Harmonious Emptiness

!!

Not when they've been freed and hold high positions in society, which they did in this case.

You're all free to disagree if you so choose, but take a look again at this fact (post #50) "Another group of slaves who rose to positions of great power, the military slaves, were normally liberated at some stage in their career, and their offspring were therefore free and not slaves." Now, how did the Moors come to Europe? As a military. So if the military slaves were normally freed and then all their successive generations were born free, and all the paintings from as early as you go back show the battles with black-African soldiers peppered here and there with light-skinned soldiers, then I think it's quite obvious. Consider too that the non-Africans had reason to go back to their home lands, while the black-Africans were far more motivated to stay in the Iberian colonies where they were free and holding positions of power. People that are successful breed like rabbits too, so this population would only increase, rapidly. Remember, it's been well over 500 years since the Moors held power in Europe, and since white-Christians would even consider mixing with non-whites in Europe (until rather recently, and not talking about the USA here). So it's no wonder that there are only slight traces of black-African features in the Iberian peninsula. Those traces are over 500 years old with virtually zero continuation of the lines since then, and intense white-Christian-supremacist propaganda ensuring that those lines disappeared once the Moors had basically disappeared from Europe.

I would add to this: I've heard the main reason for full-lotus is to have the feet pointing up. Could other positions that do this (kneeling, half-lotus on a high cusion) be adequate for that effect?

If you take the time to read or re-read my posts here -- not whatsoever.

Interesting history about Chinese voyaging, but it's not like China has any better a track record for human rights abuse than anyone else. Again (again, again, again, again), this is not about who is more civilized than whom, it is about the simple fact that people we would say are "black," today, were at the top of the socio-economic pyramid in most of (and later less of) Europe for nearly as long as (the history of) the United States has existed. I think this has been well demonstrated up to and including post #50 here. Of course, once the previous arguments against this had been squashed, this topic was forgotten and those rebuttals not even responded to. Why can't you all just admit this simple historical fact? It's not about the side details, etc., etc., etc.. This is the fact I'm trying to show, but nobody will admit that I have proven them wrong about it. They argue on the side details while skirting around the principle issue. I'm not saying this topic needs to be locked because it is going off topic or anything to that matter, btw. Just say it folks: "The Moors brought education, hygiene, medicine, math, science, and literacy back into the cultural milieu of Europe while they ruled about half of western Europe, and the vast overwhelming majority of the Moors who remained settled in Europe were black-Africans. Therefore, it was black-Africans who had the most power, education, and wealth in Europe while these developments took hold." I'm glad that you have all corrected me on some of the details regarding dates and changes over time to the map (the moving map is incomplete, btw, considering that the Moors held power in Italy and parts of France as well). However, it was approx. 300 years before the Moors started to lose much territory, and the black-African Moors had already been holding their sense of moral and cultural superiority (narcissistic nationalism) over the Europeans for 300 years, the same way "white-Christian America(ns)" held it over black-Africans for over 300 years and still do. I appreciate that it takes up time to look at this, but this issue's been sitting a long time too!

TTB member Shazi mentioned this rebellious group of Taoists in the Neiye forum and I think there ought to be a topic for further learning about this inspiring group of artists/Taoists/free thinkers. Perhaps people can share some links to their poetry or other information. Here is a link about The Seven Sages of Bamboo Grove: My link I haven't been able to find much of the poetry of Ruan Ji online, so if anyone knows where to find it.. do tell..! As a side discussion (though I'm sure it would be a controversial statement for some), I must say that reading a bit about them, they reminded me a lot of the early hip-hop culture which sought to escape the tyranny of their surroundings and live a life of free and honest expression through music, dance, and art at a time when the superficiality of disco had taken over "the scene" and small groups of free thinkers started their own club outdoors, finding their expression in playful poetry of freestyle rhyming and highly physical dancing that involved much fluid body movements spinning around (not unlike some internal arts) as well as graffiti art requiring a minimum of brush strokes. There was also a system that sought/seeks to control the expression of culture and cage it into the Frankenstein like control model. The arts served the purpose, for both the Seven Sages of Bamboo Grove as well as the early hip-hop culture, to avoid being controlled by a heartless system, and to live from one's true self, even learning more about one's true self by practicing arts of true and immediate expression, enjoying their right to be and live as a real human being [not, necessarily, to be confused with the Real Human or Immortal of Taoism]. edit to add: Of course, hip-hop culture did not seek to transcend desire, ego, and "the 5 theives" of Taoist parlance, though in a way it did in that it sought to transcend the absurd level of importance that these things held in the other scenes at the time (mid 70's to early 80's). (feel free not to comment about the hip-hop aspect.. just trying to add a practical level to the topic)

There's always a bit of that in these types of productions. You just need to read between the (party) lines. It's almost like bootleg recordings. Kind of hard to listen to, but still worth it.

