Pietro

Well, no, I am against it too:

Ok, now I have a bit more time. On friday I left the office, and the only internet connection, and there was no book club. I read from the phone (from where I cannot post, it does not work) the book club. ANd then in the space of one day it seemed we were all confortable with Charles Luk. I had to go to a great length on Sunday to find a connection to write my post. May I ask in general to take more than 24 hours to make those decisions. I just some time like to take the week end off, and I suspect others do as well (or they should! as a matter of fact ). I tend to agree with Tao Meaw. Although I have to say I never managed to read much of Charles Luk. Yes, I have it, yes I have tried it, but my internal censor stopped me, calling bullshit. My idea of Eva Wong book was not to sound or look academic ( Can I mention that I also own an History of Taoism from Robinet somwhere ), but to really paint a frame. There are academic books on taoism, there are ancient taoist book, there are medieval taoist books, there are modern books on taoist practices, and there are introductory books on taoism. And then there are books that are neither about taoism nor from the taoist tradition. Well Eva's book is an introductory book on taoism. It is not academic in any extent. It easily readible. It gives a good background, and it will permit us to have some sort of vague map later on for our next books. I would also stir away, for now (!), from those pillars like the daodejing or the zhuang zi. Maybe they should have a standing reading section. But the idea of reading the dao de jing in one month, and then commenting I find it both commendable and incredibly amusing. And I also would stir away from practice book from other tradition. Independently from how much they might be Taoist-like. At least for now. Taoism has a HUGE tradition, ancient, wide and diverse. You can easily pass a lifetime and only scratch the surface. But if we start to cross mix at this stage we run the risk to just make a big mess. So I would say the way to go is: 1.) Get the basic picture 2.) Get deeper in the sub-tradition you want to explore. Find out what the main books are that has been translated, and read them. 3.) Discuss how the practice we have read link to what we are studying from our teachers 4.) go back to 2. Either going deeper, or to another sub tradition. 5.) every now and then deepen your picture by going back to 1. with a similar book (Example by reading a Taoist Anthology) What we should avoid instead is: 1.) find a book that is very popular and sounds taoist-like (Luk, not taoists...) 2.) read it and try to practice from the book according to your understanding. Pietro

Hello Gamuret, my name is Pietro, and I use to know David when he was in Italy. We since long time lost track of each other. But I might be able to add my .02 cents. David is slightly younger than me, unless he grew older faster than me in the last 10 years :-D. When I was 22 I think he was 19, so now he would be about 34-35. The second thing, is that David is, like me, Italian. In Italy, when you get your Laurea you become Dr. The law has changed just in the last years, so what I tell you might not be correct anymore. It is about 10 years that I have left Italy. In any case a Laurea (according to the old law), was more than a simple degree, and less than a master. It included a thesis (which a normal degree usually doesn't), but the thesis was not considered a publication (unless you publish it later). As such a bachelor degree would not be considered valid in Italy according to the old law. You would have needed to do some extra exam, or at the least write and submit a thesis. But yes, I think the thesis is a public document, so I suspect that if he got a Laurea from an Italian university you might be allowed to go to the library of that university and get a copy of it, at least for some years after the candidate has got his degree. Often also supervisors keep the thesis of their students, so if you find out who his supervisor was, you might ask the favor to have it for some hours, just for long enough for you to photocopy it. So, all this to say that David can call himself Dr. Verdesi without having done a PhD. He just needs an italian Laurea. So how are people who finish a doctorate called in Italy? Still Dr. Is all this confusing? Yes. It took me some time to realise that I could not use the title Dr unless I had a PhD when I was outside of Italy. I also 'kind of' remember that David was teaching at some point in a Sweedish University. Could be a course in 'Compared Religion'. Although I don't know exactly what the content of the course was. Hope this helped clarify the confusion. (well maybe it just made it deeper ) Pietro

