Taomeow

I'm not sure why you equate what I was talking about -- "aggression and destruction" -- with "rationalist thinkers." You like to think of Western civilization as a bunch of rationalist thinkers, while I notice something else about it -- not what it "thought," but what it actually "did" to everybody who wouldn't get in line. It's just a matter of what you're paying attention to and what you're ignoring. I don't care if the perpetrator of genocide is a rationalist thinker. What matters to me is, how come his thinking, whatever it happens to be, has resulted in genocide?.. What came first, the rationalist thinking or mass murder? Which is utilized to support which?.. or are they two sides of the same coin?.. I pay attention to questions like this one, is all. And so I get answers that might seem unexpected to someone who already has all the answers... the ones supplied by someone who is actually a mass murderer but prefers to call himself (and has taught you to call him) a "rationalist thinker." I didn't say rational thinking is "just bunk." I said something different. What I did say was that your definitions of "bunk," "crazy," and "nonsense" have all been supplied by the aggressor who has destroyed all societies for which these definitions were different. So these different opinions are not available to you in any shape or form other than from a "poisoned well." It is a fact of history, not my personal opinion. So you assert performing a home exorcism is crazy. And I assert you are being a "repeater" of what you've been told, is all, and what you've been told was told by the party with many ulterior motives. While a taoist performing such a ritual is not relying on hearsay, he or she is relying on the kind of sensory (sic) perceptions and mental (sic) comprehension not available to a "repeater." Wisdom has nothing to do with it; it's a matter of what you've been trained to perceive and allowed to believe. I don't claim greater wisdom, I claim greater range of perceptions resulting from "waking up," and a smaller range of "permission" in what I believe (e.g., I don't allow myself to believe anything from any institutionally co-opted source anymore. I will check them out, I will put them to a test, I will cross-examine the evidence, I will draw my conclusions to the best of my ability... but believe them?.. Nah, I'm not that gullible anymore...)

Well, there's a history, as long as that of cross-polination between taoism and Buddhism, of their both cooperating and clashing. A direct slight to Buddhism by a taoist is not a modern idea at all, nor is it Western. At least one source I'm relying on for making this assertion: "My Country and My People," by Li Yutang (translator, linguist, novelist, philosopher, and inventor of the Chinese typewriter, which was thought of as impossible before he invented it). In this absolutely delightful and insightful book (written in the 1930s) which I think every Westerner should read who wants to begin to understand things Chinese, he cites a classical poem by a Chinese Buddhist nun expressing profound hatred of Buddhism , just to illustrate the range of attitudes present in the society. (Traditional taoists gave a much harder time to Confucians though, whom, according to Li Yutang, they compared to "bugs crawling along a straight line ironed into someone's pants.")

Ours is a trickle-down reality. Whoever understands this, understands the world of spirits. If you notice what's going on in this-here world -- really notice -- you get an accurate picture of what's going on in the world of spirits. As above, so below. Practices that force one to notice the demons are not attracting the demons anymore than driving on the highway attracts drunk drivers. If you never drive nor get rides from anyone, you may never encounter any drunk drivers. If you never live consciously, you may never encounter any demons. Consciousness is not such a bargain after all. It's not bliss, it's just the truth. Watch The Matrix once again?..

The trick is called anti-martiarchy, anti-femininity, anti-Mother, Father-dominated culture. "Pure yang" is its theoretical baby.

Taoism predates Laozi et al by thousands of years. Shamanism, from which it directly originates and smoothly flows, has dealt in metaphysical sense, not metaphysical nonsense, for tens of thousands of years at least, and according to some researchers, hundreds of thousands. Western civilization meticulously conquered and destroyed all shamanic cultures it could find on the face of the earth and, in the process of doing so, came up with many theoretical justifications for doing so. It denied these cultures any value precisely in justification of the pillage and plunder and theft and genocide unleashed upon them. The aggressor has always justified his aggression by belittling and ridiculing his victim and negating everything the latter stands for. You've been taught to do this from the get-go by any and all sources made available to you by the winning aggressor. Me too. But I woke up. Some of the other "gullible Westerners," ditto. Hope this answers your question.

