Taomeow

Taoists see true will as a cooperation between your yang zhi and yin zhi. Zhi is a shen, i.e. one of the inner "spirits" or, in an earlier system, inner gods. Yin zhi is the part of your will that is somewhat similar to the concept of "destiny," a kind of hidden hand in your life, and you understand its moves only in hindsight. "Oh... so now I understand why a and b had to happen -- if they didn't I wouldn't arrive at c!") Yin zhi is the part that knows a lot of what's in store for you in advance, and exerts its clandestine influence based on this knowledge. The other part of your will -- yang zhi, your will on the surface that makes things happen, or tries to -- may sense it and be guided by it, or it may be disconnected from it or resist it. If both are working harmoniously, you have your true will. If yang zhi pulls you in the opposite direction or just randomly wherever, or is too weak to catch mice at all, you don't. It's important to add that all five major inner shens have to pull the weight, otherwise your true will will have a hard time emerging.

Briefly. According to gestalt theory, the brain, presented with complex input of multiple elements, incomplete pictures, fragments, parts, etc., will attempt to simplify it by subconsciously organizing the parts into a structured system that creates a whole. The brain is always busy seeking structure and patterns -- that's how we learn to navigate any complex environment. An open gestalt is one where this hasn't been accomplished, and it's a kind of constant irritant to the mind, whether conscious or unconscious. The idea of how to complete the pattern is germinating, but there's no guarantee it will emerge. If the brain, presented with the right amount of information, manages to establish the right connections ("right" for the task of organizing the elements into a coherent structure, not in the sense "right" vs. "wrong"), it connects the parts that are present, fills in the missing parts, cuts off the unnecessary elements, and creates a unified whole. This reduces complexity, carves out a finite thing of meaning from an infinite pool of noise, and closes the gestalt.

A closed gestalt.

Why would a smart person -- scientists are smart, right? -- invest time and effort into studying live bodies when all of their training and expertise has been obtained via studying dead bodies?.. No one is that foolish. They didn't spend countless dedicated hours dissecting corpses, looking at slides of dead tissues under the microscope, learning everything there is to learn about dead blood in a test tube, electrostimulating pieces of dead muscles to find out how they work, etc., toward forgetting all of that hard work and all of their expertise gained thereby. Their expertise in the functioning of live bodies is gained by extrapolating everything they learned from dead bodies. If they were to observe something unusual about a body that is actually alive yet does something dead bodies don't do -- something their curriculum doesn't include -- where would they go from there? Into peer sneer territory, in the best case scenario. Don't underestimate scientists, they know what's good for them.

I've reaId about it too, but can't think of examples either. However, I can offer a taoist explanation. From the get-go, taoism made inroads into Time as a subject of scrutiny, study, contemplation, and ultimately comprehension. So, in this system, every period of Time has its own distinct characteristics, and these are conductive to certain specific kinds of events that have a higher chance of occurring when this type of Time arrives. Taoist Time is a kind of climate -- when spring (e.g.) comes, everything is affected all at once and responds in a way characteristic of spring rather than, say, autumn or winter. Ideas are somewhere there too among things stimulated, and the emergence of certain types of ideas when particular kinds of Time arrive is probabilistically higher.

I doubt it, it's a fun line but neither me nor even google know where it's from. Where is it from?

Ah, that explains it -- at the time Mario Puzo was a much more efficient conduit than me, hands down... But shouldn't ideas be taken out of circulation once they've found their conduit and materialized? He already wrote the novel by the time the idea struck me (even though I had no knowledge of it). It's as though the same lightning struck the earth in a different place at a different time. A doppelganger idea?.. Or maybe some of those lightnings are not only of this earth? Some transcend space and time and maybe get through from some parallel universes? And the one that came to me was not from this one, but from the one where Mario Puzo didn't exist? ???