I decided to start a new thread to express even more how the ontological problem is separated and uphill respect to the ethical problem. This thread refers back to: Tao Bums Forum Growth and development Folksonomy, For Pietro (and anyone else who cares) Hello Sean, thanks for letting me know of the post you wrote on Folksonomy. I missed that at the time. Yes the concept of tagging in mind opening. The idea of tagging individual posts is not new. It has been tried before by Anthony Eden, when he programmed, following the specifications from Russell Beattie, tagsurf. Tag Surf was essentially a forum where you could tag the posts individually. Like I suggested for the threads. But the individual posts, like you specified. When it came out, I thought it was going to be a break through. It ended up being a hole in the water (italian expression litterally translated: meaning something totally useless, like trying to dig a hole in the water). Why? First of all every internet technology needs a certain number of people to be turned on. For example wikis need few very dedicated people. Or a LOT of partially dedicated. So communities where the community is already there, and they start a wiki, like for wikipedia, are succesful, but when the community is not there, or it is too small, often the wiki will just not turn on. The more the people has a topic to work on, the less people need to be there. Intranet corporate wiki can be very small, but still succesful. Tag surf was a technological jewel, which had no community, and no topic. First it was used to discuss tagsurf itself, then it became Anthony's blog, and then that ended too. I tried to convince Anthony to release the code, but (long story short) we never managed to get an agreement for taobum.com. He wanted to keep the code private and to have all the posts appear also in his website, and well, the content of the posts at taobum.com where not of the kind you would want to appear in your main website. The second problem is that posts are generally too vapid, too short lived to be tagged. People rarely (and inconsistently) tag articles they have written, while they more often tag (in del.icio.us) articles that are too long for them to read then. One line quotes are nearly never tagged. So giving the possibility to people to tag posts is not going to work, IMO. At least not as the basic structure. It can be an addition that can be added in some cases. We tried to make a system to tag objects that were being sold on ebay, but it never took off. Part of the reason was that those objects only exist for short time. Then they are sold. Why would someone invest time to recover something that they will not need anymore. Better to have it forgotten. Similarly if you could have access to your memory, you would tag days, events, episodes, but you wouldn't tag paragraphs, and individual comments. The cost/benefit ratio is (unfortunately) too low. Nevertheless, the idea of taging post could be made to work through a lot of work. Examples: You could potentially have the title of the thread be one of the tags, so you could have more than one title, and then a post might appear in more than one thread (with of course all the problems in terms of spam that this might generate), and so on. You could have that when you answer one (or more) post(s) you get to chose from the tags of the previous post(s) which one are still valid. I don't hide you that the idea is extrememly interesting. And as you said, it could made it all to appear as if nothing was going on in the background, while this great indexing machine was working. Still I would suggest that we start by tagging the threads. This in line with the extreme programming idea, of doing only what is really necessary. Also one thing was to start from an empty website, but now we have a full blown forum with hundreds of people, and we just cannot start again from scratch. So we need to make tiny changes. Ones the threads can be tag cloud tagged, (i.e. by many users), then we can extend to the point of being able to tag the single post, and make those tags appear in the thread too. But let me suggest to go slow. And avoid the thin ice. And the last thing we need to take care of is that, the fact that something is theorethically possible (as in, there is the mathemathical solution to this equation) does not mean that it is also computationally feasible. Maybe once every post has its own tag cloud, the amount of data that need tobe handled is just too big. Whereas if we just tag each thread we are working with an amount of data which is at least one order of magnitude smaller. One thing that I will insist is to use tag clouds and not tag sets at every level. I have serious reasons to suggest this. About the reantacoder thing. Yes, that was exactly what I was thinking about. I tried rent a coder myself, but I could not get a coder for my project (just debugging an open source program from an annoying bug). So I avoided mentioning specifically that website. But if you had better luck, or you know better how to use it, then we should definitly (try to) use it. We might even consider contacting Anthony, and hear if he is interested in helping us. Maybe by now he is willing to use some of his code. Regarding the cost, I am more than willing to pay the other half, provided the code becomes open source. Said that, as part of this community I think that the more people are involved in the specification, implementation, chipping in, the more it will be a community feature. And since to work it needs to be used by the community, the more people believe in it, the higher are the probability that it gets used. tao-te-wiki teaches. Also, if we start to have a coder, from rent a coder, it could even become our standard coder, to which we refer all the time. A little bit like mediawiki has become for wikipedia. SO I was baited Well the ontology of taoism is: -water method -diet -everything else Where as the Onthology is what we are discussing here

No prob, Sean; we are all very busy. Take your time, too. Pietro

Personally I'd rather start with a more general book. Something along the lines of The Shambhala Guide to Taoism. By Eva Wong. I think it would give a nice introduction, setting up the stage for the future books. Somehow after this we can see where each book belong in the Taoist millenarian tradition.

