peter falk

without doubt, i have found the rosetta stone systemof cd-roms to be the best, and that is while living in china surrounded by native speakers to teach me. i unconditionally recommend it. it even critiques your pronunciation. people have really commented to me how much my chinese is improving since i got it.

damn! we're a well-read bunch. i'll have to go back thru this in more detail as i catch up with things here. i'm reading "the last of the blue water hunters" by carlos eyles. great book about guys who spearfish while freediving. no scuba at all, just breath holding. some of them go as deep as 100 feet to spear and catch fish. they take fish over 400 lbs! while holdin gtheir breath! jesus christ! but there is also a deep spiritual side to the book that empowers all this adventure. it involves surrendering to the ocean and seeing it as provider rather tahn doing battle with it. it involves quietude, communication with nature, the spirit of adventrue and letting go of limitations. kind of an underwater tom brown book. the wrting style isn't really that good, but the content is compelling. eyles wrote it while dropping out of the rat race and living off the sea on catalina island.

damn! i'd have a lot of research to do, being so much of mixed blood. that was some pretty cool and informative stuff. i've always wondered about zoroastrianism. i actually thought it came from india. mystic fire video released this great posthumous joseph campbell video where he traces a lot of mythology and religion into the remote past. very fascinating stuff. he avoids saying that one or another mythology or religion is the source of all the others though. he avers the similarity is because they all have the same source--the human soul. also saw a good bbc video on the real life noah. they traced him through mytha and history and archaeology to ancient sumeria and even identified the actual flood the story refers to. also much older than judaism.

i'm the wolf. what scares me is that i feel entirely too self-satisfied with that..... "You are the king of smooth -- enough said."

got all the david attenborough dvds there are to have in china at rockbottom prices and have wtched them all several times. by the time he got to the life of mammals he verged on the mystical. a deeply profound observation of nature and mankind. this man has become one of the sages of the age.

get "the complete idiot's guide to the ijing" and the author explains it. in china most foruntetellers don't use yarrow stalks anymore, just flat sticks with red tips painted on them. i think its the same technique though. yarrow's hard to comeby these days. you need 64 stalks if i remember correctly.

if he ran for president i'd vote for him.

maybe we could restrict ourselves to a sort of yosemite sam brand of cussing. to wit: -GREAT HORNY TOADS! -ya long eared galoot! -rackmsackmsickcrumkrckm -i's hates that rabbit and so on. to of course be followed with intelligent refutation.

have you tried feldenkreis or chiropractic?

neither. yer the no. 1 taobabe. btw, ron, i'm with sean on this decision. i've stuck up for you before. in this case however you're neither adolescent, childish, funny, or raunchy. just plain malicious and mean-spirited. no one digs that. you'll never achieve tao as long as you remain so self-absorbed.

i can't read that link because the great firewall of china blocks all geocities sites. however, there is a lot of truth to the part you excerpted. but i also see problems. repressed sexuality is a powerful force, especially in the absence of any work on the ego. likewise, boosting sexual power with alchemy can also lead to "evil" if nothing is done to the ego, which is constantly trying to usurp our psychic power. furthermore, going overboard with hedonism is a problem as well. i dont think the "real" meaning of the tarot can ever be so neatly stated though. there is meaning on many levels to the tarot depending on teh individual and the context. they are archetypes that speak to each of us according to our level oof understanding. there is a lot of alchemy in the tarot, as well as psychic and spiritual development. we need evil. we live in a dualistic world. when you achieve tao and live in the infinite oneness, fine, at that point you become beyond good and evil. and you can't really inhabit the flesh anymore at that point because you are no longer dualistic, that is to say, polarized, and your atoms need polarization to exist. you cannot bring the tao down here, you must rise to meet it. ren fa rong also said this on a trip to louguantai monastery i attended. when you cease to be dualistic, you can longer exist dualistically. so there is good and evil, just as there are day and night, male and female. the danger in this line of thinking is taht everything becomes ok, from overeating to child pornography. "it's not evil, that's just an illusion of dualistic thinking." some things are evil. it's better to be a demon and achnowledge it than pretend youre an angel when youre not. in fact, i'd rahter have a consciously, self proclaimed evil parctioner as a friend than some sleepy, unaware flake who thinks their super nice and super compassionate, as a friend. the flake will screw you and everyone else they can while believing he/she is some great loving person. with the evil dude, you know where you stand. child pornographers are evil. commiters of genocide are evil. unfortunately i've rambled on about an excerpt i havent even really checked the context of, so all of what i just said may be totally fucked up.

