Zhongyongdaoist

I appreciate your appreciation, you are most welcome.

Yes, it was taken seriously, it is exactly in this model that the distinction between "High Magic", that of Ceremonial Magic which was upper class magic and manipulated the "dead matter" of the Cartesian worldview through the animal magnetism, and low magic, the superstitious magic of witches and old women and the lower classes arose. This is purely a Nineteenth Century invention, nothing even remotely like it can be found in Agrippa's Three Books on Occult Philosophy, where magic is viewed as the result of a practice that unifies Natural, Mathematical and Ceremonial magic. Curiously it does emerge as the root a the title of Gerald Gardner's witchcraft novel High Magic's Aid, in which Gardener introduces witches and "low magic" as something which "aids" high magic, thus seeking to heal the imbalance brought about by too much emphasis on "High Magic". Interestingly Agrippa warns about not doing ceremonial magic without using natural magic as part of the procedure, and to my mind the history of the modern magical revival is definitely proof of the Wisdom of that warning. For a person who is interested in the historical perspective, Ennemoser is as I said essential, but to gain a fascinating look into both the theory, the practice and the lives of people who practiced magic in the mid-Nineteenth Century and pre-Blavatsky, you can't beat Art Magic and Ghost Land, both ostensibly written by an anonymous adept and edited by Emma Hardinge Britten, the first deals the theory and practice of magic and the second the adepts supposed biography, are fascinating reading. Of particular interest is the contrast that emerges between the German "occult scientists" who first train and at the same time exploit the young author and the British "ceremonial magicians", a group which the author later meets during a time spent in England. This later English group is usually considered to be the descended from Francis Barrett and is supposed to have included Bulwer-Lytton. A wonderful website dedicated to this remarkable woman can be found here: The Emma Hardinge Britten Archive Where downloadable versions of both these works may be found. A very worthwhile modern scholarly history which uses Britten's accounts as a source is: The Theosophical Enlightenment by Jocelyn Godwyn Edit: Minor spelling

As I thought about my post above it occurred to me that the above statement left out the most important contribution of mesmerisim to neo-magical theory which was the emphasis on "will power and imagination" and should have been written as: "As far as the theory of Neo-magic goes, basically it follows from mesmeric practice as it existed circa 1800. The magician and his control over the 'animal magnetism" through his will power and imagination was taken as the sole cause of magical phenomenon." This point seemed to be too important to leave to a simple edit to the original post as someone who had already read the post might miss it, so I decided to add this edit as a separate post. The emphasis on "will power" is not a characteristic of earlier magic and is an attempt to arrive at a "quasi-scientific" explanation for magical phenomena through modeling it on mesmerism and is quite in line with the "zeitgeist" of the late Eighteenth Century as reflected in the Kantian reduction of ethics from practical wisdom to "good will", so the emphasis in earlier magic is on wisdom and understanding, not on will.

