Bindi

The Dao Bums
  • Content count

    2,903
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    5

Everything posted by Bindi

  1. Look at the last line in TT's quote (below the box). My line is an exact quote. But nor does "righteousness" sound like an effective method to move energy through a subtle body.
  2. The earliest mention of qi as a philosophical concept can be found in the Book of Changes, one of the oldest books in existence. It is a key concept in Chinese medicine as well as in Mencius' idea of fulfillment and happiness. Mencius makes it clear that this vital force is nourished through the steady accumulation of righteous acts. http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/mencius/ Mencius (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) - Mencius (fourth century BCE) was a Confucian philosopher "Mencius makes it clear that this vital force is nourished through the steady accumulation of righteous acts." I don't consider "righteous acts" to be a neidan method though. If it is it's one I've completely ignored.
  3. Linear thinking/processing is Yang. It's weakness is the lack of Yin in the equation. Getting the balance right is itself the neidan process IMO.
  4. Do you mean linearity is both a strength and a weakness of neidan? I still don't understand what you mean exactly.
  5. It is possible that Waidan was a distorted understanding of an initial 'natural way' that had to be rediscerned again later from Waidan. For example, if someone once talked about a mysterious Pearl and mercury and a cauldron and elixir and exact timing referring all the while to elements of subtle body development according to inner vision, it's not unlikely that someone hearing this information might make up a method for concocting it all in an actual cauldron, somewhat like this from the Scripture of the Nine Elixirs: "Heat two pounds of Mysterious Pearl and twelve ounces of Nine [-cycled] Essence of Elixir-Lead in Vinegar of the Yellow and the White [huangbai zuowei ], for seven days and seven nights. When the compound coagulates and becomes white and stabilized, let it dry and remove its toxicity. It is used as “blanket and mat,” and no elixir will form in its absence." I was aware of these sort of images before I had ever heard of Daoism or Neidan, and it's taken me a long time to understand how things could have gotten so mixed up, but this is a possibility that accounts for my own personal experience of these images. In this paper the author states: "The links among the Scripture of the Nine Elixirs, the Hugang zi corpus of texts, and the Cantong qi show that lead-mercury processes were practiced in southeastern China within a tradition that counted the Cantong qi among its sources. We know nothing about the history of this tradition during the Six Dynasties. The scarcity of contemporary related sources suggests that what may have started as a minor local lineage progressively acquired influence, and later came to affect the whole development of Chinese alchemy." To my mind this makes perfect sense, there was a minor local lineage that practised a 'natural' psycho-spiritual way with the aid of someone who had inner vision, and this lineage was very early on corrupted into waidan, before people realised how devastating ingesting these chemicals was. Someone then figured out that the instructions were internal instructions, and the whole movement continued on from there in a much confused fashion which is what we have inherited today.
  6. I find xing and ming difficult to remember and not really necessary, it's too much like dry learning for me. One of those 'people came along and made stuff up' moments sounds good to me.
  7. Would you care to elaborate on your comment? Please
  8. I think effort in the form of forbearance is needed to tolerate the clearing of the channels of the subtle body, and much mental effort is required to understand the process minutely, as well as the big picture that one is working towards. Clearing the subtle body and directing energy through long unused channels requires various methods - intention, breathing, physical forms, muscle clenching, as well as sometimes the patience to allow a process to occur naturally - each used at exactly the right time, in exactly the right way. Alchemy is strictly linear because each dantian has to be worked with using exactly the right method at each moment, and only when the 1st dantian is complete can you move to the second, and then the third. If the foundations aren't working properly, the next step simply can't happen, the whole system relies on each step being done exactly right at exactly the right time. Without all this exacting effort I think there is always an emptiness or a hunger that can never be sated, an itch that can never be scratched. To bring consciousness/energy/communion to True Yang and True Yin is to my understanding the only way to finally satisfy that restless hunger, and this is the first time that wuwei becomes possible.
  9. Thus it could be said neither Jesus nor the apostles flowed with the dao?
  10. Aren’t Matthew, Mark, Luke and John the gospels? You keep quoting letters from Paul to support your opinion, while ignoring the actual gospels. Of course the spirit is important, but the spirit is housed in the body which is it’s temple. I think evolution of the spirit cannot occur outside of a physical body anyway, which necessitates having a physical incarnation and making the most of it while you’re here.