i would like to add to this conversation for th erecord that i have a great deal of respect for the peopel who stick to the issues. lozen never really got into presonal attacks on anyone like some people did. all of us tried to analyze one another's thoughts or feelings, we even jumped to conclusions about them and made assumptions. i think that's ok because it occurred on a civil level without namecalling (with one exception). i don't mind attacks on my personal philosphies and beliefs as long as they are intelligent and don't attack my worth as a human being. it's one reason i participate here. i value these kinds of dicussions that challenge our personal values and beliefs and am grateful for them. even with this kind of disagreement we basically kept the discussion intelligent and civil. some us will change as a result. others of us will live and let live. i "met" lozen just over two years ago and am amazed at the growth and progress i've seen in her work as well as her genuine enthusiasm for it. i hope that seeing this growth is also a reflection of my own, but it's better left to others to see that. there is also the possibility she's grown in ways that i haven't, and these kinds of discussions bring that stuff out. for all of us. if we just stroked each others egos all day like i've seen in some forums, we would never get anywhere. as far as the concierges go, i admit that i am probably the most conservative in that role. not because i find things objectionable or offensive, but because i am concerned about all the participants as well as the legal implications of allowing certain material to appear. in my heart i may be wilder than any of the others. thoug h i don't have to deal with the issues of being short, big-eared and green. anyway, be that as it may, after so many discussions about moderating with the other concierges and the big kahuna, sean, i think it's best to honor the vision the founders of the list had. it works best for me personally, but that's not why i agree to it. i agree to it for exactly the reasons sean states above.

i also have this pic which mrs. columbo got for me in chengdu: http://www.damo-qigong.net/tu/neijing/xiuzhen.htm fact is, this stuf is very hard to translate. i've had people read it to me aloud, cuz they know the characters, but they don't know what it means substantively. i'm stilllooking for someone who is good enough at ancient chinese and englsih to translate it. some of the stuff, little labels of locatins, you can deal with, it's the big sections of text and explanation that are hard.

that's fine. that's her choice to make. there is nothing the tao excludes. i hope that if she has something of value to share with us she will. i also hope she sees the value in things she doesn't currently see it in. in the bible, jesus hung out with the prostitutes and the tax collectors, for which he was reviled by many important religious leaders of his day. he also knew the law better than many of those same leaders, for which they reviled him even more. now i'm not likening us to jesus, or saying that there is anything inherently virtuous in prostitution or robbing people of the fruits of their labor. i'm just saying that there is more to things than we often realize. sometimes the sacred is found in the midst of the profane, and vice versa. sometimes, what we think is profane is really sacred, and again vice versa. i'm not going to claim the infinite wisdom it takes to know the difference. i'm going with it and i'll learn on the way. just think, jesus could've been a guy like ron jeremy. oh no, wait, ron doesn't like tax collectors

i jsut work with fire and water and everything else seems to take place. the worst thing you can do with this work is fill your head with a lot of complicated ideas. unless you're going to be rading hte ijing, dont worry too much about those trigrams. here's a simple practice: work your core channel. move the energy up and down the left and right core channel using your hands. palms up as your go up, palms down as tou go down. eventually you should be reaching over your head and bending over to the floor. feel it deeply. then imagine the early heaven bagua over your head up therein the heavens among the stars and the later heaven down there in the center of the earth or on the ground under your feet. as you go up, pull the later heavcen bagua up the core channel and place it into the heavens on the early heaven bagua. as you come down, pull the early heaven bagua down thru your core channel and palce oi the ground or into the earth, and so on. for however long you feel like. note: DO NOT WORY WQHAT THE BAGUAS LOOK LIKE. JUST KNOW YOURE BRINGING DOWN THE EARLY HEAVEN AND BRING UPTHE LATER HEAVEN. let the baguas teach you the rest.

yeah, i think that's it. i got shit boxzed up rioght now so it'd be hard to check, but that looks like it.

after sleeping on this i have decided that you can have it both ways, and that it is important to do so!