You should repeat the question in the main forum. But yes, bad things can happen, it does not always wear off. Sometimes some people can help, some times nothing can be done. And some times the situation is so bad that the most compassionate thing would be to end the poor guy misery. Many people inthis forum know at least one or more person who had some bad things happen, although in most cases they DID recover.

Don't tell me! if we get to make those tags I am looking forward to suggest a way to let similar threads automatically be suggested. Like the "if you enjoyed this you might want to read this" function in Amazon. I have thought it all, and it would just use tags. If you look on my blog I even describe how to do it. Also right now the threads are mostly in a time structure. If they start to appear in a topic structure you get to read on a topic until you are familiar. Imagine looking for all the threads on retention. Or on kunlun. or on the healing tao. It would be like having a different forum for each topic. Except that all topics are just one forum. Speaking about holding the One! It would be like turning on the Turbo.

Hello everybody, and thanks for all the feedback. Reading through the feedback I felt the necessity to clarify a few questions. So here is the tags F.A.Q. Is the idea of letting an ontology emerge related to the use of ontologies for the AI people? Not really, let me explain better: The term Ontology has been used in AI pursuing a dream. The dream was to use them to make what is called the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web was the personal dream of Tim Berners-Lee. And since Tim has nearly singlehandedly created the world wide web (the internet was already there) this vision had got a LOT of attention, a lot of money, and a lot of development. But it never took off. That is not in full. Why it did not took off is too long to describe right now, but essentially it was a very top down vision, that would enviosion everything being well ordered so that machine could understand them as well as human. It did not fly because reality is not well ordered, and every human being divides reality in a different way. Instead a different vision took hold, what is now called web2.0. That thing for which Time's 2006 man of the year was You. The web2.0 was mostly made by hackers. Some now millionair. The semantic vision, was mostly made by professor. Nearly all still poor. The dialectic between the web2.0 community and the semantic web community would take up many many posts. So I will spare you. But I will post you to one article and one video. The article was some sort of groudbreaking post, that most web2.0 people have read, and mostly agree with. Yes, it has been criticised, but never totally denied. It really explain why ontology does not work as a general principle, in our society, for large topics, for many people. The aricle is here: Ontology is Overrated, by Clay Shirky The video instead is a funny video that shows better than many other the kind of mind opening that happen when you start to let structure emerge from the bottom up. The video is here: As such neither me nor Sean are suggesting to have an external ontology system, that would constrict people where would they write, or what to write. Sean might be more attent about what is written, but that is the ethical problem, and has nothing to do with the technical solution that I am proposing here with the tags. If the whole point is to reach our true nature, isn't all this too complicated? Well, actually the whole idea of the tags is to make something as easy as possible. Yes, it might be quite complex to program it. A bit like the internet is really complex inside. But then you can absolutely use the internet without losing your true nature. And then some of us have that technical mind as part of their nature, and this is why people call us uber geek. . In other words, reality is complicated, martial arts are complicated, internet is complicated. But you can live in reality, and use the internet without handling all that complication. And about being a martial artist, well, speak to Buddy about it. I am just a