Walker

The community may have a responsibility to deny him the ability to use this place as a pedestal from which to preach. I don't know if that is the right think to do and it's not my decision to make, but given that he offers meditation instructions on a regular basis, I think the discussion needs to be had.

1. If your sitting in full lotus causes women and adolescent girls to have orgasms, this is because there is something wrong with your full lotus, not because that is what full lotus does. As you know what effect your practice supposedly has on children and non-consenting women, you are violating these individuals when you choose to go into public places and insist upon sitting in close proximity to women and female children who will affected by energy you evidently believe you have but cannot control. 2. Most likely, thankfully, all of this is a deranged fantasy of yours. I can sit in full lotus and I have meditated in rooms where men and women were in full lotus for ten hours a day and NONE of this nonsense occurred. While, thank heavens, it seems highly unlikely that you have managed to serially molest anything but the eyes of people who stumble upon your HORRIBLY FORMATTED posts, your persistent belief in your fantasy abilities and your idea that these assaults would be ok if real demonstrates a highly pathological reaction to whatever concoction of practices it is you play with. Calamity is not far off, Drew. I hope the mods, if there are any nowadays, are paying close attention to what the man who offers far and away the most practical advice to newcomers to Daoism on this public site is saying in this thread.

Yeah. This guy just quoted writings about some sort of Daoist sex between CONSENSUAL ADULTS to justify what (if it really happened at all and is not his fantasy) was effectively energetic molestation of CHILDREN. Utterly jaw-dropping bastardization of the teachings and a horrid reaction to this thread. I never saw a reckoning with Drew over his long narratives about qi-molesting girls and women and I figured that was either because it had already happened and I never saw the thread, or nobody else noticed/found the stories disturbing. I am somewhat shocked if this is the first time this has come to a head, and glad it is happening now that Drew has essentially parked himself on this website to inundate it with his presented-as-gospel "teachings." Still shaking my head and deeply, deeply disturbed that "this is my thread" + "look at what this ancient Daoist said" is his reaction to very legitimate questions about his supposed sexual assault escapades.

Oh gawwwwwd, save your hypocrisy or put your MA to use responding with some sincerity to my post.

Exactly!

When a garrulous fellow who has already let the world know that he is no lesser than a bo-na-fide Master of thee Arts in Philosophy wakes up one day and finds he doesn't like long pieces of writing, after all... Why, you do just have to wonder, don't you, dear?

Didn't know they'd written about HK. I look forward to reading it (with dread ). Crimethinc has an interesting piece on Hong Kong, too. I always feel like such a brainwashed, unwittingly pro-capitalist rube when I read Crimethinc stuff haha...

