Taomeow

Very few indeed -- possibly only those who didn't get covid to begin with (works quite a bit better with other coronaviruses, the ones that give us the common cold, which, indeed, responds to qigong, among other things. Not in 100% of cases by any stretch of imagination, but in a very experienced -- decades of practice -- seasoned practitioner trained specifically in medical qigong, it might. No guarantees, but it might. I've seen it go both ways.) As for covid, it's a bit different. I for one made a donation to Wuhan taoist monks afflicted with corona when they asked for help, and not by sending good vibes. Professional Buddhists don't seem to be all that reliant on "energy healing" either. But then, our own homespun all-powerful "energy healers" never taught those amateurs the correct methods I guess. Anyone familiar with traditional medicine that does utilize "energy healing" (Chinese, Ayurvedic, Tibetan, Native American, etc.) knows that the power of the pathogen ("pernicious influence") is not a constant where "any" pathogen will respond to "any" energy healing. They know that a human being can't, e.g., "energetically" regrow a severed limb, and don't waste their energy on a lost cause. They know that certain "plagues" (the official designation of the covid pandemic in TCM terms -- "hot damp plague") are imbued with energy of their own... which can, on occasion, be tremendous... and avoid getting cocky around them.

I think it's more than 30 years -- I remember how doctors told my paternal grandmother not to eat eggs when I was a little girl, and she didn't, then they told her, forget it and eat them because all that hoopla about cholesterol was proven wrong, and then again, boom -- avoid, cholesterol!! -- and she was always trying to do as the doctors/newspapers say, authority was everything (a classical case of learning via trauma conditioning, she learned the hard way to do as authorities say -- any authorities). But it was difficult for anyone with functional memory to do as they say, because they turned what they say 180 degrees so often. The only way to do as they say was to become amnesiac. Most people are trained to oblige, and to forget on cue in order to believe in the Latest Science® -- which in the case of eggs happens to be the least of our problems with this approach. By the way, dietary cholesterol in general (not just from eggs, from anything that has cholesterol) contributes a maximum of 5% (more often far less) to the overall cholesterol in the bloodstream. 95% is produced endogenously, by our own liver, and how much or how little of it will be produced depends primarily on the level of toxicity it has to handle. High cholesterol is a defense mechanism the body uses when the level is too high and the liver and other organs charged with metabolizing and eliminating toxins are not coping -- so part of the toxic load is arrested for future reference, trapped in cholesterol (and also in body fat) in hopes of a future chance of processing and elimination, and also to prevent toxins from roaming free in the bloodstream, damaging organs and systems on their unchecked wild ride. Which is why lowering high cholesterol with drugs is like firing the garbage collectors when there's too many garbage collecting machines driving around -- they don't look nice, and seem to contribute to traffic jams. But once they're fired, no one collects that extra garbage anymore... A better idea would be to produce less garbage. But then, it's the producers of garbage who are in charge of those Scientific™ decisions, but don't let me digress too far.

The Science™ does not differentiate -- the USDA asserts that the difference in eggs from happy uncaged chickens and factory farmed chickens is minimal. Based on their own regulations they are actually telling the truth for a change of pace, but only because, according to those regulations, chickens that are let out of cages for a few days in a year can be labeled "free range" or "cage free," as opposed to chickens that are never let out of cages. Most "free range" chickens, for whose eggs we pay two to three times more, are let out of cages once a month for a couple of hours. So they might eat a few grasshoppers in a lifetime if they're particularly lucky, the rest is corn. So, yes, the difference might indeed be minimal -- until they investigate the real thing, which has nothing to do with those labels and is produced by a chicken that runs around digging for worms all day long, absorbing all the sun that will go into the egg to raise its vitamins A and D levels tenfold, to say nothing of the rest of the nutrients and, importantly, the happiness of the chicken producing it that will also contribute to its stellar nutritional value. Of course if the egg is contaminated with humongous amounts of pesticides, antibiotics and hormones, it can easily be made into something very unhealthy, no question, but in this respect eggs aren't different from any other food items -- and scrambling the ingesting party's metabolism this way can lead to what-not, including but not limited to diabetes. But the egg itself has nothing to do with it. Runny or hard-boiled is not that important. Most nutrients in the egg are not destroyed by sensible cooking.

Just trust The Science® and The Media™ and you can't go wrong.

More like "what is huge can't be comprehensively addressed point by point" -- including a difference in opinion that is huge ("unembraceable"-- no one's arms are long enough to comprehensively embrace all of it), a huge discrepancy in what two different people perceive as "vice" and "virtue" -- also the sheer volume of written material showing up on social media, including on this forum -- which is why what you pointed out is unavoidable:

"Spit in the eye of whoever tells you it's possible to embrace the unembraceable." -- Kozma Prutkov

True. We would have to define "soon" though. Considering tao is eternal... might have to wait a minute. Diana Lucifera, "light bearer," used to be cool. Her previous incarnation, Hecate, was a bit more controversial... To say nothing of the original Sumerian Inanna/Babylonian Ishtar... But the lady they passed the torch to stands for Liberty, of course.

