sean

Awesome questions everyone, thanks so much. I'm going to start organizing these questions into an interview format. It's going to take me a few days at least, so feel free to continue to post your questions. I'll keep an eye on this thread. Best, Sean

I think i fixed it. Give it a whirl. Sean

can you link directly to it, i'll check it out. sean

Been wrestling with a forum upgrade for well over 24 hours. Lot's of things out of place, including some code spilling out at the seams in certain places. I still have a ton of work to do and I've barely even touched customizing the template. But as far as I can tell the forum is stable so fire away. Please report any bugs or glitches or general weirdness in this topic, thanks. Thanks, Sean FEEDBACK: when you "preview the post" the newlines are all lost. Except that the second time this did not happen. Boh! (pietro) pietro, or anyone else, can you reproduce this again? i'm not able to reproduce this issue. i'm using chrome. Where did all the little swirly thingies go? (taomeow) coming soon! having some issues with the template editor. namely, it's not working at all, heh. It takes forever to load. I guess it is part of the new thing. (durkhrod chogori) please elaborate. you or anyone else. is it general slowness? is there anything particularly slower? opening a forum, opening a topic, replying, etc? thanks. i may move to a new server. done: the emoticons didn't pop up in the sidebar until after I both hit the button and then clicked show all (capital) Oh! No emoticons! (cat) i believe i've fixed this.

I want to apologize for how long it's taking us to fix the new design here. It's just very tedious to modify these themes, in fact this is one of the main reasons I procrastinated upgrading the forum for almost a year. I've decided to put my feelers out here for any web designers / web developers that would like to help us with The Tao Bums. Your first task would be to fix this theme and get rid of the green and blue and bring us back to our previous black, white, pearly color scheme. We need someone with experience with HMTL, CSS, PHP, and ideally at least a small portfolio to show examples of your work. The Tao Bums doesn't have a budget yet to afford to pay you. But we can offer you something pretty cool for your work here. I would be willing to send out a newsletter to the mailing list of members here, applauding your help with the design work here and with a link to your website for anyone on the list that needs web services. Considering there are several thousand confirmed members of the forum, this could definitely drive business to your freelance business or web design company. If you are interested please PM me or write me at somlor AT gmail.com. Thanks! Sean

hey guys, i appreciate all the feedback on the design. besides the header graphic it's obviously just an "out of the box" design from the forum upgrade. it's pretty tedious to re-style these things (which is actually one of the main reasons i procrastinated upgrading for over a year), i just need to carve out a weekend to do this soon. if any of you are experienced web designers and want to help out, feel free to pm me or write me at somlor AT gmail.com. thanks! sean

agharta and drew, ticos are wonderful people and costa rica is beautiful. but i kind of got into a bad space for the last half of my time there and got sucked into a kind of party drinking lifestyle so i sort of missed out on the yoga scene or anything productive unfortunately. speaking of thinking you are at a different level, i was meditating a ton before i moved down there and feeling pretty imperturbable. then all of a sudden i'm on this remote beach with nothing much to do. high quality problem, right, and probably a meditator's dream. but i guess i just wasn't ready for that much "space" and i got sucked into some old humbling patterns. i've been back in the states a month and i already feel saner and back on track so i'm happy about being back. agharta, suninmyeyes, thanks for sharing your experiences with 80/10/10. for the first week of 80/10/10 i also slept a ton and generally felt like crap. but now i have so much energy i don't even know what to do with it all. i too have a history of anxiety and that is probably the number one way to get me to quit anything, if it increases my anxiety i'm out. but in this case, somehow, i had the clarity to just face the challenging emotional stuff that has come up. for example, one thing that was really hard was that for a few days i really felt like a part of me was dying. specifically the part of me that goes to food for emotional fulfillment. it wasn't so much that i was not enjoying the 80/10/10 food, on many levels i was, it's really easy for me to eat sweet fruit, but on another level eating became more about functionality. "i am giving my body nutrition now". that was a hard transition. anyway, had to process some weird stuff, but once i moved through it i've just been feeling better and better with random pockets of awesome and still few rough patches here and there. we'll see how it goes. i'm definitely playing this experiment by ear. sean

