Taomeow

Happy New Year bums.  May it live up to everyone's best expectations.

I remember making great plans for 2020.

That taught me about the truth of the adage, "Do you want to make god laugh?  Make a plan."

I'm nobody's comedian.  Whoever wants to laugh at my expense won't be helped along by my New Year's resolutions. 

2 hours ago, liminal_luke said:

Would any Bums like to join me for a slow read -- one short chapter a day for the entire year -- of War and Peace?

I read it in high school -- it was included in our literature program, so I skipped chapters, like schoolchildren are wont to do when dealing with something this monumental.  The chapters I skipped were about war.  Nowadays those are the ones I would re-read (edit: "read") if I saw the point.  Maybe next year.   A lot more fun was to be had recently from a novel titled "T," by Viktor Pelevin -- it's about a fictitious version of Count Tolstoy the martial artist.  I was about to suggest it but apparently it still hasn't been translated...  

This was posted elsewhere by TDB's MythMaker, I'm just a messenger.  

13 hours ago, ChimpSage said:

It is the field in which the elixir is created.

 

”Elixir Field.”

Or, by another name, the "yellow sprouts court." 

What's the dantien for?  It's like any other potential that you can develop and use for whatever you're aiming to accomplish.  In this sense it's no different from the ability to acquire language, to read and write, to ride a bicycle, to juggle a dozen tennis balls, to form an emotional relationship with a human or animal or even a device. (Song in the background: "I'm In Love With My Car.")  You are born with the potential; you may learn to use this potential spontaneously upon exposure to whatever tools help it actualize, or (more often) via a particular set of practices that develop it.  

What do we develop the dantien for?  It's like asking what our writing ability is for.  Once you got it, how you refine and use it is your choice.  Become Shakespeare or get into arguments with strangers online.  Or both.   

5 hours ago, Jenn said:

 

Banishing true evil is very taxing on the energetic system.  Rest little kitty, regain your strength before returning to face the darkness within.

Thank you.  "Facing the darkness within" sounds a bit ominous...  but the body is not transparent to light so everybody has darkness within, complete darkness.  That's the great still yin, with the yang motion within it.  Facing it is what meditators do -- is that what you meant?         

I messed up my solstice yesterday.  7:27 pm in our parts (says google).  I started out right -- in the afternoon, I put two heavy cast iron skillets with a layer of coarse salt on the bottom on high heat and commanded all the things I wanted gone to be cleansed and burn away.  The salt crackled for a long time and gradually turned grey.  Once the loud explosions signifying the most malevolent energies being dismantled finally stopped, I flushed the salt down the toilet.  The ritual part done, I decided to re-season the skillets (those cast iron savvy know what I'm talking about) and then got carried away, applying three layers (that's four hours of making a mess in the ambient atmosphere) and polishing my copper pots and pans while at it.  Cinderella solstice.  Once I was done I forgot all about meditation and just went to bed.     

Boo hoo.

Now onward to stranger things. 

What I find strange -- always -- is the universal response of the masses to being treated like manipulable morons, which boils down to, "if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy."  

Not that I ever get my coffee from Starbucks, but if I ever did, I would boycott them now.  

I will boycott whoever follows suit.  Don't know how long I'll still be able to procure basic necessities, but I'll hold out for as long as I can. 

Thanks for posting.  I've read "Stairway to Heaven" the book and found it quite interesting.

By the way, among other things Peter Levenda has allegedly authored the Necronomicon.   Albeit considered a "hoax," this grimoire has been rumored to have occult powers of its own...  

59 minutes ago, dwai said:

If I remember correctly, Wang Liping had a theory about how the LDT location changes based on how close one is to the equator. But it certainly is below the navel. 

This is Google Bard's description of Wang Liping's theory (I first read it in Opening the Dragon Gate) -

 

 

Far as I remember (from personal interactions -- and that was quite a while ago so I don't remember all the details), master Wang Liping was conducting his own investigation into differences in the location of various qi junctures and gates ("energy centers") based on geographic location and anatomical peculiarities of practitioners from different places.  In particular, I remember a conversation about the upper dantien and the distance from the surface to the "mud ball" or niwan -- he was interested in whether it's different in the Chinese vs. Westerners due to the difference in the shape of the bridge of the nose and the area between the eyebrows.  As for geographical explorations of these phenomena, he even traveled to the North Pole to conduct his investigations!  

1 hour ago, Sanity Check said:

Its not complexity, its redundancy.

Both are words that gain meanings only in context.  The size of genome that is addressed in the OP (larger vs smaller) presupposes greater complexity -- much like The Iliad possesses greater complexity than a tweet.  Whether The Iliad is redundant compared to a tweet...  depends on who you ask.  Ask among the tweeting generation and it's highly likely you'll get an answer in the affirmative.  So?..

1 hour ago, Sanity Check said:

To say plants with longer codebases have greater complexity is 100% false.

