Taomeow

From what I've seen, no. Taiji does seem to do that though, in my experience, but only if practiced as a martial art. It's very difficult to make someone angry who is trained to respond to an attack with relaxation. And the moment anger kicks in, relaxation goes out the window and you lose. So it becomes more and more one's second nature to scan first the partner, later every situation for ways to improve it by relaxing. I believe just abstract "relaxation" is not efficient because it lacks human context -- and people who believe they are relaxed are often anything but, they have no frame of reference for what "relaxed" feels like and can't sustain the feeling because of that. Seriously, of all the various human types I've met, people who practice taiji as a fighting art seem to be the least prone to outbursts of anger (which of course can happen, they're still human) because countless times they have been in situations where getting angry equals getting tense, and getting tense equals offering your opponent a decisive advantage over you. They may be egotistically relaxed and peaceful, for all I know... but relaxed and peaceful is not an unusual state for many of the really good ones.

It may also be cultural to varying extents. There's cultures that are more accepting of anger expressions, and then there's the ones where it's unacceptable and can even get one arrested --you are just not supposed to get angry no matter how justified your anger is unless you are in some position of power or other, then of course you can get as angry as you like. One kind of anger I can't stand is directed by an adult at a child, no holds barred, they can go all out because it is the ultimate power trip, that's where power abuse in all spheres has its roots. Hate that shit. And in many cases, that excessive anger you're talking about, not justified by the trifle nature of the irritant, is the outcome -- people who were never allowed to explode in anger when they were little, who were expected to regulate their emotions better than adults do, live on a keg of accumulated powder as adults. That's why some of them explode from the tiniest spark. But back to the cultural differences... Of course it's not the practical solution for most cases, but I sometimes think that if I was unable to control anger, I'd go live where it's acceptable to get angry. The yelling I've witnessed in some other countries... here it would be happening seconds before someone gets jumped, beaten up, arrested, or shot. There, they yell at each other like madmen and madwomen, let off steam, and then calm down and don't think twice about what happened. What happened? They got angry. So what? They're human. I lived in a lovely place once, in Italy, with upstairs neighbors, a married couple, who not only yelled at each other every day but threw stuff, including what sounded like heavy furniture. Broke quite a lot of dishes too. But then I'd meet them on the way out, smiling, kissing, looking radiant and very loving. Different strokes.

Interesting theme. Got me thinking. I think it's the opposite of the phone. There's a large grey space between autonomous and deliberate regulation of our functions. Breath, which is most often used as the focus of conscious awareness, is chosen as the number one function to focus awareness on precisely because it is positioned in the middle of that grey space, in that it can go either way -- to fully unconscious/autonomous and to fully conscious/deliberate. So if you fail with fully conscious control and regulation or even mere observation, no biggie -- the autonomous will pick up where you left off. Try pulling that off with taiji. Other functions you mentioned are shifted more to the involuntary part of the spectrum -- if you are satisfied with how they work on autopilot, no need to intervene. What if you're not? Will it help to become consciously aware of the process taking place? Conscious awareness has been shown to, e.g., increase the blood flow to the parts of your body you are paying conscious attention to. You can't increase the blood flow to your phone though. But if you're playing with your phone while eating, your body will decrease the blood flow to your stomach, inhibit your digestive enzymes, strain the ciliary muscles in your eyes and partially suppress the rods in charge of peripheral vision, divert 25% more oxygen from your inner organs to your eyes and your neocortex, and so on. In other words, you will allocate a ton of resources that are yours to an object that is not part of you by taking conscious awareness away from your body. You may also do stuff to your spinal column by sitting statically in a posture that is dictated by your phone use rather than by either autonomous or conscious choices. And so on. I believe conscious awareness is all-important but also a very generic term. One would need to specify before we can decide what it is we're talking about. Personally, I find taiji to be one excellent method to assess how many things you (the generic modern person, not you personally of course) are unconsciously doing wrong. I look at a beginner and proprioception is usually a nightmare -- no conscious communication between the mind and the body, and unconscious communication all driven by ingrained wrong habits of use. Then I look at someone who's been doing it with conscious awareness for a number of years and see how wrong unconscious patterns are being gradually replaced by beautiful, meaningful, physiologically sound ones -- perhaps psychologically too, perhaps in a wider context of life too. Of course it's not the only activity where conscious awareness makes all the difference, but I find it most striking. The new habit might then get transferred more and more to many other functions. This is the beginning of freedom... I believe the real purpose of developing conscious awareness is just that. Freedom. As much of it as one is able to stomach.

