Taoist Texts

I find it interesting, however, that Verdesi views Jiang Feng as "an elaborate scam"

it takes one to know one.

What you do with your body is far more important than what you put in it.

It sounds like a very reasonable opinion, i agree. But is it a traditional POV?

Look at the ultra-distance running Taramuhara made famous by the Born to Run book. They subsist on maize for the most part.

They are great, i have researched and admired that tribe.

But...

There is a very high infant mortality rate among the Tarahumara. This fact is counterbalanced by the fact that there is also a very high birth rate. The average Tarahumara woman gives birth to about ten babies hoping that three or four will survive into adulthood. Adulthood is usually short for the Tarahumara with the average life expectancy being forty-five (Lutz 50)

Nutrition is the single most complex subject in existence

That's true. But why it should be so? Because eating  is the strongest bio-program of the human bio-robot. It overrides any critical thinking.

The Massai get over 50% of their nutrition from plant sources in the dry season, and subsist mainly on milk/blood mixtures in the rainy season when their animals are nursing. They generally eat mean only for ritual purposes.

(sigh) 

Traditionally, the Maasai diet consisted of raw meat, raw milk, and raw blood from cattle. Note that the Maasai cattle are of the Zebu variety. In the summer of 1935 Dr. Weston A. Price visited the Maasai and reported that according to Dr. Anderson from the local government hospital in Kenya most tribes were disease-free. Many had not a single tooth attacked by dental caries nor a single malformed dental arch. In particular the Maasai had a very low 0.4% of bone caries. He attributed that to their diet consisting of (in order of volume) raw milk, raw blood, raw meat and some vegetables and fruits, although in many villages they do not eat any fruit or vegetables at all. He noted that when available every growing child and every pregnant or lactating woman would receive a daily ration of raw blood. Dr. Weston A. Price also noted the government efforts back in 1935 to turn the Maasai into farmers.

Those Inuit were anything but healthy. They simply didn't live long enough to develop heart disease or cancer. The whole healthy fish oil myth began with a hugely flawed and misinterpreted study of them.

Thats not what wiki says;).

 

In the 1920s anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson lived with and studied a group of Inuit.^[66] The study focused on the fact that the Inuit's low-carbohydrate diet had no adverse effects on their health, nor indeed, Stefansson's own health. Stefansson (1946) also observed that the Inuit were able to get the necessary vitamins they needed from their traditional winter diet, which did not contain any plant matter. In particular, he found that adequate vitamin C could be obtained from items in their traditional diet of raw meat such as Ringed Seal liver and whale skin (muktuk). While there was considerable skepticism when he reported these findings, they have been borne out in recent studies and analyses.^[67][68] However, the Inuit have lifespans 12 to 15 years shorter than the average Canadian's,

 

 

Life expectancy in Canada hits 80 for men, 84 for women ...

www.cbc.ca/.../life-expectancy-in-canada-hits-80-for-men-84-for-wome...

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May 15, 2014 - In Canada, average life expectancy for males born in 2012 is 80 and for females 84, the agency said in Thursday's report, World Health Statistics 2014. 

 

 

 

 

What happens to Inuit that travel down into ..or tropical areas?

Hmmm, they became Maasai may be?

 

How about the "Atkins Diet" - know anyone who has done that for any significant number of years?

Yes. They are called the Eskimos and the Masai.

Many of us think he is a troll... or a sophist.

Dear Damdao;)

thanks for thinking about me. Because I do not think about you guys at all, so i am touched. I understand you try to insult me here, which is all good. You did a good job on the 'troll' it is mildly insulting indeed. No cigar on sophist thou. You see in English 'a sophist' is not an insult, may be it is an insult in Argentinian but still, better luck next time.

Anyway i understand you went to a seminar in Bangladesh to learn all about the electrical dantians.  How did it go? Were you zapped by one? Do you have one now yourself? When you will start teach others how to have a electrical dantian? What voltage you plan for? Please tell me all about these electrifying topics.