thanks for the info. it's hard for me to tell so soon what is beneficial detox and what is just not going to serve me long term. i have noticed i am almost compelled to want to move and stretch and exercise which i've considered a good thing since my work keeps me rather sedentary. i've been cheating a bit with things like steamed veggies and mushrooms with rice and chicken broth and it seems to be supporting me on some level. not sure yet if i'm going to keep pushing it toward strict 80/10/10 to see how i feel. my instinct is to go about 80% with doug's suggestions and then the other 20% i will "supplement" with savory soups and sashimi. what do you think of that? what if anything you've found has served you long term? also, i'm not in costa rica now, back in the states plotting my next adventure. sean

agharta, please elaborate. did you do 80/10/10 long-term or have direct experience with anyone doing it long-term? I'm very curious as I've only just begun. I've read interviews with athletes that have been on the program for years and seem to be thriving, but as with everything individual experiences vary. Sean

Hello, yes it's been challenging but I feel good and more importantly it feels right for me, at least for now. I'm not at 100% yet, still steaming veggies/mushrooms with some rice here and there. Care to share the modifications have you made? Sean

Thanks for recommending this. Added to the top of my reading list. Sean

Hey thanks everyone. It's my pleasure. I've been procrastinating this upgrade for sooo long, it's just been sitting on my to do list looking at me every day with a sterner and sterner expression. hah. Pietro, everyone, yes please let me know any feedback. Anything. Comments about the look and feel, bugs, annoyances, things you like, feature requests, plugins you would like to see installed, etc, etc. I am curious, what do think of the full width layout? Do you like it better than a fixed width centered version? I am going to edit the first post with all feedback to keep this organized. Sean

For what it's worth I started the 80/10/10 diet a little bit before 2010 and I feel amazing. You'll absolutely lose weight and have more energy IMO. Sean

No problemo. Sean

Via Official Google Blog A new approach to China Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different. ... [...] we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. ... These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. Full story here Sean

Thanks for more details about "The Book of Nei Kung", just ordered it. Also, it's cool to see positive things said about Falun Gong. I also had good experiences with this form years ago. But I also eventually shyed away from it when I read some strange things that Li Hongzhi was saying. Sean

Great discussion. I've been fascinated with this diagram for years, but never dug nearly as deeply into it as this topic here. One thing that drew me to this diagram immediately was it's striking similarity to the Jewish diagram of the Kabbalah. The only other person I've seen online discussing this connection is Bradford Hatcher of Hermetica.Info. Here is a back and forth I had with him back in 2006, hopefully it adds to this discussion in some way. ------------------ Brad, I stumbled across your site today via a post in a Yahoo group about the taijitu symbol. You are the first scholar I've heard even mention the similarity of this diagram with the qabalah, something that struck me immediately the first time I saw it. I have been pretty desperately trying to find any published works that discuss this diagram at any length, and if there are any other resources that discuss it's similarity with the qabalah that would be a godsend. Terrific site and life work, Brad. I will have to make time to comb through it with more depth. Thanks, Sean Hi Sean- I haven't seen much on the subject either. But it seems so obvious. Naturally the form of the Taijitu uses Chiese concepts or "sephira". But really all you need to do is tease Chokmah and Binah apart to have a Tree more modern than Kircher's. I got what I could form Henry Wei's OP Authentic I Ching and Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China. I teased Richard Smith (a Yixue historian and professor at Rice) with the notion, so he's on the lookout for anything relevant in his travels. It being the 10th Cent for Chen Tuan and the 111th for Zhou Dunyi, I would imagine that the Arabs had something major to do with the transmission through India, the Mid East and into Southern Europe. I mention some other names in my book, links between the two Chinese scholars. Can't remember where I got them though. Maybe Fung Yulan? The links I have in the Tongues section have the names of some of the Arabs who might be worth looking at. I wish I could search translations of the Ikhwan al Safa encyclopedia (10th cent?) and the like for clues. I'm pretty certain an Arab scholar would need to be brought in. That's where the lights were on in that era. b. Hey Brad, I really appreciate your response. Yes, just splitting Chokmah and Binah apart, exactly! It's unbelievable. I am shocked no one else is touching this. The five element correspondence is interesting also, with Earth as Tipharet. Very Taoist. Hey, so two quick questions. Is this diagram explicitly featured in and commented upon in these books you recommended? I am going to pick them both up if so. Authentic I Ching I found easily on amazon, but when you say Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China, which volume did you mean? I am getting a bunch of different volumes coming up on amazon for that search. Thanks again! Sean Yes it is. Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilization in China. Volume Two, History of Scientific Thought. pp 304-345. Cambridge University Press, 1956. This is going to be pricey. You won't want the abridgement. I borrowed from the library and copied the 41 pages on the Yi. Fung Yulan was the unabridged 2 vol as well (if it's even in there). Henry Wei (not the other Wei) is an out of print pb, worth having for other reasons too. I tried to see a correlation between the Wu Xing and those 5 Sephira, but I don't think it's meaningful. I suspect he diagram was forcibly adapted. b I see a connection but I could be stretching it. Well, off the bat Chesed and Gevurah appear to be in the right place, Water and Fire. Then Tipharet is the Sun vs. the Earth in the Chinese system, but I can't think of a better analogy to sum up the metaphoric center of these two cultures. Sky God vs. Earth God. Really could just be a cultural difference of languaging arising from the significantly different geography and lifestyle. Then we get Hod and Netzach which I think if you just flip the positions of make more sense ... Hod as Metal and Netzach as Wood. Whattdya think? Sean I'd agree with that - Chesed and Gevurah as Shui and Huo, but flipping Mu and Jin to relate to Netzach anh Hod respectively. Still, about all Tu and Tipareth have in common are the letter T and the color Yellow. b. heheh... Sean