You rang?

Saw that someone on facebook liked a link by famous skeptic James Randi which purported that chi was entirely illusion and imagination. So I thought how to explain how chi works? The article says that all these tricks using chi in martial arts rely entirely on the laws of physics. First of all, these "tricks" were not developed by physicists, they were developed by masters of the chi arts. They learned how to do these things by their knowledge of chi. Following this path of knowledge and practice they are able to learn how to do these things, not by math and western science. So how did they learn to do this? By following the electrical impulses that were sent to the brain while doing this work, and knowing by those energetic messages, what was happening. The feeling of chi is an electric signal that is sent to the brain which enables one to control the body by electric signals, knowing where those feelings are coming from, while also allowing the body natural function. Chi gong is mastering the flow of energy to the body and the brain, perhaps enabling the reverse flow, so that the body energy and body-energy-signals can be mastered, controlling bodily functions, such as loosening the endocrine passages, and overriding bodily reflexes. This may be the scientific explanation of what is happening, but what does science know from its experience about chi and chi gong? It has hardly entertained the idea that it exists, while chi gong masters have been teaching and studying it for hundreds if not thousands of years. I don't recall reading any articles that put forth this explanation before. Does anyone know of one? Also, could someone please direct me to a link about chi gong masters emitting chi to an electrical measurement machine? Thanks hé

We'll all teachers really -- teaching ourselves again what we already know....

I guess even academia has it's applications somewhere down the line. When the highest student hears the path of Dao, they diligently go forth on the path When the mediocre student hears the path of Dao, they appear both present and absent. When the lowest student hears the path of Dao, They break into loud laughter - If they did not laugh, the path would not be necessary. from Dao De Jing, Chapter 41 (my translation) So many people knock philosophy for not being practical, but what is the purpose of philosophy if not to put it into practice and learn from those experiences? Sometimes philosophical Daoism is like having tea with someone 3 times your age. Just enjoy it. Some people will laugh, but that's part of the Path too isn't it?

before the body exerts power there's strength before it exerts strength there's energy so how do they say that chi/energy doesn't exist, and that there's no way to conduct and control that energy with one's intent?

A lot of people here, including myself, can be very strong in their opinions and sometimes a bit of passion is necessary to get the message across, which can easily lead to people ducking out of an intense exchange and not wanting to get into one in the first place. There's insults and then there's insults though, so it's difficult to distinguish. Some things are just playful, some things are so wrong it's hard not to provide the right info without being seeming a little condescending, and some insults are like subtle micro-agressions meant to debase and ridicule the other interlocutor. It's these last ones which are like mosquitos that need to be swatted down. This is a Taoist forum after all. I think when there is a pest problem, Taoists do what's necessary.

Sometimes the best teachers here are good questions.....

No?

Cultivation should do this too, imo.

Maybe credentials could be determined by who authorized them to teach? If they are certified to teach via Wudang, for example, I'd be very interested to hear their input even if they just started teaching. A Grandmaster is someone who certifies the masters who teach the students. So, some notable grandmasters, imo, would be: Anyone from the temples on the sacred Chinese mountains, including independent hermits. Jerry Alan Johnson Michael Lomax Michael Winn Chen Xiaowang There are many more of course. Other teachers would be greatly welcome and appreciated, but they might not be afforded the same privileges, like they might want to wear snake boots to keep the trolls of their ankles, while the other will have mod accompaniment to lock people out of the conversation if they're just looking for trouble. We don't bring the jade eggs out so that people can play soccer with them, but they will be able to examine the dragon lines, etc.. ?

