Taomeow

Magnolia is one of my favorite movies! It is about ganying (synchronicity to Jung)... how often do you see a fundamental taoist concept illustrated in a movie? Only Magnolia and Donnie Darko come to mind...

I so believe it -- because he was in the middle of suffering and aware of it. I don't mean abstract suffering in the buddhist sense. I mean a hands-on, heart-on chance to experience the reality of life humans have made for themselves and other humans -- experience it while having no recourse to the usual psychological and ideological defenses. In most cases people have an inifinite number of shelters to run to from reality, but in some situations, stripped bare of those, they have to face it. Kundalini can't bypass defenses without demolishing them, so if there's nothing there to demolish, as some entries would suggest, we must be dealing with a human being who never had a chance to either be hurt or notice someone else's pain... because defensive blocks are always erected by such events. The "kundalini" slithering smoothly past defenses is merely one of them in disguise... Defensive kundalini is a curious beast. Unlike the real one, the defensive one doesn't arise from the body. It is made in the neocortex and released into the sphere of ideation without affecting the body in the slightest. Like all things disconnected in a fragmented consciousness, it can grow to any size, the size of the universe and beyond, and acquire any characteristics whatsoever, universal love, universal disdain for the insignificant other people (the "train wrecks" casually dismissed), the bad-karma-infested, the ignorant ones who don't use the same defense mechanisms... whatever. It can even show the money. The only way anyone outside the experience can tell the difference is by taking the vitals... if the body is left out of it, it ain't no real thing.

No, I wasn't in the hospital, I was in an unorthodox but fully professional and licensed setting, with my vitals monitored, and the whole process not unfamiliar to the people managing it, unlike it would be in the hospital where they'd be sure to kill me by doing all of the things you mention. The people who were handling it in my case call it something other than "kriyas" but they wouldn't have trouble telling the difference between that and a medical emergency. You mentioned "spiritual emergency" in your other post -- I've read both Grofs (husband and wife) on the subject and that's quite a bit closer though not quite there. Still, if you know what it is, you know how counterproductive an ICU can be under the circumstances. The belief that a "spiritual emergency" is distinct and different from a "somatic emergency" is erroneous. A medical intervention that would aim to damp down the latter with no clue as to the former would destroy both when it's this drastic. A process that integrates the two, on the other hand, reveals, among other things, how NOT separate they really are. In my case, not only my temperature and heart rate were as stated, but my respiration rate was that of a distressed fetus in the womb (don't remember how much, it was almost 15 years ago... except the part I remember is, I was told that under "ordinary" circumstances an adult breathing at that rate would hyperventilate and faint within one to two minutes -- in my case it was going on for close to an hour with no signs of hyperventilation), my blood pressure was also in the stroke-out range (before and after it had always been, and currently is, a rock solid 110/70 -- like I said, I had kundalini awakening going on, not an illness.) This didn't happen once -- it was happening on a regular and frequent basis for two years, I learned to control the process eventually... So... did you know that kundalini, not being exempt from the way of tao, is also something we return to, rediscover, revisit rather than first discover when/if we awaken it as adults? Do you know how a baby is born? of any mammalian species, not just a human baby? There's electrochemical impulses that start coming from the base of the spine up the spinal column toward the head. There, they trigger a cascade of hormonal events and the baby releases these hormones into the amniotic fluid, and that's how the mother's body gets the signal to start getting into labor. The baby is the party initiating it, and kundalini is the energy that becomes operational for the first time for the first transition between worlds (as it always does -- which is why it is pointless to awaken it if the transition between worlds is not timely). So, basically, what was happening to me physically, all the crazy vitals, and all the feelings I can't begin to describe that accompanied this, was consistent with what you would get if you measured same in a baby about to be born, in a sympathetic, distressed, drug-free, slightly premature birth, to a first-time mother who is not squatting, in a brightly lit room, with doctors and nurses yelling... in other words, an exact replica of my actual birth which boiled down to barely making it and fighting for my life with all I had and winning. That's what I was revisiting when my kundalini got woken up for the second time. (If someone says the word "imagination" at this point I will simply unsubscribe.) OK... this is the tip of my kundalini story iceberg, I'm sure we could have a nice chat in person about all the rest of it if you were really interested, but writing it up now is totally untimely, so with apologies, I bail out of the rest. Oh, by the way. You CAN close it once it's open. It's not impossible, just very, very difficult, and the know-how is nowhere near all over the place. If you ever feel you need it, look me up... And finally, about that brain damage... I am of the opinion that all modern brains are pretty severely damaged, but clinically speaking, mine is in a good shape, knock on wood... MMPI et al show stellar normalcy, IQ is Mensa level (somewhat better than the requirements), and the only psychiatrist I know is a close friend of the family, no professional relationship. Hyperthermia with no illness, by the way, is nowhere near as destructive to the brain as medical and nursing schools teach their students. I have seen dozens of cancer patients get hyperthermia by way of treatment (a German method, not FDA-approved in this country but successfully used elsewhere)... and where I come from, the sauna is typically heated to... well, if I give you the Farenheits you won't believe me once again... but we baked apples on the upper shelf while baking ourselves on the lower one many times. Mythologies are funny... including modern medical ones.