Democrats on the left, Republicans on the right. Both make sense -- as long as they speak the language of my people.

I was looking for a nice, positive, inspiring name. Like they used to name their various causes historically -- "The Great Leap Forward," "The Law for the Prevention of Genetically Defective Progeny," "The Final Solution" -- names that inspired confidence and enthusiastic support in the populations tasked with accomplishing those goals, because they sounded so timely and necessary to the appropriately pre-conditioned ears. How about this one? Inspiring, isn't it? (As for the octopus metaphor, I don't think using its image to represent all-pervasive evil is fair to the octopus, a sentient creature with not a single bone in its body, let alone an evil bone. That thing we're scheduled to be gobbled up by is not biological. It's not an animal. It's a machine. You can't "reset" an animal. You can only "reset" a machine.)

So, what nice, positive, inspiring name should we call a comprehensive ironclad plan developed by a small group of all-powerful elite billionaires to digitize all life on the planet (plant, animal and human), privatize all of it, genetically modify all of it, implement absolute totalitarian surveillance and control over it, crush any and all resistance or noncompliance, extract maximum profit from it and discard its dead empty shell?

Also the exact time the first plane hit the WTC -- 8:46 am.

You may want to rephrase the questions. The I Ching can't answer any yes/no questions, nor any either/or questions. Here's how I would ask three separate questions regarding your inquiry: 1. I divine the impact on my health of the stretches I did up until now. (Please give me an image.) 2. I divine the most likely outcome of going back to doing stretches. (Please give me an image.) 3. I divine my best approach to doing stretches from now on. (Please give me an image.)

The first one sounds worthy of checking out, thank you. I was amazed, many years ago, to discover (from reading Western books on embryology) that Chinese medicine's organ "relatedness" -- Kidneys to ears, Liver to eyes, Lungs to skin, etc. -- is fully congruent with the original development of those organs from the same embryonic layers whose functions remain related on the deepest level for the duration of the organism's lifetime. Which helped convince me -- as an independent discovery that was really thrilling at the time -- that classical Chinese medicine is not only the real deal but the superior deal in its understanding of the human body. As for Jin Yong, aka Louis Cha, I've read many of his novels with child-like fascination, including the Condor Heroes books. Excellent kungfu! -- as the protagonists of The Deer and the Cauldron put it more than once.

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As for me, it makes me remember a song I like Countless staring messages as mortal life reflection As it's spelt out once or twice But there's this whole understanding And it's coming I guess-I know- I hope that you can get into this To this I was there and then and then You were there and then and then We were there at the beginning of time

I didn't misunderstand. I understood where you're coming from. I just didn't care for that particular brand of... er... brilliance to take bandwidth in the thread I opened toward entirely different purposes. It wasn't meant to be turned into a dumpster for any and all garbage collected wherever by whoever -- calling it "opinion" ain't no saving grace, garbage is garbage. So I asked you to delete merely as common courtesy -- not realizing the concept was so alien to you. I just felt that toward your kind of contributions you should start your own thread if you wish, and leave well alone the thread whose opening poster views your intrusion as woefully uncouth. I'm not your platform for your cherished opinions, I'm a humble OP in this thread. I know it must be hard for you but I'm hoping you can make an effort and somehow get it -- and oblige. Many thanks in advance.

With all due respect, this thread is not for disseminating production from "loony forums" whatever they are. We don't have a psychiatrist on the mod team so it's not possible to determine whether the players are LARPing or genuinely suffering from paranoid delusions and need compassion and medication. Would you be so kind as to delete your post from here. If you want to discuss your thoughts, you're welcome to of course -- if you want to point a LARPing finger at "Rothschild," the meme of all things evil in the simple minds of people who can't be bothered (or educated) to dig deeper in their ponerological pursuits, you are going to be disappointed.

Something I was reminded of today when watching a video featuring a Biden supporter attacked and robbed on his own lawn (adorned with Biden-Harris signs) -- by protesters whom he invited to peacefully protest in front of his house and who yelled at him, with great anger, that "asking us to protest peacefully is white supremacy." When the Russian revolution started gobbling up its own children as all revolutions are wont to do, Eugenia Ginsburg, a young, beautiful journalist/educator and privileged wife of a high-standing party official, whose political record was beyond reproach and whose sincere loyalties were all in the right place -- a true believer in the cause and its leader, she was -- got arrested, like countless millions of others, on made-up ridiculous charges and sent to gulag for 18 years. She survived and wrote an amazing book, which I read twice back in the day, Journey Into the Whirlwind, describing those eighteen years from beginning to end. So, this is what I remembered today. Early in her incarceration a couple of inmates were added to her prison cell: German communists who came to the Soviet Union after they had been imprisoned in nazi Germany, having been accused of being Soviet spies. They were, however, subsequently released for lack of proof -- it was still possible to get some mercy from the Gestapo in the earlier days of its reign. They fled Germany in search of political asylum, and once they arrived in Moscow, were promptly arrested there as nazi spies. Quite typical, there were hardly any exceptions to this scenario at the time. So, when the German women began undressing in the prison cell, Eugenia saw that one of them had scars all over her back and sides, horrible scars from some inhumane torture that looked symmetrical and identical on both sides of her body. Horrified, she asked, "Who did this to you?" The German woman turned, showed her the left side of her body, and said, This I got from the Gestapo in Berlin. Then she turned again, showed Eugenia her right side, and said, This I got from the NKVD in Moscow. Then she described the whole process to Eugenia, pointing out repeatedly that everything that was said to her by her interrogators, everything that was done, all the methods, from made-up accusations to made-hellish interrogations to physical torture, had been absolutely identical. "It's as though they were consulting exactly the same playbook, down to the smallest details," she said bitterly.