I find this to be a highly problematic train of thought, beginning with the title. Your definition of "practical" is highly specific to "the interests, values, and conclusions of Owl." You attempt to cut what you perceive of as Daoism into pieces, separate them into distinct boxes, create a hierarchy for these boxes, and affix the label of illegitimacy to some of them on the basis of arguments whose flimsiness is somewhat obscured by your eloquence. This pattern is as strange as it is common. It seems to manifest when two opposed desires converge upon a single point. The first desire is to maintain a comfort zone based upon what is familiar and acceptable to the individual actor (who, of course, is never truly an individual, and rather an individualized product of conditioning with a long history involving vast numbers of people). The second desire is to make up for what is lacking inside of the comfort zone through exposure and absorption of cultural patterns from beyond the commonly accepted borders of the comfort zone. The convergence of these two desires creates a certain degree of conflict. This conflict can easily be let to bubble and stew with no need to resolve any of its contradictions if a person simply exists within this confluence. It is much harder to allow these apparent-contradictions to coexist if one wishes to "package" the fruits of one's learning by expressing them in coherent language to people who have not directly experienced the alien cultural pattern. A wish to speak on behalf of the alien to one's familiars all too often seems to inspire the kind of "surgery" I described in the first paragraph above. When this happens, what emerges from the operating room is often a body at once gutted as well as retrofitted to fit the needs of the surgeon. I observe that the "need" leading many surgeons to thusly wield the scalpel is a specifically need for imprimatur. By this I mean that a person who wishes to communicate "deep ideas" to his/her countrymen finds it convenient to point at a complex array of foreign phenomena and declare: "Behold! There is a word for all of this, a word discovered long ago in a land far away. I know this word, and in telling you what it is, I will not only bring you clarity about what you already are, I shall also bring you clarity about what those in the land far away are. More importantly, I shall also draw upon my lessons from those from afar to tell you what you should do, what you should do better, and what you may become!" Somehow humans do in fact seem prone to lend an ear and credence to He Who Can Speak for The Ancient and Distant Wise Ones, and so this pattern does not appear only with westerners who are keen on Daoism. For example, Yan Fu translated western writings into Chinese (well, he had bilingual Chinese people read the stories to him aloud in Chinese and then he had other people write down his retellings, which were for a time best sellers) but took tremendous license to alter, edit, and omit in order to make a simple point: "See, dear reader, these foreign stories actually teach us the value of our Confucian values." The head-spinning subtext here is: "Chinese culture has become decadent. It needs an injection of foreign ideas to be revivified and set right. These foreign ideas will set us straight because actually they are our domestic ideas." MC Lyte said, "mad things change, mad things rearrange, but it all stays the same." Yan Fu's message was so simple that he could have presented it in a single sentence: "Study and enact traditional Confucian values in order to restore yourselves and your society." But nobody would have listened! The foreignness of the books he "translated" lent him exoticism, which effortlessly attracts a great many humans' eyes and ears. From the exotic knowledge source to which he claims to hold the keys he obtained powerful imprimatur, which he then used to deliver a subliminal message to his Chinese readers: "You don't need to believe little old me that Confucianism is the way. But how could you ignore the fact that millions of Britons--what with their warships and cannons and empire and power and dominion--have risen to their superior state precisely because they, ultimately, understand and employ Confucian values?" In short, wherever it appears, this process of creating imprimatur by identifying and then speaking for a [geographically/temporally/culturally] faraway "them" ultimately means that the the them's true identity gets lost in the process. Owl, I am afraid that this is what you are doing. I add that I think that neither you, nor Yan Fu, nor most people who do this do so intentionally or even fully aware of what they are doing. Humans' conditioning reasserts itself through all of us who are its hosts, just as conditioning that is slightly different from that which created you is reasserting itself through me as I type. I doubt anybody can be cognizant of all factors at play in his or her conditioning. The particular process I believe you enact here has been repeated time and again since the English word "Daoism" appeared. In order to label it, I will boil it down in way that oversimplifies and yet likely contains a solid grain of accuracy. I would label your ideas as typical of Comfortable University Educated First World White Person Daoism. While Daoism was the source of inspiration for you to start this thread, I think that your ideas are much less similar to any of the many Daoisms I have encountered in my wanderings than they are to all of the "Comfortable University Educated First World White Person [Insert Name of Appropriated Here]s" that I have encountered. If what I say strikes you from utterly out of the blue, then please read "Play-thing of the Times: Critical Review of the Reception of Daoism in the West." A very similar pattern has defined much of the transmission of Buddhism into the west. The blog Angry Asian Buddhist played an important role in prodding Comfortable University Educated First World White Buddhism to begin to turn and face this problem in the last few years, and it has been doing so with admirable candor in its widely circulated publications with articles like this one and this one (although these articles focus on Buddhism, they are highly germane to this discussion). Daoism is not organized in the way Buddhism is, so I do not know where white supremacy in western Daoism will meet its reckoning. Here is a good enough place to start, though. Comfortable University Educated First World White Person Daoism has a right to exist and may indeed have much to contribute to the world. But it should not be delivered and expressed in a way that subtly or overtly attempts to silence and pull rank over other Daoisms, whether be they native to Asia or products of syncretisms from other lands. I say this partly because doing so can mean furthering white supremacy de facto (albeit probably