Taomeow

I own a vintage scarf with the map of Paris printed on it. If there was no difference between the map and the territory, the Eiffel Tower would be poking me in the neck.

All the time.

From the taoist perspective, the central channel can be found or placed anywhere where there's yin-yang interplay and transformation. It's the "mysterious border" between yin and yang, and it's not anatomical nor material and not even "spiritual." What it is is in a certain sense virtual -- a virtual field of potential manifestations. If you look at the taijitu, it's that S-shaped demarcation line between yin and yang which both divides and unites them and sort of doesn't exist -- it's the interplay and co-creation of yin and yang that make it appear. No such interplay takes place in wuji where there's no duality. The reason there's no duality is that nothing happens there. Once something happens -- anything at all -- bye wuji, bye nonduality, hello manifestations. So, the central channel can be this division-unification between, e.g., the left side of the body and the right side, the left brain and the right, but also the upper and the lower body, or the back and the front, or the outer and the inner, and so on. Moreover, it can be the border between the body and the mind, between jing and qi, qi and shen, between life and death, between gods and mortals, and so on. If you place your unwavering awareness on any of those division-unification borders, that's where your central channel will be.

"Against the flow" examples from nature: Salmons live for 2-3 years and die immediately after spawning. All salmons are powerfully drawn to spawning, but if you put obstacles in the way of it happening, they will live for 14 years. That's going against the flow -- for longevity. Mice like to eat. If food is plentiful, they will always eat their fill. If you restrict their food at an early age, their lifespan increases greatly -- sometimes fivefold, which in human years would correspond to getting to be 160 years old. They grow up smaller than average mice but their health is stellar. That's going against the flow -- for longevity. Neidan practitioners try to go against the flow because they want to be healthy (in body, mind, and spirit) and live longer than what their "natural" lifespan dictates. What is it anyway, this "natural" lifespan? Maybe an individual practitioner won't be able to pull off a dramatic increase -- because of compromised genetics, environmental adversities, stressful events, traumatic experiences -- there's no guarantee that he or she will live a longer and healthier life than some lucky individual who just goes with the flow and still beats them at this game due to stellar genetics, environmental blessings, low stress life, happy avoidance of traumatizing occurrences or routines, and so on. But the idea is to improve one's chances despite adversities. In other words, it's natural to go with the flow, and paradoxically enough (taoism is nothing if not full of paradoxes), it can also be natural to go against the flow. It all depends on what kind of flow and where one is headed going against it and how they go about it.

I can imagine. If I had artistic training, I would probably try to get some well-deserved amusement out of those calls too, but for me, it's a rare occurrence to be inspired like that. Most often I just hang up without saying a word. The reason is twofold. For one thing, those callers are chronofages... though not as ferocious as the inhuman ones that set up time-eating traps when it's me who needs to reach this or that den of officialdom. All those "your call is very important to us," "all our representatives are assisting other customers," "please stay on the line" etc. repeated every minute, tens or hundreds of times while you wait-- with the most horrible, unbearable compulsory music enforcement in between. For another, I pity folks who have to take a telemarketing job, no one chooses it, it's something one would do out of either sheer desperation due to the overall state of the market, or else out of sheer uselessness in any other capacity. If I engage them in a conversation knowing all the while I won't give them a chance in hell of it leading to a sale, I'd sort of turn the tables and eat their time myself. So I do my best not to take those calls personally... most of the time.

It's not what happened today, it was a while ago, but I just remembered it by association with something else. Some cold caller managed to get me on the phone (the area code looked like it might be someone I know) and goes, "Is this Miss Me... umm... Mzhe... ahem... Mrzhebr... meebeeee... bebebemeee... (in exasperation) do you speak English a little?!" I hadn't uttered a single word yet, so I figured she projected her own difficulties in pronouncing my name onto me. "I do speak English a little," I responded pleasantly. "Among other things, I've learned how to pronounce names of foreign origin -- I think of it as part of English proficiency. For instance, the caller before you told me his name was Srikarthikeyan. If you can spell this name back to me, I will sign up for whatever you're offering." She hung up.

Yes, Elysium (aka Luo Ji?), go for it. Eliminate human tyranny! The world belongs to Trisolaris!

Most opinions that are absolutely correct and valid are wildly unpopular. Yours here are a good example. Yet if you wanted people to argue against them, you could choose some more outrageous unpopular opinions. Here's a few examples off the top of my head: Rich and powerful people are edible. The world belongs to Trisolaris. The jing-qi-shen sequence is natural and inevitable, and naturally and inevitably ends up in Void whether you speed it up with this or that ridiculous practice or not. If you alchemically reverse the flow, you can avoid the Void. Taoist alchemy is not about "going with the flow," but about going against the flow.

