Unota

3 hours ago, Apech said:

I think you may be mixing up a few ideas there.

Sorry, I am still learning about this kind of stuff. Is an immortal spirit body not the end goal of taoist alchemy? I thought this was like, the equivalent of enlightenment, in comparison with other religion. To persist after death, etc etc, in whatever form that may mean. *squints as notes* Did I misunderstand? Am I being an idiot again?

50 minutes ago, Nungali said:

 

Isnt early everything we do 'going against nature ' ?   Building a house to keep the weather of us , retaining water to secure a drinking source .... putting your socks on ?   Do that stuff ,  but 'go with the flow' in doing it .

 

A dam is often built between the narrowest and deepest part of a gorge ..... not in the middle of a flat desert .

 

Fence not a field  for a shark nor make a  pool for a goat .

8 minutes ago, Taomeow said:

 

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.             

Okay, I see your point. Well...I do and I don't. Ehh...my head hurts. I do...but I don't!!

Why to which part? Why I'm not interested in the alchemy?

I guess that was a wrong way to say it. I am interested in it, I'm fascinated by it and I love to read about it. But I will not try to apply it to myself, because I feel like that is not...really my personal...goal? Before I would ever consider something like spiritual development or enlightenment of any sort...Don't I have to learn to love life first? Wouldn't it just be an escape mechanism? How can I do something like that, if I can not be happy with 'going with the flow?' And if I was happy with it, then I think I would never find reason to do spiritual cultivation in the first place. Is it not contradictory? Maybe I just don't want that.

(I guess that's my controversial opinion!)

On 3/11/2024 at 12:42 PM, Taomeow said:

 Taoist alchemy is not about "going with the flow," but about going against the flow.         

This has always driven me craaazy! I always  thought, isn't alchemy literally an attempt to go against nature? I like going with the flow. And I like daoism. But not particularly interested in the alchemy part. Which sounds pretty silly, because that's a pretty big part.

Is that...A skyrim screenshot?

• cleaned the sinks. Less so to have clean sinks, more so to just relax.
• 13 squats! Woahhh! moving up in the world. Haha. (Keith is over there kowtowing 108 times. I have no excuse.)
• I tried to meditate, but I just couldn't focus today. I kept opening an eye to see what kind of bird was singing. Ended up bird-watching instead. Then I gave up and did the 8 brocades.
• went for a short walk.
• Reading...ugh. I don't think I even want to mention having read it. I am not platforming this one. Awful.

I didn't really do much today...I spent a long time working on redoing a wall instead. Haha...It was fun.

-edit-

Adding some more because I did eventually decide to do a couple of exercises this afternoon...I felt a little bad for not doing more.

• plank for 1 minute 10 seconds
• 16 push-ups
• 16 side-bridges each side
• 9 plank twists each side

What do you mean by westerners have a natural inclination to focus on the body? Why is that?

If I have, they did a really bad job.

Joking aside...I can remember vividly, and count on my two hands, the most significant times that people have been kind to me. When I was in high-school, I didn't have money to buy lunch. But I stopped bringing lunch from home, because I got bullied by other kids for what I had to eat. (Ramen noodles...) To avoid getting bullied,  I stopped eating entirely. One of my teachers-my homeroom teacher at the time, found out about this, she would sneak me snacks. Leftover food from her own lunch, leftovers from the spanish club like imported candies. She always gave me her chai lattes, because she didn't 'like' them...Though I think from that point on she continued buying them only for me.

There was also the time when I lost my home to a house fire, and all of my belongings, and my previous second grade teacher offered to donate toys to me. I said no...I felt bad taking something from someone else. (In hindsight, I should have said yes, because I never really had much from that point on. We had lost everything.) Still, nobody else had asked me anything like that.

There was also during my first job, as a dog groomer, and there was a day I had been working for 12 hours, I think after a few days in a row, and I hadn't been sleeping well. My boss was running me ragged. You know, I was hired to just wash the dogs, but I was also cleaning everything, I was grooming the dogs, I was washing them, I was lifting them from the ground into the tub all of the time, and a lot of them were pretty big. And I was still only being paid enough to wash them. I must have looked awful, because there was a girl that came up to me, she pressed a five dollar bill into my hand, and she said, 'don't tell,' because if my boss found out she'd tipped me, she'd be angry. I wonder what kind of look I had on my face then, I must have looked at her like she was God, hahaha.

And then more recently, about a year ago maybe, (or maybe two now,) around my birthday, I was planning on taking my own life. I had already tried twice by then. My health had already gone to the dogs by my 20's. I didn't have any friends. I had no money. My family hated me. I did not know if I was ever even going to get any better. I had not spoken to anyone in a really long time, because nobody would speak to me. I had no hope for a future, and nothing that I did brought me any happiness anymore. I was in bed most of the time, I didn't eat, I lost a lot of weight, etc.

