PLB

What is efficient for the moment is drawn on some account from the future. Sherman's march was effiicient. All that foraging had a cost still being worked out. Once you start really fighting, the event horizon expands beyond one's control.

I take your point about the return of individual consciousness. What I hear listening to the Daoist message is that our idea of history is based upon an assumption of continuity that is not supported by what actually is happening. So the impulse to have a topology is under review. Can one live without a map? Zhuangzi isn't promulgating a complete explanation. He is questioning the explainer.

The element in the book that strikes me most sharply is the evaluation of power. If one is most succesful, conflict never appears in plain sight because the situation is made into one that does not require war. As admirable as that quality may be, we mostly fall short of it. So the the goal is realistic but underscores a lack of resources. Both in oneself and others. That is the pragmatic part. The rest is a painful description of the consequences of failing to be pragmatic.

Maybe the difference is not so much about the karma as the dharma. Everyone has stuff they have to balance. I accept that my life has to do with a lot of stuff that happened before I showed up. But I balk at accepting responsibility for past lives. Or if I do accept the responsibility, it is not like agreeing to pay off a debt or something. It becomes a part of life. I am pretty sure I am alive.

If I am a soul who gets reborn then this life is one chapter in a long novel. If this is the only dance before the finite moon, then life is a very short story. The difference is there no matter who believes who said what about it: Expectations.

Interesting discussion of what "non dual" means. I don't have anything helpful to add but it may not be off topic to observe that this subject is very old and is a part of something that will go on for a long time after we all die.

Seeing the web is important. Maybe there is a way to dance like the spider. On the other hand, accepting the need to be graceful in the circumstances handed one does not let one fly high above what is happening. I cannot accept that all obligation is the sublunary sphere of small minds. I see how that idea is egotistical. But it is something else too. It is less dogmatic on the point of explaining why we are going through all this stuff.

One could turn the question around. Is it really possible to navigate the world without relying upon connections that a person has no idea why they work or are able to specify their connection? You better be meditating or all your positions will be assigned without consultation. We make all these choices. The process of selection runs into the deepest elements of our being. Opening up to that doesn't explain how it all works together. Logic is neither self explanatory nor an epiphenomenon of something else. Accepting that the ego driven options are not sufficient changes all the choices that are to be made. Experience is all tied together. We can change our experience through our choices. I am talking in a circle.

The daodejing speaks a lot about the difficulty of talking about things. So it makes talking about practice a part of that problem. On the other hand, there are many elements that need work. And one just has to get to work.

Marblehead, The scope of what you have taken on here is remarkable. I will have to read and ponder for a long time before adding reply or realizing I cannot. Well done.

Let us turn the thing around. What is it about reacting this way that turns you off? There is something you want and you don't know how to get there. I get that. There is no guarantee that anything attempted will get a person to a different state. That is why it is called an attempt.

I have a work life that goes back and forward between absorbing all my energies or leaving the order of my day entirely up to me (well, I am married with children so that might be overstating the matter). I have come to notice practicing makes some things more at hand in one condition than the other. For instance, when I am highly stressed, the stillness and sung element is like a drink of water, easily swallowed. When the time is mostly my own, those things suddenly become more difficult. On the other hand, when I am not consumed by work, my mind can balance many more elements. Sensitivity is possible in all sorts of situations. This observation doesn't address the larger questions you ask. But I am pretty sure you know what I am saying.

Taiji comes out of wuji. The separation of jings requires time spent in the undifferentiated. If there is a circumfrence to wuji, one is both inside and outside of it. So the separation of jings are a kind of doubling. They are represented as two lines, one on top of the other. The combination of solid and broken lines yields four conditons: peng, liu, ji, an. Qi follows Yi. We commonly experience yi as an "internal" thing because it one of the ways we differentiate phenomena. But that experience in no way informs us as to why qi follows yi. The circumstance strongly suggests there is something counter intuitive going on. Which brings us back to wuji.

The student returning completes the lesson. Sharp points that cannot join. I mingle amongst them with a learned smile.

Yes, still talking about the mind. We see things from our own perspective because we have that place to do it from. How is it that such a place is possible? It is not a rhetorical question. What are the sufficient conditions? The ego is a beautiful thing. Why can it exist?

Yes, in the sense that the movie provides a means for restoration. Baudrillard says:

The idea of being a player has a lot of connotations in English. It seems like a good translation to me. How to understand "intention" is a large stumbling block. For this player, at least.

I will let go of the Jung references since they are not shared between us. I guess we will have to start all over again from a different place. What we share is not a code that translates between different domains. It is not like you are on one mountain top signalling to me on another. That I could blame you for one thing and myself for another is only possible because of an immense structure that places us in relationship to each other. What is that structure and how did it come into being?

I like the way you said "plan Taiji." Doing the form is carrying out a plan. The classics and my teachers speak of intention eventually becoming "shen." The form is an introduction to formlessness. Wuji is what makes tai chi chuan possible. The beginning and the end.

Baudrillard would have disowned the films because they introduced a "real" that the original thought did not. The dislocation demanded by Baudrillard's insistence that reality has been murdered is a difficult narrative to follow. It may or may not relate to Taoist thought but the difficulty reminds me of Zhaungzi .The movies avoided that kind of discomfort by introducing a back story.

True enough. But Jung was saying more was given than just oneself as the agent "I" if taking responsibility is to be recognized as the highest goal. To open oneself up to that "more" gets expressed in a lot of different ways. That Jung saw responsibility as a process much larger than what was claimed by an "I" is one of those ways. If that sort of assumption is nonsense for a thinker, that is the end of the discussion. That is what I meant about the minimum to get started. It is not the sort of thing that can be proven like a proposition in Mathematics or can be reduced to a matter of logical necessity. There is this country and the shape of its terrain. You either go there and walk the hills or you do not.

Another way to look at it is that all the processes of perception are happening simultaneously. The determination about a course of action comes from decisions about options available at any given point of time. It is less important to have a theory about is what is possible than to have things to do in response to circumstances. One can be a genius about the former while being totally clueless about the latter. The way Jung said it evades the problem of definition: How will I become more responsible for my existence? The question assumes there are givens that one has to simply accept before getting started.

It is really strange to read the responses after the original post has been removed. But kind of appropriate at the same time. Some clothes fit.

Without expressing an opinion about the other opinions given here, I would like to say something about the "tip of the iceberg" metaphor. It has been the underlying idea in a number of maps of the psyche. I propose it also has a life as a sort of incantation given to break a spell. To take a page from the history of physics, consider the case of Descartes claiming that the speed of light was infinite. If no time elapses between the origin and any distant object of a light beam, this particular element is not a part of the things that travel as we understand the word. The absolute quality means the structure of things that do travel in time are fundamentally different from light. People came along after Descartes and demonstrated that light does travel in time and has, in fact, a very specific speed. The deconstruction of the Descartes vision was not an explanation; It was a demand to change the nature of explanations and that process is just beginning, really. Likewise, once one accepts that the "Rational Ego" is not an element that can be seen as fundamentally different from other things, it doesn't explain what it is. The question has to find a new place to start. We are not very far along that path.

It is great if somebody can show you the best path and you find yourself walking on it. The way it usually goes down is that you connect with teaching as best you can and work hard in the meantime. Work, in this sense, is to always start where you are weak. Cluster around the toughest things. Accept the problem. Listen to the answers.