Taomeow

@virtue walks through the forum like the sages of Tao Te Ching walked through the world. @zerostao walks through the world like the sages of Tao Te Ching walked through "the devil's country" of the I Ching.

Of course. I will repost it in a new thread I started in my PPD, titled Batshit sane.

Just keep issuing orders and your subordinates will yes sir it in no time.

It's pink and oval. Adjust your ocular lens. Smash your microscope.

"Think about how stupid the average person is, then realize that half the people are stupider than that." -- George Carlin

My neighborhood is being invaded right now by a fairly peaceful but somewhat disorganized mob

Ummmm... nm=no message? ommmmm...

Ralis, are you paying attention? You may need to post a warning against crimethink! omnomnomnom nom om mani padme hum

Here's the great Chen Bing addressing the same problem with some fangsonggong: https://vimeo.com/390182934?fbclid=IwAR0nF0Q15Hb3Zp6XB1BUjSCw7D0jZMyFNu8QDFO130GyOWX6es6rFhkD7yI

Nathan beat me to it:

This is the kind of explanation that projects the state of mind of a civilized person onto the happenings of long ago. Yes, if our early hunter-gatherer ancestors were clueless dimwits, they would indeed start "noticing" all of a sudden, after not noticing shit about their environment for two million years, some linear cause-effect steps -- while failing to notice any connection of those steps to anything else they affect, while suddenly becoming oblivious to the web of interconnected ecological dependencies in their environment. Yes, they would all all of a sudden develop tunnel vision of late-stage capitalism, and the psychology of a narrow specialist. And it's as unrealistic as the pictures "history" schoolbooks (whose real genre is "soft fantasy" -- as opposed to "hard sci-fi" of academic works) paint for us, of hunter-gatherers dying in droves in their 20s from disease (where would it come from -- the nearby airport bringing tourists from another continent, suddenly dragging in a strain the local cavemen have no immunity to?..), accidents (as though they could possibly be as clumsy in their environment as we are), animal attacks (as though animals who don't attack humans even when starving today unless completely painted into the corner by them had nothing better to eat among the staggering abundance of prey and would somehow choose to hunt for predators -- and make no mistake, we've always been predators, not helpless softies -- we hunt in packs and we are extremely good at it, even without weapons... but that, for another post perhaps).

I used to think it's as simple as that too. A dam built by beavers is natural... A monkey crushing a nut with a stone is natural... A dog though? Is a dog natural?.. And if it is, what makes it natural, considering it wasn't created by nature, but by human intervention into the fate of some wolves? And if a dog is unnatural, how do we know if we ever lose information about early domestication -- say civilization collapses radically, taking all dogs with it (e.g. starving survivors eat their pets to extinction, or else an epidemic does them in) and a few thousand years later history that included dogs in it is forgotten? To the same extent history is forgotten by now from the time of that Gilgamesh quote? Were there gods? You confidently say "no." Were there dogs? Ask mainstream-educated posterity five thousand years from now and you might be surprised. "Dogs... animals who lived with people, in their homes, and obeyed their commands? Ridiculous." They are "not 'life' they are concepts, ideas and forces, not having mortality." --© Nungali

Actually, there's quite a few biologically immortal species in nature. Turritopsis dohrnii, also known as the immortal jellyfish, is an example, and in general, if we don't insist on associating immortality with "complex" animals, it's fairly widespread. And there's nothing to stop the gods from saying no specifically to complex animals, including their human pets. How natural is nature? How unnatural is the unnatural? I had a very mind-opening discussion once with a taoist in China regarding the grey zones of this inquiry, but I don't want to interfere with my own thread by "going there" right now. Your second paragraph is an article of faith.

I'm beginning to wonder about your methods... Good to know they're still reporting. Seriously though, I do think shaking qigong is a good thing and will probably experiment. Thanks for posting.

When did cold anything ever help one stop shaking?.. On a different note, I just got a text from one of teacher Wang's senior instructors with his (Wang Liping's) article dedicated to specific practices for fighting off infections and expediting convalescence toward full recovery (which is an important, and mostly overlooked by today's medicine, part of the whole cycle of overcoming an illness). Not posting it here yet because, for one thing I got it translated into Russian (don't have the Chinese version) and currently have no time to translate it into Ehglish (it's fairly long), and for another, didn't have the time to read it in depth myself yet, just skimmed. I'll try to see what Google Translate can do with it if there's interest (and help it along a bit if it talks nonsense -- though I am often at a loss translating the Cyrillic version of taoist terms into Pinyin myself). I think it is a more spiritual/alchemical, less physiological version of the relevant parts of the Yellow Emperor's Classic, but, like I said, I just had a chance to take a very quick look so far.

Crowley was very aware of taoism. Where this idea is central, and even immortalists were not all after actual god-like immortality but invariably after healthy and contented longevity, living out the full span of one's human years enjoying family and friends, good food, all things nature, all the simple pleasures of life. The disturbing part of the quote though is this imposition of death on humans by gods who don't choose it for themselves nor let humans choose. So Laozi's "followers of death" are merely obeying the will of the gods?.. And "followers of life," the immortalists, are the taoist insurrection!

“Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created humans they allotted to them death, but life they retained in their own keeping. Humans are born, they live, then they die, this is the order that the gods have decreed. But until the end comes, enjoy your life, spend it in happiness, not despair. Savor your food, make each of your days a delight, bathe and anoint yourself, wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean, let music, joy and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand, and make your lover happy in your embrace. That is the best way for a human to live.”― The Epic of Gilgamesh

"There isn't a hell on earth that people aren't capable of making worse." -- Jordan Peterson

Fishing in Sahara! Feasting on fish -- that's how the inhabitants of that moist fertile land lived until 5,900 years ago... "Archaeologists have previously found evidence that for much of the early Holocene period (around 10,200 to 8,000 years ago) the Tadrart Acacus mountains in the Saharan Desert was humid with many permanent bodies of water. “It is hard to say how much water was there,” said Prof Savino di Lernia, the lead author of the study along with Prof Wim Van Neer. “During the early Holocene there were permanent water bodies with plenty of fish, but things changed around 5,900 years ago, with the onset of present desert conditions.” What an interesting timeline for the "onset" of those conditions if we recall that this is within a small margin of error (a couple hundred years, give or take) of the time agriculture, cities, civilization, out of fucking nowhere like David Hasselhof, graced the region with their sudden appearance. https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/early-humans-feasted-on-fish-in-the-sahara-desert-10000-years-ago/

Cassandra was the paranoid bitch to Trojans -- till the day Aegeans came. And Noah packing animals, two of each, was called insane -- till it began to rain.

I'm shaking 24/7. Cassandra's qigong.

掩耳盗铃 We don't use the word "sink" anymore, they declared. It's a word that scares people unnecessarily. Scared people undermine the economy, they figured. They grew pensive, they started counting. Scared people undermine our profits! But there's still a window of opportunity, a narrowing window to be honest, but we'll squeeze through that window and fly away. All it takes is to stop using the word "sink." The Titanic experienced a period of negative buoyancy. No reason for concern -- the flu kills a lot more people. The Titanic was contained. Its period of negative buoyancy was only temporary, lasting a mere 108 years. It will be restored soon.

That "straight/square" is perhaps derived from the idiom "compass and square" originating in the concept of Fuxi and Nuwa giving "proper," "as it should be" law and order to earthly/human affairs. (A broken clock shows the correct time twice a day, and ChiDragon got the idiomatic meaning of the terms right!) Here's a picture of Nuwa holding the compass and Fuxi holding the square that is part of the yin-yang philosophy of taoism (and a noteworthy borrowing therefrom by the Freemasons):