The Godfather, the novel by Mario Puzo, was written before I knew any English, and long before it was translated. I never heard of it until much later after the fact, the Iron Curtain was fully functional at the time and didn't let through anything deemed inappropriate. And yet when I was 14, I started writing a novel (left unfinished) with the following plot: a mafioso family in the US, with a great criminal don at its head and two of his sons in the key positions; the third son chooses to have nothing to do with mafia businesses, intends to lead a law-abiding life, dates a "good" girl; events start unfolding that pull him into the eye of the mafia wars storm against his will, kicking and screaming first, then committed; he has to leave the country and go into hiding abroad (in my version, not to Sicily though but to Mexico); and so on. When a few years later the first Soviet translation of the novel (which happened to be Ukrainian) appeared, I was racking my brain trying to figure out how Mario Puzo could possibly steal my draft and copy my plot. To this day the Corleone family is the Rinaldi family to me (from my version), Don Vito is Don Silvio, and so on.

Could be if he saw the cake fall, but the thing is, he didn't. Something knew, but it wasn't his eyes, his brain, or his muscles. The only "ordinary" explanation might be that he sensed the movement of air with the back of his head (the body part not isolated from the event by the back of his chair). A bit of a stretch, but even assuming this explanation, he had no muscle memory of catching cakes he's not aware of that are falling behind his back, it was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. People occasionally report inexplicable things of this nature that happen in various situations where their very lives could only be saved by this combo of instant premonition and instant action. Due to the spread of surveillance cameras in the streets there's even videos of such incidents. When asked about how they knew, these folks report all kinds of things they subjectively perceived in the moment -- e.g. time abruptly slowing down, gravity getting weak and mitigating a fall, something that feels like an invisible hand pushing them out of the way, or suddenly "just knowing" and so on. And if the episode I described didn't happen in front of my own eyes, I would probably doubt that the same mysterious forces can be put in motion toward saving a cake.

Speaking of tennis. Once upon a time I went to a birthday party accompanied by someone who was good at tennis. At some point the hostess brought in the cake but got momentarily distracted by the conversation at the table, joined in and forgot, just for a second, that she was holding a very delicate cake. It was positioned on a flat plate and the distraction led to the plate in her hands tilting sideways and the cake abruptly slid down off it. It never hit the floor though. Before anyone -- including the hostess -- had a chance to realize what was happening, the tennis guy, who was sitting with his back to the hostess and was completely unaware on any "ordinary"* level that the cake was in the process of falling behind the back of his chair, swerved around and extended an open palm an inch above the floor. The cake landed in his palm, completely intact. He had absolutely no idea what he was doing and why, had to nearly dislocate his shoulder to suddenly assume the only position that could save the cake, and all of it took far less time than it would take the brain to get the input from the eyes (to say nothing of there being no eyes on the back of the guy's head), assess the situation and then issue the appropriate commands to the muscles. The tennis guy didn't have the foggiest how he managed to do it but attributed it to tennis. *I attribute it to some antics of the "nonordinary reality."

Leonardo da Vinci reportedly advised apprentice artists to look at blank stucco or stone walls, uneven floors, etc., and pay attention to the images that the eye inadvertently seems to discern (or create?.. or what a taoist would call "co-create?..") in the random lines, cracks and spots. Faces, figures, landscapes, whole scenes might appear -- and the apprentice is advised to focus on them and try to draw them. Apparently he considered this happy accident plus imagination plus pattern recognition (plus a lack of hubris, a prerequisite to taking these "co-created" things seriously, or maybe not taking oneself too seriously) a good artistic tool, a method to utilize when honing one's skill. There's also a famous Russian poem (by Anna Akhmatova) that begins, "If only you knew what trash poems grow out of shamelessly, like a dandelion by the fence, like thistle and ragweed..."

I remember the story about a young Japanese soldier who was decorated posthumously with the country's highest military award and made famous in the land as a great hero. What did he do? Well, absolutely nothing. A bullet found him and he died in the very first battle he participated in, before he could fire a single shot. Yes but afterwards his comrades found his diary, full of patriotic declarations and dreams of great heroic deeds. He intended to be a fearless, invincible, formidable warrior for the emperor and the country. And even though none of it materialized and reality turned out to be removed very far from his idea of what the war was going to be like for him, the diary was presented to the commander and then to someone higher in command and so on, and everybody deemed the boy a great national hero based on his thoughts and intentions alone. The general consensus was that the thought counts as much as the deed -- provided it is sincere, which it apparently was since it was entrusted in private to the personal diary. Wasn't enough to win that war though. (Thank god for that.)

