Taomeow

"Most people imagine god as a cat with his paw in the fish tank." -- Terrence McKenna And why is that? Why, if it's all a dream, billions have been dreaming the same dream for the past fifteen thousand years? and nobody, before that?.. Looks more like the kind of dream induced by sending a signal from a central computer to the microchip imbedded in a cyborg's pineal gland. Do check yours, and if you find one, pull it out -- then you'll hear the music of the spheres and know the universe is real. "It's beautiful, you balmy bastards, this is not a dream." -- George Starbuck

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVQNt64PxfE

Thanks for sharing, Freeform, that's the kind of stories I like to hear. Stories of quality, not quantity... ...because the largest quantity of orgasms in a unit of time was what I observed in the Bronx zoo, among the resident monkeys, who use sex as a painkiller pretty much nonstop (well, because they're locked up in a cage... they don't do it anywhere near as much in nature... like, a hundred times less, or less). I know what you're talking about -- I've had these waves on my skin and hair (and obviously I don't have a lot of bodily hair -- so again it's not quantity that matters) after the first physical contact (not sex yet, sex was off limits at that time...) with a man I was in love with. These waves of goosebumps lasted for three days nonstop, and for another week on and off, and also every time I remember how it felt -- even now, ten years later! I think the secret of super-intensified, super-amplified everything -- all physical sensations, emotions, all interactions -- was in our positively scary level of physical compatibility -- we pretty much looked like some Fibonacci sequence for a male-female transition, all proportions an exact golden-ratio match -- from height and weight to the length of the foot, the inverse hip to waist ratios, the length of each finger joint, and so on. Pheromones were in on it too, sound effects too (e.g., I learned how to sing via harmonizing my voice with his, I was exceptionally clueless about singing before, and spontaneously much, much better at it ever after) -- so... everything -- it was just some biological jackpot. I believe when people had their senses about them, when they weren't swimming in a chemical and electromagnetic soup that confuses them so badly, that's how they found their perfect partners ziran. Naturally and spontaneously. Yeah. Our minds were one hundred percent incompatible though. Go figure.

Butterflies have light receptors in their genitals -- a scientific fact. Now a real man emits light too when making love -- and a real woman has receptors for that. "Real" in taoist literature means "of old," "the way we were before tao in the human world got destroyed." (Don't tell me it didn't get destroyed, all taoist classics say it did, and I have to agree because I can see it everywhere. One needs ideological blinders of some sort so as not to notice. "Awakening" would have to start with doing without.) Of course it's easier to compare sizes than feelings. My experience is humble compared to that of many other women (I married early, plus I'm extremely, extremely picky), but I haven't discovered a direct link between the size of the equipment and the light-emitting ability of a male. It's something else...

Think of it this way. No other primate female loses blood in this fashion. Taoist alchemy recaptures some earlier developmental stages both philogenically and onthogenically, i.e. both on the level of the individual and on the level of the species. On the level of the individual, one can expect rejuvenation; on the level of the species, one can expect to unblock some earlier genetic memories in the body. An alchemical woman doesn't just modify her body -- she modifies her species-specific jing, the past of all humanity. Stopping her periods is a step in this process, because menstruation is a stepping stone in her way that has "ordinary human" written all over it, a stepping stone that turns into a stumbling block that needs to be removed from the road that leads past an ordinary human. Interestingly though, in female alchemy, instructions are given to older women who have stopped menstruating to first restore the flow via practice, and then stop it once again via practice, instead of just letting it run out of steam due to aging. Again, that's because one is supposed to keep moving back in time in the alchemical process. Bioidentical hormones (a sales label, not an accurate description of their chemical and biophysical sturcture) can perhaps restore the period, but in doing so out of the context of the overall rejuvenation of the whole system, ultimately harm rather than benefit the woman's health. E.g., the liver, which is the main player in removing promptly all the highly toxic metabolites of hormonal reactions in the body, is still an aged liver, and if an older woman munches on xenoestrogens to "restore" her cycles, it is taxed with doing the work of a young liver -- which, a few years down the road, will prove to be too much.