tao geek. Would the fact of giving to anyone the possibility to tag any post with any string imply that eventually no one will read my posts because someone tagged them as "off topic"? The fact of having tags appear will never force anyone to ignore a certain post. As such if the tag "nonsense" appears, this will not, cannot, take away a post. At least not in the modifications that I have in mind. Could with time someone program a search that stops him to read posts with a specific tag? Yes, of course. But we are here to open up possibilities, if some people chose to censor themselves it is not our role to stop them, right? Can Sean write something that would stop anyone from reading posts appearing with negative tags? Sure, but would Sean do it? He has shown to be quite against censorship (within limits of good manners). There are more effective ways to censor people, just by banning them, so any modification of this type would get very much discussed before being tried out. The tags are not here to solve the ethical problem but the ontological one. Giving us enough space to grow. Can a minority of people use tags to control the whole community? Let's suppose we have 4 type of people: a) people who would not tag, and would not use tags to search people who would tag, and would not use tags to search c) people who would not tag, and would use tags to search d) people who would both tag and use tag in their search Now I claim that there will be very few people that would tag, and not use tags to search. I mean, if you are making the (relative) effort to tag things, why would you not use the tags yourself. So mostly people who tag will also use them. But then when people start to use tags when they search, it is just a matter of time before they start tagging themselves. Things will never be tagged exactly as they wanted them, also to really be able to be sure to find back the things they need to tag. Only relying on other people tags is generally not reliable enough. It is like in delicious. Others tags can be good to discover something, but when you have discovered you definitly want to tag it yourself to make sure that you find it back. And the first time that you do not tag it yourself, and then you spend half an hour to look form something you will know that those extra 5 seconds were well spent. So essentially people will either tag and use tags, or not tag and not use tags. In this sense the possibility that a minority of the community starts to control the whole community through the tagging system is really non existant. Will the experience of the community become worse for the average person who chose not to use tags? No, it will be the same. The only difference will be that a list of tags might appear on the side (that link to some common search), and you will have the possibility to add tags. But I assume the basic window with all the new threads will still be there. Of course since the aim of adding the tags is to let the community expand beyond its current limits, the number of active threads might become much bigger. Why can't we just remain as we are, and let the community find its own balance? It is true that this community will always find its balance. If too many people will be posting the community will look as too complex, and no new people will join. Instead old people will gradually leave, until the community will reach its equilibrium again. We had this dynamic happen at the HT discussion board many times. But right now we are in the unique positon to be able to let the community grow, riding the wave. If this happens TTB might become the number one community on the web dedicated to inter school taoist meditation. This would mean that we get a direct experience on all the new school that will open up. And we get to be among the first to give some direct feedback. Also greater teachers will start postiong here. Already a number of instructors, sifu, teachers, and academics are writing here. But to make the place wide enough for all of them we need to make a space that can expand with the people. If not those teachers will just start to trample on each other foot, and eventually leave.

