Entries from November 2006 ↓

Via A Modern Approach to Ancient Tao

1. A Modern Approach to Ancient Tao
(excerpts from Dynamic Tao and Its Manifestation)

Tao has survived thousands of years of analysis, remaining as a mysterious philosophy without a modern interpretation. Different schools of Chinese scholars chose to interpret Tao in different ways. In order to make progress in a more systematic way, we need to build a coherent base for Tao philosophy and use it as a common platform to foster further understanding of Tao.

Our approach was to start with a few Tao principles and use them to interpret the Tao Te Ching verses. After we understood more about the verses, we then went back to refine our Tao principles. This process repeated until we established consistency between Tao principles and their interpretations.

Visit Dynamic Tao and Its Manifestation for more

I have to admit, I got pretty burnt out on politics several years ago, but here it is.

Basically I think that an insistence on an elusively defined ideal of fairness is one of the biggest timbers in the eyes of the left when attempting to present a coherent politico economic philosophy. And then history keeps showing us that the most well intentioned master plans built around some typically liberal group’s idea of fairness always seem to end up needing a violent revolution to begin with and/or be enforced, top-down at gunpoint. Shouldn’t that be the first clue something is wrong? Anarchism, individualism, libertarianism, laissez faire … these approaches more accurately mirror the reality of life and are more in the spirit of Taoism. A forest does not need a centralized committee to redistribute resources “fairly”. Mice do not need a political correctness board to protect them from the insulting howls of wolves. Order emerges from chaos most naturally when we get out of the way and stop trying to control things. Like Campbell says, follow your bliss. If it makes you happy and your life more meaningful to lend a hand to people that need it, do it! You don’t need to read a book to prove the value of so-called altruism. Give your Mom a call or your girlfriend a massage or a man on the street ten bucks and feel into the oneness of your hearts. These things can objectively feel good. Not for everyone, but then can this be changed by force?

I imagine the 60’s and 70’s were some amazing times. But in a way I think this generation was the most selfish in recently recorded history. Think about it, three quarters of a generation of youth decided they didn’t feel like supporting their country anymore, didn’t care what their families thought, didn’t care about working to contribute to society, basically just dropped out to become active in intellectual political ideologies (some of which turned out to be essentially totalitarian), experiment with psychoactive drugs, open sexuality, new forms of music. Sure there was sacrifices but their hearts were on fire! Real sacrifice was the previous generation of men, grinding away in mind numbing jobs without any sense of entitlement to self-actualization, artistic expression or even happiness, all just to support their family and die with stomach ulcers … and the previous generation of women, who swallowed any concept of personal autonomy to wither in joyless, sexless marriages, again just to keep their families together. THAT is sacrifice. Real sacrifice is doing what you don’t want, what is not even that helpful and then having nothing to show for it, and no applause. Growing your hair out, playing the drums and holding up anti-war posters is not. Sorry. Honestly I think I would probably have been right there with the hippies. I would have done the same shit. But I think their cause went downhill when the self-righteousness came to a boil. The reality that the real paradigm shift was follow your bliss, not “we are heroes saving the rest of the corrupt selfish world” got lost and turned bitter.

Materialism, in the sense of a flatland, one-dimensional vision of reality, is at the heart of so much evil. But ironically it’s the left now that are the loudest proponents of secular materialism, insisting spiritual values are backwards, can not be taught publicly and should have nothing to do with how a country is governed. I understand why. The left is trying to respond to a fundamentalist, religious right. But the left has completely lost it’s own positive vision. It just nitpicks and deconstructs the conservative vision into an incoherent patchwork.

I won’t even get started on the right!

Via Science Daily via Corpus Mmothra

Beauty And The Brain

The phrase “easy on the eyes” may hit closer to the mark than we suspected.
Experiments led by Piotr Winkielman, of the University of California, San Diego, and published in the current issue of Psychological Science, suggest that judgments of attractiveness depend on mental processing ease, or being “easy on the mind.”
“What you like is a function of what your mind has been trained on,” Winkielman said. “A stimulus becomes attractive if it falls into the average of what you’ve seen and is therefore simple for your brain to process. In our experiments, we show that we can make an arbitrary pattern likeable just by preparing the mind to recognize it quickly.”

…

“It seems you don’t need to postulate an unconscious calculator of mate value or any other ‘programmed-brain’ argument to explain why prototypical images are more attractive,” Winkielman said. “The mental mechanism appears to be extremely simple: facilitate processing of certain objects and they ring a louder bell.

“This parsimonious explanation,” he said, “accounts for cultural differences in beauty — and historical differences in beauty as well — because beauty basically depends on what you’ve been exposed to and what is therefore easy on your mind.”

Read the full article

Old post on TTB, but worth checking out.

Via The Tao Bums

One of the things we tend to do is constantly scan the environment so that we know ‘where we are’ - “I’m at home, I’m in bed, I’m at work, I’m in London, I’m in a new location, I’m on the pavement”. This is completely automatic - you dont think about it and you dont notice yourself doing it - it’s there to make us feel safe - because ‘where we are’ often equates to how safe we are. But the thing is this constant scanning is using up a huge proportion of our light beam - even if we dont need to know where we are… it also uses up our energy, our attention and gives our ego the chance to start trying to control ‘where you are’. Constantly working out what’s safe, what’s compelling, where to go etc. If you dont know where you are - and have no concern in knowing this, you cannot feel unsafe, you cannot grasp and attempt to control things beyond your control, you cannot worry or plan etc. basically you can become still and present in the now - if only you lose yourself… in other words lose your concern over where you are.

So try this out if this sounds like it could be usefull - I first tried it lying in bed - because I remember doing something similar as a child for entertainment. Feel yourself in bed in whatever room you are in - then feel yourself in bed in another room, then another, then another - keep going, each time really feel the place and then move to another place - keep going and keep getting faster and faster at some point it becomes a blur - keep the blur spinning and suddenly you’ll pop out of it into emptiness - you are nowhere/everywhere… usually (unless you’ve done a lot of meditation) this is frightening - and you’ll immediately re-locate yourself in your room. But getting comfortable in losing yourself gives you a much bigger light beam of awareness to play with - whether in your practices or in interacting or just when you’re relaxing.

Don’t do this while crossing the road or driving!

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