Taomeow

Thanks, CowTao/ I do have a taoist altar, but the god of fire wants to live in the stove. On the altar I have gods who wanted to be there. (Including two buddhist deities, one of which is represented by a statue sitting in full lotus holding hands in the Red Phoenix mudra exactly as taught by Max. This buddha, of superb quality, showed up at the thrift shop next door when I started practicing kunlun and RP. I had never seen one like him before, but after I bought the statue, I researched and found out that he's the Sevenfold Buddha actually, comprized of himself and seven others, a very important guy. Kunlun introduced us... ) Thank you, Captain Obvious.

Exactly! Now in China before "historic materialism" (a term of Marxist philosophy describing what people are expected to be guided by philosophically, which proclaims all spirits, demons, deities, etc., harmful capitalist tools of exploitation), this kind of dating was done by arrangement, much like human dating: you didn't just go out and date "anybody," your parents consulted a taoist fortune teller and chose your prospective match. Now comes modern dating where you get into something, you don't know what you're getting into, could be good, could be bad... and spirit communication that some practices make possible follows the same line of unpredictability. Not just with Kunlun. It's just that with Kunlun it's like going to a party -- someone might start hitting on you -- vs. going to a library with a zen sitting, e.g. -- you might meet your date there too, but the whole atmosphere is less frisky, so chances are lower. Taoists (and if a village had none, buddhists) were the ones who dealt with spirits professionally, and their task was to screen out whatever "dates" you may have picked up in the spirit world who you didn't intend to "marry." The easiest and most immediate method for seeing spirits, ghosts, etc. is to sprinkle powdered rhinoceros horn into a burning fire. Taoists specializing in exorcism and ghostbusting (a major source of income for wandering taoists of old, who usually carried a bit of that powder, a gourd for trapping spirits, and other tools of the trade) mixed it into candle wax and used these special candles for the purpose. Interestingly, this was also a remedy for asthma. Probably has something to do with spirits stealing breath. Of course rhinoceros is currently endangered, like pretty much everything else. Otherwise anyone visited by anything in kunlun could easily find out what or who the visitor really is. There would be many surprises... A lay person's method for removing lesser spirits from the house is to offer alcohol to the god of fire living in the hearth in every home (in a modern home, in the stove...) I do it so as to keep him (it's a he) happy -- when he's satisfied he will keep spirits that steal nutrients from the food you cook from doing so. Mine likes tequila.

Right... It happened everywhere, but in Australia it was still in full swing incredibly recently -- didn't they take away aboriginal children from their parents by force to get them "civilized" till, like, the 70s of the 20th century? God only knows how much an original culture retains of what it used to have after it was so thoroughly dismantled. While we're on the subject... My mother always tells the story of how an uneducated, illiterate old peasant woman in Siberia once saw her give me a pill when I was sick with a cold or something, and asked her with genuine surprise, "THIS is going to make a child healthy?.. THIS?.." She asked her to show her the pills, sniffed at them, turned them around this way and that way, took a little bite -- and all the while was marveling: "THIS?.. Makes a child healthy?.. You give THIS to a little girl to make her healthy?.." My mother told me she thought the woman was unbelievably ignorant -- and now she believes it's the other way around, it was she who was unbelievably ignorant.

Do you practice with your eyes closed?

Down under might be reversed -- water knows best! What do aborigines say? Left-handed for a man is a cultivation bonus, methinks. Intent that goes against sacred geometry loses hands down, I'm afraid.

It's like the light bulb. If you want to screw it in, you spin clockwise, for energy release. If you want to screw it out, you spin it counterclockwise, for energy conservation. Spirals going clockwise release energy. Good for cleansing/detox/release/heal others/hurt others (if that's what you're releasing) purposes. Spirals going counterclockwise take it in. Good for absorbing/increase/store/take from others (whether the good stuff or the bad stuff you're taking) purposes.

Too true. The universe exists as the outcome of an act of courage, and expects us to learn this and only this. Nothing is possible without it. Love is feckless, wisdom is toothless, consciousness is nonexistent if courage is not their method.

You were speaking in a "for the masses" style, i.e. in generalities -- how irresponsible it "generally" is to expose children to something unsafe... I was ranting "to the masses" in generalities about the same thing... but from the perspective of my own unregistered trademark: "Choose your battles wisely and courageously."