Yeah, give me this responsability too I have a flight in a few hours. Those days were pure gold, I was in Tuscany, but now I need to go back to Dublin. I have tons of things to say, but to avoid getting all tangled up, you'll have to wait till I am settled in Ireland again.

I think I'll go for the poem he improvised which started with: the pussy, the cock, the battered bed, and empty bottle of San Giovese, this is heaven for me, the... ADDENDUM: I actually keep on remembering bits and pieces, like when he said: BECAUZE WE ARE HALF ANGEL AND HALF MONKEY, BUT THE MONKEY DON'T GIVE A FUCK

how to pronounce hfd? Hi August Leo, I think e-ich ef-fe di.

Thank you everybody for the kind words. Actually, Craig, I was thinking about you when I wrote the description on how it is possible to win respect over time. So I am not that surprised that you liked it. It should fit you like a glove Sean, I also appreciated your message. I have to say that I don't feel anymore like a guest. I feel taobum.com has now finally been buried, with a laugh, as it should have happened long time ago. Long life to thetaobums.com. Speaking about the community, I would say that we are facing two different problems. One is Onthological, and one is Ethical. The Onthological problem can be expressed as: how do we split up Taoism in a way that makes sense of all of us. So that we find all the posts on a certain topic together, and generally no posts of different posts in that topic. The Ethical problem boils down to: what is an acceptable behaviour, and what not. I want with this post to try to actively help in solving the onthological problem. Mostly because I do have a solution for it, and also because I think that ones that is solved, the ethical problem will be less severe, thus giving us time to face it properly. Being a son of this generation I am convinced that many problems can be solved a priori, by changing the technical features we are using. In a sense we already have the solution. We just need to tweak it a bit, add a few extra bits, and make it obvious how to use it. The idea is that everybody will have its own personal onthology. And this will let the onthology of the community emerge bottom up. How to do so? But using tags, of course. Tags are already there, they were introduced some time ago. Possibly after my suggestion, but since at the time I was in a big brawl with Sean himself, I never got a chance to explaine in full details the idea, and how it should work, and so it remained this sort of added thing, only partially working. I now, would like to finally explain in details how tags can be used to solve the problems we are facing. We only need to modify them slightly from what is alread implemented. How do they work right now: Any person who starts a thread can now decide the thread tags. This would be ok, if we were all agreeing on the same onthology. Then we would all tag a thread in the same way, and we would all feel ok with how a thread is being tagged. But fortunately we are not like this, thus we all feel like tagging (which essentially mean classifying) a thread in many different ways. Plus not everybody knows how to use tags, and so on... And the result is that very few people are really using those tags. And this makes them useless. So the first important thing is that each person must be able to tag any thread. Yes, not just his own thread, but any thread from anybody. I can start a thread, and Cam can tag it as "Pietro's nonsense again". And this must be ok, too. Not only, but the tags of a person should not get confused with the tags of others. So we should be able to see who have tagged what. It should then also be possible for a person to easily search for all the posts that he has tagged in a particular way. By making it easier for a person to tag things in way that he likes, and then giving him the possibility to search according to his own personal onthology we are providing the reason for members to tag the threads: If I want to keep an eye on a particular thread I better tag it. If I want to keep the threads I am looking organised, I better be consistent in my way of classifying them. If I want to be able to search for those thread time after, I better use intuitive tags. Technically this change might require to insert a whole new table on the mysql database. I hope there are already some tools out there that supports this, but I am willing to divide the expenses of having a programmer write the code needed for this. Now as a thread start to receive tags from many members, a tag cloud starts to form up. This is a list of tags, where each tag has a different weight. The tag cloud is the emerging onthological classification of the thread, according to community. It will be like: 20 people tagged this as kunlun, 10 people tagged this as fire method, 5 people tagged this as newmasters, 30 people tagged this as retention, and 9 people tagged this as nonsense. Or just, kunlun, fire method, new masters, retention, nonsense. (with the size of the tag reflecting the importance of each tag). Once this is done we have to implement 2 search funtions. In each of them the list of threads should appear as in the main page (red square if there are new posts, white squares if there are more pages, etc...): get me all threads that I have tagged with the tag x get me all threads that n person have tagged with the tag x get me all threads this person (...) have tagged with the tag x Essentially we will be implementing a sort of local del.icio.us classification (Sean knows what I am talking about). Once this is done the richness of this community will start to really shine. Everybody will start to go back and tag threads that were important for them, to be able to recall them. People will use tags to refer to a certain series of threads. Instead of saying, the answer of this is in those threads, a person y can just tag those thread with some word (i.e. answers on kunlun), and can then refer to the page: get me all threads y have tagged with the tag "answers on kunlun". Also a tag cloud for all the community can then be added in the homepage, with each tag t pointing to the page: get me all threads that 3 person have tagged with the tag x This will let people get on the spot the list of the threads on the topic they are interested in, according to the emerging onthology of the community. It might need some further tweeks, but this is the basic plan. And can assure that if it gets implemented it would let this community grow to much more than 700 active members. But of course it needs a lot of work, and I don't think Sean has the time to program it. Maybe if we agree to do it we could outsource the programming to some external programmer. Right now free programmers willing to program things for others are very common. Sean, as you will remember years ago I was a vulcano of ideas. Eventually I stopped, and once I came back I avoided to speak to much. If you feel that my posts start again to sound demanding, please let me know. For me is hard to realise why does not everybody see those "simple" technical solutions

I saw a post from him in the HT. For what I know he was playing Chess with Trip for quite some time after TB thoe other forum was closed. And he posted a few time in Plato's Prostate forum. On the other side he has let go of his address: http://taobum.servebeer.com/ maybe he just let that mask drop, took a new one, and is among us.

