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A blitz foray into TCM
Below is a blitz foray into traditional taoist philosophy and traditional Chinese medicine (which is rooted in the former in its entirety)...
Date: 6/10/2005 5:43:07 PM ( 19 y ) ... viewed 2486 times Below is a blitz foray into traditional taoist
philosophy and traditional Chinese medicine (which is
rooted in the former in its entirety), intermixed with
my own take (as is everything in my world, where
there's no such thing as "objective," "impartial" and
"impersonal," unlike in the "let's pretend I don't
exist," "never mind me, I'm nothing really, I'm not
even here, objective science is happening all by
itself, no one is personally responsible for the shape
and form it takes!" make-believe world of
"peer-reviewed," "modern," "double-blind,"
"statistically significant," etc., hypnotic
suggestions and creative fantasy games).
1. The basic stuff the universe is made of is not
definable, the only way to comprehend it is by
comprehending its properties, and the only way to know
it is by directly perceiving it. It can't be reduced
to an explanation of what it is; one can use a word to
call it something, some name, but there's no such
thing as a definition: being undefinable is one of its
properties. One good traditional word to call it is
Tao. Tao is uncreated, but every-thing created comes
from it. It is complete, eternal, and unchanging, yet
everything incomplete, temporary, and changing comes
from it. Everything is included in it and nothing is
excluded, including the nothing itself.
2. Change born of Tao comes about through the
interplay
of the two opposites, yin and yang. Yin and yang are
the properties of Tao, and everything has yin and yang
attributes. Yin and yang are always relative --
there's no absolute yin nor absolute yang, and things
can only be compared as "more yin than yang" or "more
yang than yin." There's a seed of yin in all things
yang, and vice versa. Extreme yin turns to yang, and
vice versa.
Some of the attributes of yang are:
male principle
light
moving upward
fast
aggressive
creative
dry
restless
bright
moving outward
external
Sun
West
upper part
left side of the brain
right side of the body
Some of the attributes of yin are:
female principle
heavy
moving downward/sinking
slow
passive
nurturing
moist
dark
quiet
moving inward
internal
lower part
Moon
East
right side of the brain
left side of the body
3. Simultaneously the medium and the message of
change, the force that both creates change and is
created by change is qi. The interplay of the
opposites of yin
and yang is moved by qi and generates qi. Qi is often
translated as "energy" but it is not really "energy"
in the Western sense. It is the flow of change. It
is the continuum of events and their meanings.
4. The Five Elements (better translated as Five Phases
of qi transformation) that comprize the flow of qi are
known as Fire, Earth, Metal, Water and Wood. They
are a lot more, and very different from, the actual
fire, earth, metal and so on, though the "elements" as
such do manifest some, thought not all, of the
properties of the corresponding phase of qi. These
five phases are
locked in continuous repeated cycles of generating and
destroying each other, and are governed by three basic
types of relationships with each other:
nourishing/creating
(e.g., Fire creates Earth);
reducing/destroying
(e.g., Fire destroys Wood), and
controlling
(e.g., Water controls Fire).
5. The five phases manifest their interplay in
everything in existence, including the human body and
all the substances it takes in. All events in the
body are governed by the fact that
a)it is born of Tao
b)which manifests yin and yang properties
c)which generate qi
d)which is a process made up of five phases and their
cyclic interplay.
6. The whole of creation is in perfect balance, and a
healthy human being is in harmony with all of
creation.
7. All disease comes from local imbalances of
elemental forces. There's only two basic types of
imbalances: excess and deficiency, often leading to
the lack of meaningful events in the body that is
usually termed stagnation. Excess, deficiency and
stagnation are at the root of all evils.
8. Food carries meaningful change to the body. It can
help maintain proper balance, or restore it in
conditions of imbalance. Yin foods can nourish and
replenish yin, yang foods can nourish and replenish
yang, foods that are active with plenty of qi can
break through stagnation, cooling foods can counteract
conditions of excessive heat, moist foods can heal
conditions of excessive dryness, tonifying foods can
increase qi, and so on.
9. Traditional Chinese medicine knows EVERYTHING about
the properties of ALL foods, herbs, minerals, and
anything and everything of natural origins a human
being is capable of ingesting or encountering.
10. TCM doesn't put this knowledge in "Western
scientific" terms, but every time anything from its
arsenal is tested scientifically, evidence of its
efficacy can be, and is, obtained in Western
scientific terms.
Whenever there's something modern science understands,
if it tests something TCM doctors have been
doing for thousands of years, it invariably discovers
some good Western reason why. E.g., for night
blindness, the TCM cure is bats droppings. Looks like
a stupid barbaric superstition... bats can "see" at
night, right?.. -- till scientists
bother to examine the composition of bats droppings
and discover huge concentrations of vitamin A therein
(whose deficiency is the cause of night blindness).
So then scientists simply register the fact that the
ancients "somehow" figured it out (usually asserting
that they figured it out by trial and error, as though
everyone who ever lived is supposed to have used the
fool's method they are using themselves). They can't
begin to fathom how those un-scientists of ages ago
could possibly know what they knew, and they haven't
come up with the first idea whenever they tried to
explain it.
11. Unlike "modern Western" scientists, in order to follow TCM's
reasoning, I use the same methods the reasoning party
itself was using when its members "somehow" discovered
nature's secrets -- all of them.
The way I follow this reasoning is non-western,
non-linear, non-left-brain, non-dualistic,
non-Cartesian and occasionally non-human. I find it
exceedingly difficult to put much of it into words,
but I find it easy to learn it from plants, animals,
clouds, flowing water, my own deepest feelings,
crystals, body language, natural sounds, pain,
pleasure, sunlight, darkness, and so on. I also incorporate
a little help from my friends the scientists, but what
happens when I turn to science for validation of what
I perceive by different means has nothing to
do with "giving a scientific background to my
empirical observations." Scientific background is
what I'm trying to get away from, because it destroys
the true perceptions (where subject and object are
one, are in a relationship, and no such thing as
"objectivity" exists or ever did.) Rather, I resort
to science as one occasionally useful catalyst for the
larger process of distilling pure, nonverbal,
non-objective comprehension, the only real kind. One
science I find particularly enlightening is the theory
of chaos and fractals -- which is about as close to
taoism as Western science can get without going
psychotic from the effort.
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