Pietro

that site in my todo list from a loooong time

Hi Non, indeed women as they get old fall get it much worse than guys. Look at this graph: from OkCupid. I love okcupid blog. It has great statistics with a size of data that is much more than what any academic study can do. Never in your life will you be as attractive as a 21 years old sexy chick! NEVER ever ever. Not in this life time. Not's gona happen, sorry. But as time goes by the same girl will start to be a woman that is starting to feel her age, that is getting near the point where she cannot have kids. And once she cannot have kids anymore her desirability decreases drastically. Think how terrible must be for a women who owned the world to fall from there. And be seen as less attractive as you are right now. Look, I am 40. I have no problem in going out with a woman my age or older, but if I want to have kids in my life I MUST go with younger women. And although everybody seem not to care about kids, actually we all do. We are just under this spell where we think we don't care. But start to go to tantra workshops and then you will see nearly all the women over thirty facing that problem. Women below thirty are unraveling what this person and that person did to them ages ago. Or are deciding what to do in their life. Women over thirty are either too old, or feeling the clock. We carry on ourselves the error that as a society we did. Buying into the feminist point of view was one, and it fucked up both men and women. Thinking we could remain forever adolescents and work was more important than family was the second. It's not your fault, it's not their fault. WE ALL AS A SOCIETY GOT CONFUSED. Please find patience and compassion, and try to make the best of this situation. On a different note: Serene, I thought you were much younger. I did not realize you were 40. Where are you based? You want to come out? :-) You know taoists should go out with taoists. It's a law of nature ;-)

I think that condensing Mizu's realization in saying that we do everything to ourselves, and kunlun did not do anything to him, because kunlun could not do anything, is making a big disservice to the process he has gone through. And to the realization that he reached. I think that if we come to term with this realization, as a community, we all can make a jump. By changing our attitude toward several practices. And I repeat "several", as in more than one, less than all. To Mizu were done some promises: this practice will give you ... , ... , and ... . He believed those promised, and found himself two years down the line sicker, lonelier, having lost his girlfriend, friends and most of his interesting life. Yes, it was him doing this to himself. No, he is not responsible. Because he approached this practice with an open heart, and full of trust. In another tradition they would have said, from his internal child. But we cannot also blame who taught to him KunLun, in the measure in which those people honestly believed what they were teaching. Somehow we human beings are in this together. We are all together fencing off the darkness of our collective ignorance. This is why we should honor Mizu's awakening and make it our own. And this is why I suspect Buddhists speak about ignorance. At least I suspect so. Not being a Buddhist I might be dead wrong, and maybe they use the word ignorance with an alternative meaning. Also it is false to say that every practice does not do anything, and we always do everything to ourselves. There definitely are practices that "do" things. Of course you need to practice them, but it is the action of the practice that makes you succeed. Not your belief, or your intent, or the purity of your heart, or any other unmeasurable reason that people in spiritual groups tend to use to describe the fact that some things sometimes work and sometimes don't. I am thinking here of a simple exercise like the spinal stretch. it is being taught by Bruce students in the first lesson of the first course. It can do really good things to the spine. No one (I hope!!!) will suggest that doing spinal stretch all day long will do miracles for you. In fact we are specifically told NOT to practice spinal stretch too much. 3 times a day being the limit. And this exercise will do good, but will not solve everything. So here we have a difference: on the one side we find a school that teaches a practice, saying that it will do all sort of good things, on the other an exercise in another school that give limited results, and should be practiced a limited amount of time. And there are many exercise in many schools that are like this one. I only speak about Bruce because lately I am just practicing his material. But the list is long, of schools and of practices. I think that when a school will tell you that a single practice will do unbelievable things, you have good reasons not to believe her. Or put it in another way, exceptional statements need exceptional proofs. But then someone might say that I am comparing apples and oranges. One is a physical exercise, the other is a spiritual exercise. And many people share the believe, or the hope, that although the physicality is undeniably complicated, the spirituality will be simpler. That eventually there will be a practice that will take care of everything. And we just need to reach that one practice, and then everything will be simpler. Not necessarily un-painful, but uncomplicated. Well, if there is such a practice, and if there is such a level, I sure as hell haven't reached it. So I think this is the second take away message I think there is in this story: spiritual practices are not necessarily simpler. But then there is a third gem in here. And please forgive me if I do not unroot it completely because I am still working on it. We (meaning western culture, or any culture that bought into western values) believe that bliss is a doorway. So many practices use bliss. Kunlun is not the only one. We also have them in the healing tao. But if you really think about it, we have this also in normal life. If spiritual bliss must be a doorway to immortality or enlightenment, then orgasmic bliss should be the doorway to a life long happiness with a person. Think about it, the two concept just mirror each other perfectly. Well, I now think that bliss in not a doorway. Or more specifically it is a doorway, but not to a happy land. Bliss tends to unbalance the hormonal system, and as a result you need more of it to feel good again. It essentially makes you an addicted. An addicted to sex, to spiritual high, to drugs, to adrenaline, you name it. * But if bliss is not the solution (and off go all, -not some in this case, but all- the practices that teach how to reach bliss) then what is the solution? Maybe the Buddhist decision to let go of any desire at least leads in the right direction. You let go of any desire, at least your hormonal system calms down. The dopamine receptors open up, and you start to feel good always. Essentially you reach a semi-bliss state. But you just don't go so high that you need to go down after. You just go as high as you can support yourself. It grows every day, but it never peaks in such a way that the body needs to protect itself from the dopamine surges. So you never feel down.* But maybe is possible to reach this state without giving up "all desires". Just by learning to discern which desires will make you feel bad, and which will not. So all together I think the take away messages are three fold: -if a practice should do unbelievable things, then you should pay extra attention. -spiritual practices are not necessarily simpler than physical ones -bliss is not a doorway to unending happiness, but can be a doorway to addiction (unending unhappiness). * A bit of basic neuro-physiology can help here. When you experience bliss, you are essentially experiencing surges of dopamine through your brain. The problem is that the body is evolved to protect itself, so when so much dopamine reaches the system, the receiving neurons start to close down the dopamine receptors. So when the peak has ended, you will feel more unhappy, because now your average level of dopamine is filtered by the fact that many dopamine receptors are closed. It takes a few days for the receptors to open up again. (cfr. Cupid's Poisoned Arrow)

