Tai Ping...

So obviously the internet has all these keystroke loggers operating in the background 'watching' everything you're doing on the net.

I never even looked anything up on Google or was typing in anywhere other than right here in a recent Blog article - and then a day ago, the YouTube feed presented me with a video taken by some kids who live in the Tanjung Balai group of islands (used to be an independent pseudo-sultanate; I think it's sort of jointly a 'protectorate' with quite some independence and a lot of European tourist operators there!); and the video was for a Taoism ritual for Jiu-Tian Xuan Nu.

Hey, waddya think, Bill?
Do you want one?

So I'm watching this and I get the shock of my life, more or less.

Now, I have said before that my father retired the Permanent Director of National Education somewhere. So, that and the fact that he had a brother and a cousin who were very high up in Shell Oil, meant that we had a pretty 'connected' life with all of the local cultural groups.

On the one hand, he was much sought by parents wanting their kids to get to go to Uni and so on, on the other hand, there was this intrinsic very old school, 'ancient traditional culture' thing alive everywhere and he was necessarily patched into all of that because for one thing, the government wanted all the language groups to have equal opportunities to go to mainstream English-speaking Universities overseas if they were smart enough. 

And then on the other other hand, his family had been in China for over two hundred years already even when my dad was a leading education system figure mid to late last century - and so a lot of the local Chinese, especially the Cantonese from Mainland China (who kept to themselves) literally accepted us as 'inside the family door.' They still do.

...Which means that all of the Taoist, the really wild stuff, was nothing special to me growing up - and this 'lineage' style is hardly even really that common in say Hong Kong by comparison. It is there but it's not really all that common common.

So Taoist nuns and priestesses turning up at our place and deciding that there was something 'special' about my younger sister was not really anything strange to any of us.

I mean it ended up becoming a thing we all 'raised our eyebrows' at, but because we knew what she was like as a baby, and a young child and growing up, well it was like - yeah, so those cultural guys got something right; they must know something afterall! 

When I say 'raised our eyebrows' I really mean though, not them coming over and doing rituals and stuff, but that in fact my little sister was truly weird.

That is an incense burner out on a precipice
on the top of the Wudang Shan (mountain
peaks).
We think we're smart in the West.
We're really really stupid.
This is the mountain of Tai Ping:
Great Heavenly Peace.

And so, we just had this idea, oh there must be something to all of this astrology, maybe, or whatever else other 'signs' these guys were going from. Yes she had weird ear-tops (literally had them surgically altered when she was in her twenties because she wanted to be 'normal...'), and yes she apparently spoke to plants and never spoke to humans, but then, my elder sister never much did either, choosing to speak in Hokkien which none of us properly understood. What can I say - my dad was already very old, he had survived the War, and so, both he and my mom, I think they were more pleased that they even had any children at all, because the doctors said my mother never would.

Now listen, you all have been reading here for ages already, so you know this is all against the background already of the connection both of my parents had with 'all sorts of government agencies' and all of the carry-on with the Disney Corporation and frikkin' Kim Philby in Singapore and the Dr Stephen Ward (Profumo Affair) stuff.

So then, like, who cares about some little local 'thing' that the marginal religious groups were getting into with the youngest kid - well, in fact the baby, really.

I suppose even so though, the parents had some notion of the real strangeness because the Tamils would turn up and I think the Jain priests - I'm pretty sure them - and they would literally take her out, never even ask my parents okay at all; they would come in their religious ceremonial clothes, stick garlands around this little baby and stick her on a mat out in the concrete courtyard we had at the back, where they had made this 'area' and then do rituals and ceremonies. So then, the odd thing was, they were all using her name but apparently they all had a version of it in their own cultures - so, the Indians had 'Muriya' and 'Murti' and 'Moordah' and 'Murta' and these all have the sense of a concrete, a manifested female spiritual aspect.

And the Chinese called her 'Amoya' which means like a maiden, not 'grinding one's teeth' (which is mo ya).

Anyway the point is this: it's all meaningless to us. Well, not meaningless, but it has nothing to do with us, this is a their culture/s thing and we didn't interfere.

Nothing really happened.

This is 'me' though, right here;
this is more like 'me' stuff.
I am just another guy,
looking over a coffee.

Just when we were about to leave the place permanently, she goes to sleep and does not get up at all, literally at all, until we get off the plane here in Australia. So in those days that's a long long time. And I mean, she was asleep in the car, in the airport lounges, the whole whole whole saga.

And then, years later, we ask her about all the things she remembers when she was back over there - and she swears black and blue to the point that the rest of us had to just back off, that she never remembers a single thing at all.

O-kay...

And as time passes, it's like we're dealing with two different people. One we knew from 'before,' and this 'new' one who is completely Australian, speaks perfect normal English with an Australian accent, and wants to have her ears 'fixed.' There was nothing ever wrong with them. She could have landed a part in Star Trek any day.

My mom, had a theory about something and I never could fully see how that would work what she was saying but I do now.

My mother was simply enunciating what Sir David Hawkins would end up saying about 'the field.'

I've noticed that recently, Rupert Sheldrake's Wiki page has stopped saying that he is 'widely thought of as spouting pseudo-science.' Saying that kind of thing (calling someone a pseudo-scientist), using that sort of crude phraseology, is the death-knell to any serious academic, and for years many unknown nobodies saw to it very diligently it that it was their duty and their destiny to dispose of Sheldrake in as agricultural a fashion as possible.

But what happened in this video I was watching...

Prosecco, Amontillado sherry, cognac,
and a bit of lavender.

Well I see my sister, more or less, that is to say, she was physically, except for a few facial details (my sister has a prominent pointed chin), in all of the exhibited mannerisms, style of moving, physical strength - everything - right there on-screen but that's impossible.

Secondly, despite the fact that my sister was born in Tai Ping(!), she never did or could have come into contact with such a sophisticated system and process and array of 'things' and movements and behaviors and everything - that you can see when these people 'invoke' this spirit being into this human vessel there. My sister was no years old when this all began!

And I was with her every single moment, pretty much, of every single day, between zero years and say four or five at least.

But the person today, who is a senior manager at a major global mining engineering company, is not the same person.

Every now and then, after many wines, when she was still around back down here, she 'might' vaguely vaguely, agree that all of these things went on and that she recalls them. But it's like talking to someone who is telling you a dream they had. And to them it is very much a meaningless dream with no actual point to it now and even less point talking about it at all or going over.

The historical fact that one of my ancestors was involved with the 'Tai Ping Ever-Victorious Army' again is eye-brow raising to me and so what though.

I am not she, and I am not them, and personally I am not planning to raise any 'Ever-Victorious' anything except maybe a few hundred dollars of cash that I will send out to do some damage somewhere and come back with a few friends.

Well but how does this help us? I think that Hawkins and Sheldrake are right, and how though!

So rather than go into the devastating war stuff, we might dabble around a bit in the field itself and see what we can bring back... Next few exciting episodes.

Meanwhile, here is Jon Meyer (not the ex-BF of Katy Perry!) and 'For The Lonely.' This just means people looking over their coffees in the evenings.