Taomeow

That "Protocols" is a fake I can prove not because someone told me so but because I know the players in the creation of the forgery, the dates, events, names of the people in charge, their real affiliations and agendas, the name of the person tasked with the actual writing, and the royal seal of approval on the product that propelled it into wide circulation. Though the names of all the people killed as the outcome I don't know, I can only give you the numbers -- pogroms were the first reaction to the dissemination of the first edition and they were massive. That the "Extreme Oath" is a fake you can prove by... dropping the "conspiracy theory" label or by something similar to what I could put on the table if we were talking about the "Protocols?" Regardless. If you were to ever get interested in the study of ponerology (an involuntary hobby of mine), you might find that looking into Jesuit behind-the-scenes accomplishments proves a rather worthwhile inquiry. I can recommend a dozen or so books.

Not exactly. What I posted is a link to a document recorded in the Congressional Record of the U.S. (House Bill 1523, Contested election case of Eugene C. Bonniwell, against Thos. S. Butler, Feb. 15, 1913, pp. 3215-3216). It is horrible, and it is factual, and it is the tip of the iceberg the size of the Snowball Earth. What you post is... well, it's usually hard to tell which part is fact, which part is emotional reaction (sometimes justified but often just lashing out at scapegoats of your choice, for lack of grasp on the real -- albeit elusive -- targets worthy of your wrath). Part accurate, part misattributed to the wrong or else unprovable perpetrator, part Malthusian, part biased not against the wrongdoers but precisely against the targets they have conveniently provided. Part insightful but unfortunately usually buried under a mountain of stretches, uneducated guesses presented as fact not hypothesis, presented as axioms, and so on. In other words, if you're going to present a "general theory of everything," you need to take some extra care not to discredit the little sparks of truth with mountains of disregard for any and all more fruitful but far more labor-intensive methods of obtaining it. Also presentation... even if you were right about everything, it is for a reason that no one tries to present any theory by condensing all the material of a vast discipline into one slide show and expecting Ph.D.s with full grasp of that discipline to leave the auditorium once that slide show is repeated enough times.

http://www.reformation.org/jesuit-oath.html

It is my understanding that no Jesuit ever leaves the order. Whatever else they do is done in the service of the order.

(((@ilumairen))) Hugs back!

A taoist interlude. It was all a misunderstanding and it was all meant to happen. I'll explain. Limahong PMed me asking to join in and say a few words. I was saddened by Marbles's passing like so many, and of course I would honor the request, except I felt some inner resistance which I didn't understand. I simply couldn't write anything. Not to wax mystical but it was like some spiritual "no" that would flash across my screen every time I tried. This, for three days or so, and finally I did what I always do when I don't know what to make of something -- an I Ching divination. The I Ching told me not to write anything in the memorial thread, in rather strong terms. I asked "why," the answer boiled down to "because I tell you so, and don't inquire again." I was surprised and still felt bad about not saying anything and not even being able to explain why. The next day I asked again -- though I should've known better given my I Ching experience of almost 20 years -- and the I Ching gave me something akin to a tired parent yielding to a pleading child who insists on getting what she wants -- "well, I told you not to, but if you insist on entering the realm of the devils, fine, go right ahead and see what happens." Lima in the meantime sent another PM trying to convince me to participate in the memorial thread. So I decided, all right, I'll be brief and careful, and posted a few words. To which Luke responded -- to which Lima promptly addressed me and him as "ladies" and then "fairy ladies" -- to which Sean reacted -- all within minutes I think. Instant unfolding of the very scenario the I Ching couldn't explain to me because the oracle doesn't actually speak in scenarios. She told me how to avoid it. Tao told me to do nothing, people asked me to do something, I went with what people asked, and tao unfolded the scenario. No one's fault. The butterfly was told not to flap its wing. A human tied a thread to that wing and pulled. The butterfly flapped its wing and the tornado it was to trigger followed. End of taoist interlude.

