Integrated

I personally don't like to think about tarot as a magical tool. I end up doing pretty much the same methods that magical oriented people do, but I classify it as a psychological tool. On the surface things seem mostly similar, but the subtle differences become bigger the deeper one goes. Not that one perspective/way is better than the other, just different paths with similar aims. Although with different trappings and different ways of looking at what is going on. I guess I'm too much of a materialist to be able to fully embrace it as magic. I have in the past delved into having a magical approach to the cards and elements. Burning spells, burrying them in the ground, scatter them in the wind and throwing them into bodies of water. At one level such actions are powerfully symbolic and does indeed have an impact on how one sees the issue. It is sort of like the extra work is a sacrifice to deepen the promise to oneself that the spell in many ways represent. In my view such symbols attach to the unconscious and drives one to syncronistically get to ones destination. It in many ways acknowledges the limits to our consciousness power. The ego does not like to be told it is not in charge, and sacrificing time, effort and material in a ritual, is a way to accept and submit to the inner forces that drives us, at least in the areas defined by the spell/promise.

It depends on the person really. If your psychic structure is constructed in a way that makes you need a group to orient you, then go join a formal group and get injected into a hierarchy where you can fight for position with others. Masochist and sadists alike have a lot of great opportunities for unfolding themselves there. Personally I don't operate well in hierarchies. So I keep on the fringes, always trying to spot traps that want to pull me into others sadistic structures. The bait is always alluring, but having access to the same material they pull upon to create those groups to begin with. I'm seldom impressed by their teachings, and find that the overhead of submitting, far outweighs the benefits. In fact all I need to do is triggers some of the higher members, and they will spill all the beans in defence of their little bubble of participation mystique. Beyond that, all that seperates someone good is practice...LOTS of practice.

So I joined this here forum and I even found a tarot section haha So I decided to lay a spread on what this whole new experience meant to me so far. I'm using the Modern Spellcaster deck. 1. Core issue There is a lot of arguments and colliding opinion on my entry here. 2. Crossing factor This is somewhat at odds with my original purpose to learn more about Nei-Gong. Though I have made headway on that too. 3. Visible factor I seem to be caught within some very narrow reactionary dichotomies, where I operate out of an either or solution to certain situations. 4. Hidden factor I have strengthened my willpower and resolve considerably lately. 5. Past influence I've been plenty of dark places, and have taken plenty of deep journeys already. Always finding something new to be disillusioned about. 6. Future ideal My ideal for the future is pretty realistic, you win some you lose some. 7. Me as I see myself I'm driven by a wish to compete, to put my own take on things first and damn all the rest of the blind fools. 8. As others see me Others see me as a newbie with a lot to learn. 9. Solution Keep gathering resources and power, that is all that people respect in the end. 10. Result The end result will be that I will find a way to take part in this community. This paints an interesting picture on the last couple of days.

Yeah, now that I know the lay of the land, I guess I can start and focus on the message and such. This whole thing took me on a little detour, but it was useful. Biggest takeaway about others: Biggest takeaway about myself: Now excuse me, I have some shadow work to do.

Heaven North and Earth South someone wrote in some book I read a long time ago. If their assertions are right, I do not know.

That is fine, will make sure not to name anyone I ignorelist from this point on.

Yes apparently even Taoist sages find use for mindgames through proxy-flamewars... It is how they develop their super detached attitude! Since people didn't come out and said it, I can only understand it as a supersecret training regimen. Makes sense since Grandmaster Windwalka wanted to recruit me with just such a setup in mind. From my point of view people who are ignored are more or less handicapped. If they want to shit on the person that ignored them, they need help to wipe their ass afterwards. In the beginning of a handicap, a lot of people are available for reasons of sympaty and pity. Four months down the road though when things turn bad, and they suffer from a severe case of diarrhea, good friends will be more hard to come by. Fighting a proxy-flamewar in the longterm is not really a viable strategy, but some like to think that slipping a message past "the line in the sand" means some sort of grand victory. Just as someone paralysed feels about managing to take a crap with minimal assistance.

I think Ken Wilber asserts that non-duality is consciously accessing the state of rem-sleep. Nothing in the world changes, it is just your perception of it. And apart from the impression it makes on your experience, you do not become radically changed by it. Just as sleep won't change you much, you wake up maybe in a better mood, but that is it. Your work, bills, friends and family will stay just the same when you "come back/wake up."

Good! Cause you are a funny guy, I'd hate to lose out on some of your jokes.

I'm somewhat of a spiritual/esoteric traveler. I like everybody else have my own take on what is what in the world of Taoism and the like. As much as one can have ones own view, being drowned in memes and archetypes. I join this place because I think it might be useful exchanging views with people here. I have experience with Tai-Chi, Nei-Gung, Ba-Gua, Tarot, Jung and many other subjects. I warn you though, that I have a heretical attitude, and don't care much for orthodoxy. If all you have to back up your claims is lineage truths or anecdotes that don't seem to make sense, then pardon me for not being convinced. I follow my own path with no strings attached, using my own spirit as a guide.

