Taomeow

4 hours ago, Taoist Texts said:

 

If only the scientists invented a small popular handheld device with the ability to capture and disseminate moving pictures. .. well maybe someday...

Why would a smart person -- scientists are smart, right? -- invest time and effort into studying live bodies when all of their training and expertise has been obtained via studying dead bodies?..  No one is that foolish.  They didn't spend countless dedicated hours dissecting corpses, looking at slides of dead tissues under the microscope, learning everything there is to learn about dead blood in a test tube, electrostimulating pieces of dead muscles to find out how they work, etc., toward forgetting all of that hard work and all of their expertise gained thereby.  Their expertise in the functioning of live bodies is gained by extrapolating everything they learned from dead bodies.  If they were to observe something unusual about a body that is actually alive yet does something dead bodies don't do -- something their curriculum doesn't include -- where would they go from there?  Into peer sneer territory, in the best case scenario.  Don't underestimate scientists, they know what's good for them.          

2 hours ago, liminal_luke said:

In a related vein, isn´t it true that scientific discoveries tend to emerge more or less simultaneously among researchers who don´t know of each other´s work?  (Can´t think of an example offhand but I read this somewhere and it seems plausible to me.)  

I've reaId about it too, but can't think of examples either.  However, I can offer a taoist explanation.  From the get-go, taoism made inroads into Time as a subject of scrutiny, study, contemplation, and ultimately comprehension.  So, in this system, every period of Time has its own distinct characteristics, and these are conductive to certain specific kinds of events that have a higher chance of occurring when this type of Time arrives.  Taoist Time is a kind of climate --  when spring (e.g.) comes, everything is affected all at once and responds in a way characteristic of spring rather than, say, autumn or winter.  Ideas are somewhere there too among things stimulated, and the emergence of certain types of ideas when particular kinds of Time arrive is probabilistically higher.  

2 hours ago, Apech said:

Did it have the line ‘alla my life I gave you nothing and still you ask for more’ ?

 

 

I doubt it, it's a fun line but neither me nor even google know where it's from.  Where is it from?  

12 minutes ago, liminal_luke said:

 

I think it was Elizabeth Gilbert who said that the ideas for books exist out there in the ether and can be picked up by multiple people.  I tried to find the quote in her book Big Magic and the closest I got was...

 

“ideas are alive, that ideas do seek the most available human collaborator, that ideas do have a conscious will, that ideas do move from soul to soul, that ideas will always try to seek the swiftest and most efficient conduit to the earth (just as lightning does).”

-- Elizabeth Gilbert

 

-

Ah, that explains it -- at the time Mario Puzo was a much more efficient conduit than me, hands down...  But shouldn't ideas be taken out of circulation once they've found their conduit and materialized?  He already wrote the novel by the time the idea struck me (even though I had no knowledge of it).  It's as though the same lightning struck the earth in a different place at a different time.  A doppelganger idea?..  Or maybe some of those lightnings are not only of this earth?  Some transcend space and time and maybe get through from some parallel universes?  And the one that came to me was not from this one, but from the one where Mario Puzo didn't exist?  ???  

The Godfather, the novel by Mario Puzo, was written before I knew any English, and long before it was translated.  I never heard of it until much later after the fact, the Iron Curtain was fully functional at the time and didn't let through anything deemed inappropriate.  And yet when I was 14, I started writing a novel (left unfinished) with the following plot:

a mafioso family in the US, with a great criminal don at its head and two of his sons in the key positions;

the third son chooses to have nothing to do with mafia businesses, intends to lead a law-abiding life, dates a "good" girl;

events start unfolding that pull him into the eye of the mafia wars storm against his will, kicking and screaming first, then committed;

he has to leave the country and go into hiding abroad (in my version, not to Sicily though but to Mexico);

and so on.  When a few years later the first Soviet translation of the novel (which happened to be Ukrainian) appeared, I was racking my brain trying to figure out how Mario Puzo could possibly steal my draft and copy my plot.  

To this day the Corleone family is the Rinaldi family to me (from my version), Don Vito is Don Silvio, and so on.     

32 minutes ago, old3bob said:

 

could be some muscle memory kicking in that is fast...

Could be if he saw the cake fall, but the thing is, he didn't.  Something knew, but it wasn't his eyes, his brain, or his muscles.  The only "ordinary" explanation might be that he sensed the movement of air with the back of his head (the body part not isolated from the event by the back of his chair).  A bit of a stretch, but even assuming this explanation, he had no muscle memory of catching cakes he's not aware of that are falling behind his back, it was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.  

