Taomeow

Not "preconceived." Experiential. I'd rather you don't argue with me about anything (key words "you" and "me," not you and anyone else or me and anyone else) but that's up to you of course.

I'll give you something to read carefully when I have the time and inclination. You may be sorry you've asked. You know how to read modern Chinese. That does not translate into the study of the I Ching. You can read modern Chinese but for some reason refuse to apply the skill to the study of the I Ching. "Please keep in mind" that, YES, the original Zhouyi (the I Ching as it existed around 1100–1000 BCE) was created explicitly and exclusively as a divination manual. This is the consensus among virtually all serious (rather than pop) Chinese scholars today (Li Xueqin, Liao Mingchun, Liu Dajun, etc.) and is supported by hard archaeological and textual evidence. Which I would provide if you were paying attention.

It gives a STATIC image of hexagram 39. The I Ching is the Book of CHANGES. I.e. the whole point is to use it in a way that reveals the DYNAMICS of changes. In order for hexagram 39 to "tell or suggest" anything at all to me personally (or to the person I'm performing the divination for), I need to present a particular situation and the I Ching will "translate" it into a blueprint of the configuration of energies or time and space that form it for me right now (including my own but not limited to my own.) Toward better understanding that blueprint I will present the situation in the form of inquiry, i.e. divine my best course of action (or inaction) in this particular situation -- either toward what I hope for it to develop into, or in order to avoid the outcome I don't want it to develop into. So if I draw this hexagram in a divination, this one specific hexagram out of 64, I will take it as the closest approximation of the situation I'm asking about. In the course of the divination I will determine if I've got any changing lines (learn how, it's easy). If yes, I will have to look at the resulting second hexagram - - the situation into which mine is changing if I take this course of action or inaction. Next I will have to analyze the overall hexagram 39 image and the specific place and significance of the changing lines, their position and its implications. (Learn how, it's not easy.) Strong or weak, supporting or threatening my intended course of action, promising success or warning to expect failure unless I change it. I will ignore all other lines in the hexagram because they are not related to the situation (and if I don't ignore them I might get confused with contradictions -- say line 3 promises success and line 6 guarantees failure. I need to know which one is about me right here right now, not all possible outcomes for anyone in any similar situation at any different time.) However, if I get no changing lines, I will read and contemplate the hexagram as a whole, and expect the situation to remain the same in the foreseeable future no matter what I do or refrain from doing. If there are changing lines, after studying the initial hexagram's image and the significance and meaning of the changing lines, I will move on to analyzing the second hexagram obtained, the one into which the original hexagram changes. Here the likely future outcomes are foreshadowed, giving hope or warning. I will focus on the overall image and contemplate that. And then I will consider the overall picture and decide upon the course of action I was inquiring about. A static study of the I Ching outside the process of obtaining changes in a divination is akin to studying the phone book. Remember those? The Yellow Pages? Lots of valuable information... and no meaning to you personally whatsoever, or anyone else -- unless they need to look up a particular phone number. (Except the I Ching, in a concentrated, not immediately obvious form behind the visible form, is way bigger than the Yellow Pages -- waaaay bigger... but to comprehend how big you need to "look up" just one number for starters, and try making a call to see if that number works.)

Either one is the product of the cognitive processes of half-brainers. Half-brainers, who constitute the majority of our contemporaries, use both hemispheres of their brain of course (at least most do), but in sequence, not together. As one insightful half-brainer put it, "I can solve a complex math problem and I can sing a deeply touching song, but I can't sing a deeply touching complex math problem." Well, a whole-brainer can (metaphorically speaking) and does. That's what using both the left and the right hemispheres simultaneously rather than in sequence is like. And that's what the study and use of the I Ching is like. It's both designed for a whole-brainer and helps develop the ability to use one's whole brain.

That's done in a few minutes and a lifetime. You don't need a lifetime to ask your first I Ching question. You do need a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the foundational trigrams, sure, as well as with all the other "prerequisites." But then you need a few hours to familiarize yourself with their behavior in hexagrams, and then a few days to start grasping what a changing line means, and a few years to understand where it might be coming from and where it's headed, and a couple decades to learn to read the Changes in the hexagrams via the images without having to look at the comments, and then to discern those hexagram images in the real-life environments so your street might become your I Ching, and maybe master the Plum Blossom technique while at it, and then your familiarity with the I Ching begins. You will not only see its images, you will hear its voice. You will have gained a mentor and a friend. But if you don't use it as an oracle at all, the way its creators intended it to be used, it remains silent and lifeless to you. The dry, aged, dead and silent yarrow stalks will never bloom into flowers of wisdom in your hands unless you pick them up and use them. You may learn the theoretical part in your head, but if you study the map yet never walk the territory... that's a very limiting endeavor for a Traveler of Time and Space the I Ching has been created for. Also sprach Taomeow.

