Taomeow

Indeed it depends on the framework one subscribes to. If I ever found myself attending a meeting of Hindu/Buddhists Anonymous, I'd be promptly kicked out. Hi. My name is Taomeow, and I'm a taoist. So I'll just leave it at that and let Laozi share his opinion instead: Therefore the person should be viewed as a person. The family should be viewed as a family. The community should be viewed as a community. The country should be viewed as a country. And the world should be viewed as the world.* You and those who share your approach always do the opposite -- and that opposite is not part of my tradition and also nowhere near my experience and falls afoul of my personal cognition. My tradition maintains we live in the real world. We are persons in this world who should be viewed as persons. Our personalities are of interest as personalities, and are not made insignificant, nonexistent or inconsequential by the fact that some bigger-better whole is also real. A glass of water is not a "projection" of some "more real" water. When you are thirsty, you don't quench your thirst with some grand idea of water being an illusion, or of your thirst being a projection, or of you yourself not really existing. Or do you? I dunno. I don't. Well, your thirst is memory of water nourishing life... and if it wasn't so, you could easily quench your thirst and nourish your life with sand perhaps? Or with gasoline? Or with right words, right actions, black hat, white shoes, Cadillac?.. Your life's origin, in its turn, is memory of an unbroken lineage of ancestors, their actual existence in reality, their genes, their DNA, their jing. Mind you "memory" is not equal to vague recollections in the head that are universally sloppily mistaken for what memory is. Every step of the way I'm talking about memory as the only way any reality can exist. Your molecules only stick together because they remember how. Your doorknob doesn't have the same memory of what brought it into existence built into what it is and so can't be equated to you under any circumstances. A person is a person. A doorknob is a doorknob. An unbroken lineage all the way to the source is memory. Let's capitalize for clarity. Memory is the Way to the Source. If you have this memory, the memory of all-the-way-to-the-source, you have consciousness. The source itself is not consciousness. You need to co-create consciousness with the source by forming a memory. A memory of how to come from the source and a memory of how to return to the source. No memory of the way to the source, no consciousness. A doorknob is a doorknob. It's not a projection of some unified consciousness. It's real. It's a real doorknob. But its memory is short, and its consciousness is therefore limited to a few metallurgic and metal-working operations that brought it into existence. A person is different. Her personal memory is greater than that of the world, because it originates from the Source in an unbroken lineage. So some persons are more conscious than some doorknobs because of that. Persons who don't suffer from total personal amnesia. Now does it make a bit more sense when I say, for short, that "I equate memory with consciousness?" Yes? Great. No? Well, to each their own. *(TTC 54, Wing-tsit Chan, which I believe is the best translation into English in that it's the closest to the original, with translator's infusion into the text of his own ideas absolutely reduced to the minimum compared to others.)

This is the cat's meow of all of taoism. It's the ancient (before the commentaries and before the linear arrangements) representation of the I Ching generated by the initial (and eternal) transformation of wuji into taiji, with further division into "families" of trigrams, with further formation of hexagrams. If you look at the white semi-circle on the left in the center, that's the original true yang. As it floats upward (because it's lighter), follow the rest of the white segments of the concentric circles above it and the six form the first hexagram, Qian, heaven. The black semi-circle on the right, the original true yin, sinks downward (because it's heavier). Follow the rest of the black segments of the concentric circles below it and the six form the second hexagram, Kun, earth. The world is set in motion, tao-in-motion. As the world turns, other trigrams and hexagrams are formed. To a total of 64 hexagrams containing all of the meaningful reality. Beyond 64, further divisions become too numerous, forming structures too complex and chaotic to yield any meaningful information about the whole. That's the realm of hundun, chaos. (Which sadly is where our "studies" of "everything" based on smaller and smaller divisions and subdivisions into millions and billions of bits of fragmented information, absolutely impossible to put together into a coherent picture of reality as a whole, have taken our own "modern" science... but don't let me digress.)