Well, Eva Wong whose translation I cited is indeed a practicing, lineage taoist. (Song Yong Dao asserts she's taken some liberties with her translation; are you asserting he's taken some with his? But you've taken some with English while expressing this thought and yet I understand you! ) Useful things can be used without being understood in depth. I don't understand computers in any depth at all, but I use one daily. Most of your clients don't understand your Fu, yet benefit from them?.. Reading the writings of the Immortals in an imperfect translation does not equal being born into a taoist lineage, of course. English and Chinese, indeed, do not overlap very often. If reading imperfect translations (or perfect originals for that matter) is the only thing a person does, he or she is not practicing taoism, of course, but rather, getting a whiff, the flavor, a point of view... I got a sense that the Immortals Chung and Lu are strict disciplinarians, e.g., from reading the book. This might clash with the prevalent Western idea of taoism being a "just be" easy ride, with a popular but erroneous "anything goes, it's all good, it's all tao" point of view. So I think it's useful for some to get the original flavor from a good source, even if it's nothing more. What's cooking, steak or cake?.. or a bitter herbal decoction to cleanse one's brains?.. Just a whiff will tell... the rest is for those who get really hungry, and learn to cook by cooking, not by reading the cook book. Obviously my words mean something else entirely, yet you understand what I mean, right?..

It is my understanding that not "all" Buddhists practice incorrectly -- only those who belittle, disown, despise, or neglect the body and all its multiple normal natural needs that aren't reducible to "quiet sitting," and those who belittle, disown, despise, or neglect their human mind, and those who belittle, disown, despise, or neglect the human nature of humans in general and their own humanity in particular... If they do that on whatever theoretical grounds, it's ghostland, man... Gautama Buddha himself learned it the hard way! -- but he learned... it's amazing how many of his followers manage to skip over that particular lesson... gotta run, more later...

Well, it means learning taoism from moving the taijiquan way. You start learning the form when you're a kid, and all you're learning is how to move, how to master the naturalness and intelligence of your own body. You perfect the way you move for a few years. While you're at it yin and yang are mentioned, and their interactions are pointed out to you as you move, so that they become obvious and personal rather than abstract and theoretical. Then, a bit later, qi is mentioned -- same thing, you only start dealing with it once it's obvious and personal to you due to the way you've learned to handle and "hear" your body and those of others (via push-hands). Then meridians, dantiens, same thing. Emptiness and Fullness. Heaven and Earth. Movement and Stillness. The Five Phases and the Eight Directions. And so you keep going deeper and deeper into the theory of taoism without ever separating it from the practice, even for a second. You get to learn things taoist from doing them the taijiquan way. What you're doing is learning to "ti taiji" -- embody taiji. Taiji's mom is tao. When you embody taiji, your relationship with tao is immediate and personal, rather than third-party-mediated and abstract.

http://dmt.tribe.net/photos/6c20d58b-815e-...6e-6e4d8c34bbb0

Here's another one I heard in RL: "Hi. This is not an answering machine. This is a questioning machine. And the questions are: Who are you? and What do you want? Think carefully before responding... remember... most people leave this planet without ever having answered these questions. Beeeep!"

Think of it this way... Your ability to read -- is it real or imaginary? Where's the organ of reading? The energy of reading? The metabolism of transformation of lifeless black lines and curves on a page into meaningful live thoughts, capable of showing you real-life events and objects and the imaginary ones too and what-not? And, hmm... the eye-mouth connection that makes it possible to read aloud -- where is it, what is it made of? Could one see this organ of eye-mouth interaction upon dissecting the reader's dead body? Dantiens are a lot like that. We are full of "stuff" that is like that. TCM knows what to do with this elusive "stuff.' It looks at things like "organ-system-function" phenomena. A function may be the cause or the effect or the concurrent action of many organs and systems -- reading is one such function, using a dantien, another. There's thousands more, both actualized (some) and potential (most). So are they "real?" or "imaginary?" Can't be one without the other. You have to imagine that the letter A will represent the sound A and the letter M, the sound M before you can create the organ-system-function interface that will produce "MA" out of 7 straight lines going up-down and diagonally and across. Then you can double them up and read your first word -- "mama." There's no mama in those lines, really -- and yet there is, if she sends you a postcard and signs it with these lines, she'll have sent you her presence. Real or imaginary?..

