Taomeow

We call it hermitage or asceticism, and monasticism is defined by institutions, complete with vows, institution-prescribed not voluntarily chosen. It's about as "the same" or "similar" as practicing taekwondo as taught in the Korean Army (which I used to) and enlisting in the Korean Army. It was Sun Bu-er who left Ma Yu -- at the age of 57, her family obligations fully completed, her children married off, her grandchildren cared for -- announcing to her husband that from this point on she will take care of her own spiritual needs. He joined her in cultivation ten years later, when she was 67 and he, probably older. At that age celibacy tends to come more naturally. If you can even call it that after a lifetime of human normalcy predating its onset.

Yes. Rephrasing the question: it's rhetorical, meaning, I'm surprised to hear it, never heard of it, have never come across any mention of either one of the three "choosing a staunchy monastic path." A staunchy path, yes, at least part of the time. But monastic, never heard of anything like that. The biographies I'm familiar with go as follows: Wang was born into aristocratic wealth in 1113, got a classical education and martial training, planned a rebellion against the Jurchen Jin dynasty, but then, at the age of 48, met three taoist immortals -- Zhongli Quan, Lü Dongbin, and Liu Haichan. They met in a tavern. The immortals taught him, he adopted the taoist name "Chongyang" and, as part of his training, built a tomb for himself and practiced taoist arts there for three years. Then he built a hut on top of it and lived there for another four, practicing and sharing the teachings with others. He named his hut "Complete Perfection Hut," and later it became the name of the school -- Complete Perfection. It was a hut, not a monastery. In 1167, he burned the hut down and went traveling, eventually accepting a married couple, Sun Bu-er and Ma Yu, as his disciples. Damn, it's late, I'll continue tomorrow. Happy coming Chinese New Year!

I've never heard of it. Don't know about Ma Danyang, but Wang Chongyang and Qiu Chuji? ?

It also makes me feel great about my tradition, which is not monastic. I think all the things you talk about as deviations are the tip of a much more sinister iceberg. For one thing, people used to become monks not in order to accomplish anything in particular but mostly because parents were unable to feed an extra mouth, so the boy would be sent off to be a monk, or to marry off an extra daughter -- that's your nun. People society had to put aside for lack of a role to offer. I will never forget what I saw in Saint Francis Monastery in Lima, Peru, which has catacombs filled with countless wells, each containing this arrangement to the depth of 30 feet: It is also believed there existed secret passageways that connected to the Cathedral and the Tribunal of the Holy Inquisition. To my question about whose bodies were thus arranged, the guide just shrugged. To my next question -- what for -- he responded, "This served no purpose, the monks just did it for no reason." The skulls and bones are thought to have belonged to some 25,000 people. That's just one monastery, in a very remote place, and its having these catacombs was discovered only accidentally in the 20th century. I was very perceptive just then after ayahuasca sessions in the rain forest on the opposite side of the country, and I was absolutely destroyed by that place. Couldn't put the visions out of my mind's eye for weeks... So, not much of a believer in monastic virtues... and I don't care which denomination we're dealing with -- though not all are equally sinister -- but I tend to think promiscuity and lack of piety are the least of their problems.

"Growth for the sake of Growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." -- Edward Abbey

Me too. The rat of the Chinese calendar is forever associated in my mind with the beginning of the first dialog I ever learned in Chinese, from a study CD. It went exactly like this: -- Hello, rat. -- I am not a rat. I am a teacher. -- I'm sorry. Hello, teacher. My imagination ran wild of course... The idea must have been to make the student aware of the difference of pronunciation between "laoshi" and "laoshu."

The traditional way to celebrate the Chinese New Year is with family and extended family, and then friends and acquaintances. The whole clan gathered under the ancestral roof for the main feast and then everybody proceeded paying multiple happy visits during the following days and weeks. It was easy enough to pull off when family members and friends lived in the same village or in the neighboring one, but times have changed -- people moved to live in far-away cities, foreign countries, across the oceans, yet the custom persisted, and many parents and grandparents in Asia still expect everybody to come celebrate the proper way, as a family. Whether the offspring are obedient and filial, don't want to lose face, are genuinely homesick (many are, from what I gathered talking to quite a few Chinese Americans) and prepared to go to any lengths toward the yearly reunion with family and friends, many, very many are going to keep it up. And among those with no family to visit, many will still take a traveling vacation. The travel season, known as Chunyun, begins about 15 days before Lunar New Year's Day and lasts for around 40 days. The number of trips taken during this period is staggering. In 2019 it was 2.9 billion. In 2020 it is expected to be higher -- over 3 billion. It has been called the largest annual human migration in the world. I believe "human" is redundant in this context -- unless I missed something, no animal, bird, or insect migration I tried to look up even comes close. May well be the largest migration of multicellular eukaryotes in the world. It was a time to rejoice for thousands of years, and still is -- with another modern caveat. Any new contagious disease that has a 7 day incubation period (i.e. can't be detected till a week after it's been contracted, because the person who's contracted it will remain asymptomatic and unaware of carrying it) will go global within 24 hours. Wash your hands often, eat your healthy foods, take your supplements and herbs, keep warm, well-ventilated, moderately active and use the rest of those common sense precautions. And if you plan to travel by plane during Chunyun period, consider wearing a mask.