That week I bought my first journal, I wanted to at least leave something. But then, not shortly after that, something really dumb happened. A person said something to me. And then kept talking. I was like. What is going on. Why are you talking to me? Are you stupid? People don't talk to me. Nobody ever does this. He was raving about stuff he liked. Video games, tv shows, things I had no interest or joy in anymore. But he seemed so excited and happy about it. So I listened. I was jealous of him. I was baffled. Maybe even a little bit mad at him. How can you care so much about trivial things like this when life is falling apart?! He started throwing things at me, one after another, making me listen to this, watch that, play this game. I didn't want to be rude so I did, and I wasted so much time doing it that I didn't have time to think about anything else. Before I knew it, the time went.

And it's not that I thought that they were dumb, I was just confused, because I couldn't understand how they made him happy. Maybe out of spite, I took that journal that I had bought for other reasons, and I started using it for something else. I started writing to remember things that made me 'happy.' Not happy, but, at least made my day a little less worse. This is when I started drawing things in there, too. I didn't have any art supplies at first, so I used charcoal in my wood stove. I think this was the first thing I drew. (Or it was the sunflower? I genuinely don't remember.)

Anyway, when my spanish teacher saw me not eating, when my second grade teacher offered me toys when I lost my home, that girl that pressed a five dollar bill into my palm so I could buy a treat after working really hard that week, and that person that spoke to me when nobody else would, if those aren't 'blessings,' I don't know what is. So...maybe? I guess they were, to me.

(...That was really difficult to talk about.)

• I finally managed to go on that bike ride today. Covid can't keep me down! (Ignore the past few days that I spent asleep. That didn't happen.)
• While I was on my bike ride, I captured some captivating landmarks, like...'fallow field,' and... 'hay bale.'

• attended online drivers ed class.
• Meditated for a bit. This time I did white skeleton, I haven't done that visualization method in a while.
• doing a ....750 piece jigsaw puzzle? What an extravagant life. (It's 'Library Mischief,' from Roseart.)

• Turned over the compost, and added some cardboard to it. I was also going to shovel some into the garden, but...It looks like it hasn't broken down enough since last autumn, because it's been frozen. Oh well.
• Uh....12 squats.
• Reading 'Between Heaven and Earth.'
• I think I will also go out and get firewood later, but, probably after I log off.

53 minutes ago, Dainin said:

 

See May 3, 2016 post:

 

I feel like I've invented new facial expressions the further I read. I did not know my face could do that.

What?

AI is just a commercialism machine. Built off of stolen work to spit out things for profit without having to pay anybody to make it. A child's drawing is more impressive to me.

Bluh. I am ok. Fine. Just been sleeping. I'm really not that sick, just hit hard by fatigue. It's been quite nice, actually... I wish I had an excuse to sleep all day more often.

What was it that I said the other day to someone...Something like "I am always discovering fun new ways to feel terrible." Like, oh, that's new. It's a fun surprise. I now know what it feels like, to mix already present pain with whole-body sick aches, fatigue, and being unable to breathe (at all in general, too, but also) through my nose. How fun...Always learning something new...Never before have I appreciated the fact that we can just be unconscious for hours on end whenever we so choose... love that for us.

Joking aside, I guess I will be more or less serious about something. I've had quite a bit of free time lying around being sick in between sleeping. And to amuse myself, I started picking at memories, remembering good things. And as a consequence, as I was digging deeper, I also uncovered a lot of bad ones. I am not really sure how to put into words how I feel about it.

It is kind of like...Reliving these situations, there is no other way that I could have possibly lived my life. Not in a bad way, as in a nihilistic 'I don't have any free will' kind of way. But more like, this is the kind of person I am. This is why I did this. There was no other way I would, or could, have reacted. Because that is me, I was raised like this, I did not know better. I was not given the same kind of opportunities. I reacted how I was able to, with what I have. So there is no real reason to wish...that things had gone differently, because they could not have. And even if they had, they would have likely only been replaced by another situation that I would have reacted to similarly. So...It doesn't matter.

I also realized how important it is to do this to recall these sorts of things, because it is like...For one, exercise, for the brain. Memory recall, being able to remember these events and situations on command. Secondly, it is regaining a sense of self, because being...uhhh, connected to the person that I used to be, it's like, finding a missing puzzle piece under the couch and putting it back where it belongs. I used to be a very good writer, when I was in school. It came as second nature to me. Words would just flow out. I never needed to edit anything. I could breeze through essays and fiction like nothing. NOT anymore! I have to sit here and think for a very long time, write, rewrite, edit, edit, edit. But for a moment, after doing this, it came back to me. I grabbed a piece of paper, and I spat something out just like that, like I used to. It was like I briefly unlocked a piece of my head that had...died, since then. Hell. My imagination? Hahaha. Do I not have an imagination anymore? Shoot.