Yes, theoretically, the asymmetry is significant. But since the whole process is not exactly in the realm of the "ordinary reality," maybe that asymmetry gets autocorrected by the process itself. I am not entirely sure. I would have to ask the I Ching. The same distribution as the yarrow stalks sounds good. But it still takes the yarrow oracle itself out of the process. Don't mind me if it's not a concern to you -- I'm a traditionalist, I collected my yarrow in the flowering meadow by the lake and, after making the divination stalks, didn't use them for two years as the method prescribes, giving them time to mature. I'm not particularly trained to sense energies of "all" stuff as some claim to be and some really are, but to the extent my ting (listening with the whole being) skills have been developed, I can often tell an empty ritual from a ritual that opens the door to genuine subtle energies of the world (or deities or spirits, depending on what or who the diviner is working with.) I can feel the difference. When I use traditional methods, they somehow switch me to a different, "attuned" wavelength -- like a radio that starts broadcasting loud and clear instead of indistinct and noisy. Not a perfect metaphor of course... hard to explain, but for me, impossible to ignore. I think there's additional factors in one's own wuxing make up that provide or block affinity with various elements/phases. I'm of the Wood phase and like to handle objects made of wood, if I go hiking I always end up picking up a stick, taking it home, doing some minimal work on it and making a walking stick out of it. I've a bunch of wooden taijiquan implements which I'm trained to use for MA and for qigong, and I still prefer paper books to electronic ones. So who knows. Still, we're surrounded by "mundane" paper, and to me, cards don't feel the same as plants they once were. But I guess they can be consecrated and then "a withered tree sprouts a fresh shoot," as Hexagram 28 put it. It's a typo. I mean three coins. Thanks for noticing, I fixed it.

And I hoped to keep my thoughts to myself! I admire the effort and contemplation @remod put into creating the method, but I wouldn't use it. I've given a fair try to all kinds of "new and improved" divination techniques in my day, from a box of "I Ching cards" I once picked up at Barns & Noble (with nice artwork in the traditional style of Chinese ink painting illustrating each hexagram) to the online I Ching, to the esoteric numerology method with 4 coins. Still, I prefer the traditional ways precisely because of what you suggested -- things are lost when the method is modified or simplified. Sometimes subtle things, and sometimes the not-so-subtle baby is thrown out with bathwater. The yarrow stalk method was originally developed as a cooperation between the I Ching and the diviner plant which yarrow was known to be in shamanic traditions predating the I Ching. The divination was understood as a sort of brainstorming session between the two sages, with you facilitating the exchange of opinions between them. You did it by giving them time to discuss the issue and together come up with the best answer. It is not uncommon for serious taoist divinations (besides the I Ching there's a number of other systems) to be performed using three different oracles and going with the "majority vote," so to speak -- all three agreeing is a strong confirmation, two out of three, good enough but might give one pause since it entails uncertainties, two out of three saying "no" might mean you are going against the will of destiny if you insist on a particular course, and all three saying "no" is enough to stop anyone but a madman. There's something of that vibe in the yarrow stalk method, since yarrow itself is not an inert observer, it's an active oracle. There were attempts to improve the three-coins method toward imbuing the divination with some of that "active participation" from the coins. Some suggested using ancient Chinese coins, hoary and wise and world-savvy. Others, to fish out the current ones from your wallet and use those -- they are in tune with the current times, they have been around modernity and know it better. Then there's the metal container requirement advocated by still others -- shaking the coins inside the container rather than in your hands removes your own unconscious influence on the outcome, your own electromagnetic field gets shielded away from the coins this way and the outcome is thought of as more objective. And so on. In any event, none of them overcome the main limitation of the coins -- namely the statistical equality of the even and odd outcomes. In the real world, yin outcomes outnumber yang outcomes, i.e. things that are a certain way tend to stay that way more than they tend to change. So the coins divination might be giving yin and yang sides an equal opportunity to manifest, but in the human world, where "the more things change, the more they remain the same," their chances to manifest are not equal. Whether there's mysterious forces that take care of this discrepancy by somehow producing more "things-stay-the-same" outcomes is a matter of debate. In any event, I am seldom faced with an issue that asks for the yarrow stalk method, it is reserved for the most serious decisions. If I'm trying to decide whether to buy or not buy an item on Amazon, I might use the online oracle. Questions of in-between seriousness are the three coins questions to me. And for deep contemplation and meditation I use the Circular I Ching.

