Easy

Thanks for making that a little more clear. I did not get that from the OP. The model's images make more sense to me now.

Non, You have either misread the studies or they have been misrepresented to you. This is the how the myth of which you wrote began: 1. When either a male or female fetus is in utero, the level of testosterone in the mother's system is reflected in the degree of facial symmetry in the offspring. High levels of testosterone means a higher level of facial symmetry, i.e. how the two sides of the face match up with each other. (Handsomeness and beauty are both generally ascribed to those who have have a high level of facial symmetry.) High levels of testosterone in a male child while in utero and at birth also generally produce a more robust kid who will mature into a robust man; a man in ancient times who would be more capable of providing sustenance and protection to a female and her offspring than someone from the average range of potential mates. 2. The recent studies to which you refer (and which in part were conducted by a woman--a very good looking woman who had fine facial symmetry and who was once my lover) sought to distinguish what was the most important factor in women's mate selection at mating (ovulation) time; high levels of testosterone or high levels of socio-economic status in the potential mates. 3. To conduct the studies a wide number of undergraduate females were selected. (Note: these were mostly middle to upper middle class white women in their peak child bearing years--U.S. college girls) They were instructed to keep records of their menstrual cycles and they were presented daily with a wide selection of photographs of men in more or less the same age range. These photos also gave broad hints as to the subject's socio-economic status: crisp haircuts as opposed to uncombed hair, neckties as opposed to T-shirts, etc. Somewhere in those always fluctuating and inconsistent panoply of photos were ringers, a man or two of obvious low socio-economic status who had a high degree of facial symmetry. There were also planted photos of average looking men who obviously held high socio-economic status. The women were asked daily to pick out the men who they thought were the most attractive. 4. It was found that during most of the menstrual cycle the majority of the women tested preferred the men whose context showed them to be of higher socio-economic status. But during the ovulating time in their cycles they tended to pick as attractive the men with the greatest degree of facial symmetry despite whatever socio-economic contexts were evident in the photo. 5. U.S. culture generally makes "bad boys, and sinister, non-monogamous and violent type" to be those who come from lower socio-economic status. But the studies were not designed around "bad," "sinister," etc. types. The studies were designed to show that facial symmetry was predominate in the instinctual mate selection of women. This "bad boys, and sinister, non-monogamous and violent type" was just a wrong-headed, cultural projection, a dim-wit blow-by arising out of the nature of the studies. 6. The bottom line is that after thousands and thousands of years of human evolution the female instinct is to select a mate who has the physical attributes to be able to bring home the meat to keep their kids alive. 7. When the two selection alternatives, facial symmetry and high socio-economic status, are put together it becomes obvious that a symmetrically featured, handsome man of high socio-economic status is going to attract more women than any other man, definatly more than your "bad boys, and sinister, non-monogamous and violent type(s)" because he has both of the winning qualities and they have only one...if and only if they have a high level of facial symmetry. The ugly bottom-feeders get nothing but what they can rape or pay. But you, Non, knew that already. Right? How does your face shape up?

Good thinking, nicely written.

This is a good space for me to flow into this interesting thread to write that I while I can understand Stig's original model, I think it has more problems than it has "cash value" as the pragmatists call it. In my way of thinking the problems begin with the apparent dualistic separation between the known and the knower. In my perception the known is a processual emergent in my mind (which is not just the brain) and I am a manifesting event that encompasses that mind. Perhaps the only thing I know that has any cash value is that I am a continually emerging event that permanently, though ever so slightly, effects reality, makes tracks, fathered children, creates steel artwork and generally degrades energy a la the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That story might not be in accord with the Great Metaphysical Truth Of It All, but metaphysical truth is perpetually beside the point. In other words the known is grounded within me, thus it can't be an island. The other problem with the model is that the known, as island, is delimited by its surrounding shoreline and that limits possibility for growth and flow and other dynamics. As you can see I am writing this from a 'process" perspective that has the known in a continually emergent flow. I am going to have to think about this some more, but the corollary of that might be that the unknown is not the ocean, but also a flow in itself that exists just beyond the horizon of now.

