Taomeow

Taiji method: don't move at all, sit like a statue until the fly flies by close enough, then suddenly shoot out your arm and grab it. But just any which yoink is not the real skill. The real skill is to be able to specify in advance which of the two wings or six legs you're going to grab. It IS intelligence! -- systemic temporo-spacial intelligence which is the real deal. We merely redefined what intelligence means so as to accommodate our (domesticated humans') severe disability and reinterpret it as our special ability -- to wit, the ability to drop out of the real world and live outside of it -- dwelling instead inside abstract thought in the head and the prosthetic world it allowed us to build. I don't think a prosthesis, however sophisticated, is a more intelligent design than organic reality. But since that's what we use, we misunderstand organic reality as something dumber than ourselves and rationalize away all signs of genuine intelligence in organic reality as "instincts," "reflexes," "automatic actions" and so on. We believe every living thing is an automaton and only we are truly conscious and smart. But that's because systemic embodied intelligence is something we lost and consequently don't understand and don't recognize in others.

We are surrounded by masters of supreme ability -- or, as Chan put it, "we walk knee deep in buddhas." Not only does a common housefly fly unimpeded in the house built by the wingless who can't make it even to the second floor without using the stairs. We humans see 24 frames per second, the fly sees 100. So when you're trying to approach it stealthily so as to swat it, it's watching you as a very slow slo-mo video.

raw selvedge denim

The Way of the Celestial Masters was the name of a taoist school founded by Zhang Daoling in 142 CE. It was the first taoist branch in history that adopted the form of an organized religion (a borrowing from buddhism). It had a long and colorful history, absorbing some other schools and their teachings, splitting into the Southern and Northern branches, and mostly dissolving into other kinds of taoism around the 7th century. It reemerged as a distinct school much later. In 1949 its 64th patriarch, Zhang Enpu, fled to Taiwan, with subsequent disputes of authenticity between that branch and the mainland branches that survived under Communism. If the OP means he's an initiated member of that school, I'd be curious to learn more. He would be "a Celestial Master" in the same sense that "I am Longmen Pai" -- not a claim to fame but a claim of lineage. However, appointing oneself a Celestial Master without initiation into a lineage (I think Celestial Masters have the requirement of the lineage song to learn, among other things) would mean something else. So I would be interested in an elucidation.

It's priceless to live with a cat who has a funny bone! I also used to have a cat with a great sense of humor. Not Siberian or Norwegian, just an extraordinary calico of five colors. Her humor was not slapstick comedy, it was refined... E.g., one thing she did was walk in a full circle around the perimeter of the living-room and head for the kitchen, but on the way she had to walk past a visiting friend who liked to mess with her. So as soon as she was within his range he'd grab her, turn her in the opposite direction of where she was going, and set her back down on the floor. Instead of just turing around, Lola then kept walking in that opposite direction, making a full circle around the room once more and approaching that guy exactly like the first time, as though deep in her cat thoughts and paying no attention to him. He'd grab her and turn her around again. She would make a full circle again, still insisting on her original route without showing the slightest frustration or impatience. Neither one would give up for, like, an hour, the guy turning the cat, the cat walking the full circle and still offering no resistance but not changing her Way. He would be the first one to admit defeat and let her pass. She did many things that were subtly hilarious, and I believe she understood not just comedy but even tragic comedy, a very complex genre to master even for most humans.

SirP added a bit more of the historical details (which I know well enough... the leader of the reformation, Protopope Avvacum, even visited me in a dream in my rebellious youth and instructed me, then a passionate and reckless dissident, in the art of curbing my enthusiasm for truth toward avoiding pointless martyrdom.) But if we don't focus on the details and take a google earth-like view of the whole, I believe the whole of our history, past, present, and in all likelihood future, is a lot like that -- the model of social strife is to fight each other to the bitter end over a finger's worth of differences while the organizers of the strife quietly steal a planet's worth of what really matters to all sides. Jonathan Swift had a similar model in mind when he described the Big-Endians' rebellion against the Little-Endians over which end of the boiled egg is the correct one to break.

Siberian cats are friendly. They look serious but they are playful and usually get along with everybody. Very adventurous and quite muscular and agile under all that fluff. Extremely efficient mousers too. It's the back of the house, the path must be in the front. The open doorless premises on the left might be the firewood storage shed -- saraj. "Old believers" were the 17th century religious dissidents who resisted church reformation, were persecuted and were forced to flee. Many chose to die rather than submit. The subject matter of the reform was whether one ought to cross oneself with two fingers or three. There were other disagreements about the "new" vs. "old" ritual, but that's the gist of it. They believed that three fingers harbor the devil.

