Taomeow

Why of course. Remember what the Twin Towers looked like? A great big eleven.

I think it's a great story of liberation. Much worthier than all those metaphysical "liberation" stories about successfully hiding one's head so far in the sand as to admire the only perspective that opens up from this position -- the view up one's own incomparably enlightened ass. ...and any practice that can cause someone to cry who didn't for years, and consciously know why, is "real" by default.

In numerology, 9 intensifies whatever number it happens to combine with. I.e. whatever 11 represents, 9:11 will intensify ninefold. So "good" or "bad" depends on the phenomenon observed: a good one will be nine times better, a bad one, nine times worse. Source of info: "Math for Mystics," by... um, if you're going to read it, I'll look up the author.

This, however, doesn't follow from the taoist paradigm. Tao-in-stillness is nondualistic. Dualism is the driving engine of locomotion at step two ("tao gives birth to two"), but motion starts already at step one ("tao gives birth to one") -- that's the Fibonacci sequence, the natural progression from oneness to duality and thence to trinity and thence to the "ten thousand things": 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. Notice the first two numbers in the sequence -- both "ones?" The only thing that differentiates 1 from 1 is its position in relation to the neighboring manifest or unmanifest phenomenon: the first 1 has 0 (nonbeing, transcendence, emptiness, stillness) to its immediate left, the second 1 has 2 (duality, yin-yang, being, manifestation, motion) to its immediate right. 0 is the taoist symbol of wuji. Beyond wuji, which is also known as tao-in-stillness, there's no "beyond" -- there's no "transcendence" of this level, it contains all possible levels, all potentials for all manifestations, while itself being "empty." Where do you go beyond 0? Either nowhere (remain in stillness) or everywhere (move). That's how it works in the taoist system. I don't know of a mathematical way to disprove it -- nor a spiritual one. So between tao-in-stillness and tao-in-motion, pretty much everything is covered, all being and all nonbeing. And the crucial spritual idea (far as I'm concerned) to derive from the fact is this: tao in stillness is not the goal, it is just where the vibration goes when it goes to the left ("to and fro goes the way") -- and its opposite, tao in motion, is where the vibration goes to the right. Man-made left-brain paradigms gravitate toward the 0, woman-made right-brain paradigms, toward yin-yang interplay, by virtue of the natural pull of their proximity. The Way is isomorphic -- goes both ways. You don't get stuck in stillness or in motion, and cultivation toward "transcendence" is going to be a shocking surprise to the transcending party when tao transcends its transcendence and returns, as is its natural property, its "main virtue." Returns to non-transcendence! No way around it! except toward transcendence, where it won't get stuck, however... Beautiful, don't you think?..

I can come up with a dozen plausible stories... but "plausible" and "true" are not the same. I don't know the true story of kunlun-induced invisibility. I don't understand why others who know every bit as little as I do feel strongly one way or the other -- all they know is the story of what they think is plausible, none of them know the actual story... why is it so hard to live with "I don't know?" I honestly don't know. For me it's easy. I don't believe anything or anybody as a matter of mental hygiene. I don't think anyone tells anyone any truths about anything anyway, just because no one can know any truths upon having been born into a world that is fake to the bone. We are born into artificial light and artificial air, artificial substances are immediately injected into our bloodstream, artificial foods fill our stomachs and start building our body cells and our brains, artificial leaders tell us what to do with our artificial lives... so artificial brains can produce plausible stories but they can't possibly know the true story, they are not made of the right stuff for that, even on the cellular level, let alone the spiritual level. Which is why I try to make sure I never confuse "it's plausible" with "I know." I only know things I consciously do and feel and live (key word "consciously") -- they are the only truths that overlap completely with what I "believe" them to be. Richard Feynman the Nobel prize physicist simplified his life by deciding once and for all that when dining out with friends or colleagues (which happened frequently) he would never wrack his brains trying to decide 1) whether to order the dessert or skip it, and 2) if ordering it was chosen, which item on the menu to prefer. He decided that once and for all he would eliminate this recurrent problem from his life by making and following an ironclad rule for himself: he will always order the dessert, and he will always order chocolate cake. Period. No more waste of decision-making powers on a repetitive non-vital decision. So, I did something similar with my life. Instead of wracking my brains every time over who's telling the truth and who's lying, I go with Dr. House's mantra: "everybody lies." When this is out of the way, the rest is easy. I investigate with any and all means at my disposal except for taking someone's word for it.

