Taomeow

This came up on the car radio -- I love this song, and it sounds so relevant today

It is also the case today. Just not so much in mainland China anymore. And the debate about who really is a taoist is, to me, settled. To nobody's satisfaction I suspect. If it quacks like a duck it's not necessarily a duck. It can be a CCP-approved cleared for release duck quack recording. But if it also swims, dives, walks, flies, lays eggs like a duck... I say it's a duck.

So, according to some interpretations, being a taoist is like being an Oxford guy -- you can't be it unless someone accepts you in a formal ceremony. It's apparently different from being a Christian -- you can be that by believing in Christ, or a Moslem (declaring that there's no god besides Allah makes you one), or a Jew (all you have to do is be born to a Jewish mother), or a Hinduist (any number of things can qualify you -- you can be that by birth, by religious observance, by geographical location, or by choice.) In Jainism, you can undertake self-study and become either a lay follower or a Jain monk, your choice. On the other hand, to be a Jesuit, a Hasid, or a Maoshan sorcerer, someone has to formally accept you as such. But those are movements, sects, schools within a larger context of their respective denominations. If taoism is in the same boat with these, it renders it a school, sect, or whatever subsidiary of the main denomination. So, if taoism is a sect, what main denomination is it the sect of? ???

All of them, minus the ones I dropped. If I practice it, it brings benefits. If I don't, it doesn't. As the I Ching put it when I asked what my main focus should be, "any movement in any direction brings good fortune."

Of course it is, and I didn't object to the assertion that taoist magic, derived from proto-taoist shamanism (my main area of interest and a good chunk of practical experience), was not peripheral but central, the cat's meow of it all. Just to presenting the origins of institutional/religious taoism as the origins of taoism. While I'm at it, let me throw in another comment, to your original assertion that "there was a time when things like qigong would be considered superfluous" -- indeed, but that time came later, and earlier times knew magical qigong. The word may be new, but the practice itself has archeological evidence of having been around and about for at least 7,000 years. That is, e.g., the age of a Neolithic vessel that depicts a wu xi 巫覡 in qigong posture, and this 4,000 year old silk painting from a burial has postures that at least some of the modern qigong practitioners will be stoked to recognize as their own practice:

Fuxi, actually. Long before Laozi and Zhuangzi. The first book included into the Daozang or Taoist Canon was the I Ching. The original and the best. The rest is 1,120 volumes of the icing on the cake.

Telam Totius Orbis Terrarum

The highest, to me. And I believe failure to cultivate it nullifies any and all other attainments. Of course cultivating kindness is nowhere near as simple as all those new age calls to unconditional this and that. At a more opportune moment I might tell the story of a friend of mine and his sick old horse. He had to rip his heart out to kill that horse, out of kindness, usually his most noticeable natural trait. He did it after exhausting all other ways to be kind and compassionate over the previous two years. The horse was in constant pain and couldn't stand on legs that were destroyed by illness. He spent extreme money and extreme care to help her. Then he finally agreed to the lethal injection. And he was never the same. And because he's not a cultivator, this "never the same" seems to have robbed him of a lot of humanity. He became unkind -- even to his own children, whom he used to never hesitate to spoil rotten with his kindness. Cultivating kindness in extreme circumstances is the most arcane spiritual task of them all. Which is why I don't think it's worth it to treat every circumstance as extreme and try to fix all the ills of the world by focusing on a particular individual who may be in the wrong, the setting of whom straight may serve humanity -- but... I believe one has to choose one's battles so as not to exhaust too much steam on causes not worthy of such effort. Aquila non captat muscas.

After all these years, World Taekwondo Federation has finally decided to change its name "over negative connotations" of the abbreviation

Trying to get back to the rules suggested by the OP. @CloudHands Witty and sharp, kind-hearted and thoughtful and a taiji aficionado @Rocky Lionmouth Perceptive and empathetic and knowledgeable yet never overbearing, never lording it over to others

And I was reminded of Scythian artifacts: And tattoos:

They are lying.

