Taomeow

Yup, that's pretty much how it goes. But only with domesticated sheep -- the wild ones are part of their natural habitat and don't destroy it. Moreover, the land itself regulates the number of grazing sheep -- plants which they eat in their natural environments (notably clover) respond to being overgrazed by producing phytoestrogens that interfere with sheep's fertility, so next year, there's fewer sheep. Once the plants recover, they stop administering birth control. Any natural ecosystem has countless feedback loops like this. Most of them, in all likelihood, on the level of the soil-based-organisms. Even beyond, on the level of minerals. E.g., a couple of weeks ago I went gathering feijoa which, if you gather it where it grows close enough to the ocean, you can make into preserves that don't spoil without cooking (which is exactly what I did with my little harvest) because the fruit then contains extremely high amounts of iodine, higher than seaweed. It absorbs iodine from the ocean breeze! You can usually heal a sore throat within a couple of hours with this yummy remedy, among other things. It can regulate the thyroid and reportedly even cure some chronic thyroid conditions. Yet plant it farther inland and it will start progressively losing its medicinal properties. Our "prehistoric" ancestors were walking encyclopedias of knowledge about that kind of interactions between things in their environment. It went farther than minerals -- to the kinds of light shining at different plants in different seasons, so you would be instructed to collect this under the full moon, and that, with the first rays of sunlight. Well, it is known now that hothouse pumpkins (e.g.) which produce both male and female flowers on the same plant get their information about how to diversify sexually from the particular wavelengths of the light they're exposed to -- until it was figured out, they would get a hothouse full of all-male or all-female pumpkins that couldn't reproduce. Yet all knowledge coming to us from sources other than the fool's method of trial and error we call the scientific method is chalked up to superstition and discarded wholesale. It went farther than visible light... but classical feng shui is a separate topic. Among other things, when we lose our freedom, we also lose all our real natural sciences.

And the real sheep are these:

Whereas the real natural is this:

I meant "civilized," i.e. domesticated people practicing sedentary agriculture/city living, two sides of the same counterfeit coin. No domesticated animal is capable of preserving its habitat, for lack thereof. Instead of habitats, they live in enclosures, corrals, coops, sties, pens, cages, etc.. And they invariably foul them up.

Mesopotamia, "The Fertile Crescent," "The Cradle of Civilization," left behind what people always leave behind once they're done with the land and move on. Not magnificent forests, not blooming gardens, not fragrant meadows. Just a whole lot of nothing interspersed with "archeological evidence" -- pieces of broken stuff, writings on some of those pieces, debris, garbage, more dead meaningless nothing, more garbage. I envision archeologists of the future digging through our modern formidable landfills still containing similar dead meaningless "evidence," only a helluva lot more of it, trying to understand who we were. And, from the clueless vantage point of their far-away long-since, attempting to reconstruct and understand why exactly we were doing what we're doing right now.

I guess it would be something like, the matches to light the fire, the fuel for the fire, the cold water, the uncooked rice, the container, the know-how of cooking rice, and the potential to put them all together and start the process of cooking -- that's jing. The steam that formed under the lid in the process of transforming this jing into qi, cold water into hot, uncooked rice into cooked, the aroma escaping good rice (e.g. jasmine), that steam and aroma and flavor getting turbulent and mobile and moving every grain of rice, bubbling up, aiming upward, gathering under the lid and then escaping the pot and dissipating -- that's shen. So then, jing is the basis, foundation, prerequisites for the transformation; qi, the process of transformation; shen, the expenditures of this process. Hence two types of practices, the easy one that goes with the flow, in the direction things go anyway (from concentration to dissipation, from potential to actualization) and the difficult one that goes against the flow. It is easy to cook rice. It is easy for the steam to escape. One can speed up this process by increasing the fire. One can get more shen faster by spending jing and transforming it into qi, and qi into shen more actively. The opposite, which is taoist proper, is about capturing the steam that escaped, putting it back in the pot, cooling off the water, uncooking the cooked rice!! Reversing the "natural" flow of the order of things. Or, as another taoist metaphor put it, "putting the oak tree back into the acorn." Now that's tricky. Which is why you will encounter many instructions as to how to get what will happen anyway to happen at will -- jing to qi to shen transformations -- toward leaving the "material world," the pot and the rice and the water -- the body -- behind, toward a "lighter," "immaterial" existence as pure spirit. While the opposite process entails seeking out older, immortalist-taoist alchemical reversal practices aimed at preserving and rejuvenating, possibly indefinitely, the material body in the material world -- or at least slowing down the process of its "immaterialization" and gaining longevity. Capturing dissipated ling (an aspect of shen that I've heard translated as "supernatural intelligence"), finding a way for the steam to condense and drop back into the pot... But that's probably for a six-year-old, a five-year-old is not ready yet.

And Captain Hook too? -- Julius Caesar exclaimed. Dafuq, Captain Hook?!

@Nungali If this story is indeed authentic rather than made up by some folklorist (happens all the time) or represents what they told the kids to get them to stop asking questions, it's also a creation myth -- didn't they believe that women become pregnant from swimming in the ocean, from ocean salt and wind? Putting the two stories together we get conception as the continuation of the cockroach legacy. And it makes the cockroach the progenitor of the human race. Well, they do seem to have something in common. Ubiquitous, opportunistic, omnivorous, indestructible. Swinburne does accomplish in two stanzas what Lovecraft strained for in a hefty tome, and does it better.