Not necessarily deities, since these are older than fully personified religious taoist gods and can be understood primarily as forces of nature, but the Red Phoenix of the South is one of the five main players of the wuxing philosophy and the Rooster of the Twelve Animals represents one of the twelve Earthly Branches of xuan kong (of Flying Stars or space-time-matter) feng shui. You don't so much worship them as handle them the way they require. E.g. the Red Phoenix flies South, its "fractal" as-above-so-below counterpart is one of the Inner Gods and is supposed to be let loose to fly freely at night when the person sleeps. If you block its path, it can hurt itself running into an obstacle (because it's impatient yang energy that tends to rush headlong into things) or even break its wing. It is believed that the space at the foot of one's bed should therefore be open, especially in the case of a child, whose phoenix is a young and inexperienced chick. Placing a tall piece of furniture in that direction may cause the child, in her waking life, to break an arm. (I nodded with grim satisfaction when I first came across this information because that's exactly what happened when I was 6. A tall-ass cabinet that went almost up to the ceiling, and a very nasty fracture.) There's also the Crane who usually hangs out with the Eight Immortals. Another one, with Shouxing 寿星, one of the three Star Gods. Shou (壽) is the star of the South Pole in Chinese astronomy, which is believed to control the life spans of humans. Shou is associated with wisdom, longevity and immortality, so is the Crane. This is also older than formalized taoism and probably goes all the way to the earilest "folk religions" of China as Western sources like to refer to them, although I'm not sure "folk astronomers" were ever a thing, and this stuff is all related to celestial observations. Feeding birds for whatever reason is good. I think they're always in need of food everywhere, they are such high energy things, so yang, with such hunger in their bellies. And life can't be easy for any of them these days. And they are so smart. I often see seagulls steal lunches from people on the beach -- they have developed a routine that is specifically aimed at hunting for the human lunch. I've seen them spot a lunch box eaten from or not yet left unattended and start interacting with the little kid of the owner, coming very close -- just reach out your little hand and you can stroke me. The kid starts moving toward the seagull with her arm outstretched, the seagull retreats a couple of steps, and again, moving more and more toward water. Eventually mom has to run after the kid and the seagull will grab the lunch box and drag it aside and have lunch, or fly away with a bag of chips.

I've no poodle here. Step all you like on someone else's. I only have a cat.

It does look like a kettle bell, doesn't it?.. Maybe weighs and measures require strong folks to lift the weights and they took up exercise, with kettle bells, Russian style, and that's what is signified? -- they're going to the gym, that's what it is! Except there's also depictions that imply it's nothing of the kind. That imply it's a bucket. Irrigation again perhaps? But why are they dipping the pine cone in that bucket and dousing people's heads from it, not fields of barley?.. ??? And then there's this problem of different sciences not communicating with each other. Let's see... Historians assert increasingly arid climate leads to irrigation and eventually agriculture. Paleontologists assert we're in the thermo interlude of the cryo era. Agriculture is what happens in the last thermo interlude of the otherwise cryo era. Geophysicists assert increasingly arid climate is a regular feature of the cryo developments -- thermo interlude ending, ice age starting. Ice ages are dry. Thermo interludes are wet. Cold brings about arid climates, heat brings about damp and wet climates. So how does arid climate descend upon the land without an ice age descending upon it? How does it happen in the midst of the thermo period, the "fertile" one? How does its fertility relate to its moisture? -- why directly, warm periods are moist and fertile, two sides of the same coin. So how does a land become arid in the midst of it? Two ways. Either the thermo phase ends and the cryo era advances once again. Did that happen in the "fertile crescent?" Hell no. OR Agriculture makes it so. Agriculture that throws off the fine balance that makes the land fertile, agriculture that destroys a few, then a few dozen, then a few hundred, then exponentially all the feedback loops between the land and its plants and animals and rivers and lakes, and starts rewriting the natural script which dictates absolute geophysical exemption of thermo periods from becoming arid. Unless you interfere with the feedback loops. I don't buy agriculture and its bedfellow civilization as a response to climate change -- I buy climate change as the outcome of agriculture and city-building getting in bed with each other, breeding monsters. Beginning with the monster of desertification. (A very local and very temporary development, the larger cycles of cryo and thermo eras of course remain unaffected. We're still in the larger cryo era for the next couple hundred million years. Long-playing cycles of climate on planet earth are fully yin-yang. With a bit of yin within yang and a bit of yang within yin, otherwise... textbook. That's what geophysicists have found -- even though they know nothing about yin-yang dynamics.)

I wasn't aware anyone asserted that. I haven't revisited linguistics much since the days of the Grimm's Law and tracing the whole bunch to the Proto-Indo-European, not to each other. But then I was taught linguistics by card-carrying commies.

And earlier you said that he "called you out" somehow personally and put the word "commies" in huge red for anyone who may have missed it -- so I went back and re-read what dwai wrote in case I missed it and found no such thing. He presents two views. One of the Nationalists and the other of their opposition -- Western scholars and Indian commies. It's not "right wing conspiracy bullshit." It's the description of the scene one side of which you may consider "right wing conspiracy bullshit" if you like -- but considering all nationalists right wing and all their complaints about the legacy of colonialism made-up conspiracy theories is left wing bullshit. Just because certain bullshit is left wing doesn't signal enough virtue for it to be exempt from bullshit designation. Anti-colonialist and anti-globalist sentiments can be exploited, it's true, and they are readily exploited by the right wing movements, that's also true. But it doesn't mean on autopilot that anyone who happens to share anti-colonialist and/or anti-globalist sentiments is right wing or a bullshitter. Please be more reasonable. Let's talk fact, fiction, hypothesis -- even mistake -- without dispensing labels onto whoever presents any that are not mere spam, trolling or suchlike.

