Taomeow

I did give it a cursory listen. I think any problem of "humans" must be addressed by first finding out who they are. There's actually two different kinds. Different not biologically (though even that is debatable) but in terms of the amount of energy they consume. Here's the breakdown based on their energy consumption peculiarities: the species that consumes 95% of all energy produced on earth is 1% of humans, and the species that consumes 5% of all energy produced on Earth is 99% of humans. Let's call the first species "the rich and powerful, who are continuously looking for ways to increase their wealth and power," and the second species "the ones continuously manipulated or forced into doing or not doing things that facilitate the objectives of the rich and powerful." What he proposes is to shift the burden of reducing overall energy consumption on earth to those 99%, to that second (second rate) species. To make them consume less than the current 5% of all energy produced on earth. In other words, he is essentially yet another proponent of placing the burden of the solution on those who are not the problem. Have you noticed that he, like everybody who is supposedly proposing a solution, still fails (or else meticulously avoids) to notice that it's one species that creates the problem and an altogether different species that is tasked with solving it? I always do.

San Diego Valley fire last night. It has grown sixfold since then and is 1% contained. The air is nasty, and the afternoon sun was not only an eerie orange but so painfully bright that I had technicolor phosphenes for a good ten minutes after I looked at it for a couple seconds. Probably some reflective particles in the air?

With a mod's warning for blatant trolling. But if I was asked as a teacher of what I used to teach and no longer do -- languages -- I'd suggest extra work on reading comprehension skills, since it may be that rather than premeditated trolling that is the reason for the "you are offended" attribution to people who most definitely showed no discernible signs of having been offended.

I have to think some more about this one. Empirically, I don't know a single conscientious person who is just fine with who they are. Maybe I need to get out more. If you are one of them, you are lucky. For me, self-dissatisfaction is the only engine of growth -- partially because external validation ain't no substitute for the inner cognizance of how I actually played the hand I was dealt and why I did it and what it cost me. But I don't always have a good excuse.

Belarus is not in Central Asia. And this is one of those "don't even go there" subjects for me. I've generations of family hailing from Belarus, travel memories and many relatives and unmarked graves of repressions victims among them. The guy they honor as their greatest 20th century poet and writer was my dad's best friend and his letters to my dad are now in the memorial museum. I've the language and understanding of history, mentality, culture -- but no chance against the 6 corporations that own worldwide information. And they won't tell any story in a way that allows for an outright lie to be pinpointed, they are not that naive. The recipe asks for a tiny pinch of facts to be added to the mix (with their own spin and some subtle but crucial translation peculiarities thrown in of course). An the morsel that can be spinned into being the most ridiculous, outrageous, discrediting, etc., is the one that will be offered to everyone to savor ad nauseam. Lukashenko's words about banya (not sauna) and vodka with a fatty chaser known as salo and some garlic were not an idiot's medical advice. They were a populist joke of an experienced and shrewd political survivor trying to be cute, to show understanding of a simple person's hope for simple solutions -- while including himself as one of those simple common folk, aiming to endear himself to them, as politicians are wont to do. There's an entirely different real reasoning behind his handling the pandemic the Swedish style. Basically he believes that the remedy everybody else has come up with is worse than the disease. Well... from what I've seen, more than half the planet believe exactly the same thing.

Cool places, great people, food to die for... but atrocious dictators here and there. Here's a glimpse of today's Turkmenistan: Translation: Covid pandemic development statistics for Turkmenistan up to September 5, 2020: Cases, 0. Recovered, 0. Deaths, 0. If you think it might be too good to be true, chances are you are right. Translation: Turkmenistan has banned the coronavirus. If you wear a mask, or talk about the infection, you get arrested.

I know that these are your criteria, I didn't mistake them for financial success as your criteria. What I assert is that King Wen imprisoned by the tyrant of Shang and fed his beloved son for dinner couldn't have shown you a good life around him if you happened to be checking on him in that particular moment. And the immortal Li Tieguai was a lame beggar with an iron crutch and a drunk -- and chose to take all of these habits with him into his immortality. And Lady Chang-O, who graduated to be the Goddess of the Moon, as a mortal woman was stuck in an abusive marriage with a cruel bully. And so on.