Here's a poem for you (I knew it since childhood and found a translation online): There are no boring people in this world. Each fate is like the history of a planet. And no two planets are alike at all. Each is distinct – you simply can’t compare it. If someone lived without attracting notice and made a friend of their obscurity – then their uniqueness was precisely this. Their very plainness made them interesting. Each person has a world that’s all their own. Each of those worlds must have its finest moment and each must have its hour of bitter torment – and yet, to us, both hours remain unknown. When people die, they do not die alone. They die along with their first kiss, first combat. They take away their first day in the snow … All gone, all gone – there’s just no way to stop it. There may be much that’s fated to remain, but something – something leaves us all the same. The rules are cruel, the game nightmarish – it isn’t people but whole worlds that perish. -- Yevgeny Yevtushenko (translated by Boris Dralyuk)

Our eternal selves look inside our heads and see no self reflections.

Not only was it not Anderson. Just now I got curious about how common that name is in the US. According to google, it's even less common than I expected -- much less. At its most represented, in 1880, there were 6 families by that name living in Iowa. This was about 46% of all occurrences of that name ever recorded in the USA. Weird...

My former "guru" made a distinction between emotions and feelings. Feelings was the term he used to address systemic responses to actual experiences of the whole organism. They were healthy if the experiences could be successfully and safely integrated into consciousness, and turned unhealthy if the experience was such that consciousness couldn't accept it -- in which case they were relegated to the unconscious. Unconscious feelings are not irrational -- irrationality arises from that disconnect, from the gap between "what I know about me" and "what I don't know even though it's my actual experience, something that really happened to me." Irrational emotions arise from disconnected feelings. Feelings run deeper and, even if they are disconnected from consciousness, they are always connected to our basic life functions, to our aliveness itself. Healthy emotions reflect that. Unhealthy emotions reflect frustrated foundational aliveness.

Nice one. Since you brought up weird happenings at retreats, I'll up the weirdness (hoping for the prize of a live raccoon, at least) by telling the story from my participation in my first ayahuasca ceremony. Upon drinking it, and before I could feel any effects, I was just sitting there in the dark, trying to organize my thoughts around a particular issue. The thoughts ran in Russian, and I mentally said a name of a certain person and addressed that person, also mentally: "such-and-such, let's make peace." A dark silhouette approached me and a male voice said, "Hey, did you just call me?" "No, I didn't call anyone." "But I distinctly heard you call my name and then say something about making peace." "I did not... what's your name?" He said the name I was thinking and added, "That's my last name." The name I was thinking is a first name, in a different language, which I never heard used as a last name. It is possible of course but it's uncommon enough for me to have never heard of such a last name before. So -- triple weirdness here: 1. The guy heard me telepathically. 2. He happened to have the same last name as the first name I mentally said, and the odds are, all last names I ever heard in my life to one. 3. He was in that place at that time. The place was removed from where either of us lives by thousands of miles.

It is not an abnormal function of the Liver to produce anger in response to adequate stimuli -- on the contrary, it is one of its normal functions. A major task of the Liver is to deal with toxins. A normal amount of anger is like a normal amount of liver enzymes -- something you produce in order to be able to metabolize, deactivate, and/or remove from the body any toxins thrown your way. Per my assessment of the amount of toxic feelings and emotions (coupled with a drastic deficiency of the nurturing and beneficial ones) we are exposed to from the start and then every day of our lives, excessive anger is not the outcome of a faulty Liver -- on the contrary, a faulty Liver is the outcome of too many emotional toxins thrown its way. Excessive anger is produced when it has to process excessive toxins beyond capacity. Just like elevated liver enzymes, elevated cholesterol, etc., elevated anger starts out as a coping mechanism. I would think twice before fixing that mechanism. Instead of removing anger you might end up somatizing it, i.e. you will hurt your own body for someone else's transgressions -- not the best outcome. Somatized anger will manifest (among other things) as elevated levels of stress hormones that can damage all organs and functions. Unless of course it's so out of control that it will produce additional problems for yourself and others should you express it full force, just relax and get angry. Trust yourself not to get an "anger diarrhea" -- control it when expressing too much of it can realistically hurt or endanger others or yourself -- but don't make it your task to control it always for all purposes in all circumstances. Don't delegitimize your anger. In many cases it's legit. I think the art of anger is accessible via Sun Tzu, just something to master like any high level skill. Addressing it via qigong is not likely to be either enough or the right method. Neigong, maybe. But not even that unless your level is unimaginably high. Immortals and gods and bodhisattvas get angry. (Yes, even the merciful Quan Yin, to say nothing of Bu Dong.) I wouldn't try to outholy the holy ones, it seldom comes out as intended, and never-angry passive aggressive types is one outcome I have seen often and cared about little. Besides, I find the scenario shown below to be pretty realistic.