It's a pretty cool movie, a 1991 "art comedy-drama" as Wiki put it, directed by Jim Jarmusch and depicting one night in five cities -- Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki -- through five separate vignettes with five respective cab drivers working that night. It can be found on Netflix I think, and the episode I was referring to, the one taking place in Rome, someone posted on Youtube, although it's even better in the overall context. If you have 26 minutes to spare, enjoy.

I applaud your effort. Aeons ago I cut my translating teeth on methane hydrates as technical translator/writer, and a lot of it was excruciatingly boring, but certainly not this part. Now I'll have to reciprocate by researching Lake Taupo.

I thought we were talking about methane bubbles in lake Baikal. Observed for almost 200 years due to regional warming unrelated to any other kind. Related to volcanism associated with the Baikal Rift Zone. The rest is, indeed, beyond the scope of this particular thread.

I believe you are also not exactly informed in this particular case. Lake Baikal and the surrounding area has been warming up by 0.5 degrees Celsius per decade since the late nineteenth century (maybe earlier too but no one measured), and has been the fastest warming area on Earth for well over a century. My both parents used to work on the methane problem straight out of college -- it was in the 1950s. It's not new, not related to man-made processes, and far as I know, is about as feasible to "address" as a volcano eruption. Something may happen, or we'll get lucky and it won't. There's a line between science and indoctrination that the media crosses too eagerly but I wouldn't follow in their footsteps.

I'm done talking to you, and thelerner to whose post I responded knows "how it is related to AI again." Make five consecutive sensible, thoughtful, hostility-free posts and then give me a holler if you feel like getting off my ignore mode. Steeping in your own angry juices any further won't accomplish that. Entirely up to you.

The usual problem with those visions is that a lot of pieces of the overall puzzle have to be ignored for it to look good. Moreover, the crucial pieces are not just ignored by the public -- they are hidden from the public. Let's take a look at some of those pieces though. (By far not all, but it's just a forum post, so...) Autonomous solar machines have to be manufactured. To manufacture solar anything, we use electricity. 80% of this electricity in the US and 85% globally is derived from burning fossil fuels. The solar panels themselves are made with organometallic compounds and light-absorbent dyes. This entails mining for and producing ever-greater amounts of cobalt, rhodium, aluminum, zinc, lithium, ruthenium, copper, titanium, to name a few (as well as fossil fuels that are the other part of organometallic chemistry.) Most mining operations and industrial production of these goodies are land-intensive, displacing and exterminating all animals and plants in all locations where they take place, and entail human labor, chiefly in the "third world" (i.e. where humans aren't supposed to matter) that is either bordering on slave labor or is exactly that, often child slave labor, extremely high pollution, but also extremely high profitability (due in part to generous subsidies of taxpayer money by governments and various international organizations to the corporations that call this cycle of production "clean energy" -- nice words, who doesn't want clean energy? Only the worst of monsters, right?) Then there's a problem of disposal -- all this stuff is highly toxic, its lifespan is presented by manufacturers as 20-25 years but in reality they seldom make it to 12, and then the toxic chemicals they release "forever" have to be buried somewhere, which poses another land-intensive challenge. Where? Where people don't matter, obviously. But we're rapidly running out of places to poison even there. I like Robert Zelazny too but Philip K. Dick is a lot more accurate as visionaries of a technology-based future go.

No, sometimes I use it when I feel a conversation on a particular subject with a particular individual is likely to go nowhere. This preliminary conclusion relies on the assessment of the incoming data toward probabilistically predicting the outcome. A deflection might be used in order to avoid an outcome deemed undesirable -- e.g. a pointless debate where I won't be heard. However, I didn't use it in my original comment on your starship premise. To elaborate: I didn't use "whateverism" or a "deflection," I used an analogy. An analogy is one of the literary tropes. A literary trope is the use of figurative language, via words, phrases or images, toward artistic effect. It can be a figure of speech, a rhetorical device, a metaphor, an analogy, and so on. It is plain English with a creative twist, in other words. I'm prone to creative twists, I write sci-fi and poetry. Hope this answers your question directly enough.

Are you using one of these? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3taRZXNL3As

I went to great lengths to remove mine. And to think that this dust-collecting, mites-breeding, toxic chemicals-releasing, allergies-promoting, fleas-harboring abomination was installed by previous owners over beautiful oak parquet floor! &$@#%!!! You're ahead of the curve with this too, I assure you.

It's not our water, it's theirs, according to Nestle CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe. He maintains that access to water is not a human right. Moreover, in the 2005 documentary called We Feed the World he characterized the view that human beings have a right to water as “extreme.” I think what it practically means is that, once privatizing and monetizing water is complete, any human being in need of water who can't afford to buy it will eventually be classified as an extremist and dealt with accordingly. No worries, Elon, everyone who matters is on your side. Take as much as you want.

