goldisheavy

I strongly disagree with this view. The Tao is not really the source, but it is the way of things, so to speak. The Tao is the experiential ground of things, but it's not some kind of substance and Chuang Tzu makes it pretty clear because the Tao is neither being nor non-being. The idea of the Tao is more of a teaching device, to get the person to think about the common pattern or the common reality behind the 10,000 things. Some Buddhists ignorantly ascribe monism to Taoists, but this way you only trick yourself. The biggest difference between Taoism and Buddhism are not their ultimate views on reality, which I think are comparable, but different emphasis on different virtues. For example, compassion and skillful means (or skill in means) is a Buddhist distinction. I think we should make a distinction between what the Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu said and what others who call themselves "Taoist" say, which is very different sometimes. Taoism in some ways is a wide umbrella like Hinduism, under which all kinds of views and practices get lumped, sometimes mutually incompatible views and practices. I think all in all, religious Taoists have done a piss-poor job of studying what their founders said. But whose fault is that? Chuang Tzu is awesome and is beyond reproach in my view. No Buddhist thinker could hold a candle to the man if he was alive today to answer questions.

I'm pretty sure I came across a Taoist temple or maybe a center in San Francisco. The problem is, it felt very weird and unwelcoming. I entered but there was no one there to greet me or to talk and the place seemed strange and empty, except one room where people were talking in Chinese in a very loud manner. I didn't feel like interrupting them and I just left.

Same here. Here's how I see it. I've studied a bit of both Buddhism and Taoism, and have some amount of spiritual practice which is neither specifically Taoist nor specifically Buddhist. Taoism is much less formal than Buddhism. Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi) is mostly a series of damn good questions, or statements that are meant to provoke questions. There is also plenty of humor in Chuang Tzu, whereas Buddhists seem to lack humor. So while Buddhists always smile, they are also always serious. Taoists seem to laugh a lot and they are much less serious and less constipated than Buddhists. It's not uncommon to find two Buddhists splitting infinite hairs over some doctrinal point, whereas you likely won't find Taoists engaged in such behavior. Buddhism is more useful than Taoism to someone who has a lot of questions and who wants answers instead of counter-questions. Buddhism is more down to earth than Taoism in the sense that Buddhist practices are easy to explain and anyone can practice them. Taoist practices can be a bitch to explain and are somewhat elitist. It makes sense because Buddhism stresses compassion. So accessibility and digestibility are important values in Buddhist teachings, but Taoists are equally happy if no one understands what they say and thus, they are less compassionate and more snobbish than Buddhists. I love Chuang Tzu, but I fear Chuang Tzu is impenetrable for most people. Even when I re-read Chuang Tzu, I get a different understanding from it every time. On the other hand, Buddhist sutras have simple and down to earth explanations that even children can understand. This is because Buddhist compassion leads to skill in means. I love both flavors and I am moved by and learn from them both. I think Taism and Buddhism are like apples and oranges, they are both part of a balanced diet. As for qi gong, Buddhists do not emphasize energy practice because Buddhist believe that energy is essentially a trick of consciousness, empty, and not worth trying to micromanage. Thus even when Buddhist engage in energy-like practices, their point of focus is emptiness rather than energy accumulation. Buddhists don't believe things can be accumulated. Trying to accumulate energy is like trying to accumulate rainbows or like trying to accumulate rabbit horns, from a Buddhist perspective. Taoists tend to take a more substantialist view of energy and to them it makes more sense to try to refine and to accumulate energy, although I must say, this isn't consistent with what the founders like Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu have said. So in a sense, Taoists ignore what their founders have said (especially alchemists who do things that downright contradict the spirit of Chuang Tzu) while Buddhists tend to listen to Buddha pretty faithfully in comparison. Still, I find alchemy interesting anyway. Substantial or not is important for the sake of ultimate understanding, but in day to day experience alchemy can yield results even given a mind that's chained by subtle substantialist ignorance. And to most people results matter.

Is it possible to be mindful and attentive? Yes, of course it is.