Judging by the smoke over the roof, it's being used as we speak -- there's got to be a chimney on the opposite slope of that roof. Winters are tough, and summers have their challenges (assorted biting insects), but rewards are many too, for those who are tough enough to match the environment. People I know in Siberia are in the foraging, preserving and canning season right now. There's delicious endemic berries of many varieties which, short of raising the dead, can do almost anything else for one's health, hundreds of most powerful medicinal plants, fish so scrumptious and so tender that it doesn't get shipped anywhere else, and a kind of survival competence in the atmosphere (from skills to attitudes) that is hard to find in milder environments. And then there's Siberian cats.

Our home delivery worked alongside stores up to the end of the 1980s, though the delivery person didn't milk the cow right in front of the customers but it was the next best thing -- fresh raw milk. It was delivered once or twice a week, in large (40 liter) metal jugs from which it was scooped into individual small ones -- mine looked like this: The arrival was announced by a piercing, unbelievably loud without any aid from technology, but melodious, sing-song yelling -- "milk! milk!" I think the delivery woman was specifically selected for this opeartic voice as the main qualification, LOL. I can still hear that call so clearly. It's a three-syllable word in Russian, moloko (which non-speakers might know from The Clockwork Orange) and she always made this abrupt, ear-splitting high-pitched emphasis on the second one, you could never miss it even if you had music on at full blast, or the TV, or sledgehammers working nearby.

Bugging out since the 17th century. The Old Believers' settlement Erzhey on the Kaa-Khem River, Tuva Republic, southern Siberia

This was unexpected... took me a moment.

No dairy friends, alas. (Where's the weeping emoticon when you need it?) I buy powdered goat milk from the Netherlands... the only kind I use when the recipe calls for milk.

Yeah, I can tell. Well I am. I can't deal with the resulting product. It doesn't sour, it rots. It doesn't get metabolized, it bloats. And it tastes like nothing and is insultingly watery. In my previous incarnation, just like in this one, I didn't have much of a sweet tooth but I'm a natural born saturated fat fiend (hence a lifetime of no weight issues), so I used to buy a half liter bottle (glass of course) of 35% cream almost every day (52 copecks), and it was hours old when sold and you could tell by the smell, without looking at the production date, that it was not 24 hours yet, less than that. The sales person would tell me if it was two days old ("yesterday's cream... still want it?"), so I would know to consume it the same day. If it was three days old, I would make cottage cheese with it. If it was four days old... well, that didn't exist. Supply was slightly lagging behind demand. Obviously this model couldn't compete with Al Capone's. And the one that went before it couldn't compete with this one. And the one that went before that one... well, we call it progress.

The concept of "Expiration date" was invented by Al Capone. Here's how it came to be: one sunny day the famous gangster decided to monopolize the dairy market in Chicago, which up to that time was not regulated in any way. He started out by legally purchasing a large dairy plant, and then using his people in the City Council to pass the law that would require a stamp of "Expiration date" on all dairy products. It would have to be a special factory stamp which only his facility possessed. This way farmers were forced to sell their milk only to his plant, at prices that were essentially robbing them. The same scheme was later appreciated and implemented by many other business owners, and the requirement of an "Expiration date" stamp eventually became universal law. (That's why you find it on, e.g., a bag of salt, whose expiration date is in reality coming up in a few hundred million years, if ever. Also on pharmaceutical pills, 95% of which, containing no organic matter, in proper storage can last about as long.)

"After the year 2000 gaps in time started appearing. I was flying through time devoid of matter." -- Strugatsky Brothers, "Monday Begins on Saturday," 1965

Favorable mutations are very rare. We had one in the past 400,000 years. It gave us an enzyme that allows some limited populations to digest and metabolize small amounts of seaweed. All other mutations have been either neutral or harmful. We've accumulated far more than any other species of mammals on earth, and our mutation rate is accelerating. Viruses do contribute, although wild viruses do it rarely and we have to do something to help them, often in a rather roundabout way at that. E.g. start grain agriculture. Arthritis that came simultaneously with its adaptation is an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks the cartilage of the joints. The structure of wheat and related grains' lectins (highly reactive proteins that stick to the cartilage via a process of agglutination) is hypothesized by some researchers to be close enough to "something" that our immune systems used to fight maybe a million, two million years ago, and can mistake wheat lectins for this "something"-- which in all likelihood was some ancient virus, most probably long extinct. The virus may be gone but immune systems have long, looooong memories. Normally it would be to our advantage -- if we didn't drastically change our ancestral diets and lifestyles. We did though, and hey presto-- autoimmune this and that and counting. Our immune systems are not stupid, but we do too much to confuse them with stuff they never encountered before. They fall back on what they learned in the course of natural evolution and try to "deal with" whatever resembles anything they encountered before, anything they remember. But today most of it is not what they can reliably identify. So they have a choice of either ignoring it and missing a dangerous invader, or overreacting to a harmless one and damaging what they are trying to protect. All in all not a great evolutionary venue IMO. Still, wild viruses coexisted with us since the beginning of time and never did us in. Presently I'm much more worried about the frankenviruses... perhaps more than about anything else under the sun.