Next week we will start parting with the kittens, but before we do, here's a little sample of what my life has been like since the 4th of July when they were born. (The hairy human legs in the video are not mine. )

In a three-dimensional world, there's an up, a down, and a sideways. So in all traditions you have something going up, something going down, plus a left hand path and a right hand path. End of spacial choices. I don't know of any taoist systems that use kundalini -- doesn't mean they don't exist, but I'm not familiar with them. Indo-European traditions other than yoga do use it, including the most unexpected ones, e.g. the Rosicrucians. Not so unexpected though because ultimately they all share the same core ideology, and by the way our "modern science" is but an incarnation of same. Progress, nevermind at what and whose cost... take no prisoners, you're aiming for higher-bigger-better... you're ditching the mini van for a Lamborghini... you are turning into something super-human, eugenically superior... no looking back, higher and higher, climb that ladder, get to the top of that pyramid, shoot that rocket up, that missile, that obelisk, that phallic symbol of dominance... and of course from up there you look DOWN at whoever is at the bottom of the pyramid. You have no other way to look at them -- you are HIGH and they are LOW and the whole game is about getting up there, wherever it happens to be -- you want to be the CEO, whether in science, politics, religion, or your own body where the head is the part that matters and the whole upward deal is so top heavy it shows in POSTURES, for chrissake... The whole enchilada seems very un-taoist. Evolution, progress, transcendence, etc. -- that's all Indo-European. Return, cycles, back to the source -- that's East Asian. Kundalini is about evolution of man -- pretty much like Also Sprach Zaratustra... taoism doesn't have any use for that. "The way of tao is motion and the pattern of this motion is return." If you don't return, if you "move on," you violate the pattern of tao's motion. Seems shocking to a member of a progress-oriented culture, but taoism shares the belief in original primordial perfection of the fully human human being with many shamanic cognitive paradigms and seeks to access that, not transcend it... or at least not to rush to transcend something never fully experienced. I often think that the whole argument for evolution and progress arises from the empoverished sensory predicament of the modern civilized human. Human condition doesn't seem all that exciting to someone whose ordinary human senses are working at a fraction of a percent of their capacity, in a world supplying only the most meager stimuli. I still remember the brilliant, vibrant, visceral perfection of real things in a real world caressing the perceptions of a real child -- I was blessed to have known what it's like to be fully human -- I doubt anyone who had a glimpse of that will rush to evolve somewhere far, far away from THAT... they will, rather, long to return... as I do. As taoism does, generally speaking...