It has been pretty clear that Immortal(etc) has been pouring fundamental Christian dogma into this site since he joined. It has been somewhat covert until now. I was wondering when he would come out.

Scurry for the hole Songs, anarchists are out there to get you, get your momma too and sis and her Filipino house boy and the neighbor's Great Dane...yum yum! So many dogs, so few recipes. (As Marble says, Hehehe.) Hohoho.

And that is how anarchy works. No rules from the outside, but respect from within. Here we make it up as we go along; stay close to our side arms and all is ok.

Hey, I find this amusing on several different levels. 1. Apparently no one else has gone searching the web for clues to what is going on with this video. Just call this the instincts of a 33-year-year veteran of various investigative rackets. The spokesman in the vid is Garret LoPorto who claims to be a psychologist or someone who is deep into psych and one of his interests/passions is to direct the energies of young people with AADD etc. into creative channels rather than into substance abuse and so on. It is a recruiting video. I followed it up. I took the test to see if I was a "Wayseerer" and found out that I was, but of course I knew that already. When I was 18 (1963) I organized one of the first anti-Viet Nam War demonstrations in the USA. I also spent 18 years as a private investigator specializing in criminal defense. My mission was to help keep outlaws on the street. I had any number of clients who were AADD (etc) and junkies and crank heads and strangely enough they all had a deep hunger for spirituality, but no way to connect to it because the Little Goody Two Shoes spiritual seekers and philosophy huggers were frightened by their energy and locked them out and then locked them up. 2. It is not surprising that the two of the most prolific posters on this site (a spiritual/philosophical site) didn't quite get the point of the vid. Carl Jung went a long way to demonstrate that the Spiritual/Philosophical fans are hard wired a little bit differently than the kids that LoPorto is trying to reach (Intuition verses Sensory...google "Myers-Briggs" or "Keirsey Temperament"). Apples and oranges. 3. When Songs writes "Yeah, but we need rules to function. Rules are necessary..." I want to reply, "Who is this 'we' you are talking about? You and your sister's Filipino house boy? You and the neighbor's Great Dane?" One of the few things I like about Venezuela is the almost non-existent enforcement of The Law. There is no regulation of traffic and as a result Venezuelans are the finest drivers with whom I have had the honor of sharing the road. There is no law on those highways, but there isn't any road rage either. Everyone respects the right of the other to do what he has to do as long as he is respecting them as well. Venezuelan highways prove that anarchy works because everybody gets where they need to go, happily. Maybe only those who think there is a need for law, need law. 4. I've long since thought that one of the finest sentiments of humanity was expressed in the admonition: "Keep a song in your heart and a smile on your lips as you set out to smash the state." Who else agrees?

Aaron, When I googled "scientific measurement of qi" I was directed to a number of different studies that indicated that qi, as bio-electrical energy, could be measured. Or, in other words, qi is physical. I am not a highly trained practitioner in any manner of speaking but my experience with qi development in internal alchemy and medical qi gung gave me the phenomenological sense that it is physical energy. I always assumed that this was a given among expert practitioners also. My use of the word metaphysics goes more toward the realm of mythology. The experience of which you wrote, my similar experiences, are definitely real. They are actual happenings. But I do not think it is useful anymore to contextualize them in mythological terms.

That is a great sentiment Mythmaker, but what you say only tells us something about yourself. To say that everything is god or dao or green cheese or whatever robs each of them of any significant meaning. Any universalizing statement gives the reader neither effective nor essential information about god or dao or everything or green cheese. It says in effect 2+2 = 2+2. The significance of god or dao or green cheese lies only in their being distinct from everything else.

MH, Nice post, good clarification. You are a man of apparent faithful belief in the abstract. I was born in 1944. I spent the first 15 years of my professional life as an investigative journalist and after that another 18 years as a private investigator and after that I lived in Venezuela. Those three experiential stretches have taught me, and reinforced in me, that I would be insane and probably dead if I believed in anything other than what I can touch with my hands right here and right now. However I can entertain myself with the speculation that The Dao, as mankind imagined it, is a slightly more satisfying fantasy than mankind's imagination of god, but a fantasy in that very same vein nonetheless. It isn't as good as a story, but it makes a little more sense, at least to me as sensible stories go. Different lives can agree to disagree, no?