Regards, TT

PS. if you have picked any Bangladeshi insults while on your seminar in Bangladesh feel free to use those, at least you will get something useful for your money  

 

May 2014, and it was time for us to fly over to China.

Dr Jiang Feng

 

After this we all had individual sessions with Dr Jiang to discuss any treatment required, and if herbal, what the cost involved may be. Special chi infused herbs were required by 4 of us, some required regular herbs as their imbalance hadn’t resulted in a full blockage yet. (An excess imbalance normally causes blockages if not treated early). The cost was kindly allowed to be settled over 12 months, making treatment affordable to everyone who needed it.

 

 

 

Further Training Opportunities

 

After discussion with Grady, I am looking to arrange another trip to China in late October early November this year (2014). Anyone is welcome, those who would like to train, those who seek treatment or even those who just want to see if it’s truly real.

 

There is no cost in the form of tuition,

I do not believe that there is really any need for you to spell out anything for me.

is that so?))

The fact that you do not believe in a given phenomena is neither here nor there.

Is the fact that this phenomenon is not proven, but rather is made up out of whole cloth  here or there?

The Teacher must know more than the student on the given subject or why should he go to learn from him?

Provided there is that subject.

The fact that at this stage the student cannot manifest the abilities of the teacher does not mean that he will not be taught to do so.

of course it does. Do you want me to spell out the logic for you?

 

 

I still don't quite get the point you are trying to make. 

the point is that you and your teacher got nothing except your word on it. there is no such thing as electrical dantian, its a gimmick to string the gullible ones on.

 

These things take time to learn how to do. You don't meditate today, and then tomorrow have a Dantian that is full of qi. Even when you have a dantian full of qi, learning to use it and control it takes time.

Can I do it by myself. The short answer is no.

then what use is the truthiness of your teacher?

 

 

Now, that makes it better for all of us who want to sit at home and have the true teachings just given to us. We can sit on our couch, and just read books and make progress from the exercises in these books. Why bother to get a plane and go meet a true master, we can learn from books, and know everything there is to know. More than this, we can sit and argue with those who have bothered to get off their bum and go find a true teacher.

So Rudolf I assume you got on a plane and learned from a true teacher who zaps people with electrical qi from his dantian. Can you do that too now?

So. I must say, that Opendao is the only one on here who seems to have things quite close to my own beliefs. He speaks only the truth

It takes one to know one

Had forgotten about this.

 

 

What's the unknown concept?

i was poking fun at this "the form of the heart/mind" . what does it mean?

It's a good translation, certainly my preferred kind of style. Concise, direct, fairly elegant, and well-formatted.

i would add - honest.

He did not understand the central concept and admitted it honestly, tip of the hat.

it is unclear what 一 言 means here : “one word”, “one saying”, “word of the One” (“One” perhaps referring to Dao?), “word of Oneness”, “sound of Oneness”, possibly even “the whole utterance”, etc.; so it is just left literally translated as “one word”

  So is anyone familiar with Chen Tuans dream work?

 

Teri Takehiro is

Hopefully someone out there put it out into an easy to understand format.

Teri Takehiro did

The Nature of Doaist Meditation
by Robert James Coons

typo

Based on everything that I had read it seemed reasonable that Plato intended to found a school,

Why would he want to do that?

By now first thing to do is to ditch both your doctor and your drugs, and to stop looking for magical hand-waving like a new qigong or acupuncture.

Yr illness perpetuates itself because your heart is on it, discussing it with yr doctors, anxiously looking for magical powders. What you need to do is to start riding yr body hard and to stop coddling it, then the illness/heart link will break and the body will heal itself. Take up jogging , fasting, doing push-ups. When you go well beyond average man's capacity for these, that will be the day when u will get well.

On occasion of one Taoist being sick, the teacher told the assembly: if a practitioners is rational in his food and drink, constant in his rest and movement, peaceful in heart and spirit, does not do anything stupid, and still gets sick, then it is a Heavenly command, who would dare not to accept it? Also it could be the matter of personal fate, due to some karma to get a demonic illness.