Actually I found both another video on the Human go game: And some go games commented by Guo Juan. Guo Juan is a legend here in Europe, she is a 5 dan pro, and very much loved. Her lessons are very funny, and very direct. I met her Prague some years ago. She also started an online Go school. Unfortunately I asked her if she knew about the connection between Go and meditation, and she did not know. :-(. By the way, when I met Guo Juan we were at the European Go Congress and there were some strong player coming (also a couple of 9 dan pro, if I recal!), but the most funny was a 6 dan amatorial who was ... 6 years old! So cute! You could see him yawning in front of a game, with his little dog strapped at the feet of the table. And then playing rapidly because the dog had to go pee outside. Playing rapidly, but still winning. LOL!

Thank you for this. I really enjoyed it. Apart the technical game (it looks like white made some bad strategic choices at the beginning and then had to fight all the time to recover) I found interesting the idea of the human Go Game, with the two 9 dan players moving a big board of human beings. Do we have a video of the people big board? Personally I stopped studying some time ago, when I realized that I did not have the time to become good at both Tai Ji and Go, and realized that my work already forced me to develop my mind, while as time went by tai ji would become more and more important as I got older.

...Christianity. And I would go as far as saying that Go is to Sun Tzu, what Chess is to Clausewitz. Historically Christianity and chess has flirted for thousands of years (2 thousands). In the west people play chess with death, saints play chess with the devil, and in genera the idea of life is of a battle between good and evil. You even have some central figures in both that once you have lost this the game is lost. You lost Jesus, end of game. You lost the Madonna, end of game. In Taoism things are more spread out, it's more a war than a battle. Although there are deities, they are not SO important. This because the central ordering principle is the Tao. In Go the Tao is the whole goban. Heaven is in the center, the earth is on the side, and the players go from the center to the side. But also one player represents the light principle and the other the darkness principle. The only thing that surprises me is that there is so little around about how to use Go to improve meditation, and how to use meditation to improve Go. We know in Japan there was a group of celibate buddhist priests that devoted their life to play go. One of the 4 main school of Go came from them. And after a few generations they were also not celibate anymore. There is also the story of a Go master who would pass the time in brothels, and then once a year he would participate in a Go competition and win, and win big. And then use the money he has won to support himself in the rest of the year. The Li Po of Go ;-).

Interesting about BF telling you how to evolve an ethical system... would this be different than the evolution of Te that happens via practice? Interested to know the excercise, if possible. I am sure I must have described it many times on tTB, although I tried to look for it and I cannot find it. In any case the new taoist meditation circle covers it for 1 third of the program. Here is the advertisment of the course. I am following it, as many of my meditations friends, and teachers. ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- The psychopathic nature as it is recognised in psychology is one that has grown from a fundamental lack: the infant not getting required mirroring and eye contact and needs met, fails to develop the awareness of there being any Self outside of Own Self, through lack of experience of such. Therefore it is ok to do anything to anyone, as Others havent become real. So this says nothing about not being 'born good'. Very interesting interpretation, and makes a lot of sense. Although sociopathy is linked with being of the same family, but not so much. If it was much more, then people born from the same parents would very often be both sociopath. I am afraid there are times where the DNA just has the upper hand. Like people who become blind, and people who are blind from birth. ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- Interesting point of view. Indeed the percentage of sociopath is not a constant in different cultures, so it might be measuring something. Interesting about the sociopathic variables. Do you know more about it? It was on "the sociopath next door". According to it in the west 4% of people are sociopath. In the east the percentage is lower. But in no community that I know off, they are totally absent.

