OldDog

Yeah, me too. That and my dad's Julie London albums.

Of course, it might be gettin close to lunch time ...

Saturday has always been chore day. Back in the day, Mom used to fire up the stereo with Perez Prado and Sarah Vaughn to help the chores along. These days I fire up Outlaw music. Oops, laundry is calling ...

I tend to see thoughts as a normal process of the mind based on inputs ... mostly sensory. The mind is a discriminating process ... constantly comparing, contrasting and attempting to relate to other experiences ... building reality. You see or hear or feel something and the mind confirms for you that what you just saw, heard, felt is consistent with other experiences and so is true/real ... and you believe it because it is your reality. Or, it stores the information away for comparison to future inputs ... and if, over time, the information doesn't get matched up ... well, it's recorded over. It can be self-directed. You can lie in bed in the quiet dark and run the list of the days experiences and choose some to "think" about. Or ... you can ... but it takes a little practice ... choose to let the discriminating process idle down ... and let other ... internal ... sources of experience ... awareness ... be experienced and stored away for future comparison. And when you see it again, you will recognize it and it will be true and part of your reality.

Couldn't agree more. To put it another way ... With drugs ... or even alcohol, food or sex for that matter ... you easily get to the point where it becomes the focal point of your life. Everything you do ... every decision you make ... becomes oriented towards supporting your indulgence. It's insidious, pernicious. At some point you may realize that you no longer have the ability, as much as you may want, to choose anything that is not supporting your indulgence ... other explorations of life, family, friends. If that is not a description of loss of freedom ... loss of independence ... I don't know what is. I once had a friend that was into marijuana in a big way. When I asked why he smoked pot all the time, he said, "Because I like it too much". Slippery slope ... Indeed.

Haven't heard this in years. Did you remember it or did you look it up? I recall it as chastity not virginity.

It is ever so that in the life of man, Heaven produces his essence and Earth produces his form. - Neiye

Still reading a paper (provided elsewhere by Bindi, I believe) on the Chinese model of cognition represented in the Neiye. Part of that analysis has to doing with how the Neiye considers preparations for making the heart-mind (xin) ready to receive the awareness of Dao. In that explication there was ... what for me has become ... a somewhat different way of viewing the meditative process. It is generally acknowledged that one needs to quieten the heart-mind of thoughts and emotions to achieve a state ready for awareness. These activities of the heart-mind become the focus of the quieting process. We are told to simply let them pass without attaching to them. What was new for me was the notion that such thoughts and emotions are the heart-minds way of responding to reality ... most typically the result of sensory input. Arguments about what reality is notwithstanding, the point was that heart-mind is responding. It would seem from this that the process of quieting the heart-mind is to a great extent one of addressing the response mechanism ... something not easy to do. In a practical sense, we try to achieve this quietened state by limiting sensory input. The argument then would seem to distinguish the stimuli from that which is responding and suggest the responding be the focus. I never really thought of it this way ... but felt it was something worth reflecting on. Thought this was an interesting sidebar to the Xin discussion.

I tend to agree with the "whole being" notion ... and think the TCM connection is worth bringing to the foreground of discussion. It's an overlooked source of understanding on this subject. Qigong is kind of a nod in the direction of the TCM. Would seem that the level of balance and harmonization achievable through qigong would be very helpful in developing the "whole being" notion. Xin in many ways is metaphorical in that it represents at once many different aspects of what we are trying to get at ... trying to unify. So, yeah, I can accept that it may not be translatable. But Xin is also just a word ... and once you have the meaning you can forget the word ... or so we are told. Perhaps Xin as a process can be thought of more as the equivalent of whole cognition.

btw... who's the we? ... what are we celebrating?

Is it too late? Sounds like the kind of event that calls for a glass in hand.

Something for a rainy dreary day ...

Each informs the other ... imho

I think my Dad must have been a Daoist ... not in fact but in heart. While quite strict he was also quite gentle, reserved and just ... quiet ... often choosing to just listen rather than speak. He taught with few words and much example. When it came to discipline, as a child, I saw my share of the belt ... but it was always deliberate and measured. When I committed some offense worthy of corporal punishment, I was sent to my room to ponder what I had done ... and allow him time to cool down ... then the belt was applied in a measured manner, not violently. That pretty much ended by the time i was 10. I still draw lessons from my dad, though he has passed. One of the strongest only occurred to me years after I took up study of the Dao. I have this strong memory of sitting on a lake fishing with my Dad when I was maybe 10. It was early morning. The lake like a mirror, reflecting the sky, mountains and trees. The air was almost a chill. We sat in a small boat at the base of a cliff still fishing for trout. Nothing was said. Just stillness. I get the same feeling when reading the poems of Cold Mountain. Some years later, I recall my dad remarking that he got more religion out of being on the lake than a whole month of Sundays sitting in church ... not that we didn't go. Years later, it occurred to me to look up the image of mountain over lake in the Yijing. That image continues to be an instructive meditation to this day. As the days grew closer to his passing, I could see it coming. I am grateful to the lessons from Zhuangzi on life and death for preparing me for the inevitable. Zhuangzi continues to be a guide in many matters of life.

