Taomeow

Not an indicator of anything. You can get a lot of BS absolutely free of charge, and you can buy yourself the services of a doorman who will open the door an inch and then shut it in front of your nose -- but if you've glimpsed what's on the other side, you'll burn all your plastic to start a fire under that door, chances are. Don't judge a book by the price tag.

Me too, and I wouldn't pay someone like him any heed (just another fraud, eh?) if it wasn't for the techinques! I've encountered at least one more master who shall remain unnamed who is like that. Lies, lies and more lies -- and techniques to die for. I don't understand. And then there's wonderful, truthful, realistic, conscientious masters who offer you... um, something that works as a nice relaxation routine, tops. I honestly don't understand.

It depends. Melchizedek is VERY strange. At first glance you would think you're dealing with the usual new age hodge-podge. But anyone who has studied sacred geometry will recognize a genuine and superb sacred-geometrical foundation to his material. It's as though he's giving a lot of mystical, esoteric knowledge to non-mystical, non-esoterically educated folks trying to build some bridges between what he knows and what they know or are capable of knowing. Dumbed down writing... if you're after eloquence and stylistic prowess, he will sorely disappoint. But I sensed an unbelievable amount of the real stuff behind the veil... and I've tried applying some of his stuff to everyday observations with spectacular success. Of course if someone is used to a more rigorous style of presentation and has a general aversion to mysticism, Melchizedek will simply infuriate or else be put aside with disdain. He teaches a specific meditation though which is the key to what he's talking about -- the talking is the veil, the meditation transmits the knowledge which can't be put into words. So, see for yourself...

This reminded me of John Lennon's aunt's saying, which was engraved on a plaque at the entrance of the mansion he bought for her: "John, playing guitar and singing is a nice hobby, but forget about making a living this way." Nikolaus, this book (in two volumes) can answer your question: http://www.amazon.co...l/dp/1891824171 http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Secret-Flower-Life/dp/189182421X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356127508&sr=1-2&keywords=The+Ancient+Secret+of+the+Flower+of+Life%2C+Vol.+2

Tonight is my Cannon Fist taiji class. Whatever comes will find me kicking and punching. If it comes later though, it will find me sitting in full lotus in front of the altar meditating. If it comes later still, it will find me watching an episode of a British spy series aptly titled The Hour. And if it comes later than that, it will find me sleeping. My cats don't seem worried...

Definitely. These issues are not just in the head. I googled "bellybutton sickness" and got 438,000 results. Either without any provocation, or in response to any kind of stress, whether physical or emotional, some people's bellybuttons get sensitive, painful, itchy, oozing, inflamed, infected, herniated, cause fits of nausea when touched, and on and on. The body remembers what the thinking mind does not -- because the body was there when the neocortex wasn't.

There's lineages that seem eternal. In this sense, no one "becomes" part of a lineage, they have always been and will always be. One such lineage I'm aware of is the DNA. The I Ching, which chronologically (by the chronology of this-here world) came billions of years later, is part of this lineage and has always been and will always be. It belongs by default, it is built on the same principles, and the same principles are built into that. If you study from a teacher who studied from a teacher who traces his learning of these practices to King Wen who traces them to Fuxi and emperor Yu who trace them to the dragon-horse and dragon-turtle from the celestial realm transmitting the markings on their backs, you are part of this lineage. "When" doesn't matter. "Always."