This is correct. What makes a path Water or Fire is the Wuxing dynamics of these phases. To put it succinctly as Taiji Songs do, "water descends, fire ascends." To notice more, one needs to study the behavior of both phases and meditate, meditate, meditate on it to get it! It's not what you name them that matters... it's what they DO, consistently, in accordance with their nature, that matters. What does Water naturally do? It chooses the path of the least resistance, it flows down. It doesn't go up unless forced, unless pressured. Which is why water methods are, generally, safer: no pressure. Occasionally there's upward-mobile water methods used too, these are water's another incarnation: mist, steam, fog, clouds... subtle water. This is used in kunlun, e.g.. Water that goes up but not under pressure, rather under the spell of its own foggy, steamy, misty lightness, just the way it does so in nature. And soon as it hits a hard obstacle (the crown of the head, e.g. -- or even before that, a calcified, clogged pineal gland for that matter, which is what any energy flow will invariably encounter in a modern human, no way around it, we have been imprisoned in our own heads with assorted toxic, physical, emotional, energetic blocks since before birth), it stops. It doesn't "break through," doesn't break anything -- unless you install a pressure cooker in your head and force the steam -- but you need fire for this, right?.. But if you don't mix fire in, keep it cool, the action will be subtle dissolving even though it's not downward all the time... the important thing is, it is not upward all the time, it replicates the circulation of water that turns to mist to clouds to rain to water to mist to rain... ultimately always coming back down... Downward-dynamics cultivation can be strong, fast and powerful -- no less so and on occasion more so than upward-fire cultivation, nothing beats a tsunami, a hurricane, a flood of water power! So it's not that water methods are for cowards. You want them full blast, they are available. All you have to do is open the gates real wide... and the deluge is upon thee. I went through a water method process that was absolutely violent... but only because I burned some gates with fire first, unbeknown to me. What a fire method before a water method is like I know first hand. You get boiling hot water... a deluge of that. This sounds plausible. I'm not a big expert on systems that bring the energy up because I am opposed to the goal both on a personal level and on the level of what our civilization really needs, which direction for the energy to take. Our civilization has burned with Fire most of our planet's Wood and polluted most of our Water -- this translates into society's values, lifestyles, ideation, aspirations, ideals... Fire ideals, in any disguise -- electricity, combustible fuel, father in heaven, spirit in the sky, firearms, explosives, nuclear bombs, upward mobility, pyramid schemes, hierarchies, elevated beings, light beings and, yes, kundalini... wherever you turn, there's too much of that and not enough of Water ideals, lifestyles, values, processes... I didn't suggest that it was silly and most certainly didn't say it. What I did say was that kundalini and BK's dissolving are opposite processes. They are. If in the video (which I didn't see) they talk about "relaxing sinking all the chi in the rest of the body as a safety mechanism," fine, that's the technique they use, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with dissolving. Besides, words are words, experiences are experiences. You can't be relaxing in the middle of a fire burning out of control, I guarantee it. My own kundalini came complete with a fever of 108 and a heart rate of 140 -- I'd be curious to see someone relaxing that...

Yes, I admit ignorance and a cognitive obscuration, if that's the way you prefer to put it, of the method whereby you put the toothpaste back into the tube after you've squeezed it out. Maybe you could teach me someday? I am a student of Space-Time-Energy by methods of taoist arts, sciences and practices, but so far my taoist sources both live and written have been making it way complex... so if you have a simple handle on Time for starters, do share! 'cause saying "nothing is ultimately impossible" over an empty toothpaste tube doesn't fill it up, in my humble experience...

Based on what I've learned and practiced, taoism and hinduism (as well as hinduism's buddhist derivatives) are absolutely opposite processes because they are based on opposite worldviews and have opposite goals. The reason they are lumped together in the Western mind and form some generalized Eastern-flavored porridge in the head where a Judeo-Christian brain, displaced and disgruntled by the intrusion, keeps looking for a comfortable spot to rest and, finding none, gets intermixed with the rest of the porridge, is that they are thus lumped together in the way modern Western style exposure to them takes place. They are, in reality, separated by thousands of years of cultural developments quite distinctly different. East Asian vs. Indo-European. If you want to understand why taoist processes go downward from up and yogic ones go upward from down, I suggest meditating on the pyramid... I'll write some more, it's a very interesting question, but right now gotta run...

Thank you, Susan, this answers my question.

No and no. I don't know what's happening to you and I don't necessarily view even the most drastic outcome as a disaster. What I'm saying is, based on my experience, that of other people (e.g. Eternal_Student's post corroborating my experience with his own), and books by Gopi Krishna who is a traditional authority on the subject, as well as my understanding of the nature of both the process and the obstacles gleaned from many other sources and experiences, it is not something you can have happening on the side while having the rest of your life go as ususal. I don't want to be responsible for doing this to you, Kate! -- but let me ask the I Ching on your behalf? What do I know? -- nothing, except who to ask. Though as a general approach to any and all processes humans engage in, I have great respect for brake pedals. Susan said in her response that with kundalini it's like stepping from a mini van and getting into a Lamborghini. Sounds glorious... but the pragmatist, the taoist, the driver in me will still inquire -- does the Lamborghini have a brake pedal?