I think this mixes up the Soviet Union and Russia. They were banned in the Soviet Union. After its demolition, the resulting states got incorporated into the free microwaving world. But I remember that large-scale study -- it was actually conducted in Belarus, then a republic of the Soviet Union -- and resulted in a ban. They were feeding the workers of the huge Minsk Tractor Plants microwaved dinners for some six months or a year, don't remember, all the while a team of doctors and researchers monitoring their health dynamic. The outcome was what they named "microwave sickness" which had all the features of a muted, low-grade radiation sickness. And the experts convinced the government to ban them. And there was no corporation in existence to bribe or strong-arm its way to the microwave market past those recommendations. So, no mistake there.

Thank you for your thoughts too. Respect.

Didn't mean you personally, I was speaking in generalities -- the stance of "we the people" in general. It's pretty common for "us" to say "we" when talking about things "we personally" have absolutely nothing to do with. I don't like it, but it's an idiom hard to avoid, despite it being so very untrue and so very misguiding, perhaps deliberately so. When you, e.g., mention "our" bulldozing etc., I don't think you personally did that, and know for a fact I personally didn't. I have no information as to whether you even know how to drive a bulldozer. I for one don't. So, a misreading occurred, which is normal when all we see is letters on the screen.

The way I see it, it's a fractal, a self-replication/self-similarity process not unlike land erosion brought about by deforestation. The land does not corrupt itself -- it gets corrupted by what was done to it, what went before (and never stopped happening), what caused a repetitive self-replicating pattern of corruption that looks as though it is happening "by itself," as though it's doing it to itself. But what's really happened is an intervention that threw it off balance -- once and for all. The trauma will keep reverberating and self-replicating and someone who comes later will not know that there were forests on that land holding it together and not letting its fertile topsoil to get washed away by rains and blown away by winds. They won't know the forests used to be there, they won't know they got destroyed, they won't even believe someone destroyed something that used to be there. All they will find will be the land that is corrupted and keeps seemingly self-corrupting. But whoever cut down the trees was an alien government to that forest, to any and all its native inhabitants great and small, and to that land those native creatures created by living on it rather than destroyed. Yet someone who comes later, hundreds, thousands of years later may find no trace of what that alien intrusion into the life of the forest and the land did. And then they will assume that what's being observed is merely the "nature of things." And that stories of forests that got destroyed by someone alien to the forest are merely "mythos we crafted." The mythos we crafted, far as I'm concerned, is that we're so omnipotent that we are capable of fucking up a planet with no help from any non-us, just because we are so badass, bad to the bone, such mighty rascals. People are actually proud, deep inside, of this fairy tale of their free will that chose evil because the alternative seems unthinkable. A sheep going to slaughter would feel immensely better if it could believe that butchers are mythos sheep created in order to remain blameless. Alas, they are blameless, as anything powerless is.

When the internet was young, and I was younger (not younger than the internet, just younger than today I mean), I used to have this signature embedded under my posts: "A life unexamined should be terminated with extreme prejudice."

Ah, we posted simultaneously!

Ah, yes, it's a heartbreaking antiwar song about Afghanistan. You are very perceptive! It's not exactly a folk song... and not a mainstream one. In between we have a tradition of songs created and performed by authors, very widespread and deeply rooted in the culture. It has produced many outstanding talents over the decades. We call them "bards" -- like the Medieval poet-composer-storyteller-oral historian professionals. In America it's perhaps Bob Dylan who comes somewhat close but it's not the same. At some point some of our bards also started going commercial, to varying extents, but most of the time most of them created outside the officialdom and often against it and sometimes in a dangerous conflict with it. The song you heard is Black Tulips, by one of those bards, Alexander Rosenbaum. I happen to have met him once, he wasn't famous yet (he later did become famous and somewhat commercial), he was a classmate of my best friend at the then-Leningrad medical school, though already a professional bard at the time I met him, not a doctor anymore. Here's the song -- it starts at 0:40

The human nature is not corrupt, it is corrupted. That's what I believe. Although "believe" is not the right word for it and "know" would invite "prove it" and I can't prove it. But I know. We need a word that is missing. For "know to the extent that I don't need to believe, but don't believe I know how to make anyone know what I know."

How come I never heard this one. It's beautiful and surprisingly accurate. Could have been narrated by a few of my relatives. The first one you posted is from the Civil War of 1918-1921 though, not the Great Patriotic. And the one I posted is from 1848.