The plot thickens...

No hmm, 3bob, we actually agree! I was making exactly this point -- that buddhism, as well as taoism for that matter, is a spectrum... and a spectrum is colorful, not black-and-white. One end of it, the one the farthest removed from my own views -- i.e. that outer extreme of buddhist sects where the physical body is seen, as dawg put it, as loathsome and disgusting -- is also very far removed from the authentic/original taoist views rooted in shamanism that went before. Whereas the other end, where taoism was combined with buddhism into taoist sects that have features of both -- as in Celestial Teachers sect, e.g. -- they may come much closer to each other. By the same token, at that other part of the spectrum, some influential buddhist schools have retained a lot of the shamanic roots of the modalities that went before them, e.g. in Tibet, where Dzogchen retains strong links with Bon, a shamanic culture that went before the buddhist conquest. In India and Pakistan, you see the same spectrum -- some Indian sects of buddhism are blatantly magical-shamanic-psychedelic in their practices, some Pakistani buddhism has strong Islamic overtones, which in their turn are resonantly shamanic on the other end of their own spectrum... It's all ganying, things resonate into each other... and the real thing is indestructible, that's why it will transcend the spectrum end to end and endlessly beyond.

Kids who learn martial arts are not perceived as a threat to the establishment right here right now (what are they gonna do against HAARP?.. and who cares if they bully their classmates?..). However, where I grew up, and at the time when levels of paranoia maintained by the establishment were higher there than here... once upon the Iron Curtain... Asian martial arts were forbidden to the general population. You had to be a member of the ruling establishment, some kind of special forces or other, to learn that. People with guns and bombs can be raided, scanned, and otherwise revealed as possessing guns and bombs, so the establishment can take the latter away and put the former away. Not so with internal power. It can't be revealed by search and seizure. It can't be suspected from a bulging pocket because it's not in the pocket. It can't be ass probed out of the one possessing it. So if it is real, it is feared. Control systems don't like to deal with anything at all they can't control. Any master who knows he/she has something "they" can't control is likely to be intelligent enough to know not to let "them" know.

Yup, perspective, and awareness... I've a nice short test to post that illustrates the point...

Craig, thank you so much for helping formulate some of my ideas (and the ones we share) better than I do myself!

I think I told the story before but since most people in this thread probably either didn't hear it or don't remember, I will indulge myself and tell it again. At the second kunlun seminar I attended, some two years ago, there was a woman for whom it was her first one, who got into some deep, soul-shattering feeling. She started crying and couldn't stop for a while. She was mumbling something incoherent and trying to communicate her feeling to others -- all I could make out was "we're all the same... I understand now... compassion... all the same... compassion..." Every attempt to express this just brought about more uncontrollable sobbing. Finally Max came up to her and did something, a mudra I think, I couldn't quite see from my spot, or else don't remember what it was. All of a sudden, the woman stopped crying and jumped three feet up in the air, her jaw hanging open, looking at Max it utter disbelief. He started saying something comforting, she interrupted him: "but why... but why... but why did you just go transparent?.." Max quickly changed the subject and distracted everyone's attention from this interesting exchange. After the seminar, I bumped into this woman on my way out. I asked her how she was feeling. She immediately started crying all over again, hugged me, and said, "I wish for you to experience someday what I experienced today." What I gleaned from that episode was that seeing a rainbow body or not seeing it is a co-creation between who's showing and who's looking. Most people won't see! Whoever is not ready to see, won't see! There's no way in hell that the woman was "fake," an actress hired to perform. I can tell a human hug from an act. So the point about the pictures is mute. It is very possible that the camera can't see. It is very possible that the pictures showing what people who can see actually see can be made, as an educational aid. That they were created for this purpose instead of just snapped is possible and even likely, but this wouldn't render anyone or anything fake, in and of itself, if you follow my logic. Oh, and what she wished for me that day came true.