It's usually both, far as I know. You get spiritual and this-here-life teachers either from the same lineage (a rather common occurrence in shamanism and in taoism alike, by the way) or familiar with each other on the spiritual plane. Lu Dongbin taught his own teacher Chung-Li Chuan four hundred years after joining the realm of the immortals, e.g.. The chronology of a spiritual lineage is not linear... Spiritual planes, some of them, don't relate to sequential time as we do. When I was re-reading Castaneda not long ago, I nodded when he mentioned that it took him 13 years to work out the linear sequence of his experiences happening both in ordinary and "second attention" reality ("second attention" being his teacher's term for "the spiritual plane.") It can get mighty confusing, in my own experience. This is another function of a this-here-life lineage and a teacher thereof, to help live in the linear-time world without getting lost amidst "what's real" to others sharing your this-here "current" timeline and what's "really real" beyond that in your own experience. Which is a rather immediate threat for anyone who accesses other realities, realities that don't care much (or at all) for the sequential events of this one. This can drive one certifiably crazy (and does, more often than not) without a this-here-life teacher who knows what's going on because he or she has been exactly "there" before and made it "back" in one piece and "knows how." Sometimes you can't even tell with certainty which reality a teacher belongs to. Sometimes it's because he or she is beyond being bound to just one. Spiritual planes are immense, complex, and populated with everything you can imagine and more of everything you can't. A lineage is a road in this maze, a map, a territory, everything you are going to walk. But you have to walk it of course. All the way if you can! Which brings me to Viator's question about the significance of direct "energy" transmissions in a lineage. I wouldn't call it energy though, more like a "pattern of arrangement" of space-time-body-mind-spirit configuration... a tune-up, so to speak. Sometimes it's like the significance of putting gas in your car. Yes, it's you who will still have to drive it. If you don't drive it, just having gas in your tank won't get you anywhere. But you do need the gas for to drive it somewhere. And sometimes it's not that, it's just, like I said, a tune-up -- suppose your car's motor is fine and you have plenty of gas but your transmission is busted?.. e.g. by your early developmental history that was traumatic, or by emotional and spiritual deprivations of your formative years, or by being clogged with garbage thrown in by others or picked up by you yourself on the way? A transmission is a transmission -- in a car or in a human.

Reverse breathing IS normal breathing. What we use and think of as normal breathing is abnormal. We do it defensively because they cut our umbilical cord the moment we are born. It's imprinting. Shallow breathing without moving the abdominal area the natural way (in on the inbreath, just like before birth) becomes the imprint for protecting oneself from trauma and pain because it is what transpires as the very first learning experience: "breathing normally means pain." We breathe the way we do in response to this lesson for the rest of our lives -- imprinting is systemic learning and the developmental window for it taking place is extremely narrow (in dogs it is thirty minutes -- if the mom is prevented from licking the newborn puppies within this period, they die, because they never learn to breathe normally. The licking is the kind of signaling stimulation their species requires to start functioning. The non-cutting of the umbilical cord is the kind ours requires, but we don't die from not getting it, we just get damaged for life.) It also has to do with the natural blood flow that is disrupted when the umbilical cord is cut abruptly and too soon (under original normal human conditions, anywhere from a few hours to a few days was the norm before it was severed, and in many tribes this wasn't practiced at all -- it was supposed to dry up in about a week and fall off by itself.) The change from in-utero blood flow pattern through the umbilical cord to relegating the task to the newborn baby's heart pumping blood is, under normal conditions, gradual -- the unsevered cord pulses still pumping blood for hours after birth. The shock of switching abruptly is another thing that throws off a lot of normal metabolic patterns in our modern kind. This shock is invariably accompanied by oxygen starvation, and breathing abnormally (in the way we think of as our "normal") is also a defense against drawing nothing via normal umbilical breath pattern. A system that does not take the above into consideration is either old enough and intact enough to never having anticipated hospital births and mass/universal abnormal breathing patterns, so when it says "breathe naturally" it means what we call reverse breathing by default; or else is mired in clueless interpretations of what older systems meant when they said "natural breath."