I wouldn't want parents with small children to expose them to 32 life-destroying vaccines by age 2. Are you up to fighting THIS demon with me? Why is it that institutionalized demons get such unanimous support, while stray ones, such tough opposition? I've seen billions of children exposed to the most horrible demons by their parents on a daily basis. Why not target these? Petrochemicals in their food, water and air are demons. Water with fluoride and chlorine and recycled drug-laces piss but without magnesium and other life-supporting trace minerals in it is a demon. Mercury and immunity-scrambling critters that never get into the blood stream unless someone injects them are demons injected into every child 32 times by age 2. Electromagnetic pollution is a demon. Cell phone radiation is a demon. Antibiotics for common cold that destroy angels of the gut (beneficial bacteria) are demons. No safe environment to let the child out to play is a demon. Cars that kill children at the rate of 2,000 daily are demons. Carpets that release carcinogens into their rooms are demons. Their little formaldehyde-treated fire-retardant treated beds that cause brain damage are demons. TV is a demon. Videogames are demons. Mom who works full time and is never there is a demon. Dad who passed legislation making it economically unavoidable is a demon. Why not fight some of them? Oh... because they are too strong, that's why. Besides, they have a stellar reputation, corporations producing them say they are really angels, and of course we believe it because media and disinformation and lies are a demon we all gladly obey. All these demons already possess all our children, so we might as well accept and embrace them. But we still need to prove to ourselves that there's something out there we have enough courage and indignation to fight so as to save our children. Kunlun to the rescue!! Let's fight the demons of kunlun, the ones that are not protected by our laws! They're fair game, since bigger and scarier ones -- well, WE are fair game for the bigger and scarier ones, but we're OK with that as long as we can take our revenge on something... anything... To protect our children of course, why else? Everything we do is soooo protective of our children... I have tears of joy in my eyes just thinking about how wonderfully protective of our children we as a society are...

Too true... sigh... too true.

Here's another perspective. John is a nice guy. Nice all around, never gets angry. We all know John and we love him for it. John also knows John, or so he thinks, and he knows he never gets angry. Everybody knows that, nobody knows WHY. Why does John never get angry? Maybe because he's a boddhisattva. Maybe because nothing ever happened in his life to warrant anger. Nothing whatsoever, ever. It's always perfect, nothing to ever get angry about. Or maybe because he was never allowed to get angry when he was a child. Parents have a way to manipulate children into suppressing the feelings that are troubling to them, to the parents that is. Some do it roughly, with prohibitions and punishments, and others do it gently, with subtle messages that cause John to understand very early on that mommy and daddy won't love him if he gets angry, that to be loved and accepted, he has to be a nice guy. Always. Regardless of what he's really feeling. "Bad" feelings are not supposed to be felt by John. Much less made visible, expressed directly. God forbid! So if something is happening that causes little John to feel angry, he has two options. He can go ahead and feel, "I'm ANGRY!" and express it. That's going to be natural and healthy, and anger, once released, will be gone from John's subtle body without a trace. But wait... if he chooses this option, then mommy and daddy won't love him. Or worse, they will HATE him, didn't they show him, whenever he tried to express anger, that they hate him for this?.. Didn't they make it clear?.. So then how about option number two: John needs mommy and daddy to love him, and anger that is interfering with this need -- let's pretend it's not there, Let's push it away somewhere. Let's not feel it. Let's smile and be nice. And anger, why it isn't even MY anger, I'm not feeling it, I'm feeling fine. Always. Because I'm a nice guy, see, and if I'm always feeling fine and never get angry, everybody loves me. Oh but anger had to go somewhere, right? It was going to go out and be gone, but it's not allowed, so it has to pretend it doesn't exist... it's a ghost... a ghost of a feeling... with all of its energy pent up and stored intact, none of it released... Where is it stored? What shape and form will it take there? What will happen to the next few million of its peers, Jonh's feelings that John refused to own because he was taught to disown them?.. Just curious... Then John grows up and now he has a son of his own, Jim. Jim is a nice guy. Jim never gets angry, because he is so young and perceptive that he can feel that whenever he gets angry, it hurts his dad, because his dad also needed this to be an option but was never allowed to be angry, so he had to stash all his anger away and it's right there, in the tense inflexible body, in the tired, cautious eyes, in the smile his mouth produces while his upper cheeks say "pain, not pleasure..." Jim perceives all of it, and sees how it reminds "something" or "somebody" in daddy, some ghost... ...what happened to him when he was a little boy. And this reminder hurts him. So Jim won't get angry either, because he doesn't want to hurt daddy. He will be always nice. Just like daddy. How terrible is a practice that can cause daddy to start losing the numb ways in which he has to function so that the demons he'd collected won't be disturbed and displeased? And how terrible would it be if Jim didn't start out growing up "just like daddy"? Oh, horrible. We have such a nice, wonderfully functional world. No more than 93% of its population live in pain and misery. Why rock the boat?.. Why risk losing this comfortably numb unconscious state, why do anything that might God forbid bring it to consciousness?.. Let's only practice whatever supports the way things are. And it's not kunlun, obviously.