People occasionally report inexplicable things of this nature that happen in various situations where their very lives could only be saved by this combo of instant premonition and instant action.  Due to the spread of surveillance cameras in the streets there's even videos of such incidents.  When asked about how they knew, these folks report all kinds of things they subjectively perceived in the moment -- e.g. time abruptly slowing down, gravity getting weak and mitigating a fall, something that feels like an invisible hand pushing them out of the way, or suddenly "just knowing" and so on.  And if the episode I described didn't happen in front of my own eyes, I would probably doubt that the same mysterious forces can be put in motion toward saving a cake.   

4 hours ago, Apech said:

There's a very simplistic view of perceptions - like the image of a pin hole camera - where some kind of input comes in, is processed by the sense organ (eg. the eye) and then sent to the brain via the optic nerve to produce a pattern in the cerebellum (or some part of the brain) whereon the brain 'recognises' the object, a candle a tree or whatever ...and this is what is happening in every moment when we look around.  So perceptions are nothing but electrical sparkings in the brain and so on.  This model quickly breaks down in real life.  For instance if we were playing tennis and someone serves the ball at 100 miles an hour and we instinctively react and move to return the ball in a time scale which could not possibly be accounted for in simple perception models.  Something else is happening.

Speaking of tennis.  Once upon a time I went to a birthday party accompanied by someone who was good at tennis.  At some point the hostess brought in the cake but got momentarily distracted by the conversation at the table, joined in and forgot, just for a second, that she was holding a very delicate cake.  It was positioned on a flat plate and the distraction led to the plate in her hands tilting sideways and the cake abruptly slid down off it. 

It never hit the floor though.  Before anyone -- including the hostess -- had a chance to realize what was happening, the tennis guy, who was sitting with his back to the hostess and was completely unaware on any "ordinary"* level that the cake was in the process of falling behind the back of his chair, swerved around and extended an open palm an inch above the floor.  The cake landed in his palm, completely intact. 

He had absolutely no idea what he was doing and why, had to nearly dislocate his shoulder to suddenly assume the only position that could save the cake, and all of it took far less time than it would take the brain to get the input from the eyes (to say nothing of there being no eyes on the back of the guy's head), assess the situation and then issue the appropriate commands to the muscles.  The tennis guy didn't have the foggiest how he managed to do it but attributed it to tennis.   

*I attribute it to some antics of the "nonordinary reality."   

1 hour ago, liminal_luke said:

 

My mom sometimes paints abstracts.  She talks about "happy accidents," unplanned but beautiful happenings on the canvas.  Maybe the skill is to recognize when a happy accident has occured and capitalize on it.

Leonardo da Vinci reportedly advised apprentice artists to look at blank stucco or stone walls, uneven floors, etc., and pay attention to the images that the eye inadvertently seems to discern (or create?..  or what a taoist would call "co-create?..") in the random lines, cracks and spots.  Faces, figures, landscapes, whole scenes might appear -- and the apprentice is advised to focus on them and try to draw them.  Apparently he considered this happy accident plus imagination plus pattern recognition (plus a lack of hubris, a prerequisite to taking these "co-created" things seriously, or maybe not taking oneself too seriously) a good artistic tool, a method to utilize when honing one's skill. 

There's also a famous Russian poem (by Anna Akhmatova) that begins, "If only you knew what trash poems grow out of shamelessly, like a dandelion by the fence, like thistle and ragweed..."      

5 hours ago, Nungali said:

 

16. To obtain Magical Power, learn to control thought; admit only those ideas that are in harmony with the end desired, and not every stray and contradictory Idea that presents itself.

17. Fixed thought is a means to an end. Therefore pay attention to the power of silent thought and meditation. The material act is but the outward expression of thy thought, and therefore hath it been said that “the thought of foolishness is sin.” Thought is the commencement of action, and if a chance thought can produce much effect, what cannot fixed thought do?

 

- Liber Librae .

I remember the story about a young Japanese soldier who was decorated posthumously with the country's highest military award and made famous in the land as a great hero.  What did he do?  Well, absolutely nothing.  A bullet found him and he died in the very first battle he participated in, before he could fire a single shot.  Yes but afterwards his comrades found his diary, full of patriotic declarations and dreams of great heroic deeds.  He intended to be a fearless, invincible, formidable warrior for the emperor and the country.  And even though none of it materialized and reality turned out to be removed very far from his idea of what the war was going to be like for him, the diary was presented to the commander and then to someone higher in command and so on, and everybody deemed the boy a great national hero based on his thoughts and intentions alone.  The general consensus was that the thought counts as much as the deed -- provided it is sincere, which it apparently was since it was entrusted in private to the personal diary.  

