Taoist Texts

oh, that. sorry, i did not catch on your meaning because in my cult we make no distinction. buddha=buddha-mind=nirvana=samsara=the way=ordinary-mind for us. The naive westerners hear '“Ordinary mind is the Way” and think that they are 'already enlightened buddhas' if only they could calm down or something. They hear 'nirvana is samsara' and think they are already in nirvana if only they get compassionate wisdom or some such. Make me laugh every time. They dont get that these two formulas are a secret code with the key variable intentionally left out. Bless their poor souls, little they suspect that it is all about the medium, the vajra body, into which the ordinary-mind=samsara should be repackaged to become the buddha-mind=nirvana.

absolutely! in fact something like that has been id'ed in an adjacent field https://southcottpsychotherapy.co.uk/how-to-manage-silent-or-resistant-clients-in-therapy/ https://www.carolynspring.com/blog/why-do-we-avoid/, but, highly likely, thats something completely different. Anyway, in my cult we have none of this sulky avoidance. For us, the cultists, Buddhahood is an immortalized person, plain and simple. i did a 2 year stint as a grunt, then security through college. i have no point. just braggin' about my life. thats fantastic! although this can be mistaken for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia but nah, i am sure thats not it, like at all. Anyway, on a completely different note, in my cult we have no secret handshake, no dog-whistling, no guesswork. We, the cultists, use a set of traditionally documented milestones expressed in explicit keywords. Then, it is either IYKYK, or, if you dont, and dont wanna know - it is the 'old dog, new tricks' assisted living community for us. Cest la vie, etc...

before the debate about whether something is developed or present, should not there be a debate about what exactly the said something is actually? /otherwise some wool just might to creep in idk ;)/

great thanks @forestofemptiness this is indeed an excellent formula of what the western buddhism is about. i also do not quite know in what direction the discussion should go from here, so i will leave the ball in your court;)

the main one is materialism. a materialist is deaf to the message of salvation because salvation transcends matter. yes it is in a sense that the wool itself is the only message. Same as in western philosophy or in any media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message meaning the message is irrelevant as long as the medium triggers an irrational attachment in the robotic audience. E,g if the audience needs a father figure it does not matter if the figure preaches Buddhism or spaghetti-monsterism, as long as the figure plays the part well - it will be a viable cult.

of course it is, i just quoted it to show there are different opinions. hehe, i love those, thanks great and good for them but what is the difference? are the latter ones buddhas? unless they are, theirs is just an opinion. It is great fun to debate what alaya is and what 'infividual' is in various later authors, asian and western but like you said Exactly. And unless we concretely explain how the practice works first, all the concepts remain meaningless words salads like these whats the sun of wisdom? how is enclosed different from floating? whats a stain? why and how these are dissolved? is any of this in Theravada? wth does this rant even mean? it sounds like AI lol yes i would bet that they do too, but unless they explain how exactly it is done it means they have no clue what they agree about. Yet the crucial, square one, question is simple: I posit that the end goal of Buddhism is to immortalize the individual ego* (and the western buddhism had no clue about it from the get go). Lets say you care to disagree. Then you should say what the end goal is in your understanding, yes? * PHILOSOPHY (in metaphysics) a conscious thinking subject.

no, MCO is one line

yes they do, thats right. but none has the right method, save neidan. that is correct. it totally does. and it is the end goal of buddhism too. According to Thomas McEvilley, although Vasubandhu had postulated numerous ālāya-vijñāna-s, a separate one for each individual person in the parakalpita,[note 2] this multiplicity was later eliminated in the Fǎxiàng and Huayan metaphysics.[note 7] These schools inculcated instead the doctrine of a single universal and eternal ālaya-vijñāna. This exalted enstatement of the ālāyavijñāna is described in the Fǎxiàng as "primordial unity".[56]

yes thats what those are:)

yes, more or less https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/11125112

excellent question. normally our files are recorded on a flesh and bones hard drive, our body, which is perishable. so we use the neidan process to manufacture an imperishable flash drive for them, known as the golden body or yang sheng or a vajra body.

your own person, with your individual life experiences, your memories etc. like all user files we have on the hard drive.

sure man has a soul. it corresponds to the OS in the computer, the heavenly ming;). its a robotic soul.