“Man is an upright, featherless biped with broad, flat nails.” -- Plato

“The soul pauses not. In its world is incessant movement. Genius has no retrospect. Virtue has no memory. And that is the law for man. Live without interval: if you rest on your oars, if you stop, you fall. He only is wise who thinks now; who reproduces all his experience for the present exigency; as a man stands on his feet only by a perpetual play and adjustment of the muscles. A dead body or a statue cannot be set up in the upright posture without support. You must live even to stand.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

More fun facts. Sumerian slaves were allowed to own their own property, make deals, and own their own slaves. Some well-positioned slaves were wealthier than the free folks. However, many attempted to run away from the master, and occasionally succeeded. The opposite also happened on occasion -- a master who went broke ran away, abandoning his slaves. The Sumerian term for "slave" literally meant "one who came down from the wild."

I learned abdominal breathing at the age of 15 from a billboard in the park in the beatiful little spa town of Druskininkai in Lithuania where I was on vacation with my parents. I had no idea what that weird billboard was about and why it suggested you breathe in a weird way. It weirded me out so I decided to experiment with following the instructions. I liked the weirdness of that experiment so much that I kept breathing like that, almost every night before going to sleep, for the next 5 years or so. It would be years before I encountered this weirdness again, in a taoist context. I wonder who erected that billboard and why. My parents, as well as my uncle and aunt and cousin who were on vacation there with us, never noticed it. I'm not aware of anyone ever noticing it in the month that we were there. So I'm wondering if it may have been my future self that put it there.

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What's so aesthetic about that horrible picture? Oh.. you probably mean anaesthetics (or, as we Americans put it, anesthetics.) And with this subject, we can go back to Sumer. Sumerians left the first written records of the use of anesthetics. The European learned medical barbarians who performed surgeries without anesthesia came much later. For anesthetics, Sumerians cultivated and harvested the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) as early as 3400 BC. The most ancient testimony concerning the opium poppy found to date was inscribed on a small white clay tablet at the end of the third millennium BC and is considered to be the most ancient pharmacopoeia in existence. (An aside: "the most ancient written one" -- I believe oral transmissions were in existence much, much earlier, and can personally attest to their accuracy and efficiency because, e.g., everything from the family herbal lore that I got from my grandmother and my father who were both knowledgeable about such thins I got in oral transmissions often accompanied by live demonstrations beginning at about age 4, and by age 13 I knew 80% of all I know today about the medicinal and wild edible plants of the part of the world where the teachings took place -- the rest did come from books later -- and remember close to 100% of what was taught orally with live demos and only about 20% of what was later learned from books. I knew all about the opium poppy at age 4 because my grandmother grew a different kind, edible, but still with trace amounts of opium in it, in her little flower garden, for poppyseed pies which were out of this world good and fiercely addictive, and strictly forbade consuming raw poppy seeds straight out of the natural "box" they grow in -- explaining in detail why. I usually managed to talk her into giving me one or two of those "boxes" to eat the poppies straight out of, they were sooo tasty. More was off limits. And baking them in a pie deactivated the opium.) The Sumerian for opium was "hul gil", which translates as "plant of joy." Nisaba, the Sumerian goddess of writing, learning and the harvest, was often depicted with opium poppies growing out of her body. In some parts of the world, the term "gil" is still used for opium.

My human entertainer, I shall reciprocate.