MH, How do you know that? Were you there? After I wrote in a previous post, "Haven't we had enough metaphysics," I thought through it all and decided that I was being too hard on metaphysics and convinced myself that they are ok as exercises in metaphor. In these days metaphysics can work well as stories as long as all concerned recognize they are grounded only in the mind which is grounded only in the body. In this light metaphysics and statements like the quote above have to be seen as real, but only in the same sense that fantasy science fiction is real. Protagoras wrote "Man is the measure of all things." Whether it is right or wrong is incidental to the fact that anyone who says differently will, at some point, be content to be a subordinate.

Why don't we discuss the observation that the Dao is a function of the human body. The human mind (and the Mind of Dao) emanate within the body to perceive and formalize this apparently all-encompassing and infinitely deep Dao-function. Thus when one experiences the Dao, they are experiencing the one-and-many aspects of the endlessly wondrous human body...nothing more. Haven't we had enough metaphysics?

Hey, When Stig writes that he is not a Taoist, and then Marblehead writes that Stig is in fact a Taoist it becomes clear that this is not a philosophical debate but one of linguistics. As such it cannot be resolved due to the elusive nature of that thing through which humans write and speak. Until there is a universally accepted definition of the words Tao and Taoist then the debate that has taken place on this thread is nonsensical. The first chapter of the TTC (seminal to the context of "Taoism") indicates that by its very nature the Tao cannot be defined...it is by definition impossible to define. So without the ability to define Tao, how can one define Taoist within the boundaries of the context of Taoism? This reduces the problem from one of philosophy to one of marginally intellectual entertainment. I am an old man and I have long since become bored with ideas, debates etc that are essentially only entertaining. I am however highly entertained by the behavior of those engaged in the debates. Occasionally it becomes evident that a few of the debaters are using the process not just for a chance to strike some thoughtful appearing posture, but to make themselves clearer to themselves. If their increasing clarity makes a coherent and sensible change in their behavior than this helps to slow my waning respect for humanity.

Look Blasto, you don't have to go with any of those superficial chemical routes. All you have to do is get underneath it all. Go deep into that pain, let that pain become your entire being...it will only take 10 minutes or so. Let that pain become your ALL, your totality. Immerse yourself in its source. Empty yourself of all but the pain. And then remember the Heart Sutra... "Therefore, Sariputra, in emptiness there is no form, no sensation, no discrimination, no conditioning, and no awareness." NO SENSATION! Let that flood your being! NO SENSATION! You will be pain free...pain free forever...because the Heart Sutra is THE TRUTH!