One of those many stories most people never heard -- along with the stories of the great female samurai warriors of Japan, or the most powerful and successful pirate of all time who was a Chinese girl, or the three great women who headed the fight for independence from Moscow in the 15th century Novgorod Republic, and so on. This is Henriette D’Angeville, who, in 1838, climbed Mont Blanc with 18 bottles of wine, 26 roast chickens and a carrier pigeon. She was the first woman to complete the ascend unaided. Her outfit was homemade as there were no climbing clothes for women. The pants stirred some controversy...

"My dear Watson," said Sherlock Holmes, "I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers." -- Arthur Conan Doyle "Don't be so humble, you're not that great." -- Golda Meir

Don't put fingers onto your stomach at all if it's confusing. Instead, mark the size of your own personal cun on a piece of paper or on a measuring tape or on a piece of string and use that. Keep in mind that for the location of the lower dantian, it's fine if it's approximate enough, it's not really a point you need to locate as precisely as for sticking a needle therein. Many years ago, someone let me borrow a simple little machine with two electrodes and a graduated scale that measured electrical conductance on the surface of the skin (and doubled up as a treatment device, but I don't remember by now how exactly it was used.) The acupoints have significantly higher conductance -- when you hit the correct point, the measuring needle on the scale would instantly jump. It made it easy to find precise locations. That machine was very simple -- there's modern devices however that are designed for the same purpose, fancier and computerized and costing way more -- but some acupuncturists might have them in their office. You could perhaps try to find one of those and measure the precise location "scientifically."

The above says 1.5 cun. Unfortunately, I don't understand what you mean by "behind the middle finger or below it."

Today is the International Women's Day. It meant something at some point. In 1908 when it all began, 15000 women marched in New York for shorter work hours, equal pay, and voting rights. In the 5th grade, a boy in my class gave me a little pendant for the March 8th present. I remember it well -- it was my first-ever piece of wearable jewelry. A little pink crystal in the shape of a teardrop on a delicate chain. I would still wear it today, it was surprisingly tasteful. Later I found out that the boy made his dad go shopping with him, on the assumption that dad would be a better expert on what a girl might like for a present. The boy grew up to become an expert in the field of economic espionage. Stranger things happen.

Classical Chinese medicine's zang-fu theory classifies organs into 5 "full" (zang), 6 "hollow" (fu), and 6 "miscellaneous and curious." The Brain is in that latter category.

What factory farms do to animals, birds and fish and what humans are designed to eat are two topics that have sadly merged into one, as though the latter is only possible if we accept the former. But factory farms only came into vogue in the last 100 years or so... the "damndest" years for all life forms on Earth if you don't count the ones still ahead.

Fish oils in ample amounts may be as good as lard, but one would probably have to eat fatty fish every day -- some people do, in Japan, Taiwan, or wherever Tom Hanks survived his mishap. The Eastern European way is this: Not just lard -- pork back lard prepared and preserved several different ways, raw salted, raw smoked, or cooked as a whole piece. I am a huge fan. Miss it always.

Yes, there's some. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7584803/ There's a naturopathic physician who wrote a book about it, "The Stevia Deception." https://empoweredsustenance.com/is-stevia-safe/ https://www.faim.org/the-stevia-myth

While we wait for Nungali's take, here's mine: I absolutely hate the taste -- they say there's better and worse brands, but I found none palatable for me. The plant was originally used by some tribes in South America, but the commercial sugar substitute is not stevia the plant, it' steviol glycosides, produced from the leaves by genetically modified microorganisms. The resulting steviol glycosides, according to manufacturers' disclosure, "may or may not be found in the stevia leaf." I didn't know it when I discovered I hate the taste but now I think I might have an idea why. My taste buds' reaction to any foods our (or anyone's) ancestors never ate is always like that: "are you trying to fool me?.. You can't!!!"

With me it was funny next, but terrifying first. "Fresh off the boat," I just started my first job in New York and during lunch was eagerly exploring what the locals eat and drink. The spot (3rd and Lexington) was dotted with places to eat, and I was slowly figuring out my likes and dislikes... and then I bought a can of "diet" Pepsi by mistake. Never tasted that stuff before, and didn't know that "diet" meant aspartame -- I think I just expected it to be less cloying. Well, at the time, there was this huge story on the news about some never-to-be-identified deranged individuals going around injecting grapes in supermarkets with cyanide or something to that effect, poisoning food out of sheer malice. I'm pretty sure now the story was made up -- food corporations and plastic containers manufacturers wanted to package more of the foods which earlier you could just get your hands on and take the amount you needed, not the amount the seller forced you to get by pre-packaging. (That packaging is one of the true enemies of nature, but don't let me digress.) That's what I think now, but I was so naive and trusting back then... So, I came back from lunch, sat at my desk and opened that can and took a sip. What happened next was, I jumped to the ceiling, spat it out forcefully and started screaming, "Oh my god, it must be one of those tampered-with cans injected with poison! It tastes like some foul poison, what do I do now? Do I go to the emergency room? HELP!!" My boss, a cool guy, picked up the can, poured some of the Pepsi into a glass and bravely tasted it. "It's normal diet Pepsi," he shrugged, finishing the drink. "Relax."

