Easy

Hey Marble, What's humanity and justice? Please define the terms. Where is the cut-off point between them and the inborn sense of compassion and fairness? This stuff you posted has nothing but a dewy-eyed nostalgia for a primitive paradise and that kind of romanticism just doesn't cut it here in the 21st Cent.

Hey, Aaron...I like these double AAs coming into a name. You must have God's own backing. Tell us where we went wrong...why we are unnatural. Surely He'll give you a hint. I think we all need to know how it is you can know.

On the other hand, I say that everything that has ever happened on this incidental crumb of mud, all of it, every blink across a prosthetic eyeball, is natural. To say that anything that we human beings have done or ever will do is apart from nature is a blasphemy against every being that has ever lived before and all of us who are still standing. It is a blasphemy against the unimaginable power of nature. To say say that this race is doing something that we are not supposed to be doing is the ultimate height of arrogance. Where in the hell did the following statement come from? Did God whisper that in your ear? "The tragedy is that we have sought a means of existence...that defies what we are supposed to be doing." I am arrogant and so I should know that statement is arrogance that can only show itself from below contempt.

I would have said the same thing, but these dudes around here might know I'm too likely to shoot from the hip before I can think straight and they'd call me a liar. But what you wrote has all the wisdom that we need to read.

Marble, you are such an old sweetie...wouldn't Marshmallow be a better handle? It works so much of the time around here, but there are times that call for jerky instead. Like now is the time for some investigations, a time to go back to the source of this thread...this Yogi Ramacharaka. He was such a fraud...some businessman out of Baltimore working the New Thought circuit at the turn of the 20th Century. This Beast Within garbage has nothing to do with Eastern Philosophy and a hellova lot to do with Protestant Christianity as it formed the basis of Yogi Ramacharaka/William Walker Atkinson's Babbitesque perspective, plus a variety of other subforms of American culture circa 1910. I have been studying Taoist philosophy for 34 years, and in the profound depths of that time I've had the ecstatic wash of Kashmir Shaivism flow across my life from my lover, and neither one of us have ever heard of this "beast within" garbage, this Yogi Ramacharaka hoo ha. Its all Protestant Christianity. It is not wonderful at all...the moderators don't want to hear what I would like to call it. Nonetheless...I have been reading with some interest this dialogue between Otis and the ferocious Hundun with great interest. My take is that Otis is a little on the soft side and if he thinks that there is no psychological function higher than another then he might want to research thoroughly Karl Jung's writing on the Archetype of the Self. Or on the far other, less intellectual, side of that spectrum, come nut cutting time if one is still debating brain functions--this as opposed to that--and forgetting the supreme overriding impulse of bestial instinct, one is going to end up singing soprano. Then on the other hand we have the ferocious, nickle-silver, feline overbite of Hundun and his Ken Wilber influenced hierarchical elitism..."transcend and include" and the ridged 'this is inferior to that' which is 'inferior to something else' Jacob's Ladder into the hierarchy toward the Heavens... It all has what an irreverent friend of mine calls a "Kenelingist" vocabulary. I can understand what Hundun is all about and it works well if one's privileged guru is pontificating into a tape recorder in a Denver loft and living off his dead old lady's Texas gas wells. But if I'm headed down into the world's most violent capital city outside of Somalia and in coming back I can't get to our house except though some torn-up concrete, fallen-to-the-dogs barrio alley-way because there are too many murdered dead guys laying in the street between the best exit off the freeway and home then that hierarchy between one's own well being and all that yada yada yada crap about watching your slack hand's back is inferior to considering one's responsibility to all life on the entire planet is pretty feeble. It doesn't wash at all. Hundun might be talking correctly for the Euro-American Privileged but that's not more than 5% of the species. The rest of us have to deal with floodgates open on the processual flow of unimaginable variables from every imaginal direction plus a few dozen more contingencies than he puts up in his imperious little posts. I'm glad he can write about hierarchical development forever and the nobility of top-bunk leadership. And I'm just as glad that I've lived long enough to laugh it all off.

