Taomeow

That's nearly a synchronicity. I've just finished reading a work of fiction presenting that very scenario. "The Girl with Ghost Eyes," by Matthew Boronson, set in the late 19th century Chinatown in San Francisco and featuring a Maoshan daonu (female daoshi) for the main protagonist. (An aside: don't try to learn Maoshan magic from that book. It's a work of fiction, not a how-to instruction manual.) Have you read it, or did the idea occur to you independently?

Someday we will return to the beginning and eat the fruits of paradise ad-lib. And Adam will be skipping, jumping, spinning, and Eve will turn right back into his rib.

((( @manitou ))) Likewise

Ah, here's where it gets interesting. The forest, the woodcutter, and the carpenter all contributed to the qi of the wood table on which you now write. If you bang it around and make its legs rickety, you will have diminished its qi. If you become a famous writer and this table winds up on display in a museum, or sold at Sothesby's, you will have increased its qi. However, none of it will affect its jing, which is dead. Manufactured things can have qi, plenty of qi. They can have shen. But not jing. Jing is at the core of that elusive difference between what's possible and what's impossible in the course of "natural" developments. It's possible for a tree to become a table. It's impossible for a table to become a tree. Of course there's always magic. Barring that, jing is what you get, qi and shen is what you do with it. Not a whole lot you can do to animate a dead tree. So, qi doesn't have to be "living," shen doesn't have to be "living," but jing is either jing or dead jing. AI can have qi, even shen, but not jing. Jing is natural developmental history. Neither a table nor AI are an outcome of any such process. Simply put, they don't have natural ancestors. Nothing unfolded naturally into a table or a computer. Someone had to lose his or her ancestral jing to make them. They don't come from the Valley Spirit. Things that don't come from the Valley Spirit don't have jing. Even if they're self-replicating (it's quite possible to make self-replicating robots), they're not replicating jing -- they're replicating dead jing.

Little Daobum Boy Come they told me, pa rum pum pum pum The Daobums to see, pa rum pum pum pum Our finest gifts we bring, pa rum pum pum pum To lay before the Bums, pa rum pum pum pum Rum pum pum pum So to honor them, pa rum pum pum pum When we come Little Daobum, pa rum pum pum pum I am a Daobum too, pa rum pum pum pum I have no gift to bring, pa rum pum pum pum That's fit to give the Bums, pa rum pum pum pum Rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum Shall I post for you, pa rum pum pum pum Oh Daobums? Laozi nodded, pa rum pum pum pum The yin and yang kept time, pa rum pum pum pum I post my dao for them, pa rum pum pum pum I dao my best for them, pa rum pum pum pum Rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum Then some smiled at me, pa rum pum pum pum Some thought me dumb Dumb

I've never taken any lab-created drugs in my life. Entheogens have been lumped together with them for legal/criminalizing reasons, not because they have anything in common other than the ability to change baseline consciousness. But that's a meaningless criterion. Meditation can change baseline consciousness too, high fever can do that, a creative impulse, getting in a fight, falling in love, body-inclusive deep feeling therapy, or a devastating life blow of the kind that turns one's hair gray overnight. Doesn't mean any of these are "drugs." I have never even taken a caffeine pill despite drinking coffee every day. Caffeine is a drug. I don't do drugs. So, I have no experience based opinion about LSD, but I was roommates (and friends) once with a guy who'd taken it once eight years earlier and went on a permanent bad trip, irreversible. By the time I befriended him he was in Primal therapy, and possibly on the mend -- before that, a dozen psychiatrists had given up on him and told him he'd have to be institutionalized for the rest of his life. He was intellectually brilliant, but what he had where regular humans have an emotional life was something altogether else... He told me that that first and only time he took LSD, he wasn't aware of it, it was slipped to him by his college "friends" as a "joke." He was resolved to kill anyone who'd ever do this to him again, told them so, and meant it. I think it was the closest I ever came in contact with that stuff, and wouldn't come any closer at gunpoint. I miss that guy (not in any romantic sense, he was gay) and all the crazy far-out philosophical discussions we used to have... but I wouldn't want to be in his shoes.