Yes... but... there's a but. Most of "you" (or "me") is not active all at once and there's a good reason for that. You have complete information and full potential within your DNA to be all species on Earth that went before -- all of them. A fetus goes through a rapid total recall of a whole bunch of them, gills, tail 'n all. At any given postnatal time, however, once you're human you want to be, ideally, fully human, not half human half alligator, not half human half pine tree... at least not accidentally and not "just for the hell of it." Just because you can doesn't mean you want to be that. So tao in her eternal wisdom has provided special "silencing" rings (I seem to recall they're called SIR2P, some of them) around most of your genes that literally keep them asleep and don't let them manifest in your phenotype. If you wake them up for no good reason, the outcome will most likely be cancer, because these genes' program for growth and development clashes with all other active programs your body is currently running. So some of them are immortal like those of a lobster, but you don't want to wake them up none the less, because you are not a lobster. And others could let you regenerate a lost organ like those of a salamander, but you still don't want to wake them up because you are not a salamander and everything in you knows it, and any lobster or salamander program you activate, while still "you," will be the kind of "you" which the rest of you will find impossible to coesixt with. Kundalini is similarly asleep for a damn good reason. Basically, it's the energy of human evolution, according to Gopi Krishna who wrote most informative books about the process (he awakened his kundalini after many years of meditation on the third eye, for hours daily, and what followed was a long stretch of years of full blast psychosis. While in India, the culture being familiar with the phenomenon and tolerant/acceptive of it, he wasn't locked up for life, in the US he would have been and fast.) So... the energy of human evolution, the ability to change into something that transcends the currently prevalent human condition. If everything goes smoothly, fine, you are going to have an enjoyable life as something, um, else from what you know yourself to be, no big deal, this "something" is supposed to be better than what you are now. But what if your new, and currently unknown to you, awakened-kundalini-augmented you isn't compatible with your current lifestyle, society you're in, or your own expectations? Wouldn't you want to have a choice whether to give her total control or retain some for yourself? In a typical scenario (I'm talking a generic scenario, not this specific one of course) loss of control over cultivation process is THE substance cults are made out of. You lose control, the guru takes over telling you what to do, how to live, how much to give, who to worship, who to kill in an extreme case. Cults simply wouldn't exist if processes -- psychological, physical, emotional -- that run away from the initiate weren't a sad and thoroughly documented reality. So the first thing I would ask about any process I would undertake is exactly this: do you know how to stop it should you need to? And are you willing to share this information with your students? On a personal note. In 1996 my kundalini was awakened accidentally, the event was not planned and the environment for it to unfold was not ready. She roared out into existence, causing me to demolish the life I had been patiently building till then, discard nearly everything I ever was, and become someone new. This someone new eventually decided to pull the plug on the process, having developed, in the interim analysis, other ideas as to where she wanted to be headed. So I put my kundalini back to sleep. I knew how so I did. Only took me four years. As for your practices -- well, we're all pretty eclectic these days, and in most cases mix and match works just fine, many things are very happily compatible with many other things. However, KAP and BK's dissolving are opposite processes... If you have laundry to do, you can wash it or you can throw it in the fire and burn it -- either way it will work, you won't have dirty clothes anymore -- but you would complicate things no end if you do both simultaneously. Besides, fewer things can go wrong with a washing machine if you pour water into it than with a fire in the middle of your living-room... and true kundalini awakening starts out as that at the very minimum... and if it doesn't it's not real... if it's nice and fuzzy like a well-behaved puppy it's not her. If you control her it ain't no kundalini. Nobody today has a living-room... um... a shushumna either clean as a whistle or equipped to accommodate a clean, controlled fire. It gets messy or it isn't real. So therefore, once again, my question: are there any fire extinguishers in the KAP house?..