Nice, thanks! The book would have a chapter on relationships and then other chapters on wuxing principles applied to choosing a diet, a practice, a business investment, and so on. Choosing partners by feeling is what most of us do, but the feeling takes the path of least resistance -- e.g. you go for the phase of qi it's easy for you to support, not the one that's hard to come by, but it's the one that's hard to get (because it's missing from your chart!) that you really need. So if I go with the feeling I go for Fire, because it's easy and natural for Wood (my phase) to be set on Fire... especially dry Wood (not enough Water or missing Water)... Likewise, Fire guys will be drawn to me because Wood is their nourishing phase... so the feeling part will be there, will be mutual -- and will be wrong. Surprise... but not really, because most marriages result from feeling and more than half fall apart, so feelings can mislead in more than half of all cases, while primal energies... hmm, never. Infamous indeed. Maybe I'll try combining them...

prove it, pretzel boy. Yay, seduction technology! It didn't occur to me, but then yes, of course, why not. I've seen situations where a chart is not balanceable bewteen two people and requires three or four (children) -- as in my own, where the children's Fire has to melt the father's Metal to get me some Water I need. I can't use my own Fire (though I have more than enough) because his Metal controls my Wood, whereas our children's proprietary Fire phase controls Metal, but incidentally they have a Water deficiency and Water controls their phase, which results in an interesting family scenario -- children must obey their mother but not their father for energies to run smoothly. Thanks to all prospective buyers, I love you and my New Years' resolution is growing stronger by the minute.

Thank you. The central concern of taoism is time. Much the way western sciences and Indo-European religions and philosophies alike have become proficient in studying and manipulating space, taoism dedicated its main efforts to studying and manipulating time. (Please nobody come back with any no-space no-time all-is-one advaita whacks on the head with scrolls of sutras, I don't discuss these subjects with houtian-based temporal beings. ) So where you find spacially based ideas of development ('evolving') in Indo-European practices (pyramid-like, fire-like, upward-mobile, "ascention"-oriented, from the "lower" to the "higher," from earth to heaven, from root chakra to crown chakra, from "lower" to "higher" vibrations, etc. etc. ad infinitum), you find temporally based ideas of development in taoist practices (flowing-water-like, loopy, "to and fro goes the Way," cyclical, "the way of tao is return," from Conception to Growth to Fruition to Consummation back to Conception, etc., from the "earlier" to the "later" -- as in Earlier Heaven and Later Heaven -- and back, from wuji to taiji to bagua to the 64 hexagrams of which No. 63 is called "already accomplished" but No.64 following it is called "not yet accomplished!") All Indo-European ones (whether religious, philosophical or scientific in their application of these spacial concerns) can be viewed as one system because they all follow the same paradigm. All East Asian ones originating in Chinese taoism can also be viewed as one system, a different one, because they all follow the same temporal paradigm. And then there's the crosses-between, e.g. zen or Tibetan dzogchen which partake of both Indo-European -- buddhist -- and East Asian -- taoist -- input. So, practical methods used by each of these two major post-shamanic systems will differ accordingly. To understand taoist alchemy, one has to understand this crucial space-derived vs. time-derived set of concerns first, otherwise the tools for assessing the goals of the practice in context won't be there from the start and one will wind up not actually knowing, despite "believing something about," what it is she is in fact practicing and why. Wait, my cat is eating my New Year's cake, gotta run rescue it... later...

actually, jing to chi to shen is kundalini, and shen to chi to jing is taoist alchemy... Ice and cream combined produce ice floating in cream. Ice cream is made differently.

