Taomeow

I don't have a "bless you" for every "achoo." -- Russian proverb

Thanks for the reference. I usually listen to something this long in the car if I have to travel somewhere far -- so I listened to a couple of Jordan Peterson's podcasts while going back and forth between San Diego and Los Angeles last year, though not this one. I am more of a fan of his daughter's, one of the carnivores (there's a Youtube channel dedicated to her explorations, her name is Mikhaila Peterson). She credits "zerocarb" with saving her life -- and she eventually got her parents on that diet too, which apparently made her dad quite energetic and consequently prolific. I'll give a listen if I have a chance.

Read it some twenty years ago. Count this book among a dozen or so that were formative for the worldview and overall perspective I gained since then. Glad it's on your next list. I'd move it to the top of the list.

Yeah, and as long as you carefully substitute "Zionist" for "Jew" you can say everything a nazi would say and be in the politically correct zone cleared for you by "some scholars." Congratulations. I guess Arab citizens of Israel could tell a lot about their suffering to those "scholars" if the latter bothered to ask. Nevermind, here's some statistics of the horrors of the "racist apartheid" in action for the accidental tourist: 20% of the population of Israel are Arabs • 23% of Israeli doctors are Arabs • 46% of Israeli pharmacists are Arabs • 28% of hi-tech students at the Technion are Arabs • 16% of the students in all of Israeli higher education are Arabs Shocking I'm sure. Care to compare to any other country with a minority population? Take your pick. What a disappointing day it has been.

Nope. I tried. I type 95 wpm, the "rant" was nothing time-wise. But "Israel is a racist apartheid state" is not an exact quote, quoting from memory, and you can't swing a duel gun around here without hitting a direct exact quote aficionado, so I hold off on quoting that particular entry until I actually find it. And an even more interesting document you produced. Do stay tuned.

I would definitely apologize if it was the case. Have to reiterate -- I won't be able to present proof until I have the time. I remember what was said, I don't remember where, so the benefit of the doubt is yours.

Correct. Note to self: when the title of the thread is WWIII, no one is particularly fazed until there's ad homniem involving members of the forum, yawn, no one is particularly interested in contributing something passionate and heartfelt. But when a loosely alluded to idea (to wit, why Iran and the US were referred to as a cop and a criminal -- to wit, to tongue-in-cheek simplify with metaphors, as one would for a 5-year-old) flies right over the head of the recipient (not simple enough? not a precise enough quote? a stellar chance to open one's mouth to challenge something/someone perceived as smaller than thou?) who then ingenuously responds by dragging in something from a long abandoned unrelated thread toward a smug ad hominem jab and that's when you realize that it's the same person (no mistaken identity) who posted antisemitic crap on at least two occasions so now you're really pissed and tell him so in terms never used before and probably only used now because you're actually on hold on the phone with cops (real not metaphorical) over something that isn't making your day at all, and then he feigns innocence and cordially invites you to sift through 150 posts of his on a fishing expedition for which you have no time because you're on hold on the phone with cops so you tell him it's bad timing and promise him to get back to that at a more opportune time and mean it -- resuming that long and winding thought -- there will always be two or three or maybe more if it's one of those days energetically sensitive individuals who will smell a drop of blood and start pecking, a little peck here, a little peck there, there's notorious birds who peck a fellow chicken to death if they notice a drop of blood and the behavior crosses species-specific borders too often for comfort -- better get the fuck outta there. End of note to self.

I also have no problem with your not understanding many things.

OK. You are not wrong, you just don't understand.

Find & Share Quotes with Friends Join Goodreads Albert Einstein > Quotes > Quotable Quote “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” ― Albert Einstein

Remind me later. Bad timing, and very bad moment to goad me. I don't think I ever told anyone to fuck off before in all of my years here. We can resume at a more opportune time.

Oh, now I remember who you are. The poster of antisemitic crap? Fuck off.

Ah, so a criminal colluding with a corrupt cop. Don't mind me. They say this about science but it fully applies to politics: if you can't explain your theory in simple words to a five-year-old, it is wrong. I can.

Iran is attempting suicide by cop?

