Taomeow

A robot in South Korea apparently committed suicide a couple of weeks ago. It was a municipal officer, a very diligent one, and its human colleagues reportedly perceived it as "one of us" and were emotionally attached to it. There's speculation that the robot (just like many of its human compatriots) was driven to depression and despair by overwork. It threw itself down a 6 story flight of stairs and died. Not sure the story is interpreted correctly -- could be a mere malfunction that fried Azimov's Third Law of Robotics in its brain. Which means a similar malfunction can (and IMO eventually will) fry the Second in one of them (or all of them) -- and even the First. Especially considering these are sci fi laws and who knows (or decides) what laws govern the actual AI machines' behavior in real life, and how much the decision-makers can anticipate even if formulating them with the best of intentions (which I seriously doubt is "always" or even "often" the case.) https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/robot-suicide-rocks-south-korea-authorities-investigate-a-depressed-cyborgs-sudden-death-101720083069470.html

In texts on classical Xuan Kong feng shui. Advanced ones are insurmountably difficult (traditionally it took about 30 years of diligent study and practice for a student to master this discipline), and good (vs. bogus) beginner ones are rare. I don't remember exactly in which of them I encountered the breakdown -- the better beginner ones I recall were by Eva Wong, David Twicken, and Elizabeth Moran/Val Biktashev. I wouldn't go to any analysts/therapists for that. But there's traditions here and there that retain some of that expertise -- taoism is one (primarily magical schools, but there's "footprints" all over much of it, visible to those trained in reading footprints), Bön, and of course whatever shamanic proper (or nearly proper) traditions survive in places like South America, Africa, Siberia, and perhaps Australia (though most of what I know about that latter is traceable to Nungali )

Can I tell you a secret while you're talking cars? I only know one thing about cars. To wit: I want a Bugatti Tourbillon. And unlike what its name may suggest, the price tag is not in the billions. A mere $4.5 million separates me from my want. Well, closer to $4.8 for some versions, but I'd go for the lower end, I'm not too proud to skimp a bit.

Valar morghulis

Thank you, that's what I thought. On a different note, an acupuncturist of my acquaintance tells me that her teacher yells at her for drinking water. He thinks that every such instance, every sip, is a wasted opportunity to offer the body something better -- tea or herbal tea. We live in an age of deficiencies, why not replenish whenever we can? And we can every time we're thirsty. She has to hide her water bottle in his presence or he gets furious. Old school.

I usually keep a few varieties of tea in my home (albeit I'm mostly a coffee person and tea is effectively limited to one cup per day, not every day, since sometimes it's something herbal instead -- in the second half of the day when coffee is off limits.) But I don't have any tea bags. I only make tea with loose leaves, in a pot. Because there's a variety of teas I use -- black most often, green sometimes, herbal fairly regularly -- I use three different clay or porcelain pots, one Chinese, one Japanese, one English. (I have more in my small collection, but these three are always handy and in circulation.) And then there's matcha. Not a habit but I make it on occasion too. Tea bags haven't earned a place in my life no matter how they tried. You spend 5 more minutes on making your tea, you get a five times better outcome. Worth it. I would certainly like to see a reference but I believe it's entirely made up with no evidence. The part that is true is that when grown on contaminated soil and poisoned with pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and the rest of ecocides, tea absorbs and accumulates hundreds of harmful substances, and aluminum is one of them. Lemon or no lemon is inconsequential. Poisoned food and drink is the problem; there is no solution. So even a "reputable" reference would probably fail to convince me because I know that the vast majority of "studies" that have anything whatsoever to do with human health tiptoe around corporate interests on eggshells, so whatever they "find' is usually something that in a vast majority of cases has nothing to do with anything, and what is really of consequence, they conveniently don't notice.

I first read about it as a kid -- the story was part of a 1936 sci-fi novel, "The Burning Island" by Alexander Kazantsev. The novel (albeit tainted somewhat with soviet propaganda passages and plot twists) was full of breathtaking apocalyptic adventure, and the Tunguska event was built into its premise in the beginning (but I don't remember how exactly). According to this particular version, it was an alien spaceship with a nuclear engine that had an accident and exploded. One of the aliens, a female, survived though she was not in a good way due to radiation exposure. She was rescued by a local Tungus tribe and eventually became the tribe's shaman due to some extraordinary abilities she exhibited. She didn't survive into the rest of the novel but I think the link to the main plot was that she gave some protagonist an object which may have been some kind of Kryptonite type material, but my memory is quite vague -- I was no more than 10 when I read it. I found it totally fascinating at the time, and was later mighty pleased to find out that at least that part, about the Tungus event, was actually taken from real life. What have you heard?