Dolgan Indigenous young man from the Arctic part of Siberia in traditional clothing and snow goggles. Indigenous people of the Arctic have been using snow goggles since time immemorial. They have been worn to protect the eyes from the glare of bright sunlight reflected off white snow. The snow goggles fit tightly against the face so that the only light entering is through the slits. The slits are made narrow not only to reduce the amount of light entering but also to improve visual acuity. Depending on the ethnic group snow goggles have been made of wood, metal, reindeer antlers, walrus ivory and even horsehair. Snow goggles were usually cut in the form of a thin, elongated convex plate with a notch for the bridge of the nose, with narrow slits for the eyes. The front part along the edges is often decorated with engraving or an embossed pattern.

Yes, that too. Abuse of power is always an attempt to compensate for feeling weak. Something inside a tyrant is always rotten, disintegrating, putrid. Or, more often, everything.

Photo from British India, 1903. So... what do you think you're looking at? Make no mistake -- you're looking at humanism of our generous philanthropic betters. He provides her with a job. She would starve without him. And yet not everyone today sees this picture with this depth of understanding. Some might even feel they're looking at something quite atrocious. But that's only because back then our betters' riding techniques were still somewhat crude and unsophisticated. How they have evolved. How much more refined, subtle, elegant they are today.

And covid. I know a doctor who started a whole campaign in the ICUs to put covid patients on NAC, apparently convinced a whole bunch of her colleagues, and they all reported stellar results. I don't remember if I've seen any actual studies or not (might have to check my piles of files) but of course pharma companies perform internal ones when they suspect a readily available substance might be digging into their policies and plans. If the substance is found too efficient for comfort and they don't own it... sigh. And those of the studies that are intended to be published toward discrediting the substance are designed accordingly. The classical example was the way the Mayo clinic "studied" Linus Pauling's high dose IV vitamin C protocols. They made a solution of vitamin C in advance for the whole month of the "study." In water, vitamin C, being an active antioxidant, promptly degrades within a couple of hours, undergoes oxidation and turns first into the harmful oxidant dehydroascorbic acid, then to diketogulonic, oxalic, and threonic acids, each with its unwelcome properties. And that's what the study subjects were effectively getting in their IVs the whole month. Mission accomplished.