The answer is simple but requires accepting man for what he is - a bio-robot. His processor, the brain, is built in such a way, that vague, high-faluting, 'woolly' speech gives him a jolt of physical pleasure, both speaking and listening to it. Its a hard-wired survival mechanism. Hence the supply and demand for such. The cultish behavior, is secondary to it. Note that when asked to specify the wooly speech , the speechifier demurs, because it harshes his mellow. (always observed when i ask for specific examples or definitions). yes thats it, the physical pleasure incentive. Modern biology calls it neurochemical https://innermammalinstitute.org/your-neurochemical-self/

exactly does. "The Heaven sends down an order/command ming which creates an individual human psyche xing." These are the original real xing-ming, not what @forestofemptiness or the book neidaneers have in mind. Good job Cobie. yes;)

i would love to know what you mean but i cannot without a concrete example, lest we be guilty of Apeche's wool above. Also i am not sure how it is germane to the very concrete, practical hsing ming divide of the book. And finally i suspect your hsing ming is rather different from theirs.

what he said. regarding this, fortunately, this passage on cults was a random tangent, its shallow moralizing quickly abandoned never to mention cults again. on the other hand the ming-hsing split is ubiquitous throughout the book which is an amateurish mistake in the beginning leading to a fatal miss in the end. uuh, we can go either way and still get to the same place? thats nice lol

so back to the OP. Whats a cult? Apparently nobody knows. nope, thats not it, like at all. Chiefly because there is no such thing as the norms of society, nowadays. yep, nobody knows. Thats it. Except the truth is of course, as usual, a total, 180 degree opposite of what a scholar claims: A cult is a religion which does not like you. Pertinent to this forum when peeps jump out of the woods to aggressively claim that their pies are more than your pies or their neidan is secreter than your neidan, their zapping is better than your no zapping - is a cult. In other words, if they enforce a taboo on you doubting them or you not believing what they believe - is a cult. Any organisation with outbound taboos is a cult; any other - is basically a book club.

excellent topic. It is my specialty. Thanks for bringing it up. thats very true. while commending these two learned experts for reminding us about the cults (i am not sure why cults are an issue for them or even what are cults according to them), they are being naive on 3 counts relevant to this forum. Their naivete is shown by how they just say things without any explanation why these things are bad or even what these things are: 1/ why should not it be so? what's refined? what's base? 2/ if they have those why should not they? 3/ what do the Quotation marks inveigh here? what is exploiting? how is this different from any other human career apart from that of a solitary cast-away? a neidan bonus/ this is a big red flag debunking their expertise because there is no ming without hsing.

yes it is ironic on many levels, not least the criticizer never achieving it himself, instead just regurgitating the WLP literature. Since you read the book here is a bonus for you, a passage not included in the book, on one of the interviewees in the book. some of them want more pie, some of them want whole pie, but all they get is cool-aid

neigong would be like, lets say a car mechanic tells you that you pay him upfront a $1000 and he tunes your car to run 'better". you ask how much 'better'? he shrugs: just better. you ask him: better when? he shrugs: sometime, may be 10 years, depends on how you drive too. you ask to see a tuned car: he shows you an ordinary car and claims it runs 'better' than before. same with neidan. so..a fool and his money are easily parted. https://www.amazon.com/Meditation-Health-Thomas-Cleary-ebook/dp/B005P8E6BG

thats true. "we are all already enlightened" hehe. we gotta go easy on them because having no destiny for real work, they still admire the result. their feelings are worthy of respect. unfortunately nobody of the discussants can explain how exactly de or any other virtue bears on neidan. because they have no clue how exactly neidan works.

my understanding is that of Daodejing 道生之，德畜之 meaning De is the same as Dao, just down the road. There is nothing else to it and De has nothing to do with neidan. Of course the dao de seminar sellers spew a bunch of garbage about de but they do that just to sell seminars.

you are exactly right. i do have my texts and my achievements so of course i know better than whoever has nothing. but that was not my point. my point was that this is meaningless