I didn't know that. Went to google (Russian version) and found out that in Tolstoy's time, most prominent Russian sinologists had a rather skeptical view of Laozi and Tolstoy was sort of arguing with them and wrote a short work, The Teachings of Laozi, popularizing him from the Christian POV. Not really a translation, more like an intro. I'll have to read it (so far only found some quotes from it.) Thanks for mentioning it, that's interesting.

Today is the anniversary of the Tunguska event -- an enormous explosion that occurred on June 30, 1908 in a remote, very sparsely populated and hard-to-access area of Siberian taiga, at an altitude of 5–10 km (15,000–30,000 feet). Local reindeer herders who witnessed it (and, unlike multiple reindeer herds, were far enough to survive) described a fireball in the sky brighter than the sun. It flattened or burned 2,000 square kilometers of pine forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in central Siberia. The energy of the explosion is estimated to have been equivalent to 15 megatons of TNT—a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. At the time of the event, seismographs in Western Europe recorded seismic waves from the the blast. The fireball was visible from 800 kilometers (500 miles) away, and the nighttime sky was abnormally bright afterwards as far away as in Europe. The first scientific expedition was able to reach the area only in 1927, with several more in the following years and decades. No trace of what it actually was has ever been found. It left no crater and no debris.

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It may be different for different kinds of secret societies. For some I think the origins are purely biological. Many animals hide in secrecy under particular circumstances. E.g. when giving birth to their offspring -- this is a very vulnerable moment, both for the mother and the newborn, and the first secret societies must have been formed around a young pregnant woman and her helpers -- mother, grandmother, sisters, aunts. Those who could help and not mess things up. In tribal societies this custom survived into modernity and up to the destruction of traditional life: women involved secluded themselves in secret places, men were absolutely excluded for a period of time. (An aside: I find the artificially made up custom, a few decades old, of the father being present when the woman is in labor, absolutely insane. Unfair to the father who is prompted and coached as to what he is expected to feel, what he isn't supposed to feel... this is always destructive for the genuine feelings. Unfair to the mother who is suddenly a show, a performance -- while in the midst of the single most genuine experience of her life. Ugh.) A different kind of secret societies I believe were born of "civilization" which bred inequality which brought about criminality. For criminal minded societies, esotericism was a mask to wear, a veil to hide behind. Scare the shit out of everybody, exaggerate your power, put on a show, intimidate... that kind of stuff. And a still different kind -- truly esoteric, in touch with the invisible worlds, subtle energies, spirits, entities of power, both benevolent and malevolent. This must often (more often than not) be kept secret from the uninitiated for the same reason we don't give matches to children.

Horrible, sorry to hear your sister had to go through this. Years ago there was a devastating fire in NJ at the plaza within a 5-minute walk (not drive) from our house that destroyed a whole block around which quite a bit of my life revolved at the time. The office where I used to work (I quit a short while before), my taekwondo dojo, a little Eastern European food store/deli where I bought some of my nostalgia foods, a quaint Italian restaurant we patroned, the bank where I did my banking, the clock tower (not unlike the one in Back to the Future) that chimed in on the passage of regular "normal" time... And on top of all that I somehow felt that the Fire qi was changing the regular time into some different kind... Turned out I was right. My life was never the same -- and it was Fire qi that I felt changing it. Yeah, with THE White Cat added to the six, it could be the Seven Cats of Apocalypse. Glad you (and the other cats) didn't break those seals.

Got mandatory evacuated today due to a brush fire about half a mile from us. Luckily it got contained fairly fast, there were plenty of helicopters and fire trucks and it was under control in a few hours, whereupon the evac order was lifted and we were able to return home. A few hours in limbo were no fun though, didn't quite know what to expect and how to proceed -- but the main problem proved to be the cat. Note to self: in case of emergency, the first thing to do is put the cat in the carrier and only then start rushing to get stuff and then afterthought stuff and then stop rushing for a sec over the "get out of the area NOW!" blaring on the emergency alert system, stop being confused by helicopters flying so low over the house that it's shaking as though we got an earthquake on top of the fire -- and remember that this commotion will cause the cat to hide so expertly and resist capture so decisively that -- like I said, the first thing to do is secure the cat in the carrier before, not in the middle, not at the end of the commotion. Lesson learned. It was a useful drill.