The Early Rat's whiskers are already here. This is typical -- the foreshadowings of the new kind of qi starts streaming in ahead of the arrival of the main body. The Water of my life bows to the Fire that forged you, Steel Rat.

Thirty minutes ago, a Ukrainian Boeing 737 carrying 180 passengers on board has crashed near Iran's Imam Khomeini airport.

What do you mean "changed?" Hasn't Oceania always been at war with Eurasia?.. (Apologies to anyone who didn't get the reference. It was a joke. A sad one.) I got a ride recently from an Iranian Uber driver who told me a bit about those times. He used to be a translator/interpreter at American training bases in Iran.

In theory, yes. But how does it manifest in, e.g., Christianity? Which god is the One? Or even in Zoroastrianism, the prime candidate for being considered the de-facto if not de-jure mother of all Indo-European (not "Abrahamic") "monotheistic" religions? They did have one god... for a while. Ahura Mazda, god-creator of the universe, the One God. But then, he also created the twin gods, Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu (Ormazd and Ahriman), the good guy and the bad guy (interestingly, they associated the good guy with matter and the bad guy with spirit!) And then Ahura Mazda proceeds to sort of turn into Spenta Mainyu and gets to be identified with him. So, from one god to three to two. But that's not the end of the story, because later, around the 3rd century, the paternity of Ahura Mazda is questioned and the twin gods are assigned a new father, Zurvan (Time!), and get to rule the world alternately. So, from two to three (one of which is two, so maybe a total of four) to one at a time. It can get mighty confusing. I think the source of the confusion is the gratuitous over-emphasis on the importance of monotheism as the explanation for socio-political peculiarities purportedly consequential to this mindset. One of those theories that came to be accepted as fact, whereas all the facts point to its much lesser relevance to what we're going to have concocted against us socio-economically. Mongolian religion that managed not to clash with shamanism in any way was, after all, also monotheistic, recognizing only one god -- Tengri. The Mongolian khans also derived their "mandate of heaven," their right to rule, from this god alone. Sometimes they tolerated other gods and sometimes they didn't. It doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Even unequivocally polytheistic religions still had a supreme ruler, it's always a hierarchy. If they have the same methods and share the same goals, it doesn't matter that much if whatever sits on top is One or many, or many aspects of One (what Christians call the Trinity and what my scaled and feathered informant calls The Consortium.) Ahura Mazda does look familiar...

From the door, to play runs a girl with not a care in the world. Come back!!!

How would you define "truly monotheistic?" Even in religions that are patently monotheistic, there's tons of other entities besides the supreme god, under various names and assigned various supporting roles. Father, Son and Holy Ghost -- that's actually a group of three divine personages, but there's also the Virgin Mary (Mother Divine) and the "lesser spirits" many of whom are also worshipped (many Catholics, e.g., are much more likely to address their prayers to a particular saint than to "higher" authority, and Orthodox Christian women often appeal to "mother-protectress," Mary, in a way similar to taoist practitioners envoking Guanyin, etc..) There's a large assortment of saints, prophets and apostles and angels with or without the flaming swords, and so on. The difference is in the titles, job descriptions, the amount of reverence allocated, etc. -- those might vary, the prophet Mohammed is mentioned in the same breath as Allah but does not push him to the background to become the main focus, unlike Jesus who stands between you and his dad as a bodyguard of sorts, or as a vigilant receptionist (can't see the boss unless I let you in), but still we don't talk of these religions as henotheistic -- although in a strict academic sense they ought to be considered that. Shangdi was originally the god of the pole star. The Shang people identified their ancestry with ten suns (a recurrent ancient theme inherited later by taoism), but Shangdi was the one celestial body "higher than the ten suns" -- the supreme ruler of the realm. Tian, in the meantime, was the one god of the Zhou people, and originally the sky (what later became "heaven"). The sky was the location of Shangdi and other ancestral spirits, so "Shangdi" eventually absorbed that meaning and became the god-sky, ruler of all the celestial phenomena and spirits. The Shang rulers identified themselves with the ten suns, and the sky was understood as a spiritual force associated with patterns of time, which were revealed in the movement of the celestial bodies. So the original tian ming ("mandate of heaven") was literally an astronomical sign, a "command" from God during the reign of King Wen, whose son Wu founded the Zhou dynasty. Which sort of boils down to early Chinese religion being monotheistic and superseded by a polytheistic one, not vice versa. At least monotheistic to the same extent as any religion we call "monotheistic" -- or perhaps to an even greater extent, since Shangdi was the only god receiving massive sacrifices from the government (of course sequestered from the people.) For thousands of years, no less.