Finally we're on my turf again. I've no idea what the Hindu national party is trying to prove, perhaps stuff similar to what all nationalist parties everywhere are always trying to prove -- vast superiority of their own over "other," toward boosting national pride, a reliable engine of distraction. I think the term Indo-European has become controversial while I wasn't looking -- l wasn't aware of the controversy when it was part of my university course in comparative linguistics, I just studied for the tests, and when you do, you try not to worry too much about whether what you study actually exists (some of what I had to study actually didn't -- we had some funky subjects then and there... but I suspect here and now there's even more of those non-existent sciences in existence.) But one thing I know for sure. I don't know whether Indians migrated to Russia or vice versa (Russian nationalist parties now assert it's vice versa), but far as the language is concerned -- get this -- I understand a good deal of Sanskrit. Which I never learned. I understand it due to its uncanny similarity to Russian. Not just the vocabulary for a lot of primary, basic words but the structure of the words, syntax, grammar, even style. I have a good ear for languages in general, but I don't understand any Farsi, Kyrgyz, Tajik or Turkish or Arabic. Sanskrit is different. Go figure.

Thanks for the article. Methinks the title is a bit at odds with the contents (as sensationalism would usually dictate to most publications on most subjects, not singling out this one.) I.e. it doesn't "debunk" Aryan invasion, it proposes a possibly worthy of further explorations alternative hypothesis. They ultimately got the genome of one individual. Well, I'm one individual with a genome different from that of all my current neighbors. If I were to leave behind any remains, which as a follower of immortalist taoism I'm trying to avoid, imagine someone sequencing my DNA ten thousand years down the road with no other samples available and concluding that North America had been conquered by the Russians. And this paragraph (an assertion not backed up by any reasons for such a conclusion) I'm not buying at all: "Another significant claim in the study published in the scientific journal Cell, titled "An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers”, is that farming was not brought to South Asia by large-scale movement of people from the Fertile Crescent where farming first arose. Instead, farming started in South Asia by local hunter-gatherers." No. Farming as an alternative lifestyle to that of hunter-gatherers has never been started by any local hunter-gatherers anywhere. Elements may have always been there, but a cultural switch, a "voluntary" one, is one of the made-up stories I'm sure. However it started, that story about us just somehow "naturally" starting it anywhere would imply all our ancestors suddenly and irreversibly went globally insane. To swap the 8 to 16 hours per week work schedule of the hunter-gatherer for the 12 to 18 hours per day schedule of the farmer? It's like expecting a modern nine-to-fiver to just spontaneously, with no pressure from the boss, to start working a 20-hour 7 days a week schedule because they figured they could make more money this way. As they put it in Sumer, sipad he2-em-ta-ab-ed3-de3-a udu-ni šu-a li-bi2-in-gi4 . No shepherd, no sheep in enclosures.

But you more or less guessed what I said and why, right? I just decided a moment later that I shouldn't try to steal your thunder in case you want to say something yourself about that "ladies" entry.

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I mean, every last entry in every one of 16 topics out of 20 bears his mark. This forum has seen it all. This, too, shall pass. I guess I can just take a hiatus and wait for it to pass like bad weather.

Everybody remembers something personal about Marblehead -- he interacted with everybody. Even if it was just to say something like, "I have nothing to say to this," or "I don't think I can add anything." I once asked him, well, if you have nothing to say, why not just say nothing? His response was unexpected and really made me smile. He said (don't remember verbatim of course), when someone posts and no one responds, they're just left hanging. So I'll write something -- if I have nothing to say, I can at least acknowledge that I've read what they wrote. It may have been before the emoticon buttons were installed on TDB which now might serve the same purpose, but even if it was after -- I'm not sure when -- it still made sense to me then. Like a quick acknowledgment -- I see you, you're not surrounded by totally unresponsive vacuum. I liked it a lot. R.I.P., dear friend.

I must have picked up on the vibe... too bad it wasn't all metaphorical for you. Get well soon!

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Mr. President, is that you?