Regarding Levi's writing style, it's been since late 1967 or maybe early 1968 that I started to read Levi's Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual in Waite's translation in the 1964 Rider edition. While I was not looking for fancy prose, I certainly did notice a "way with words", which since I was looking for something practical, only bored and irritated me. Someone today can hardly imagine the difficulties faced in the 60s trying to find something to actually do, rather than to read about doing, so, no at the time I had little patience with Levi's "Gallic" style. I read Levi because of Aleister Crowley's claim to be his reincarnation. I had purchased Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice a few years earlier as a kid of twelve in the summer of 1963. As an early influence Crowley impressed me positively during adolescence, but as I read more widely my admiration diminished significantly. Crowley by the way had an excellent prose style, it is part of the reason he has been so influential, but I cannot make my judgements about magic based on someone's writing style, only on its content. Ophiel, who had a terrible, almost tortured, but after a while of reading it, almost endearing writing style, came to the rescue as far as practice went, that and some books by W. E. Butler, Regardie's The Art of True Healing, and some others, basically a mere handful of books, and a lot of creativity got me started on practice. As far as the theory of Neo-magic goes, basically it follows from mesmeric practice as it existed circa 1800. The magician and his control over the 'animal magnetism" was taken as the sole cause of magical phenomenon. Mesmer even had a "baton" which he used to direct his animal magnetism and this is the model for the "magic wand" as conceived of in neo-magic during the Nineteenth Century. The other important thing was introduced by Mesmer's were group healing sessions involving the use of his "baquet", which probably influenced the table sessions of the later spiritualist movement and is the model for the "magnetic chain of initiates", a theme that runs through neo-magical theory and is part of the theory of "egregores". I studied the theory of neo-magic in what is probably the best textbook of the classical, that is pre-Crowley, version of neo-magical theory, The Tarot, a Contemporary course in the Quintessence of Hermetic Occultism, by Mouni Sadhu, an author who, in spite of the Indian appearance of his name, taken in honor of his long study of and with Ramana Maharshi, was probably an ethnic Pole, born in what was, at the time, Russia. This book, a very demanding and challenging read, was my constant intellectual companion for a year or so beginning in the summer of 1968. Because of that study I have a very clear understanding of the ins and outs of neo-magical theory and have had such since the late 60s. At the time I did not think in terms of neo-magic, that distinction did not occur to me until later, though I did have some premonition of it in my early reflections on the difference between the practice of magic as outlined in such grimoires as the Greater and Lesser Keys of Solomon and magic as I read about it in the writings of Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune that I had bought in that first early phase of study in 1963-64. So much for a short outline of neo-magical theory, as for this: that will have to wait for another post. Some consideration of post Crowley neo-magical theory might also be in order, but I did not even think about that in my first reply since I was focusing on Levi, and not the full scope of neo-magical theory. Edit: Correct spelling, added a truant letter.

I have had the goal of synthesizing Chinese and Western Esoteric traditions since circa 1970, today I routinely practice just such a synthesis which I find powerful and effective, and the power of which has been demonstrated to some people even some here on the Dao Bums. I don't have time to go into details right now, but suffice it to say, for now at least, that between what I prefer to call Ritual Daoism and Western ceremonial magic there is a high degree of complementarity and that a satisfactory structure for such a synthesis can be achieved, it requires going back to the "pre-modern" Western tradition of the Occult Philosophy of the Renaissance Hermetic Platonist, Cornelius Agrippa, rather then the proto-new age eclecticism of Aleister Crowley, but it can be done and I have spoken of it many times on the Dao Bums, including my introductory post here, as "Cornelius Agrippa meets the Golden Dawn in Medieval China", which for convenience sake I will repost here: Many people here who have read my serious posts must wonder about this business of “stand-up”, a reference to a comedy act, I attempt to explain of some it in the root post of my personal practice section, which regrettably, non Dao Bums cannot follow: Zhongyongdaoists Limitless Mischief Machine If I have time I will elaborate on the topic of this thread and on issues raised by the above.

No, this this the true epoptic vision: Somewhat more restrained and serious post soon.

This article: New Quantum Theory Could Explain the Flow of Time was a link at: Quantum Entanglement and Information Article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy It, the article in the first link, is a very readable article and one of the most suggestive I have read in a long time. One of the longtime basics of Information Theory is that the entropy and the information of a system are linked and both increase at the same rate. This article explains it in terms of quantum entanglement and for the first time gives an actual explanation for why time has a "direction". Because of its use of entanglement it also shows that entanglement is not some exotic phenomena, but the same thing that leaves you and your coffee, or tea, cold in the morning. The relationship between this entanglement and information is also very interesting. The original paper that inspired this article can be downloaded here: Quantum Mechanical Evolution to Thermal Equilibrium for the more technically inclined of us. Edit: spelling and added clarification about the article in the first link being the one that is very readable, though, come to think of it, if you have the background so is the one at the Stanford Encyclopedia.

It's called "idioglossia" and is a well know phenomena, most common among twins: Idioglossia on Wikipedia

Eliphas Levi wrote the "Gospel" version of neo-magic an interpretation of the Western Magical Tradition that began in the late Eighteenth Century and continued to the present. It's interpretive model is Mesmerism and it reinterprets the whole of magic within this framework. Early examples include Francis Barrett's The Magus, which while quoting from such sources as Agrippa, starts to cite Seventeenth Century "magnetical" treatises also. To get a good idea of the background a read of Joseph Ennemoser's The History of Magic, is essential as one will find all of the theory and the reinterpretation of the magical tradition in its terms both outlined and copiously detailed there. Once you understand this relation every aspect of the modern tradition of magic becomes clear. Naturally enough I learned neo-magic as a teenager in the 1960s, it was all that was available and is still in its many guises, dominant, but it was thinking about those experiences and more, such as interesting experiences in alchemical laboratories and reviewing the literature, I could not remain satisfied with it, which is why I undertook in the early 70s the historical and other literary research which lead me outside that paradigm and to far more fruitful and interesting models of magic. Levi? Except from a historical point of view, largely a waste of time.