Wasn't enough to win that war though.  (Thank god for that.)  

42 minutes ago, Nungali said:

 

Thanks for that .

 

I was just challenged on a history forum to  show historical reference to the land of Olmo Lung Ring ... now I know how to respond :

 

" Of course I know the reference , but its irrelevant at the moment   .........   "

 

It's not as easy to pull off if you're not a 5-year-old.  Adults are saddled with left brain derived expectations and obligations -- which more often than not are also someone else's idea of how we are supposed to behave in this or that situation.  But give it a try. 

When my son was 5, if I told him "no" in response to this or that request, he would think hard and try to negotiate, but instead of offering good behavior or whatever more ingenuous children use as bargaining chips, he would light up as though he just had a brilliant idea, and offer to oink for me.  The idea was that he can imitate a little pig so well that I won't be able to deny him anything.  Half the time it worked, even though oinking was always irrelevant.  

1 hour ago, Apech said:

 

I think ideas are hierarchical after all concepts are big ideas which 'hold together' families of ideas.  Although the hierarchy must be multidimensional with the 'top' idea changing with context.  I see it as a vast net or perhaps a honeycomb of interrelated ideas.  On either side of this are deniers - on one side the materialists like the Marxists who see ideas like bubbles floating to the surface of sewage forming a froth.  On the other side are the 'non-conceptual' people who just like to drop the whole idea business as a bit too difficult and 'problematic'. 

 

I've known two kinds of Marxists.  The Soviet ones were huge on ideas, it's just that those ideas had to express their ideology, and the bubbles on the surface of sewage were, to them, all other ideas.  Here, e.g., is an example of a very common way they decorated buildings here and there with permanent displays of ideological slogans.  This one reads, "Lenin's Ideas Keep Living and Winning!"  ("Ideas" is the first word of this statement in the original.)    

The other kind of Marxists, the Western ones, are exactly the same.  They do differ stylistically, on the surface of things, and many of them call themselves something entirely else, while many others don't even know that that's what they are (because unlike poor me they didn't have to study in-depth Marxism and derivatives for years on end, nor live its practical applications as a state policy.)  But the same enforcement of the mandatory worship of their ideas and complete relentless cancellation of not-theirs is a trademark by which you can recognize them even among billionaires.  In fact, I doubt many (if any) of them have read Das Kapital, a book of tremendous size and excruciating boredom...  but Marx was not really a Marxist in the sense the two categories I mentioned are.  Such is the fate of ideas.  

2 hours ago, Apech said:

 

In ancient China someone had the idea of mixing milk solids and ice with sugar, Marco Polo saw this and brought the idea back to Europe where someone thought of the idea of placing the substance in a cone made of wafer biscuit.

 

That's the problem with ideas.  Modern historians have this idea that Marco Polo not only didn't introduce ice cream to Europe but never went to China to begin with, and the "everybody knows" narrative was fully invented by the Victorians.  Just their idea of a cool story to tell.  Ice cream cool.

There's got to be some kind of hierarchy of ideas, a way to tell the ones that are good from the ones that are neutral from the ones that are irrelevant and then the ones that are harmful, all the way to absolutely deadly.  We've had our fair share of all kinds, but I don't think there's a good mechanism in existence to tell them apart.  I believe we need it...     

My all-time favorite example of the hierarchy of ideas comes from a book by the creator of the mathematical theory of fuzzy logic, Lotfi Zadeh.  If you ask a 5-year-old how much is two plus two, she might oblige and say "four," but chances are she will respond with, "I want some ice cream."  It doesn't necessarily mean she has no idea what two plus two is and just wants to change the subject.  It may simply means that "four" is irrelevant in her life of thoughts and feelings right here, right now, and ice cream is relevant.  She's not being illogical either.  She's following a superseding logic.       

14 hours ago, Nintendao said:

 

"my dog wants to play"

was Chuang Tzu's reply when asked:

why reincarnate?

 

This gave birth to an alternative vision of the famous Zhuangzi's butterfly dream.  Zhuzangzi fell asleep, dreamt he was a butterfly, and as a butterfly he played with his dog.  Eventually the dog got carried away, snapped its jaws and swallowed the butterfly.  Well, that sucks, the dream butterfly thought, but then it's only a dream -- I'm really a taoist philosopher dreaming I'm a butterfly, so I don't have to reincarnate.  I only have to wake up.  

But what about the dog, the butterfly surmized.  If the dog ate a dream butterfly, does it mean the dog is also dreaming?  And what will happen if I wake up -- will the dog wake up too and turn into Laozi or something?  And if I'm really Zhuangzi, will it explode?..