Ayahuasca, hands down.

No, it's not a dumb question. Various established traditions do have disagreements. Plenty. But not about taoist fundamentals.

If that's the case, I've two questions: 1. Which one? 2. Why do I hear "Damo Mitchell's system" from its adherents but never the name of that genuine, established tradition? Would appreciate an elucidation.

I'm not freeform but I can find a way. I watched a bit of Damo's videos here and there, read a bit of what he writes here and there, saw this or that diagram he presents, listened to a fragment of a lecture and a snippet of another, and had to stop every time, somewhat baffled. Something is always off. Not necessarily glaringly off. But if he was a flight instructor, he would know that each 1° displacement over a distance of 60 nautical miles (NM) will result in 1 NM off course. If you keep displacing and never correcting, you'll never get where you're headed -- and where you end up you might not even find a landing strip. Why exactly is something always off, I don't know, but I can guess. He wanted "his" system. Without having been born into the tradition, one typically has two options. Find an established tradition and join the lineage as the next-generation practitioner. If you're talented, ambitious, hardworking and lucky, become a lineage holder, make it your own, no one will hold it against you that you weren't born into that tradition if you internalized it fully. And the second option -- cherry-pick the lineage, better yet more than one, as many as you can lay your hands on, mix and match and "create your own system." The second generation might find it doesn't really work, the third may find it doesn't exist anymore, things that aren't viable are born every day. Remember X-ray Shoe Fitter, Pedoscope and Foot-o-scope -- machines installed in shoe stores to determine your shoe size in a new and improved way by giving you a hefty doze of radiation every time you wanted to buy shoes? No? Neither do I. But they were all the rage once. I'd wait a couple generations before committing to Damo's system.

With babies to feed, husband to please, employers, chores, bills, she grew tame.

That's not a question, that's a falsification. I never made a peep about anything being superior to anything else, so why would you falsify an assertion I didn't make instead of asking a question as I proposed? Wanna try again?

You are rude, dude. And a post earlier you also rudely lashed out at the forum owner/admin, which is usually a bad idea regardless of all other considerations. Hope you're not suicidal in RL. If that's the case, I have much compassion and can share some helpline numbers. But if you're saying, unnecessarily rudely, that no one here has the real perspective, please allow me to introduce myself. I lived the first half of my to-date life in a socialist and the second half in a capitalist country. Do you have any questions you would like me to answer, or do you have all the answers already?

Even acorns rot, odd acorns sprout mighty oaks even acorns feed.

I guess everyone will recommend an approach based on their own rodeo. Some, on their not-my-first rodeo. So my suggestions will be based on mine. Start with mastering one taoist practice. One. But master it. That's the only way to find out if you have what it takes to have more than one, or even need more than one. You can have three or four or ten thousand. It doesn't matter, they're all connected, but if you're master of none, it doesn't matter how many you have dabbled in. I know ten thousand things, and personally engage in three. A moving practice, a sitting practice, and theory explorations. None of these three are at odds with the other two, none contradict, overrule, take in an altogether different direction, or invalidate each other. All of them complement each other and serve each other. Which one is stronger at any given point depends on which one begs strengthening. It's a moving equilibrium, where overemphasizing one may take away from the other two, and then I try to self-adjust. But I started with just one, expanded to "ten thousand," then shrunk it back, scaled it down, identified three venues to explore and took the rest from there. I like this approach because it is capable of providing a "second" and "third" opinion on any one of my practices from the other two. Oh, I also had and have teachers and, despite being naturally all the things that would seemingly make following a teacher to a T impossible -- rebellious, creative, eclectic and familiar with many different cultural traditions (including empirically), I chose to learn without challenging and see what happens. What happened is, the more I learned, the less I felt like challenging or rethinking or "creatively approaching" much of what I learned, while at the same time highlighting all the places where I do feel qualified to question, modify, use a different approach. The difference being, now it can be done not to humor some inherent personality traits causing a beginner or a spiritual business person to seek opportunities to establish "my very own" "bigger-better" but because of some gradually acquired competence that increased my trust in my own judgment. Trusting one's own judgment on faith alone is usually a trap. Weaponize your curiosity, sharpen it, polish it, give it an edge capable of penetrating any mystery like a butter knife penetrates a stick of butter. Use it in a battle for your best judgment. Don't treat your curiosity as a junk drawer to throw half the world's arsenal into, every spear's handle broken, every arrowhead dull and rusty, every pistol jammed, every pouch of gunpowder wet. You don't need a drawerful of junk. You don't even need an open carry permit. You just need, to allude to a popular culture item now drawing some attention due to the ongoing BBC TV series, a subtle knife. Also sprach Taomeow.