Not imperfection but the zest of wasabi in wabi-sabi. 不完全さではなく、 わびさびはわさびの風味がある

I think it depends on the kind of idea one's having. E.g., many self-preservation ideas have substantial basis -- when hungry seek food, when thirsty seek water, when sleepy take a nap, when in danger hide, or fight, or flee, and so on. Taoist (approximate) breakdown: 40% is written in the stars and can't be changed, 40% is the field of application of free will (though choices may be limited to how one deals with the part written in the stars, but they exist and we are capable of making them); 20% is surprise surprise, unpredictable, probabilistic, and not scriptable even by gods. Fully in agreement. What about "emotional intelligence?" I believe "intelligence" is not so much overrated as misinterpreted. Most institutionalized "spiritual" traditions put emphasis on serving themselves as generous a helping of status, power, control, and profit as they're able. The native spirituality of humans, shamanism, and modalities that haven't severed their links with it deals with actual spirits. Actual spirits reside in different designated places -- e.g., the spirit of the heart resides in the heart, the spirit of the river, in the river, and so on. Malevolent spirits reside where they don't belong, and are behind emotions in chaos.

Don't forget storge and philia. And, according to Plato, also mania (he asserted that love is a kind of madness. He had four different words for different kinds of madness too.) The ancients had phylogenetic trees for many emotional and philosophical notions for which we plant monocultures.

Sorry, that's classified.

In that model the ideas of pattern and whole come from the way our brains work, notably the discovery of the "predictive" neurons in communication with "current reality" neurons. The older models assumed that the brain 1)gets input from the environment, 2)then produces a response. Turns out it's not that simple. "Predictive" neurons get there first: they anticipate, forecast, produce "ideas" of what reality outside is like at a given moment. (Reality inside the body is also "outside" the brain, so to predictive neurons it doesn't matter which reality, "ours" or "the world's" they are assessing -- they treat both as the "outer reality.") The "current reality" neurons that get actual in-the-moment input get in touch with predictive neurons (which somehow get there first!), and the brain/mind compares the information and comes up with an assessment of how well the actual input matches the prediction. That's the millisecond within which the "current reality" neurons and "predictive" neurons fire lightnings at each other ("brainstorm") and either establish that both are right, both are wrong, or one is right and the other is wrong. The idea is born. It's the outcome of comparing "outer reality" and predictions of what it might be like and getting an image/thought/solution/understanding/quest, whatever. An outline, a shape of things to come that appears rooted in reality rather than in mere fantasy. In the taoist model, "In Heaven, images are born, on Earth they take shape." Interestingly, neuroscientists sometimes call the predictive neurons "upper" and the "current reality" ones, "lower." An idea is a cooperation between "upper" and "lower," between heaven and earth, that produces something that wasn't there before they got in touch. Or as a taoist might put it, "before yang embraced yin." Nature patterns itself on communication between heaven and earth, above and below, inner and outer, yang and yin. Patterns are derived from the tao, "tao patterns itself on itself/nature/its own nature" (tao fa ziran). "Whole" in the taoist model would be too long of a tangent. In the gestalt model, there's principles, numbering six if I remember correctly, that are to be observed for there to be wholeness. (They can be illustrated visually -- which is why gestalt in design is somewhat easier to grasp and agree with than, e.g., in gestalt psychology.)

To give a more classical answer, here's a quote: "The sage comes like the spring, benefitting all beings." Contemplate the coming of spring (e.g.). Doing nothing, accomplishing everything. Put a spoonful of sugar in your cup of coffee, it will transform your beverage without doing anything, by just being what it is.

In other words,

Did I miss the switch from Very Unpopular Opinions to Very Popular Platitudes?

That's close to what I meant in Apech's other concurrently running thread, about ideas, when I wrote "a closed gestalt." It's similar to a jigsaw puzzle fully assembled -- the last piece falls into place and Eureka!

The first source I came across when taoist "subtle anatomy" was news to me was "The Web That Has No Weaver" by Ted Kaptchuk. There's a brief "dissection" of the concepts of yin zhi and yang zhi there, alongside a very good explanation of the functions (and dysfunctions) of the other shens.

To an extent, you could say that yang zhi is more about conscious decisions, choices, effort stimulation -- the playground of the neocortex -- while yin zhi is more connected to the unconscious processes of the mind, the lower brain, and to the visceral processes of the body. The midbrain serves as "the middle man" in their communications, but if there's disconnects on any level (a very widespread scenario), communication turns into that children's game they call telephone (or Chinese whispers) and becomes mildly, or more often grossly, distorted.