unconsciously), in a most insidious way. I say this also partly because the committed Comfortable University Educated First World White Person Daoist does him/herself a tragic disservice by slamming shut many doors to inspiration and liberation Daoism holds in an attempt to define the undefinable and pad the comfort zone with silken pillows embroidered with Oriental motifs, so to speak. In order to make clear the reasons that your writing impelled me to write the above, I address your posts directly below. Additionally, because I also address places where our interpretations of Laozi and Zhuangzi's teachings are markedly divergent. I also comment on two of Wandelaar's posts made in support of your thesis. If by asking about "practical philosophy" you mean, "Do people here apply the insights they have gained from their interaction with Daoism to aspects of their life beyond the portions of their time devoted to formally studying and practicing Daoism," then I think almost everybody here who has an affinity with Daoism here would say yes. There you go concluding, and there you go concluding yourself. Zhuangzi, which you seem to hold as a standard of sorts, begins (see the first three segments of Legge's translation of "Free and Untroubled Ease") by mocking those who hem themselves into smallness with their conclusions (from Old French conclusion "conclusion, result, outcome," from Latin conclusionem (nominative conclusio), noun of action from past-participle stem of concludere "to shut up, enclose"). Your implication is that those things which you have "concluded are nonsense" are not what has sustained Daoism over the centuries. This is triply problematic. One, you assume that things in Daoism which you cannot use do not work, and therefore are by definition not practical, when in fact it may well be that they are simply beyond your ken. Two, you assert that you have identified "core Daoism," thereby implying categories like "superfluous Daoism" exist. Three, supposing you are correct in your identification of "practical Daoism" as a core and "impractical Daoism" as unessential or superfluous, it would still be a massive leap to say that "impractical" beliefs, ideas, and praxes are not as (or more) important in sustaining Daoism over the centuries as so-called practical Daoism is. Robert Ford Campany's book Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China is a compelling argument that quite the opposite of what you imagine may be true. That is a nice story, thank you for sharing it. I enjoyed reading it and my guess is most of the Daoists I know would like it and think that that was a nice way to protect the park. But I am not sure this qualifies as a Daoist teaching. I would call it worldly strategy with a bit of a Daoist flavor--a bit like Sunzi's Art of War, maybe. Such things perhaps derive from Daoism, but that does not mean that they are Daoism. Although many great arts come to us by those who studied and practiced Daoist teachings, the way of Daoism itself is to "rerive," something which can be seen in Zhuangzi's repeated calls to float and get lost in "rivers and lakes." Furthermore, where do we see Daoists confidently stating that worldly success of any type is something particularly desirable? When I read your story I am reminded of Huainanzi's "old fellow in the hinterlands" who loses his horse and then gains a herd, only to have his son be injured, only to have his son avoid the draft, and so on. Such a story is not usually repeated by students of Daoism as a call to figure out how to get worldly success in cunning ways, as nobody could be so cunning as to intentionally bring about what happened to the fellow in the hinterlands by chance--and for all he knows, what comes next is more disaster! The story's moral is to not be so sure we can judge what is a good outcome and what is not, and to therefore be detached from worldly vicissitudes. While yours is a good story and most Daoists would prefer parks to highways, I'm prone to say that a "philosophically Daoist" response to your story would be to chuckle and wonder aloud whether or not this will just mean that poor people down the road will have their homes get Imminent Domained for the new overpass. And to chuckle about how all of us who like parks still use asphalt roads laid atop once pristine lands day in and day out without expressing much lament as we drive to Starbucks. And to wonder why people can't make their wedding vows under concrete overpasses (I know a happy couple who essentially did). And laughingly envision a version of the lost horse story involving the collapse of the wooden bridge. And so forth. I am also reminded of the ancient Daoist Yang Zhu, who said, more or less, "If nobody would pluck even a hair to try and assist the world, the world would be better off" (人人不損一毫，人人不利天下，天下治也。). While your Parks and Rec friends won the day, they did not use wuwei. They simply used a deft, tricky, even masterful form of youwei. There is a huge difference between the two. In terms of actual Daoist practice, this difference needs to be understood. Youwei, even at its highest levels, never approaches the Dao. Youwei always keeps us away from the Way. Finally, Laozi is no exponent of craftiness nor does he put much stock in apparent worldly success. Chapter 20: What all men fear is indeed to be feared; but how wide and without end is the range of questions (asking to be discussed)! The multitude of men look satisfied and pleased; as if enjoying a full banquet, as if mounted on a tower in spring. I alone seem listless and still, my desires having as yet given no indication of their presence. I am like an infant which has not yet smiled. I look dejected and forlorn, as if I had no home to go to. The multitude of men all have enough and to spare. I alone seem to have lost everything. My mind is that of a stupid man; I am in a state of chaos. Ordinary men look bright and intelligent, while I alone seem to be benighted. They look full of discrimination, while I alone am dull and confused. I seem to be carried about as on the sea, drifting as if I had nowhere to rest. All men have their spheres of action, while I alone seem dull and incapable, like a rude borderer. (Thus) I alone am different from other men, but I value the nursing-mother (the Dao). Chapter 58: Misery! - happiness is to be found by its side! Happiness! - misery lurks beneath it! Who knows what either will come to in the end? Shall we then dispense with correction? The (method of) correction shall by a turn become distortion, and the good in it shall by a turn become evil. The delusion of the people (on this point) has indeed subsisted for a long time. Therefore the sage is (like) a square which cuts no one (with its angles); (like) a corner which injures no one (with its sharpness). He is straightforward, but allows himself no license; he is bright, but does not