Why reincarnate

when I can wake up instead?

Timeline-hopping game.

13 minutes ago, liminal_luke said:

 

I agree, in a way.  Meditating to solve psychological problems is like dining at a Michelin star restaurant because you got caught up with things at work and forgot to eat lunch.  If a hotdog would do as well, don´t order the prix fixe menu with accompanying wine service.  That said, do you find that the perspective reached in meditation puts everyday problems in a helpfully different light?

Oh yes, definitely.  

Don't know about others, but for me, the important thing is not to put the cart before the horse.  Incidentally, in some shamanic traditions, the word for "meditation" is "horse."  You want your "horse" to gain strength by tending to it first -- feed and water and brush and care for it well, establish a trusting relationship.  You learn to ride it next.  And if you want it to also move the cart loaded with your problems, make sure you don't overload that cart -- and by no means put it in front of the horse so it has to push it out of the way continuously in order to get anywhere.  

But what you learn and experience in true meditation does help.  It starts by helping you "know thyself" first.  You discover the extent of some of your qualities -- e.g. endurance and patience, ability to focus, ability to tolerate physical discomfort (especially if you are a full lotus practitioner )) ) and the prudent limits to the above so you don't do more damage than good...  And then you can apply (first deliberately and eventually spontaneously) things you've learned and mastered in meditation to everyday problems.  The horse does help move that cart provided one doesn't go about it bass ackwards.    

5 hours ago, Apech said:

Yes we’ve had quite a few conversations on here about spiritual bypassing - I don’t think that we should confuse meditation with therapy.

I've learned to never meditate the "formal" way in order to solve, mitigate, bypass, or get a break from a real-life problem or mood.  Not for to "calm the nerves," alleviate anxiety caused by a real-life problem, attempt to bypass it, or "change my attitude."  It's the wrong tool.  It's akin to cracking nuts with your smartphone just because you don't have a nutcracker handy but want those nuts cracked.  You won't get far with the nuts and you will, in all likelihood, cause your phone to cease being that smart while at it.       

"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”

-- Richard P. Feynman

"Being comes from nonbeing.  Nonbeing reverts back to being." -- Ta Chuan (The Great Treatise) 

For me, being very sensitive to the energy and qi of places (and knowing classical feng shui too) makes life harder.  It's something cat-like.  A cat -- unless she was an indoor cat all her life -- has this territorial sense she can't explain to us hoomans except via seeking and avoidance behaviors... although urban cats are not as perceptive and get in trouble because the environment is so not suited for cats (or human children for that matter...  and adults are mostly shut down to that knowledge.)  Even with indoor cats you might notice they "know something" if you ever tried to give them a designated place for this and that in your home -- a cat bed, a bowl of water -- you know the bed and the bowl will be ignored and the cat will sleep wherever (changing her commitments as energies change) and drink from the toilet and throw stuff out of a drawer she thinks is better suited to be her bed.  

I could describe the feel of every place I've ever been to better than what it looks like -- it's something I always notice, and a lot of it is a nuisance.  Even a nice environment can be completely destroyed by, e.g., luminescent lighting.  But some places are sublime.  Literally make you want to kiss the ground.   

10 minutes ago, Apech said:

 smells like teen spirit

Walk like an Egyptian

19 hours ago, dwai said:

My hometown is Mysore in south India, and is considered one of the 108 shakti peethas. When I’m there, it feels like I’m plugged into a high voltage power line. Strangely, I never noticed it when I lived there. Maybe I wasn’t sensitive to it. 

My not hometown, New York, used to feel like that to me when I lived there, and especially when I commuted from New Jersey to work there.  I'd be sleepy, tired in advance in the morning, dozing off on the train, and then -- as soon as I stepped out of the subway underpass -- wham!  A huge jolt of energy.  I liked it for a while, but after a while, not so much.  It felt like some kind of artificial stimulation, too much adrenaline, too much cortisol, too little harmony.  The energy of perpetual stress.  But there was definitely a sense of power to the place.  Manhattan stands on a bedrock of shist that's 450 million years old -- I think that's what imparts its underlying strength, unyielding, hard, aggressive, very yang... I could feel it.   

Yeah, digging deeper/earlier is always fun.  You can uproot a whole lot of very unpopular opinions this way. ))

Here's a recent example I've encountered.  (Departing from the buddhist debate for a while, or at least trying to.  )The oldest known written literary work in the Slavic language, The Tale of Igor's Campaign (aka Slovo o Polku Igoreve), an epic poem dated 1185-1187, poses considerable difficulties for translators -- although some of the original can still be understood by a non-specialist if you know a language originating from Old East Slavic the epic is written in.  That's "some," not a whole lot.  However, it's been studied for centuries and some sort of consensus emerged regarding this or that passage, and accepted translations became more or less carved in stone.