I think this is especially interesting in that it credits god rather than the devil with entrapment practices (apparently gods' ways are not our ways, as they always point out, and what's illegal on Earth is fully legit in heaven.) We are therefore invited to appreciate dirty corrupt politicians as a god-given. Personally I do hope some kind of reward is forthcoming, in whatever shape or form, for not believing a single word from the entrapment delusion's mouth.

"God sends upon them a strong delusion to make them believe what is false so that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness." 2 Thess. 2:11-12.

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Not to scare the OP but this is accurate. This symptom can in some cases be the first one, and for a while the only one. I'd look for a very good specialist to run some diagnostic tests.

As Apech already pointed out, these are yin-yang traits -- but we also have to keep in mind that our understanding of male-female traits is woefully skewed and our history grossly rewritten. The fierce onna-bugeisha, female samurai warriors, constituted at least 30% among samurai warriors in medieval Japan, and the number wasn't 50-50 not because they were inferior to male warriors but because... well, because women and men are both yin-yang but more women are more yin, and are either more suited for, or might prefer, endeavors that are more yin. By the same token, a long-standing tradition (currently being revisited in Japanese fashion magazines) of effeminate males as the ideal of maleness among the Japanese aristocracy, emulating the style of Prince Genji that dictated what a "real man" should strive to be for centuries, still turned only some, not all, men into that ideal of pretty-as-a-girl softness, elegance, refinement and away from all things rough-and-tumble. https://historydaily.org/female-samurai-warriors-of-japan

Whoever came up with that idea misled you. Theoretically, you could probably use bamboo to imitate the yarrow stalk method (provided it's thin enough for you to hold 50 stalks between your fingers, in which case chances are it hasn't had a chance to grow long enough to form enough straight space between knots yet, or knots as such for that matter), just like you could use chopsticks, plastic straws or pencils. But the yin and yang lines are formed based on the numeric values of numbers which are either yang (odd) or yin (even). That's because tao, which is symbolically represented as an empty circle -- think zero -- which precedes One, is the Great Mother, so the number following the female, Mother number, is yang, male -- One, the stick. In Chinese it looks like this: So, the female yin tao begets one -- the male 1, the odd, yang number. Next, One begets Two. The even number 2, the female, yin number. It looks like this: So there's your yin opening, between those two lines -- not a joint but a hole. In modern renditions of the I Ching lines that line is positioned differently -- with two strokes side by side for writing convenience, so it turns into a "line" like this: ______ ______ It represents, however, the same opening as in the "two" above, not a joint and not something "broken." An open receptive inner in-between space. "Yang embracing yin" in the original taoist understanding of the primordial relationship between them. So, the yin or yang lines are obtained and interpreted in strict accordance with the inner logic of taoist conceptual thought -- while the concept of a "joint" is, if anything, the opposite of the openness of yin which presupposes inner space in between, the space between the visible surface yang manifestations. This is a system that is based on a unified theory, and that's why mistakes of interpretation, mutually exclusive inherent contradictions, stick out -- they can't be unified with the rest of the theory, they are disjointed (despite having joints in this case) and random mental constructs that don't constitute a piece of the puzzle which, for all its complexity (arising smoothly and gradually from the foundational simplicity), is neither. It's Western sciences' style-- to collect mountains of pieces of assorted puzzles that don't stick together, biology not knowing what physics is up to and the latter steering clear of geography and linguistics and genetics, let alone philosophy and religion. But taoist art-science-practices always share their fundamentals -- without any of them being irrelevant or contradictory. A discovery in linguistics is a discovery in neidan, and developing cosmology means developing clinical medicine, and medicine yields understanding of mathematics and architecture and fortune telling... it's all one snake. The moment they don't work as a unit, they turn into meaningless "Chinese whispers" of new age.

Observing the natural world closely is always very helpful when tackling taoist concepts. As an old folk taoist song goes (which I saw quoted in a Chinese novel, Soul Mountain), "What do men cultivate? A stick! What do women cultivate? A hole!" The I Ching's yang and yin lines, "solid" and "broken" (bad translation and/or bad idea to call the yin line that -- "with an opening" doesn't equal "broken" in the case of a woman, a cup, a mouth, an ear, a door, a gateway to all mysteries or anything else receptive and provided with an opening), are 2D schematic pictures of 3D real-life objects. Male-female distinctions are observational, not ideational. Ideology and its bias came later.