Hey, I've never watched the videos on The Spirit Molecule, but I don't think I have to because I was one of the 11 test pilots on Strassman's first run. I wrote it up over on the Entheogin Thread. You might want to read that one before getting on with this one. Like Otis, the first two times I tried Ayahuasca I was just bored and restless. But the third time I tried it was up in a tepee on the east slope of the Sangre De Christos way above Mora, New Mexico. This apprentice Shaman had brought the medicine in from Peru and it was better stuff than he could handle. In a traditional ceremony everyone drinks the medicine and the Shaman goes last. He sings his song, tends the fire, keeps things righteous on the alter and then starts the healings and blessings and guiding journeys for the group. Maybe it was the altitude...the kid started his song and then it kind of dribbled off and petered out. And then he started singing again and then there was a little space of silence and he started a third time and then he just toppled over along side the alter and we didn't hear from him again until way after sun-up the next morning. I imagine that the protocols on Ayahuasca in North America have changed since then, but back in those early days it was all about going into the jungle and meeting the Ayahuasca Serpent who was going to threaten the hell out of the seeker at the first of the vision. But the trick was to relate to the beast in the best of positive and supplicatory manners so as to make him/her your friend for life who would always be there for you and who would whisper transcendent wisdom into your ear when the sledding in real life got rough. No one told me that. No one told me about the Serpent. Now in the jungle and mountains and wherever, in the old days the animals were always stronger or faster or more deadly or more willy and cunning than us poor human beings. But I had overcome those human inadequacies with one little piece of machinery called a 7mm magnum Remington rifle that I traded for an 0ld 1917 model 30.06 in the back of a van that belonged to a Western Onida gun runner back when the Skins were running guns all across the western USA. In short, this shamanic seeker-spirit guide animal business wasn't going to play for me. I had no more friends out there because in every situation imaginable I had more power--long story made short. (That's background.) Anyway, back to that frigid tepee in the Sangres: The shaman was out for the count and the few others all lay around and tripped and one-by-one they all struggled outside and threw-up and came back in and went to sleep. I just sat there, bored and stiff from the cold. About the time I started considering crawling into my sleeping bag..."I'll give it another count of 100..." I found myself zipping like a bottle rocket down through some underground mining tunnel. Now that is the classic start of a shamanic journey. And when I popped out the other side I was not in the jungle--I was in the middle of an abandoned mining claim at about 11,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies. It was one of those kind of places you can find way above Telluride or Silverton. (Pay attention to this point: Strassman, when he finished up his DMT tests, told me that no one came out with anything essentially new...folks get from these trips what they brought to them. I had never been to the jungle, but I had spent a lot of time at 11,000 ft in the Rockies.) I knew these kind of sites: a thousand feet of rusty cable strewn around, sheet metal pieces, broke-up ore cars, scrap... And as I stood there all that steel started to pull itself together into a metallic rendition of the Gorgon Medusa...one hell of a serpent. Her head was a 4X5 sheet of 3/4" stainless plate and her body was a spring--3/4'' high carbon steel, one foot across. She was 15' tall. Instead of vipers sprouting from her head, it was all razor ribbon. There she was poised, weaving side-to-side like a cobra, ready to strike. Remember no one had told me about making steadfast friends with the serpent, so I just stepped a little closer to her and looked her in the face and said "Fuck off, I'm a god." Have you ever seen frozen lettuce thaw out? It turns into a slimy liquid and disappears down the disposal. And that is what that serpent did...flowed like used motor oil through the cracks in the rock below my feet. It went away. Shooting from the hip, I'd say that one worked out really well. But from a long-run perspective....maybe not. Nonetheless, I sacked it up and went to sleep up there in those clear sky mountains and never drank Ayahuasca again for at least 18 years. It was almost a year ago at the far up end of the Sunshine Coast in BC. The shaman gave me half again as much medicine as the rest of the seekers. I was restless and bored and unwilling to fall off into the insane DMT geometric come-on, dead-ends I'd seen too many times before. I stayed with it until everyone else got sick as hell and then I laid back a little. Made that time significant. And then I leaned over and tossed cookies all the way back to Christmas. A little later I shook all that off and rose and raided our host's refrigerator. Everyone else was still laying about...working it all out. In a skillet I sizzled up enough rib eyes for all of us seekers, knocked back an IPA, maybe two, and got on with my life.

Nice work Taomeow! This reminds me of a time years ago when I was writing a snippet of dialogue in a SF/Fantasy story in which the all-seeing Crone tells her skeptical engineer who acknowledges neither pre-cognition nor deja vu, "Build yourself a temporal mirror, Renfrow. I know you can do it. And hold that mirror up to time itself so you can see what I can see...everything happens all at once...all of it!" And that played out as a picture in my head and it almost knocked me off the chair. What had happened in my visualization was that I had switched the qualities of space with those of time. Time was static, and space was the dimensionless emergent. If you can work that one in, it is a nice little challenge to the commonly held paradigm.

Is this to mean that virtue is synonymous with authenticity? Turds are nothing if not authentic. There is some wisdom here in what Ya Mu writes: Nothing is ever going to come back.

I suggest you pick up a copy of The Taoist I Ching (Thomas Cleary). It is a translation of a commentary by Liu I-Ming who was a Taoist adept from the 1700s. It is less of an oracle and more of an on-going and open-ended exercise in self-cultivation. The introduction is quite helpful for those who are just getting started in Taoism. It can not be read literally because of the huge gulf between Lui I-Ming's culture and time and your own.