Oh, I got a bit derailed there. Uhhh...My original point. Purposefully digging through memories. Good for your brain.

Uaghh....I have covid

Uhhh....I don't know about 'aliens...' but I do dream a lot about weird monsters. But I haven't had one recent enough to be able to describe vividly.

I remember having one nightmare about really tall faceless humanoid things...that their skin looked like it had been burned by fire, sloughing off...it was creepy.  Their faces were just, nothing but peeling skin. There was one where there was a weird small fox-like thing, but when I picked it up, it had billions of eyes, and I was startled and dropped it. I don't think that one was bad, it just scared me. There was one where there were more dog-like things...They were gray with weird buggy eyes, long snouts, and they didn't really look canine-like, they kind of reminded me of opossums or some kind of rodent...The teeth were wrong. In that one, they weren't hostile, until I picked something up to look at it, then they turned on me. I felt like I did something that I wasn't supposed to, haha.

Those, big faceless things, are the only humanoid thing that I can recall dreaming about.

I feel like I'm coming down with something. Can you make yourself sick from stress? Hahaha.
Last night I had a really vivid dream, and when I woke up, I felt like I hadn't slept at all. I had a pounding headache, my eyes hurt like I'd pulled an all-nighter.
I only vaguely remember the dream. The landscape was a bit odd, like a 3d cartoon, which is interesting. It reminded me of one of my cartoony marker drawings, almost. The sky was yellow, everything accentuated with stark black lines, the ground was very blue and green, it was very colorful and pretty, like a comic book. As I was walking, it suddenly became realistic, sort of...The ground I was walking on turned to something like plastic, like astroturf. And then, I saw a swingset. As soon as I sat down on it, it became realistic again, everything was normal. It was a nice day. There was an old weathered fence to my back. Next to some sort of alley road, I think.
As I was sitting there swinging on the swing, enjoying the day, I heard someone coming up behind me in the adjacent alleyway. I decided to swing higher, to see if I could see over the fence. It was a young girl, maybe 12. I didn't recognize her, I've never seen her before. She had long straight dark hair, dark eyes, and tanned skin.
She was kneeling down by the fence, so I asked her what she was doing. Picking mushrooms! She said. The ones she was cutting up, they looked kind of red, with lighter rings around the edges of the cap, and darker in the middle.
She asked me if I could help. I said, I'm sorry, I don't know mushrooms. If you show me which ones you are looking for, maybe I can help?
But before she could answer, I was suddenly somewhere else. This time it was a bit more normal. My dream changed to a dream about me being a kid in the living room with my family. I was playing with my little brother. (Man, he's so mean, now.) Anyway.
I'm not doing much today. I'm taking a break from driving for a couple of days to try and relax. I woke up feeling like I hadn't slept, and feeling kind of sick. I have a migraine, I feel kind of feverish. I don't really feel like doing anything in my schedule.

I was planning on doing breathwork, going on a bike ride, but I just don't feel good. Going to be lazier than usual today. Not even going to bother writing about it.

Oh, I think this was the one I was thinking of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year's_Eve_1963_snowstorm

https://www.wsmv.com/2024/01/01/record-setting-snowstorm-hit-middle-tennessee-60-years-ago-today/

Not really 1964, though, because it only went into new years. Not sure if you'd count that. Close!

I'm not really sure how I knew about that. It's probably been referenced a few times in comparing records.

I find it hard to imagine how this year could be any crazier than any year before it has been. Wasn't 1964 also the year of that crazy blizzard? Or am I misremembering? There was also a crazy tornado outbreak that year, followed by the Palm Sunday one in 1965. Some reallyyy cool dual tornadoes were in the Palm Sunday one. Lots of turbulent weather.

19 minutes ago, silent thunder said:

@Unota I admire you for not quitting, driving is an incredibly useful skill set to have mastered.  Perhaps consider/request another instructor however and remember, you always have the option to say no to an instruction.

 

My son recently^{last year} did his training and test and they gave him a good 2-3 months, probably 15 hours/sessions behind the wheel on side streets before they did a brief forray onto the freeway.

Fifteen?!!? I've had like two! I've done 45 minutes the first time, 30 minutes, 30 minutes again, and I did an hour today.

So I'm not just being a baby? That really was insane? And I breezed down the interstate! Holy crap! Look at me go. Let's not do it again.

9 minutes ago, Cobie said:

 

 

You managed up to now without a car, so just don’t do it I’d say. 

 

I am really starting to think about it, after today. But I already went through the effort of studying, of getting my permit, of paying for the classes. I can't just give up.