I have a Hun, a Po, a Zhi, a Yi, and a Heart Shen. Together these comprize my Greater Shen. Underlying my Greater Shen I have qi, and underneath that, jing, and under that, blood, fluids, organs, flesh and bones and sinews, skin and hair and nails and teeth. Above my Greater Shen I have my Causal Body, and hovering over it and penetrating it all too, my Acausal Body, or the body of tao. That's a very cursory, but fairly complete sketch of my anatomy, physiology and psychology viewed from the classical taoist perspective. Nowere in this picture do I have an "ego." So to your question -- how it affects my meditation -- I have to answer, it doesn't, for lack thereof. What affects my meditation is the level of communication between all parts of me. E.g., if my left brain hemisphere is merely silenced, it's not meditation, it's "relaxation." In meditation, it is awake and alert and talks freely to all the energies and entities, both formed and formless, that reside, across the corpus callosum, in my right hemisphere; also, simultaneously, they both talk to my midbrain whose ancestral home is my Heart Shen, and the midbrain talks to the lower brain, which stores much of my Po; and my Po tunes up my breathing and postural alignment in meditation, and these affect my Kidney Yin and my jing, and so on. In other words, meditation, in my world, is integration and its goal is to become completely whole. So obviously, in my world, nothing is singled out under the label of "ego" in order to be shut down, thrown out, ignored, punished, or be ashamed of. What about you? What's meditation for in your practice?

Per my investigation, karma is not the outcome of dualistic thought, or if it is, the thought didn't originate in the human mind. "Long ago, a wind came, blew open a door in the heart that should have stayed closed" -- that's how an Ayurvedic doctor specializing in karmic diseases diagnoses a condition that in Western terms is known as congenital heart valve defect. Such conditions are not the outcome of the patient's doing or thinking, either in this life or in any previous ones. Karma is not unlike the early Judeo-Christian idea of primordial sin, and only later developments got the concept of "sin" to get interpreted as the person's own fault. An older understanding of "sin" is more like "a flaw in the fabric of reality," something that screwed things up by itself, ziran. Many shamanic traditions maintain there once was a luminous presence in the sky at all times and people were in communication with it at all times. And then it disappeared. A wind came...

del

My ego's head is pretty. Kinda like a redhead European version of Gong Li.

Why do you think the bigger picture is more important? Size matters? Personally, I am partial to the bigger picture because it is much, much easier for me to perceive, but I am also very respectful of the details, because that's where real work is needed -- work of attention, of awareness, of presence. Otherwise one doesn't notice... and an error of a tenth of a degree, as navigators have learned through direct experience, takes you thousands of miles away from where you thought you were going. "Tao is subtle. The sage emulates that." I don't doubt that everything is connected, but as the song goes, "we are one, but we're not the same" -- and "enforced oneness" is a virtual demon persistently stalking all taoist-buddhist-zen forums and biting off all the heads that stick out and all the tails that aren't tucked humbly between anyone's legs. Biting off everything that shows up above, below, or to the side of the anything-goesness, the everythingness, the oneness and sameness that is supposed to be the bee's knees. But even in a beehive, they're one but they're not the same -- sameness destroys them, try removing the one bee that starts out "the same" but winds up turning "different," "special," "unique" -- the queen!.. -- try to enforce sameness by removing her, and everybody dies!

I didn't mean to disagree with you, I meant to disagree with the tao+te=brahman+atman formula of another entry. I once looked through the technologically simulated Eye Of A Bee contraption at the museum of science and technology. And you know what... Sun was not sun and moon was not moon, and there was definitely more than one sky. There were over seventy skies, some occupied by one sun, some by none, some by seventy. There were purple moons, there were black flowers with neon green markings, there were all kinds of things in plain view that no human ever sees at all, let alone as "truth" or "reality" -- but does it mean the bee is wrong seeing a very, very different "truth" and a completely "alternative" reality? Likewise, is a cat wrong when she looks at atman and sees, with utmost clarity, bright neon green markings on it that spell out, in Substandard English, "Attention cat, whatcha lookin' at ain't no tao, and you better believe your eyes!"

It's not all the same to me. Mozart ain't no Britney Spears to me. And tao ain't no brahman. And ego ain't no atman deficiency. Ego is a Freudian psychoanalytical term for which Fu Xi has no use whatsoever, and neither do I. If everything looks the same, it may simply mean one hasn't been paying attention. Like with classical Chinese music -- most people who were not exposed to it early enough can't hear nine-tenth of it because nine-tenth of it is too subtle. Then again, if one is completely deaf, Chinese music, Mozart, Britney Spears and the didjeridoo all sound the same. It might be correct from some divine perspective or other, but I always have a good laugh when a human being asserts there's no difference between anything and anything else. That same human being who will have fried eggs rather than the frying pan for breakfast. That same human being who will chase it with green tea rather than green acrylic paint. That same human being who told me so many times that unless I drink green paint, walk on the tips of my ears instead of my feet, breathe water with my "potentially" perfectly functional gills instead of air with my lowly here-now lungs (there's no difference, right?..) and, most importantly, stop differentiating between Indo-European and Southeast Asian spiritual traditions, then it means I've an ego problem. Yes, Herr Freud. Obviously. Meowwwwww....