Joseph Rael...blast from the past. I recall doing sweat lodge, or something like it, with the man in the 80s. But I have to disagree with this... ...that power is the most natural thing there is, nothing super about it. Folks call it Qi or Prana and those peyote guys up on the northern plains would call it 'medicine.'

It all comes down to that!. Everything else is just blow-by...nothing, nothing, nothing but blow-by (If even that.).

My understanding of "virtue" in the Tao Te Ching context is similar to the term "authenticity" in the western Existentialism context.

So far I have been lucky, or maybe I'm a little too thick to realize life has kicked me around. Either way I rode into this territory, no problem, 30-some years ago because a girl friend had a little I Ching primer called The I Ching Workbook. It had a nice, though superficial, condensation of Taoism in the introduction that described a perspective similar to my own and my exploration followed from there. I could never truly call myself a Taoist because I had spent a significant portion of my youth in a non-Euro-American culture and realized the futility of trying to assimilate fully to a philosophy that arose from deep in the roots of another culture. What is produced from that attempt seems to me to be a hybrid. I have no negative judgments of that path...it may well be a better way than my own...but purely as a matter of personal preference and for ease of travel I choose not to embrace the Taoist way but to keep it in mind (as best I can) as a point of reference by which I can triangulate my own somewhat crooked way.

The interpretation of this chapter is dependent on whether "loss" is seen as positive or negative. The Wu translation seems to have loss as a positive...the loss of the affectations of conditioning for example. I think his use of the word "accession" indicates this. In the other translations the absence of faith or trust could refer back to that which has been lost. Interesting that Henricks leaves out the last observation regarding trust/faith; however he could have indirectly condensed the essence of it in the obvious strength of his last few words..."the Way also disregards him."

This is a good question. It has been my experience that the principle of the circadian clock is accurate, but I do not think it is absolute at least in the west, because a la western individualism, every body is different. The accuracy of the principle is even proven by something as gross and unsubtle as heroic, allopathic medicine which shows that the time of death of those suffering from fatal diseases or conditions is clustered around four o'clock a.m. Of all the modalities available I have found that for myself Chinese acupuncture and western herbalism work the best. The least effective is homeopathy except in one very interesting regard: In a homeopathic diagnostic questionnaire, I have found remarkable accuracy in those inquiries as to what time of day the symptoms are the most, what time they are the least, at what time the patient expresses a need for something (such as fresh air,or a darkened room), at what times they are desirous of hot liquids, or cool liquids, and so on. This is complicated by the elemental typology of the patient. For example, a Phosphorous type is going to show difference symptoms and different needs and rejections at different times than a fairly similar Lycocodium type who is suffering from the same problems. If the homeopathist knows what they are doing and can keep all those balls in the air, then the diagnosis is spot on whether or not the remedy is effective. I have seen a homeopathic diagnosis with a western (or in many cases Chinese) herbal treatment to be remarkably effective. (The only time I have experienced an effective homeopathic remedy for me was one against a Black Widow spider bite.) In line with this also is the timing of the treatment. My wife who has been practicing Postural Integration body work for the past thirty years, just told me she does her best work at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m....Tuesdays. Good god...now she just told me what the Ayurvedic circadian clock might show for this and that and my eyes are glazing over.

Thanks for that information MH. From what I can see in the Cleary translation, one can read from #17 down through #24 and see it stacking up as a unit.

Hey, Have you noticed that in his translation Henricks cuts the first line of Chapter 20 and pastes it to the bottom of Chapter 19? It seems to fit, no?

Salud, my friend.

Indeed. The meaning of the verses is ultimately in the mind of the reader. And, in that light, I have known readers who are perhaps more susceptible to granting power to authority and they have made it a law in their lives..."I must live by the lights of the TTC"...that kind of thing. Such a reader also puts a more literal interpretation into statements like: The five colors blind the eyes of man; The five musical notes deafen the ears of man; The five flavors dull the taste of man; Horse-racing and hunting and chasing Madden the minds of man; and accept them as tending toward absolute truth without critically examining the moral judgment behind that which is not necessarily so.

In short, if you have to ask then it isn't kundalini.

