Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Home Is Where Cheap Rent Is
If you interpret things like, "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao" or "They that know, do not talk. They that talk, do not know", in the way many people attempt to interpret it, then the words themselves are Lao Tsu violating his own teaching... What he is speaking of, is what quantum physicists say about it. That the quantum field probably will never be investigated, for to attempt to do so causes the probabilities to collapse and form reality. But there is still a lot that can be said about the nameless Tao, since we are surrounded by the named Tao... It is true, there is a problem trying to translate things from the oldest extant manuscripts of the oldest written language that continues in use. There are Chinese characters in the Tao Te Ching that are no longer in use in the modern language. I mean if I say: "Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing", that sounds pretty strange and that is only like 400 year old English. So even to some one whose mother tongue is some dialect of Chinese, the Tao Te Ching is going to sound pretty strange to them... There are like 14,000 translations of the Tao Te Ching. Those translations will pick up the ideology and agendas of the translator. You have Christian missionaries translating it and you have Aleister Crowley aka "the world's most evil person" doing translations. But that both the missionary and Crowley are attempting to translate it, along with thousands of others, tells me there is something there, something that makes it worth you wasting precious time on. And so far the document has not been a waste of time. It is interesting how much flac I receive and how much people go out of their way to try to get me to discount its importance to study...— September 22, 2009 1:12 p.m.
Home Is Where Cheap Rent Is
quote: "Look, elsabio. Someone thinks that Lao Tze's an anarchist. "Some things never change." What would he say to that? Maybe... "If you don't trust the people, they will become untrustworthy." Anarchy: a state of lawlessness and disorder (usually resulting from a failure of government) Your body is not lawless. Every cell in your body is in constant communication with every other cell in your body. Take cells from your body and place them at a distance from your body and then subject your body to some stimuli or only the intention to subject it to that stimuli. As long as those cells remain alive that are outside your body, they will respond to the stimuli or the intention to subject yourself to that stimuli, as if they were still in your body. What does that? They are non-locally connected. They are connected to and orchestrated by the non-local intelligence, the quantum field, Lao Tsu, in his words, "for lack of a better name, I call it the Tao". It is the same that has brought this creation to the present level of complexity. It is the driving force behind evolution. Sure there are plenty of examples of competition in the world. But as the Dalai Lama has pointed out in his book, "The Universe in a Single Atom", there are also examples of cooperation and compassion. Man is at the place where if he does not heed that part of his nature, with intention, he is going to be a recipient of the Darwin Award, en masse. The answers have been there for a long, long, long time. Lao Tsu wrote the Tao Te Ching 2500 years ago. It is a teaching on government, at type of government that is in cooperation with the "government" that has evolved us to this stage of development. That government is the field of consciousness in which we live and move and have our being. It is a government that causes a school of fish to turn instantaneously on a dime, or a flock of birds to not collide in flight. It is the same government that tells the trillion or so cells in your body to get busy because you are going to start running, without you telling them to. That is the government that Lao Tsu depended on, so in a very real sense, you could not call him an anarchist. He believed that you do not need rules and laws to be kind and just. In fact, if a society thinks it needs rules and laws, it indicates that society has detached from that field of consciousness, and is on its way out. What are the indications of this? Oh, things like attacking another nation without provocation. Things like rejoicing when you win a war, rather than mourning that you were not able to not go to war. Things like a leader not trusting anyone. Lao Tsu saw that the greatest leader is someone the people hardly know that he is there. One who rules by consciousness, ie Mahatma Gandhi, who held no political office, but defeated the nation that at the end of WW2, Harry Truman believed was the greatest threat to democracy, England.— September 22, 2009 6:39 a.m.