I'm eating an apple. I have peeled it because I don't like the tough skin of commercial apples (yes, even organic varieties). I have peeled its green outer-yang toughness in a perfect spiral, careful not to break it. Now I'm focusing on the inner-yin apple. Without the skin, the yin-yang layout has changed, what used to be yin-inner is now exposed, yang-outer, and of course I'll get to that sooner than to the part that is yin proper, the most hidden, the innermost seed. Crunch. It's a Granny Smith, similar but inferior to the Semirenko I used to eat as a kid. The taste is simplified against the complex flavor my tongue's memory retains of the more tao-like, uncarved-block apples I used to eat. Crunch. Stay on the apple. Stay on Apple, the kind of qi that manifests as Apple. See it grow from a seed, turn into a tree, leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, tree, leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, tree... Crunch. My own saliva mixed with Apple tastes like a tree, like leaves, like flowers, like sun and moon and stars. Crunch. That's because you can't really separate us now, the photosynthesis that distilled sunlight into the Granny Smith and the hemoglobin synthesis that has now replaced the green pigment of the apple's blood with the red pigment of mine without changing much else about it. The distilled sunlight is sinking into my stomach. Crunch. And the distilled moonlight too, and the dark moonless nights, because flowers only bloom if they had proper light-darkness stimulation, light alone kills them, they need dark nights too. Just like me. Crunch. The apple lasts forever. I make my vision microscopic, zoom in on an individual cell inside its flesh. I see some leakage of juice around the cell membrane, that's because the molecules of some chemicals got inside and pierced the membrane, causing the cell to lose some of its energy. The apple is young and strong but not entirely healthy, its qi has been drained somewhat. Crunch. Zoom out, fast forward, rewind... Eve handing an apple (a pomegranate?) to Adam, bodhi tree shedding apples on Newton's head (on Buddha's head?), myself at the age of seven running like hell from a furious rolling-pin-wielding woman and her dog who are chasing me for having plucked some apples off a low branch in her little orchard -- repeatedly. Stealing is wrong, but punishment must be commensurate with crime, and the apple orchard owner seems bent on murder. Crunch. I escaped, and that's why I can meditate on the apple today. Crunch...

"The Master And Margarita," by Mikhail Bulgakov. Spoken by the devil in the course of a theological discussion he's having with two hardened atheists. This novel inspired Mick Jagger's "Sympathy For The Devil," by the way.

Really liked your thoughts, Ian! Here's from a pragmatist: I suspect the same rule applies here that I've seen some research link to efficient workouts for athletes and bodybuilders. Muscles actually grow after being worked but during rest. For bodybuilders, e.g., if their muscles are worked every day, without rest periods, muscle mass increase is slower than if they are exercised every other day. Skills are, likewise, wired into long-term memory during rest, not during actual practice (that only takes them to short term kinesthetic memory for temporary storage). What "karma" can bounce back can also be bounced back by overloading one's short-term kinesthetic memory without giving stuff you practice a chance to sink into the long-term memory. So... every other day seems like a reasonable rule of thumb. No burnout, no boredom, you actually look forward to your next chance to practice, you can't wait!.. Unless it's all my lazy bone's excuses of course. 24/7 is realistic though, imo. I taiji my dishes into the dishwasher every time...

Actually, it helps to have practiced taking care of a house plant, at the very least. If a cactus has never thrived under one's care, chances are his or her children are gonna be so screwed... Or take a cat, a dog, a fish tank -- and practice. If everything alive withers from one's touch, his or her future kids are screwed, guaranteed. Another way to practice parenting: do whatever it takes to come to an emotional place where you feel fine in your own company, under any circumstances, with no help from anybody or anything else. If you're cool being with yourself, chances are your kids will be too. If you don't need props, distractions, things to do that are all aimed at helping you avoid any prolonged one-on-one contact with yourself -- chances are your kids will not be used by you as props, distractions, things to do so as not to have to deal with yourself directly. And they are going to be far better off in this situation than the children of the opposite deal. As for death preparedness... as a protagonist of my all-time favorite novel (translated into English four times but, unfortunately, with none of the translations even remotely touching the real thing) said to another protagonist of same, "That man is mortal is not the real problem. The real problem is that man is sometimes suddenly mortal." And proceeded to predict to another protagonist that he would die via having his head chopped off by a woman. The forewarned party didn't believe it, but that's exactly what happened five minutes later... and having been totally, utterly unprepared for it caused a helluva lot of trouble for him in the next world.