Well, yes, nature works in mysterious ways. I've seen a British documentary about Chernobyl 20 years after the nuclear disaster. Totally abandoned by humans, for whom it is off limits and supposedly will be for at least another four hundred years, the land became... not the nuclear desert it was predicted by our scientists to become, not even a mutagenic hell for breeding monsters... Nothing of the kind. A haven for animals, both "domestic" (the film is actually the story of a Chernobyl cat) and wild. Species returned and multiplied and thrive there that at the time of the accident were near extinct -- hundreds of them. Not small creatures either -- the largest mammals, bear, boar, wolf, everything. And birds -- falcons, eagles, everything. And domestic cats and dogs and goats... who don't have to be domestic anymore and appear none the worse for the fact. Scientists talk about levels of radiation they are exposed to there... animals don't know about that, they just thrive, the only thing they noticed was that the two-legged super killer doesn't kill them in that spot anymore, and just live. Here's a link to Part 1 if you like to watch it (it's a full length film in a bunch of parts): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-UOHn9PvJ0 I've read about "yin-yang eyes" in one of Amy Tan's novels. I've met people who see into the netherworld (and took a peek myself, in Peru) but only one of them had one eye smaller than the other, due to a childhood accident. Which of course may be connected to his unusual vision -- in some cultures the shaman was known as "the wounded healer," the premise being that you have to have been to the land of sickness and death yourself and found your way back in order to know the way and be able to find and lead out of it other human souls. This guy is a taoist though, not a shaman, but he is indeed a healer (who has, but doesn't use, "superpowers" and uses TCM instead.)

Oh, forgot the most important point... I have the same attitude toward shamanism-bashing as toward racial hatred, crusades, extermination of native cultures, witch hunts, and the rest of the goodies that always, at all historic times, were one package deal with shamanism-bashing. The only way these practical feats of human bestiality could be justified theoretically was by belittling, negating, marginalizing, bad-mouthing the victims of the crime of genocide, pillage, plunder, totalitarian control and mass destruction all aimed at, and resulting in, redistribution of power structures in favor of the perpetrator. Indigenous native cultures, shamanic all of them without a single exception, constituted a power structure as natural and organic as the power of the forest to generate itself without killing the ocean, the power of the ocean to use not a drop of its stupendous life-giving might toward turning forests into deserts... Thus they constituted power structures that competed with the one we all know and love as our current set-up. Hence the pattern of anti-shamanic brainwashing established by our religious, educational, political institutions. If these peoples are so backward, why not cut down their rain forests with impunity? Why not rape their lands for crude materials? Why not explain to the public that we're actually enlightening them while at it? This is so... how shall I put it... so poorly informed on so many levels... Level 1: I have personal experience with shamans and shamanism -- do you?

