Taomeow

The doorman gets pissed The monks get into a brawl The cat takes a nap

I get synchronicities nearly every day. Almost enough to convince me we live in a simulation. I vividly remember the very first one -- I was 8 years old, spending a month in a summer camp. Several girls in the corner of a very large room were talking about something while I was reading a book in another corner. A name of a new protagonist came up in my book, a very unusual one -- unusual enough for me to have never encountered that name not only before, but ever again. At exactly the moment my eyes were reading that name on the page, one of the girls across the room yelled it out excitedly -- that very name. Turned out they were trying to remember an unusual name of someone they knew, and did, simultaneously with it appearing in front of my eyes. This particular kind of synchronicity has been happening to me with some regularity. I wish I knew what it means. I have several theories, but no definitive proof of anything...

Yes, sort of -- though it's not a pyramid in taoism, more like a spectrum... or a bell curve. Or even a sine wave. Self-actualization and survival needs are not as opposed in "classical" taoism as they are in other traditions. As Hong Junsheng (one of the great masters in Chen style taiji) once put it, "the meaning of life" is a very Western concept which he had a hard time wrapping his mind around on first exposure. I suspect self-actualization in Maslow's sense is a phenomenon of neurotic/traumatic origins as well... but my mind has been skewed in a somewhat barbaric fashion for quite some time, so don't take my word for it.

Thank you. I thought you were being sarcastic -- my mistake, but you often are, so... Anyway, all is forgiven and I'm flattered by your paying attention to my meows. That's the problem with claims -- too many boys cry too many wolves. In my case -- and I don't even remember if I told the story here, must have, I was bursting with this desire to share things ayahuasca for a while but not finding anywhere near adequate words to do it -- but I tried. I talked to everyone about that stuff for a while, even strangers... this only happened to me once before, after my twins were born -- I felt the world needed to know what it was like. Ha! I'm a lot more restrained now about whatever might shake me to the core on impact. But, briefly about what I was referring to. SHE spent 8 hours straight teaching me to control the rainfall, of all things. I never thought it would ever be used after that night, but there was no arguing with her, and while it was going on I sort of got the knack of it, turning the rainstorm in the rain forest on and off many times. By the end of the lesson, it was as easy as turning your shower on and off in your bathroom. And then some time later I had to travel to New York (an unplanned and unexpected necessity trip) and right after I arrived, there was this hurricane Irene warning, a big deal it was supposed to be, they ordered mandatory evacuation for 2.5 million people and issued dire warning for the rest. The night it was to make landfall, I stood outside, remembering and applying stuff ayahuasca taught me. The hurricane totally fizzled out compared to what was predicted/expected. I'll never know if I played a part. All I know is, it seemed like that was precisely what she taught me that stuff for. Interesting. WLP's rationale was, it was for not letting an attacker hit you in the liver should they aim a strike there. He taught us how to move qi wuxing style between five organs first, and then how to increase mobility of the organs themselves. He asserted it's a modern, and abnormal, thing for internal organs to be "stuck" and "glued," similar to (but harder to tackle than) any other manifestation of stiffening, hardening, loss of freedom of movement and control of one's mobility range.

Not mentioned in your proposed list of verifiable signs of having neidan, eh? No "red blood becomes milk?" No growing seven feet tall? No turning into a Buddha who is supposed to be the real verifiable taoist cultivator with neidan? Dismissed! You seem to think that either I'm lying, or I fell for some trick. If I were lying, I'd come up with something other than a phenomenon I never encountered as any sign of anything, I'd go with something more mainstream, like setting stuff on fire with one's bare hands or healing someone's hump or limp, and so on. And if it was some trick, I can't for the life of me imagine how it could be done -- one can hide a rabbit in a top hat but in one's own torso?.. ?? Everybody who has accomplished anything in cultivation is a senior citizen. This is not a young ageist's game -- they all are subconsciously convinced they are immortal by default, and forever young at that -- and someone who has reached an age beyond their reach so far is automatically disqualified. Whereas their real cultivation effort should be focused on becoming a senior citizen, for starters. Nothing is guaranteed to anyone. Real taoist cultivation is about "living out one's human years" to the fullest -- WLP teaches just that, offering the students to set a simple goal for starters, to think of themselves as naturally equipped to live a very long healthy life, take it from there. As for how to deflect a hurricane with magic, that's not WLP, that's ayahuasca's teachings, in my humble case, and I think I said clearly at the time that I've no way of knowing whether it was a coincidence. But that's what she trained me to do, for reasons I didn't understand at the time at all. I wanted something entirely different from her, but it was what it was. Those are all sort of self-defense moves, wait until I'm on the offensive... if the spirit so moves me.

Fabulous, of course A snail climbing Mount Fuji with Issa's blessings

I've read his book. Some of the stuff therein was truly far out. By comparison, any and every claim ever made on this forum sounds like a child's announcement that he's big enough to put on his shoes all by himself, and his master is even able to tie his own shoelaces! But I think that's the general situation with Western practices vis a vis indigenous shamanic ones, wherever the latter might still survive. I enjoyed the book very much. If I were to get instructions from Malidoma, I'd follow them verbatim I think. Maybe.

It starts with meiosis, then proceeds to mitosis-meiosis interplay.

Yeah, that's how it sounded to me. Did I answer your questions to your satisfaction? I was just trying to be helpful, not arguing.

Multiplication is division. If the mind could truly understand this koan of cellular biology, everybody would become instantly enlightened.

If I could make public some private letters re the David Verdesi debacle that were shared with me at one point, you would have to reconsider about the "cahoots." "What he got" and "where is he now" are separate questions. What he got I saw and experienced, but you won't be convinced. As for where he is now -- he was teaching seminars in China and in several other countries in Eastern Europe and Asia up until the end of 2019 -- the last one shortly before covid lockdowns began in China. He hasn't returned to teaching large groups or traveling abroad, but you have to keep in mind that lockdowns were renewed on a number of occasions in some cities in China way after they ended elsewhere, and China's overall human interactions with the West (as well as domestically) have changed pretty drastically. He's been only teaching small groups locally (in Dalian) -- perhaps as the result of a combo of circumstances and personal choices. That information is about six months old. As for Nathan -- what he got is a translation that was easier to read than the ones appearing before. There's a new (and probably better) translation just out, by Livia Kohn -- an emeritus professor of Religion and East Asian Studies at Boston University specializing in studies of taoism, one of the top Western authorities on things taoist, author of numerous significant works and translations, and a practitioner herself. I think if she wasn't phased by gossip of the kind you seem to have believed, she wasn't just being a gullible sucker when she took "what WLP got" seriously. A gullible sucker is not her style at all. (Nor is it mine, if I say so myself.)

"My friend in tao, the times have changed..." https://www.facebook.com/721843241/videos/427836879838735

Wild blackberries! "Cranberries" are also wild. "Pretenders," more so.

Yes. https://hermetic.com/crowley/magick-without-tears/mwt_01