dazzle. This is a most confusing statement to deliver immediately after telling a story about people who likely never studied Daoism in a land whose cultural milieu likely contains scarce little Daoist influence. Those people won their battle for their park without knowing a thing about Daoism. They did not need to "adopt Daoism into their lives," and the moral of the story seems to be that they're doing just fine without it. Why all the need to import a foreign term and tell these people what they're doing? And, again, the park improved day-to-day lives... for now... Until the day somebody dear to use needs to get to the hospital and the ambulance has to drive an extra 30 minutes because the highways aren't connected, gasp! "Woo-woo" is a derogatory term--even the OED says as much, although I do not need a dictionary to tell me that this is so. Your choice of this word implies that those who hold beliefs contrary to yours are so far from the truth that only a word representing gibberish and incoherence suffices to represent them. Thinking that the lessons many thousands of Daoists would offer newcomers actually disserve newcomers is one thing. Expressing that thought with such words is belies your fig leaf claim. The Daodejing and Zhuangzi both use the character 氣; Zhuangzi does so extensively in the inner chapters in ways that a serious student of Daoism cannot afford to write off or overlook. Your problem may be that you conflate qi, a Chinese word with extraordinarily deep meaning, with "energetics," a fairly recent addition in the English language that is ill-equipped to represent all of the subtleties inherent in the word qi, some of which I address below. This is a middling taijiquan teaching and my teachers would not call it mastery. A taijiquan master does not know, a master simply responds spontaneously. No moves from the forms are used, because the moves in the forms are not techniques, they are ways of practicing moving force. This is expressed in the sentence from taijiquan writings which says, "I know not how my hand dance nor how my feet leap" (不知手之所舞，足之所蹈). Again, there is no knowing. From my quote of Laozi's quote above: "The multitude of men all have enough and to spare. I alone seem to have lost everything. My mind is that of a stupid man; I am in a state of chaos. Ordinary men look bright and intelligent, while I alone seem to be benighted." This is how masters of taijiquan operate, and this is why taijiquan can be a path for cultivating Dao. The real test was to remain empty. Had you done so, no ego battle would have arisen. Zhuangzi's Inner Chapters are full of talk of qi and even dew-eating immortals which cannot simply be written off as irrelevant or declared as metaphors or symbols. It is fine to cherry pick what we like from books we read, but it is arbitrary to speak for the whole of a text as though it only contains the parts we like. I would agree with you that both Daoism and Chan/Zen teach a sort of "appreciation of the wonders of everyday life." But I would disagree that they somehow eschew with the "non-everyday." Even philosophical Daoism is chock full of discussion of "wonders," and to be very, very certain, so were the writings of the great Chan masters, writings which Zen masters in Japan to this very day hold in high esteem and study intensely. It is important to be clear that Daoism and Chan/Zen both teach us to do away with our distinctions, including distinctions between the marvelous and mundane. In this way, when marvels arise we do not get carried away with them, either by attaching to what seems to have occurred, or retreating into some kind of "I'm going to write off all of this 'wooo' and unrelated to 'practical' and 'simple' things" mindset. One learns to be 淡 in the face of all such matters, recognizing that ordinary/extraordinary are not essentially different. All things are simple things. All things are wonders. There is nothing to be said all things. Just sit. If you absorb the above, perhaps you will have this problem less and less. You do not seem yet to have a firm grasp on the differences between "pre-heaven qi" and "post heaven qi." This can also be expressed as the difference between 氣 and 炁, although these characters are not always used, and ancient authors did not always make it obvious whether they were talking about pre-heaven or post heaven qi. Pre-heaven qi is not an energy and it is not the ying (營) that flows in the veins nor the wei (衛) that moves throughout the body and can be felt relatively readily. In fact, it is impossible to say that one believes in the "idea of qi" if one is talking about pre-heaven qi (炁) because it is not something the conceptual mind can understand. It cannot even be experienced if the mind is thinking. It cannot even be said to exist or not exist. Another problem is that coming up with a new way to explain things does not necessarily invalidate an old way of explaining things (especially in the case of Daoism, where different texts, lineages, teachers, eras, etc. use the same words in different ways with different levels of import). Yet another problem is that Daoists, despite the proclivity of many of them to offer wordy tracts explaining things (ahem), are not particularly interested in explanations, in the end. Consciously echoing the second chapter of the Daodejing as well as their own educations in the oral tradition, more than one teacher has used words to say to me that the true teachings cannot be conveyed in speech. The first sentence in Lu Dongbin's "100 Character Stele" says to "forget words," even though 95 more characters follow. In time I have come to understand why this is so, but I will never be able to use words to explain to you why. This last sentence is very wise. Unfortunately you seem only half committed to this choice and elsewhere offer alternative explanations and put yourself in a position of being qualified to declare what is real and what is false, oh wise experienced groovy master who has experienced all the sensations what with his neuroplasticity. By the way, cultivating a persona is sooooooo youwei. A final thought on practicality. In the story of Huizi's calabash that is too heavy to lift when full and incapable of holding things when cut open, Zhuangzi suggests turning the calabash into a boat. Then he follows that advice with the story of the people who for 100 years protected their hands from chapping while bleaching silk with a medicinal cream which they sold to a traveler for a small quantity of gold, which he then used help a nation win a war fought in the wintertime. Is there anything "practical" about floating around in a gourd? Are we told about how the hand cream could be used to win wars instead of eking out a living as silk bleachers in order to tell us the silk bleachers would have been better off if they had thought up something more practical to do with their cream?

