Earl Grey

Started a draft on a thread I just created.

100% true, especially coming from strangers on the Internet who don't even see how he's standing without a picture to reference, and even with it, who else here is actually qualified so critique and instruct?

Yeah even if you find a teacher, you may have to hope he or she know what they’re doing, as the wrong teachers can make it worse.

Pretty much the good ZZ you can do can still cause problems for the spine, but not necessarily immediately. One student of mine did it wrong for a decade and we spent a while correcting it first so that he wouldn’t he in constant pain all the time. Again, some people do well from LKC’s book like @NATURE BEEING above, others used the book but injured themselves, and some who used his book came to our school and had to start over from the beginning because they did it wrong.

Generally speaking, no, but some people have done okay with it like @NATURE BEEING who tend to be the exception not the rule, and @freeform can explain the risks of doing so on your own. Mind you this is a conversation that is repeated many times here with the same answer, so you may want to search for the older threads.

Oh boy, I could start a thread on that and how in this country (Philippines), their misunderstanding of how one is supposed to act western and follow the model is not only dubious, but does not work in a country where people basically want you to tell them what to do as opposed to a more Gestaltian model with Socratic influence to help reflect. It made my own psychiatric therapy in the US seem like a fantastic thing and it doesn't help with existing societal attitudes towards mental health in this country, so the narcotics problem and refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of mental health combined with a lot of superstition amongst Catholics and Muslims alike makes a really bad scenario.

Mods! Request to split my irrelevant posts I've made here when assisting Paradox into another thread so as to not disrupt flow of conversation here if my attempts to still answer while keeping with the spirit of the topic are not sufficient enough! <<done

Great! This is a key step towards understanding what is often cited as the Sefirotic Tree of Life that resembles the ideas "as above, so below" and "as below, so above" which @Daniel can elaborate on. I might recommend a couple books for you then, at least Jonathan Black's The Secret History of the World (published in the US under pseudonym Mark Booth however) and the graphic novel series Promethea by Alan Moore. These are very good resources for those who wish to discuss or know more about the frameworks that help understand the spirits and paranormal universe we live in (in keeping with the topic of this thread). Quoting your sources is good college and grad student behavior, but all knowledge becomes wisdom when it is understood as principle. So don't worry unless you're trying to win an Internet argument with an idiot who demands references. An Aikido program was once posted here by @thelerner a few years ago I believe, and if you are not restricted to Japan, you may want to look at 골굴사 instead in Korea or some other programs in Taipei. As the old maxim goes, If a student is ready, a teacher will appear and a teacher is not necessarily an individual, but the opportunity itself for self-learning.

Hey, go for whatever it is you wish--they don't recruit aggressively and they don't treat their teacher Mokichi Okada as a god. He's a teacher and master of light, that's all. It's both a religion and spiritual practice that focuses on healing, natural agriculture, and arts and aesthetics for balanced living. Admittedly, I'm not an active member either! This in itself actually leads to spiritual arrogance potentially--read Siddartha by Hesse, or look at the people who even boast about doing vipasana retreats for 3-10 days, and people I know who went to an ashram for 2-3 years in India. Remember that the great hermit lives among men in cities and the small hermit lives in seclusion. There's also a risk you may be hoping to learn something in the temple or shrine that you don't actually acquire--be careful, as there are many horror stories about being there and finding out it's not what it was assumed to be! Grow your worldly knowledge not by hiding in a temple or shrine like a drunkard hides in his cup in the tavern, but by embracing balance. You will find there is no separation from the sacred and the profane, nor is a temple any more enlightened than a brothel (you'll know which Zen master said this if your studies are ace). Some shrines may actually tell you to turn off your spiritual vision and focus on being present instead of helping you actually cultivate that which you hope to have.

Not a problem, kohai. As long as you are open and respectful, foolish mistakes will be long-forgotten actions, but foolish delusions of grandeur are swiftly cut by other fools and wisemen alike. Sounds like you may be a student at Temple University at least! A better option may be to actually look at a group like Shumei who have their options to allow members to stay there for one year, though you'd be doing work in the shrine and have to become a member of one of the new religions, which split off from their original organization after they determined they could no longer in good conscience practice their faith once they saw the staff were bringing in yakuza, so Shumei split to maintain integrity of their teachings. Full disclosure: I'm a Shumei member! Otherwise, University of Waseda has ties to the University of Oregon for example. Sharpen thy mind and wit and the spirits will guide you to Japan however is best for your karma, kohai.

yin dee dtôn ráp!