@Apech What's wrong with you? If you are going to listen to historical songs of Russian rebellion, better check out this one:

The healthy emotions of all life forms on Earth, ours included, are just two, seeking and avoidance, i.e. a relationship with aliveness and a relationship with death. The third is a derivative, frustrated aliveness, manifesting as rage. The fourth is a derivative, frustrated love, manifesting as anger. The fifth is a mix of seeking and avoidance into one and the same stimulus and this one manifests as fear. The sixths is confusion, manifesting as seeking what you ought to avoid and avoiding what you ought to seek. And then a myriad neurotic, muddled derivative-of-derivative emotions arise that are masks the original ones don when we hide from the pain of not having had our developmental needs met. And the only way to do it is to hide from oneself. And if you are hidden from yourself, you can't do serious magic, because your access to resources -- your genuine reality -- has been denied. That's why efficient magic is so rare these days. Taoist sciences specifically help circumvent this difficulty encountered by all folks who lost touch with their natural real emotional environment and live a made-up nonsense. Here's how one would go about using the Five Phases, or wuxing, to do weather magic: first, know thyself on these terms. I'll use an example. Say you're Yin Wood with Fire, with no Water, with adequate Earth and Metal. Water is your Mother phase. You have none. Go for Water magic. Why? Why would you get specifically Water magic, for which you don't seem to be naturally equipped? Figure it out. You can't command your Mother phase, you can't boss it around, it won't obey. But you can ask. You can appeal to Water as a starving child of hers, you can beg. You are the wounded shaman -- the absence of the Mother phase is the worst wound imaginable, yet it also means you are born equipped to go into that abyss because you have nothing to lose. You don't need a "power quest" -- you were born into that, your whole life is a power quest or you don't even survive your infancy. So, in order to control Water, someone who is of Wood phase has to lower herself lower than Water -- to the level of a seed buried in the ground -- and beg for the rain from the bottom of that bottomless need. Now Fire is a different matter altogether. Fire is Wood's Child phase, you command it. You can make it obey. You can feed it. So then why not go for Fire magic? For the simple reason that every instance of Wood making offerings to Fire takes away from it. Fire burns/destroys Wood. So you can be a Fire magician -- at the cost of your own phase, your own Self. Which has no Water to replenish it. So what's your best approach to Fire? Leave it alone. Don't go there. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Earth is the phase you control -- Wood controls Earth. Why not take Earth magic? Not your strong suit, that's why. You're Yin Wood, not Yang Wood. Yang Wood is a mighty oak forest. Yin Wood is, at best, bamboo, relying on its flexibility and adaptability, not on its powerful penetration into the Earth. Its roots are not deep. You would be a mediocre Earth controller, a weak Earth magician. Metal is the phase that controls you -- Metal controls Wood. Why not go fo Metal magic? Pretty obvious why, right? It's like asking bamboo to control the axe. So when you look at the whole picture through this prism, you know which magic is yours, if any, and why. And you aren't surprised one bit when you beg the hurricane and it grudgingly grants what you're asking for. There, there, cry-baby, shut up already.

"At first, the weak perish. Then, the rest fight." -- Selco (a survivor of the Bosnian war, now teaching survivalist bootcamps in the US) "The world is looking for a panacea, something to cure our ills without interfering with our mistakes. As far as we're concerned our mistakes are sacred, and we have a right to keep making them regardless of consequences." -- Manly P. Hall (a polymath) "Why do I need someone I don’t trust to tell me not to trust someone else I don’t trust?" -- A random perspicacious Redditor

Now imagine how much power the black magicians who rule the world have over stuff like that. Among my acquaintances of long ago, Ph.D. degrees were earned for weather control work at the Institute of Applied Geophysics, and shuffling weather from here to there, including stealing or granting rains, was their daily bread and butter. I remember funky stories of botched magic -- e.g. when they experimented with seeding the clouds with silver nitrate and, to their surprise, instead of rain produced icicle-shaped hail, hundreds of thousands of icicles the size and shape of daggers falling from the sky -- and that was thirty years ago. What and how got messed up since then, and whether it was done on purpose or with wrongful disregard for the far-reaching consequences or accidentally, is anyone's guess.