It's not as easy to pull off if you're not a 5-year-old. Adults are saddled with left brain derived expectations and obligations -- which more often than not are also someone else's idea of how we are supposed to behave in this or that situation. But give it a try. When my son was 5, if I told him "no" in response to this or that request, he would think hard and try to negotiate, but instead of offering good behavior or whatever more ingenuous children use as bargaining chips, he would light up as though he just had a brilliant idea, and offer to oink for me. The idea was that he can imitate a little pig so well that I won't be able to deny him anything. Half the time it worked, even though oinking was always irrelevant.

I've known two kinds of Marxists. The Soviet ones were huge on ideas, it's just that those ideas had to express their ideology, and the bubbles on the surface of sewage were, to them, all other ideas. Here, e.g., is an example of a very common way they decorated buildings here and there with permanent displays of ideological slogans. This one reads, "Lenin's Ideas Keep Living and Winning!" ("Ideas" is the first word of this statement in the original.) The other kind of Marxists, the Western ones, are exactly the same. They do differ stylistically, on the surface of things, and many of them call themselves something entirely else, while many others don't even know that that's what they are (because unlike poor me they didn't have to study in-depth Marxism and derivatives for years on end, nor live its practical applications as a state policy.) But the same enforcement of the mandatory worship of their ideas and complete relentless cancellation of not-theirs is a trademark by which you can recognize them even among billionaires. In fact, I doubt many (if any) of them have read Das Kapital, a book of tremendous size and excruciating boredom... but Marx was not really a Marxist in the sense the two categories I mentioned are. Such is the fate of ideas.

That's the problem with ideas. Modern historians have this idea that Marco Polo not only didn't introduce ice cream to Europe but never went to China to begin with, and the "everybody knows" narrative was fully invented by the Victorians. Just their idea of a cool story to tell. Ice cream cool. There's got to be some kind of hierarchy of ideas, a way to tell the ones that are good from the ones that are neutral from the ones that are irrelevant and then the ones that are harmful, all the way to absolutely deadly. We've had our fair share of all kinds, but I don't think there's a good mechanism in existence to tell them apart. I believe we need it... My all-time favorite example of the hierarchy of ideas comes from a book by the creator of the mathematical theory of fuzzy logic, Lotfi Zadeh. If you ask a 5-year-old how much is two plus two, she might oblige and say "four," but chances are she will respond with, "I want some ice cream." It doesn't necessarily mean she has no idea what two plus two is and just wants to change the subject. It may simply means that "four" is irrelevant in her life of thoughts and feelings right here, right now, and ice cream is relevant. She's not being illogical either. She's following a superseding logic.

This gave birth to an alternative vision of the famous Zhuangzi's butterfly dream. Zhuzangzi fell asleep, dreamt he was a butterfly, and as a butterfly he played with his dog. Eventually the dog got carried away, snapped its jaws and swallowed the butterfly. Well, that sucks, the dream butterfly thought, but then it's only a dream -- I'm really a taoist philosopher dreaming I'm a butterfly, so I don't have to reincarnate. I only have to wake up. But what about the dog, the butterfly surmized. If the dog ate a dream butterfly, does it mean the dog is also dreaming? And what will happen if I wake up -- will the dog wake up too and turn into Laozi or something? And if I'm really Zhuangzi, will it explode?.. Why reincarnate when I can wake up instead? Timeline-hopping game.

Oh yes, definitely. Don't know about others, but for me, the important thing is not to put the cart before the horse. Incidentally, in some shamanic traditions, the word for "meditation" is "horse." You want your "horse" to gain strength by tending to it first -- feed and water and brush and care for it well, establish a trusting relationship. You learn to ride it next. And if you want it to also move the cart loaded with your problems, make sure you don't overload that cart -- and by no means put it in front of the horse so it has to push it out of the way continuously in order to get anywhere. But what you learn and experience in true meditation does help. It starts by helping you "know thyself" first. You discover the extent of some of your qualities -- e.g. endurance and patience, ability to focus, ability to tolerate physical discomfort (especially if you are a full lotus practitioner )) ) and the prudent limits to the above so you don't do more damage than good... And then you can apply (first deliberately and eventually spontaneously) things you've learned and mastered in meditation to everyday problems. The horse does help move that cart provided one doesn't go about it bass ackwards.