Your search will take you far and wide, but the actual answers may not be what you hope for. Yes, we all reincarnate, though how much that affects this life will vary. Likely your affinity could be for a variety of reasons unrelated to your past life lessons--it could even tie in to astrology, frankly speaking. If you follow the link above, you'd have seen the relevant thread where it came from. But, for your convenience, go here: but only after reading this: Oh boy, there's a lot about the JET program you should know and may be disillusioned to find out about, as the short version is that you're ultimately a glorified tape recorder and systematically treated in a manner where like the police in America, are supposed to pretend you don't have rights as a foreigner or labor rights. It has gotten worse since my time, which was when people still got an easy visa via NOVA. What my own sources say that if it has that necessary role (positive message or not), nothing you could do would send it away, and if you could, the higher sources will bring it back. So one is reminded of one's own limited role in the pecking order of the universe when dealing with the metaphysical. Would you send away the spirits on the Trail of Tears who were reminding white people of their genocidal acts if it is their free will to remain as testament for example? Because yes: free will is not exclusive to humans in flesh and blood form!

This could be karmic memory at best or wishful thinking at worst. In my own practice with the Akashic Records, clients most often are told that the most significant thing to look at is this life, unless past lives are necessary to consider for the particular obstacle in a client's life and the resulting karma affecting it now. How we often deal with spirits though are those who are directly affecting person, such as ancestors, parasites, or thought forms. Here's a story of me in my shrine in Shigaraki a couple years ago: during the floods that led to the death of over 40 and many restless spirits, I asked what kind of performance I could do, and this is what came from the link in my PPJ: I won't post the video here on the forum publicly because it will allow people to identify who I am, and I am a private individual, as I've chosen obscurity over celebrity. Godspeed then. I don't think you're a "weaboo" anyway--the actual "weaboos" I've met were the people who had waifus as their wallpaper and wanted Japanese girlfriends while saying random Japanese words like "Kawai!" in casual conversation but denied that they were. They also plagued the JET program and made many students think baka no gaijin were all pathetic otaku. It depends on the classification of the spirit! Sometimes, a spirit tethered here keeps coming back not for its own sake but because it is here to give a message to someone as an ancestor or to travelers who must heed warnings.

A lot of sock puppet accounts are here, and members who partook in the mass exodus to Original Dao also pretty much only come here to see what's going on and then chat in their private members-only forum about what's going on here. I also note there may be other people here for less than noble reasons, posing as "lurkers" but I've interacted with them to find questionable intent such as one who keeps looking at my profile every day and has only ever posted a couple times, once to the welcome thread and once to just link to rum soaked fist.

I had one particularly memorable encounter with a genius loci in a place called The Diplomat Hotel in the Philippines in Baguio when I was visiting the country on holiday. It was a former monastery where the Japanese killed all the monks and nuns there, which in turn became a hotel, and then ran out of business because there were too many hauntings there. As I took precautions and brought a bottle of wine to make as an offering to the place when I went there 11 years ago and poured onto the floor, I was tolerated, but not necessarily welcome. My girlfriend at the time noticed shadows appearing and disappearing and temperature different from one side of her arm to another in the same corner. While we saw ghosts--the same ones, mind you--they felt more like pimples or scars on someone's face than the actual thing itself. It was then I saw that the place itself was alive and sentient, and my first real encounter with a genius loci actively communicating with us. One particularly creepy moment was when the ruins of one particular area had strange furniture until I realized that it was more like a fungus that took the shape of familiar objects like chairs and other household items strewn about, similar to environments like in these images: With regards to the second of collective spirits tied to a place, this takes me back to my work in Indonesia and East Timor. I used to spend lots of time driving in the remote areas between the countries and the borders between realities were very thin. The violence from the Indonesian annexation of East Timor in the 1970s was felt very deeply...and it warped the landscape. It looked alien as we traveled at night where trees that seemed to uproot themselves and walk across the roads pretended to merely have fallen over during a storm or road accident that never happened so that passersby would not notice. Other times during the long night trip, I would see the forest flirt between appearing as barren as a desert with occasional trees and bizarre alien-like shapes that could be described as ocean corral reefs trying to imitate trees and plants on dry land, and an attempt by a being to mimic four people and a baby on a motorcycle that flashes of moonlight revealed in the shadows that they were something else entirely with multiple limbs... Actually, now that I write about Indonesia, here's a story relevant to the above post I made about Nikkei in Japan with an Indonesian American kid who was an engineer visiting Java. He was warned by the villagers to never enter the forest after twilight because a djinn was there. Being the know-it-all Born Again Atheist, he went in anyway and heard a woman crying. He looked around and couldn't see anyone until he noticed the sound was above him. He looked up and saw a woman covering her face in the trees and asked what was wrong with her. She then turned her cries into a sinister laugh as her fingers became talons and her face became a contorted grin that bared fangs from ear to ear and longer than his own face. Then he ran like hell and was scolded by the villagers for not heeding their warning, made worse because it would affect their relationship with the forest and the djinn as a result.