Dear Brian, I personally appreciate your posts very much. I have limited knowledge of taoism, respect to you, but I have been in online forum, and in this forum for ages. So I hope you take no offence if I try to share some of the insight that I got about posting here. This because I like so much your posts here, I feel you can give a great contribution, and I would like to see TB to have you as a permanent member. The first thing I discovered is that it is totally pointless to try to get respect by refering to anything like age, credentials and such. The first Tao War (a big flame war that happened in the forum before this forum, around year 2000) was started by a healing tao instructor who had been given the title of master from Mantak Chia and started using it in its signature. It is even worse trying to impress. I don't think you are trying to impress, but I others are, right now, and they might be reading this message as well. I agree that all this is really disconcerting. If you teach at the university Daoism, you are generally use to have students respect you. It does not work here. I am not saying that there is no respect, just that it is not easily, or automatically, given. I know this might sound vaguely offensive, but to get respect in this forum a few things need to occur. - You need to know your topic (which you obviously do) - You need to give hints that you are embodying it. How so? -- You need to be unmovable. Essentially what gets respected here alot is the ability to stand, under pressure. Both from external pressure (people disagreeing with you), and internal pressure (your inner demons, compulsions, and so on). The assumption is that the more mountain-like you appear, the deeper your meditation must be. And thus the more you can teach us. Come, say what you have to say, and do not give a hint if you are observing the reaction or not. This is hard to explain, but essentially the easier it is to offend you, the more you will be mocked. Childish? Yes. But this is how it is. And it is easier to change ourself, than to change this whole community. So for example, saying that something is horseshit is ok. We all have done it. At least I never knew of anyone protesting. If someone protests (via PM), most of us would just ignore that person. Some would mock him. Some compassionate might say that they are sorry, in fact if you honestly feel that you need to say to someone that you are sorry, then do it. But to say: "I have been invited to say sorry, but I don't feel like, but I will do it anyway", it all points to the fact that you are letting this forum push you around. So you are easy to be moved. Another thing (this again is not so much on you, but it goes nicely with the others): -- The more you need to go back and re-edit your own posts, the more fragile you seem. Look at all the posts lately, and look at who are the people who had to delete all that they have said. This will give you a hint of their stability. And from this you can judge their path. -- The more you can just get online, say what you have to say, and ignore what happens next the more stable you will be perceived. -- You need never to take offense. If someone is annoying you, then take Ian's suggestion, thank those people silently, for giving you the material for your next meditation, and go back to your cushion. At most half a hint, months later can be dropped, as a side note (in italic, two paragraphs above ). -And of course being social creature, it is also true that the more respect other give you, the more respect newcomers will give you. Yes, it is true that we often enjoy moving from one topic to another. This is partially due to the fact that the whole place is very losely moderated (and most of us enjoy it that way), and due to the fact that we know each other from some time. When you know from a long time it is quite common to cut thread, and insert things from one thread to the other. It might be a nightmare to control, but is quite pleasent to follow. Still we do try to follow up on the topic. Unless, of course, we feel that all that the question have been answered. Or the point taken, and in general the topic has reached a stand still. For example, the topic in this thread has come through at least 4 different threads, and will continue in a few. As well. Who cares if this thread gets polluted. We will keep on discussing in the others. While my sensation respect to your thread, was that your question has been answered. By yourself, and here: . Do you feel that the answer were not enough? Do you feel that the jokes on polar bear somehow stopped a thread that would have brought on more interesting informations? I am interested to know your take on this, because I felt that the discussion had both answered you and provided entertainment. So, I hope that you are not driven away but our chidish behavior. I hope you can keep on sharing your knowledge with us, and ignore, those that you cannot help. With love, Pietro

LOL If there are more forums inside. Like one for KL, one for the HT, one for whatever, will people be allowed to discuss the value of those teachings in those forums? Will the people be allowed to discuss the value of those teachings outside those forums? What I mean is: A thread like: Kunlun, a complete path or a complete fluff will be allowed... where? Because I can see how the people devoted to a path would not want that kind of posts inside (we want a place that is safe). While I can see how people who are not interested will not want those posts outside. My take is that each forum will have to accomodate ALL the posts on a topic. Both pro and against. But I can see how as soon as there will be moderators that are actually practicing that path, those posts will be in real danger of be removed. So on the forum on HT, here at TBs, people could discuss pro or against HT. If they only want to hear the pro-bell then they should go to the forum (if there is any) in the website of that school. This would make sure that TB never becomes a forum which is perceived as a forum only for a single school. Now, Cat, can you please expand more on the deodorant topic. It sounded so full of promising details! LATE ADDITION: after writing this I realise how much this is the opposite of what I was saying before, on the same topic, in the out of topic thread. The truth is that I am very confused. On one sense I feel that TB, is growing, and to keep on growing need to start to differentiate. On the other hand I can see how this is full of difficulties, and maybe it would be better off not differentiate, and let the extra people make the forum unconfortable enough for some people to leave. Thus finding a lower balance.