Yeah, not all styles are infused with a klanish attitude just like a fotball team, but most people project that attitude onto martial arts in general from watching movies and the like. I'm a part-time freelancer, and have my skills marketable under the mask of "Tai-Chi". Recently one of my fellow "consultent" at this project I'm hired to do, learned that I taught it, he soon came back the next day talking about this fitness center that apparantly taught it. He wanted to compare my teaching to that, even though I told him nothing except the Tai-Chi name and that I'm very pricey. Part of the price is just to keep all the misinformed yahoo's that want to learn from exploiting me. I can teach, but only the very specially interested and dedicated. I actually am quite pleased that I can discourage customers with my price. Anyway the long and the short of it was that he was trying to convince me that since I had competition, my prices was not right... I took a look at their website, and they called it "Balanced Energy" and had some weird mix of yoga, tai-chi and pilates. It was dumbed down and made into a neatly packaged consumer product. No internal value, no martial value, just regular excercise. Hehe, I remember when I was about 21-22 and had a few years of Tai-Chi practice, plus a few other martial arts skills installed. I met a kickboxer, a former "stormtrooper" from the Army and what passes for a Hillbilly in my country. Each of them taught me in their own way that even though I did well in certain scenarios and my forms, when put to the mettle in wrestling with the big bulky army guy, sparring with kickboxing gloves, or the hillbilly being uncooperative just for the hell of it, my art mostly failed. A fight is always messy, so ones skills need to be extreme to be able to compansate for it. That being said, the rare occation I for example threw the bulky army guy effortlessly to the ground, the look on his face was priceless.

Sure I understand, it will probably take me a little while to adjust to the atmosphere though. Might fill up my ignorelist a bit, with false positives, including the bad guys!

Didn't have surplus to address you, but now that the loud voices have quieted down I may. Yes I have learned a few things about setting boundaries already in this forum. Nothing like being thrown out on the deep end from the start. Though nothing could have prepared me for having to ignorelist someone in my welcome thread. Most forums have a very different attitude about the newbie section. I went to the forum/tech section and lo and behold, there was no order there either. Although now I was more prepared mentally. Not that there is anything wrong with it, I'm just habituated to another forum that has a more active modding staff. It matters little, I'm well equiped to switch people who don't want to behave, I even enjoy it.

Your inablity to take no for an answer, along with your denial of giving me a break. Leaves me to take the informed choice in taking a break from you. Until whatever time, I feel it is time, for those attachment lessons.

Hey guys! Since the first post felt more like a scammer/spammer/robot screening, I'll use this thread as a more indepth introduction, as in fact the introductory welcome hinted at. What brought me here was several things, one I dusted off one of my B. K. Frantzis books. Two I had already found a new forum for one of my other hobbies. Three my search engine bumped this site to the top when I searched for Nei gung Taoist forum. (Or something to that effect) I'm pushing myself through a very indepth psychic exercise at the moment, and I've noticed that one of the results is much more endurance and staying power in term of doing tasks on my todo-list. Hence I've started to add lost causes and hobbies that I just didn't have the spare energy for. One of them was Nei-gung, another is Ba-Gua. (Though I often struggle to fit Ba-Gua into the day, I may be at the limit of my newfound staying power) I've kept up the Tai-Chi more or less most of the time, but at a limited level only. I reasoned that at least I would have some of the health benefits if I stuck with it for a little while each morning. I first learned it back in 2000 and though I havn't practiced continually for that time, the dryspells havn't been too long. Especially not for the last 5 years. The fourth reason I came on here is that I have what I could only call severe blockages on my left side. Whenever I try to relax to do the water disolving thing, my left side shakes like crazy. It have two main centers, one around the left armpit, and one deep in my left buttcheek. Although the leg seems to have a secondary center on the inside of the thigh. Hence both my left arm and leg trash about alot if I try to relax and "feel chi". I've done experiements, and if I let either the arm or the butt do what they want, the muscle that is responsible for the trashing will actually tense into more or less a knot. Holding itself tensed until it becomes quite uncomfortable and tiring in only that muscle. When I let it go, by paradoxically not deeply relaxing, the muscle stops tensing immediately. When I do Tai-Chi it is a little different, there can sometimes be trashing, but when I go into relaxed mode there, the limb in question, especially the arm, becomes tense and almost like ice. In fact in Tai-Chi it is mostly the leg that trashes. It is as if I have to fight to get through the movements. But only if I try to "feel chi", if I just do the movements, I feel nothing and everything is seemingly okay. Western approach: My doctor calls it, Musculoskeletal pain and is always quick to mention painkillers and the like if I bring it up. A fysiotherapist suggested that my nerve might be pinched in the shoulder and suggested I stretch the nerve itself. I did that for a while, but life threw me a curveball and I stopped and more or less forgot the excercises. The issue in my shoulder long had a center in an old inflamed knot on the back of my shoulder, just below and left of the neck, if that makes sense, I think that part is still a knot, but I havn't felt much there lately. Not that, that has to mean anything, maybe just the other knots take all my attention. Also I had sciatica in my left leg a while, but I more or less fixed it with a yoga excercise after my doctor shrugged his shoulders, and mumbled something about getting excersise and offering painkillers. I don't use that doctor anymore, I've on my second doctor after him now, at least this one is pragmatic and has a will to do something about stuff. But, I've long since lost faith in the medical community in terms of these issues and the general doctor is just for stuff I know such doctors can handle, like testing my blood and other well documented medical issues that has a straightforward solution known to everyone. Yeah, so I hope by participating here, that I might discover some answers to this issue, and hopefully freeing up some more staying power to go reboot my circlewalking and such. Yeah so that is me and my agenda in a nutshell.

