It is known

[Taomeow]

2 hours ago, old3bob said:

 

maybe evolved would be a better word than real...for both a seed and a tree are "real" its just that the tree is further evolved

 

No, "evolved" is a different word, it is indeed "real man" (or rather "real person," not gender specific) that taoist classics talk about, and we don't believe in "evolution," we believe in "unfolding" -- the way a seed unfolds into a tree, or "folding in" the way a tree folds into a seed, from which a tree unfolds whose seeds are folded trees...  and so on.  Neither is "evolved."  Evolution is adaptation to the imperative to be something else, to abandon what one is, i.e. to lose one's de -- wholeness, integrity (which the translators have taken the habit of substituting with the concept of "virtue" that doesn't mean even remotely the same thing.)  Taoist ideal is for each of the "ten thousand things," man including, to be itself.  Fully itself -- born of star dust, unfolding into a star, a force of nature, "roaming the root of heaven and earth" -- or folding back into dust, into the humblest of the humble, into nothing.  And unfolding again!  Eternally.  So "real person" is a profound idea -- a man or a woman who can unfold their full being (or fold it -- a baby is no less evolved than an old person).  De is the ticket, oneness with oneself (aka being whole, genuine, not more than that and not less than that) is oneness with tao. 

[silent thunder]

1 hour ago, Taomeow said:

 

No, "evolved" is a different word, it is indeed "real man" (or rather "real person," not gender specific) that taoist classics talk about, and we don't believe in "evolution," we believe in "unfolding" -- the way a seed unfolds into a tree, or "folding in" the way a tree folds into a seed, from which a tree unfolds whose seeds are folded trees...  and so on.  Neither is "evolved."  Evolution is adaptation to the imperative to be something else, to abandon what one is, i.e. to lose one's de -- wholeness, integrity (which the translators have taken the habit of substituting with the concept of "virtue" that doesn't mean even remotely the same thing.)  Taoist ideal is for each of the "ten thousand things," man including, to be itself.  Fully itself -- born of star dust, unfolding into a star, a force of nature, "roaming the root of heaven and earth" -- or folding back into dust, into the humblest of the humble, into nothing.  And unfolding again!  Eternally.  So "real person" is a profound idea -- a man or a woman who can unfold their full being (or fold it -- a baby is no less evolved than an old person).  De is the ticket, oneness with oneself (aka being whole, genuine, not more than that and not less than that) is oneness with tao. 

Wow, echo...  unfolding has become my go to word in the last decade to describe the experience of my own awareness and life process.  Unfolding Stardust is an amazing image.  And it is my experience of my own coming of age and coming to more intimately know my own De.  As the Pathmaker travels, The Path forms.  They are of a thing.  And the end of the path is the unfolding of De back into Dao where the bellows repeats the cycle, endlessly.

 

As I experience it, my awareness and my body (De) unfold within the context of the co-arising conditions from which it arises and to which it returns.  It arises tzujan... of itself, always its own essential truth regardless of mentation, labels or social/familial reckonings.  The entirety of an oak tree is present in the acorn and when the body of the oak falls to decay, it becomes the soil in which the next acorns unfold.

 

It is what it is, just as is the universe and i am this.  I am my own De.  My being is De.  These are the properties I exhibit in the unfolding of my life Path.

I had this conversation (some of it almost verbatim), with my Son not a week ago as I was reiterating the concept of Tzujan to him and it wove into the mis-used (in my opinion) modern mistranslation of De.  I dearly appreciate your pointing out the misuse of virtue in this context.

 

The notion of De and its utterly miscomprehended and troublesome translation as 'virtue' has always irked me.  It misses the mark almost entirely due to the modern notion of virtue being hopelessly tied up with Christianized and Confucian (confusion) notions of morality and social more's.  When most folks talk about De, they seem to have lost its original context in the modern cloud of the word virtue.  De to me are the absolute properties of something's intrinsic nature, the expression of its essence as it is... 

 

The only manner in which the word virtue works for me is if it's used in the context of 'properties of'... as in 'the virtues of grass is that it is green and grows quickly'.

 

We unfold tzujan, of our intrinsic nature, which is the expression of De, arising from Dao the formless bellows.

