liminal_luke

Zen-Bear, I hesitate to ask this question as the aspiration might seem presumptious, but I`m wondering about Flying Pheonix and immortality. You said that the practice can lead to enlightenment. Is enlightenment different from immortality? Michael Winn explains that the Kan & Li meditations he teaches through the Healing Tao can lead to immortality by integrating/harmonizing the shen so that they don`t separate in different directions after death. (Or at least this is my current understanding of what he`s said.) Can the Flying Phoenix meditations you teach do something similar? What`s the best way to get started? If I decide to give this a try, I could see myself being able to devote an hour a day to begin with and going from there. Maybe buy the first two DVDs, basic standing and basic sitting? Or what would you suggest? Thanks in advance, LL

I like the idea of exhaustion. Only by seeking is the tendency to seek exhausted; only through long and painful struggles with impatience can patience emerge. Impatience is not the opposite of patience but rather it`s precursor.

There are those who beleve that spiritual instruction is sullied if it costs too much, and those who believe it`s sullied if it costs too little. Finally, there are those who believe that true spiritual instruction is never sullied in any circumstance.

Your comment reminds me of a Christian bumper sticker my dad used to make fun of when I was a kid. Every time my dad saw the sticker that said I found It he`d quip I never lost it.

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Yeah, I might be wrong but the whole Daddy thing suggests to me that maybe his childhood experiences of having sex with adult men were more harmful to him than he initially thought. Poor guy.

The pederasty business is what got him in trouble, but to me it`s far from the worst thing he`s said. Not that I believe 13 year olds are capable of giving consent, because I don`t believe that. But I think that when he said he thought he was capable of consenting when he was younger than 16, he was being unusually honest about his own experience. I actually respect him for saying what he thought. Lots of people believe -- mistakenly, I think -- that they freely gave consent in their pederasty experiences and were not harmed by them. What bothers me more is the shock talk (frothiness) because it`s so divisive. Lets say I read him, doing my level best to ignore all the melodrama, and find myself largely in agreement. I discover that I too am a little over all the identity politics and the victim posturing and the whiny self-righteousness. What am I supposed to do then? All of that provocative talk becomes a wall that divides right and left. If you`re on the left, it`s not so easy to climb to the other side even if you want to. Milo`s a smart guy and not everything he says is wrong, but I couldn`t bring myself to sit in a room and hear him make fun of fat hairy lesbians. He makes himself hard to like.

Thanks, I think.

Oh sorry. I was actually pulling from several different posts, so the first and second quotes are totally unrelated. Here`s some greater context for that second quote. (Perhaps it`s just supposed to be comedy, and we`re not supposed to believe he believes it?) ........................................................................................................ Tomorrow there is a women’s march, like the one in Washington DC. I support women marching. As the fat acceptance movement’s most prominent critic, I’m well aware of how “body positivity” has resulted in an increase in the number of obese women in America. Anything that involves a bit of exercise for our sisters and moms is alright by me! But I hope they bring some men along to keep them on course. I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s well established in the research literature that men have far better spacial awareness and sense of direction than girls. Can you imagine 50,000 hairy, overweight feminists wandering, hopelessly lost around downtown Seattle, like a drunk Sasquatch convention? Have you noticed these armpit hair-braiding west coast femsquatches spell “women” with an X? W-O-M-X-N. Is the X silent? How do you pronounce that? It’s like “LATIN-X”. Is it Lat-tinks? Sounds like a new paraplegic cholo X-Men character who was shocked he didn’t have to be jumped into the group. Too bad that after today’s inauguration, he has to go back! I always there was feminist biology and feminist history, I didn’t know we had feminist spelling! This is what always happens ladies and gentlemen, a women’s march becomes instead a chance, quote, “to acknowledge the impact of discrimination based not only on gender but also race, sexual orientation, nationality, faith, class, disability and body odor.” Why can’t it just be a women’s march? The same thing has happened in Washington DC, where the women’s march has become a mess of identity politics with black women lecturing their white comrades and every other identity jockeying for power in the left’s grotesque minority war Hunger Games. Or, in case of feminists, Hungry Games. My theory is that women simply can’t get along with each other or work well together. Call it intrasexual competition or whatever, but the results are obvious. I’ll quote my favorite twentieth-century philosophy, Al Bundy: “Don’t try to understand women, women understand women, and they hate each other.” Or, in other words, girls are retards. Milo Yiannopoulos

OK, I`ll bite. Perhaps surprisingly, we do have some areas of agreement. And some less surprising areas of disagreement. He doesn`t like the new Netflix show Dear White People and neither do I. I dunno. Maybe I`d feel differently if I were black? I tried to watch it and just couldn`t get past the pervasive moral scold vibe. He says that "black people can be racist too." True. Quote: I do recognize it isn’t your fault that you happen to share a gender, one of the actual two genders, with batshit crazy, mean-spirited, man-hating, and deeply unhappy feminist harpies. Here he`s being oversimplistic (and also kinda mean). I`m no expert on the biology of transexuality, but I think gender is a more complicated subject than the "actual two genders" phrase implies. What about intersex people? Some people are born with both male and female genitalia or ambiguous genitalia. Perhaps more common are those whose internal physiology (hormones?) are seemingly at odds with their physical appearance. Quote: Or, in other words, girls are retards. Disagree. There`s a phrase he uses (I think it was him) that I found insightful and apt: virtue signaling. I`d never heard of this before, but I think it refers to a real phenomenon and is a keen observation. I generally agree with Milo about free speech. So anyway, not everything he says is wrong. At least I don`t think so. A great deal of what he says is offensive though -- even when he`s right.