This is good work Aaron. If the rest of us could match the lead in your courageous style of self-examination, your manifest self-critical-analysis as stated above, then TTB would be a much more peaceful site. I especially resonate with the observation about denigrating one's own culture. I agree that you have to be reconciled to your own culture, good or bad. One must find one's fundamental strength in one's own heritage and then consciously and with precise discernment add to that from all the others. Anything other than that which comes up as purely native then one ends up a half-assed wannabe. I grew up in the middle of a culture into which I was not born. Now I am living in the middle of a different one, but I am still coming out from the one that is native to me, fucked up as it is. For example my "be reconciled" from above comes from one of St. Paul's (that miserable s.o.b.) letter to the Corinthians in which he advised that we should all be reconciled to the grace of god. The best line I heard from the latest rendition of the movie True Grit said something like, "...there is nothing free in this world except the grace of god." Now you don't have to be a Christian and your momma doesn't even have to be a Christian, but if you do not know, nor have an analogy for knowing about "the grace of god" then you don't know jack squat. On the other end of that 2,000-year cultural evolution is my "All hail Jean Genet." I have to agree with you Aaron that experience is the key. And this is what ties me back into Ya Mu's post. Ya Mu writes: I do not want to argue because I agree almost 99% but...I am into Process Theory in which one cannot "stop the world." In an old blog post of mine I wrote: Now I have a story that precedes that observation by about 25 years, a story that made that observation coherent and shows that it is not entirely advisable to stop the world anywhere along its path. I was 11-years-old and it was the middle of January and I had just walked in the last half-mile from the school bus stop to our home. The sun was going down. I knew the pickup that sat in front of the house. It was the rig of a grown-up friend of mine, the district head game warden for Central Wyoming. My mother said he was headed upstream, setting mink traps along the river that flowed through our ranch. I grabbed the sandwich she gave me and headed up after him. I needed to see how he did his work. I had no time to Stop the World...the time was 15 minutes from dark and I needed the light to find my way back home. It was a year of a big drought, there was no snow anywhere, the ground was frozen solid...nothing could make a track on that kind of weathered muddy pavement. But I could see where he had stepped, there he went along the trail and there he went off to the side. The moss on the rocks glowed where he had stepped, but when I went back and looked them over there was no difference between his invisible boot-print and the moss 15 feet away. But there was a difference. I could see where he had brushed past juniper branches...they glowed. I could sense the air. Where my friend had passed the air was just barely noticeably more dense, maybe a degree or two more warmer. There was a density to that air I can feel even now from 56 years away. It was close to dark when I came upon him washing his scent off a mink trap. I just stepped out of the willows and said "Hi." He wondered how I had found him since he left no tracks and the light was so bad. But I said I had tracked him up-river and I could show him every place he had set a trap between my home and where we had met. Then he said, "You must have better eyes than mine," and he put me in as a partner in that trap-line for the next two years. So Ya Mu, maybe you have enough medicine to stop the world to take a reading but I don't. I've always had to grab facts on the run and so I'll have to read your book. All I can do is handle flying what's coming at me in the moment and keep a song in my heart and a smile on my lips as I go forth to smash The State and anything else that feels it needs to loom larger than my little world.

If this is the original then it appears to be in line with our consensus agreement on Ya Mu's version of 'virtue.' However, subsequent renditions of an "emotional detachment from the world" have perverted it into "in the world but not of it" type of an anti-embodiment transcendence. I am thinking here of Ramana Maharshi and others like him. The presence here of Manitou reminds me that on another recent thread we agreed that virtue in the Taoist sense had a close parallel to "authenticity" in the vocabulary of the 20th Century Western Existentialists. She equated it with the "uncarved block." I am not sure if the Eastern cultures at the time of the T'ang Dynasty would even be able to comprehend mid-1940s French individualism, but it is something to consider when one is considering virtue...especially High Virtue. All Hail Jean Genet! P.S. M, my unbelievably astute wife and 30-year Kashmir Shaivism yogini, says that virtue/authenticity means the highest following of the Dharma. I mention the tenets of Existentialism and she says, "Oh yeah, that's the Highest Dharma."