 

 

[old3bob]

I'd say it can not be denied that "unfolding" still involves or has a certain amount of evolution going on with it...so the eternal blueprint as you imply is there and ever foundational  yet flexible in its DIVERSITY and iterations that are in flux  to the ten thousand.  There is obvious, verified genetic proof of that in living forms, forms that change and adapt to environmental conditions that do not to go against said blueprint but to fulfill it for greater manifestation of Spirit in form.

 

I think another good word  is emanation which is along the lines of an unfolding from the  inviolate blueprint, which includes a refolding or return back into said blueprint which it never really left.

 

 

Btw. the TTC. quote I submitted earlier is a simple and factual example of said manifestation.  (regardless of  transcendental sounding and debatable semantics)

Edited October 25, 2020 by old3bob

[Taomeow]

Thank you for your echoing (gangying!) thoughts, @silent thunder

 

25 minutes ago, silent thunder said:

The only manner in which the word virtue works for me is if it's used in the context of 'properties of'... as in 'the virtues of grass is that it is green and grows quickly'.

 

 

Yes, that's exactly the right context for the concept of de to be translated as "virtue" -- as in, "heng (constancy, reliability, long-term endurance) is one of the virtues of tao."  Virtue as an intrinsic natural property, as inherent nature independent of conjuncture.  As opposed to the kind Laozi was frowning upon in Chapter 38: born not of the constant, heng mind of tao but of the fickle, corrupted human mind that reinterprets what virtue is in accordance with how it is understood and prescribed by the latest edicts of the dominant baboon:

 

When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is ritual.

[Taomeow]

25 minutes ago, old3bob said:

I'd say it can not be denied that "unfolding" still involves or has a certain amount of evolution going on with it...so the eternal blueprint as you imply is there and ever foundational  yet flexible in its DIVERSITY and iterations that are in flux  to the ten thousand.  There is obvious, verified genetic proof of that in living forms, forms that change and adapt to environmental conditions that do not to go against said blueprint but to fulfill it for greater manifestation of Spirit in form.

 

 I agree with this understanding of evolution and like the way you put it. 

 

But that's not how the word is used in the Indo-European tradition, whether religious or scientific.  It is routinely (and in most cases exclusively) used to mean some sequence from "lower" to "higher," to mean "betterment," "improvement," "progress" -- which is not what adaptation really is at all.  Adaptation can imply a loss of something wonderful and a gain of something atrocious.  But we commonly use the idea of "evolution toward a higher state" to mean that all such adaptive modifications are wonderful. 

 

The taoist view is quite the opposite -- many such adaptive modifications are disastrous, and we may well wind up on the road to terminal degradation rather than to a better "higher" state if we keep adapting in a hurry to an environment, both outer and inner, that  we ourselves keep making unlivable for the previous-state-adapted, forcing new adaptations at a dizzying unnatural pace which no natural adaptation can hope to match.

 

There's another problem with this belief that "evolution" means "progress," a progression from something primitive, feckless, disposable toward something sophisticated, more significant and worthy of sacrificing the "primitive" to in the grand scheme of things.  This is the royal road to discrimination and abuse -- of the land, of animals, tribes, peoples, children, women, other races, the less-educated (in our understanding of "education"), and of course sky's the limit on that road -- the poor, the sick, the "dumb" (low IQ, in our understanding of "intelligence"), the old, the not-fitting-in (let's bully them for not "evolving" rapidly enough), nature itself that actually avoids evolution for as long as it possibly can if it can help it, for reasons too numerous to include in a forum post.   

 

Evolution is, incidentally, also understood as "survival of the fittest" by 99% of the concept's proponents -- by whose fucking definition "fittest" and "fittest for what" they don't bother asking -- so it's de facto murderous, as ideas to base actions on go... 

[old3bob]

1 hour ago, Taomeow said:

 

 I agree with this understanding of evolution and like the way you put it. 

 

But that's not how the word is used in the Indo-European tradition, whether religious or scientific.  It is routinely (and in most cases exclusively) used to mean some sequence from "lower" to "higher," to mean "betterment," "improvement," "progress" -- which is not what adaptation really is at all.  Adaptation can imply a loss of something wonderful and a gain of something atrocious.  But we commonly use the idea of "evolution toward a higher state" to mean that all such adaptive modifications are wonderful. 