Far as my understanding goes, 99.99999% of such experiences (yes, including the ones with kunlun, but as your recent encounter illustrates, not limited to any one modality) are the outcome of a normally unconscious/dormant/repressed somatosensory memory of an early actual event having been activated. All practices that engage the bodymind in "non-ordinary" ways are capable of activating such memories. The body remembers all sensations, feelings, emotions it has ever lived through from the very beginning of its existence; the current mind, which doesn't, will typically do its best to supply a current interpretation so as to rationalize the inexplicable out-of-context feeling (energies, aliens, angels, demons, take your pick) -- unless it connects to the actual memory. In which case demons or angels might turn into parents or doctors, "energy beings" into brothers and sisters, snakes and aliens into uncles and aunts, and invisible fingers into real-life ones. This understanding of mine is a very unpopular idea, every time I tried to express it someone threw something heavy. (duck) I'm not saying angels and demons and energy beings and aliens and ghosts aren't real. Indeed, in .00001% of cases they are the ones responsible for the sensations.

By the way, my young cat occasionally does kunlun in his sleep. The left hind leg mostly. According to Max, it means his yin energy needs balancing.

(quote -- Freeform) My opinion on Kunlun is that firstly it opens you up to see what is there already. The transmission makes you into a kind of lightning rod, attracting to you whatever is needed for you to ascend... that includes all the good and bad stuff that needs to be processed and whatever help and assistance that you must receive So is mine. Very consistent with my own experience.

The most valid point of the article, toward the end, states that taoism is undergoing the same process of transformation in the West as it already did in China earlier: from elitist to mass-produced. Indeed. To this, I might add that it is still possible for a Chinese to peruse the "elitist" aspects of taoism today, not the mass-produced ones, if he or she is so inclined; as well as it is for a Westerner who so chooses. The Chinese didn't have this option thirty, forty, fifty years ago; neither did the Westerners. Now both do... haleluja. Incidentally, currently there's fewer Chinese taoists of true lineage in China than in the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe, etc.. (That is, if we don't count the Communist party functionaries appointed as taoist priests and nuns at places like Wudang and Maoshan for tourist attraction and/or political face-saving.) I have several Chinese friends and acquaintances -- one of them a devout and messianically inclined Christian, another one a yoga-savvy follower of Hinduism, the third one an agnostic, the fourth one -- well, a taoist who rediscovered taoism when a Buddhist sage he went to see in India told him to read the Tao Te Ching... I kid you not! The morale of the story? Figure it out...

Personally, I don't go to forums for advice -- not anywhere or anywhen except when I'm in the company of people who have studied professionally or otherwise in great depth something I didn't -- e.g., I'd go for advice to groups like Physics New Ideas (mostly peopled by professional physicists) and so on. There's no taoist forum currently in existence that is comprised of professional taoists. Kunlun forum is no exception. I tried to run a theoretical idea of mine there regarding the energy of kunlun, and discovered at a very early stage that I simply don't have a common frame of reference with anyone, so I just dropped it and limited my (very sporadic) activities to the personal practice section. Which is useful if you want to keep track of your own and others' practice dynamics. E.g., I learned -- without asking for advice specifically, without even knowing that it's something I need to ask about -- that whatever happens in the beginning is no indicator of how it might go a bunch of months down the road. Take Yoda. I seem to remember that he used to describe his kunlun experience as mild, nothing too intense going on... then wham -- something IS going on, and -- well, you know the rest of the story. So I'm thinking, Yoda's kunlun experience started earlier than mine, mine was never "mild" from the start, so -- what kind of advice should I be asking for?.. Who's equipped to give it?.. Nobody. Not even Max...