The first one in the English translation, the second one by the same author, "On Marble Cliffs," in the Russian translation which I'm told is better. I've read Ernst Jünger only in excerpts so far and found his style striking and his choice of subjects to tackle both ambitious and natural. Look forward to when these two arrive, ordered both.

I read it. Broke my heart... "It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth,—you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead." Black Elk, "The End of the Dream" (1932).

He has powerful friends. We are not it. But his powerful enemies use us, and that's what his stake is in our lot. He doesn't care for us and doesn't pretend he cares, which is reassuring, oddly enough. He is after revenge against his enemies and also the restoration of what he understands as the right order of things as god meant it to be, he's very religious and quite fundamentalist at that. So his enemies' transgressions against us is not something that motivates him, what is is that he sees them as transgressions against god, plus his own and his species' self-interest. I dunno. He didn't propose to carry us across a flood, he proposed something we ourselves should do to send a beacon of distress and be heard. Long story though, some other time. Thanks for the parable.

No. I do know what the virus centric human purpose is though. Or at least I see too many confirmations of a version I heard from someone who claimed to be non-human. There's this reptilian dude who asserted that he's the enemy of our enemies and therefore our friend. I don't know if I am to believe him, snakes lie, it is known. But the story he told makes too much sense. Let's think of it as a modern myth, myths make sense even if they aren't telling verbatim the story of what actually took place. Maybe I'll tell this myth here sometime.

A great reminder.

Life is a miracle, but my point was not that we are small but that there's an elephant in the room. You know a lot of Australian aboriginal myths -- have you noticed by any chance that the size of a protagonist's significance, his or her ability to make a dent in the fabric of reality, is not necessarily proportional to their physical size? Some myths I know from other parts of the world are like that. One of the most unforgettable images ayahuasca showed me was this monster, one of many she insisted I observe and the biggest of them, extending its spiky, vibrating, oscillating tentacles everywhere on Earth, dwarfing it with its magnitude. I asked her, what is this thing, expecting some metaphysical metaphor, some abstract notion -- "greed," "anger," "desire," funny how precepts of pop spirituality can groom one's expectations. She said, it's a virus. I understood right away. What she showed me was the size of what it is capable of. The size of its impact. Nothing to do with its size under the microscope.

I've been reading up on that probably one and only nutritional experiment, of those available to me, that I have never yet performed on myself: dry fasting. Horrible as it sounds, it appears to have some interesting, albeit highly unorthodox, scientific justifications and some empirical evidence in favor of its benefits, so I decided to educate myself rather than jump to any a priori conclusions. One of the first thoughts crossing my mind in the course of my initial research was, "I should talk to TDB about it." And then I had this strange realization that "talk to TDB" is an idea similar to "talk to John" or "talk to Aunt Anna" or "talk to Howard who is struggling to get on top of his diabetes" or "talk to a bunch of friends the next time it becomes possible to see them at a party table... they'll be very unenthusiastic if I bring it up at the very moment they're stuffing their faces but I'm sure they'll come up with some hilarious reactions." But... "talk to TDB?" Who is TDB? It's not a person and not a group assembled around a common indisputable uniting factor like a turkey on the table or a ball in the game everybody's equally interested in watching. And yet there's these signs that I treat it as a kind of entity, an organism if you will, as an autonomous intelligence of sorts that I somehow can think of talking to about this or that. What kind of organism? John can be such an asshole sometimes. Aunt Anna might interrupt me in mid-sentence and start running her chain of random associations, jumping from subject to subject at a dizzying pace so I can never keep up, nor am interested in keeping up. Howard will probably sulk and come back with something like, "well, I didn't know you thought I was that fat..." and I'll have to apologize for something that only happened in his head (i.e.me calling him fat, which I never did, rather than trying to involve him in my thought process with potential benefits, which is what I did do.) And so on. What kind of organism? A healthy one? Well, we seldom get to choose entities to talk to based on their health. This one in particular is not right in the head at least half the time. A kind one? Depends. A smart one? Sometimes. A cruel one? Sometimes. An indifferent one? Often enough. A belligerent raving raging deranged one? More often than necessary. An evolving one? A devolving one? And so on. I've known it for 15 years, so it's a habitual one. A familiar one, somewhat litter box trained, not entirely feral. What kind of organism did I have in mind when I made a mental note to "talk to TDB?" A baffling one. It would be less baffling if I was a creature of screens, but I'm not. I hate the world of screens. And yet here I am. What kind of organism am I?..

Thank you. I only know about tulpas from the account of Alexandra David-Neel who encountered a few, learned how to make them, created one and subsequently lost control of it -- the tulpa started gaining independence, evolving, and not in the good direction. She then decided to dismantle it, and found the task very difficult. Took her six months.