I like the title of the thread. Before Western interpretations were put on top of the concept of qi -- the way a cowboy might put a saddle on a panda because he knows how to handle horses -- a five-year-old in China might get this explanation: His mom would light a fire, put a pot of water on, and as soon as the water comes to a boil, add some rice and cover the pot with a lid. Once the water comes to a boil again, the lid on the pot would start to jump and rattle. She would then ask the kid, "What do you think causes this jumping and rattling? Is it fire, water, pot, rice, lid, steam?" "No," the smart and observant five-year-old would respond, "it's all of them put together, they work as a team and change each other, and this change is what causes the jumping and rattling." "See," the proud mom would beam, "you've figured it out! Now you know what qi is."

@sean and the solidarity report bums -- thank you very much. 🙏 Sumerians also had two kinds of chaos, but both were aspects of one entity, Tiamat. She is the goddess creatress who peacefully brings the cosmos and all life in it into existence through a sacred marriage between salt and fresh water. And she also embodies monsters of primordial chaos and engages Anzû in a marriage that gives birth to dragons with poisonous blood and sea serpents.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. -- Martin Luther King

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_/\_ @liminal_luke @Nungali @ilumairen @silent thunder @Apech Remember the collective report decision regarding "Everything" posting another derail in this thread after several polite requests to stop? Well, here it is, that next derail. Please help.

I've never observed chaos in nature. Only in ordered societies. In nature order arises from chaos because it's simply its inherent property. Chaos is what chaos does -- and what it does is order. Whereas in unnatural, civilized/artificial conditions, i.e. conditions of domestication that abolish natural processes, chaos ensues with unnatural frequency precisely because natural processes of order-making have been cut at the root. Hence the need for consolidation of authoritarian centralized power, to impose some artificial order as the ruler sees fit. Whether the dragon stands for that natural order destroyed by the centralized authority or merely for the competition (a power grab is always competed against by someone who feels as strong, or stronger, to impose his own order as he sees fit), I don't know. History is written by the winners of those pissing contests. And before there were winners and losers, before writing, before the scribes were instructed what kind of narrative to write (or else), there was nothing to lie about. But another possibility is, it's all real. It is told as it happened. There were dragons and other genetically modified war machines, originating somewhere on a different planet, occasionally fighting for this one, attempting hostile takeovers, one of them ultimately succeeding, and life on our planet behaving as their involuntary employee ever since.

Glows with self-knowing. Abruptly does a back flip. Parkour set him free.

Ninutra vs. Imdugud (or, to Akkadians, Anzû.) Ninutra was Enlil's son, and Imdugud was a son of Sirius conceived of Water and Earth. He was depicted as a huge bird (sometimes described as made of thunder clouds and not unlike Zhuangzi's Peng bird in appearance and size) and could breathe fire and water. Later it was left up to Western dragons to breathe fire, and Chinese ones, mists and fogs, but the original could do both. Sometimes Imdugud was also depicted as a lion-headed eagle, or else a bird with a human head. By the time Ninutra was refurbished as St.George and Imdugud/Anzû was demoted to a dragon, the latter apparently started eating princesses, which is why St.George had to kill it. But the earlier story is not about anything this base. Imdugud didn't have an appetite for princesses, he was interested in something a lot loftier. To wit, he stole the Tablet of Destinies, which belonged to Enlil and had the ultimate and final law inscribed on it, proclaiming whoever possesses it the absolute ruler of the Universe. Ninutra demanded his father's property back and fought and killed the son of Sirius toward retrieving it. So, maybe not St.George and the dragon after all. Maybe even the monotheistic god himself who was only some three, four thousand years away, and his winged adversary who challenged his reign and aimed for his office. Hard to tell. Every Sumerian story seems to have been re-told. I don't think there's "myths" surviving millennia that are entirely made up. Made-up stories are short-lived. I've no memory of what MSM news was about six months ago. Something that can persevere for six thousand years is a different kind of story methinks. I believe it's only prudent to look to persistent, most tenacious myths when trying to figure out what really went down at the dawn of our unreliable (too many ulterior motives behind rewriting every word of it countless times) civilized history.

And flowers still bloom and the wick burns, not knowing the lamp's out of oil

If you will accept a short answer (don't feel like elaborating, the rabbit hole is too deep and I've been to the bottom and time is limited), here it is: "Rebirthing" was lifted off a much more comprehensive system that has nothing to do with qigong -- to wit, primal therapy. It was ripped out of that context toward a quickie mart shortcut (which the context absolutely prohibits) for to make a buck, mixed with some new age stuff (holotropic breathwork etc.) and presented as a "healing" "modality." It is about as useful as brain surgery performed by a cosmetologist, and about as safe.

Some Akkadian words still sound familiar to an English speaker. E.g., elat — higher; beyond elâtu — higher end; the sky elûti — high; upper Elate, elated, elevated... elite... Enlil (n was not pronounced in Sumerian or Akkadian)

You may want to add this lively book to your nightstand (if it can stand it, considering its already heavy burden):

Thank you!