Hey, I received a moderator's message when I logged on this a.m. that my post above had been reported as an attack on Marblehead. This is my reply: "No way was that an attack on MH, he did not write the material that was presented. I like MH; he is one of TTB's greatest assets. I was using the strong language to emphasize the point that aspects of Taoism were every bit as morally repressive as fundamental Christianity (or Islam for that matter). I have found it strange that people in the west will condemn all of Christianity as being repressive and anti-life but will wholeheartedly embrace without reflection the entirety of an eastern tradition that contains the same puritanical clap-trap. It is a kind of sentimentality that evades critical thinking and needs to be shaken up from time to time. I could have written a mild little post to that point but it would not have had any effect. If MH or anyone else thought the post was a personal attack then I sincerely apologize for not making that clear in the first place. But I will not apologize for the strong language. When I feel passionate about an issue I use strong language and I feel passionate about sanctimonious authority whether it is political or spiritual or social." I was wondering to myself whether or not to elaborate further because further elaboration might be off-topic. But I decided to go ahead because this is a philosophy thread and my musings on the matter tend toward a subjective philosophy that has been shaded more by Taoism than any other ism, but that doesn't mean I have purchased the entire package. First I should mention that I embody a personality type that Carl Jung, Myers and Briggs describe as Extroverted Sensory Feeling. (We ESFs tend to be passionate, physical and autonomous beyond the norm, and sometimes a little anarchistic.) Now this hard-wired basic approach to life was originally shaped by growing up rural in Rocky Mountain cowboy country among any number of hard living, and sometimes exceptionally wise, human beings. It was further developed in my first occupation, journalism, which has its share of hard living and sometimes exceptionally wise human beings. My second occupation was that of a private investigator who specialized in criminal defense and civil rights work in a milieu that is populated by hard-living, autonomous, passionate (and sometimes exceptionally wise) human beings, many of whom are outlaws. (For more on that you can read this.) My current occupation is artistic blacksmithing. Now in line with this train of thought and to some extent the general tenor of TTB, I once wrote in an essay about forge welding: "Working hammers of this weight—ten pounds—in this heat is a gourmet meditation on the priceless treasure of the body—that which we are until that moment we aren’t. The eyes and shoulders take care of the weld, wu wei, it doesn’t need another thought. This body is the only asset and care in the whole world now. One strikes right as if growing up, tranquil, from the earth with a dark, slacked core of original energy settled just above the groin as the center and source of awareness. It’s a little like a slow dirty, Latin dance and a dance to be regally, seductively dirty must look and feel as if it is the easiest thing two people have ever done standing up; a dance so certain of itself that the steps are barely there; just brief, cathartic afterthoughts that really aren’t thought of as much as they are small reflexive tokens to the music that, for its own part in the piece, is not so much the impulse for the dance but a restraint on its passion. So too, heavy hammers moves almost on their own, verging on beyond control. Gripping hammers that weigh like this will soon cripple the hands and the feeling of ease; being crippled spoils the fun to be had at the border with chaos. These hammers are held like a small bird—with just sufficient tension to keep them from flying away. They bounce, levitate on their own—boost the lift, stretch up with it, sense the apex, pause there. Throw the hammers down, try not to miss. Hammers of this weight in learned hands are always thrown at the work; softly guided there. They are never swung. The blow, steel against steel, generates power again into the core and that sense could be the entire reason to be right here. Care for the body—that is all there is—keep it straight, tranquil, upright and healthy so it can always feel this sublime and real, this close to the ground and a shout for delight and this fantasy of living forever that is spun up from the source. ~ ~ After the first weld is finished we stick an only slightly thinner piece on the other end. Its the same drill; heat and adrenaline, thirst, water and trace mineral tablets, flecks of slag sizzling cool on wet forearms, racked breathing, laughter, shouting, floods of sweat, sulfurous steam when I damp the fire’s edge, the sun-bleached Snickers Pamala brings back from the liquor store and the savored ground of vitality that substantiates it all." (The entire piece can be found on this blog.) I once barely avoided a fight over a woman with a C&W singer/song writer who had written in a lyric two lines that are directly to the point: "Too high and too wide and too deep ain't too much to be. Too much ain't never enough..." Yeats wrote something in this same direction, part of which is my signature below: A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. For some of us what looks like excess to another is just a standard--and moderate--portion. Some of us do get addicted to substances and sensations. Many do not, nor are they controlled by them. But this has gone on long enough...I might get back to it later and address directly some of MH's observations.