Hi Dawg, This is the single best description of buddhist attitudes to the human body I've ever read here. Thanks for that! Honesty is the gateway drug to the truth. Needless to say that as a taoist practitioner I understand the physical and the non-physical as two sides of the same coin (tao-in-stillness and tao-in motion, the unmanifest and the manifest), and do not believe that removing one side of the coin, the physical side, is either possible, necessary, desirable, or realistic. To a taoist, "being and nonbeing create each other" (Laozi), "to and fro goes the Way" (I Ching), "the pattern of tao is motion and the pattern of this motion is return" (Yuandao), so separating one part (being) from the other (nonbeing) is considered a mental experiment with no de facto counterpart in reality. Of course there's sects of taoism that historically cross-polinated with buddhism that might be somewhat skewed in the direction of accepting this mental exercise as actual experimental data, but the ones closer to original taoist thought don't maintain the theory and therefore do not derive their practices from it. To them, the physical body, whether human, animal, plant, planetary, or stellar is never loathsome and disgusting. It is actually magnificent. Their theory and practice are therefore aimed at unlocking and unblocking its potential rather than discarding it. Immortality in physicality (as a choice, not as an error of judgment or morality) being understood as one of these potentials -- we call it the Triple Treasure of Perfection, Nondecay, Immortality. (Of course there's a whole bunch of other desingations for other "triple treasures," taoists like the number three, the number of creation that gives rise, at the next step, to the whole world of magnificent manifestations.) By the way, there's influential sects of buddhism (particularly Tibetan, e.g. Dzogchen) that are way closer to taoism in their view of the physical body than to Theravada buddhism. So it's a spectrum of sorts... and looks like you and me are at the farthermost opposite ends of this spectrum. Let's keep that in mind for future reference -- I mean, I'm not here to convert you, and you're not here to convert me -- if we remember that, we'll get along fine!

Well, in classic shamanism as well as much of authentic taoism, in most cases it was (and occasionally is) a vision quest of some sort or other that determined if you have what it takes. It was extremely challenging, dangerous, difficult, and quite often life-and-death. In many shamanic societies, every male and in some every female too had to undergo a vision quest merely to become a "legitimate adult." You gained authority by braving austerities, conquering your fear, stoically tolerating pain, uncertainty, loneliness... whatever it took... leaving your weak childish ways behind and re-entering the tribe as a new, authoritative adult member who has proved his or her strength of spirit. I have an old Native American book, "The Indian How," which describes some of these quests. (For some of the taoist ones, read Opening The Dragon's Gate -- the ones Wang Liping went through are a serious example.) If the vision quest failed, authority was lost, and the author of "The Indian How" asserts it was the greatest tragedy. It meant you failed to gain respect in the spirit world and this spilled over into the attitude of your own tribe -- your brothers and sisters had pity and compassion for your plight but you were never in the position to command respect and authority, in either world -- as above, so below. Today, people gain or lose authority "below," in this-here world, for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with the strength of their spirit OR humanity's core values... and that's a far bigger tragedy for humanity as a whole, far as I'm concerned. This authority "below" that is not supported by authority "above," in the spirit world, is usually a form of abuse of power. The one supported in both worlds is use of power without abuse. At least that's what the spirits told me......I'm not kidding

Some people are in touch with the spirit world and some are not. They will never see eye to eye, because their eyes don't work the same way. In shamanic cultures, people who were in touch with the spirit world could prove they were, and the ones with the strongest ties to the spirit world became shamans. How did they prove it? By servicing the community on a daily basis -- with a little help from their spirit friends. The members of the tribe relied on the shaman for healing, weather modifications, hunting success, finding lost or stolen items -- and once the shaman's credibility was established (it's impossible to fool all people all of the time if you live a common shared life with them and interact with them for years and decades on end), bigger problems could be addressed -- e.g. major visions that dictated a migration and resettling, whether somewhere nearby, somewhere far, or even transcontinental, or in extreme cases, trans-dimensional. If the shaman could deliver when presented with smaller tasks, the tasks might keep growing. If the tasks kept growing, the shaman's power kept growing. Spirits are attracted to strong authority figures, just like most ordinary folks. I've heard from a shaman that the prerequisite for successfully interacting with spirits is authority -- the same root as in "author," creator. If you approach the spirit world with no clear idea as to what you are going to do there and what for, the spirits are pretty much guaranteed to ignore you. If you approach the spirit world with the agenda of proving it doesn't exist, they won't bend over backwards for you to prove they do... just like YOU (any generic "you") won't bend over backwards for ME (any generic "me") to prove me wrong if I were to announce that you are merely a computer virus. You're just not that invested into arguing against a belief that doesn't affect your livelihood in any shape or form whatsoever.