All right, I'll try. 1. I didn't bring it up, I was responding to Jetsun who asked about the origin of Chinese knowledge and brought up blond mummies in China. The Sons of Reflected Light is what taoists (the source of Chinese sciences) refer to when asked about the origin of their knowledge. No one knows if it has anything whatsoever to do with any blond anybody, but I thought it worth mentioning that there's a chronological coincidence. What to make of it, I don't know, nobody does, but I'm in the habit of integrating whatever information comes my way toward a possible future crystallization. Sometimes it happens -- one more bit of evidence not really intended to prove or disprove a theory falls into a hypersaturated solution of information and contemplation and suddenly the connections are formed ziran, by themselves, the whole thing crystallizes -- and you understand... This is my favorite cognitive method. It is nonlinear. There's better ones I'm sure, but that's how my mind works. 2. While we are on the subject, let me mention what I see as relevant to the discussion of my own convictions: a] I believe in the fundamental scientific superiority of the ancient taoist methods to do science. Whether they developed these organically or got a transmission from a (possibly) off-planet, not-of-this-world, or nonhuman culture as all ancient sources (not just the ones that depict Nuwa and Fuxi as snake-like beings from a UFO-like device) seem to assert, I don't know, but the more I learn, the less likely a human history that does not include a nonhuman intervention somewhere up the line seems to be. Conclusions are not available at this stage. I don't know if they ever will be drawn -- by me or anyone else -- based on any conclusive evidence. All evidence I have is circumstantial. But it seems like a worthwhile pragmatic pursuit to me at this point. Why pragmatic? Because it spares one a lot of dead-end trips to second-hand sources. If you're trying to go for the source of knowledge, you don't go to peer reviews, you go to the lab, physical or otherwise, where the discovery or the transmission actually took place... and if you try to replicate it, you ask the guy/gal who did it first, not the one who had an "opinion" "about it" later. b] Race, biologically speaking, is an extremely superficial phenomenon. One inherits the color of the skin and hair as part of a cluster of traits (the term is linkage) that is pretty small. One inherits other, less visible traits in much more strongly linked clusters, but these are not visible to the naked eye. E.g., one's blood type is linked to hundreds of other genetic traits one inherits along with it, but skin and hair color are not part of this linkage. So if my blood type is different from that of my own children (which it is), but the same with some random African American in the street, genetically I may be closer to this random guy than to my own children, amazingly enough. So all those ideas about "superior races" are, for starters, rooted in glaring biological ignorance. This also goes for all ethnic and national affiliations -- these are superficial, and not worth the hairs split over them in the least, though we've been splitting them through millennia. c] Ideological affiliation, a matter of free choice, is not as superficial. I believe one has to take the ultimate responsibility that comes with the territory of free will (something even gods don't mess with) very much to heart when choosing an ideology, a cognitive paradigm, a set of beliefs or disbeliefs, etc.. I feel that, unlike race, ethnicity, or the chance of birth into a particular culture, this is a true human definer, a true game-changer. Upon exposure to assorted systems of approaching reality, one must find the melody of one's true soul, true being, that resonates with a particular one, and investigate it as thoroughly as possible. If it proves to be one's soul's song indeed, one would do well learning it well, learning not to sing it too off key at least... This may seem vague, but it is vague by design, this is the quest we're on -- the quest for the true source, true being, reality, whatever one may call it it -- and a quest is not, usually, plumb straight and perfectly delineated, it is not a schedule, not a curriculum, it's a process of co-creation between you and reality... So, because taoism is what resonates, I undertake explorations. What I uproot sometimes answers my earliest questions -- why this, why that, why I like or dislike, believe or disbelieve, etc.. And sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it just foreshadows... leaving me with an inner source of thrill, an anticipation of "things to come" -- which of course might only come if I pursue them going in the right direction. That kind of a deal.

Hi .al., yup, it is fascinating. I can refer you to my starting point (I did quite a bit of research since, but as Apech rightfully notes, one can only scratch the surface with these things in one lifetime): Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science--From the Babylonians to the Maya, by Dick Teresi

I don't think they aren't willing to admit the mummies or we wouldn't know about them. Whether they were Aryans is debatable because Aryans themselves are such an elusive entity. As for where the Chinese learned what they knew, this gets very interesting indeed. Taoist legend has it that it was passed down from a legendary culture, known as the "Sons of Reflected Light," some 14,000 years ago. It taught scholarship, meditation and alchemy. Interestingly enough, this is the date (14,000 years ago) cross-referencing with a seemingly unrelated science, genetics. It was exactly at this time that the genes for blondness suddenly sharply spiked in all human populations studied to date. These genes were present in the human genetic pool long before that time, according to modern view due to cross-breeding of homo sapiens with neanderthals, who (unlike the ugly pictures of what they purportedly looked like we were all shown in elementary school, which still persist into many obsolete unscientific curricula of anthropology not up to speed with either archeology or genetics, and into mass media sources of course) were very tall and blond and very good-looking. (I've seen an opinion of a geneticist that neanderthals engaged in occasional cross-breeding with our kind as a form of pity sex.) But these genes were never widely represented and in fact were on the way out, being recessive. Then 14,000 years ago it suddenly changed, they became ubiquitous. Why?.. Of course the official explanation holds no water (it's along the lines of, Hollywood beauty standards prevailed and all over the planet blondes started procreating preferentially, or something equally idiotic.)