Ego is a concept that promotes as much delusion as does the concept of God. Instead of clarifying issues it just confuses them. What is ego? Ego is a self-identity. Can self-identity be escaped? No, it cannot be. Even Buddha has an identity as a Buddha. Buddha is distinct from non-Buddhas. Has Buddha ended his intention? Absolutely not. Intention has no beginning and thus it has no end. Relaxed state of intentionality is not absence of intentionality! So if ego is such a dumb word, why do people use it so much? People use it because of a simple reason: fear. People fear that if someone gets very powerful, that power will be used to damage other people. And what is that fear? That fear is every bit as egoic as the egoism these scared people want to denounce. Fearing for one's safety and restraining others from power is egoism every bit as much as seeking power is egoism. At the same time, if you look at the nature of ego, it's non-egoic to begin with. Ego is empty by its nature. Self-delineation is not rooted in the self! Self-delineation is itself rooted in the ultimate baselessness of the nature of mind. In other words, self-identity from the very beginning is completely selfless and doesn't need to be cured or suppressed or improved. It just needs to be understood. Power is not evil. In the world many ignorant beings seek and, worse, attain power. It's only good if some of the good people also sought and attained power, instead of shying away from it. Attain it and help others attain it too. When everyone in the world becomes powerful, what will become of power? Power is scary only because you don't share it. If you can share the power you can use power without fear.

I can't speak for Buddha, but I'll say this. I think it's correct to follow the path of the greatest joy, provided your identity has been integrated with others. What I mean by this is that if you see yourself as an island, your greatest joy might easily end up being someone else's greatest suffering. However, if you see other beings in yourself and yourself in other beings, then following your greatest joy will not cause great/catastrophic harm to fellow human beings. As for the path of least resistance, most of the resistance we experience is self-created artificial bullshit resistance. At the same time, not all resistance is bullshit resistance. Sometimes resistance is necessary. To know the difference you need wisdom. And wisdom is not something you can borrow from others. You must develop wisdom in yourself and in the process of becoming wiser, you'll make lots of mistakes, which is the natural process of learning. So I think it's a good idea to investigate and question resistance and to eliminate any of it that is not essential. But one shouldn't develop aversion to resistance. Nor should one develop fear of resistance. This would turn the medicine into poison. So it's OK to resist sometimes and it's silly to avoid all resistance. Just avoiding stupid and unproductive resistance is enough. And like I said before, what is stupid and what's not is not an easy thing to determine. You need wisdom for that.

The truth has some depth to it. Because of this, at some level, the distinction between good and evil is seen as an ignorant and baseless distinction. At a different level, it is seen as a useful distinction. What's important is to realize that because we are alive, our morals must be alive also. Living beings cannot abide by dead, unliving morals. This means all dogmatic moralities hurt us, because we grow, but dogmas do not. We are not static, but dogmas are. Dogmas are contrary to life, and I think that's what the Daoists noticed more than anything. So it's less about good and evil and more about inflexible unbending dogmatic mindsets. Dogmatic people are necessarily ignorant because in order to observe dogmas faithfully you must become numb and blind to life. Should you be sensitive to life, you will notice it is alive and dogmas are not alive. You'll notice a discrepancy. You'll see how our experiences and knowledge are circumstantial and contextual while dogmas are not. The worst disease that human beings have is when they not only hold to a dogmatic belief (Islam, Christianity, Judaism), but when they feel that they must install this dogma into everyone's mind regardless of reasons, conditions, circumstances, regardless of anything (Islam, Christianity, but not Judaism, because Jews do not evangelize). When humans believe this way, they create divisiveness and strife. They not only offend others by implying that we can't decide, like adults, what is and isn't right for ourselves, but they then go on to use force, including lethal force, to try to spread their dogmas against people's better judgement and will. Thanks to Islam and Christianity many ancient cultures are now forever lost to us. So, ultimately there is neither good nor evil, and yet relatively speaking, there are processes that we find suitable for good life and processes we find unsuitable. Nonetheless, because what we deem suitable or not is not absolute, we should be able to discuss morality like adults, and we must haggle over it while respecting two things: 1. Others have as much say in determining morality as I do, and 2. There is no absolute morality. If we can all respect those two things, we can haggle toward a decent system of morality that's flexible enough to embrace people of different proclivities on one hand, and on the other hand, that's firm and principled enough to stand against abuse and degradation of human beings. And I must say both Christianity and Islam, as they currently stand, are blocking the way toward that future. Especially Islam.