It's not Mal, it's the outcome of a two-day discussion between four moderators. Very disturbing content was removed because the unprovable disclaimer "this happened to one of my lovers" didn't do much to change the fact that what was posted twice constituted graphic detailed descriptions of specific criminally insane techniques.

Those who have people in their lives who look up to them, e.g. children or students, might want to check their chosen style of communication against one simple guideline: would you be proud or ashamed if your children or your students were to read what you write here?..

Well, it's a discussion board methinks. The moment you manage to get Gauss to discuss anything, I will repent. In any event, it was merely a suggestion. I based it on the precedent established by Sean the Owner when handling Mak Tin Si's offerings. Taoist as they get, but found inappropriate in the shape and form presented (not a discussion but an advert or a sermon -- or rather a long series thereof in a succession.) Merely channeling Sean here...

I dunno, but I was just reading Edgar Cayce's biography (didn't pay much attention to his stuff before, but apparently he was in touch with something "not of this world" for real, according to this particular biographer, who knew him well and personally for a bunch of decades -- the book is from the 40s) -- so, according to Cayce's "readings," people reincarnate in whole groups, whole families, whole nations, whole races -- there's personal karma and also family karma, national, racial, etc. -- so that's why chances to run into someone from a past life of yours in this one apporximate 100%. But, like I said, I dunno... seems to make sense though. You personally may not have done anything wrong, but someone had to come to this continent to kill 99% of its native inhabitants... so this has to be paid for. If you choose to be white in this reincarnation, you choose to pay some of that. We're all a bit like Jesus in this respect, according to Cayce's supernatural sources -- we take on some of the karmic burdens voluntarily, because "not man and not God but the natural law demands an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

---Moderator's note--- Gauss, this is not a "moderator's warning," just a suggestion. If I were in your shoes I would heed the advice to post in off-topic. I'm equipped to move your threads there, but I'm giving you a chance to exercise Kindness-Forbearance-Truthfulness you preach and do it yourself in the future. Kindness (to other TTB members, some of whom, like me, have practiced Falun Dafa and pretty much dropped it because of people like you, even though as a practice it's really pretty good), Forbearance (of the fact that you are preaching to people who have been preached to too much and regardless of the message find it insufferable to be preached to here, where they come to get a break from being preached to elsewhere), Truthfulness (i.e. honesty and courage to face your lack of clout to convert TTB to Falun Dafa). Please. Whoever is pre-destined to find the way your way, will find it in off-topic. Peace out. ---Sword of tao sheathed---

As for barriers, I use Budo (Fudo for the Japanese slanted ) and Stone Warriors, and clear the space fivefold -- with incense/smudging, with sound (bells and rattles and Tibetan singing bowls), with water (scented with something bad dudes don't like, like frankincense and myrrh), with talismanic symbols, and with the sword.

If you do, could you look up something else too -- I haven't seen the book except for the index page following the link posted, and saw a few unfamiliar concepts mentioned and a few suspicious ones. E.g., a suspicious chapter I recall was titled "Your Wealth Position" or something like that, which made me think the feng shui of this book is BTB, Lin Yun's legacy, which was developed specifically for Western consumers and uses fixed "life stations" or "positions" within the home -- for Fame, for Health, for Wealth, for Love and so on, to a total of eight, linked to specific "sectors" of the home and used as such once and for all. This is much easier to do than real FS but this is, unfortunately, bogus FS. In the real thing, the dynamics of the Flying Stars are phased in, which change in a major way every year and then in lesser ways every month. The Stars are indeed conductive (or counterproductive) to these kinds of influences in your home, but they are dynamic and follow the pattern of qi motion in the universe (which I mentioned in another thread, by the way, "Qi is not energy," and posted the sequence of changes, which, of course, was ignored -- somehow I find that any real "secrets" of taoism can be revealed safely to the Western community, hidden in plain sight, so to speak...) Anyway, my question is, is this what the book offers? fixed "stations" or "positions"? If you could look that up, I'd be grateful -- I'm trying to determine whether I want that book or not.