AYP Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha Adyashanti Could you talk about and/or link to topics here where you've discussed your experiences with this book? Thinking about picking it up. Thanks, Sean

Lagrangian coherent structures: The skeleton of water Via the Economist What is emerging is a picture of fluid dynamics more subtle and more complex than anything dreamed of even a decade ago. The atmosphere and the ocean are, it seems, dominated by invisible barriers that have come to be known as Lagrangian coherent structures. They govern the movement of everything from the trajectories of aircraft to the distribution of pollution, the migration of jellyfish and the tracks taken by hurricanes. They are, as it were, the skeletons of the sea and the air. To understand what a Lagrangian coherent structure is, it helps to imagine a crowd at a railway terminus, says Thomas Peacock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who studies the structures. Some people will be arriving. Some will be leaving. And, whichever they are doing, they will be going to and from numerous different platforms. The result is chaos, but structured chaos. What emerges is a shifting pattern of borders between groups of people with different goals. These borders are Lagrangian coherent structures. They are intangible, immaterial and would be undetectable if the passengers stopped moving. But they are also real enough to be treated mathematically. Read more ...

Ok, I raised the max number of connections significantly. Please let me know if you get this error again and I'll raise it even more. Thanks! Sean

Has anyone received this error recently? Please let me know, yeah this is serious, I'll have to look into this. Sean

I am going to do an email interview with Jack Johnston, creator of the Male Multiple Orgasm Step-by-Step product. If you are unfamiliar, basically he has refined a specific form of vocalization that he teaches as part of a method to elicit multiple valley orgasms and "heartgasms" in both men and women. It's a pretty unique method, I've played with it in the past a bit and have recently begun experimenting with it again and exchanging emails with Jack. So he has offered to do a Tao Bums interview. The only other man who has survived such a grueling encounter was Ken Cohen himself, so let's see if Jack is up to the task. So whether you have a lot of experience with his techniques or zero, check out the site at http://www.multiples.com/ and hit me with your best questions. Here are some off the top of my head: Does this technique work for everyone? How long can I expect to see results? What is a suggested daily/weekly practice routine for creating optimum results in reasonable time frame? Do I always have to make this sound during intercourse? How would you describe a valley orgasm? A heartgasm? Are you suggesting there is there really such a thing as intense, pleasurable, climactic style orgasm, complete with PC and penile contractions without ejaculation or retrograde ejaculation? Hit me guys and girls, I need your input! Sean

I really really deeply appreciate everyone who came forward and offered their assistance. I have not had the opportunity to write everyone back yet who did so, but please know that I really do appreciate it. This feels like a good, well-rounded team to me. Here's to many more years of TTB being a supportive environment for some of the weirdest discussions on the Internet. Salud! Sean

Thanks for the nudge Mal. I've been meaning to upgrade. I think it'll cost me a couple hundred bucks altogether. Hmm... if we rounded that up in donations I would feel obliged and then more motivated. heh, After three years of running my own business now, I'm still 90% externally motivated. haha... Sean