  11. “... and stuff” was the power to heal all kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease (Matthew 10:1) though. Healing of the body is a focal point in the NT, for both Jesus and the apostles, as well as being a power promised to believers, it can’t be summarily dismissed.
  12. You said "What one would call healing is about the physical body, and as Jesus said, focusing on that leads to death and not the life everlasting." It seemed to me that you were saying the physical body is equated with death and is incompatible with the Kingdom of God which is equated with life everlasting. Can you explain why Jesus did so many healings, if he was so against the physical body?
  13. I don't think Jesus would have thought healing the physical body was focusing on that which leads to death, if he did think that he never would have healed anyone physically, nor would he have brought someone who had died back to life, surely following your logic he would have rather rejoiced at the man's death. I think a point of difference would be whether you have to die to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, or whether you can achieve it while alive. If you can achieve it while alive, there would be no reason to exclude a a compassionate focus on the body as well as the spirit. “When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick” (Matthew 14:14). Perhaps performing non-healing miracles was basically to engender faith in his followers, “Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves” (John 14:11), but healing seemed to have been for compassionate reasons. When he said "you too will do these things" - meaning move mountains, and throw mulberry trees into the ocean, to me he wasn't talking about demonstrating being one with God, but he was talking about demonstrating power, including the power to perform mind-boggling miracles. This hasn't been demonstrated since Jesus as far as I know.
  14. "Ye shall do what I have done," if you accept going via Jesus. Before him (in Christian terms) it was not possible, only after. And after there is no record of anyone doing anything like he is recorded as doing. The one thing that seems to be needed is faith the size of a mustard seed, and then you can do these things. This seems to be the stumbling block to anyone following in his footsteps, though my favourite example, St Seraphim, seems to have gotten close - he could heal miraculously, and "knew what was in the hearts of men before they spoke." No other sorts of miracles though, and no moving mountains.
  15. "One of the most important characteristics of Dao ("the Way") in Lao Zi's thought is that of "inaction" (wuwei), or, as it is put, "doing nothing, and therefore doing or being capable of doing, everything" (wuwei er wu buwei). Lao Zi said: "The Way is constant; doing nothing and therefore there is nothing that it does not do or that it is not capable of doing; if only those who of noble birth and rule as monarchs can keep this principle, all things shall evolve and change of their own in the proper place" (See Lao Zi, chapter 37). Since Lao Zi advocated using Dao (the Way) to rule, or govern "all under heaven" (tianxia), "inaction" (wuwei) then becomes the general principle behind his political philosophy. In Lao Zi's perspective, if a person were to do things according to his principle of "wuwei," that person will be able to become "wu buwei" (there is nothing that the person cannot do), or in other words, achieve complete success." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2753/CSP1097-146726010213?journalCode=mcsp19 "Liu Yiming often mentions "superior virtue" (shangde) and "inferior virtue" (xiade) in his writings. These two terms are related to "non-doing" (wuwei) and "doing" (youwei) according to the Daode jing. Superior virtue is the way of "non-doing": one immediately realizes the original "celestial reality" (tianzhen), which is never affected by the change and impermanence that dominate within the cosmos. Inferior virtue, instead, is the way of "doing" the Neidan practice in order to "return to the Dao." Liu Yiming states, however, that the latter way, when it comes to achievement, "leads to the same goal as superior virtue" (Commentary to Cantong qi)." http://www.goldenelixir.com/jindan/jindan_intro_3.html
  16. First there is youwei, then there is wuwei. I find these concepts easier to understand than Xing and Ming. I didn't mention wuwei after youwei cos wuwei already gets way too much press around here. It would be worth starting that thread, since it is the basis of these systems that are being discussed,
  17. I don't take too much notice of the TTC, it does seem to be at odds with alchemy quite a lot of the time, and it certainly doesn't resonate with me. A Daoist seems inclined to take things as they are, promotes wuwei, and looks for balance and the Dao in nature, while an alchemist actively works to instigate a spiritual process, promotes youwei and works via male/female and yin/yang principles within themselves towards a very specific end goal, all of which seems to make Daoists shake their heads somewhat dismissively. Male and female does work for me as a fundamental principle, we probably agree on that, but I don't know how emptiness and luminosity are female and male, it doesn't make sense to me, and it doesn't relate to yin and yang as far as I understand them.
