Taomeow

The hurricane/tropical storm is a couple hours away from us per latest predictions, but some fire hydrants in downtown decided to help it along ahead of schedule. Video: https://packaged-media.redd.it/k703vjwl1bjb1/pb/m2-res_1280p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1692572400&s=6d053c7ae8deeab4e038fffffacb9f5afa090978#t=0

"Demon," "monster" and similar words may mean all sorts of things, different things to different people, but there's not a single ancient, indigenous, etc. tradition where they are not present. And even though we have been led to believe that their existence is somehow at odds with modern science, this in itself is merely a belief with no scientific proof -- because no scientific studies to tackle demons have ever been undertaken by modern science using its scientific method in any shape or form. For starters, scientists would have to agree on the terminology used. What is a demon? What is it that purportedly doesn't exist? I think a certain configuration of form and function can assume the distinct behavioral characteristics of a demon, and it can happen inside the human brain and the resulting mentality and emotionality -- what psychiatry of old called "complexes" -- but it can also shape itself into something made of microplastics, of xenohormones, of social trends tinged or thoroughly permeated with malevolent insanity, of frankenfoods and drugs... I think PTSD is a kind of demon, and glyphosate is, and Rockefeller medicine, and many aspects of child-rearing and education, and and and...

Ah yes, I can imagine. I have a vivid memory of a guandao blade flying off its handle in the middle of a demo by a master from China who was giving a workshop to our taiji class. The master was unable to board the plane with the real thing, so he trustingly used some prop found locally (and used only as decoration, so, never tested for quality) at a hard MA place where my teacher rented the premises for a while. Just as the visiting master was twirling it over his head like a helicopter propeller, off it went flying, and could easily take someone's head off, but luckily we were an agile group and everybody ran for cover just in time.

I remember trying to design a sheath for my jian just so that I could carry it on the back and draw from the back -- and be able to put it back in like that, which is a bit trickier. I couldn't figure out a design that would work, so I asked someone who makes sheaths semi-professionally, and she also failed. And that's when I learned that these swords were originally designed for horseback riding warriors -- and I don't mean the stance, I mean the actual horse. No problem to draw it from the back if you're so inclined -- but you have to mount a horse first. Or else use a shorter sword.

I haven't come across yin devils or yang devils as categories, but my forays into taoist demonology weren't that comprehensive. Of course any demon, like any other phenomenon of the world of manifestations, can be classified as primarily yin or primarily yang, but they can also change their taiji allegiances. E.g., Sun Wukong, sometimes referred to as the "stone monkey demon," was imprisoned under the mountain for 500 years for, basically, being way too yang for anyone's comfort, and spent this long and boring time as an extremely yin entity. Whereas fox spirits (a rather well-explored category) are very yin to begin with -- until they flip into their aggressive yang manifestation. Taoist demonology and exorcism constitute a major part of the canon, not a footnote. They have their educated and trained professionals with different sets of qualifications, and detailed and specific "job descriptions." A very tongue-in-cheek analogy would be psychiatrists vs psychologists vs social workers, except what they do is not what a Western therapist would do. Taoist priests are "psychiatrists," Fashi (skillfull masters) are "psychologists," and spirit mediums are "social workers." And then there's sorcerers, those can be likened to undercover agents, and sometimes double agents.

Taoist yaoguai ("strange monsters") are thought of as being born due to human activities which disrupts the Way. They come into being via many venues as the outcome of deviations from the tao and the resulting abnormal, aberrant qi. They can take the shape of people, animals, objects, supernatural phenomena in the environment, and outbursts of strange, "idiotic" and/or destructive behaviors, both in individuals and in large groups of people. They can shapeshift too and possess various powers, primarily mind control and the ability to create illusions and delusions.

