Taomeow

Four thousand years ago, students practiced writing by copying various exercises. Some of the writings they left behind give us a glimpse into the life of a Mesopotamian student. “I went in and sat down, and the teacher read my tablet. He said: "There is something missing here." And beat me with a cane. One of the overseers said: “Why do you open your mouth without permission?” And beat me with a cane. And the one who monitors compliance with the rules said: “Why did you get up without permission?” And beat me with a cane. The gatekeeper said: “Why are you going out without permission?” And beat me with a cane. A Sumerian teacher said, “Why do you speak Akkadian?” And beat me with a cane. Teacher told me: “You have bad handwriting.” And beat me with a cane. "

There's been several translations into English -- here's a compilation: http://www.rgm.hu/download/NeiJingTu.pdf

I only have this -- 1906, my great-grandparents with their seven children. My grandmother, the youngest, is 3, right behind her the oldest sister, 18. The tallest guy to the right of her is the oldest brother, future personal guard of Nicholas II, later a military nurse in WWI, then a blurry period he never talked about, and then some 50 years of working in a theater. A famous theater and movie actress was his lover for many years. He never married. Two younger brothers were educated in Germany, at the University of Göttingen. Both were killed in action during the civil war following the Russian revolution, sometime around 1918, fighting on the opposite sides. All the girls survived into a ripe old age (90s) -- a pediatrician, an artist who also worked in a theater, as a set decorator, and the least educated of all, my grandmother, a med school dropout turned nurse. Both great-grandparents were executed by the Nazis in the summer of 1941, at the age of just under and just over 90, respectively. My great-grandfather was an agronomist and, like his father and father-in-law before him, worked as CEO for the sugar enterprises of the Tereshchenko family, famous Ukrainian sugar magnates of the time. He developed, via selective breeding, the sturdiest, most cold- and pest-resilient variety of sugar beets that yielded most successful crops for the next 100+ years and to this day. It pretty much eliminated the Russian empire's dependency on imported cane sugar. I suspect the humble hut in the background is the photographer's -- from my grandmother's accounts, the family must have lived in far greater comfort, solid upper middle class.

That's the thing about an "intervention." Once it's unleashed on a population, there's no leaving it alone -- typically there's nothing left to be left alone that is viable. The term "romantic" originates from the word "Rome" and it's actually pretty ironic that we have come to use it to mean something like "free of Rome." How can anything "romantic" be free of "Rome?.." "Leaving a population alone" post factum, after a comprehensive assault on all its survival/thriving paradigms, is like running someone over by a car and then "leaving them alone" bleeding by the curb "so as not to keep interfering." Yet the only alternative currently being offered to the victims of this assault is to either bleed to death -- or to hop in that car, get patched up with band-aids and continue on the joy ride to run over someone else. If you can't beat them, join them. If you can't join them, be left on the side of the highway to die. The cars will keep whooshing by with or without you. There's got to be a third way? But for it to have a chance, people would have to start by actually noticing and acknowledging the sheer existence of the other two. Of the inescapable "you can't beat them so join them" trap the only alternative to which is comprehensive existential misery -- so "joining" in whatever seems to be its opposite, not because it is but because that flip-over mirror world we all believe in (if this is so bad, its opposite must be amazing) is the only solution being proposed by even the best. And it's not the best who call the shots in an intervention and post-intervention world we all know and love as civilized.

So why are our alternatives only these two -- the reality of poverty for those without modern amenities and the "hipster dream" ? What's so hipster about Native Americans before the advent of "modern amenities?" Or about the Miao tribe in China living in caves for 6,000 years, their amazing culture an exquisite example of what you can do when you have enough and don't strive to have more than enough, now being forced by the government to apply blanket amnesia to who they are like all good little constituents do and move to cities and join the ranks of the poor in the name of modernization and progress? Or even the Amish, not that they would be a prime example of the "dream" society but they are neither technological nor poor and neither unhappy nor unhealthy? The kind of poverty that generates all other kinds is not a lack of modern technological capabilities. It's the destruction of all alternatives to these capabilities, meticulous and relentless. Sometimes good-hearted, by people who come to "really help" after the fact -- and the extent, the very nature of this help, is always help to "fit in" but never help to "opt out." For that, they aren't equipped -- nor allowed to be even considering this kind of help (that would step on some very important toes) -- nor educated in how to go about it even if by some miracle of god the lands destroyed and the resources put to the service of "modern amenities" returned. More often, however, it's not good-hearted and not altruistic in the least. It's ruthless and unstoppable and violent -- and because of that we accept it as though "development" is a force of nature, death itself, and celebrate the global death cult as our "modern amenities" lifestyle. And whoever fails to rejoice is automatically a hipster dreamer. Hipster my ass...

