Apech

Thanks Wilfred for all you have done. I think it's amazing when people give up their time and energy to make this board a better place. I think your contribution has been fantastic and it's a big shame that you felt you had to step down. See you in chat Mr. Penguin.

She must be so compromised by all the favours she's brought in.

Better known as DaoBums.

I'm still looking for the Stork:

If a person is suffering from serious illness then you should follow Doctor's advice. In extremis it is more important to preserve the body integrity and to prolong life. If the treatment itself produces imbalance this can be dealt with in the long term.

Don't say anything.

In terms of energy cultivation, what many people overlook is that stages involving renunciation (in the sense of losing attachment to worldly goals) and conduct (as in having an ethical view) are important to forming a stable and strong subtle body. The more work you do on yourself the more adequately you will be able to respond to life's demands and also the more you refine the rate at which you can assimilate new experiences (on all levels) will increase. We are incarnated in this world to learn this, or so I believe, which means each time you take a knock, you get up a little stronger - 'what does not kill us makes us stronger'. There are times when cultivators have to retreat in order to master some inner subtle process but for the most part engagement with the world is healthy and necessary for our development. Ultimately reality can be viewed as a field of energy and beings within it are modalities of that field. Our ultimate identity is with the field itself - but the work to attune to this level is quite hard. The boundaries which form beings (our skins if you like) are formed by that intelligent power (spirit) for good reason and so whilst ultimately there is no separation between beings - in effect we need to work within the boundaries formed. As above so below, as within so without. And so the cultivator works in the microcosm on perfecting their own being.

Yes I think a deal has been struck.

Ban them all (he screamed from his iron throne).

Yeah but it's a groovy kind of nothingness.

I think wuji and wu chi may be the pinyin and Wade Giles transliterations of the same word - i.e. the limitless (lit. without pole.)

Defamation?

Wuji schmooji.

I suppose the one good thing you can say about the Tories is that they certainly sort out their problems quickly. Even though one of the chosen ways seems to be to foist your greatest buffoon on the rest of the world as Foreign Secretary - a seeming act of madness which might turn out to be an act of genius. How many days did it take to get rid of that hideous Mr. Gove and the hitherto unknown Ledsome? Not many. So now we have Theresa May - who missed a big trick when she went to Berlin not wearing the exact same outfit as Mrs. Merkel (shoes and everything) which as someone pointed out could have freaked everyone out. Meanwhile the Labour party chose the exact moment of Tory confusion and in fighting to implode, foisting upon us their own list of non-entities to challenge the anointed Jeremy. Incidentally the NEC sent out an instructions at this time that there were to be no local party meetings until the leadership elections. How very Stalinist. And Karl don't tell me you don't care about all this. Your Brexit has all the substance of a puff of smoke once this lot have got their teeth into it. You just watch. A soft Brexit landing awaits. Deals have already been struck in the corridors of power. Keep waving your Union Jack won't you.

Damn ... if only I could think of a come back .... (fume).

Your avatar is already disturbing my tranquil equipoise.

Wells, you need to develop non-attachment to your profile - it's holding you back from entering the natural state.

@Nungali Write that book, then the TV series ... then when your career begins to dip go on reality TV or become a guest on a comedy panel quiz show ... On the subject of the beginnings of agriculture - I think its well established that pastoralists do limited farming to promote certain grasses and other plants which are used for feed for cattle. The other interesting observation I read in the great Romila Thapar's Penguin History of Early India was that there was a symbiotic relationship between farmers and pastoralists. In that the pastoralists would drive their herds to the fields after harvest to eat the stubble which would in turn fertilise the fields through manure. So it is easy to conceive of a time when some of the population were still nomadic and others settled. It doesn't have to be, and surely wasn't a drastic sudden change from one life style to another. The other point I think you have to establish to fulfil the 'Atlantis' requirement is sudden destruction through cataclysmic disaster. Can you build that in somehow?

Very happy to say that Damo Mitchell has agreed to an interview. I emailed him a while ago and received this (typically modest) reply. He is the author of several books on Daoist cultivation: http://www.amazon.com/Damo-Mitchell/e/B004J7R0JY/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1398684970&sr=8-1 and has his own website: http://damomitchell.com/damo-mitchell/ "Damo is a teacher of the internal arts who began his studies at the age of four. He was brought up in the UK but has travelled extensively throughout Europe, China and the rest of Asia searching out answers to the nature of existence. His books are a study of the Daoist tradition and the arts which it gave birth to." We have already had some discussion of his work and here are a couple of examples. http://thetaobums.com/topic/21036-daoist-nei-gong-by-damo-mitchell/?p=300003 http://thetaobums.com/topic/21190-lower-dantian-theory-by-damo-mitchell/?p=301922 So I'm hoping for some good questions. As you see we have four months so I'm kicking off this thread now … so by the time he comes out of retreat in September we will have a good interview ready

I've reupped it.

I understand Nungali is very keen.

@Nungas You're right that is more interesting - and you wrote all that yourself without any copy/paste type tricks! I am confused though. 1. Latin may not be the ancestor of Romance languages ? I naively assumed the Romance languages existed because of the jolly Roman Empire which spread Latin ... or are they saying that the extant languages in France, Spain, Portugal and Romania were already Latinesque/Aryan before the Romans. 2 . They talk about the spread of farming ... and yet I also understood that the Aryans in the Vedas were pastoralists ... and they certainly didn't bring farming to the Indus Valley who already had irrigation systems and fields ...

Its an internet meme!

The oldest corpus of texts is the Pyramid Texts dating from about 2345 BC - carved on the walls of the pyramid of King Unas (Wenis) - not a book exactly but since they show clear evidence of being copied from a master version which was probably on papyrus a book must have existed which probably dates back to at least 2500 BC. The I Ching in the sense of the King Wen Judgements and the Duke of Zhou yaoci dates from about 1046 BC but of course the symbols and the art of divination probably far older - exact date unknown. It all depends on what you count as being a book.