I not only think the difference is profound but I know for a fact that some of it is measurable objectively (much as I'm not a fan of this criterion for assessing human states, sometimes you want to use this tool.) That's my primal training speaking, where the difference between things psychology working or not was determined by changes in physiology. (At least in the original non-bastardized and non yet thoroughly corrupted version the end tail of which I managed to catch, just in time before it all went the way of all flesh.) E.g. if writing in your journal -- one such session, or ten, or three years thereof -- finally resulted in your making the kind of conscious connections that eliminated your desire to "binge on high calorie food," without any effort on your part, without your being divided onto yourself (your mind saying one thing about those foods that it believes are doing you no favors and your body saying another, nagging you for those favors), I would say it is actually an efficient way toward emotional expression. If, also as a result of this practice (or any other), your health parameters normalized -- e.g. your blood pressure, in case it is too high or too low, became normal and stayed there; your core body temperature, ditto; your heart rate, ditto; your brain waves, ditto; and so on -- then I would say the practice does indeed work to process and resolve some stored trauma. Far as subjective criteria, the one that is pretty reliable is the restoration of the original memory -- again, and I can't stress it enough, systemic, not just a construct in the head. Everything you are has to unlock it, by "being there" in your entirety, in the entirety of the being you were then, not as a visit from an older wiser stronger more experienced better protected you but as the actual defenseless someone of back then -- the bridge between the two can only be built by systemic total recall. And that's when your more mature, resilient today's consciousness can stop reverting to the unconscious mode, by making part of the unconscious conscious. And then the next bit. I equate systemic memory and consciousness, in case I haven't said it a million times before. The memory of who we really are in this-here life, of what we really lived through in this-here life, comes before the enlightened memory that "we are all one" and so on. I don't believe the latter matters at all without the former. Know thyself is the ticket... but the actual "thyself" of this life for starters. Skipping that is not going to unify the whole of reality. You can't leave your 6-year-old, your 6-moths-old, your 6-hours-old self out of that universal picture without a hole in that picture the size of the universe. For that's what each of us is -- yes, at 6 hours of age too, and at 6 minutes of age, ditto. And finally, when you make a current choice to react emotionally or to keep your feelings to yourself, in a healthy scenario you have a choice. In an unhealthy one, people tend to feel "too much" or "not enough" (depending on which defense mechanisms are working as the main default setting), and are either unable to feel where it's normal and natural to feel (and have an easy time keeping the lid on their emotions), or else unable to contain their feelings, no adequate brakes, and everything bursts out into the open even if they know from prior such experiences it hurts themselves and others. When emotions are healthy, one can trust oneself to express or not express without any need to "work on one's anger problem" or to "stay positive" or what not. After much work of the "know thyself" variety I trust my anger as much as I trust my love. It's not misguided. It's not excessive. It's a formidable beast but thoroughly, thoroughly domesticated. I have a choice to let it off the leash or not -- depending on whether we decide, together, that it's time to go for a walk or to take a nap. I know that in nearly all situations it will stay on a leash, so if it feels like going for a walk, why not let it -- it's alive and healthy, not a rabid beast. I trust it. I know that I absolutely don't want to kill it, disown it, or deny its validity and, I'll say it, beauty. The real beast is beautiful no matter what it is -- anger, love, compassion, sadness, rage, self-sacrifice, courage, fear. The neurotic beast is ugly no matter what it is. That's basically the difference. Would that people had eyes to see the difference.

Acute sickness caused by trauma or pathogen is not, although the ability or inability to mount healthy defenses and recover from either is most definitely affected. But none of it is expressed emotions. It's merely the effects of a reverberating circuit of repressed emotions from the past continuously agitated by present triggers and coming to the surface in endless attempts for processing and resolution. Which are bound to fail because emotions that were repressed in the past can't be resolved in the present unless consciousness steps in to connect the present trigger to the past source. Systemic consciousness at that, not thoughts in the head, not ideas of the neocortex alone. Which, in the case of projection, dumping, never-ending current responses to non-current triggers (built into the system by all past repressed emotions and traumatic memories that really call the shots in the absence of communication between the conscious and the unconscious where they have been stuffed) is indeed neither healthy nor healing. The whole pattern of such behavior is very telltale though. The pain is real. The attribution of it is erroneous, and the methods utilized in an attempt to ease it are wrong. The right ones are rare and precious and very, very hard to find. And not omnipotent. Not everything broken can be fixed even with the best of glues. Believe you me ( just a figure of speech -- you don't have to of course)) ): most things civilized people perceive as emotions are merely neurotic manifestations of pain.

Methinks it depends on whether you see neidan as going against nature or going against something that went against nature. There's options. Cultivation goals are transcendent but what it is one is planning to transcend is the cat's meow of it. The cat's meow of it.