The whole idea that the responsibility for all the workings of the world lies with the individual is a re-interpretation into belief terms of certain parenting techniques in wide circulation. Children are made feel responsible for whatever is wrong in the family quite consistently, and they grow up with this idea of guilty responsibility all over their unconscious. Later they apply it to the world-as-stand-off-for-parents, and feel guilty and responsible for things that are absolutely not their doing, or alternatively, proud of things that are absolutely not their merit. (e.g., "proud to be a Frenchman, an American, a Japanese, a Zulu...") Another such common-parenting-derived belief system posits that this world is a school of sorts, that we're here to learn, and that whatever is wrong is the result of our lack of effort, talent, dedication to perfection and so on. This is common because children are schooled (and reprimanded or punished for failure, sometimes severely) from the start and the idea that the world is a school comes naturally to a mind conditioned in this manner early on and to an individual who grew up actually going to school every day for years and years. No imagination required, nor exploration -- just project your own conditioned mode of being onto the rest of creation. Another one from the same source: a belief system based on the idea that whatever happens that's bad is punishment for something bad you did in the past. You're eight, you catch a cold, mom says, didn't I tell you you'd get sick if you don't wear your jacket? Any kid who had heard this line of reasoning enough times (several million times, on all manner of occasions, while growing up) has no trouble buying any karma-based ideology. Oh, and what about psychotic abusive parents? Are they also the kid's fault? Why of course! You've chosen them yourself, didn't you? You're the one in control, remember? You chose exactly the parent you need so as to learn exactly what you need to learn. And so on. "I'm in control, have choices, have power" is the first line of defensive ideation for sooo many people stripped of ALL control growing up, having zero choices, having nil power over anything. Which makes this whole set of concepts a bit suspect to me. At the very least I wouldn't buy it on faith, without some heavy corroborating evidence... The Occam's razor shines too bright...

Trunk, thank you for being consistently real. Priceless.

Bingo. Have you seen my little DNA entry, lost somewhere in this never-ending thread?.. By the way, I've met beings from a lower frequency than mine too, as well as from a higher one. The lower ones, at least most of them, I understood, dreaded, and fought. But some of the higher ones... like, waaaaay higher... the ones who let our world be by a process I would describe as "trickle down existence" -- which won't tell much to anyone who hasn't seen the phenomenon and instead may cause some to wonder if I've lost my marbles -- these, I didn't understand... the level of their incomprehensibility overwhelmed me... and I ran. The moral of the story so far: communication outside your own element OR frequency is never easy.

and mine to you, mgd.

Not true in my case -- I've talked there about things I don't talk about here (and the only people who had objections are the ones who post here and there anyway and have objections against my existence wherever I meet them. Fortunately, they are fewer than two now, so I can live with that.) As for Skiff, he is no more Chief of Police than Chris is the Big Bad Wolf. Methinks you over-dramatize sometimes... ...and Winpro is right, 99% of kunluners don't post here. I've occasionally wondered if I might ultimately join them in this, since nearly everybody who's anybody is there anyway... that's "nearly," please nobody take offense... ...then again, someone I'd rather avoid might show up both here and there, and someone I'd rather seek might bail out of there but still be here, and someone who is never there is such a bonus to not have there that... you catch my drift. It's occasionally tempting to be neither here nor there, but then, I wind up both here and there, and this too shall pass... ...this too shall pass.

My teacher knows some very authentic folks who never left Chen village, in case taijiquan-'biased' taoism is what you're looking for. If you're interested, I'll ask him if they might be approachable to teach an outsider when I see him next week.

Yes, DNA-based life in the universe, that's the one specific thing I was talking about. That's the only kind of universal applicability I found. DNA-based life in the universe includes all humans (alive and dead and not born yet), all animals (current and extinct), all plants (ditto), all bacteria, all aliens (sic), gods, demons, and engineered semiartificial entities like androids and GM monsters. Oh, and all spirits too, since DNA is the Mother Spirit of it all. Indeed, it's nowhere near more universal than that.

Thank you, Seadog. Yes -- exactly. Power without compassion is the very definition of evil... Whereas compassion without power is... well, I'm reminded of an old rhyme: "Sympathy without relief is like mustard without beef."