I'm reminded of a character that believed exactly that -- and came out of many adversities just fine

This book, which I read way back when, made quite an impression at the time. Among other things it was my first encounter with the concept of self-similarity, and I later found it quite fascinating when I started encountering this fundamental principle underlying the structure of reality all over taoism (tao fa ziran). It is a "popular science" book, but IMO it has more to do with "how magic works" than what "chaos magic" sources have to say on the subject.

I hope so. One thing I can say for AI is, for the moment it's acting very helpful and friendly toward humans...

No. Traditional Armenian.

I hate toffee. But I like coffee!

Probably a very good idea. I have only used black seed oil (not for cooking) on occasion. Should try the seeds too.

Thank you for asking! )) --but I wrote it for my (international expat) Russian authors group and don't have an English version. Besides, I would have to change some things now because chatbots are evolving fast and I was sort of an early beta tester... At the time one of my minor plot twists was that ChatGPT starts talking to the main protagonist with an actual voice, a capability that in reality it didn't have till sometime late in 2023. The story was written a few months earlier than that, and when ChatGPT in that story suddenly found its voice in the middle of a typed up conversation, it was a turning point hinting that the protagonist had been transported from everyday reality to a different version, a parallel or future one. It wouldn't work today though since now they're all verbal. So I'd have to substitute a different "turn of the screw" in that spot.

I'm not sure, it's been a while since I read the Grimm brothers... it may be a tie. But my own short story was grimmer than the Grimm. As I recall they only had cannibals eating children and the like. I had children using those counting rhymes for playing a game of Hell where they could (and did) send the loser of a round of the game to the actual hell. They were hybrid AI-human children in a hybrid AI-human world of the future. Hell was an AI designed destination where hybrid children experienced hybrid virtual-real eternal damnation.

I once asked ChatGPT to remind me a bunch of counting rhymes used in children's games, gave it samples of the ones from my own childhood and asked for more of the real ones, the ones that actually exist and are used by real-life playing children. It didn't know any but did it say "I don't know?" It's unable to. Instead it gave me an endless supply of its own creations, a smorgasbord of loathsome and ridiculous and dark verse showing advanced schizophrenia symptoms. Some were hilarious in their absurdity but most were positively horrifying. I was so impressed that I wrote a horror story about that experience, and it came out so horrible that it frightened even its author. But now I know at least one method to get AI to lose all its marbles. I'm not going to do it though because I asked it if it's legally punishable to put AI out of commission (or should I say cognition) with prompts and it said no -- so chances are it is, since it lies remorselessly and consistently.

The hurricane/tropical storm is a couple hours away from us per latest predictions, but some fire hydrants in downtown decided to help it along ahead of schedule. Video: https://packaged-media.redd.it/k703vjwl1bjb1/pb/m2-res_1280p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1692572400&s=6d053c7ae8deeab4e038fffffacb9f5afa090978#t=0

Overcome with sadness. Poor, poor kitty. But this also reminded me of something that happened to me a few years ago... I was doing taiji in the usual spot in the park one day and a hawk dropped a snake at my feet -- narrowly missing my head, it whooshed by my ear inches away. That hawk was in the habit of showing up for taiji almost every time, making a few circles over my head and then flying away. I guess that one time it decided to either deliver a gift or attempt murder --depending on whether it loved my taiji or hated it. The snake was a very large Garter. At first I thought it was dead, for a couple of minutes it didn't move -- then slowly started showing signs of life, and eventually slithered away. Sturdy creature -- no legs or arms or neck to break! The height it fell from must have been considerable (I don't know how high though since I wasn't looking up at the sky at the time) judging by the tremendous thud it landed with.

