's riding a bicycle and has bills to pay and still not lose track of her breath and her intent, not lose track of being present and aware. Moreover, she can remember she's eating an apple, breathing, clearly seeing an apple tree in full bloom in her lower dantien, tasting the apple of a private garden in a Ukrainian village of long ago that tastes vastly superior to the supermarket one she's eating right now, breathing, never losing track, tasting all the apples she's ever eaten, all at once, breathing in the smell of the apple tree in full bloom into her blood... and expanding it all any which way she likes into anything she feels like creating or receiving at the moment. Meditations and "awareness" of a person who doesn't lose track of the past become quite holographic with time. There's room for everything in there... you can strip it down to the bare bones, breathe in breathe out, but only through duration and continuity (tao's virtues, according to the Ta Chuan) the bare bone starts sprouting reality... Every breath I take every twenty-four hours has some molecules in it breathed in and out by Laozi once, it's about as long as it takes every molecule of air around Earth to travel across the globe and come back, and it never dissipated and never disappeared, it's never "in the present" without simultaneously being "in the past," which means you can call it anything time-wise but it "keeps happening" only because it "was" and "will be," over and over. "The pattern of tao is motion and the pattern of this motion is return," as the classics put it.