True story: One evening in 2007 in Auckland, New Zealand I decided to just zhanzhuang till my alarm went off, mosquitoes be damned. I was living in a house on a damp, sunken plot of land, and as such the mosquitoes in the evening were many and they were ravenous. I was outside in the carport, and I just kept standing as the mozzies made a meal of my hands, neck, and face. A most unpleasant itching soon became my unignorable companion. I have no idea why, on that day, I was possessed of such determination, but I did not move. After some time I began to have a unique sensation: each mosquito bite seemed to go from having a typical "burning, itching" feeling to having a very sharp burning feeling, all pain and no itch. Have you ever shocked yourself with a piezoelectric cigarette lighter or camp stove lighter? Imagine that feeling, except sustained and present in each mosquito bite. It was quite painful, but I just kept standing. After no more than ten minutes the constellation of points of sharp, burning pain all over my body subsided. I used to often stand for about forty minutes back then. Not long after my alarm went off, I closed my practice, and I went inside. I was shocked to discover that I had no mosquito bites on my face and no sensation of itching, anywhere. Prior to this event, I used to get bitten by mosquitoes regularly--pretty much any time I was outside in the evening or night time in the summer. Typically I would get raised, itchy, red bumps that would remain itchy for many days. I tended to scratch them enough to occasionally cause them to bleed, especially when I was a kid. After this event (which never repeated), several things changed permanently. For one, I can be outside in the evening and night in areas full of mosquitoes and have very few land on me. In fact, even in damp environs swarming with the things I can often do zhanzhuang outdoors in the evenings without getting a single bite. Sometimes I will even close my practice and look down to see a small cloud of mosquitoes circling my pants legs, but none have flown up to the level of my arms and head (or, there may have been a few landing on my arms in the first minutes of practice, but after a few minutes of practice they all disappeared; in such instances more often than not the ones that landed on my arms did not bite). Also, on the instances when I do get bitten, I often get no bump or itching. When I do, instead of itchiness I usually get ~15 minutes of pain, after which point everything disappears. This is convenient except for if I get bitten at night, because the pain wakes me. I have never heard of a similar story from anybody else. I have no idea what mechanisms allowed my body to make such a change in such a short period of time that I no longer react to mosquito bites as I did for the first decades of my life, and that mosquitoes obviously find my body far less appealing than they used to. Many unpredictable and marvelous things can happen during practice, that is for sure. I would love to hear if anybody has had a similar experience. It's likely you won't be eager to try this and even if you do, who knows if your body will react as I have. I'll pass along a suggestion from an acupuncture teacher I respect which might help you. She suggests holding a burning moxibustion stick above a mosquito bite for a few minutes if the itching is bothering you. She says that this usually solves the problem in a few minutes.