Blasto, You wrote: Personally I am a great fan of ambiguity because certainty and KNOWING are so boring. I have a few other thoughts on this thread's issues: 1. I don't believe it is the least bit difficult to understand the universal unity of it All. Just look at the possibility that 13.75 billion years ago everything was one, a whole. And even now it is...we are...made of the same stuff and propelled by the same energy. Unity--we all have the same birthday and we're all damn near 14 billion years old. A high school level understanding of The Second Law of Thermodynamics and a little Process Theory (one can't step into the same river twice) puts the idea of impermanence front and center. Of course all of that is just theory without a whole lot of certainty about it. 2. Having the ecstatic experience of the "divine" is always a Maslowian Peak kind of deal but it tends to interject God and a lot of unnecessary complications into what is, on its own, most profoundly simple. It has been my experience that Spirituality puts an opaque film around that which is numinously clear. However I would never deny anyone their right to put God to a peaceful use any more than I would deny them the peaceful use of any other of mankind's inventions. 3. I like Ya Mu's definition of virtue. He calls the practice Listening, which is nice and compact and gets the point across very well. For a long time I have called what I think he is talking about "sensing the experientially informed instincts," which as a teaching gimmick is a little too long and clumsy. 4. If one of the key ingredients of enlightenment is an "emotional detachment from the world" I don't want any part of it. This transcendence business is as reductionistic in its own way as science is in its own realm.

Hey. You might want to take a look at this. I was a test pilot on Strassman's first run into this abyss. I made his A List because I had a reputation for being able to go to the furthest reach of potential human insanity and come back with a song in my heart and a coherent story to tell. I've been around this stuff...spent almost two weeks with Sasha Shulgin going down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon. I don't like Sasha's stuff. He's a world class designer but he takes most of his medicine off the basic methamphetamine molecule and the best you're going to get out of that is MDMA and if your self-esteem ranks anything above a minus-85 it is going to be telling you megalomaniacal lies. MDMA is nothing but swishy-assed crank and it has nothing to do with entheogins. My advice is wait to do DMT until the last. You have to know that right now you have probably enough DMT in your blood stream to be arrested for possession of a Schedule One controlled substance. As far as science knows it come out of your pineal glad. Once you have done big-time DMT you are no longer fit to do the lesser stuff like ayahuasca or peyote. My dad was an old cowboy and veteran and horse thief and even though he was a white man he ranched on the rez and when he was old and sick his Arapaho compadres helped him out with some peyote meetings and a couple of times I was allowed to tag along...this is 50-some years ago...neither one of us got off on the stuff...but the ritual was cool as hell. Now there are 'shrooms. There is stuff like peyote and San Pedro and ayahuasca and Syrian rue and these are the righteous kind of medicines if you want to get down and dirty and serious and religious as all hell about your issues. A good priest is handy to have with this stuff...but 'shrooms? 'Shrooms are disneyland spirituality. If you are going to work shaman stuff with 'shrooms your heart had better be three times the size of your brain and your will had better be five times that of both. Working with 'shrooms will take a focus that will deplete the best of your qi to nothing inside of four hours and back on the rez I have known healings to take up to 48. You have to work like hell until the work is done--none of this 20-minute, drumming-trance workshop piddlie-do if your are trying to save a life. If you don't have a slack hand who is into your brain and can take over from time to time, you'll get nothing done on 'shrooms. But if you are just into R & R there is nothing like making love on 'shrooms. Far better than grass...but grass does nothing but bore me back to drowning in a cold plunge if that is what it will take to clean that shit out of my system. So it all comes down to some variation on DMT. Because getting 99.9% lab-made stuff is probably impossible except for the director of the lab, I would recommend Senoran Toad venom. Even if you have to sneak around in the Salt River Irrigation Project, night-time in the Spring (its southeast of Phoenix, Arizona) and milk those toad glands on your own and smoke the dried slime from them...it'll put your right with god if you have half your head about you and someone else to hang onto on the ride out.

Hoo ha! I'd be doing what I love to do now: make love to a beautiful woman, hammer steel, drink my fill, run white water, and eat gourmet. Oh right, I meditate every morning and write down my dreams and make a little trouble just to keep the adrenaline up...66 years and counting down on immortality.