From a Taiji perspective, I had learned the 13 forms as references to the steps (bu) and energies (jin) used in Taiji. But I suppose other traditions have their explanations. I think the origins of many concepts and technics are lost to antiquity. One thing I have learned from Taiji is that the same outwardly apparent movements can have multiple applications. I have both seen and experienced (as in being on the receiving end ) this in the many variations on forms. I think this is why the same form may look significantly different from one master to the next. Ultimately, good Taiji ... martial art ... I think is formless.

Yes, this is the direction I am leaning ... due, in no small part, to the link you provided on the Chinese model of cognition. While i don't always agree with some of the author's conclusions, these discussion have helped me to explore the potential for different meaning in key concepts, as I seek a better understanding. I have always been uneasy with a mind centered notion of awareness. After all, most meditative traditions teach some form of letting mental activity go ... quieting the mind. But if that is accomplished then what is there left to attain awareness. The heart may qualify, but then what is the heart ... what role does it have in cognition. And are there other bodily aspects to cognition ... awareness. This is what I think the Neiye teaches ... a set of physical practices that are simple and direct without a lot of ornamentation to detract from the real goal. Just an opinion.

Xin is indeed a hard concept to understand ... and I am still working on it. I dislike using the word mind because for a westerners it evokes a sense of understanding and knowledge that does not account well for all notions of understanding and awareness, which I feel Xin is expressing. I have provisionally accepted heart-mind, as many others have done, because it is a device that for a westerners can be a subtle reminders of the greater sense of meaning we try to understand. But all of the definitions above, while certainly valid in their various contexts, still do not seem adequate. Most of these are referring to conditions of the heart. Condition of the heart certainly has a place in these discussions, but still something feels missing. I think it may be conveying a sense of process that is missing.

True enough. I agree with Marble's sense of process. Which, by the way, is underscored in the link that Bindi provided on the Chinese model of cognition. Sure do miss Marbles.

Sunday morning jazz ...

So, it appears that I argue from an unsafe position ... that is, I am unable to shed enough of my western bias in attempting to understand what you have presented. However, you have left enough clues for me to pickup and follow ... perhaps get an inkling of what you are saying. I will try to remember to delve into this when I have finished my excursion into the world of metaphor. For me this discussion lacks a frame of reference that I can latch onto for grounding ... and, in a way, points to the reason why I have had such difficulties with mathematics. If I can not relate to something more tangible then it begins to lose meaning for me. As an old philosopher once said ... " I yam what I yam." Thanks for taking the time.

I have no doubt about the emotional content of music. I experience that all the time and often use music to set the mood for what I am planning to do, knowing that corresponding music will enhance the outcome. Isn't this a sort of chicken or the egg kind of thing? That is, presupposing that music theory is the impetus for math evolution. No doubt humans learned to beat a drum or hum a tune before they learned to take a derivative but it seems the underlaying math was always present even if not expressed. Maybe its just western ... and I use the term provisionally at the moment ... bias, but math would seem universal, that a mathematical model could be found to fit any phenomena. Still, there are different senses of what is musical in different cultures ... thinking scales as an example here. If what you propose is the case, one might expect there to have developed different mathematics in different cultures. But, math is math ... while there might be different forms within mathematics, it is still just math. Hard to wrap my head around. Can you provide an example of music that is representative of a different notion of math? Perhaps I can hear the difference even if I don't understand the math. .

@Limahong You didn't finish it. A specialist is one who knows more and more about less and less, until ... ... finally he knows nothing at all. Or, at least that's the way I always heard it.

I think it begins when you view others as being separate from yourself ... a decided unconnected way to view the world.

I am not sure I understand your question. I take it to mean ... How can the notion of synergy be shown in light of the current discussion in this thread? One way, I think, is in the results of the Neiye practice. Trying to use your line of reasoning ... If you consider that the heart-mind can have two states ... The active busy state which does a pretty good job of dealing with the physical world ... and a quiescent state that is capable of approaching Dao and understanding how the world changes, are not those two states capable to acting synergistically ... producing a better balanced individual with a more effective way of dealing with the world? Perhaps that's a stretch ... but it seems to be not an unreasonable way of thinking about it.