Ok, I get how you could read me like that. Thanks for explaining. In my defense, I think I do a passable job of treating people as individuals. There are conservatives here whose opinions I hold in high esteem and those I don`t. There are also liberals here whose opinions I hold in high esteem and those I don`t. The tone of these kind of internet debates can often get ugly. I do try -- not always successfully, I`m realizing -- not to contribute to the muck.

Agreed. Left-wing frothiness, particularly in the wake of the election, reached a really shocking pitch. The conservative frothiness I`m referring to is an admittedly more muted phenomenon. MooNiNite recently posted a video about Milo. I hadn`t heard of him before, but I looked him up and have been reading his posts at Breitbart. Now, he`s not as frothy as the people who are protesting his Dangerous Faggot tour, I`ll grant you that. But still....well, here`s a brief sample of his writing: In fact I’m considered so dangerous that today, January 20th, I am the second most dangerous man in America. Second only to Daddy, who has taken office today. That’s right, social justice losers! Donald Trump is your president now and there’s nothing you can do about it. A bit on the frothy side, imo.

If you`d like to explain it to me, I`m listening.

Brian, Your point that leftwing protesters are "frothy" is well-taken and one that I have already acknowledged in my reply to Aetherous. Like I say, it`s not hard to find examples of left wing foolishness. All I`m saying, is that there`s also conservative frothiness. Do you disagree?

Please understand, WuDao. What I said about the vast majority of Trump supporters wasn`t such an insult. I said that the vast majority of Trump supporters would not independently come to the same sophisticated analysis that RC did. That`s also true of the vast majority of people who don`t like Trump. You might have noticed that I also said that I myself would not have come to that conclusion. In my assessment RC is a very astute thinker. Few people can match her, Democrat or Republican. To say that the "vast majority" of any group of people are not going to independently arrive at her level of insight isn`t a great insult, it`s just the truth.

We disagree, Aetherous. I see conservatives repeating his losers comment right here on Taobums in a way that seems pretty frothy to me. RC might have been right when she said Trump stooped to a spit-waddish name calling level for a specific purpose; I do not believe that most of his supporters who parrot the language share the same sophistication.

Ah, I dunno. You may be even-tempered Aetherous, but the same can`t be say for many of your conservative companions. For the record, I`m equally critical of leftist foolishness -- of which there is plenty.

Some further thoughts... It`s not just terrorists (losers, if you prefer) that listen to Trump. His supporters also listen to the speech in which he spit-waddishly calls them losers. You posit that the level of Trump`s thinking is well above the level of his discourse, that he`s purposely speaking in a simplistic and emotionally inflamed way for some strategic purpose. That`s a sophisticated analysis on your part (perhaps influenced by your business expertise?), and not one that the vast majority of Trump supporters would come to on their own. Most people, including me, assume that Trump is talking on a spit waddish level because he himself functions at a spit waddish level. Occam`s razor and all that. Like a Starbuck`s barista frothing milk for a cappuccino, President Trump froths the more savage passions of his conservative base. Perhaps this increases his support; it certainly seems to around here. It also has the effect of bringing the whole country down to a more spit waddish level. Not a good thing, in my opinion.

RC, You may be right. Like I say, I have an almost gut-level negative reaction to that kind of talk. But then again, it`s not really my reaction that matters. If it really is a well thought out strategy and it works, well, more power to him. LL

You`re probably right WuDao. I suffer from a bad case of Western Do-itis and have a hard time gently leaving anything alone, especially my "self." What you say though...probably right. Warm regards as well LL

Maybe I misunderstand but... I think that the people who experience "no-self" also have a really solid sense of who they are as particular individual people. The contradiction between "no-self" and "strong-self" is only an apparent one. And no it doesn`t make sense how both could be true at the same time. That`s OK though, because we live in a paradoxical universe: nothing true ever makes sense, and nothing that makes sense is ever true. The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao. There`s not really a conflict between developing the self and dissolving the self. Psychological therapies seem to aim towards building the self up while some mystical traditions seem to aim at tearing it down. I believe we have to do both.

Now, when someone thanks me, my computer alerts me with a little ding. If I happen to be on another page, a little notice appears at the bottom of my page alerting me to the activity. That`s nice but I think we can take it further. I think it should be like at a casino: multiple thanks should be like hitting the jackpot. Lets add flashing lights, celebratory jingles, the sound of thousands of coins coming down the chute.

If you appreciate Taomeow`s clarity now, you oughta of seen it before the edit. Even better!

That`s too bad. Imagine how awesome it would be if Marblehead was exactly like that. After all these years, I have this one impression of him in my mind and it turns out to be stunningly, stupefyingly wrong. Marblehead comes out from behind his fishpond or wherever, and says "fooled ya!"

It`s not like I really need another way of annoying people, but I`d love to be able to add differential calculus to my mental torture toolbox. Very cool.