Mostly agree, but "how they're doing in life" is a criterion that doesn't apply, far as I can tell. For the greatest accomplishments, there's been the greatest challenges thrown in the cultivators' path far more often than a red carpet unrolled under every step they took in life. Not many enlightened beings among the CEOs, the bankers and the media darlings. Lots of poor beggars, hermits, rebels, victims of mob violence, of ostracism or imprisonment or exile, folks in originally poor health or else crippled by adversities, social "losers" of all kinds. The particular moment in which you look at their life may not be stellar -- nor what their life is about at all. @Tombajo This thread is not for those who "claim to be teachers." It is for those who actually teach. I teach taiji. I don't claim anything other than if you want to learn the style I teach, come and I'll teach you, I've done this before and that's how I know I can. My "enlightenment" or its lack is nobody's business. Classified. And you better believe it when I tell you this: no one can become "enlightened" as the outcome of trying to prove it to someone else. The master will offer proof, to someone worthy in her eyes, by maybe offering a peek into her other-dimensional capabilities, when and if she feels like it. Or not. So, yes, do look for a good teacher in whatever you want to learn. No one who is not a fraud can offer more to a beginner.

Nah, just a Germanism inspired by Weltschmerz. I forgot most of my German over the years, so I always appreciate it when I encounter a German word borrowed into English --it stimulates some of that memory, so when I see one, I can seldom resist using another. Also sprach Taomeow.

Thank you for the well-wishing. My mind is in its full-on "coming into the world" mode -- a legitimate stage of taoist cultivation, to the same extent as its "leaving the world" mode. Maybe even to a greater extent due to the dialectic of the situation. When the world bustles around with purposeful "goal-oriented" activity, a taoist might be internally still, not moved in her mind. When the world comes to a screeching halt and freezes around her, her mind might be set in motion. The weather witch is right on. We were promised 114F over the weekend and into Monday. September heat wave, 2020 edition.

Please try to respond without reading other people's responses first -- just scroll past them. (Please do read other people's responses after you've given yours, to compare pictures.)

“But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings. Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid.” ― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

You already asked that and I answered that on page 1. Of course I saw other stuff on second, third, fourth look, and could see some (not all) of what others described seeing, but what I wrote on page one was the very first image. Maybe because war is on my mind. A lot.

A honey sandwich deserved better than that. You got snubbed unfairly. I once saw a calf being born, right in the pasture. The cow did indeed look competent.

Joe decided to lead rather than get out of the way. Other than that, I'm mostly in his shoes 24/7.

Looks more like schadenfreude to me.

Nice! I had a wilderness encounter with a whole herd of cows, which for some reason was roaming free through the Bryansk forest in Belarus. Our party were all taking a midday nap in our tents, after a few hours of rowing, everybody was out like a light -- and a cow woke me up by putting her nose against the side of the tent and mooing. In my drowsy daze I mistook that mooing for the roar of a bear and, having no bear spray on hand, grabbed a mosquito repellant... don't ask. Then more cows joined in, which I again mistook for a whole sleuth of bears, then finally I woke up for real and realized they were cows. I don't know how many cows, I had no desire to count. Before they left, they ransacked our camp and ate a can of sweetened condensed milk, a sack of potatoes, and my bikini off the clothes line, but I was still happy they weren't bears.