I've learned to never meditate the "formal" way in order to solve, mitigate, bypass, or get a break from a real-life problem or mood. Not for to "calm the nerves," alleviate anxiety caused by a real-life problem, attempt to bypass it, or "change my attitude." It's the wrong tool. It's akin to cracking nuts with your smartphone just because you don't have a nutcracker handy but want those nuts cracked. You won't get far with the nuts and you will, in all likelihood, cause your phone to cease being that smart while at it.

"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.” -- Richard P. Feynman

"Being comes from nonbeing. Nonbeing reverts back to being." -- Ta Chuan (The Great Treatise)

For me, being very sensitive to the energy and qi of places (and knowing classical feng shui too) makes life harder. It's something cat-like. A cat -- unless she was an indoor cat all her life -- has this territorial sense she can't explain to us hoomans except via seeking and avoidance behaviors... although urban cats are not as perceptive and get in trouble because the environment is so not suited for cats (or human children for that matter... and adults are mostly shut down to that knowledge.) Even with indoor cats you might notice they "know something" if you ever tried to give them a designated place for this and that in your home -- a cat bed, a bowl of water -- you know the bed and the bowl will be ignored and the cat will sleep wherever (changing her commitments as energies change) and drink from the toilet and throw stuff out of a drawer she thinks is better suited to be her bed. I could describe the feel of every place I've ever been to better than what it looks like -- it's something I always notice, and a lot of it is a nuisance. Even a nice environment can be completely destroyed by, e.g., luminescent lighting. But some places are sublime. Literally make you want to kiss the ground.

Walk like an Egyptian

My not hometown, New York, used to feel like that to me when I lived there, and especially when I commuted from New Jersey to work there. I'd be sleepy, tired in advance in the morning, dozing off on the train, and then -- as soon as I stepped out of the subway underpass -- wham! A huge jolt of energy. I liked it for a while, but after a while, not so much. It felt like some kind of artificial stimulation, too much adrenaline, too much cortisol, too little harmony. The energy of perpetual stress. But there was definitely a sense of power to the place. Manhattan stands on a bedrock of shist that's 450 million years old -- I think that's what imparts its underlying strength, unyielding, hard, aggressive, very yang... I could feel it.

Yeah, digging deeper/earlier is always fun. You can uproot a whole lot of very unpopular opinions this way. )) Here's a recent example I've encountered. (Departing from the buddhist debate for a while, or at least trying to. )The oldest known written literary work in the Slavic language, The Tale of Igor's Campaign (aka Slovo o Polku Igoreve), an epic poem dated 1185-1187, poses considerable difficulties for translators -- although some of the original can still be understood by a non-specialist if you know a language originating from Old East Slavic the epic is written in. That's "some," not a whole lot. However, it's been studied for centuries and some sort of consensus emerged regarding this or that passage, and accepted translations became more or less carved in stone. That's until a Kazakh, Olzhas Suleimenov, who happened to be both a Russian writer and a Turkologist, published his revised versions with corrections, and corrections concerned multiple words from Common Turkic language which appear here and there in the original and which had escaped the comprehension of Slavists who went before. Here and there in the text, the new translation immediately made a whole lot more sense, and the "weirdness" of the ancestors became quite a bit less weird as more logical passages replaced the misconstrued ones. Needless to say this opinion, which in my opinion was one hundred percent correct (and a work of genius), immediately became very very unpopular among both the mastodon specialists and lay folks who studied the old version in school. Neither were ready to let go of the nonsense they are used to taking at face value. "Such is the nature of man." -- Gurdjieff

I'm talking about my taiji teacher. After 20 years of taiji and a lot of assorted taoist "stuff" I dare say I can tell transference from qi. (Besides, I am not a fan of pop psychology parlance, I've been around that block too, but on entirely different terms.) In practical terms, in the presence of my teacher, my taiji is better, everything is smoother, easier, and more efficient. Verifiable by (e.g.) performance in sparring with others. I don't have physical or mental strength to throw a guy half my age, twice my size -- I have skill learned from my teacher, and that skill is qi based.