Historians credit Sumerians with many inventions -- among them, beer. Archeologists have found beer-making equipment from the fourth millennium BC. There's also written documents that seem to offer some evidence that Sumerians drank nothing but beer -- that they didn't drink water. Beer was, hypothetically, their method of water treatment to make sure it's disinfected. (Of course the problem didn't arise until the cities and sedentary agriculture.) Sumerian beer was so thick that they used special filtration straws to drink it through. They sucked. There's hymns to beer, which was supposed to give people "a joyful heart and a contented liver." The hymns were dedicated to the goddess of brewing, Ninkasi, “one who waters the malt set on the ground.” A clay seal depicting beer drinking in a banquet scene dating from 2600-2350 B.C. (I have no idea why it posts twice and I can't remove the second image)

I think I did tell the story of the origins of my fear of pressure cookers here at some point. If you were attacked by one of them the way I was, in the circular line of fire from the valve that got clogged so pressure built up (where was that whistle?..) and then exploded with oatmeal, rotating at high speed while shooting pressurized streams thereof in a tight trajectory covering the whole range of the kitchen and much of the living-room, and if you were the one who had to crawl on your belly under that rotating fiery inferno before you could even turn it off, and then crawl back and wait another 30 minutes before it finally subsided... I don't know if you would then give me reasons to question your own courage under fire, mister, or if you remained unperturbed by any and all pressure cookers thereafter... that remains to be seen. That would really reveal people's true colors. Now... daobums arguing? civilization collapsing? tao destroyed? You think a cat would build up too much pressure over that? You don't know cats very well, do you?

Edit: nah, changed my mind

O Fortuna! How cruel is the way thy lyrics are misread!

Terminological ambiguity is the source of many misunderstandings. Memory in the broader sense is not what you remember in your head. Memory loss is not what you don't remember in your head. Jing is the memory embedded in your DNA. It is pretty obvious on the stage of fetal development -- the body, in the process of becoming "itself," actually expresses this memory by morphing into everything it remembers, from its unicellular state to a multicellular "blob" to the formation of a fish-like, reptile-like, mammal-like, finally human-like entity that "remembers" how to arrange itself into a member of its species and then an individual of this species. Part of what it remembers is how not to express what you are not, even though the memory of what you are not, of all the ways a live organism on earth could potentially go that your individual self hasn't chosen, is there. Your jing stores memory of how to grow scales and feathers and horns -- and the memory how not to do it (encoded in a special "don't go there" stop-signs on the developmental sequence. I Ching's "Standstill" or molecular biology's SIR2P recombination inhibiting gene or what have you.) Artificial genetic manipulations can remove a stop-sign of this nature and get the body to "forget" -- they can now grow chickens who have teeth, e.g., by causing a loss of memory of a whole sequence that made a pterodactyl into a chicken and replaced the teeth with a beak. And many, many influences of a lifestyle of which we don't have systemic memory but which we now lead can interfere with this kind of memory, the fundamental memory of who and what you are and where you come from. We systemically remember pterodactyls, we don't systemically remember how to handle electromagnetic frequencies never before encountered on earth in which we presently swim, or designer molecules produced by chemical and medical industries that neither our kind nor any kind before ours has ever had a chance to encounter, learn to process and include into its systemic memory database, aka jing. That's what "memory loss" is. That's what "jing loss" is. Not just Alzheimer's (although it's one possible side effect). Jing is pretty fundamental and not even limited to the events in one organism or one species -- it's the memory of everything that brought you to the point of individuation here and now. Jing comes from the stars. Yes, we have a limited amount, but that's not the problem -- we have enough of this limited amount for all purposes unless it has been tampered with from the get-go, from our earliest developmental history (which it was) and continues to be tampered with by many features of our lifestyle that "waste" whatever remains after we're done getting formed under wasteful or distorted conditions. That's why it is so very hard to conserve, let alone replenish -- no one method even scratches the surface. Try conserving the star dust being blown away by a cosmic wind. Not entirely impossible, according to some taoist immortals. But very involved.