 

The taoist view is quite the opposite -- many such adaptive modifications are disastrous, and we may well wind up on the road to terminal degradation rather than to a better "higher" state if we keep adapting in a hurry to an environment, both outer and inner, that  we ourselves keep making unlivable for the previous-state-adapted, forcing new adaptations at a dizzying unnatural pace which no natural adaptation can hope to match.

 

There's another problem with this belief that "evolution" means "progress," a progression from something primitive, feckless, disposable toward something sophisticated, more significant and worthy of sacrificing the "primitive" to in the grand scheme of things.  This is the royal road to discrimination and abuse -- of the land, of animals, tribes, peoples, children, women, other races, the less-educated (in our understanding of "education"), and of course sky's the limit on that road -- the poor, the sick, the "dumb" (low IQ, in our understanding of "intelligence"), the old, the not-fitting-in (let's bully them for not "evolving" rapidly enough), nature itself that actually avoids evolution for as long as it possibly can if it can help it, for reasons too numerous to include in a forum post.   

 

Evolution is, incidentally, also understood as "survival of the fittest" by 99% of the concept's proponents -- by whose fucking definition "fittest" and "fittest for what" they don't bother asking -- so it's de facto murderous, as ideas to base actions on go... 

 

yep, a good example being the genocide against millions of American Indians sometimes called "manifest destiny".

 

[silent thunder]

 

I hold to the notion that of much of Darwin's observations seem to have been either unread by modern folks, or ignored/dismissed in favor of casting his entire observational treatise about the systems of nature, into the catch phrase 'Survival of the fittest', which in our times, ever so conveniently focuses almost solely on how it applies to not just to the thriving of an individual species (at the implied expense of all others) out of all of co-mingling life; but often only to specific individuals within a species... with an even more insidious bend toward how actions taken by an individual and abilities possessed can result in that one individual's gain to the implied loss of the rest. 

 

A constant source of 'scarcity' mentality that is it seems to me, an unavoidable illness of experienced reality in the mindset of the overcrowded, imbalanced and wholly uncivilized atmosphere of 'civilization' that most modern humans now find themselves born into. 

 

And always with assinine notion, this havoc wreaking mental bend that all change (particularly human instigated) somehow is always improving things. 

 

This has not been my experience this life. 

Not all change, and particularly not change wrought by modern human linguistic thinking results in what I consider improvement.

 

 

Nature as competition is a modern 'civilized' notion to me.  Which is wholly uncivilized and alien to any Natural Mindset where Nature is experienced not as something to be conquered, but is known as home... source of all vitality and abundance.  There are no need for grocery stores in a natural mindset.  The world is the grocery store when living naturally.  It's only when we stack up upon one another in unmindful masses that scarcity becomes the norm... and this is the very foundation of civilized living in modern times.

 

My Sami ancestors roamed from the Arctic Circle of Northern Scandanavia, across Siberia and into the steppes of the Mongols.  And they have a saying that i embody in the fluid vibrations of my very blood and awareness..

 

my home is within me

it follows me wherever i wander

 

All of the world is my home.  Is my grocery store.  If I can see it.

 

Scarcity mindset... seems saturated everywhere in civilization.   Makes sense really, as when you're overpopulated and utterly dependent on the crops and animals grown by others and your water supplied by others... the notion and drive to hoard and that you are in constant competition seems unavoidable, because you are in constant competition.  Ever on the brink of not having enough.  whatever that is.

 

It's a spiritual and mental illness as I see it.  One that saps so much vitality from our core being and has caused humanity as a whole to embody uncivilized conditioning the more it 'evolves'.  Civilization, in its sedentary and overpopulated state, is inherently unsustainable and we prove this ever more drastically each passing decade. 

 

Whereas a forest is the very demonstration of augmenting oppositional forces that runs utterly counter to the notion of competition as the driving force of life.  The fungus in the soil of the forest, transmits minerals from areas where it is abundant, to areas where it is scarce, in order to help foster the vitality of the roots of the trees and shrubs that depend on them to thrive, thus causing the fungus, which relies on the roots, to thrive as well...  Or spend a bit of time snorkeling the shallows of kelp forests if you get a chance.  Life is endlessly augmenting and supporting itself.  Everywhere.