@sean Chuang is great! Thaaaaaaaank you for reminding me the name of this journal! I read a great article on Xinjiang there this summer, lost the link, and then for the life of me could not remember what the journal was called and couldn't find it on Google. Look forward to reading some more.

There is much that we can and should learn from so-called "aboriginal" peoples, without idealizing them and forgetting that ancient lifestyles were not perfect and certainly do not hold all of the answers to the future. After all it was ancient peoples who: Hunted countless animals to extinction Gave birth to modern people This is a very general prescription. Why don't you share with us some of the changes you have made and the experiences/challenges/rewards/outcomes/surprises/etc involved in your process? For instance, what do you do with your poop?

I would still have to fly to the PRC, as sea travel is not at all practical for me. While there, I would have to--as always--refrain from offering my opinions about: Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Falun Gong, the Nine-Dash Line, persecution of human rights lawyers, persecution of feminist activists, persecution of religious people, and indeed persecution of environmental activists (which I mentioned here). Thus my decision.

I have a close friend who studied TCM in China, practiced internal martial arts, went on vipassana retreats and maintained a long term meditation practice, and is also an observing Jew who prays daily and regularly attends services. He has quite a bit of affinity for Daoism and visited a holy mountain with me, so he had no shortage of friends to share bits and pieces of Daoist thinking and practices with him over the years. There was sincerity in his approach, so his study and practice added depth to his life, but he never found anything along the path that gave him what he needed to break his porn and masturbation addiction. Finally in real despair (he was at risk of ruining his marriage and the mood swings his masturbation apparently caused were leading him to fly into rages with his small children) he Googled his problem and came upon SLAA. He has been "sober" with them for a few years now, and he tells me that due to the nature of his addiction he needed to find people who knew the specific "medicine" for his disease (it is he, not I, who stresses that addiction is a disease). Most interestingly, in addition to helping him break his addiction, the 12 step program has also very clearly deepened his religious and spiritual life. After seeing similar processes unfold in two other addicts I know (one was an alcoholic who, like this friend, pursued a TCM education, meditation, and martial arts), I read the AA Big Book. I would say it is something that anybody with spare time and interest in spirituality should read. One need not be an addict to glean insight from this text. 12 step programs are not a magic bullet and they do not work for everybody, but my friend tried Daoism + Buddhism + Judaism + TCM + internal martial arts to no avail, while SLAA's teachings and community clearly worked.

I did not plan on sharing the following with anybody at first, and when the idea came to mind, my first thought was something along the lines of, "don't go patting yourself on the back in public." But then it crossed my mind last night that maybe we need to share stories like this more often (and I would be very interested in hearing others' stories and reactions), so here goes: About three weeks ago when I was in China for work an old friend there sent me an email and asked me to give her a call. We caught for awhile up having not spoken in a year, and after she told me she is now the manager of a traditional medicine spa of sorts in a luxury hotel surrounded by old growth forest in the foothills of the Himalayas, she asked if I would be willing to come teach Daoist abdominal acupressure (道家臟腑點穴) and myofascial release, both of which I've studied for some time and which I've done on her in Shanghai. This would be a job, with the air travel covered, free room and board in the hotel while I was there, and payment for my teaching. Quite a nice offer, especially since the mountains in Yunnan are utterly spectacular and this friend is somebody I trust and respect. She also wanted me to lead them on some forest bathing activities. Sounded like a great way to earn a few yuan! I told her I needed some time to think about it, and finally last week I sent her an email turning down the job. I gave two reasons. The first is that I am not sure that the possible benefits of me teaching these techniques in short seminars justifies the large amount of jet fuel I'd have to burn to make it out to Yunnan, which would likely require two flights in each direction. The second reason sealed the deal. I am tired of working in China, where money comes easily to somebody with my skill set but where I have to live according to a totalitarian government's script or else risk losing my visa or--if I were to truly speak my mind--going to jail. The first reason alone might not have stopped me, as I could make the argument that teaching people how to do a form of "natural healing" justifies increasing my carbon footprint. But I feel that authoritarianism and the environmental crisis are two intimately linked problems, and we have no hopes of progress in the latter area if the world continues to be run by groups like the CCP, who jail, torture, and murder vast numbers of people who simply want what most of us on this website want (and, if we live in freer countries, already have and possibly take for granted). Thus, I walked away from the money. I plan to tie off all of my loose ends in China (which includes lucrative, easy interpretation work as well as a years long teacher-student relationship with a Daoist master) by the end of 2019 and close that chapter in my life. I do not plan to return to the PRC unless I can freely express myself and take part in society there. I do not think I am special or deserving of plaudits for my choice. I do not want congratulations at all, especially as my decision feels more like a kind of failure than a success. I share this because I wonder who else has faced similar dilemmas or made similar choices (perhaps choices with far weightier consequences--heck there might people who've walked away from Exxon or Monsanto jobs on this forum, never know...), or if anybody is currently facing similar dilemmas. We should talk about them; this is what community is for. While it is absolutely true that the lion's share of the responsibility for many of the problems in this world lies with a small-ish group of people who clutch vast amounts of wealth and influence in their hands, I do not think that absolves us of the responsibility to make small changes. For instance, this mindset one of the primary reasons I have not been a meat eater for ten years, have never owned a motor vehicle, did not turn on my AC once all summer, and try to use electronic devices till they're more or less dead (although, to be certain, I have burned huge amounts of carbon with my jet set ways in that time).

2:1000 is a mind boggling ratio.

Great advice. Also: Anybody who believes he (women seem almost immune from this disease, too) has discovered the secret of telekinesis/immortality/transmuting semen into gold/etc... If you still personally cannot move stuff at a D/live forever/cum necklaces, then you ain't figured out diddly squiddly! Speculation with footnotes = Speculation

Gooooooood point about repetition, Drew. Are you immortal?

I have long found George Monbiot's writings insightful. What do you all think of the final four paragraphs?

Also bears repeating.

Ammmmmmmmmeeeeeennnnnnnnnnnnnnn. A bunch of internet nerds sitting around offering confident-sounding diagnoses of why so-and-so got cancer, claiming to know the pathways of a barely-understood disease and a cultivation system which probably none of you are initiates of? GTFOOH, YGTBFKM. Not even an oncologist (or TCM doc, etc, whatever) with years of experience would tell you s/he could be sure precisely why a person developed cancer!