What problems are you talking about? Also, why did you pick pink for your message?

Yea, but if you try to investigate any evidence, there is none to find. So it's like they came, one person saw them, and went, and there is nothing left to find. It's like some kind of spy activity. The discussions themselves aren't secret, sure. But the alien activity is secret in the sense that you can't readily verify it. Compare this to say Paris, which is not a secret. You can get a plane ticket and verify it 100% of the time. This is false. I remember this misinformation. That lady later said that she was never appointed as an extra-terrestrial point of contact, and that it was all a bunch of bullshit cooked up on the Internets, although she said it would be neat if it were true, if I remember correctly.

How about a link to a credible news source? Hell, even just a friend you know personally in China will be credible enough. This youtube video is not credible. Besides, China is famous for removing villagers from their villages if they want to build something in that village. So it's possible they simply bullied everyone out off the land, or just physically removed them all, or hell, even executed the entire village just to do something there. Now, I am not saying aliens do not exist. In fact I think they probably do given how many planets and solar systems are "out there." But why would aliens monkey around with this planet in secret, it just makes no sense at all. If they have the technology to fly all the way over here, they surely have nothing to fear from the monkeys on this planet.

That's good. In a lucid dream you are like 20 years to many lifetimes in the future in terms of your magical abilities, assuming you will remain resolute in all that time. So have you experimented in your dreams? You should perform many experiments. Write down your intentions if it helps you get serious. Or don't write them down if you know you can just trust yourself. For example say, "I will try to go through a wall in this dream." Then try it. Then contemplate what you find. I'll tell you what I found in my dreams, since you're not revealing yet what you have found in yours. In my dreams while I can do amazing and at times utterly mind-boggling things, I still experience limitations. For example, there was one dream where I decided to go through a wall and guess what? I couldn't do it right away. For a while I was just pressing up against the wall and going nowhere, even though I knew I was dreaming! I knew I could do it, at least theoretically, since it's all just a dream, and yet I couldn't do it. Then I realized it had to do with how I conceived of the "walls." Even in my dream I imagined the walls to be actual impediments. In other words, I was intending the walls to impede me! When I realized this, I could go through a "wall" except guess what? I re-conceptualized the "wall" as a non-impediment and I could go through it, but guess what??? guess what?? When I did that it was no longer a wall! So in a sense I actually never did go through a wall, not even in a lucid dream. Do you get what I am saying? I enacted an illusion of going through a wall while all the while I knew there was no actual wall there. Get it? So even when I succeeded, in a sense I never did go through any wall. There is a mystical saying that reflects this truth, "A mage doesn't open any locked doors." This means that to open the lock you have to re-conceptualize the lock as a non-lock. But the time you can open it, it's not a lock anymore. Do you see what's going on? This is just a hint. To really get somewhere with this, you have to put your mind to it and practice and contemplate for years and years and perhaps lifetimes. If you're serious, you'll get there. But along the way you'll have many moments where you may ask yourself if you really still want that kind of life. By the time you realize what you have to do, you may not be willing to do it. Or you may still want it. It can be either or, but there is no guarantee. Only you know what you want.

Sloppy, you have got to be kidding me. You think you can overturn a mountain of conditioning in just one day? Think about it for a second. Take a mundane skill like carpentry. You know you can become a carpenter if you want. But would you become the kind of carpenter that can earn money in one day? Even mundane skills take a lot of practice. An in a mundane skill like carpentry there is nothing that contradicts your worldviews, nothing that contradicts any fundamental and basic assumptions about reality, and even then it's not easy. What you need is less trying and more understanding. It's good to try to fly once in a while just to get really close to the issue for your contemplation. But then you must contemplate the issues you discover in trying. In other words, it should be 1% trying and 99% contemplating what went on. Trying and testing is important, but contemplative analysis is much more important. You'll never fly if you don't understand what you want. Can you imagine the kind of world where you can do anything? What would it mean? Would you want it? It might be a lonely world. It might be a world with you and not much else in it. Have you thought about this at all? Have you thought why your intention is fragmented to begin with? Have you considered that perhaps things don't fly around because you actually want it that way? So before you can change it, you have to remember why you wanted it to be so fragmented and limited to begin with. Think of it this way. If your body is numb, you cannot control it. The first step to regaining control is to become sensitive to the body again. You cannot control that which you cannot feel. So something segments feeling, or at least, creates the illusion of such segmentation. What is that? Why does it happen? Are you ready to spend many lifetimes investigating it? Are you then ready to give up many things you now enjoy and love to get your wish? It's not a freebie. It would be a total restructuring of the world as you know it. Suppose you did all that I am hinting at and came back from the future to meet yourself in the present. I say your present self would consider such future you to be insane and scary to boot.