There's bums in traditional taoism, they are known as The Wandering Taoists -- there's a book describing what they are up to, by Deng Ming-Dao, titled "The Wandering Taoist," or in modern terms, "The Tao Bum." As for atman and brahman, these are hindu, not taoist, i.e. Indo-European goodies that a tao bum only comes across if he or she happens to wander far, far away from his or her Southeast Asian spiritual home.

Far as conspiracies go -- I don't think there's ever been anything but. But then, I learned history in school (the country is Russia, Pietro), and then some out of school, so I really don't buy the syndicated-media-sponsored image of a "conspiracy theorist" as some paranoid, gullible, ignorant misfit. (Syndicated media is not a conspiracy theory, right? It IS syndicated, ever wondered how much independent, honest, unbiased, informed reporting this fact translates into? Per my calculations, 3% -- and even this consists of things that don't matter. What matters doesn't gets reported. You get far more information on what kind of underwear Britney Spears wears than on any of the hundreds of thousands of carcinogens in your food supply. The 3% of "The Truth" you'll be able to learn this way will be about a movie star arrested for drunk driving -- yes, it's The Truth! -- or a football player signing a seven-figure contract -- wow, another Truth!) Anyone who has learned history the real deal knows that the history of civilization, the history of accumulation, distribution, and redistribution of power, is the history of nonstop conspiracies -- nonstop, everywhere and always. Read some Plinius or Flavius if you don't believe me... ...but in any event, I'm breaking my own promise to myself (to never talk environmental issues with anyone who hasn't read Derrick Jensen) -- so please consider my contribution to this thread as nothing but a book recommendation. (Witch, you might want to take a look too, what's with a Witch being this tame on environmental issues? Global warming, and all the billionaires are going to worry? They will have their air conditioning cheerfully blasting away the doom and gloom of whatever level of global warming long after the rest of us have switched to buying breathable air by prescription only from our friendly local pharmacy.)

You know, what Ghandi really accomplished was not what he planned to accomplish. The outcome of his actions was a war with Pakistan, Moslem-Hindu-Buddhist bloodshed, with the British empire still supplying weapons to all sides. What the French Revolution accomplished was a lot of bloodshed and some minor redistribution of the cake, with 97% of the population still getting exactly the amount of crumbs they were getting before the bloodshed. As the wife of Chan Kai Shek once put it addressing the supporters of the Communist-Maoist competition of her husband, "you were slaves in Old China, now you are slaves of the slaves of Old China." But then of course ordinary members of a colonial empire like ourselves have a chance to get more of those crumbs than citizens of the countries under demolition, which creates an illusion of someone having accomplished something. This illusion promptly dissipates if you take the global view -- most people living today starve, most labor out there is excruciating slave labor (yeah, you can, in many cases, voluntarily change your owner unlike the slaves of the 18th century, but what you CAN'T do is lose the owner altogether. Someone is always in this nifty set-up that allows him to own you, your children, and even your cat, which is supposed to jump through all the hoops the owner has set for her or be killed.) But the non-vital stuff abounds -- wow, look at all the electronic toys we have! Surely we must have accomplished something! And, you know, I grew up in a country where revolution was supposed to have won. And what happened was, again, the redistribution of the cake, with 97% of the population still getting exactly as many crumbs from the new government as they were getting from the old one, or fewer. And then, seventy year later, it got redistributed once again, and a few new people laid their hands on the cake, and that's about it. Frankly, I don't think anything works against old power, it doesn't change, it might change hands but not its nature. Old power, like old qi, gotta die in order to be reborn... you can't change an evil old bully into an innocent infant by putting make-up on him... and all the discussions, all the revolutions, all that jazz -- is about which make-up looks better on him, which paint to apply to make his cheeks look rosy and his smile, a bit less cannibalistic. Is all... It's funny how people would do anything so as to avoid feeling helpless, so as to create the illusion of control for themselves. Gandhi was a control freak par excellence. He didn't give up in order to give up, he played this game, "I pretend I give up whereas what I really want is to win, so I'm going to win by giving up, confuse the hell outta everybody." And he won. And old power used him the way it uses all "winners" of all such games...

WF, have you read Derrick Jensen by any chance? "End Game?" He's both organized and watched the activities of groups that tried to fight the big business protecting lands and forests and living creatures and their own homes. Apparently no one has ever won. The book spells out "why" better than most. If you know of a group that has ever succeeded in getting the 3% of the world population who own 97% of the world resources to dismantle their empires and start living off the land using only the energy of their own bodies towards sustaining their existence, I'd join in a second. Unfortunately, nothing done by 97% of the world population ever matters. The way the cookie crumbles is determined by whoever owns the cookie, down to the last crumb.