You should see--quite vividly, with smells and sounds and the rush of hot wind against your face all accompanying your vision to prove that this is not mere phantasy--the butt of a man farting onto candle flame in very close proximity to your face. (Well, pretty much every time I sit to meditate I have visions like that, do you guys? No? Oh, huh. Yeah, actually me neither, was just thinking out loud, you know, about stuff I don't actually think about.)

Hi CodeXs, That's a long list. I'm just going to jot some notes into it where I can offer some thoughts off the top of my head. If you do not read Chinese, I think your best bet is to consult The Routledge Encyclopedia of Taoism, which is a fantastic and extremely in-depth resource. To be honest, consider its enormity and the care went into making it, I don't consider its price on Amazon to be exhorbitant whatsoever, but it is still expensive. If the price makes buying it impossible, you might be able to get a copy through inter-library loan or even convince your local library to purchase a copy. I've had luck getting hard to find books through both methods in the past.

I get that you probably said that tongue-in-cheek and you're not trying to start a fight by saying that... and I also appreciate that you deigned to "discuss stupid shit instead of practicing" your own good self... But don't you think it's a little ripe for older practitioners who spent years (decades?) of their lives reading, discussing, and contemplating their spiritual options before finding their paths to make comments that make younger, newer seekers feel like they're making a mistake by seeking to get something of a lay of the land? Also, discussion is arguably part of "the practice." I don't think that the dichotomy you propose here is accurate at all. The first "branch" you identify above is not the only type of wuwei teaching I've encountered in Daoism, because I have met multiple teachers who teach wuwei that certainly does not involve "direct connection to a Shen." The second "branch" also does not really make sense, because wuwei practice can be and very often is taught by living masters. There is much more that could be said about this, but suffice to say that what I have encountered in the Daoist world does not match up with your thesis. Have you read Li Daochun's Book of Balance and Harmony (《中和集》)? This book--which was important in its time and remains a useful read today--revolves around a way of practice that is not youwei in the sense of the long list of considerations you wrote above, nor based upon having a hufa work upon/with the student as you suggest. This important thread of Quanzhen teachings remains very much alive today and I have been exposed to aspects of this teaching by more than one living teacher in three countries. Well, I see no reason to doubt that this is the case... Nor believe it haha. But, if that's truly what's going on, sounds great. I see no reason to doubt that either, but, people who practice "normal" zifagong also report similar things. Er, good for you guys, but does this even matter... like at all? Every crackpot religion worth a dime claims government ministers and nobility in its ranks. And does anybody even like/respect "nobility," what with their castles and yachts and hemophilia? And anyway, I've met plenty of Daoist priests who barely know their ass from their elbow. So, if you've got nothing to prove, what's with the "rich and famous and powerful and priestly guys hang out with us?" Not saying, just saying, namsayin? Doesn't that kinda disagree with: Well, we'll just have to take your word for that one... Which ascended Daoists who wrote books have said that to you? Except swans do bathe daily... like... literally. And Laozi wrote a book for posterity that has helped countless people develop their wisdom, like, literarily. I don't know if you appreciate that you have kind of created the questions that you're getting here by posting lots of "spiritual fireworks" testimonials over the years. You talk about people suddenly hearing voices and even seeing spiritual beings the very moment your initiation ritual is conducted, and you've offered lots of stories about various highly intense reactions to your school's practice. Given that you've shared so much information of this sort, it does seem a bit discordant to now be saying that nobody should look for/expect/want any of that in instead expect to have an XYP practice that is so subtle that they cannot, in fact, feel anything at all. Er, again, you've shared a lot of stories that do anything but say to the reader "XYP is a boring practice." Also, you might be right about why people didn't experience lasting results, but blaming the practitioner like this... Well, we can agree on that one... but maybe that just means we're getting old Anshino was talking about people who don't even feel that. Which again, is a very gross manifestation, not subtle at all. Also, when Anshino raised the experience of the long-term practitioner of Zhinenggong who was initiated into XYP, I think he had a fair point. Somebody who has done Zhinenggong for even half a year is likely to have developed quite a bit of qi and sensitivity (I used some of this school's techniques for a couple of months); ten years of practice would almost certainly create substantial changes and lead to lots of sensitivity. I honestly do think it's a bit weird that this person would feel essentially nothing, and I find an explanation that amounts to "he didn't work hard enough" or "he had too many expectations" unsatisfying. Of course, who knows, maybe you're 100% right, but I think the questions are fair. As well as important. Why? Because there are a lot of deluded people walking around who are sure they're getting direct transmissions from spirits and deities who are also happy to "initiate" disciples. It is a good thing for people to have open, honest conversations about this phenomena--this way they're more likely to walk into a real school than a charlatan's or deluded fool's. So cultivation that involves pre-heaven energies will not create tangible changes in the post-heaven body? Well that's annoying haha. He seems to me more like a sincere seeker who is trying to get a handle on the arcane lingo and habits of the vast gallimaufry (ah, I got to use that word today, today was a good day) of weirdos who share a single moniker, "Daoist." Sure, perhaps a bit too much "brain," but I don't sense that this is a person who never wishes to practice. And surely a bit of thinking and questioning is better than none. Remember that you spent years doing your fair share and ended up in a place where you find yourself very happy. This is interesting--the idea that it needs to be "downloaded." Other Daoist teachers I have met suggest that it is innate in the human being by virtue of the human being's very existence... nothing needs to be added, merely revealed. Sincere question: how do you know? I thought he walks away from initiation with a spiritual guide/friend who he can potentially quite literally talk to, and who chose him. If he's saying he was able to talk to his spirit guide, why does he need you to interpret the conversation for him, and to tell him his interpretation is wrong? How do you know that his spirit guide didn't plainly and straightforwardly "approve" of his request? The reason I ask is because it seems like the premise of XYP is "you come here once, you get your guide, you go home and you practice, you never need to meet us again." But your comments here sound very "religious," in the sense of the many religions where there are those who claim special ability to "know" what the heavens really intended, and who like to tell off "commoners" and remind them how they could never know what that so-to-speak Brahmans know... Luckily the real cannot be sullied. You sound more like the Confucius than the Laozi of the story you mentioned above I've certainly never seen evidence to suggest that it does. What evidence have you seen to prove that it does not? That's simply not true. Of course, the lore and hagiographies of various Daoist schools is unverifiable, but I know lots of Daoists who, if asked this sort of question, will start rattling off the names of various men and women in Daoist history who flew up into the sky when they left the world, vanished into nothingness, turned into light, etc. They don't get sensitive at all. Ditto for Buddhists who believe that Padmasambhava simply teleported to the land of ogres to continue spreading the Dharma and that Shakyamuni left a corpse on purpose to reduce people's attachment to the body. Finally, as these people have it, their ancestral are indeed still alive (beyond birth and death might be a more accurate attempt to word what they think about this) and do indeed appear, physically, to those who have the fate to meet them. Including, for instance, Tai Shang Lao Jun. Lolol, I thought you said less knowledge was better???? I feel like I'm talking to Gerard in two posts at once... You too.