I assume that tradition to be the same as your namesake here?

They do--the section is just small and you have to ask for it. Of course, culture and language has many things lost in translation, but don't rule out reading in another language, as it's like saying The Magnificent Seven is unnecessary to watch when you have Seven Samurai or that Rip Van Winkle is "just a European version of Urashima Taro". They are valid reinterpretations through a cultural tapestry in the Joseph Campbell-like manner that give deeper insight into understanding in the ideaspace of between cultures rather than hopping from one island separated by a sea of Otherness to another island. This brings me to something important: cultural differences in encounters with the other world, which @Nungali reminds me of when speaking of his as a European heritage Australian with the Aboriginal peoples he knows and studies as an anthropologist and magician himself. Consider Neil Gaiman's American Gods novel, in which the gods themselves brought over in the ideaspace and heads of migrants take on very different qualities and characteristics because of both the environment in the new world and the changing cultural landscape of the New World. In particular, meeting Odin in Scandinavia for the protagonist is different from meeting Odin in the New World--they were two separate characters, which the former said, "He is me, but I am not him." Yet Shadow can't understand the former without having had his experience with the latter, and even without the latter, he will never understand the former the same way as an outsider, in this case, an American, with direct experience, because it's not his god, yet the latter is. Likewise, if you ever visit a shrine for Japanese American communities during their obon festivals, you will learn just as much about Japanese culture as you will Japanese American culture, and likely your own if you aren't of Japanese heritage. Traditionally, in Japan, the matsuri is organized by the communities, not the shrines or temples, but in these Nikkei communities, the shrines and temples are the community. With regards to Neil's book above and the paranormal experiences out there in keeping with the topic, you'll gain insight reading in the language, but a language is more than just translating, it's idioms, history, and culture beyond words--but you as the observer and the one who encounters these beings will inadvertently have a different relationship if it's not your history...which is crucial because relationships with otherworldly beings are two-way streets. The grandchildren of Japanese who lived through Hiroshima and Nagasaki have a particular relationship with their dead culturally and genetically since trauma is passed through one's genes, which is much different than the Nikkei who immigrated to Hawaii or the US before WWII and have had no connection to the country since. So when on a heritage trip, the disconnect between Sansei and even Gosei friends of mine visiting Japan was shown when they had unique encounters with the yurei since they weren't their dead and the yurei could sense that. I'm going to add that the trauma of Nikkei in America's mainland who went to the internment camps is quite different from the Nikkei in Hawaii who worked in the plantations...and thus have separate yurei. The Hawaiian Nikkei develop a relationship with mana and the local gods in Hawaii...

Seems like you are not familiar with the Kinokuniya as they would have it all in both languages too. 😁 the other reason is that there are some resources that would not be easily found online that the store has.

The Kinokuniya bookstore has plenty of English language resources. I do not know where you live, but in San Francisco, NYC, and LA, there are branches and even in Japan itself there are English books to study. Otherwise, go to the library or even just hang out in a shrine.

Yeah, cultures classify things differently. As you were in Japan, there’s a huge difference between kami and yokai for example.

Interesting, so is it more of a genius loci that was borne of the suffering, the energetic imprint of collective of spirits tied to the place, the actual spirits themselves or what? My guess is it is the second.

Yes, they are ghosts. The undead are only one classification if you look further into paranormal research. This is the bias that does not include the above categories mentioned. Maybe for the white communities, but not the people with ties to their heritage.

Ah yes. There are about five or six classifications of ghosts as I recall, and only one or two kinds are the undead spirits. One variation are "echoes" in time of people who left an imprint in a place, like a person whose presence can still be seen at times entering a study room and sitting in a chair 200 years later. Another variation is I believe the poltergeist which is the raw emotional energy given limited sentience and awareness, something that children and teenagers can inadvertently be behind. And still another is not even necessarily from the past but a ripple from another time or space or dimension, usually only seen by certain people. Americans, in spite of their Puritanical values, have an unhealthy relationship with death and the dead, much like with their cult of positivity. It is quite strange given the rituals of the indigenous peoples there, and their neighbors to the south with their Dia de Los Muertos with the happy skulls and reunion of families.

If you think the level of hatred is local or unique to America, you're going to have a lot of people from other countries such as Rwanda, Sudan, Myanmar, and so on giving a very loud ahem... Yes, Shinto shrines and the animistic culture of Japan is very much into ritual purification even in daily life. In my own group's shrine in the Shigaraki mountains, we have to wash before entering via car, wash before the main entrance to the area, then wash before the main doors of the prayer area.