Apech, I know you know a lot about Egypt, but I have yet to figure out how you used Egyptian magic to get me off my track and into something I wasn't talking about to begin with. Paper, papyrus -- how did we get to papyrus and Egypt from "a piece of paper means more in terms of a Chinese taoist lineage transmission than does a piece of paper to a European/Eurocentric cultivator of non-lineage eclectic (new age) traditions," which is what I was actually talking about?.. What you had to offer was very interesting but it did magically change the subject to a cucumber... I don't know if this old joke from my old country is known elsewhere in the world -- basically it's a recipe for finding one's way out of any question one doesn't know the answer to or doesn't care to answer: you learn absolutely everything about just one subject, anything, e.g. cucumbers, and then find a way to switch whatever is being discussed to the discussion of cucumbers, where you can truly shine. E.g., if the question is, "Who was Alexander of Macedonia's teacher?" and you don't know, you go, "Alexander of Macedonia had a remarkable teacher. Macedonia was highly developed since ancient times, with flourishing culture rooted in the most advanced agrarian practices of the time. The land produced many fruits and vegetables -- olives, apples, tomatoes, cucumbers... A cucumber (Cucumis sativus) is a widely cultivated plant in the gourd family Cucurbitaceae. It is a creeping vine which bears cylindrical edible fruit when ripe. There are three main varieties of cucumber: "slicing", "pickling", and "burpless". Within these varieties, several different cultivars have emerged. The cucumber is originally from India but is now grown on most continents. Many different varieties are traded on the global market..." and so on. By the way, I know who Alexander's teacher was and who his teacher was, and who his teacher's teacher was... that's another Eurocentric tradition, to care very much about lineages of the rich and famous only, I mean, really, really care -- ask any European royalty whether they care about their lineage... and then ask them if they care about yours. And then try this with the Chinese, for comparison. You will be shocked... So, you're right, they studied in Egypt, not necessarily in Alexandria... I didn't mean "literally every single one of them" to be taken literally, should have phrased it so it's clear I'm using an emphatic statement as to the origin of their knowledge in Egypt (Alexandria has come to mean things not limited to geography or chronology). And no, Pythagoras was not "flat out Chinese" (another emphatic statement not to be taken literally) -- what I was trying to emphasize was that he knew what he knew from Chinese teachers who taught Egyptians who taught the Greeks. (And by the way, our beloved Fibonacci sequence is of the same -- documented -- origins, Leonardo Fibonacci learned it from an Arab mathematician who learned it from his Chinese teacher...)

You mean the rule of this forum of "no personal insults" leaves you incapacitated in a discussion?.. I'm sorry to hear that. Most people find quite a few other ways to express themselves (they must be the "clique" you are talking about) -- but if this takes away the one and only efficient means of self-expression available to you, that's very unfortunate.

It was sort of common knowledge, far as I recall from my university course in the history of philosophy, but that was so long ago that I'd have to saddle myself with more homework than I bargained for to really "go there." One interesting fact for your consideration though: the universal western belief that Alexander founded Alexandria in the middle of nowhere is quite without merit. In reality he merely expanded the already existing and active town, Rhakotis, or Râ-Kedet, established before the fourth century B.C. in the area subsequently developed as Alexandria. It was an active port for centuries before Alexander.