I hear you. I feel much the same. By the way, your name -- silent thunder -- is in itself like a heavy snowfall, no? I feel the same. Miss the weather of the real world, four seasons, each with its own personality, they were like friends and relatives and foes and adversaries, a whole family of relationships each, complex, rich. SoCal climate is like that kindly aunt who has a warm smile for everybody but after a while you can't tell if she even notices you. She does not engage, does not interact, it's up to you to wake up her soul -- if you can. So, in a sense, living here is a spiritual challenge, whereas elsewhere it's a physical challenge that can turn spiritual sort of spontaneously for someone while only annoying and inconveniencing someone else.

She does look like a Zen master, although her pillow says Om. My cat Haomao is no zen master. He is a control freak.

Wow! Did you see the lights though? Or were you too cold to pay attention by the time they showed up? You should have talked about keeping warm to someone who wound up in California but started out in Siberia, and not just about meditation -- I'd tell you about 100% wool socks, boots with sheep wool lining big enough to accommodate two pairs of those socks without impairing circulation and with room to wiggle your toes, and if they do get cold, thawing them afterwards with vigorous rubbing and dry heat rather than warm water (a lot less painful), and about wool underwear and a scarf to cover half your face to warm up your nose with your own breath, and many other intricacies of thorough insulation and dryness, the solution to the extreme cold problem. The coldest I've ever been in my life was in Los Angeles in June, when I was stuck outdoors for an hour on an unexpectedly cold and windy day -- I think it was 50 above -- dressed in the usual SoCal close-to-nothing. I honestly didn't expect to survive, even though I've known 95 below back in the day.

Gives you a warm fuzzy, right? Metaphors aside, I always feel a warm fuzzy when looking at the teacher's face because that's how my first encounter went quite literally. I arrived at the Moscow seminar so catastrophically jetlagged that the first thing I did was to fall asleep on the cement floor of the Antarctic cold unheated Sokol'niki gym as soon as I sat down to meditate. When I woke up, quite mortified but unexpectedly warm, I found I was covered with the teacher's warm fuzzy jacket.

Penguins might be a bit challenging. I did practice with stray cats, squirrels, rabbits and the like. Even a rattlesnake at one point. The rattlesnake was the easiest to ignore -- I didn't even know it was there until I was done.

Going interstellar once we're done fouling up planet Earth must be very inspiring to every kid who was ever asked by mom to clean his room and didn't feel like it.

@Walker Thank you for the graphic picture. Could it be that taoist monks enjoying sex with watermelons were inspired by that great movie, Night on Earth? -- though come to think of it, it should have served as a warning to them when the Catholic priest therein had a heart attack from merely hearing the story of someone's carnal knowledge of a pumpkin... I won't say more in the unlikely case you haven't seen it. I don't know much about monastic life of taoists, and the only taoist nun I ever knew was batshit crazy, throwing prudeness tantrums and proclaiming celibacy as the Way with such regularity and such fervor that I suspected she may have been driven emotionally unstable by the very practice she preached. But I thought we were talking about taoist priests, 道長 , not monks and nuns? Is it the same word? -- my Chinese is, alas, very limited. I don't think I have any links saved specifically, I'm not a scholar of taoism, just a practitioner of a number of taoist arts, monkey see monkey do. Monkey choose at that. I read things "around" and "about" it of course but usually forget whatever is not found practically useful, theoretically compatible with my "bigger picture," or smacks of trivia which I try to avoid because my poor memory is overloaded with too much of everything as it is and I "seek daily decrease" as a good little taoist. The Encyclopedia of Taoism edited by Fabrizio Pregagio, with whom I occasionally talked online, may have been one source, but my memory of it is far from encyclopedic. Other than that, I have Taiwanese friends (living in the US now) and rely on what they tell me. The picture that emerges from their stories is very colorful, but, again, no links. I've a hunch the real reason for your questions is that you suspect Nathan's organization is not legit -- well, I've no idea one way or the other. But from what I heard about how taoism was resurrected and "restored" in China... I wouldn't take anyone's word for anything legitimacy-wise. (Which is one reason I am 90% empirical in my pursuits and use theory as a crutch when there's not enough monkey see for to do, and research around it as the crutch of the crutch.)

There's a number of varieties of fish in Lake Baikal (a schoolmate living there tells me) no one knows the sublime taste of who doesn't catch it himself or herself or else hangs out on the shore with someone who does. This fish, bless its fishy soul, can't be exploited commercially, because it has to be cooked and eaten right on the spot -- its texture is so tender that it completely disintegrates within thirty minutes of being caught. I often wonder how many sublime human experiences we miss out on by mass producing inferior ones. The only fish from Baikal I ate that is sturdy enough to be smoked and transported, omul', was the tastiest thing I ever had in my life. It's impossible to describe taste of course -- but if taste was color, it would be like a peacock's tail flashing open in your mouth.