To make such a statement, you would have to get a very good handle on what a genome is and what complexity is -- not just in the colloquial sense -- tackle it as a term from complexity theory which presupposes a working understanding of linear and nonlinear algebra, graph theory, probability theory, basic abstract algebra (groups, rings, and fields), basic logic and fuzzy logic -- for starters.  I've seen geneticists and mathematicians alike in absolute awe of plant complexity, and yet you used the OP's humble word "complex" as a platform for debunking...  what exactly?  That plants may possess the kind of complexity which the johnny-come-lately organ of a new and experimental animal species, the neocortex, might still have a hard time comprehending?..  700 million years of evolutionary success can only be debunked by a matching/exceeding feat.  So, let's talk about it again in 700 million years.

7 hours ago, EFreethought said:

 

For some reason, this picture is causing.....dirty thoughts.

 

Just like that old joke about a psychiatrist giving a patient the Rorschach test:

"Ugh!  Shame on you, doctor!  What kind of pervert are you, keeping this kind of dirty pictures in your office?!"   

10 hours ago, Nungali said:

 

  Could  Nungali be in love ? 

Stranger things have happened. 

30 minutes ago, Apech said:

Discussing non-dualism on DaoBums:

 

This picture is wrong too.  I'm nowhere near a brunette and I never wear below-knee shorts.  Also, I hardly ever discuss non-dualism.    

On the surface of the body, the LDT corresponds to the 氣海 REN 6 (Qihai) or Sea of Qi acupoint, which is located 1.5 body units (cun) below the navel.  Cun is one's personal unit of measurement -- all bodies are different but all bodies are fractals, so your cun may be different from mine, but you can easily determine yours.  Most "average" bodies will have approximately similar average cun values  but someone short or taller than "average" (whatever that means) might do better not relying on inches or centimeters offered by various "approximators" and finding the actual point on his or her actual body.  Precision matters more in acupuncture of course, dantiens don't need to be located within millimeters, so a rough idea of where your very own "1.5 cun below the navel" is  should suffice.

At the back of the body, 命門 Du 4 Mingmen or Gate of Life point is located exactly opposite your LDT.  Of course neither one is merely a point on the surface, it's more like a vortex connecting the two.  

@Unota  Your username sounded kind of Japanese to me, so I googled...  well, I was close.  There's a Japanese name Unita, which has a whole wealth of meanings apparently:

As for me, I am a taoist and I like to meow.  I meow in many situations where normally people would go "wow" or "ouch" or "ah" -- in other words, meow is my placeholder for any emotion that warrants a brief in-the-moment expression.

I was Taomeow online before TDB existed, and never changed that username, although over the years it's grown a bit too cute for my current age and my anti-cute cultural preferences.  But I don't give a flying through a rolling.    

14 hours ago, liminal_luke said:

 

A long time ago, Jane Alexander was a member here and I remember her talking about her book.  Love the title, Possessing Me.  It seems to me that that´s what good spiritual practice does -- puts us in better possession of ourselves.  

Yes, I remember her too...  

.

Just now, Bhathen said:

 

Have you been near a cassava flour factory?

When I was in high school, I've been to a tour of a mayonnaise factory.   

If I can't find a picture of the mayonnaise factory, may I show you a picture of my high school?   

Youtube keeps flooding my feed with "recommended for me" videos according to some algorithm or other which I find a bit disturbing.  After I watch a tutorial on, e.g., cleaning a shearling jacket, my feed overflows with videos trying to teach me how to clean everything, from a live sheep to a rural Japanese house.  If, after a Mandarin Chinese lesson, I want to see what yesterday's flood in Turkey looked like, the powerful but mysterious mind behind profiling the viewer inundates me with suggestions to learn Turkish, a decade's worth of videos on assorted disasters all over the world, videos promising to teach me Russian from scratch in just one month, and a Thanksgiving turkey recipe.  Latest installment: a documentary about the superb intelligence of cuttlefish, right next to a crunchy cuttlefish pancakes lesson.  That pairing in my feed was not enough to make a vegetarian out of me but just for this morning I had to change my breakfast plan (which was cassava flour pancakes) so as to give myself some time to process the trauma.   

I think the worst part is, people's minds today seem to be conditioned, more and more, in this schizophrenic fashion -- random associations latching onto this or that key word or image instead of...  well...  whatever human minds were like before all this technological conditioning.  

.

4 hours ago, NaturaNaturans said:

🙋‍♂️ link?

Here it is.

If it was a simple matter of voting for or against, I'd vote no.  A mere thread in the General section would suffice. 

A few years ago I got interested in the Sumerian origins of, not just Abrahamic religions but a helluva lot of Indo-European civilization, and started a thread on the subject, which was plenty enough.  (For anyone interested, it's still there.)  Considering it is far less likely to cause tensions and inflame passions today due to Sumerians themselves having disappeared, unlike an Abrahamic discussion which would be populated by individuals exposed in real life, one way or the other, to the irreconcilable differences between these three major branches of the Abrahamic tradition, methinks dedicating a thread or three to them, for those interested, would work better.