The most devastating love deprivation is developmental though. The earlier it strikes, the worse the effects. I am of the opinion that not remembering one's early childhood -- even infancy -- is traumatic amnesia in every single case. People just don't know what love is anymore. Teenage love that is perceived as salvation or devastation (depending on whether one manages to get it or not) is one outcome. Someone who was loved properly from the start has love as part of their metabolism, internalized in every cell. They are not as starved for love by the time they are old enough to try procuring it for themselves outside the family as those who are malnourished and deficient. It's not unlike any other normal natural need. Someone who lived a chronically dehydrated life in the desert is a lot more desperate for water than someone who lived by the pure stream. Someone who spent years looking for food leftovers in toxic dumpsters may feel the need for a proper meal more acutely than someone who never went hungry.

Late spring on the lake. Red-tailed hawk chicks awkwardly flap, learning to fly.

Human-made systems and nature-made systems don't seem to be on the same page though. In nature, aversion is a built-in survival mechanism that works even on the level of unicellular organisms. Aversion to noxious stimuli is observed, e.g., in amoebae -- if you put a bunch of them in a dish with clean water, they will swim all over it minding their business, but if you add a drop of ink to one side of the dish, they will start swimming frantically to the other side, and as the ink expands and spreads, they will all crowd to the last remaining area of clear water. And when that's gone, they will die. In humans, aversion is built into our physiology in many ways that bypass our conscious mind and rely on our conscious body to make decisions about what to accept and what to reject -- e.g. the vomiting reflex (primarily to expel ingested or endogenic poison, and in the case of a horrible scene, emotional and mental poison), spontaneous abortion of a compromised non-viable fetus, and so on. Attachment is a built-in mechanism of caring for the young in all species whose young are born dependent on parents. Sharks and reptiles don't have attachments because their young are born ready to survive on their own. Birds and all mammals do because it is imprinted in them toward survival of the individual and the species. In humans, likewise, attachment is secured by our physiology, in the form of, e.g., 'love hormones' -- oxytocin (which healthy women and healthy men close to them release in response to the presence of their baby), pheromones (in species reproducing sexually, they help target the most compatible candidates) and so on. Ignorance is in the eye of the beholder. I believe repressed emotions are the root of sickness -- but not just negative. Repressed positive emotions can do as much damage, if not more. Love is healthy. Early deprivation of love is deadly. Institutionalized abandoned infants tend to not survive past 6 months of age if they are adequately cared for in terms of food, physically adequate accommodations and hygiene but aren't held, caressed and interacted with in an attached, loving way. Beyond this extreme, a plethora of deficient positive emotions born of love deprivation early in life sets the stage for a lifetime of health impairment, emotional, mental and, yes, physical too. It's all connected.

This is an amino acid, known as "semi-essential" because, while we can't live without cysteine, the body can synthesize it from other amino acids (methionine and serine). In its free form, and in an appropriate dose, it exhibits pharmacodynamic properties that enhance or modify its effects, allowing for use toward specific therapeutic goals. Thousands of such substances are often efficient toward treating particular conditions -- the most common example would be using "unnaturally" high doses of free form vitamin C to cure scurvy, but there's many more situations where an illness can be treated with a higher-than-normal dose of a naturally occurring substance (like a vitamin, mineral, or an essential amino acid) not toward counteracting a deficiency but toward capitalizing on the substance's many specific pharmacodynamic properties. Most of these substances are orders of magnitude safer than patented designer molecules we know and love as pharmaceutical drugs, because our bodies have well-established metabolic pathways to handle these normal constituents of our normal food. A super high dose is usually utilized or excreted with either no side effects or with minimal transient ones that go away as soon as you stop taking the substance. In any event, free-form NAC as a supplement has well-studied effects on the body, importantly the lungs and liver. It is an antidote to intoxication by many exogenic and endogenic toxins (notably acetaminophen, alcohol, some chemotherapy drugs, and radiation poisoning). It is a stellar hepatoprotector (keeping the liver healthy or restoring its health after damage done to it) and protector of the surface of the pulmonary alveoli. It provides tension for the surface of the alveoli and, accordingly, a fully functional organ for gas exchange -- and a fighting chance for the lungs affected by any pathology. There's never been a documented case of death from an overdose. So, following in the footsteps of thousands of safe and efficient substances already removed from the plebeians arsenal of self-help (a barbaric practice of the unwashed masses that translates into incalculable losses, of both money and power, for our betters), it is now banned. But there's great news on the horizon... have no fear, the hand that taketh away is also the hand that giveth. And finally we get what we've been clamoring for since the beginning of time! Ladies and gentlemen... I present... ta da... (drumroll)...