The taoist canon, the Daozang, is comprised of 1445 texts. The catalogue collated in 471 under the Director of the Bureau of Evaluation is about one-third the size of the earlier catalogue under the editorship of Lu Xiujing. Which may explain why some of the canonized texts contain recipes for immortality. What mortal could possibly find the time to study something like this in any depth?.. Especially considering abstract study ("philosophical taoism") constitutes a fraction of a percent of what it's all about, while most of it (the three main parts known as the three grottoes) is dedicated to hands-on practicalities?.. To wit, meditation, ritual, and exorcism. According to the canon, exorcism is the lowest stage of taoist cultivation, but there's no moving on to the intermediate (ritual) and highest (meditation) for anyone skipping this stage. Which may explain why modern meditators generally accomplish nothing in particular beyond maybe some sedating effect on their nerves -- if they're lucky. If they are less lucky, their demons (with which civilized humanity is infested beyond belief) that have successfully escaped the exorcism stage get a preferential chance to flourish. In a demon-infested meditator, the demons are given a favorable environment for projecting their power of delusion onto a mind which has been quieted just enough for them to come to the fore and set up shop, uninterrupted by the mind's usual everyday distractions.

Where evil's reach falls short, stupidity gleefully finishes the task. -- Marina and Sergey Dyachenko

Actually he doesn't. American diet belly hangs low and flabby. Frantzis's belly sits high and tight, balloon style. It's a different kind of belly altogether.

The doorman gets pissed The monks get into a brawl The cat takes a nap

I get synchronicities nearly every day. Almost enough to convince me we live in a simulation. I vividly remember the very first one -- I was 8 years old, spending a month in a summer camp. Several girls in the corner of a very large room were talking about something while I was reading a book in another corner. A name of a new protagonist came up in my book, a very unusual one -- unusual enough for me to have never encountered that name not only before, but ever again. At exactly the moment my eyes were reading that name on the page, one of the girls across the room yelled it out excitedly -- that very name. Turned out they were trying to remember an unusual name of someone they knew, and did, simultaneously with it appearing in front of my eyes. This particular kind of synchronicity has been happening to me with some regularity. I wish I knew what it means. I have several theories, but no definitive proof of anything...

Yes, sort of -- though it's not a pyramid in taoism, more like a spectrum... or a bell curve. Or even a sine wave. Self-actualization and survival needs are not as opposed in "classical" taoism as they are in other traditions. As Hong Junsheng (one of the great masters in Chen style taiji) once put it, "the meaning of life" is a very Western concept which he had a hard time wrapping his mind around on first exposure. I suspect self-actualization in Maslow's sense is a phenomenon of neurotic/traumatic origins as well... but my mind has been skewed in a somewhat barbaric fashion for quite some time, so don't take my word for it.

Thank you. I thought you were being sarcastic -- my mistake, but you often are, so... Anyway, all is forgiven and I'm flattered by your paying attention to my meows. That's the problem with claims -- too many boys cry too many wolves. In my case -- and I don't even remember if I told the story here, must have, I was bursting with this desire to share things ayahuasca for a while but not finding anywhere near adequate words to do it -- but I tried. I talked to everyone about that stuff for a while, even strangers... this only happened to me once before, after my twins were born -- I felt the world needed to know what it was like. Ha! I'm a lot more restrained now about whatever might shake me to the core on impact. But, briefly about what I was referring to. SHE spent 8 hours straight teaching me to control the rainfall, of all things. I never thought it would ever be used after that night, but there was no arguing with her, and while it was going on I sort of got the knack of it, turning the rainstorm in the rain forest on and off many times. By the end of the lesson, it was as easy as turning your shower on and off in your bathroom. And then some time later I had to travel to New York (an unplanned and unexpected necessity trip) and right after I arrived, there was this hurricane Irene warning, a big deal it was supposed to be, they ordered mandatory evacuation for 2.5 million people and issued dire warning for the rest. The night it was to make landfall, I stood outside, remembering and applying stuff ayahuasca taught me. The hurricane totally fizzled out compared to what was predicted/expected. I'll never know if I played a part. All I know is, it seemed like that was precisely what she taught me that stuff for. Interesting. WLP's rationale was, it was for not letting an attacker hit you in the liver should they aim a strike there. He taught us how to move qi wuxing style between five organs first, and then how to increase mobility of the organs themselves. He asserted it's a modern, and abnormal, thing for internal organs to be "stuck" and "glued," similar to (but harder to tackle than) any other manifestation of stiffening, hardening, loss of freedom of movement and control of one's mobility range.