Yes, indeed, nothing compares. Then of course it is very useful to push with practitioners of all levels if you are going to learn how to actually help someone else learn -- if you're going to teach, whether formally or just helping out in your own school, you need to know not only the "above" but the "below" as well as possible. Also, this helps you "feel your own sung" and assess your own level without delusions or distortions -- many people tend to exaggerate their proficiency in their own mind, some underestimate it... an accurate assessment of "where I'm at right now" is a very useful reality check from time to time. A few years ago, I used to "challenge" athletic guys half my age and twice my size who are proficient in all kinds of athletic endeavors but not taiji to push me, just to test my "embodiment of taiji principles" closer to real life, so to speak. Once satisfied, I stopped doing that. From zero to moderate to about your own level to higher to much higher -- I believe all levels of proficiency in mastering sung are a useful learning ground. Though of course to get a glimpse of what's possible, and a very accurate reality check, nothing like touching hands with a master who's light years ahead of you. No dispute there.

Within oneself, definitely. Within a whole society, definitely. Both the individual human self and civilized human society are very impermanent phenomena while tao is eternal. It is possible to destroy anything eternal locally even though it's not possible to destroy it on its own scale. Does it matter on the local level, of an individual, or a whole society where it has been destroyed, that on the nonlocal level it's indestructible? Hardly. One's own scale is where things matter. Imagine a man whose hair naturally manifests to always grow and renew itself -- continuously a few individual hairs fall out every day and a few new ones sprout to replace them. At all times this lucky individual, impervious to male pattern baldness, would have a full head of hair if he were to just "go with the flow." But what if he's a monk and the monastic code demands that he shaves his head daily, so that not a single hair can emerge. What if he shaves his head for 70 years, since he's been admitted as a boy and throughout his life? One can say hair on this man's head has been eliminated. "Destroyed" for all practical purposes -- maybe it isn't "really" destroyed, maybe all he needs to do for it to manifest is stop shaving it. But he never stops. He always shaves his head. So, it's not that all hair everywhere has been destroyed -- unless the society, for whatever reasons, decrees that everybody must shave their heads. Besides some varieties of monks, there's other groups that do it, for religious reasons (e.g., in a few communities, married orthodox Hasidic women shave their heads and wear a wig instead), or hygienic (in Russia, an army conscript and a prisoner alike had their hair shaved off to prevent the spread of lice in confined settings), or fashion mixed with this or that ideology (skinheads), or iatrogenic (chemo patients), and so on. If one of such groups were to gain universal power and demanded that everybody shave their heads, and if it happened ten thousand years ago, we would probably never even know what human hair looks like. Well, in our practical case, it didn't happen with human hair. It happened with human life as a whole. It got shaved off and replaced with a wig, or a head scarf, or a burqa, or a tinfoil hat, or a soldier's helmet, or just remained bare -- metaphorically speaking, not in terms of what we do with our hair universally, in terms of how we do nearly everything with all things natural. That's what taoist sages meant I think. Of course they knew better than everyone else that tao is indestructible on the nonlocal level. But they also knew it's zero consolation and zero redemption for those dwelling on the local one and destroying tao just about as far as their local size allows them to reach.

I don't mind hearing you out on the Buddhist version if you're up to sharing (although I seldom agree with Buddhists on much, I can always find it in me to process their perspective. ) I do know the non-Buddhist version -- several in fact. Take the gnostic one, e.g.. They came up with theirs long before our kind of technology, long before anyone thought that AI would ever be a thing... I wonder how they knew that an excess of technology and a deficiency of the soul are two sides of the same coin. I developed some new respect for their version when I did Prince Charles's bazi reading and discovered he only had two phases of wuxing in his make-up. That's an elemental, practically. Humans are usually more complex than that. And demons have only one phase. So royalty must be somewhere in between (although I didn't have access to more royal specimens' natal information, who knows -- might have discovered that some of them do have only one phase.) "In the human world tao has been destroyed," according to everybody who's anybody in taoism. Tao doesn't print money. But it does base its functions on self-replication. Who'd have guessed that this "virtue" of tao could be imitated to build replicators of dead things and get enslaved by them. I'm pretty sure tao itself, if it had a head to scratch, would be doing just that looking at us.