edited the post many times, so, here's the final draft: quote from above link: Offspring: The recruitment of the slave population by natural increase seems to have been small and, right through to modern times, insufficient to maintain numbers. This is in striking contrast with conditions in the New World, where the slave population increased very rapidly. Several factors contributed to this difference, perhaps the most important being that the slave population in the Islamic Middle East was constantly drained by the liberation of slaves -- sometimes as an act of piety, most commonly through the recognition and liberation, by a freeman, of his own offspring by a slave mother. There were also other reasons for the low natural increase of the slave population in the Islamic world. They include 1. Castration. A fair proportion of male slaves were imported as eunuchs and thus precluded from having offspring. Among these were many who otherwise, by the wealth and power which they acquired, might have founded families . 2. Another group of slaves who rose to positions of great power, the military slaves, were normally liberated at some stage in their career, and their offspring were therefore free and not slaves. 3. In general, only the lower orders of slaves -- menial, domestic, and manual workers -- remained in the condition of servitude and transmitted that condition to their descendants. There were not many such descendants -- casual mating was not permitted and marriage was not encouraged. So then for 600 years of military people being freed and having offspring with parents in powerful military and political positions -- what do you think happened? Imagine a large population of military soldiers who were freed, and mostly Muslim, meaning they were allowed to have power in the Muslim ruled territories, while the white mostly Christians were systemically disenfranchised in the Muslim ruled territories. These black Muslims had children who were free and who's parents held power in society, while the whites were living in deep financial, intellectual, and cultural poverty after the fall of Rome in 400 AD (the European feudal system didn't even start until 900 CE, 200 years after the Moors had conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula). If any of these free people, with their powerful parents, had a child, and the mother was enslaved, the father could simply declare her FREE, and their children would grow up with the same powers! Imagine! Slavery only ended 150 or so years ago in the West, and people are still disenfranchised/not embraced, for the most part, by the cultural majority in "the system." The African descendants in the Iberian Peninsula and the surrounding areas (about 1/4 of Europe) were free and politically advantaged, being Muslim, and often connected to the military. These politically advantaged populations, with their military connections, held lots of power in their territories. The tables were turned in these areas for 600 years when white people were (treated as) the "heathens/infidels," and black people were sitting in the chair of political, economic, and societal privilege, not to mention cultural advantages of education, science, math, literacy, and medicine which the Europeans finally (re)learned from the Moors.

It's not quite so cut and dry as that. The way I see it/understand it has a lot to do with timing, and doing the right things at the right time. If your motives are wrong, you will be out of step with the greater mechanism that is turning and determines the outcome, like a musician that stops listening to the band because he wants to show off and play an awesome lick that comes out sounding terrible in the grand scheme of things. Of course there is more to it than just managing your emotions and desires, but that is sort of the main mechanism that catches and reverses a great deal of it, sort of like a safety mechanism on the grand order of things. Not a guarantee, but something that is in place to catch things before they mess everything up too much. Notice that bad things can turn out to be good in their timing with other things too. When it's time to use your adrenaline, then use it, but you will also use it more wisely if you practice this Dao of self-awareness in other situations.

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Another thing I should add here about the Arab-African slave trade, is that, as vortex mentioned in the second thread, those slaves, whether African or white, were all castrated and served in very "non-masculine" roles. They were not warriors as you will find in all of the paintings of black-African Moors.

"That which is done with the Tao will succeed. That which is done without the Tao will fail." This sentiment appears in many many important Taoist texts. I'd say that is essentially the Taoist explanation of Karma/divine justice/Ma'at. What does it mean to act without the Tao? Being overtaken or influenced by strong emotions, such as fear, greed/selfish grasping/egotism, anger, sorrow, despair. Actions that rise out of the Wuji, out of calm openness, they can work with Tao as they can work with people. It's hard enough to work in cooperation with other people when strong emotions get the better of us, let alone to work with the illusive Tao. So if someone acts out of these emotions, their actions will not bear the fruit they hoped for as they will not be working with Tao. It's like drinking water - sure there's lots of water around to drink, but if thirst gets the better of you and you're not conscious of how clean the water is, you'll realize it would have been better to stay calm and ensure the water is clean.

Zhongyongdaoist, thank you for engaging the topic and correcting me on the details of my dates. What I should have said is not that there was no more Moor power in Europe after 1492. True I don't have so many details on the dates. Wikipedia has: The Moors invaded the Iberian Peninsula in 711 and called the territory Al-Andalus, an area which at different times comprised Gibraltar, most of Spain and Portugal, and parts of France. There was also a Moorish presence in what is now Southern Italy, primarily in Sicily. They occupied Mazara on Sicily in 827[1] and in 1224 were expelled to the settlement of Lucera, which was destroyed in 1300. The religious difference of the Moorish Muslims led to a centuries-long conflict with the Christian kingdoms of Europe called the Reconquista. The Fall of Granada in 1492 saw the end of the Muslim rule in Iberia. but, it still stands that it was the Moors who brought education back to Europe, and it was primarily black Africans who were teaching them maths, sciences, chemistry, literacy, medicine, and hygiene. There was also an Arab slave trade with it's false myths, but the Moors in Europe were no doubt free and thriving, and you can see from the paintings, most of the Moors were black. It's not that hard to find paintings of Moors with light skin, but not as many. [see post #30] Note that nowhere have I said this means one race has inherently more potential than another. Only that this history of European education destroys present day racial myths based on the idea that whites were teaching all of this stuff, so they're the smart ones. The way I see it, it was mostly maths and sciences and other knowledge developed in the ancient world which continued outside of Egypt and then later re-learned by North Africans who taught them to Europe. [edited to add wikipedia quote and refer to post #30]

Did that say what it looks like it said?