Could be any number of things or their combination. Carpets are treated with flame retardants, at least one class of which, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), has been linked to brain development retardation in children (no one looked at the effects on adults, to my knowledge, but one can extrapolate...) As well as other chemicals which were never studied for their effects. New carpets are the worst in this respect, but older carpets are no picnic either, since they trap all the toxins one may have in the environment, also mites, mold spores, pet and human dandruff and ordinary dust, and a vacuum can remove only what's visible to the naked eye. Air conditioning can be a health hazard as well -- it is often contaminated with what-have-you and the air quality in air-conditioned buildings is poor, sometimes resulting in "sick building syndrome" with a range of symptoms including nasal congestion, breathing problems, headaches, fatigue and irritated skin. I guess indoor yawning that is outside the normal yawning range for the individual can be one manifestation of these breathing problems. The solution for a sick building is controlled demolition... just kidding, I don't know of a solution for the air of the building you don't control. In your own home, check for all the trappings and see what improvements can be realistically introduced. There's even books out there dedicated to the subject, with suggestions about everything. Furniture (wood is also treated with harmful chemicals and can keep leaching them into the air, ditto formica -- the name comes from "formaldehyde"). Bedding (flame retardants again). Mattresses and pillows (flame retardants, mites, dust and molds). Detergents and (especially) "fabric softeners," possibly the most toxic household chemical of them all. Any and all toxic cleaning products (you may want to substitute nontoxic ones, down to the old-fashioned baking soda and soap and vinegar and so on -- there's recipes out there, and also whole books on the subject my grandmother once taught me in two minutes.) Of course air conditioning and carpets mentioned above. I would start by buying a good air filter for the home, and also making sure that the premises are aired out regularly (twice daily) and in any weather -- opening the windows as much as possible, in a way that creates drafts (don't sit where there's a draft though), and keeping them permanently open in warmer weather. And reading one of those books about a "healthy home" and introducing whatever improvements are affordable toward making it healthier. Good luck.

"A straw man is a form of argument and an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent."

This can be extended indefinitely. We are all programmers, we are all garbage collectors, we are all historians, teachers, traders, etc. What I meant is something different though. Sumerians understood the instruments of healing and of intimidation, subjugation, or (as the case may be) killing as wielded by the same hand, answering to the same master. In the light of "nothing has really changed in the patterns of use of power since then," which is my main idea under exploration, comparing that pattern to the actual functions of the medical establishment of today may be worth pondering.

God has a dog. Or, rather, a goddess does -- Gula, the Sumerian goddess of medicine. The dog is her alter ego, her spirit, and her standard attribute (all ancient deities had some distinct attributes, often used in their depictions, as a signature of sorts so that they could be recognized.) Gula is credited with both introducing humans to surgery and using surgical instruments as weapons. Her scalpels are praised in ancient hymns as weapons that caused a twofold effect. One is that they were used against any wound, an object lodged in it, or an illness understood as a malicious spirit lodged in the flesh, and the actual application was preceded by threatening incantations: "Leave this body before my scalpels and my catheters reach you! My weapons are sharp as the lion's teeth, they will tear you apart!" But the other side of it was, these weapons "kept the black-headed shaking with fear." Because they, well, could "tear apart" the patient too. And so heroic surgical medicine, medicine as a bloody battle whose outcome, like that of any battle, is a matter of much uncertainty, was established. Gula's dog, however, looks quite nice and eager to serve in this depiction... Although about dogs, we also know that they can go either way depending on the purpose decided upon by the owner. The dogs of war... hunters' dogs, police dogs, guard dogs...

Of course not, besides ghee doesn't work for stir-frying, it gets stuff to stick to the wok. They used lard. Still do wherever dietary habits haven't been completely changed by modern industries. Traditionally industries producing plant oils did not exist. Sesame oil was very expensive -- at one point it was reserved for the emperor's kitchen.

It all depends on what your overall plan is. If it's "whatever," everything goes. If it's "avoiding grains," only potato stays on your first line. If it's "avoiding starches," potato too has to go. If it's merely "gluten free," rice and potato stay, everything else goes (maize may be in a grey zone -- it doesn't technically have gluten but it triggers similar immune responses due to the close similarity of some of its proteins, which the immune system reacts to with antibodies the same way as to gluten in some, though not all, people.) Herbs should be OK, onions and so on, I'd say OK for most people under most circumstances. Olive oil, sesame oil -- for high temp cooking it's not ideal. Traditionally, both were consumed as seasoning on food, not as frying oils. Honey -- depends on what you're trying to accomplish. It has something worse than the notorious "glycemic index" -- glycation rate (eagerness to form protein-sugar compounds that are at the core of a lot of degenerative disease as well as accelerated aging) 50 times that of sugar. So, I wouldn't use it as a "food," perhaps only as seasoning in small amounts, or as medicine (it shines in some medicinal applications, notably external, and also helps if you have a cold or flu). That it comes from an animal doesn't make it an animal. For that you would have to eat bees, not their own processed food derived from flowers.

