Taomeow

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.

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

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.

Long story. This guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilev And the "spontaneous discovery of feng shui on a macro scale" I was referring to was how I later interpreted his Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of Earth -- a rather wild (by accepted scientific standards) theory that links the appearance of distinct ethnicities and nations and their subsequent characteristic behaviors to the geographical landscapes of their places of origin. He also introduced the notion of "passionarity" and the "passionarian" it produces, the type of individual personality that moves and shakes history. It was his way to settle the long-standing problem of "the role of the individual in history" -- and if memory serves, the appearance of such potential and such individuals was also linked to the influences of the landscape and the cosmic radiation as it interacts with it -- in classical feng shui terms, to Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches. When I read this work in the late 70s or early 80s, it was still taboo, and I had a samizdat (typewritten-at-home) version someone let me borrow.

I read the book, but never knew about the show. People whose sublimation of our hunters-gatherer instincts causes them to hunt and gather lost, misinterpreted, censored, suppressed, adapted to an agenda or to a preconceived idea etc. information command the highest respect in my eyes. But being human, they are not immune to doing more of the same on occasion. I don't mean the holy grail authors specifically, for all I know they may have been right! Nor would I write off without a second look, e.g., Sitchin just because his theory appears wild... I find the "accepted" views among the wildest on many subjects -- 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' Or Lev Gumilev who was a serious influence back in the day. (I think he spontaneously discovered feng shui on a macro scale -- of course he never called it that, and "spontaneously" may not really be the case, considering he was an expert on things Asia...)

LOL, that explains it. Danny boy didn't strike me as a scholarly type (unlike another mass-appeal author, R.R. Martin, behind whose fantasy worlds one can sense rather vast explorations of actual history -- via spending time at the library rather than watching TV shows.) But the show presenter didn't know his Latin either. Those kings were known as reges criniti -- long-haired kings. Had they been hairy they would have been reges hirsuti. The term hisrutism is used in medical jargon today as well, for the condition of being excessively covered with hair (which in many cases is not a "condition" but a genetic/ethnic feature, but in others a symptom, e.g. of some ovarian disorders in women.)

They weren't hairy, they were long-haired! The belief existed that cutting their hair rendered them powerless. Just like Samson. Native Americans were of the same opinion. The Chinese, ditto -- until the Manchurians forced them to shave the front of the head (but the rest was worn as long as it grows, and braided. And that also had to go with westernization in the 20th century -- for men first, and then Communists convinced women to cut their hair as well.)

Maurice Druon, The Accursed Kings historical novels -- read them all as a teenager. For a while they made me an expert in medieval French history. I remember little by now, but I did remember the story of Jacques de Molay and was under the impression, for many years, that the curse concerned not just the Capetian dynasty but all of Europe. I don't remember why I interpreted it this way, but there you have it. The dynasty that went a long time before that one, the Merovingians, I find particularly interesting. In their heyday they established the largest kingdom in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman empire (if there really was such a thing as "the fall" -- to me it seems more like the refurbishing/recalibration). What I find special about them is that to this day, chronicles exist that officially derive their genealogy from a sea monster, a “quinotaur,” who had a relationship with the ancestress and produced Meroveh, the founder of the dynasty. This gave the dynasty sacral pre-Christian legitimacy—a ruler whose authority comes from the sea/chaos/the Other. (Just like Chinese emperors who derive their Mandate to rule from the dragon. Chinese dragons spend the first one thousand years as water creatures, then develop flight and take to the sky, the mountains, and the imperial court, as the case may be.)

Nice looking site! (talking presentation for now, might explore later.) My Grandmaster is also Chen Zhenglei. Which makes you my taiji brother. (Unless of course you mix "creativity" into the traditional style, in which case it makes you my taiji not-my-cup-of-qi. )

That Ermakov book was first published in 1995. The 90s were the lawless decade for the freshly collapsed USSR, and there's no end to horror stories I heard and read about those times... but they were unique in that respect, those times I mean. I did take that trip as a toddler, and I could swear I remember stuff -- except my mom told me stories about it later, so it's hard to tell now which ones I really remember and which ones came alive for me based on what she told me. If anything, according to my mom people on the train were afraid of me, because I looked like a much younger child but talked like a much older one -- they thought I was some bewitched infant, and some old ladies discreetly made the sign of the cross...