MH, I have to hand it to you for bringing all these fine teachings into one space...Old Number 97...a sublime crock of sour owl shit. I've lived in the South USA and so I know that you don't have to go to China for this kind of sanctimonious crap and you had better not try what with the perilous balance of trade these days. However you can pick it up from any Christian fundamentalist bitch-meister at least three times within any five blocks you might want to wander. I have no respect for this because it is so goddamned common, so goddamned petty, so goddamned eager to debase life itself. The only people for whom I have respect are those few who know, down there in the don-tien, more about the Tao than anyone on this forum because they have been around the block with their eyes and their minds wide open more times than anyone around here. And you will see them standing there with a bottle of Jack Daniels and the reins of a fast horse in one hand and an arm around the shoulders of a beautiful, wise and loving woman...a smile on their lips and a song in their heart...

Hey, I have never been very impressed with this chapter of the TTC. I sense an undertone of sophistry in it...not the sage's best moment. But I think the different translations are interesting in that everyone I have read (within recent memory) cast the first line in the present tense except Wu who puts it into the past tense. This has two effects, I think; one is to again conjure up that antique Taoist nostalgia for an actual paradise lost. The second is to shade the rest of the chapter with a fatalistic review of the fallen human condition rather than give the warnings (as the other translations do) of the dire consequences of deviating from The Path--Be afraid...be very, very afra... Oh No! Here come the ministers now!

Reynolds makes a nicely concise presentation. Joseph Campbell said essentially the same thing over 20 years ago and Aleister Crowley was saying the same thing 100 years ago.

MH, Did you mean by "self-awareness," (1) the awareness of one's discrete "self" (whatever that might be, illusory or not), or (2) self's awareness that would include awareness of the immediate environment, the presence of others, the task at hand, the current mental activity and the nature of the discreet self's relationship to The Other, which is everything except the discreet self. The latter is close to the Jungian definition of ego. In the latter, the amount of the self's awareness of the discreet self is always on a sliding scale ranging from, for example, a large sense such as the self-pity that might come while experiencing a monumental tooth ache, to a small sense that comes from losing one's self in one's work. I don't think anyone can be fully self-aware in the former (1) sense any more than one can see their own eyes without the help of a mirror.

Well, damn it all! It looks like I was being too droll again, or too stingy with the smilies, such that those of a now evident high erudition didn't get my play on the ambiguity of the word, "good." However, the discussion might be taken further given the good/bad polarity might be applied to the functional/dysfunctional dichotomy. I would think any therapist could see.... mmmmm, never mind. BTW, I am a little confused. cat, at one point you write: But above that you wrote: and a little later you refer to your Jungian training. Now after having lived 11 years with someone who had, more or less, the same credentials as you, I am wondering why they called themselves a psychologist (a professional title tied to licensing regs and all) and you apparently do not call yourself a psychologist since I am not disagreeing with you, but with "any and all psychologists." So, do you no longer work in that racket and if so, why did you write: "I...am actually (lets hope not fictionally) a Rogerian etc. etc. etc?" Please enlighten.