Sounds nice, thank you!

When I was young son you had to.... Give me a break will you? I'm here suggesting a forum feature that can be used in all sorts of ways. Sure my way is one of lessening the burden of attachment. But guess what, I'm not your non-attachment student. My agenda on this site is not about handling attachments at this time. I'll keep you in mind if I ever set that up as a major milestone on my todo-list, Masta-Windwalka!

cursed

I'll treat this thread as a sort of mini-journal on what happens in my Nei-Gung and such, now in the beginning. After writing that mini statement about where I felt I was at in my practice, the experience of Nei-Gung was very different today, I still had a lot of trashing, but equally in both legs. I was pretty much syncronous, there was small tendencies to the old trashing still, but they where small. This leads me to believe that some of the blockages where of a psychological nature, maybe from feeling isolated in my practice, not really having any likeminded people to share it with, and hence feeling judged in all setting where I had to bring up the health issues that was implicit in the blockage. In other words, the blockage was made up in great part of having to endure others intolerance towards my art. Makes perfect sense that this should be an issue, now maybe it will come back in some form, maybe this was just a fluke, who knows...

To me pure tao is to de-evolve back into the "singularity?" that was before the theoretical big bang. It is also to evolve so far that one finds the tao at the end of the journey anyway. As above. so below. There is yin in yang and yang in yin, and under it all is Wu-wei (void). Wu-wei in many respects is the start and the end of Tao. So no matter what one does, one is on the path, question is if one is conscious of the journey or not. I certainly have not been a lot of the time, and I still have a lot of evolving to do to gain full consciousness. But at least I know the path in theory, which is something I guess.

Personally I don't subscribe to Buddhism, so at this point it is just an imaginary excersise for me. I certainly don't intend to split hairs over the direction my imagination went. You reservation is noted though. I will try to not make you a complicit party to my heresy, if I ever stand before a divine tribunal for my sins.

Hmm, I recognize this pattern, it is a fairly toxic one, I've seen it plenty of times on other forums. Unfortunately for you, I have a rule of thumb, if someone acts like a bully online, I shut them down. Maybe they are innocent, maybe they are not, I will probably never know, and I really don't care. Goodbye, and good luck on your path either way!

Yeah, sure, let us go with a potters wheel. It is a huge potters wheel that contains our universe. It was made by God a long long time ago, to make sure that someone, somewhere always suffered. Buddhism is a vain attempt to challenge this order, but I doubt it will succeed.

I like to think of Buddhism this way. If everyone followed it fully, humanity would be extinct in one generation. The irony of it all is that, absolute peace = absolute evil, if you value life and humanity. If you don't value life and humanity, then absolute peace = good = humanity gone. So I would guess that you deep down value humanity and life, and hence find Buddhisms ultimate message a bit bleak. After all breaking the wheel of karma = breaking humanity. No humanity, no karma, no suffering, but tons of peace.

That is interesting, you where lucky that your inner self knew that you shouldn't keep up the practice. Many are not that lucky, many do not even manage to get out of psychosis, that is a big feat all by itself. Cause when you enter psychosis, you are losing grip on reality, and start to not really care if you live or die. Caring for life again, can sometimes be an insurmountable obstacle, cause someone who really don't care anymore, cannot be convinced back into the light. When they have stopped caring for it, they just want their fall into doom to be as interesting as possible, so to speak. Of course there are several levels of psychosis, and one usually don't lose all anchors to life at once. But pulling up even one, makes the strain on the others that much harder. At least that is how I usually think about it in terms of metaphors. I've never really gone that deep down, but I have been as deep that I considered pulling some of the anchors free. But, I saw sense at the last minute and turned around every time. So most of my understanding comes from common sense and a lot of theory, Jung/Freud etc I did have a near death drowning experience when I was seven myself, I wonder if that changed me somehow, cause all the weird social shit in my life started happening mostly from age 8 and onward. Maybe I became too wise for my age and hence my peers. Wisdom can be a double-edged sword indeed. But as Echart Tolle says, the more one suffers the more motivated one is to evolve consciously. I have a lot of motivation to push me through all the weird shit I have taken on lately.