Sloppy, I can teach you to do it, but you won't like the price you will have to pay. In fact, if you've been paying attention to my posts, you'd already understand how to do what you want. Don't bother chasing traditions. Just use your own understanding. Begin by tracking your present limitations. Try to move something with your mind, and when you fail, look into it. Ask yourself this: "If I was a great mage and I wanted to make a world where I had no power to affect objects with my mind, how would I accomplish that?" In other words, if you wanted things to appear physical, how would you do it? If you understand this, then you will know how to go back. Ask yourself this: "Why do my arms move?" "Does intent have a beginning and an end?" "Does intent have a boundary? If not, then why do people talk about 'intentions' in the plural?" Learn lucid dreaming and try to do all that you want in a lucid dream. You may discover something interesting. You may discover that while you can certainly do interesting things in a lucid dream, even in a dream your power may not be infinite. If you experience limitations even in the dream, then ask yourself, "Why?" If you follow all this up diligently, you'll get all your answers in time.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/12/why-genes-are-leftwing I found this article very interesting. Of course it confirms everything I believed already, so perhaps that's why I think it's interesting.

Sure. I had to work to achieve my one OBE too. I wanted to see if I could roam around the city I lived in, but the experience didn't turn out that way. There were a number of surprises. Intent is influence, not control.

I could do it, but why bother? Do you know anything about photography at all? I know a lot of this stuff because my dad used to teach photography professionally. You need to be smacked with a clue bat. (check out this light-body master) http://www.flickr.com/groups/g10-challenge/discuss/72157619734701305/ (read this) http://www.flickr.com/groups/761746@N21/pool/ Google "long exposure photography ghost" You might also want to look up neutral density filter.

Mal, I don't appreciate your censorship.

You can attribute anything to anything. You're like a story author. It won't make it true, but it will be your story.

I've been saying this for years. No one gives a crap. Everyone already knows what's true and what's not and argumentation is only applicable in case someone actually cares for it. Still, arguing with hard materialists correctly arouses a lot of cognitive dissonance in them and torments them nicely. And this is a good thing. They need to be honest with themselves and cognitive dissonance is a signal that they've been lying to themselves somewhere. Still, arguing takes a lot of energy and time. It might be more selfish to avoid arguing, just save one's energy for oneself. The selfless thing to do is to provide a mirror when the chance arises, but you really have to be good at reasoning to do so in a legitimate manner. The moon the Buddha's finger points to is not really the spirit world. That's a mistake. The fingers points to Nirvana, or a non-dual reality beyond both the spirit world and the physical world. In this case reality is also a special kind of view. In spiritual systems of thought realities and views are not two distinct things. In non-spiritual systems of thought reality is often separate and distinct from views.

This has very little to do with energy body actually and everything to do with intent. I intended to enter into this physical world with a spirit body. Which is exactly what I did. When I OBE'd, I was in my room, floating above my physical body in the beginning. It would be really dumb to pick up a cup and then act surprised you ended up with a cup in your hand, given you intended to pick up a cup in the first place. Yea, maybe "boring" is not the right word. I just meant it's a lot less exciting and exotic than some people think. It's just doing something over and over. It's like any other training. Are pull-ups boring? Well, if you want to get good at them, you might need to do say 20 pullups 3 times a week = 60 a week * say 50 weeks, that's 3000 pullups a year, and you need to do it for about 2 years, so that's 6000 pull ups. Well, tummo practice is exactly like that, only even more so. Whether it's boring or not depends on your disposition. It's was cool when I succeeded for the first time and my stiff cold hand became warm and soft, without any prickling or burning sensations. I was making sure I wasn't walking too fast and I wasn't swinging my arms much and definitely not trying to flex my hands to make sure it's the mind that's doing the work and not the body. Of course I could have just rubbed my hands together and jumped around to raise my temperature. That would achieve the same effect but would be less interesting. I did this for a while, but my interest in this activity dropped like a rock after the first time. I was thinking, "Yea, I get it. It can be done. With more practice you can get better at it. I am not getting any wiser from this." I remember I discovered a different kind of tummo too, something much higher level than just warming the body. At one point I thought, why should I warm the body at all? Why not just warm the weather. And that worked too, perception-wise, which is all I cared about.