Uhhhhhhh, really? Here: Point: The following is extremely hypocritical: First: 1. When a woman comes and kindly shares a book she just wrote for free, you jump on her to man-splain how all religion is wrong and how books are a "a human mechanism to enhance the ego." This is extremely rude because: A. You are accusing her of having simply done something to "enhance her ego." B. You did not even read any of her book before of before lecturing at her, so you have no fucking idea what her ideas actually are. Then: 2. In this thread, the same Gerard who needed to shut down Shanmugam because she wrote a book about religions, is now going on about how baguazhang is "a kind of religion" (your words) and "the sum of all reigions" (your words). Yet in her thread you criticized her book (did I mention that you didn't read it?) and religion in general when you prognosticated for us: A. "No god" B. "No religion" C. [Religion only works to] "divide (as mentioned above) amd argue with others; eg. my religion is better than yours. Hmm, makes no sense, Gerard. Especially since your religion (baguazhang) is evidently the best ever. Sigh. Are you in the process of founding the all-new Church of Baguazhang? From what I can tell so far, these are the rules: Gerard is a priest in this religion, he has walked in lots of circles and his eighth eye opened (or was it the 64th eye?), so now he knows whether or not there is a god and he knows the contents of all books BKF is the pope of the Church of Baguazhang. Gerard has never met Him, but He is really great and we should respect him blindly otherwise we are not "worthy" We should read the writings of the Great BKF, but we should not read any other books, because books are bad and reading is counterproductive, unless you are reading BKF books It is also okay to read online internet posties by Gerard But don't read anything else Idle hands do the Devil's work, so if you find yourself with free time, it is best to go to your local Asian supermarket and ask if they will let you practice your "two in the pink one in the stink" with the tofu. While you're there, you can also try and pick up girls, who will surely be impressed by your bagua disco moves and tofu-pleasuring skills. If you manage to get to 3,000 sexual partners, then you become immortal and ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Meh, it was an okay essay. Pretty much typical "doing baguazhang will solve all of your problems" martial arts teacher website boilerplate, im(perhaps insufficiently)ho. By the way, last week didn't you just say this when a woman came here to share her book? Wait. So reading books = bad, but reading essays on websites = good? Just wanna be clear here.