  18. Alchemists have never been so limited in their hopes and expectations (thank God ): Spiritual immortal – Shen Xian ( ç„žä»™ ) Spiritual fetus - Yanshen goes out of a human head (is born in the spiritual world) but it still needs to be educated and developed. That looks like a mother (body) takes care of her child (spirit). After its strengthening and implementation of this phase this spirit can move anywhere in the Universe - primarily to understand its structure and subsequently for execution of spiritual work. It’s impossible to kill it, it’s immortal. But there’s still a body which requires attention. At a certain stage of its development the yang spirit Yanshen gets the opportunity to divide, reproducing the same doubles. Their number gradually can grow to a huge multiple. They can do various spiritual works in different worlds. That is when the complete understanding of the Universe laws and the sense of the further development come. If a practitioner wishes, this phase can be stretched to a very long time. For example, it is possible to sit in a cave for a millennium and to practice in spiritual bodies. Uniting male/female and yin/yang within oneself might look very different to uniting emptiness and luminosity though. "I am the way to the Father" - that's got to be duality?
  19. I'm thinking of the testimonies in Acts as the only proof available to us of the reality of an immortal spirit, though of course this is tenuous proof at best. Still it is the best example available to us of the possibility of an immortal spirit that I know of. Vive la dualité If he was the only one to actually achieve an immortal spirit, that would set him apart from the rest maybe?
  20. If we can accept yin and yang as the material expression of the 'absolute' in us (and I do), and work on understanding these relatively simple forces within ourselves and thus uniting them, this should ideally take us to the very edge of the ineffable, and from this vantage point we might just be able to examine the ineffable in the light of full consciousness. A system which pre-packages the absolute as ineffable might discourage any effort to understand it, which seems similar to me to believing the distant ocean falls over a cliff and thus discouraging sailors from going anywhere near what is accepted as the edge of the known universe. The duality or non-duality of Jesus as immortal spirit hasn't been agreed on yet, and makes all the difference whether he is being used as a divine principle or whether there is some spooky dualistic divinity going on.
  21. ... the trigrams of the Book of Changes are used to illustrate how the alchemical process consists in extracting the pre-cosmic True Yin (zhenyin) and True Yang (zhenyang) from Yang and Yin as they appear in the cosmos. True Yin is represented by the broken line () within Li â˜Č, and True Yang is represented by the solid line () within Kan ☔. When the inner lines of these trigrams are exchanged with one another, they reconstitute Qian ☰ and Kun ☷, the trigrams that represent Original Yang and Original Yin, respectively. Then the conjunction of Qian and Kun produces the Golden Elixir, which is equivalent to the original state of Oneness. I'm not sure what the Golden Elixir is exactly (maybe Yuan Qi?), and certainly I don't understand how the Elixir relates to Oneness, but given this threads topic it does seem quite relevant.
  22. Well that's kind of interesting in itself, because they should all be describing the same thing logically, and if their definitions and understanding differs so much, then they're not describing what is actually true, but just their own version of something beyond the physical body. How about in the case of Jesus, who is the closest I think we have to a verified 'immortal'. He seems on one level to be a distinct entity, he appeared to people, he said 'you cannot enter heaven except via him', so there is some distinct sense of himself he had in mind, is he beyond duality?
  23. Self, soul, Buddha nature, immortal spirit, are any of them a thing? Or all not things? Why are those that aren't things not a thing?
  24. Here is my understanding of this - the Yang Shen is the Yang's spirit which is the 'higher' yin (being the black dot) contained within white Yang. It is accessed via the higher yang (being the white dot) contained within black yin. Funny, I'd always thought of Yang shen as male/Yang etc, but it turns out to be the ultimate 'spiritual yin matter' ('matter' cos it's still attached to the embodied person I imagine).