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

It wouldn't occur to me, but I don't remember either all that well. Flatliners was about a memory of a trauma Kiefer Sutherland inflicted on someone else as I recall? -- the movie creator's dream of a remorseful perpetrator? Alas, memories of trauma buried deep in the unconscious are usually uniquely personal and concern the trauma inflicted on us... if we survive it that is. Perpetrators, even those who are capable of remorse, seldom get traumatized on the unconscious level, hurting someone else doesn't rewire one's neurophysiology -- in most cases they either feel nothing in particular (no mirroring neurons operational, so they can't relate to the feelings of those they hurt) or actually enjoy it (10% of the population, aka the sociopaths). But like I said, my memory of the movie is rather dim. And from Travels I only remember that Crichton hated medicine and his father, both for a good reason.

Have you ever watched "Altered states?" It's a 1980 sci-fi/horror movie, which starts out as a great and unusual sci-fi and then devolves into a trite and unimaginative horror one. But up to that unfortunate commercial plot twist, it's cool and even somewhat plausible.

About stuff that strikes one as stranger than average. Anything. I don't remember which season I stopped at but I loved the series at first and then it started jumping the shark with evil Russians, so I abandoned it. Not saying there are no evil Russians, but the Hollywood version is invariably stranger than a normal evil Russian.

This is a koala's paw. As you can see, it has not one but two opposable thumbs. Perhaps our problem, as a species, is not that we built our lifestyle around the fact of having the opposable thumb that allowed us to mess with things. Perhaps the problem is we don't have two of them. If we did, it would make climbing trees so easy and enjoyable that maybe we wouldn't ever get down and start messing with things on the ground.

Fire from the Heavenly Stem hits the stable where the Horse has been chomping at the bit for 60 years. The Horse jumps out of the burning gate and takes off galloping, mane fiery, tail ablaze. It never fails to leave its hoof prints on the world's politics, economy, and landscape. Here are some of them: 1846 Mexican–American War begins, reshaping the future borders of the U.S. Peasant uprising in Galicia, future Ukraine, engineered by the occupying Austrian empire against the local Polish nobility. 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, one of the worst urban disasters in U.S. history. Mount Vesuvius eruption in Italy, a major disaster affecting Naples and surrounding regions. 1966 Cultural Revolution begins in China, profoundly reshaping society and politics. Flooding in Italy destroys a lot of cultural heritage in Florence and Venice. A major escalation in the Vietnam war. 2026 -- ? Of course there were good things happening too. The type of qi known as the Fire Horse can be quite transformative and, under the right circumstances and given the right treatment, energizing, illuminating, and magnificent. But it's the most volatile kind of them all, unpredictable and not easily governable. Let's hope no pale riders manage to mount it.

I am not sure it's all that realistic, I was just reacting to the that hijacked this topic. Maybe it's too late in the TDB day for quality control. It was being controlled for something else for too long, through no fault of the current mod team I should add, not their fault at all.

你真是太懂我了！Nǐ zhēnshi tài dǒng wǒle! შენ ჩემს აზრებს კითხულობ! Shen chems azrebs k’itkhulob! Ты прочёл мои мысли! Ty prochyol moyi mysli! You have read my thoughts! /ju hæv rɛd maɪ θɔts/ The second line of the above is in Georgian. I don't know the language but I do know the alphabet. Me and my girlfriends at school learned it from a Georgian classmate circa the 6th grade in order to exchange coded messages during lessons by transliterating them into that alphabet. The motives were strictly pragmatic -- so that classmates who passed little pieces of paper with messages along, or the teachers should they intercept them, wouldn't be able to read them. Now I wonder... what purpose does it serve to use a writing system here guaranteed to not be understood by nearly everyone on the forum. Just curious.

Sounds more like an anti-toastist. I used to see an acupuncturist who thought sushi is the food of the barbarians. And those were the times when I frequented an amazing sushi place (they don't make them like that anymore... everything gets corrupted once it gains popularity/profitability). He would ask me about my weekend and if I mentioned eating at a sushi place, he would always make a face and go, "eeewww... Well, at least you didn't eat any raw fish there, did you?" Affirmative. I did. "How could you?!."