Seeing is believing. I saw Max show a simple but tao-revealing gesture to illustrate what you're talking about, Winpro. He started spinning an index finger in the air and said, see, tao is spinning like that... and then he brought his other index finger into the "field" of "tao spinning" and boom -- it collides and is deflected. "Resistance." He showed the approach this way and that way and the other finger is thrown off. So then he started imitating what the first one is doing with the second one, spinning it in the same manner in the opposite direction. Brought them together, and they started spinning and dancing around each other, creating a sideways 8, a loop of immortality, as they go. Anyone can do that?.. Just two fingers not resisting each other's movement?.. If you can, you've arrived at a place where alchemy can start. If you can't, whatever you're doing is betraying your body and your subtle body, do something else.

It's vice versa -- these entities (not "high level practitioners" but demons your upbringing taught you to create in your subtle bodies) keep stealing your subtle energy on a continuous lifelong basis while you're not aware of their existence, and stop doing so only if your practice brings their existence into consciousness and you face them and fight and conquer them. Sure, the ones that are made visible by the very practice designed to bring them to light can then be treated as someone else's contribution; to refuse to own up is very human. The ones that become actually in-transition, from their hiding place in your subtle body into the glaring obviousness into your everyday life, can then be exorcised by talismanic magic, the way you chose to go about it. Why not. I'm a big fan myself. Problem is, talismanic magic which you're offered by someone else is like "here, take this pill" offered by a doctor. The symptoms of this particular flare-up will be gone. The disease, no. A practice that manifests demons is to be viewed as a practice of how to become healthy instead of taking pills. Most people believe a disease is someone else's fault (a virus, a bacterium, a worm stealing your energy) and take pills. Some believe a disease is your creation (a lifetime of junk put into your subtle body) and will keep truckin' till the junk is removed. To each their own. ShaktiMama is right, by the way -- this is the process encountered in ANY deep-reaching practice. Absolutely any one of them. Read Gopi Krishna, the foremost kundalini authority, on the subject of the demons of kundalini. Read Swami Muktananda on the demons of the Hindu devotional guru practices. Read Stanislav Grof's "Spiritual Emergency." Don't underestimate your power.

Um... I can only judge what I saw and experienced, and "judge" is not quite the word... you get a different kind of perceptions from Her, trans-human for lack of a better word, so explaining a trans-human "judgement" in human terms is a bit like explaining a symphony to someone deaf from birth. So the question "who's to judge" is like asking, well, say you hear Beethoven's No.9 and your deaf buddy hears nothing, who's to judge?.. Beethoven himself was deaf but he could hear his music even when he was deaf because he hadn't always been deaf. If he had always been deaf, he would never even know what music was. Ayahuasca merely eliminates, temporarily, certain kinds of "deafness, dumbness and blindness" from our perceptions, but until/unless they had been eliminated even once, there's no sharing the experience with anyone who never had it. By the same token, once you've had it, you can "judge" to the same extent that Beethoven could compose even after his hearing was gone. HE's the judge of what "Beethoven's music" is, an absolute authority. Ayahuasca makes you such an authority on whatever She puts you in touch with -- absolute. No overruling it... regardless of whether it can be shared with others and agreed on by someone else. Hard to explain... So, to your animal question... See, the way space and time are really arranged, you are animals and animals are you, there are no real cut-off lines anywhere, only dimensional shifts of aspects of your existence... it's just that animal aspects and human aspects of the same entity occupy different... um, don't know what to call it... OK, realities, different space-time/mutual-access realities. My scientific, anti-spiritual in this-here reality husband is really a bear, and a bear-shaman, and a bear-king -- not "was once" but "is now" but it's a different kind of "now..." I didn't know that. I was shocked out of my mind but at the same time the bear connection explained to me pretty much everything, I mean every single thing I never understood, about all of his current "now" human personality... and to this day, due to this having been shown to me, I understand him better than I ever did in the whole history of our long and tempestuous marriage. So... things like that. Animals are us. It's hard to explain, I have to repeat, but none of it is really important to understand. There's only one thing important to understand. DO NOT ABUSE POWER. Anyone who gets that, don't have to worry his or her lil' head none about none of the rest of it... That's the cosmic jackpot. Hit it and enjoy the most mind-blowing universe of meaning, love, beauty and justice way beyond your wildest dreams. Miss it... Ouch.