Yea, me too. Sounds interesting. I guess it's obvious to everyone except me, but who is Robert? What system are you talking about? I am curious, because you seem like a no-nonsense person, and whatever interests you seems interesting to me too. Yup. It is sad things can be tough sometimes. I don't think we always deserve this kind of situation. I hope you realize all your best and highest dreams in this life.

I don't know about all of the pictures, but some of them look definitely deceptive. Are you guys aware of something called long exposure? If you take a shot using a low sensitivity film, you need to expose the frame for a longer period of time compared to what you'd need for a higher sensitivity film. Long exposure can be something like 30 seconds or even longer. During that time you can move your body and make it appear fuzzy. Also, you can begin exposing a frame, have the person sit on a chair after some time. The result will be a shot that captures some of the features that would ordinarily be blocked by the body in the chair. In other words, it will look like a transparent body. Digital cameras allow you to digitally set the sensitivity of your "film". To get a better effect, you can also put a very dark filter onto your lens, to block most of the light and to increase the needed exposure time. With enough effort you can probably get the exposure time even in a well lit room into the minute range. Consider what the photo will look like if you begin the exposure with an empty chair and wait 30 seconds, then have the person enter the frame and sit on a chair, taking 3 seconds, and finish the other 27 seconds of the exposure. What do you think this will look like? It will look like a clear semi-transparent body sitting in a chair in an otherwise normal room. Considering how easy it is to make a fake shot like that, I will accept no photographic "evidence" of any of these things. In fact, I am 99% sure all these photos are fake. They all use a well-known photography technique that I describe in this post. Be careful my friends.

Yea, I hear you More Pie Guy. Have you thought about sending Wim Hof a letter/email, or trying to track him down? You seem very sincere and interested. Maybe he'll talk to you. It seems like you really want an impressive teacher. At first I thought you should just train on your own, but if you keep having persistent thought about a teacher, maybe you should save all your money and begin a search in earnest. Try to track one of these famous guys and see what you get. I do worry you might get disappointment before you find something satisfactory. Tummo is not that complicated. It's very boring and time consuming though. You can expect to spend years on it to get really good at it. I used to practice warming my hands up in the winter using my mind, and I was fairly successful but it was hard work, and the success was never instant, and plus what would often happen is that I couldn't keep both hands covered in heat consistently. I would thaw the left hand, and the right one would freeze. I would then unfreeze the right hand but as I did that, the left one would freeze. My heat focus was too narrow and I found that when I made it wider it also got less powerful. So I felt like if I just had the patience to do it for a few years, I could get a nearly perfect control of it. But then I asked myself, why? Siddhis like that are cool and they can even by life saving sometimes, but I am after wisdom first of all. When I am satisfied with my level of wisdom, I will spend more time developing unusual abilities.

The one time I got out for an OBE, I first met a scary ghost, which I dispatched by sending it love. Then I began twirling around and I woke up as some kind of homeless man (not me as I know myself). That was strange. First I was just myself and suddenly I was another guy in a strange city. I was laying on the bench and feeling peaceful. I spent about 10-20 seconds as this other guy and then I woke up/came to back in my room, in my dead corpse meditation posture I was using. I thought that the OBE was definitely interesting and somewhat mind-opening, considering I became a different man for a short while, but nonetheless I didn't feel compelled to pursue it further. It required a lot of practice just to get out that once, and I felt the rewards didn't justify the effort at the time. I wasn't interested in tourism anyway and after hanging out in the astral plane, I got a strong impression that I won't be meeting anyone more enlightened than myself that way. I had a lot of questions and curiosity about my regular life in my usual body to be dabbling with a life away from my body. It's a very cool ability though and I can't say I'll never want to try it again.