A better question is, if the cow recognized the picture, would she inform you that she did? Animals know we exploit them, and if they can help it at all, they don't put all their potential on display. An animal can't do anything about being good to eat for another species of course, but conceal its intelligence? I think cats especially have figured out a way to hide a lot of their abilities, 'cause they're intelligent. That's why they don't serve us -- we serve them. I once caught my cat red-pawed understanding mirrors which was something she concealed from everybody for many years, always walking past mirrors without the slightest interest... until the day when we were doing some renovations and took a large mirror off the wall and it was temporarily left in a place where the cat couldn't have anticipated seeing it, leaning against the wall right outside the door of the room where she was taking her nap. So, she wakes up from the nap eventually, walks to the door, steps out... and suddenly sees another cat walking toward her! What happened next looked something like this:

Wow! Just incredible how many things one can see that wouldn't be there if not for the eyes that look! A screaming shark... a skeletal Mr. Peanut... a flying monster... a planet, a tornado, a soldier, an imprisoned cat in a cage... We're all a bit Michelangelo -- he suggested to his disciples to stare at a blank stucco wall for inspiration, just waiting for various images to start appearing in the pattern, becoming people, animals, scenes, landscapes -- and once they do, to start painting them.

Foot-and-mouth disease?..

If a reality exists independently of any observer, whose word am I supposed to take for its existence? Hmm... "Solid" and "real" are not synonyms, by the way. The different beings observing different appearances suggests that appearances depend on the observer, nothing more.

Open Sesame! Shazam! šamaššammi (šamnu — oil, pressed oil + šammu — plant, grass) — sesame

Most definitely co-creating. The photo itself exists regardless of whether I see it or not -- you've seen it, I haven't hidden behind your eyes to use my mind/brain/eyes to get yours to see it. The cow exists too -- or at least existed, for someone to take her picture. So when we see a 2D picture of a 3D cow, it's not an illusion, it's a 2D picture that the mind (mine differently from yours) interprets a particular way, co-creating (mine for me, yours for you) something that is neither the actual original 2D picture (we only look at a digital copy -- and in this day and age we can't even be sure it wasn't photoshopped) nor the original 3D cow -- but here's the interesting twist: the original cow is not 3D anymore than she is 2D. The original cow is as many D as the perceptions of the observer are equipped to register and process. The pit viper sees this cow all the way from the far infrared light she emits (which we only perceive as warmth, if at all) to its ultraviolet radiation (which we can't perceive at all). The horn fly that might have the mind to bite the cow doesn't see the cow -- its compound eye sees a mosaic of thousands of images that can't be assembled into a cow because the horn fly can't focus its eyes -- it can detect motion though, and a particular kind of motion in that mosaic spells food. The mosaic is real to the horn fly, not illusory, it can't sustain itself on an illusion, it would starve. See where I'm going with this? A 4D alien could see that you are 3D, yet it wouldn't render you an optical illusion. You are still real -- even though that alien could put his cup of coffee on top of your liver without violating the integrity of your body (we should hope).

Aha, that's where our practices have bifurcated! Mine has convinced me that the mind/brain participates in creating our reality. It is a co-creator of reality -- neither the creator alone nor the creation alone, neither the "source" nor the "recipient" but both simultaneously. I've learned about the negative space a long time ago when working on eyesight improvement, before all other practices. In everyday life, negative space is mostly processed by our unconscious. Learning to see it consciously, bringing it into continuous conscious awareness without "switching" into the either-or mode (i.e. either seeing positive spaces as we do in everyday life, or negative ones when we deliberately go for that but in the process lose awareness of the positive ones -- so we merely change the "which part is relegated to the unconscious" mode instead of integrating both into consciousness) is quite a trip...

One's ability to not see the cow and see something else instead -- doesn't matter what. I can't say more, but for purposes of this test, those who don't see the cow, at least not right away (with the reveal the cow is impossible to unsee of course), have nothing to worry about. I'm not qualified to tell whether those who only see the cow and nothing else have anything to worry about, but they are definitely unusual. Interesting! Yes, it's about positive space vs. negative space. To see the cow, one has to see the negative space. To not see the cow, one has to focus on any which positive spaces. The negative space here is yin (hidden, not obvious), and positive is yang (in your face -- that cow is in your face, right? -- but without seeing the negative space one still can't see it!) Yet it is seeing their interplay -- a story, meaning, context, something that the observer contributes to give the picture its reality -- that is actually seeing reality. It's not the cow that's reality here. It's the dependence of reality on the observer's perspective that is reality. A fixed perspective makes it a cow -- but is it really a cow?..