Maybe none of it applies because I suspect we don't know the real situation, we see the tip of the iceberg and we can't find a solution because, well, the tip has been dissolved many times and it didn't affect the invisible part of the iceberg at all, and the new structure growing on top of it just replicated itself, with this or that level of precision. That's one reason I don't pay much attention to what's going on on the visible top. Sometimes I get glimpses of the invisible though, and that's when I start scrambling for a time machine to get the hell outta here. A casual item on some TV show I saw perhaps 20 years ago. About what wealthy people are into, about "it's not what you plebeians think." No, not foie gras and black ties. Not champagne and caviar. They are into "whatever the hell I please," that's the name of the bigger game. And that tip of the iceberg that gave me one of the memorable glimpses into what lies beneath was a few minutes' worth of a documentary within that show about a woman in California, in a place that "will remain anonymous," who -- the narrator informed the viewers in a voice full of admiration -- does not collect cars or works of art but likes to collect live lions. She doesn't do anything with them, just collects them. At the time she had 56 of them -- in rows of small cages on her property, much like prison cells in an ordinary jail. She was a young woman, perhaps in her 30s, looking like a regular California trophy wife. There's no way she earned, or any which way deserved, to have the resources to be doing what she's doing. Why? Why inflict unimaginable misery on the magnificent, endangered animals in this manner, toward no imaginable purpose? What can possibly be happening in a head that came up with this hobby? How many heads of this kind are out there, in control of 99% of everything there is to have and to control? And how scary is it if you stop and think about it? What else is going on? We all love to think "nothing much," horror scenarios are for movies and tinfoil hat wearing cooks, what's going on is, at most, champagne and caviar in excess of what we have access to but that's it. Nope. That's not it. Secret wealth and secret power and secret infernal madness go hand in hand -- that's what I think is the part that doesn't even occur to most about the invisible underwater part of the iceberg. No one wants to "go there" and there's no proof anyway, ever. But, man, circumstantial evidence... Damn...

The people who can be nice to each other without taking their stuff wind up having their stuff taken by those who are not so nice. I don't know what could undo a predatory economy. Perhaps a social movement that would heavily stigmatize, without punishing, wealth in excess of what one can use in one lifetime? I remember, as a kid, being really worried that I might accidentally wind up possessing something that would make other kids think I'm "wealthy." I only had very basic necessities growing up, and so did most kids I interacted with. So a new pair of boots, fancy, expensive looking, of uncommon style, higher-than-average quality -- when I was 7, I refused to wear them to school. "What if they think I'm wealthy" -- it would be shameful, I knew it! I also had a bicycle where most kids didn't -- well, that was redeemable by letting anyone who wanted to ride it borrow it. I don't remember exactly when this flipped toward the opposite scenario, only that it happened fast... a revolution of consciousness of sorts... and at 9, a girl who showed up wearing pants that were fancy, expensive looking, etc., was no longer worried that other kids will see her as "wealthy" and shame her for it -- on the contrary, she was proud and everybody was envious. How does that happen?..

Poor bird! Hunting for sports is... well, I don't want to judge, maybe cats need to do it in order to not lose the skill should civilization collapse and they are forced to hunt for food for real. The cat who raised me, my grandmother's (who was 5 years older than me), caught birds like that approximately once a week, becoming airborne and snatching the hapless sparrow in midair -- but she actually ate them. She was only very partially a pet, and a fully engaged huntress in between home meals.