Wow! This is quite something. I'm going to try it... if you don't hear from me again, it might mean I tied myself in a pretzel knot I can't untie. Here's a demo from my teacher:

Neijia, whatcha doing to my hard-earned humility! Bow ...

Consider this... Medieval witch hunts, in full swing in Europe for 300 years nonstop, were pretty much about usurping every shred of power which "pagan" healers (overwhelmingly women) had since time immemorial, and accumulating it in the hands of the fathers of the church. According to some researchers, 1.3 million women were burned as witches during this period, and almost all European cats, who were hated for their free and independent ways and therefore declared to be devil's servants and witches' accomplices. With cats gone, mice and rats multiplied exponentially, invading graineries, shaking up the agrarian foundation of the economy, bringing famine and the fleas of the Black Plague on their backs. With witches gone, the healing arts forbidden and forgotten, what would have been stopped (the way it did get stopped every time it started for hundreds of thousands of years) killed more than 2/3 of Europe's population and threw the whole culture into the Dark Ages for centuries to come. The horrible wrath of the cat is not the kind of power that is unnatural, it's our good old karmic law of inevitalbe paybacks for expenditures of life and limb in excess of one's normal survival needs. In and of itself it is not an "evil" power, it is benevolent and nourishing. Interfere with it, try to negate and usurp it... and die of "natural causes." Today, 150 species of animals and plants disappear from the face of the earth daily . This kind of mass extinction the puppeteers of our modern scientific witches have unleashed on the world has never taken place on this planet in the billions of years of its existence. I wonder what natural "effects" we are to expect. I'd be lying if I told you I know, but I have a feeling it can't be good...

In Dzogchen, there's a part that trains you to sleep a certain way, a sleep yoga practice that takes years or even decades to master. They assert that training to sleep consciously is the necessary step for retaining consciousness and control during and after death. As much control as you have over your sleep process you are expected to have over your death and afterlife. Unconscious sleep with no voluntary control is a harbinger of being lost and confused in bardo. A master of sleep, on the other hand, is expected to be able to choose where to go once she's dead, and in what capacity. Then there's assorted taoist views. Complete Reality and Celestial Teachers folks believe you become a gui, "hungry ghost," if you die unfulfilled, or if you don't practice, or if you screw up your practice, e.g. by sitting in stillness meditations too much and accumulating too much yin or by "practicing tao without understanding it." Zhuangzi is far more optimistic -- you are just going to be incarnated as "a rat's liver," for instance, "where can tao take me that isn't good?" Then there was a realized master, forget his name, who was asked by a student what happens after death and replied, I've no idea. "But you're a great and accomplished realized master," the student protested. "Yes, that I am, but not a dead one!" snapped the teacher. Then there's old shamanic beliefs, more or less universal worldwide. Some African tribes believe that if you had a normal, successful family life, then after death you turn into mboga. Mboga is the kind of ancestor who retains interest in the affairs of the living and makes himself or herself available for wise and kindly advice provided the living remember and respect their mboga, or becomes vengeful and hindering if they don't. This places the affairs of the dead and the living in a feedback loop that is also taken into account by the oldest part of classical feng shui, yin feng shui, the art of making the dead comfortable. I think Zhuangzi appeals to Westerners more than many other Chinese philosophers because he basically advocates doing nothing special towards any special goal whatsoever. That's unusual and eccentric in the overall scheme of things, most would require certain preparations and imply different options and choices after death, on the assumption that to the same extent that life can (and often does) go haywire, so can death, and it might be a good idea to take some care to disentangle and straighten out both.

I did try it once. Nothing happened. The practitioner was surprised and wanted to know what my diet is like. (My diet is an omnivorous deal, mostly organic, no junk food, no soda ever, almost no grains with the exception of rice, no dairy except some organic kefir and goat or sheep cheese, high fat, very strong black coffee, an occasional glass of wine, red meat and fish, vegetables both cooked and raw, some seaweed on a regular basis, soups on a regular basis, fermented foods and drinks, fruits and berries, herbal teas, and never any large meals -- I eat as much as I can digest by the next meal, and if I'm stricken with night munchies, which happens, I take digestive enzymes with those. I am a good cook and believe "how" you prepare your meal is every bit as important as "what" you prepare. I never eat "punitive" meals of bland unimaginative stuff like steamed vegetables or unseasoned brown rice or coarsely chopped "rabbit food" or some such. I use two dozen spices and fragrant herbs in my cooking, which help digest whatever I eat. The colonic practitioner didn't believe me. Her idea of a "healthy diet" is something else. Almost everybody's idea is something else. But there you have it -- I eat as a "red-blooded human" and it keeps me clean as a whistle.)