Freeform: - all or nothing is a failure strategy. "Until I am able to ...,", is very often the same as saying, I will never... - I don't want to help them, but help me. It feels wrong to me to cut them out. As I don't like to be cut out, even when I might have a different point of view or be a bit crancky. - In another corner of this forum, a well estabilished member threatened a new member to send him cancer. And all just escalated because the guy was being critique of the project discussed first (probably with good reasons), and quoted her in part (probably, again, with good reasons). In a community of people who are generally able to send/feel energy this can be quite unpleasant. Even when is meant as a joke. I like both those people. Probably more than they like me. But I DO NOT like this kind of behaviour (yeah, I am posting from Ireland). And when the whole community start to align behind this and that person, saying this is a troll, she is a well respected member, I see all sort of warning lights start flashing. Treat people as human beings, and not as troll and they will generally respond in a similar way. And if they don't at least you have treated them as human beings, which is good for yourself. Right here, now. Not then!

Hi Brian, welcome to our forum, then. When is your book coming out? I am looking forward, Pietro

Hello Ian, is not related with imposing rules, it is more that cutting away someone feels always as cutting away part of my soul. And, no, sending a PM is out of the question too. Apart the fact that I don't send PM even between friends (how many have I sent you in those years?), but I simply find that to be even more ghettoing? (making someone feel he is in a Ghetto). Something like saying: I would like to speak with you, but they would all look at me bad if I do, so I will only do it secretly. So, sorry but I will not participate in your We vs Them game. I will, as much as I can, try to reach out. As disrupting as this might be/feel to you.

And what should you do if you don't find someone annoying, but everybody else does? If you keep on speaking with that person you will be viewed as feeding the troll. But if you don't you will make a wrong to your own heart, which just wanted to touch that person as well. You get what I mean?

I think the release of endorphine and adrenaline just will give you that. And there are very good evolutionary reasons for those hormones to be released, as you need to be as awake (in phisiological terms, not spiritual ones) as possible to look for possible alternative story endings.

I did, at least until I got bored. It is so boring that even the critique of his work end up being boooring. Thanks for the link, though. Made me economise $10.

If it doesn't include taoism, it can't be a good book

Yes, I am often quite taken aback by some of the quotes, too. And if you dig in that thread you will find my quote from long time before, which you might even agree on. Yes. It is unfortunate. But do all the people who became Christian in history knew Greek? After all some people might have a serious interest for Taoism, but a serious difficulty in studying languages. Which is a totally different set of skills. Many things, thanks for asking. Some of the things we learned were techniques. And those are somehow the easier to list, if you ask me. But then each technique was given with explanations about how it can go wrong, what to do if it goes wrong. As well as how to apply it, and when to apply it, and why. So, for example, you might be given a technique on how to dissolve blockages in your body or mind. Then it would be explained to you when you should do it. In what cases is better not to do it. Then what other techniques should be done before. And what other techniques can be done at the same time. In which case this opens up the door to how those techniques work together. Ecc. And all this respect to the how. But then you have the why. And here is where the taoist philosophy is more important. How Taoist aim to see reality, directly. So, for example, the idea that there is no good or bad, becomes real, when you are told to dissolve not just blockages coming from bad things that happened to you, but also blockages coming from good things. Both your demons and your angels. And only then you will be able to see reality. Similarly we have been presented with Taoist morality, as a way to distinguish what can be done, and what "is not a good idea" to do. This not as a list, but as a way to discover your own list, by yourself. With the explanation that eventually most people will end up with a similar "list". But never with the same. And so on. Teachings about taoism, are followed by teaching from taoism, who are followed by techniques from one of the branch of taoism, their how and their why. All of them are mixed together in a direct, very intense experience. And under all this there is the teachings without words. Both coming from the fact of being with a person who is embodying many of those principles, and and from the direct transmission of some of those teachings. And what about you? You obviously know Chinese. Can you tell us more about your study of Taoism? Are you in China right now? Have you been in China? Can you tell us something of the Taoism you are studying?

No, if you think your words are relevant, please explain how. I do not speak Chinese, nor did I said that I do. What I did say is that my teacher spoke Chinese, which he does fluently. Being a Taoist priest and a taoist master, lineage holder. As such I feel I am learning Taoism from a reliable source. And from there I could answer you. I went to the favorite quotes, looking for maybe a translation to those characters, but I could not find it. You just posted them again. Is that what you wanted me to see, or was a general remark on the quality of the quotes that people find memorable?