My Dzogchen training was only ever practical as well. It was a long time ago, and of course there was a bit of theory too, nothing deeply scholarly though. What I remember the most is how it involved, for me, a sense of certain spiritual heroism about my teacher, I imagined his spirit as a fearless trailblazer, strong and sturdy and adventurous. Something very human and humane, even what one might call cool. I was always wary of the guru aura around anyone, and he had something opposite of that, very genuine. So it was monkey is told monkey do, and the only theoretical literature I remember reading was brief, this or that brochure, he would also do things like send me a photograph (physical -- that was before smartphones with cameras) of, e.g., monks walking across the monastery grounds, one of them turning his head to look (at the photographer?), others absorbed in something, detached... he'd send something like that with no explanations, no instructions, and I would be just gazing and gazing at the picture like a cat at a mouse hole, waiting for the mouse to appear. Sometimes the mouse disappeared and I was in some "nothing to chase" place. Or he'd subscribe me to a year of some Dzogchen publications, also without any instructions. So I learned to meditate, and to question my practice. And when I expressed my doubts and frustrations, he dropped the word tao. I heard it from him first. Ever so grateful. But then there was a detour very elsewhere between that and all things tao. My taoist training has been both theoretical and practical, but never scholarly in a way a "researcher" might go step by step after that mouse not worth chasing -- the theory, for me, always concerned concepts to grasp toward things to do (not necessarily in that order, it has always had the tendency to go both ways). So, I'm an empiricist with a theoretical background primarily in the fundamentals (besides what my teachers tell me). Yuan shen is a later acquisition in relation to the foundational fundamentals -- an interpretation, a refining of certain concepts. And as experience it is quite resistant to being put into words. Many words I've seen "about it" are basically, to me personally, nonsense. Here's one exception I've come across -- I'll just quote that paragraph, see if it begins to answer your question. (I don't know if it does because I don't know enough about rigpas.) "What is called original spirits (yuan shen 元神) is mainly understood as the power at the origin of all processes of life, emanating from the impenetrable mystery of Heaven, source of life. In each human, it is part of their original endowment. In a Daoist context, it is the spirits of the human being, perfectly merged with those of Heaven, moving without impediment through the infinite spaces of the universe and companions to the spirits of Heaven. In a more common context, it is the spirit which gives the human heart/mind its clear-sightedness and intelligence and which makes it possible for the heart to recognize more and more clearly the nature of things and its own nature. This understanding provides a proper basis for mental activity and for how it expresses itself in thought and purpose. It enables us to accomplish our destiny (ming 命). Calmness encourages the relationship of the spirits to our origin, giving strength and vigour to the vital spirits (jing shen 精神). Emotions, agitated hurrying or exhaustion diminish it. In a more specific or medical context, the original spirit is also linked to the functioning of the brain, which, in Chinese medicine, mirrors the condition of the heart/ mind. Thus, the spirit is the possibility, the potentiality given to each human being to build their own heart/mind, and through it their own awareness and consciousness, discernment and reason, in such a way that they behave according to the order and patterns of the cosmic life. It is the spiritual intelligence (shen ming 神明) operating through the human heart/mind. In Daoism, it leads up to the union with the Dao." -- (from a lecture by Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallée)

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Thank you, yes, that's pretty cool. Especially the last line, which a taoist can read as "not only is tao a mystery, she's a mystery even to herself! ) I suspect the biblical creation dating permeates our archeology too (to name just one science that never really broke its familial ties with folks who burned heretics at the stake). What a mess that is. Scientific tools and methods that are quite regularly discarded as unscientific upon closer inspection. Educated guesses and hypotheses that transition into the realm of "facts" as soon as someone pays for their ticket to ride into that realm. Forgeies and fakes and unreliables, massive hidden evidence of whatever could rock the academic boat. The storage facilities of most wealthy museums are orders of magnitude larger than display premises -- to say nothing of private acquisition by the filthy rich collectors or governments, looting at conquest/colonization time, wartime looting. Cutthroat personal and academic competition, rampant racism and speciesm, past and current political agendas and continuous revisions of the past information to facilitate compliance with present bias. Manipulation by religious and materialistic fundamentalism alike -- whatever you're looking at, you're looking at a minefield where only conformists survive academic competition, only people who have figured out what to say yes sir to. I better stop. Between 15000 and 6000 BCE seems like an interesting time. Do traditional Indian estimates have any proof, evidence to corroborate this dating?

sipad he2-em-ta-ab-ed3-de3-a udu-ni šu-a li-bi2-in-gi4 If you get rid of the shepherd, then his sheep will never come back!

It's a very versatile machine. It may illustrate many things. E.g. it reminds me of the experience of talking to people whose POV is embedded in cement.