I feel for you... but I can't resist the temptation of sharing the picture of our annual New Year tradition -- January 1st Penguin Plunge. My teacher participated. I will wait till at least April...

My teacher is all for strength/power training -- with traditional taiji methods. So he got us to practice pole shaking forms -- without using the arms, with routines developed to engage, strengthen and build up internal power that is not the kind that's "in the mind/spirit/yi" alone -- it involves core muscles/organs, alongside proprietary stuff of course -- qi, blood, LDT, martial applications. Most moves involve generating complex motion patterns in the pole by turning it into a body part of sorts but not an extension of your arm as, e.g., with the sword -- rather, an extension growing straight out of your LDT -- 7 1/2 feet long and freakin' heavy. Your arms will get plenty of muscle building action from just holding that thing and turning, coiling, supporting, coordinating the moves, no lifting of anything additional required for them to get a good workout. To say nothing of the legs. But the main action is in the internal muscles and organs gaining control, strength, mobility, resilience, all the good things. This practice is physically rather challenging, but also exciting and fun, something I could never get myself to feel from any "reps" of anything. The interesting thing is that a beginner will invariably use external muscles instead (but hopefully not to the extent that might be detrimental to internal structure) because knowing how to use internal ones is proprietary territory of internal arts and that territory takes time to get to. So maybe Dwai is right in his assertion that someone who already has internal workings down pat is way safer doing strength training with weights and such. In fact, I was almost ready to add light kettlebells to my routine and got a couple, and that's when pole shaking was introduced. So now they're collecting dust.

I'm guessing it might be the feeling of endogenous opiates the body releases in response to trauma. The reason I think this might be the case is, among other things, that I was in communication for a couple of years with an ex weightlifting champion of a certain country. In his younger years he was a beast, unstoppable, looking for street fights as a matter of routine, feeling like a god much of the time. By his early 40s, however, he was pretty much in constant pain, mostly back pain, but also knee pain and what not -- he still looked muscular and strong, and he was still strong -- when he could walk at all, which occasionally took hours of heroic effort. He took up qigong after a movie-like scenario that happened in real life -- after having his ass whooped by an old taiji master. The master refused to teach him taiji though, asserting he's too violent. This guy then started looking for taiji instruction elsewhere, not many options where he now lives. Wanted me to teach him long distance. I refused, I found him too crazy...

"Modern scientific" consensus still habitually ignores China though when peeping into the origins of monotheism. It's as though China didn't exist or didn't matter until they started manufacturing our smartphones. The earliest references to Shangdi, the god of monotheistic Chinese religion, are found in oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty in the 2nd millennium BC. Sima Qian, the father of Chinese history, who had access to much more early material when writing his Classic of History, lived at the time when it was something of a common knowledge that yearly sacrifices were made to Shangdi by Emperor Shun, even before the Xia Dynasty. Which places the origins of monotheism thousands of years before "Judaic monotheism." And here's something interesting I found... The Shang time oracle bone script for "god" -- di -- which also meant sky or heaven or god in heaven or god equal to heaven.

Back to Sumer. -- diĝir -- a god in general, or An, the supreme father of the gods. Dingir also meant sky or heaven -- in a sense close to the taoist tian, the opposite of ki -- earth (kun to taoists). -- diĝir-diĝir -- gods. looks like the Eight Directions of the bagua to me. I don't know what the order of the strokes was in Sumerian, but this word was most likely written beginning with the vertical line -- up to down -- with the initial indentation into the clay assuming the position of Tian in the Earlier Heaven bagua. Whereas the last indentation in this case marks the north-east (in the mapping system that doesn't flip the poles like ours, i.e. where Fire/Sun means South, and so the South on the map is located where the Sun is, on top, and North on the bottom). The trigram of the north-east, zhen, is the one that starts the manifestations of the Later Heaven.