Here's a description of his translation of Tao Te Ching (he also translated the I Ching and introduced his own method of divination, with six coins, after using the I Ching for divination on a daily basis for a number of years): "Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was uniquely qualified to produce a translation of Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching. He was called the finest English metrical poet of his generation by some of his contemporaries, and his work is anthologized in the Oxford Book of Mystical Verse. He was also a profound and experienced magician, mystic, and philosopher, trained in western esotericism, Hermeticism, the Qabalah and more traditional western philosophy, but with a deep and abiding interest in the ancient philosophies of the Orient. Crowley traveled widely in the East, and he actually walked across Southern China in 1906. His first-hand experience of the Orient made him one of the first students in the West to grasp oriental philosophy on its own terms, without a Eurocentric or Judeo-Christian cultural bias. The Chinese scholar Hellmut WIlhelm acknowledged the primacy of Crowley's work in Taoist studies. Crowley had no Chinese, and his translation is that of a poet interpreting the dry and scholastic translation of James Legge, as Ezra Pound would later do with the Confucian Analects. He contributes an autobiographical and critical introduction that discusses his religious philosophy and his lifelong attraction to Taoism, and his extensive notes and commentary to his translation help to amplify the meaning of the Chinese classic. This edition includes Crowley's verse translation of the Ching-ching Ching (Liber XXI, The Classic of Purity) as an appendix. This edition includes an editorial forward by Hymenaeus Beta, Frater Superior of O.T.O., as well as bibliography and index." --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

No, not everything. But Egypt was looted bare. You seem to be doing exactly what I object to -- counting Egypt as something "Western" just because we took so much from it and made "our own." How Western is Egypt?.. All Greek philosophers studied in Egypt, at Alexandria -- I mean, literally every single one of them. That, at the height of the Great Silk Road cross-polinating Egypt and China -- I've read some research that seems to point toward Pythagoras having been flat out Chinese, how's that? And the rest of them may have realistically had a few -- or scores -- of teachers who were taoists, for all we know. (That's the thing -- when lineages are destroyed, libraries burned, scholars murdered, what remains is second best at best. And more often than not it's the perpetrators themselves who rewrite history as soon as they derail it. Support their claim to legitimacy thus achieved?.. Not me.) But we don't write that in our history books. We write "The Greek Miracle," we make sure we Westernize the miracle and never mention its real source. And nonchalantly make Egypt, when looking for "our" roots, as "Western" as Alabama. Not all stolen? I sometimes wonder...

Africans learned their lineages by heart and were supposed to be able to recite them by age 6, beginning with the (invariably) mythological, animal, or off-planet ancestors. No written records kept were no obstacle to preserving the knowledge of where the knowledge came from. Native Americans -- same deal. The totem pole was a reference to the ancestral lineage of the traditional way, the most sacred concept in all their cultures. Siberian shamanism -- same deal. Australian aborigines -- same deal. Since the dawn of human history, preserving and transmitting what went before was seen as the only way to avoid a cultural Alzheimer's, a cultural schizophrenia, a cultural death. The Chinese were only different in that they invented bureacracy as an aid to record-keeping so early in the game, and in that their civilization never collapsed, never disappeared into rubble. "A piece of paper" so many seem to loath is something that was as sacred to them for thousands of years as the totem pole to the Native Americans, the kayak of the ancestors to the Tundra tribes, the songs of the ashok to pre-literal Armenians, the clay womb retaining the memory of where things came from to pre-Columbian Mesoamericans, and so on. There were boxes placed in the streets of Chinese cities for collecting any and all pieces of paper no longer needed by the owner -- they were not to be considered garbage, they were collected and handled as sacred objects. If a doctor wrote a prescription for an herbal formula, the patient boiled the piece of paper together with the herbs because the piece of paper itself carried the healing qi transferred to it by the doctor of his or her own qi, and if the patient couldn't afford the herbs, the medicine was made of the boiled piece of paper alone. The major Chinese magical tradition, talismanic, which is thought of as more potent than any other, is all about pieces of paper. The Chinese invented paper, remember? -- it hasn't been the same profane thing to them as it was to the peoples appropriating this bit of another culture's accomplishments and understanding only its surface usefulness for their own purposes and not the deeper meanings, energies, and magical properties thereof. Paper is a Wood-Water interface (it grows and expands like Wood and it flows and circulates like a river) and as such is a type of qi with properties not considered, understood, or even suspected by those who are not part of the tradition which discovered both paper and qi. This is true for every single phenomenon Westerners undertake to discuss from their perspective when talking about cultural phenomena taken from elsewhere which they treat as their own simply because of this cultural Alzheimer's the whole civilization suffers from. Whatever you steal becomes yours, and the first thing you do of course is forget in a hurry who it really belonged to before you stole it -- THAT seems to be the tradition, the only unbroken Western lineage... Surface skimming, grabbing for a quickie consumer satisfaction and discarding like so many paper cups -- and the resulting disdain, of course. What they really should disdain is their own ignorance mistaken for progress, sophistication, creativity, what not... but they believe they disdain the "piece of paper." Ah well. Whatever floats whoever's boat...