A few short thoughts on this thread. 1. Cat wrote: I think it is always good to do a little research before shooting from the hip. The article in question is from a web site for the author's patented brand of psychotherapy, which tends toward the self-help style. But examination of the site shows the author was inspired by the work of Eugene Gendlin, philosopher, theoretical psychologist and one of the last living colleagues of Carl Rogers. Here is a link to one of Gendlin's essays that shows that his "focusing" process rises little higher level than a superficial, popular magazine. I think some parallels can be drawn between this work and the old Taoist admonition to "Empty the head and fill the belly." Often that is translated as "empty the mind..." But I think that is in error because as anyone with half their wits about them know by now the belly is just as much a part of the mind (if not more so?) as the brain. 2. As far as translations go, I think it is a grave error to translate the Buddhist concept of unenlightened and predominating self-interest into one English word, "ego," given the fact that Freud, Jung, et al, had a lock on the English meaning of the word long before Buddhism became a popular entertainment in the English speaking world. The Buddhist concept might be a little closer to Freud's idea of ego than Jung's.The western definition of ego from the article above seems to be derived from Jung's concept. BTW, I disagree with the statement that ego is neither bad nor good, which sounds the equivalent of saying "arms are neither bad nor good." Remember statements regarding a cripple: "She only had one good leg." Without one good ego we would all be operating at the level of slugs. 3. Vortex wrote I am not convinced enlightenment comes that easily: Any one who has delved very deeply into the concepts behind the simple word, "Intersubjectivity," or can see at least a little validity in Physicalist theories of mind can be pretty well assured that no one in the world is a separate individual. I know that. But am I enlightened? Hardly. And does that knowledge end the suffering of my No I? Hardly. But then I only suffer when I read tautologies like those found in the Vortex post.

Yes, trust is the issue. Briefly I am going to bring in (as is my want) the Cleary translation. Bear in mind it is more a word-for-word translation from the old texts rather than an interpretation from preceding ones. 17.1 Very great leaders in their domains are only known to exist. Those next best are loved and praised. The lesser are feared and despised. 17.2 Therefore when faith is insufficient and there is disbelief, 17.3 it is from the high value placed on words. Works are accomplished, tasks are completed, and ordinary folk all say they are acting spontaneously. Note that it is much shorter and it has the feeling of being brief and direct in contrast to the more interpretive renditions like English/Fen. (I like the English/Fen because it expands the chapter's fundamental concepts beyond just the realm of governmental operations simply by leaving out the word "leaders.") Now look at how Cleary translated the part about speech: "Therefore when faith is insufficient and there is disbelief, it is from the high value placed on words." I think the warning here is equal to the lesson learned by all those idealistic Democrat kids in the last presidential election in the USA. When all the valued words from the campaign trail are stripped away it is revealed that Obama has been a Republican all along.

MH wrote: That statement in itself constitutes a moral code... And then MH wrote: ...a statement that outlines another part of the MH Moral Code... Which was followed by: ...and here we have the ultimate MH moral code. Sagacity lives in self-contradiction, que no? I prefer to look at it with the sentimentality that is implicit above cut away: Anyone can do anything they want because that is what nature allows. (As the Taoist/Anarchist/Realist explained above.) 1. Morality is a broad based contract the same as legal codes and more individualized business agreements. 2. Legislation and business contract are obsolete the moment they are signed into enactment and moral codes are obsolete the moment they are concensualized because all three are based on compilations of the past. For 33 years my professions put me in daily contact with The Law and it did not take me long to realize that laws are a futile attempt to regulate the future by translating, interpreting and putting into judgment situations from the past, but like Carl Sandburg once wrote, "The past is a bucket of ashes." 3. Those of us who love to spend time there can certainly say that at the leading edge of the Moment of Now there is only chaos. And then back a bit there is only ashes--time incinerates instantly. The legal codes, the moral codes and the boilerplate contracts only draw diagrams in the ashes.(Incidentally, legal codes do, as do moral codes, establish a certain tenor of regulation; however this is not due to the general "law abiding" nature of most conscious civilians, but to an exceptionally low key level of mass hysteria that political scientists call, "the habit of obedience." As Louis XVI and Tzar Nicholas the Last found in their final hours, this habit is very temperamental and very frail. There is, come nut cutting time, an innate and instinctual wisdom in the masses.) I have known only a few men (I was fathered and raised by one) who knew the natural sovereignty found only on the front edge of now. And there every one of them was a sovereign sage who knew they could do as they pleased--and hey wait! It was mostly compassion that pleased them.--and were fully willing to accept all responsibility and consequence of their acts. It is not surprising that almost all of these men were intelligent, grounded, squared away outlaws. And come some bad, nut cutting situation, I would rather be in the company of two of these men than an army of Little Goody Two Shoes who had subordinated their hearts and minds to some fundamentally mediocre code of right and wrong no matter how beyond the beyond it was of itself.