Animal fats got demonized when they learned how to commercially produce seed oils, margarine and other peroxidized goodies. (Historically these were mostly used for treating wood and leather, making lubricants, and so on, with the exception of some -- which were produced locally in small quantities and consumed within a few days.) Meanwhile, dairy corporations figured out how lucrative it is to steal fat from dairy while peddling low-fat and fat-free metabolic garbage as a healthy choice. Studies that showed it's refined sugar and carbs, not fat, that are behind obesity and a lot of degenerative disease had the word "fat" substituted for public consumption due to sugar/carbs lobby's efforts. The latter got a taste of their own sweet medicine though when manufacturers of artificial sweeteners attacked sugar with an ambitious goal to gradually replace all of it with their own teratogenic offerings -- more dangerous than sugar but a helluva lot cheaper to make. The "alternative" entrepreneurs then came up with "natural sweeteners" to peddle to those who don't like chemicals -- even though many of those plant-derived sweeteners undergo so many chemical transmogrifications that the final product is about as plant as crude oil and coal which, of course, are plants, or at least started out this way, or at least that's what they taught us in school. Scientific nutritional recommendations are every bit as honest and true as any other prostitute's declarations of eternal love to the latest client.

I guess this leaves all of us taoists out in the cold, along with thousands of years of our 40/40/20 realization. (40% predetermined/40% free will/20% left to chance).

By the way, Turritopsis dohrnii, also known as the immortal jellyfish, is really biologically immortal. It can still die if a predator eats and digests it, but barring such adversity, it doesn't care if it gets damaged, sick, or old -- it has a mechanism whereby it will just revert to its baby state and start all over, young, healthy and fit. I see quite a few possibilities there... If I were a very advanced civilization, building vehicles based on this mechanism would definitely occur to me.

Mine had nothing angelic or demonic about them. Nor anything from modern alien folklore or research or mass culture. (Sheesh, I'm always the odd one out.) However, later I found out that jellyfish UFOs were a thing. At the time I had that dream I had no idea. Went to explore the vast web and voila... jellyfish UFOs. But none as clear, detailed, colorful, alive, real and up close as mine. Also, I don't normally dream (or as they put it, don't remember my dreams), let alone in vivid detail and as sequentially as the way time flows in our normal waking life. I believe there's this multiverse thing to consider... at least cutting edge physics does. The quaint belief in our reality being "the only real one" and anything from outside it just a figment of our imagination, subconscious, etc., seems to be scientifically obsolete. In the heyday of "scientific materialism" (a Marxist invention) they didn't have enough physics to refute it. Now it looks like they do... but who wants to rock the boat.

It was an early summer night in the dream, just like in real life, and a number of police cars were speeding up and down the street with lights and sirens, in a somewhat haphazard manner, so I went out to find out what kind of emergency they were having this time. And over the street, hanging quite low and very close to the house, I saw a jellyfish UFO "parked" in the sky, huge, with many lights all over its tentacles, which were moving as though it was staying in one place the way you would stay in one place in the water, by adjusting your movements ever so slightly. I could tell right away it was a vehicle that was alive -- there was no mechanical anything about it. It was very beautiful. For some reason, I said as though I got my answer from some prior knowledge, "oh... and there's the UFO." I then found it amusing thinking of the cops in their cars trying to figure out what to do about it, something "needs to be done," but what?.. I shrugged and went inside the house. And from inside the house, three aliens who were already there by now, in my house, walked briskly toward me. They looked like ordinary people -- a black woman and two white men. The woman extended her hand, smiled broadly and said, "There you are! And we were looking for you in Guangzhou!" Later, in my waking life, I found out, to my surprise, that I did spend about 2 hours in Guangzhou at one point, at the airport -- a layover which would be so short as to rush from point A to point B. I knew the layover would be in Guangdong, but it didn't occur to me that it would take place in a specific city, which I never saw. And the aliens were looking for me there three years or so after the fact. Weird. Then I thought some more about it and realized that their counterpart of our GPS, given the vastness of spacetime, must have homed in on something "close enough" but not exactly, just like ours sometimes do. It must have noted my approximate location at some "point in spacetime" -- "slightly off," but corrections were made with the same ease with which you drive around the block to find the correct spot instead of the "close enough" one.

Sometimes the qi of the new year arrives a bit early here and there... not unlike a coronal ejection on the sun, it can propagate protuberances. Occasionally they can be quite extraordinary. E.g. 1972, a Water Rat year (a wet one), started on February 15th, yet it was on February 3rd -- 8th, a bit ahead of schedule, that the greatest blizzard in history took place in Iran, dropping 26 feet (8 meters) of snow on 200 towns and villages. For many of their inhabitants, it was the first snow they ever saw in their lives. (And for 4,000 of them, also the last.)