 

Intrinsic to all life is an unfolding interwoven, co-arising utterly reciprocal and self augmenting and supportive process...  The five elements and their eternal flow and relational shifting into and out of one another in the myriad forms (like the body typing these words, or the eyes and mind reading them).  YinYang.  TingSung.  Tzujan.  De. 

 

I've always resonated with Bohr's notion of Darwin's Observations and that is, Contraria Sunt Complementa.

Opposites are complimentary.

Opposing forces augment each other.

 

Life is not competetive, it is explorative.

The myriad forces augment and diminish each other in fluidic unfoldingness.

 

beingness

 

Oh shit!  It's raining!  first rain in months!!!

 

later!

 

 

Edited October 25, 2020 by silent thunder
rain's over, found a typo

[old3bob]

On 10/25/2020 at 10:14 AM, Taomeow said:

 

 I agree with this understanding of evolution and like the way you put it. 

 

But that's not how the word is used in the Indo-European tradition, whether religious or scientific.  It is routinely (and in most cases exclusively) used to mean some sequence from "lower" to "higher," to mean "betterment," "improvement," "progress" -- which is not what adaptation really is at all.  Adaptation can imply a loss of something wonderful and a gain of something atrocious.  But we commonly use the idea of "evolution toward a higher state" to mean that all such adaptive modifications are wonderful. 

 

The taoist view is quite the opposite -- many such adaptive modifications are disastrous, and we may well wind up on the road to terminal degradation rather than to a better "higher" state if we keep adapting in a hurry to an environment, both outer and inner, that  we ourselves keep making unlivable for the previous-state-adapted, forcing new adaptations at a dizzying unnatural pace which no natural adaptation can hope to match.

 

There's another problem with this belief that "evolution" means "progress," a progression from something primitive, feckless, disposable toward something sophisticated, more significant and worthy of sacrificing the "primitive" to in the grand scheme of things.  This is the royal road to discrimination and abuse -- of the land, of animals, tribes, peoples, children, women, other races, the less-educated (in our understanding of "education"), and of course sky's the limit on that road -- the poor, the sick, the "dumb" (low IQ, in our understanding of "intelligence"), the old, the not-fitting-in (let's bully them for not "evolving" rapidly enough), nature itself that actually avoids evolution for as long as it possibly can if it can help it, for reasons too numerous to include in a forum post.   

 

Evolution is, incidentally, also understood as "survival of the fittest" by 99% of the concept's proponents -- by whose fucking definition "fittest" and "fittest for what" they don't bother asking -- so it's de facto murderous, as ideas to base actions on go... 

 

which got me to thinking of the story of Plato's cave people who "adapted" to being in the cave and which most would not leave  because  of ingrained fears...(haven't read that story in over 40+ years so I've forgotten lots of its details)

 

[old3bob]

On 10/25/2020 at 11:24 AM, old3bob said:

 

yep, a good example being the genocide against millions of American Indians sometimes called "manifest destiny".

 

 

 

[Taomeow]

"The United States has Socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor." -- Martin Luther King Jr

To illustrate:

Gilead is charging $3,000 for Remdesivir, a drug they developed with $70,000,000 of taxpayer money that costs them $10 to produce.    

[natural]

I am sad by the fact not much has changed...

[silent thunder]

'Murica seems to me to be one large many interconnected, highly legislated, finely honed, nauseating parts in a machine of financial predation...

 

Both parties sicken me... one a bit less than the other.

Edited October 28, 2020 by silent thunder
accuracy

[zerostao]

22 hours ago, silent thunder said:

'Murica seems to me to be one large many interconnected, highly legislated, finely honed, nauseating parts in a machine of financial predation...

 

Both parties sicken me... one a bit less than the other.

Murcia is richly diverse, great folks from all walks of life, all of us vulnerable to the machine. A two headed dragon type of machine, if one don’t get ya, the other one will. It’s not a good arrangement imo. 
 