How interesting!! I would love to know more about this, if you have any link, reference and so on... In an ethical system where you are supposed to find your own compass about what is ok and what is not, a group of people who are just ok in harming other people are a problem not just to themselves but to everybody else, and to the system itself. I remember Bruce when telling us the exercise on how to develop our ethical system mentioning how some people are ok (really ok, not just suppressing the feeling ok) in doing everything, and how this was "a problem". Maybe that tradition did not solve this "problem". Maybe Lao Tzu was wrong and not everybody was born good. Interesting point of view. Indeed the percentage of sociopath is not a constant in different cultures, so it might be measuring something.

Is committing murder against the Tao: No, it is against humanity. What you do to others you ultimately do to the depth of your soul, so it's usually not a great idea. Tao couldn't care less. It's you who are hitting yourself when you do it. There are some people that do not have a problem in killing. My understanding is that those people probably take less karmic weight for doing it. The problem is not so much theirs but of everybody else. But then those people pay a big price as their life tend to be quite black and white. Not feeling any connection with other human beings. Maybe we could say that if you have killed every trace of humanity inside yourself (or you were born without, both are possible) than you can also kill without paying any price... more. A more interesting question would be: can a person like that recover its humanity? Says the retired soldier :-)

what a great act of generosity!

They seem closely coupled :-)

Hello, thanks for the interesting paper, and thanks for your explanation of it. For us non doctors those kind of explanations are important. A few things: 1) when they say "spontaneous orgasms" I don't think they are referring to night pollution, but to actually experiencing orgasms, like state of bliss. Something so common among celibate meditators, and so rare in other people. Are you sure they speak about "night pollutions"? Maybe we can ask the author? 2) you say we need to chose between steroids and amino based hormones. Of course you must mean that we need to chose between two different balances, one that have more steroids and another that have less of them. But no human being can survive without steroids or without amino based hormones. Beside Cholesterol, which I understand being a steroid and the precursor to pretty much all the steroids (except Prolactine??), is being regulated by the human growth hormone, which is not a steroid. So I cannot see how can you get one without the other. It seem to me that you need to play between various steroids, not between all the steroids and all the other hormones. BTW, I went back into my notes. When I said that Serotonin was connected with Monogamy, I was wrong. Vasopressin is correlated with Monogamy. And Monogamy is then connected with discriminate partner choice (duh), Serotonin is just correlated with discriminate partner choice.

The reason why I asked this question in the first place, is because I have noticed an interesting relation. According to http://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Love-Lust-Theresa-Crenshaw/dp/0671004441 on serotonin: people with low serotonin tend be more casual over who they have sex with, people with high serotonin tend to be more discerning. people with low serotonin tend to be more impulsive. Very high serotonin leads to spontaneous orgasms. Serotonin (with endorphine) is also correlated with happiness or contentment. Look at it in order: low serotonin: impulsivity sex with anyone (and I mean anyone, they can cross the interspecies barrier or do any form of sex which have no reproductory sense). Middle serotonin people become more monogamous, are more discerning over who they have sex with. High serotonin spontaneous orgasms. can you see a trend? Then there was a paper describing how people who would masturbate after a period of celibacy would do it out of some sort of desire which is different. But then later on (often the same day) they would masturbate again, now out of compulsion. So it looks to me that as a person is celibate he is building up serotonin. Which considering the serotonin is a precursor of melatonin, which is a precursor of all the steroids, makes sense. As you need to build less steroid the organism has more serotonin. As serotonin grow you slowly become more discerning. And generally more stable. But everything that reaches a limit will go toward the opposite. Eventually you have so much serotonine that you start having spontaneous orgasms. This is ok, but if at this point you have a real sexual orgasm then you deplete your steroids, the serotonin goes down, and with it all its effects in terms of contentment, sexual discernment and so on. Also it should be noted that as you start having orgasms, they might release so much dopamine (Another neurotransmitter, related with energy, and will), that it start to close the dopamine receivers. Now you have high serotonine, and (you perceive) low dopamine. As a result your spontaneous orgasms grow higher and higher trying to have again the same dopamine, and the whole thing is unstable until you cum. As you cum, after some time serotonin goes down, perceived dopamin is at its historical low, and you feel really bad. Then you keep on masturbating out of compulsion. (as the paper before describes). Then the cycle starts again. And regarding the fact that animal with low serotonin jump away from a heated plate faster than animals with high serotonin, well there are multiple reasons for that without having to recover the unmeasurable ghost of consciousness. But I would like just to notice that on a similar test where they asked people with different level of meditation to move away from a heating plate, the people who did meditation for longer would also remain longer. The really high meditators did not move away and eventually the researcher had to stop because is somehow unethical to burn your cases. But the researcher admitted that he was curious to continue. Also if we consider the claim from taoist master B Frantzis that pain are sensation we are unable to experience fully (or something similar), it looks like the fact that someone does not move away might be due to the fact that it feels the full sensation, and not because it is numbed to that. EDIT: link to book