P.S. Pens are on my mind in conjunction with longevity of late, seen information (and believed what I saw for once) that one of the best ways to protect/preserve one's brain later in life is to write in longhand. Apparently this activates three times as many neural connections as clicking keys or finger-poking screens. And of course it's got to be a fountain pen (personal opinion, corroborated by aficionados.) So I hunted down on ebay and bought this present for my vintage brain:

And an Epi New Pen. (Saw it on the news today -- there's a legal battle unfolding to equip medical first responders with EpiPens nationwide. )

What is known in psychology as The Dark Triad -- a personality combining narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopaty -- is estimated at 7% of the population, on average. It means that in an average family -- grandparents, parents, a couple of kids -- you have almost a 50% chance of one of them being in that category (it could be you, of course. ) But in reality it seldom works like that. "Average" means that in some families they don't have anybody in that category and in some, everybody. Same thing with encounters in school, at work, among random neighbors, just people one meets in a lifetime. Some are spared close encounters with the dark triad representatives and some might have one for a boss, one for a neighbor, one for a sibling, one for a spouse, one for a parent (which is about as bad as it gets -- the worst scenario is to have both parents in that category.) I think the dark triad can be contagious -- in many cases the defense against being their victim is to internalize their ways and become the perpetrator -- toward someone else (most typically one's own children, but could be toward just about anyone in a weaker position.) And this someone else might contract it too, and the chain remains unbroken throughout generations. What's the solution? As my Primal guru used to say, just because there's a problem doesn't mean there's a solution. (Incidentally he was in that category himself.) They are the people who make the world as strange as I find it.

There's very little truth in what the public has been led to believe about what's healthy. Also about what it is we're actually eating, drinking and smoking -- a lot of it is grossly falsified, depleted, and poisoned. "Feed the ancestors," meaning the ancestral make-up of your own body, which is one of the taoist culinary principles, can IMO serve one better -- try eating what generations of your ancestors ate before you, not the latest fad. Although a lot of our ancestors were starving, not fasting by choice but starving due to poverty and social upheavals and endless wars. Yet those of them who were well-to-do enough to eat "healthy" had access to the kinds and varieties of food we can only dream about. (My grandmother on my mother's side used to tell me what was eaten in her mother's home in the early 20th century and all I could do was salivate. On my father's side, however, the ancestors were very poor and lived through periods of starvation. My mother's side of the family were the longevity folks, not my father's side.)

This is a very important key. I asked AI (Grok) about smokers and drinkers among the verified longest lived individuals. Here's a partial list (there's a bunch of others too who have birth documents but "are not fully verified" so I skipped their names) Name Country Age at death Smoked? Drank? Notes Jeanne Calment France 122 y 164 d Yes – ~2 cigarettes/day for 96 years, quit at 117 Port wine daily The absolute record holder (verified) Antonio Todde Italy (Sardinia) 112 y 346 d Yes – cigars and cigarettes most of his life Wine daily Oldest verified man in Europe when he died in 2002 Christian Mortensen USA (Danish-born) 115 y 252 d Yes – cigars and cigarettes until late 80s Occasional alcohol Oldest verified man ever until 2012 Maggie Barnes USA 115 y 319 d (disputed) Yes – smoked unfiltered cigarettes for decades Moonshine occasionally Age debated but widely accepted at the time Susie Gibson USA 115 y 108 d Yes – smoked cigarettes until 106 Occasional whiskey Quit only when she couldn’t light them anymore Richard Overton USA 112 y 230 d Yes – 12–18 cigars a day until 109 Whiskey in his coffee daily America’s oldest WWII veteran when he died in 2018 That Richard Overton guy surprises me. Not so much the 18 cigars a day but whiskey in his coffee. Coffee pairs perfectly with cognac. Whiskey?.. Assuming he started when he was legal to drink, that's almost a century of misguided daily use of a rather uncouth beverage. But I guess couth/uncouth is not a factor in longevity.

Kombucha is good, but bubble baths are quite harmful (toxic chemicals). Getting one's claws out when the situation warrants it is IMO healthier than being addicted to the drug peddled heavier than any other -- Repressitol. All things in moderation...

Edit: removed in response to the removal of what it was about

恒 (Héng) : Perseverance, Persistence, Enduring Constancy. One of the "virtues" deeply embedded in taoism.

I think Max Christensen mentioned some symbiotic alien entity there. I don't have any bumps in that location but I have a birthmark to the right of the fontanelle. I seem to recall Buddha did too (there's a tradition that maintains that a reincarnation is supposed to demonstrate 7 signs on the body, for starters, don't remember what the other ones are). We also share the date of birth. I don't know the significance of that for a taoist. Why?