/

Russia's greatest love machine

From what I've read in one of my favorite books, The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost, that's how mothers of the nearly uncontacted tribe the author lived with for a few years nurse their children. And that's how they watch out for their well-being and safety. Simply put, they don't, they just enjoy doing what they normally do plus the child on the body, doing its child thing which is never seen as "extra" anything. The child does its child thing, mom does her adult thing, and the child is interacted with continuously even when not directly interacted with. The child knows nothing but this immersion into well-being and safety, because no one is fussing, and no one is fussing because no one is anxious, and because no one is anxious, everyone is capable of paying unimpeded, unencumbered, relaxed and aware attention to everything in their environment. Which is why toddlers who might wander off "unsupervised" if they like routinely play tumble on the edge of a precipice, and the author was the only one worried they might fall off. No child ever falls off.

Forgiveness is a gift of the sweet fragrance a flower gives when trampled upon. -- Anon.

.

These things work best when no one depends on you. If someone does, not so much. Not to give the more obvious examples, just to illustrate with what's going on right now right here. I've run out of cat food. The cat is meowing. I'm almost but not quite over a cold so I don't feel like making a trip to the store. I'd rather let it be. Or, in the spirit of the approaching Christmas, let him meow, let him meow, let him meow. Going to the store now.

I don't know what Chick Tracts are. The rest I've heard too, but not from him. "Heard" is an understatement. I propose dropping the subject.

No worries. As for someone producing a copy later than the 17th century, what about Dr. Alberto Rivera in 1967? Also fake? ??

Ah, good -- you started building a straw man to burn at the stake, but then changed your mind, which is prudent. Michael Saso is a good friend of mine. Whether he ever "really" left the order, I can ask. I meant what I meant in my initial entry, but perhaps I should have added the word "really" for clarity. A Jesuit never "really" leaves the order. Not that he never "formally," "officially" leaves but "really" -- which in the case of Michael Saso serves to prove this opinion. Does his example serve the order? Why absolutely. Whether this service is "nefarious" or not, I'm not the one who said or implied that -- the word "service" does not equal "service to a nefarious agenda," and the word "service" is what I used. In some cases, definitely nefarious, I've read enough accounts of precisely the infiltrations toward destruction from quite enough sources. Whereas someone who is sincere may just undertake "building bridges," incorporating ideas and practices from far and away denominations into something more "on speaking terms," looking to unite rather than divide. Which is, again, exactly the case with Michael Saso. Is every member of a different denomination supposed to see it as a positive? That's debatable and definitely not the case with me, but then, I'm a seeker of separate shelves in the pantry and in the crafts cabinet for a jar of strawberry jam and a jar of sewing needles, not for Strawberry Jam With Sewing Needles jars. As for what's fake, it can get hard to prove because the proof of something being fake can also be faked, no? The context is what proves. Thanks for some context, I'll look into that.