Hi Anshino, thanks for your thoughts (and for your interest in mine!) I do think your second paragraph nails it. A lot of foods commonly designated as "beneficial" are beneficial only in that they offset (to an extent) the detrimental effects of eating a lot of "those other" foods. Some vitamins we are told are "essential," i.e. we purportedly need to get them from our food, cease being essential on keto/zerocarb -- notably vitamin C. In carb eaters, it is a huge player in carbs metabolism and its role is similar to that of insulin. Traditional meat/fat/dairy eaters (from nomadic Mongols to Innuits to Masai) don't get it in their diet and don't get scurvy or any type of "deficiency." This is true of many other "good nutrients" which are only good due to giving a helping metabolic hand to carb eaters. Looks like only humans who are carb eaters turn into obligatory omnivores -- i.e. there's no one food they can survive on, no grain, legume, vegetable or fruit -- while meat/fat eaters don't. They can, and historically did, thrive on a monodiet of fatty meat for hundreds of thousands of years. Native Americans had a term for the conditions when that became scarce and they had to resort to eating lean meats (e.g. rabbit) instead: "rabbit starvation." "Longevity" and "performance" are indeed, in the majority of cases, outcomes competing against each other. Perhaps with some rare exceptions where "performance" is to be credited to a stellar genetic lottery win rather than strenuous effort. But we would probably have to define "performance" and determine the parameters. Record setters, competition winners, performance-for-hire folks are not known for their longevity as a group. The traditional taoist view, incidentally, favors conserving subtle energies (jing, qi, shen) rather than squandering them toward performance. This conservation does not mean "doing nothing" of course -- but, rather, avoiding excessive exertion. "The sage has spirit but does not make it labor." So, again, it's hard to tell how HG and other growth-promoting factors would affect someone in the state of healthy homeostasis. Growth is energy- and resources-consuming. Unnecessary growth may be consuming necessary energy and necessary resources, taking them away from a simpler yet loftier goal. And the illustration with mice is simply sad. What can be learned from abusing an animal who never eats a high protein diet in nature by feeding it abnormal amounts of what it wouldn't normally eat? Of course it will get sick. This whole "animal studies" "culture" is animal sacrifice (they do use this word in scientific papers to this day) on an unprecedented scale and I find it profoundly disturbing for many reasons which I will omit here. Best of luck with your dissertation.

Of course, we live in the age of the global triumph of black magicians and occult forces, whose servants have been implanted on every earthly throne. Few shamans remain, after millennia of massacres, who are still trying to resist the diabolical tide against overwhelming odds. The occultists don't take them lightly though. It took road blocks and 40 armed members of the special forces to surround and kidnap the Siberian shaman Alexander Gabyshev who was walking from Buryatia, Siberia, toward Moscow, covering 1,7000 miles on foot so far, with the goal of performing a ritual to banish Putin from the Kremlin. Here's a bit in English on the event that took place on September 19th, as presented by The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/19/siberian-shaman-arrested-on-trek-to-exorcise-vladimir-putin

Did I ever say anything about osteoarthritis? No. We have a glorious epidemic of opioid addiction to take care of that, don't we? Wouldn't want to mess with the profits, would we? Did I ever say anything about a panacea? No. Just because something is not a panacea doesn't necessarily leave us with the only alternative -- "placebo." Incidentally, I've also come to the conclusion, in a personal hands-on experiment, that those bracelets are useless -- I've no arthritis to test them on but it pretty much did nothing for anything when I tried, I suspect the reason is that the contact surface is way too small. There was a Chinese guy in my taiji class a while ago who wore a wide, Japanese made, and very expensive one, he asserted that his arm didn't work without it after a bad accident, and was completely normal with it. Go figure. It may have been "placebo" but he could kick anyone's ass wearing that bracelet, and no one's without it. But that of course is anecdotal, no opioid manufacturer would ever get interested in something this disreputable. Some of the patents I was talking about, however, had folks sleep over copper plates covering the whole lower back, e.g.., or another large surface. Copper is a notorious conductor of electricity (look inside one of the wires your computer is connected to) and we possess The Body Electric (need references or do you believe me? If you don't, there's a book under that name. A bioelectricity 101 course. And then a dozen more worth one's while.) There's a lot of interesting stuff that can happen. Magnets, of course, are also interesting in that they have to have adequate surface area contact -- and be strong enough -- and not be viewed as a panacea of course, but they do increase the blood flow to the area, did you ever think of asking me what happened in those unwanted pregnancy cases I mentioned?.. Don't cite entrenched self-serving orthodoxy's "studies," I've read them all. Get curious. Ask me about that polished penny that sticks to the forehead by itself if you have a headache -- tightly, reliably, not in your imagination, in the real material world -- and then falls off by itself when the headache is gone, and you can't get it to stick again. Placebo can't do that, placebo doesn't stick. Polished pure copper does. To a problem area. It's not placebo. It's magic. Try it. (If you're using an American penny, make sure it's from before 1982, the last year it had enough copper for any such effects -- 95%).