Probably, but it may be hard to find. Even neigong the real deal is something that is mostly taught in private, one on one, for all kinds of reasons. E.g. "pearls before the swine" is avoided, "teacher tell all, go hungry" is another consideration, persecution of taoists that repeated many times throughout history (communists didn't invent it, emperors did long before them) and what not. The culture has always been big on "family secrets," "secret skills," "secret manuals," "secret formulas,' "secret transmissions" and so on, from neidan to porcelain to herbal formulas to martial styles, it was more common than not to not tell everything, and often tell nothing outside the family or school. This is not just history, this is also true in our time. Even though a lot of Chinese movies and Jin Yong's novels are centered around the pursuit of such secrets , all of it has a real-life cultural counterpart. If the private forum materializes, I might tell a story or two... can't share in a public space, so for now they are secret.

The CPC is known to have insisted on the "out with the old, in with the new" approach most decisively for decades. Traditional arts and sciences were condemned, taoist temples burned to the ground, practitioners publicly humiliated, sent to "reeducation camps" and so on. The legacy lingers -- although later they took a somewhat different stance and the pendulum started moving toward "restoration." They realized that all those things they used to condemn can be turned into tourist attractions and marketable trinkets. So it's not unusual to encounter views in people influenced by this sort of education that glorify things traditional at the cost of the tradition itself, by reformulating it in "modern" quasi-scientific terms. Instead of forbidding all things cultivation they try to give them Western style respectability. This is a very simplified picture of course...

@Sanity Check Didn't understand your cryptic statement -- are you sure you meant it for me? I am not an admin/mod who can do or not do it, and I've no clue which "basic facts" you're referring to that I "can't get straight." ???

Nope, the idea was not an elitist club, anymore than a tennis club that wants its members to be tennis players rather than football players bent on preaching to them about the correct shape of the ball they should be playing with. Or a football club that tries to stop tennis players from running around the field swinging their racquets at the goalkeeper. TBH that idea was born out of sheer frustration... a pipe dream... something along the lines of that tree house rule:

You fared better than me. I got arrested first, then nothing, then beer. The "nothing" proved somewhat prophetic -- my son sent me a gift he got from Amazon and Amazon happily delivered a freaking empty package where six bottle of Diamine fountain pen inks should have been. (They promised a replacement once I complained but so far... nothing.)

I read your comment as "on first fake." Which reminded me of that visual game someone posted a few days ago... I didn't fare all that well... would you give it a try, see what you see?

Yes, this is not unlike what I proposed. Name your teacher, name your lineage, and then which part of that practice you are going to discuss. This would be great to apply to qigong, neigong, taiji discussions as well. The first tip I got from a fellow practitioner back in the day: start with a very limited volume. Don't breathe in the whole expanse of the universe, don't breathe out the ocean and the sky. Practice in a small room. When you can pore breathe reliably the volume of air wall to wall, ceiling to floor, then move on to larger volumes. Precision trumps ambition.

Yes, that too.

20 or 200 or 2000, I don't think it will help. What might help would be applying a special rule to that forum: only those who could reference their neidan teacher and lineage would be qualified to post. Pipe dream of course. But what passes for neidan discussions otherwise is akin to a plumber teaching a neurosurgeon that the internal carotid arteries supplying blood to the brain should be tackled exactly like the water pipes supplying water to the toilet. After all both carry fluid (or as the case may be in current neidan discussions on the board, "breath"), and therefore there's absolutely no reason to call a neurosurgeon when one needs to regulate blood supply to the brain -- a plumber is fully qualified.

There's a very popular Chinese rapper who goes by the name Skai Isyourgod (Sky is your god) who peppers his songs with "mysterious" lines imitating or even citing daoist classics. "Sushi has come from the east. One yin, one yang, that is called the dao, purple qi arrives from the east." This is a veritable mass transmission -- his followers count in the tens of millions. This reminded me of something... Something about this thread... and many others by some resident dao rappers...

Cookies Santa keeps are so full of glyphosate he is MonSanta.

Some books also depict history in a way that makes me laugh, cry, or fall asleep from boredom. But I'm sure shows are capable of doing even more of the above. History, by the way, has never been a reliable account of anything at all, since we all know it's written by the winner. "Until the lioness has her historian, the hunter will always be the hero." And another quote that comes to mind -- from circa 1600: "Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason." That's not to say you shouldn't accept the "challenge to read more books." The best of them are among the best things life has to offer. The rest are (or will be) history.