Thanks, I didn't even know that serotonin is a precursor of melatonin. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2843929/?tool=pubmed

Very interesting. I have of course read the wikipedia page, but I was not aware that Mantak Chia had given a neurobiological explanation to all this new stuff he does. Is there a single document where he relates all this? Something like taoist neurophysiology, or similar? :-)

Hi Taomeow, I am not convinced by your conclusions. But before I make my point I would like to explore them further. Can you please give me some references. You know, the usual :-). Pietro

Hi, do you refer to The Descent of Man ? Darwin's book where he explores the question of evolution applied to the human species. There is a key point in evolutionary theory that is hardly understood. The point is that it is easy to assume that a species A (existing now) derives, from a species B (existing now, also). This is usually incorrect. Because if you go back you can find that the species A derives from a species C that existed x million years ago. And that also the species B derives from the same species C. But C is neither A nor B. Because while A made its evolutionary trip, in those x millions of years going from C--->A. B also made its evolutionary trip from C--->B. So that x million years ago we had no A or B, but only C, and now we have no C, but only A and B. C is usually called the "common ancestor" of A and B. Now it is in fact incorrect to say that Human evolved from modern days apes. Because if we go back to the common ancestor, this was of a species that is now (probably) long extinct. I think this is clear now as it was for Darwin. I a not so sure if it was so clear to the people that were attacking Darwin. In any case the common ancestor between a human and a bonobo, if it was alive today would probably be categorized as an ape, so maybe the royal society were right in feeling threatened. Uh! Uh! In any case we are still far from drawing the evolutionary tree correctly, and we now have information of metabolic pathways, DNA, DNA of extinct species, carbon dating, ... that expecting Darwin to be able to give this kind of informations correctly would be preposterous. His great intuition was that species are not fixed in time. And that a recursive process where we have a casual element (mutation), selection of advantageous traits, and reproduction can bring on an emergence of complex trait is one of the greatest intuition in the history of science. It totally turned around the edifice of intellectual understanding of the world, where we assumed that there must have been a God because if not where did complexity came from. We still have a lot to learn (luckily, or I would be without work ;-) ). Now the fact that selection is based on competition or collaboration, that works at the level of individuals or of groups, tht human beings evolved through an aquatic species, or not, that uses only DNA or also other protein... all this does not negate Darwin, but just polishes his work.

The homo aquaticus and the idea that some mammals passed through a stage inside the water (elephants also if I recall) does not contradict the idea of darwinian evolution. Just the particular path evolution took. That's no big deal. There is a talk on ted about it too. Surely enough if you go back at some point we an bonobos have a common ancestor. Now that's where things went crazy! (bald mine) I am not sure what other taoists do, but I am a taoist and I am a scientist, and I research in the topic of evolution. SO there is at least one taoist who considers darwinian (actually neo-darwinian) evolution as a workable premise. What taoists of our tradition usually don't do is to "believe". In our tradition we don't believe in things, in fact we have been also given practices to help us "not believing" things. The word believe for a person who does those practices (which incidentally are usually taoists, but obviously not all taoists do, since you seem not to) has a different meaning. More similar to how a scientist (an honest scientist) would use it: I have looked at it from all possible angles and my best guess at this is that...

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=D3hHzQGBefY Benigni trying to stop Cristoforo Colombo. Personally I think we just should never evolved as a different species from Bonobos.

We know meditation can be done in every moment (except, of course answering posts on TaoBums), but what everyday activities naturally bring you into a state of meditation? How do you describe in Taoists terms this state? What activities use to bring our ancestors into such states? How did have effect on society?

agreed with all that has been said before, but if you wish to to retain you should be able to do it without having a wet dream every 4 days. Consider going to a chinese doctor to see if your yin is a bit weak. You might strengthen it with diet (fish, for example). Just little tweaks, no need to worry. Beside at your age is better not to take herbs, as this would take away their strengthen when you are older and really need them.

Just came to me this morning.

Hi Stig, It might have become clear to you, but not to us. I personally value transparency especially in the way a community of any size is governed. So i think it would be a good thing if how you feel the community should be moderated and how the other moderators feel the community should be moderated should be out in the open. Without that decision I do not know what to expect out of your resignation. In any case I join everybody else in supporting you as a member, and asking you not to leave taobums completely. Pietro