[Taomeow]

22 hours ago, silent thunder said:

'Murica seems to me to be one large many interconnected, highly legislated, finely honed, nauseating parts in a machine of financial predation...

 

Both parties sicken me... one a bit less than the other.

 

11 minutes ago, zerostao said:

Murcia is richly diverse, great folks from all walks of life, all of us vulnerable to the machine. A two headed dragon type of machine, if one don’t get ya, the other one will. It’s not a good arrangement imo. 
 

 

My vision is more along the lines of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia.  Aside from some disputed Muslim territories and central Africa, it's all either spoken for or is in the process.  The differences between the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Great Britain are merely stylistic, and have to do with the pace of the process rather than its nature, which is quite uniform.  In fact, the differences between all three 1984 superstates as well as the disputed territories are also shrinking -- the Lockstep vision is fleshing out more and more every day and it's global.  On this road 'Murica is as vulnerable as everybody else even though it may seem that it's pushing everybody else in that direction.  No.  It's being pushed just like everybody else. 

 

Squabbles between two heads of the same bird merely ensure that both are fed our lifeblood in equal measure.  It gets fatter and greedier no matter which head's turn it is to feed.         

 

Such is the nature of any empire, but a global empire is beyond anyone's worst nightmares who might try to retain a shred of humanity inside its chomping maw.  And yet any step away from that maw is a step toward the abyss, now that we are less than a week away from the possibility of either the decisive push or the decisive chomp.  

 

I never voted and I hardly ever prayed.  Not after Laozi's nonchalant admission anyway: the sage doesn't give a flying through a rolling about the straw dogs. 

 

Time to practice.

 

 

[silent thunder]

time to practice.

 

my Sister!

so. much. yes.

[silent thunder]

12 hours ago, zerostao said:

Murcia is richly diverse, great folks from all walks of life, all of us vulnerable to the machine. A two headed dragon type of machine, if one don’t get ya, the other one will. It’s not a good arrangement imo. 
 

Well said.

Thank you for reminding me of the levels that are always present.

Some times my words reflect a myopia in my awareness that does not accomodate the broader picture.  In times like this my Hawk medicine can be piercing and unforgiving.

 

The daily lives of Americans of all folds are awash in the myriad colors of all those aspects of life I find most endearing and worth fighting to protect and nurture.

 

[Taomeow]

[Taomeow]

 

 

[Taomeow]

.

Edited November 4, 2020 by Taomeow

[Taomeow]

Something I was reminded of today when watching a video featuring a Biden supporter attacked and robbed on his own lawn (adorned with Biden-Harris signs) -- by protesters whom he invited to peacefully protest in front of his house and who yelled at him, with great anger, that "asking us to protest peacefully is white supremacy."

 

When the Russian revolution started gobbling up its own children as all revolutions are wont to do, Eugenia Ginsburg, a young, beautiful journalist/educator and privileged wife of a high-standing party official, whose political record was beyond reproach and whose sincere loyalties were all in the right place -- a true believer in the cause and its leader, she was -- got arrested, like countless millions of others, on made-up ridiculous charges and sent to gulag for 18 years.  She survived and wrote an amazing book, which I read twice back in the day, Journey Into the Whirlwind, describing those eighteen years from beginning to end. 

 

So, this is what I remembered today.  Early in her incarceration a couple of inmates were added to her prison cell: German communists who came to the Soviet Union after they had been imprisoned in nazi Germany, having been accused of being Soviet spies.  They were, however, subsequently released for lack of proof -- it was still possible to get some mercy from the Gestapo in the earlier days of its reign.  They fled Germany in search of political asylum, and once they arrived in Moscow, were promptly arrested there as nazi spies.  Quite typical, there were hardly any exceptions to this scenario at the time.

 

So, when the German women began undressing in the prison cell, Eugenia saw that one of them had scars all over her back and sides, horrible scars from some inhumane torture that looked symmetrical and identical on both sides of her body.  Horrified, she asked, "Who did this to you?"

The German woman turned, showed her the left side of her body, and said, This I got from the Gestapo in Berlin.

Then she turned again, showed Eugenia her right side, and said, This I got from the NKVD in Moscow. 