That's until a Kazakh, Olzhas Suleimenov, who happened to be both a Russian writer and a Turkologist, published his revised versions with corrections, and corrections concerned multiple words from Common Turkic language which appear here and there in the original and which had escaped the comprehension of Slavists who went before.  Here and there in the text, the new translation immediately made a whole lot more sense, and the "weirdness" of the ancestors became quite a bit less weird as more logical passages replaced the misconstrued ones.  

Needless to say this opinion, which in my opinion was one hundred percent correct (and a work of genius), immediately became very very unpopular among both the mastodon specialists and lay folks who studied the old version in school.  Neither were ready to let go of the nonsense they are used to taking at face value.

"Such is the nature of man." -- Gurdjieff                 

17 minutes ago, snowymountains said:

 

Feeling someone's presence energising you, is attributed to Qi in Daoism ? - genuine question.

It does happen, I view it through the lens of transference & countertransference.

I'm talking about my taiji teacher.  After 20 years of taiji and a lot of assorted taoist "stuff" I dare say I can tell transference from qi.  (Besides, I am not a fan of pop psychology parlance, I've been around that block too, but on entirely different terms.)  

In practical terms, in the presence of my teacher, my taiji is better, everything is smoother, easier, and more efficient.  Verifiable by (e.g.) performance in sparring with others.  I don't have physical or mental strength to throw a guy half my age, twice my size -- I have skill learned from my teacher, and that skill is qi based.  

4 minutes ago, dwai said:

That is certainly possible. My teacher is like that - we can feel his field in a 40-50 mi radius around him (Maybe because we are attuned to him). 
 

Yeah, strong cultivators are a separate story.

 My teacher never failed to give me a boost of qi by his sheer presence.  It's as though no matter how you feel, no matter where your baseline is, after spending some time around this person you invariably feel better.

12 hours ago, liminal_luke said:

Can people be mobile power spots?  Is the force that draws us to some people the same as the force that attracts us to places?  

Definitely.  And just like with places, or even more so, it's not one kind of force, it's different kinds of power.  The most obvious is sexual attractiveness which in some people reaches its peak at a certain age, stays there for a certain while, and then begins to ebb.  It is the force some modern folks try to cling to (and some make fools of themselves in the process) -- whereas it's meant to work like that line in the I Ching: "It flares up, dies down, gets thrown away."  Other forces are waiting in line to take its place.  Motherly/fatherly energy -- powerfully attractive when it's there, and a talented teacher (or even a general whom soldiers see as a "father figure" on occasion) has it.  Powerful but unscrupulous leaders exploit it to the max.  Then there's forces that make someone talented, or even a genius -- also a magnet, although a more selective kind, or rather, the kind that can pull on one end and push on the other.  And so on.        

27 minutes ago, Apech said:

 

 

I suppose another way of asking my question is why do we see this world and not another?

 

(It may be a different question)

Because we are human?  I believe every live creature sees (hears, smells, feels tactile impressions, etc.) the world where it can exist, or else it wouldn't exist.  We don't have echolocation of whales and dolphins among our sensory abilities because we don't live in the ocean.  (Maybe we did when we did, but lost it when we crawled onto the shore...  if that's how it really happened.)  Nor of bats because we don't fly in the dark.  (That's why we can occasionally bump into trees in the dark, so at night we prefer to sleep.)  Or take the trees -- their sensory organs are phenomenal, notably the roots' ability to find nutrients and water deep in the ground (and take in only what they need -- each little rootlet is an advanced biochemical lab!) and their competence in stereometry (or they would lose balance and fall on the ground and on each other's head...  try being 380 feet tall like the tallest sequoia in California and standing on one leg for 3,500 years -- you've got to be an expert in, not just stereometry but space and time, no less!)  But we don't live like that, so we don't have the ability to see that world.  Their world.  We don't need it. 

Methinks we'd be supremely lucky if we could see our world, the real human world, but we've changed it into something I'm not sure we have adequate organs of perception for handling competently.  E.g. chemical and electromagnetic pollution -- we may not be feeling what we really need to feel in order to have a chance for long term (or even moderate term) survival.  We now have an environment for which we don't have organs to adequately process it and competently respond to.  If we survive, we may develop them.  But far as I know, our technological "advances" work tens of thousands of times faster than evolution does.  Too damn fast to catch up with on the level of adequate perceptions, let alone organs for handling those tasks.