Oh my god. Nope. I went driving again, and she threw me into 55 mph interstate traffic. I have been in the driver's seat...What...Three? Times? So far? Three. I have barely just been shown where the turning signal switch is. You can't do that to me. It is one thing, to tell me that I am 'good' at it. She says I did 'good.' But some idiot, pulled out in front of me. Someone was tailgating me and nearly slammed into the back of me. I had to pull through busy intersections after only just learning how to turn. It is one thing to be able to do that. It is another thing, dealing with the fact that we are going 55, surrounded by other idiots, that are constantly trying to kill me. I lost a close friend years ago. I heard it happen live, on the scanner. Her entire family died. She was at an intersection, and the top half of her car got shaved off. They were all decapitated. And I listened as the first responders described it on scene. Do you have any idea how hard this already is for me. I am terrified. I don't care that I am 'good' at it. I don't care that I DID good. You can't do that. At least give me a hot minute, to get used to driving in the country.

I can't do anything else today. My hands are still shaking. Somebody pulled out in front of me. My knees hurt. No practice journal  today. I'm going back to bed.  Fuck. You are lucky. You're lucky I'm good at staying calm. But if you keep pushing that, and I lose my nerve, we are going to get into an accident. Just because I could jump into a busy interstate after only a couple of times out does not mean you should. My parents were given an entire semester to learn this kind of crap. Not! Three! Days!

• Went driving again today. Still not dead!
• ttended online Driver's Ed Class.
• -Supine Twist (Supta Matsyendrasana) 1 minute each side, Reverse Warrior (Viparita Virabhadrasana) 1 minute each side, Happy Baby (Ananda Balasana) 1 minute, Corpse (Savasana) 1 minute, Bow (Dhanurasana) 1 minute, Chair (Utkatasana) 1 minute. not necessarily in that order.
• 12 squats. I felt like it wasn't necessary today, because Chair Pose should have been enough, but I did it anyway.
• Meditated. It was also very nice out today. The basal leaves of the wood asters are starting to spring up from beneath the dead leaves, lots of baby red deadnettle, blue creeping speedwell, and little mallow. All of which you can eat. (Mallow, specifically the root, when boiled, creates a sort of gelatin- which is where the first marshmallows came from. I'm sure you can guess which species.)
• we made sourdough bagels!

• coffee break...
• Practiced painting again. It was more difficult because my brushes are starting to wear down. I had no idea they get torn up so easily.

23 minutes ago, Cobie said:

Try Mandarin, it will crack your brains.  
 

 

That is one I'm learning too! It's so hard! I still only know how to write 你好 and 再見! Hello! Goodbye! If you need anything else, I am at a loss.

Do you want to know something funny? The pen-pals I have made in an effort to try to learn more, they are all college students that love romance novels, and that's what they keep suggesting to me to study and learn more. This has resulted in my personal dictionary having entries like '校草,' before anything else.

• Today was check on the plants day. I watered everything that was starting to dry out.

• Tossed some new seeds into containers to see what is still viable. Some of these collected ones are pretty old. The ones wrapped in brown paper are some from last years, I have some in another drawstring bag that are from a couple of years ago, etc. etc. I need to go through some of these. The ones in baggies are mostly tuber seeds from a nursery, which I'll sow right into the ground.

• Update on one of the Coleus pots, this one has taken its parent's place in the old coffee tin.

• One of my cats keeps knocking over my marigolds and killing them. Fortunately, I have more seeds I've saved. I can always grow more. Menace.

• Did some yoga: Tree pose (Vrksasana) one minute on each foot. Seated Side Bend (Parsca Sukhasana) one minute each side. Cat-cow (Chakravakasana) 1 minute. Bridge Pose (Setu Bandha Sarvangasana) 1 minute. Triangle pose (Trikonasana) 1 minute each side. Locust Pose (Salabhasana) 1 minute. Downward Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana) 1 minute.
• Attended online driver's ed class.
• 12 squats, of course.
• Practiced a language for memory reasons.
• meditated. Today, instead of just sitting passively, I decided to count breaths and focus a bit. I'm a lot more awake now. I'm up! I'm up.

That's all. I was going to do more yoga, but I decided to split it in half for tomorrow as it was already about 3 o clock, I already did a pose today that puts some strain on the knees and I wanted to divide those up, plus, I have other things to do.

I once read that nobody is truly a master. Everybody is always constantly learning. Sometimes you are the teacher, sometimes you're the student, blah blah blah.

I do personally think though, that the moment something you  have always done because you enjoy it, turns into the thing that you do for money, to make a living, it's no longer sincere.

Back when I was really struggling to get by, someone kept trying to tell me to go into Journalism, or to start publishing instead of writing as a hobby. I am not turning my feelings into a monthly tabloid, just to afford health insurance. I am going to hit you with a broom.

Anyway, my point is, charging crazy money for anything you have to teach is a red flag.