Another way to learn sung is to study a cat (who is in good shape)

We have a finite amount of "something," it's true, but before applying any practical solutions to this problem, it would be a good idea to first figure out what that "something" is before undertaking to conserve it. Otherwise one might discover that "something" that shortens our lives by running out too fast and "something" we are trying to save are not the same thing at all, so the latter won't help with the former. Jing in its broadest sense is memory -- memory of self, of how to be yourself. The copies of copies our cells create under less-than-optimal conditions can indeed take us farther and farther away from the "original" -- but what exactly is the process whereby we produce "more copies" and lose more and more of the original? Well, the good news is, sex isn't that -- bad sex is. Sex is part of normal functioning like all other processes associated with aliveness, and doesn't take away from our cellular memory of how to be "ourselves," members of our species and individuals of that species. Bad sex does though -- by causing the body and the mind (and more) to "forget" what we are, on all levels -- from scrambled, haywire hormonal cascades affecting all organs and systems that respond by cascades of abnormal functions throwing off system-organ-function memory of "what it's like to be normal," to really stupid ideas in the head, including all in-betweens. Now I'm going to stop before I write a dissertation on the subject of "what constitutes good sex and what constitutes bad sex" -- I'll just say they are not the same and leave it at that. May we all find a way to figure it out and be blessed with partners who have figured it out too.

What Freeform and Steve said. To this I will add that, in my own experience, you assemble the proprioceptive ways to get your body to understand sung gradually and from multiple sources. From reading Taiji Classics and trying to play, in a somatosensory way, with its metaphors ("a flexible steel needle wrapped in soft cotton" -- that's sung for you) to "investing in loss" (one of the most accomplished MA folks I've interacted with, whose push-hands skill seems to border on supernatural -- when he "stands like a tree" you literally find yourself trying to push a 600-year-old oak tree off its roots, and he's merely a small-framed dude of under average height -- answers all questions about his "secret" with this primary advice -- "for three years, let everybody push you, don't ever try to win, that's the only way to understand how you lose and keep correcting whatever you didn't know you were doing wrong) to getting as many corrections as you can stomach from a good teacher and always asking for more, to just practicing enough (sung is internal MA territory, you can apply it to whatever else you do but the best way to master it is through practicing an internal MA) and more... there's always more. Sung is also twofold -- how you learn it and how you actually apply it in a spontaneous real-life situation are sort of opposite (but that's a later-time skill, to be able to turn it inside out and have that soft, mellow, relaxed "cotton" inside while on the surface the steel needle emerges and strikes -- instantly and spontaneously.)

I suspect that "culture" that entails elimination of normal natural developmental pathways (since before birth, during birth, in early infancy, and onward) is not the right word for what happened to us, that the word is a euphemism for something entirely else: domestication. Epigenetics is a relatively new science and its findings are relatively frightening. We inherit whatever features of our "culture" have been traumatic, persistent or imprinting, that's what it keeps finding. We are not free of what our ancestors did and what has been done to them. When we experience a spontaneous opening, ideally it is an opening into a pristine paradise, but in reality, it's an opening into reinforced walls of developmental trauma of millennia, into whatever hell happened between that paradise and now -- not just ontogenically but phylogenically. I think I can relate more and more to that taoist who, upon returning from the invisible realms, found that our everyday world is not all that rich with nuances and differences -- "everything is mysteriously the same." The indoctrination by CCP you describe, e.g., is something I encountered growing up myself, in the form of the indoctrination by the CPSU, almost verbatim. And I was growing up a dissident, believing that if what this side offers is a crock of shit, there's got to be another side, in some imagined mirror world, where they offer a crock of honey instead. I genuinely believed that whatever side does it differently does it right. What can be worse than the devil you know, intimately, up close and personal? Turns out something can be worse. The devil you don't know, skilled at wrapping the crock of shit in a shiny plastic wrapper that lists "Honey" as the main ingredient on the label. You buy it, you commit to gobbling it up -- and if everybody around is smacking their lips and going "sweet, fresh, fragrant," you have to choose between shutting down your senses and sensibilities and going along -- or finding yourself in that uncomfortable misfit/outsider position once again. Besides, flavors of our various "cultures" might indeed vary. If you're lucky to focus on that instead of on "everything is mysteriously the same," you can choose one over the other -- see everything that's wrong with the ones you didn't choose in clear detail, blurring out everything that's right with them (if there's anything that's right with any of them, that is) -- and consider the problem solved. Historically, no one with any power to change things ever stopped at that though -- they typically proceeded to get whatever culture was different from theirs to conform to what they have chosen for its "development." And that's more distortions piled up on top of the already piled up distortions of the "abnormal and pathological process of domestication of humans" (Konrad Lorenz.)