First thing to do in this case is to recognize that the four great components of the body are illusory, each one of those, so this sickness is their sickness, the death is going to be their death, so bear the sickness with calm heart and mind. If so, if in these tribulations, its not your heart that will be sick, then a heavy sickness will ease up and a light sickness will cure by itself, your nature will be calm and placid, the muddy morbid qi will dissipate.

A NEVER-STABLE WORD: ZHUANGZI'S "ZHIYAN" 卮言 AND 'TIPPING-VESSEL' IRRIGATION

    Daniel Fried

Early China 01/2007; 31:145-170. DOI: 10.2307/23354214

ABSTRACT The zhiyan described in the "Entrusted Words" chapter of the Zhuangzi ("Zhiyan come forth daily, and are harmonized with the heavenly divisions; through this they spread out, and thus years draw to a close") have long aroused debate and confusion among readers, as the word zhi usually refers to a type of wine goblet.

Contemporary readers cannot easily obtain clear assistance from traditional commentaries, because the mainstream of Zhuangzi scholarship has been disturbed by Guo Xiang's original notes: "This zhi is [a thing which] tips when full, rights when empty, and does not stay fixed." The questions which arise from this note are two: (1) What sort of goblet could "tip when full, right when empty"? And (2) how would this remarkable behavior on the part of the goblet relate to the original text of the Zhuangzi?

Happily, Guo Xiang's gloss is similar to a paragraph from the Xunzi in which Confucius is said to note an "urging vessel" in the hall of Duke Huan of Lu which also "leans when empty, rights [itself] when half-full, and tips over when full." Early strata of material from the later text of the Wenzi also mention this "urging vessel" as a kind of ancient ritual object prone to tipping over. Although a few readers have considered the relationship between Guo Xiang's gloss and the text of the Xunzi, only in the past several decades has there accumulated enough historical data to provide readers with a more comprehensive background for interpretation.

Mainland Chinese archaeologists working in the 1950's discovered a "narrow-bottomed jug" (or, "tipping-vessel") which, because its handles were located below the center of gravity, tipped in the fashion described of the "urging vessel" in the classical text. More recently, researchers have returned to this topic in the 1990's, and have discovered that the tipping-vessel since the Neolithic age was used in agriculture as an irrigation device. By simultaneously using the Xunzi, Wenzi, and other texts, as well as modern archaeological conclusions to re-read the Zhuangzi, it is possible to discover that the concept of the zhiyan is well-suited to an agricultural interpretation. In such an interpretive context, it is possible to speculate that the linguistic skepticism Zhuangzi expresses through the term is related to a cyclical temporality associated with the use of tipping-vessels for irrigation.

A NEVER-STABLE WORD: ZHUANGZI'S "ZHIYAN" 卮言 AND 'TIPPING-VESSEL' IRRIGATION - ResearchGate. Available from: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/260104686_A_NEVER-STABLE_WORD_ZHUANGZI'S_ZHIYAN__AND_'TIPPING-VESSEL'_IRRIGATION

The term 'spillover goblet words' is twice mentioned in the Zhuangzi, both with reference to the words of Zhuangzi. The accepted understanding of the word 'spillover-goblet', though it is not certain, is that it was a special vessel used in sacrifice. When wine was poured into it, it would automatically spill the contents and then upright itself. One could ever fill it, and it would ever empty itself. This became a metaphor for the use of words as an upaya (skillful means) to convey truth and yet to disallow those words becoming confused with the truth itself.

use of words to convey truth and yet to disallow those words becoming confused with the truth itself.

this is nonsense though.

 

Is there a kind of quick fix for these problems or any other help?

yes there is. it is called fasting. try spending 24 hrs w/o food and as lil water as possible. that will fix ya.

Doesnt know the man, doesnt practice the art. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that...

In both references you can find some material on the six harmonies.

 

Mike Sigman is great, he is one of the precious few westerners who knows what he is talking about. I did not know he still posts so thanks for the link.