i was just going thru the gallery section, something many of us don't do very often, so i thought it would be interesting if we commented on our favorite pics. i'll start off. my fave is lezlie bending over backwards in her underwear. we should put it on our homepage.

aw, shit. i loaned that book to someone and never got it back. let me look at my complete idiot's guide to the ijing and see if there's anything in there. i also have trouble with the thunder wind, etc. thing. the early and later heaven bagua just refver to two different states of being. when you incarnate here, you're in later heaven represented by that bagua, which is out of balance. as you cultivate, you move toward the early heaven bagua, which is balanced. notice heaven and earth , fire and water are directly opposite in early heaven bagua. that's the recreated state.

what symbolism specifically? i find her work to be very informative but f limitied usefulness here in china because she does not use the pinyin romanization of chinese. this makes it difficult to cross-reference her chinese terminology or ask for further explanation form chinese speakers cuz they dont recognize it. a lot of it i had to piece together from other sources.

this may be true. but how is sacred expressed? and how is profanity expressed? this is a very thorny issue. i remember one night at tracker school everyone was sitting around the fire telling dirty jokes. someone remarked that they didn't think Grandfather would appreciate our behavior and then walked away indignantly. later on, tom told us how in the middle of a sacred ceremony grandfather would crack a dirty joke and then continue with the ritual. i've been in sweat lodges with natives who do similar things. there's purpose to this. ron, bless his soul, does a lot of sacred things on this board in his own inimicable style, and i'm grateful for his presence here. so what exactly is sacred and what exactly is profane, and, how are they properly expressed? you might not be able to have it both ways, but either way can be fun and spontaneous, or boring and overly serious. finding the balance is important and doing it with your own personal medicine is important too rather than according to someone else's prescription. sacredness is not an excuse to stop rejoicing in the wonders that surround us.

excellent assessment, lozen. screw your feminist friends! you know, the women here in china, though fully in favor of liberation and equal rights, at the same time have a lot of scorn for western feminism. the whole "Ms." thing, which i have to explain in Business English, is confusing to them. the times i found business partners to be most open and laid back were among the american indians and the chinese. they didn't have a lto fo uptight notions about sex roles and people were able to joke freely with each other, even raunchily at times. i remember at a conference with some navajo, ojibwe, lakota, yupik, chupik, tigua, and a coupleof others we were writing this report for the government. during one of the breaks i told the facilitator, who was a navajo this joke: Q: what's the difference between the rolling stones and a scotsman? A: the rolling stones say, "hey, you, get off o my cloud!" a scotsman says "hey mccloud, got off o my ewe!" well anyway, after the break, he gives some inspiring introduction to the next section and then goes on to tell the group how he's like to 'come to my brother peter here, who told me something remarkable during the break. peter would youlike to share?" and i'm thinking, what the fuck is he talking about. so he tells me to tell him what i told him about the rolling stones. holy shit! i thought. they got some pencilneck form washington spying on us (they really did) and he wants me to tell a dirty joke! it took some convincing. i was more concerned about killing theior project due to adolescence than i was with offending anyone, as those of you who know me know. so anyway, i told the joke. and the pencilneck jsut about had a seizure--from laughing too much! it changed the whole meeting. we even played a game at some point where all the men and women had to touch each other's asses. evryone had a good laugh. i get my chinese students into similar games to break the ice and teach them some "real" english once in a while, which they love. maybe it's because of this anchor of traditionalism or semitraditionalism that makes it possible. political correctness is right out in these cultures--navajo and chinese. you should hear the nicknames they give each other like fat girl, or jap, or stinky. and no one seems to mind. learned some good midget jokes from the medicine men too.

nowadays, for self-defense, it probably pays to get training in all areas and ranges--kicking, punching, grappling, edged weapons, sticks, firearms, etc. the world is a dangerous place and has many modern tools with which to kill.

if i had a scanner i'd post it for the world to see. scanners are shockingly uncommon here in china. however, i'll copy it and send it to monkey. maybe he can scan it or get it scanned. postage is also pretty expensive here. the copy i have is a handout from HT that mantak supposedly did. it includes a numbered diagram and a brief explanation of each numbered position. it comes free with the poster. that poster, btw, which is in color from HT, is highly coveted by the chinese i've shown it to. they've never seen it in color. only etchings.

i don't know what 4 shen you have already...... loads of stuff on google about gurdieff