Not really, because absorbing negative energy for one's own benefit and healing out of love and compassion are different things. (See, I know my cat. I know what love is. I could put two and two together.) There's many messed-up cats out there of course who "don't give a shit," but they are messed up by humans. All the "vaccinations" plus spaying/neutering plus the corn, rotten protein, and addictive chemicals sold for commercial cat food will mess up a cat, no question. But an unmolested cat is a healer with free will, among other things.

and what am I, chopped liver? I would be interested to find out HOW the gifted astrologer is going to do it -- will he/she talk shop with me?

Well, I can answer that because She took me on a journey through several types of death (surprise -- there's several, not just one...) To explain, I have to bring up Her main lesson to me repeated on many examples, from the lowest life forms to the sentient beings in dimensions that generate ours. The lesson was, Do Not Abuse Power. So, basically, She showed me that the only suffering and the only horrible death comes as a result of some form of abuse of power, not of use of power. A most important distinction. So a wolf who kills a sheep to eat it because that's what a wolf eats is using but not abusing power, and suffering and horrible death don't result, what results is a path -- for the sheep -- into somewhere I don't know what can or cannot happen for the sheep next because I didn't have a chance to investigate (what happened for me was, the shaman spotted that I'm in that world and made a bridge of smoke and sound to show me the way back.) But then when people "eradicate" wolves because it's been our habit to "eradicate" all species that might have some power (and enslave the ones that have none) -- that's abuse of power, and that creates a different kind of death, a horrible one. The interesting part being that the abusers of power get to a place that's the worst kind of death I've seen, a hell of sorts but not the burning hell but a customized one, where everything you ever did that abuses power is done to you by all the demons your actions had created. This is a superficial description of course, but the first thing I knew after visiting that place was that there's nothing in the world worth abusing power for, considering you will have to experience the receiving end of the process... and there's no information I have as to the 'proportions' -- demons grow by themselves in certain fertile soils, so a minor abuse of power is not guaranteed to produce minor repercussions, it can grow huge and vicious and want nothing but do the only thing it knows how -- the very thing YOU taught it how to do when you created it! -- only now it wants to do it to YOU, and there's no reasoning with it as to the "fair" proportions of the ricochet action... I kid you not. Oh, and the way you know it's all REAL is, you recognize those demons. They are not anonymous. You just see what you actually did do -- magnified and embodied and turned around against you. No way. 99% of it was a shocking surprise, and went against any and all beliefs I ever had.

Thank you, Little1, cool! In this situation I would be able to reconstruct some of it by asking many questions, but it would still be an approximation. There's other methods that can be used when natal info is not available, but all of them would have to be used in person -- palm and face reading, body markings reading, etc..

A lot of anti-cat propaganda out there... they used to say the same thing about women, children, black people, Asians, Jews... Cats are in good company. Smile posted links to research that I didn't look at right meow but I saw it before and remember that the purring frequency of cats (the same for all cats) is exactly what's needed to mend broken bones and heal a lot of other conditions. Cats are natural healers and purring, a scientifically documented healing tool they use, one of many.

When there was long illness in my family, our cat who usually, year after year, spent all her summer days outdoors chasing wild mice, moles, squirrels, the neighbors' cats, and all kinds of cat fun, didn't leave the sick person's bed for the whole duration of the summer. Even the closest relatives and friends would pay a visit and then leave, but the cat was always there, just sitting unobtrusively in the corner of the bed and "being there." She would leave the room to have some food a couple of times a day, and then be back in the corner of the bed, taking a compassionate nap, making herself available 24/7 to being mostly ignored (no one paid much attention to her at that time), asking for nothing, giving everything.

Thanks, Steam! You just gave me an idea... I used to do bazi charts and give relationship advice (among other things) based on the five phases analysis, but it was often frustrating for me because I can't really tell people to dump each other in a current relationship, now can I?.. even though the chart reveals that they are pretty much killing each other, qi-wise?.. An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure... so I was thinking dating service, but there's some basic taoist education involved before anyone would really get interested?.. So I woke up today thinking, I could write a book on practical everyday applications of the five phases theory to pretty much everything, and dedicate a chapter to dating/relationships. I could explain how to do-it-yourself it so that the process of practical application is as straightforward as Witch's "take this and this amount of fish oil" -- well, maybe a little different... but I think I could make it fun... So now my New Years' resolution can be writing this book in the next three months... but everybody else's New Year's resolution would have to be buying it?..