Home Is Where Cheap Rent Is
A great scholar hears of the Tao and begins diligent practice. A middling scholar hears of the Tao, retains some and loses some. An inferior scholar hears of the Tao and roars with ridicule. Without that laugh, it would not be the Tao. So there are constructive sayings on this. The Way of illumination seems dark. Going forward seems like retreat. The easy way seems hard. True power seems weak. True purity seems tarnished. True clarity seems obscure. The greatest art seems unsophisticated. The greatest love seems indifferent. The greatest wisdom seems childish. The Tao is hidden and nameless. The Tao alone nourishes and brings everything to fulfillment... Tao Te Ching, verse 41 If you realize that all things change, there is nothing that you will hold onto. If you are not afraid of dying, there is nothing you can not achieve... TTC I believe that the people of Tijuana unconsciously live the Tao. The city of Tijuana reflects the Tao. The US thinks its more or less the crown of creation, the closest to perfection that has been attained. But according to the Tao Te Ching, the greatest perfection seems imperfect. "The usefulness of what is, depends on what is not"... TTC Fiamma Montezemolo, an Italian anthropologist, has written: "Tijuana explains it all the time: 'It is easier to reveal what I am not, than what I am..." http://www.worldviewcities.org/tijuana/fragmented…— September 22, 2009 4:34 a.m.
Home Is Where Cheap Rent Is
Concerning noise, the need for control is the primary American drug, and it needs to be kicked in order for the US to survive. I have been at parties that have spilled out into the street on a weeknight at 2:30 AM where 20 people, of questionable sobriety, were singing Aca Entre Nos, with Papa Chente being cranked on a car stereo, in a relatively upscale neighborhood. The police never showed up, primarily because they were never summoned. Everyone of the neighbors understood that they would be doing the same exact thing in maybe a month. That is freedom, true freedom, not propaganda freedom. It is freedom among a people who either consciously or unconsciously understand that in order to have freedom, one must give freedom...— September 21, 2009 9:23 p.m.
Home Is Where Cheap Rent Is
http://sagradatijuana.blogspot.com/— September 21, 2009 9:12 p.m.
Home Is Where Cheap Rent Is
Reasons to live in Tijuana... No one is trying to save you from yourself by means of legislation. The greatest public transportation system, cheap, plentiful, 24/7 and opposed to the San Diego Trolley, safe and comfortable. Therefore, there is no need to own a car. People, complete strangers, greet each other on the street. No one is paranoid and perfectly willing to allow you to be yourself. The culture of Tijuana is the culture of the people, as opposed to the culture of the US, which is corporate culture. Color, strong color is allowed in Tijuana, no combination of color is disallowed. You can paint your home any color your heart desires. You realize that you are no longer in beige hell, everything the color of a dead body. Life is allowed to flow as it will.— September 21, 2009 2:50 p.m.
Home Is Where Cheap Rent Is
The principal difference between housing in Tijuana and housing in the US is that in Tijuana they still know what the value of a home is. In the US, the value of a home is to sell, at the highest resale price that can be obtained. This value is poison, as we see the results, which ultimately is going to end private ownership of property, since eventually the prices are going to be so high that only corporations will be able to buy real property. The value of a home (bought or rented) in Tijuana is what it should be, a place to rest, express yourself, have identity with the community, a place to have fiestas for family and friends, a place to live. I believe that the tradition of renting most places in Tijuana in dollars is starting to bite the owners in the butt. The overwhelming majority of people living in Tijuana do not cross the border to work and there are 3 million of them. They are impacted by the practice of requiring rents paid in dollars the worst. This has caused these inhabitants to seek out places that do charge in pesos, thereby abandoning the dollar rented places to lay fallow for extended periods of time. This on top of the information war that is being conducted by the US press against Tijuana and Mexico, not unlike the info war conducted by William Randolph Hearst against Pancho Villa, for economic reasons. This causes most Americans, who are already stewing in their self inflicted paranoia, not wanting to cross the border to take advantage of the lower rents. So the months and years click by with the properties in dollars remaining vacant. But this is all a very good thing, in that it keeps the poisonous values north of the border for the most part, leaving the speculators and developers empty handed. When Americans come to Mexico to live, they for the most part live separate from the people in cloistered communities, paying high prices just because they can, driving up property values as has been the case in the US. This makes it difficult for Mexicans to buy or rent properties in their own land. This tendency is mostly in other parts of Baja and mainland Mexico. But it is rude to move to a country and to not be willing to live among the common people as they live. But the term of endearment, "the ugly American" is not without precedent...— September 21, 2009 12:15 p.m.