OK, I should have phrased the premise with more precision -- I know that neoteny (which is the term describing our developmental history as a species much better than evolution) is not entirely unique to our species. What I meant by "unique" is everything I mentioned -- neoteny plus the length of neoteny-induced period of infancy plus the length of dependency on mother period plus the rate of maturation of all vital organs and systems and the number of years it takes to reach the age of independence plus the number of years it takes to reach the age of reproduction. All of these combined. And more, but that's a subject too broad for an in-depth detailed TDB post. Yes, monoculture is the set-up most vulnerable to change. Change is inevitable, but monoculture as the mono method to adapt to any and all changes is most certainly doomed -- at least where multicellular organisms are concerned. The history of eukaryots on this planet is the history of progressively increasing rate of changes (primarily of the climate) and progressively decreasing rate of adaptation to these changes for anything complex enough to be profoundly affected by them. 99% of all species that ever existed went extinct. But the smart ones lasted for tens and hundreds of millions of years before they did -- no small feat -- and some of those are still here. And only and exclusively those that adapted to the changing environment rather than trying to drastically change the environment. We are also unique in that we are the first species to attempt survival not by adapting to changes but by refusing to adapt -- going to war with nature, throwing all we've got at conquering, subduing, subjugating, and ultimately canceling and replacing nature with our own bright ideas of what to replace it with. Well, good luck to us.

I don't know if I would be able to go at all in front of a dog. Let alone two dogs.

I could not care less for the latest stupid ass in charge of this mess

Thank you for the offer, Yueya. Yes, I do think that video belongs in a different thread, if you would care to start one. Personally, I have "heavy" and "light" and "neutral" threads here, and this one was meant to be light. There's too much heartbreak in the world, I wanted to create a little virtual niche for something that isn't about that. If you remove it, I'll remove my comment under it too so as not to leave it hanging.

Moved to PPD.

As the OP, I'll explain too. It so happened that I was also communicating with a friend in India at the time, a doctor/researcher who has been living there and treating covid patients, who came to India from a country that in his opinion is in no better covid shape at this point (Ukraine), and his main argument was for people to look at where they're at in their own countries. He was mostly addressing his compatriots whom, just like Americans, the media had lovingly taken by the nape of the neck and turned in the direction of India, and turned their attention and awareness there rather than wherever else (out of 220 countries each with its own story to tell, 38 of them a scarier story than India). So the conversation was fresh in my mind when I saw your thread -- but I didn't add the "counterargument" to it precisely because you specifically asked to leave the "political" opinions out of it (sorry, don't remember your exact wording). It's just that the timing was such that your thread seemed like a counterargument to exactly the information I was processing at that moment. So, the intent was to respect your request while giving my own thoughts a voice too, hence a thread at around the same time. Like I already pointed out here and elsewhere more than once, it was a slip of the keyboard -- as a general rule I've sworn off the subject. (With apologies to @cheya and others posting in a different thread that I would contribute to if I wasn't too afraid at this point of letting anyone know I have any opinions of my own at all. I'm learning, painfully, to move in the world only the way a puppet is allowed to move, only in response to this string pulled, then that string. My heart is not attached to those strings -- but I have to go through the motions of either moving my tongue as though it is, or not moving it at all.) I never doubted your heart, Steve, it's just that these days I'm a firmer believer in hell is paved with good intentions than I ever was. Edit: typo