Here's a question: do you know how to put her back to sleep? To a taoist this is the most crucial question. Taoists with a clue (which, granted, used to be a tautology... but we do witness a new breed of taoists, those without) generally avoid irreversible somatic and spiritual moves until they know exactly why and what for they're making them, choose the timing for the move with great care, and still make sure they have an antidote on hand in case they decide to backpedal. A genuine teacher I had the privilege to learn from tells the story of how he made the Pill of Immortality in his lower elixir field when he was still a child. His teacher promptly broke it to pieces, because it was untimely, too early. (Yes, they know the techniques for doing this, and the timing of all cultivation stages in sequence too.) Even in voodoo, where they differentiate between the left hand path and the right hand path just as they do in taoism, both the houngan (the "good guy") and the bokor (the priest who "serves with the left hand") can create both good and evil spells (the good guy has to know evil so as to know how to deflect it, the bad guy has to know good so as to know how to thwart it) and fundamentally differ only in one respect: a bokor can create a spell that has no antidote; a houngan will never do that. It doesn't matter whether the bokor's spell is "good" or "bad" -- if he has no antidote for it, this is the very definition of an "evil sorcerer" to a voodooist. So... do you have the kundalini back-to-sleep antidote?

Me in the mirror of the lake, drinking water nose to nose with me

And if you practice yoga fast, it automatically turns into figure skating.

I went to check out their websites and looked at the pictures and, globally, the picture is the same everywhere: horrible taiji... Besides, even the name foreshadows some imminent problems with this system... Would you practice something that calls itself "Christians For Jesus Worship" or "Einstein Is Related To Relativity Theory!?" Taijiquan is a taoist martial art by default. Any taijiquan system that calls itself "taoist" implies that there are other taijiquan systems that are not?.. This is inherently bogus.

Hi Kate, glass jars are good, especially for the "stinky" stuff and anything powdered or otherwise finely textured. Whole uncut herbs can be stored successfully in paper bags (not plastic) for a rather long time provided your storage space is dark and dry. The most expensive ones (like high grade ginseng) are traditionally wrapped in silk or velvet and stored in wooden boxes. Herbs you store need to be examined periodically for any possible pests. I had a whole batch of Korean Angelica eaten to dust within a month of purchase by some Korean insect whose eggs or larvae or whatever must have been present there. I stored it in a glass jar though so the insect didn't get to any of my other herbs.

I'm sure there's hordes of high-priced scamsters out there, and I have sympathy for you and everyone else who's been burned. I've been lucky so far -- never ripped off by a master, never given a useless practice "available elsewhere for a fraction of the cost..." In fact I never sought a master or a practice till circumstances somehow came together to make it a clear and logical step to take... and if I couldn't afford it, circumstances would conspire again so I could. But then, I have never undertaken a study of a taoist practice without consulting the I Ching first. It's also true that some of the best stuff out there is free, but not really... you have to invested into something (yourself? the who you are?) by some other means to get it. E.g., on occasion I got some high priced stuff for free because I gave something first... and gave it just because I could, not because I expected a business transaction.

---Moderator's note--- TheTaoBum will take a little break from posting.

Most of the famous and authentic older Chinese masters who teach today spent most of their lives in the kind of poverty most people in the West would have trouble even imagining. They buried friends and family who died of hunger. They preserved authentic ancient arts in the midst of a life of back-breaking labor, ideological pressure, and political danger that could translate into a prison term, a forced labor camp, or worse. Times have changed and now their chance has come to get rewarded even though when they did what they did for the preservation of the taoist tradition they didn't think of rewards at all. No one becomes an authentic master who starts out with an explicit goal and a step-by-step plan for "making a shitload of money." But if money should come later as a side effect... how can a master be blamed for "grasping Time by the tail, not letting it pass you by" just as the classics advise him?.. People tend to see only one side of the story -- "it's too expensive for me, and therefore something is wrong with it." The other side, however, is, "every single thing you had by the time you were four years old used to be too expensive for the master at the time he was forty." Is it or is it not true that most of us are too poor to afford a seminar given by a master who used to be too poor to afford a steamed bun?.. It is! So I think a high-priced master who teaches to high-maintenance spiritual seekers is -- yup, a karmic investment for them to make. If it doesn't hurt, it doesn't relieve the karma.