 

Then she described the whole process to Eugenia, pointing out repeatedly that everything that was said to her by her interrogators, everything that was done, all the methods, from made-up accusations to made-hellish interrogations to physical torture, had been absolutely identical.  "It's as though they were consulting exactly the same playbook, down to the smallest details," she said bitterly.  

Edited November 6, 2020 by Taomeow

[old3bob]

That is a very good reminder/story of those horrible times !   

 

Many years ago at a thanksgiving dinner I spoke with a man who was a  Polish soldier in WWll.  He was captured by the Germans along with several hundred other men from his company and most of them were sent to the same  concentration camp. (I don't remember which one)  Anyway he did not want to recount to me many of the details of his imprisonment except to say that the main reason he survived was because he was a good musician which the Germans used for their entertainment.   He said they were still hard on him but not anywhere near as hard as they were on his fellow soldiers, saying that out of the several hundred captured that only him and 2 or 3 others lived through it!

During parts of the rest of the evening he happily played his old style accordion with great talent and gusto for us.  I was kind of spellbound at that!

Edited November 7, 2020 by old3bob

[shortstuff]

On 8/3/2020 at 12:10 AM, silent thunder said:

Highly possible to me, based on pure population numbers and prevalent international coporate processes, that there are more slaves at this moment on Earth, than in all history combined.

 

Back then it was chains. Now it's smartphones. The difference is the latter is permitted, no, not permitted...desired slavery.

There was a post on the "loony forums" a few years back where a "Rothschild" did an AMA. Throughout the years different groups have tried to figure out if it was a LARP or the real deal and most come to the conclusion he was the real deal.

In the thread he states they have found a way to enslave humanity and that humanity will beg for it.

 

Seems pretty accurate to me.  https://ia802300.us.archive.org/8/items/rofschildv1/IAmARofschildAxeMeAQuestion.html

[Taomeow]

18 hours ago, shortstuff said:

Back then it was chains. Now it's smartphones. The difference is the latter is permitted, no, not permitted...desired slavery.

There was a post on the "loony forums" a few years back where a "Rothschild" did an AMA. Throughout the years different groups have tried to figure out if it was a LARP or the real deal and most come to the conclusion he was the real deal.

In the thread he states they have found a way to enslave humanity and that humanity will beg for it.

 

Seems pretty accurate to me.  https://ia802300.us.archive.org/8/items/rofschildv1/IAmARofschildAxeMeAQuestion.html

 

With all due respect, this thread is not for disseminating production from "loony forums" whatever they are.  We don't have a psychiatrist on the mod team so it's not possible to determine whether the players are LARPing or genuinely suffering from paranoid delusions and need compassion and medication.  Would you be so kind as to delete your post from here.  

 

If you want to discuss your thoughts, you're welcome to of course -- if you want to point a LARPing finger at "Rothschild," the meme of all things evil in the simple minds of people who can't be bothered (or educated) to dig deeper in their ponerological pursuits, you are going to be disappointed.  

Edited November 9, 2020 by Taomeow

[shortstuff]

You seem to misunderstand. I don't think that Rothschild was a larper. I think he was the real deal. And no I won't "delete my post" because you don't share my opinion LOL

[Taomeow]

28 minutes ago, shortstuff said:

You seem to misunderstand. I don't think that Rothschild was a larper. I think he was the real deal. And no I won't "delete my post" because you don't share my opinion LOL

 

I didn't misunderstand.  I understood where you're coming from.  I just didn't care for that particular brand of... er... brilliance to take bandwidth in the thread I opened toward entirely different purposes.  It wasn't meant to be turned into a dumpster for any and all garbage collected wherever by whoever -- calling it "opinion" ain't no saving grace, garbage is garbage.  So I asked you to delete merely as common courtesy -- not realizing the concept was so alien to you.  I just felt that toward your kind of contributions you should start your own thread if you wish, and leave well alone the thread whose opening poster views your intrusion as woefully uncouth.   I'm not your platform for your cherished opinions, I'm a humble OP in this thread.  I know it must be hard for you but I'm hoping you can make an effort and somehow get it -- and oblige.  Many thanks in advance.