Sometimes people say things which they see as relevant to the point they're trying to make. That was the context of "800 people died" -- it was part of a logical train of thought on its way to the destination of the point being made. I wasn't aware of this being definable as "bragging" -- thanks for a brand new perspective on the usage of the concept. What were you bragging about when you said "om?"

Thank you for transmitting both ways. If I was talking to Josephine directly, I would ask why she chose to chalk up my assertion regarding no unbroken Western lineages to my lack of knowledge and exposure without any information to that effect offered by me. I may be wrong, but I base this assertion on the work of the very leaders and forefathers/foremothers Western tradition acknowledges, who all point out its eclectic nature. Moreover, a comparative study of this tradition against the taoist magical arts reveals where exactly the breaks have occurred. ( Mr. Crowley himself did figure that out -- hence his extensive taoist explorations, and an attempt to use the I Ching to mend some of those breaks in his own system. I would say that was too little too late, but don't let me digress.) I don't deny the possibility that some wise women or even men (though it's less likely) quietly taught their daughters throughout the witch hunts (or even their sons, which is even less likely), religious persecutions, political and later "scientific" marginalization, illegal status of such knowledge and its practitioners on the books for hundreds of years (England repelled these laws only as recently as the 1950s if memory serves and Gardner is to be trusted... and if he isn't, who is?..) But this is as proof-less as the peaceful existence of taoist immortals thousands of years old in the mountains of Maoist China -- I mean, sure, I personally have reasons to believe that, one can believe anything... So Josephine iterated her beliefs. That's fine. But a lineage is something that has proof, documented proof, which is neither better nor worse but definitely different from a "belief." It doesn't make a lineage tradition "better" or "worse" than an eclectic tradition except in the eye of the beholder, but that's what makes it a lineage. There's no such lineages in the Western tradition older than several decades of documented age. I assert it not because I don't know but because I do. So... Stet.

~~~~Moderator's note~~~ Here's the Secret of the Golden Way to Avoid Suspensions/Bans (actually, it's no secret, it's posted in this forum's guidelines): Please no ad hominem attacks and no personal insults. It's OK to challenge, question, dispute opinions, ideas, beliefs, etc.. Never OK to attack, belittle, humiliate members. I humbly suggest you contemplate the difference and cultivate comprehension thereof. ~~~Taomeow for the mod team

I'm in the habit of looking into the primal energies and original meanings behind symbols (I collect books on symbols and signs). "Fuck it," of course, dips into jing -- that's what gives it its energy and makes it efficient and strong. This is important to understand when you use your jing this way. People who dissipate too much, fuck it being their answer to any and all difficulties and problems (including the ones better addressed with other types of qi applied to the task) squander it too fast, keep losing jing at an accelerated rate, and consequently age before their time. Memory loss, sexual dysfunction, and degenerative disease down the road are not uncommon. (A similar warning in Christianity -- "thou shalt not use the Lord's name in vain" -- aims at protecting shen, which is what dissipates if you do. ) So, if you use it, be aware of what you're using of your own resources, and preferably use sparingly.

I should tell my son, whose Vietnamese girlfriend's name is Ho, to stop the incessant flow of puns he usually entertains her with and just call her Lo beginning this Christmas.

There's no such thing as a "Hermetic line." A lineage means real live human beings teaching other real live human beings in an unbroken teacher-to-student succession. It's very simple. And very unavailable in the Western tradition because it was destroyed -- the lineages have been meticulously destroyed, they don't exist anymore. That's why some of us have chosen taoism which still has unbroken lineages. The name of the game is "whole." A real "hive" is not a collection of individual bees -- it is a whole, complete entity. A lineage cultivator is not a bee in the hive. She is the hive.