What I meant was, it will make you rich and famous -- look what it did for The Beatles! But seriously... no, don't just sit through it. The shaking is not the problem in and of itself unless it is brought about by a strained, misaligned position -- which is likely since you mention backache! -- this you absolutely don't want in a lotus, half lotus, or any cross-legged position. Zero tolerance! Back pain in any such position means you are doing damage to yourself. I would suggest a meditation in a chair with a straight back instead -- until that's comfortable, don't go cross-legged. If you don't have anyone live to adjust the position, get BK Frantzis's book (someone remind me which one please -- The Great Stillness or Relaxing Into Your Being?) which has pictures and thorough explanations as to how to do it right. Also, I would do some stretching routine or other on the side -- there's been plenty of material posted here in the Full Lotus and how to get there discussions, this will apply to a half lotus too.

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=3KOiITxwWIM

maybe I won't try to sleep on the ceiling, 'cause the blanket falls off

I've heard several things from reputable sources... 15 minutes of taiji fully metabolizes and neutralizes one cup of coffee. Goldenseal is toxic, and one doesn't take it on a regular basis for any reason -- only for 3--7 days as needed. Contrary to urban legends, tea, coffee, mate, and any other natural caffeine-containing brews (no relation to sodas from a can) do not raise baseline blood pressure even though they do raise it temporarily upon consumption, for about an hour. Too much liquid, however, does (another urban legend to flush down the drain, the one about 8 glasses of water for "everybody" in "any" weather and in "any" health condition), so if you drink too much of anything, including pure water, and notice effects on your baseline blood pressure, reduce your fluid intake. The best way to neutralize substances is by not taking them. If they are airborne, however, some Longmen practices (maybe others too, but this is the one I'm familiar with) train you to regulate the intake of air, including through your skin.

It's a very solid and hope-giving approach, to refuse to get depressed not via happily hiding one's head in the sand (in the officialdom, distractions, denial, Prozac... wherever one finds enough sand to stick one's head in while sticking one's oh so vulnerable butt out... the vulnerability of this pose is what makes it less than appealing to me...) -- yeah, to refuse to get depressed WITH maximum alert awareness of the goings-on, DESPITE absorbing and analyzing information rather than deflecting it like some wound-up bounceback machine... is the ticket... or at least the closest thing to a ticket worth buying. Instead of depression... hmm, I can only see cultivation as a chance to beat the earthquake machine... maybe not enough... but I want to give it a shot because none of the alternatives really seem worthwhile. To pretend nothing is wrong? Bah humbug. To get depressed? What does THAT accomplish?

This sounds extremely interesting to me, thanks. What you mention above briefly seems to have very strong parallels with what I've been shown in the shamanic process in Peru. Water reality of which multiple versions exist simultaneously -- but more than that -- ours is a "trickle down reality" from one of them -- but I can't really explain what I saw beyond just these words. It was literal. A trickle down reality -- every one of these words means exactly what I saw. As for the Five Phases theory, DNA-based life in the universe is fundamentally of the Wood phase, Wood being born of Water. Makes sense to be a trickle-down reality of a Water multiverse if you're DNA-based. Of course there's other life forms -- the ones derived from the Wood phase are Fire life forms, afreet and angels and assorted light beings and such, Fire being born of Wood. Which is why we're in so much trouble in our Fire-Dryness-Deforestation-Upward-striving pyramid of a world: in terms of the Five Phases, we (Wood, life on earth) are ruled by our Wuxing children (Fire, the phase energetically and sequentially derived from Wood, all father-in-heaven or otherwise heaven/dematerialization/light/the Sun/electricity/economies running on combustible fuel/discorporation-worshiping religions and so on ad nauseam) instead of by our Wuxing mother (Water). This is why it's such a puerile endeavor... serious dimensions ignore us because we've put the cart before the horse (or someone put it there for us, don't know for sure if we did it to ourselves but seriously doubt it), which is a fast and sure way to get nowhere. The dimension She showed me looked as though we are merely a by-product of their operations, something they eliminate from their reality, the way we take a leak. It was as terrifying to behold as it was incomprehensible and unforgettable. I'll have to deal with this picture carved into the very retina of my mind's eye for the rest of my life trying to approach it on some human terms... but I've digressed far... As for chakras, a taoist has none, so I dunno... We have the Five Shens though, comprising the Great Shen, and MK-ultra conditioning seems to be removing or damaging all of them -- most of Hun, nearly all of Zhi, parts of Po definitely... and of course the Heart Shen... Yi appears strong in them but it's a tunnel-vision kind of strength... Pretty horrible overall.