Not mentioned in your proposed list of verifiable signs of having neidan, eh? No "red blood becomes milk?" No growing seven feet tall? No turning into a Buddha who is supposed to be the real verifiable taoist cultivator with neidan? Dismissed! You seem to think that either I'm lying, or I fell for some trick. If I were lying, I'd come up with something other than a phenomenon I never encountered as any sign of anything, I'd go with something more mainstream, like setting stuff on fire with one's bare hands or healing someone's hump or limp, and so on. And if it was some trick, I can't for the life of me imagine how it could be done -- one can hide a rabbit in a top hat but in one's own torso?.. ?? Everybody who has accomplished anything in cultivation is a senior citizen. This is not a young ageist's game -- they all are subconsciously convinced they are immortal by default, and forever young at that -- and someone who has reached an age beyond their reach so far is automatically disqualified. Whereas their real cultivation effort should be focused on becoming a senior citizen, for starters. Nothing is guaranteed to anyone. Real taoist cultivation is about "living out one's human years" to the fullest -- WLP teaches just that, offering the students to set a simple goal for starters, to think of themselves as naturally equipped to live a very long healthy life, take it from there. As for how to deflect a hurricane with magic, that's not WLP, that's ayahuasca's teachings, in my humble case, and I think I said clearly at the time that I've no way of knowing whether it was a coincidence. But that's what she trained me to do, for reasons I didn't understand at the time at all. I wanted something entirely different from her, but it was what it was. Those are all sort of self-defense moves, wait until I'm on the offensive... if the spirit so moves me.

Fabulous, of course A snail climbing Mount Fuji with Issa's blessings

Himalayan Lynx ( (Lynx lynx isabellinus) Photo Credit: CGNP, Camera trap clicks. Chitral Gol National Park, Pakistan

I've read his book. Some of the stuff therein was truly far out. By comparison, any and every claim ever made on this forum sounds like a child's announcement that he's big enough to put on his shoes all by himself, and his master is even able to tie his own shoelaces! But I think that's the general situation with Western practices vis a vis indigenous shamanic ones, wherever the latter might still survive. I enjoyed the book very much. If I were to get instructions from Malidoma, I'd follow them verbatim I think. Maybe.

It starts with meiosis, then proceeds to mitosis-meiosis interplay.

Yeah, that's how it sounded to me. Did I answer your questions to your satisfaction? I was just trying to be helpful, not arguing.

Multiplication is division. If the mind could truly understand this koan of cellular biology, everybody would become instantly enlightened.

If I could make public some private letters re the David Verdesi debacle that were shared with me at one point, you would have to reconsider about the "cahoots." "What he got" and "where is he now" are separate questions. What he got I saw and experienced, but you won't be convinced. As for where he is now -- he was teaching seminars in China and in several other countries in Eastern Europe and Asia up until the end of 2019 -- the last one shortly before covid lockdowns began in China. He hasn't returned to teaching large groups or traveling abroad, but you have to keep in mind that lockdowns were renewed on a number of occasions in some cities in China way after they ended elsewhere, and China's overall human interactions with the West (as well as domestically) have changed pretty drastically. He's been only teaching small groups locally (in Dalian) -- perhaps as the result of a combo of circumstances and personal choices. That information is about six months old. As for Nathan -- what he got is a translation that was easier to read than the ones appearing before. There's a new (and probably better) translation just out, by Livia Kohn -- an emeritus professor of Religion and East Asian Studies at Boston University specializing in studies of taoism, one of the top Western authorities on things taoist, author of numerous significant works and translations, and a practitioner herself. I think if she wasn't phased by gossip of the kind you seem to have believed, she wasn't just being a gullible sucker when she took "what WLP got" seriously. A gullible sucker is not her style at all. (Nor is it mine, if I say so myself.)

"My friend in tao, the times have changed..." https://www.facebook.com/721843241/videos/427836879838735

Wild blackberries! "Cranberries" are also wild. "Pretenders," more so.