As a useful preliminary to any type of physical training system Feldenkrais is hard to beat. I discovered: Awareness Through Movement back circa 1977 and even though I had started practicing yoga when I was ten in 1961 (Through Richard Hittleman's "Yoga for Health" TV show) and practiced it on and off through my teens and had been working since the early 70s with Chinese style movement and meditation, nothing gave me the sheer ease of motion and natural limberness which Feldenkrais techinique gave me so quickly and easily. With any other type of stretching, there was always a loss unless you stretched every day and a period of having to work back into it and if not practiced regularly the benefit was lost. Working through the exercises in his book I was surprised to find that one session was enough to allow me to put my foot flat on my head. Twenty-five years later I could still do it even though I had not done Feldenkrais for decades. It is not a spiritual or qi type of system, but as a preliminary training for or other forms of qigong and internal or external martial arts training, I think it would be hard to beat.

Pi only becomes truly ONEderful when you add e to it. Thus in English pie, but in mathematics Euler's identity: In mathematics it is not quite as easy as English, but the result is amazing as you can find out here: The Most Beautiful Equation What I find really interesting is that two of the most important irrational Constants pi and e can be related in such a way that they yield any integer at all, much less the most ONEderful of them all, and also of course it shows that all of the pi/pie homonym puns are actually a divine revelation. Funny isn't it? I think its hilarious myself.

Just to clarify some matters related to space/time and spacetime: Space/time is our ordinary awareness in which there is one dimension of time and three of space, however no coherent model of matter and motion can be created within space/time, but it requires the introduction of the notion of at least four dimensional space, to even begin to make sense of the world. Also, as the quote says, this was originally developed for Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism and then applied to special relativity, indicated that the matter energy equivalence usually attributed to Einstein and Special Relativity was already implicit in Maxwell's equations (Einstein's two 1905 papers that deal with this were basically papers dealing with electrodynamics, so this is no surprise.). In my interpretation of this I view space/time as broken symmetry of four dimensional spacetime which results in space/time, matter/energy, and more importantly for us here, body/mind, in which a fundamental four dimensional unity is experienced as a body with consciousness in it, and that meditation states are those in which awareness is regained of this four dimensional "being", which is what we truly are, in Daoist terms, experiencing "sitting and forgetting" our Body/mind to experience our real nature in wuji. While it is generally believed that Einstein proved aether did not exist, it was only the existence of the Luminiferous Aether of electromagnetism that he eventually realized had been rejected and later reexamined Aether theories: This four dimensional aether also can be compared to Indian notions of Akasha as well as Daoist wuji, and has some more complex relations to Aristotle's aether, which are too complex to enter into now. One of the interesting aspects of this is the relation of derivatives as ratios, space/time, like miles per hour, i.e. miles/hour and integrals as "spaces", areas, volumes, hyper-volumes, etc. such as spacetime, i.e. space x time as a four dimensional volume. It is just a curious of the mathematics which people who know calculus will recognize and maybe find interesting. As a note to what, in a previous post, I described as "considerable controversy", though one of his great 1905 papers was taken as one of the foundation documents of Quantum Physics, Einstein objected to Quantum Physics from the time he understood its implications about locality and determinism, spending the rest of his life working in directions more like this: Kaluza–Klein theory, or how to save time in a Kaluza-Klein bottle and opposing Quantum Physics to anyone who would listen to him.

Thanks Brian, aside from being an interesting article I had to laugh out loud when I read about how the "the enigmatic Norwegian-American chemist Lars Onsager", was "famously incomprehensible". It seems his science was clear enough, after all he won a Nobel prize, but apparently just couldn't talk to people, including students and college administrators resulting in the lose of two faculty positions.

No, I had nothing to do with it and came across it recently while looking for internet material to refer people to in posts like this, but thank you for the compliment of thinking that I had anything to do with it.

It works for "particles" as large as beryllium too: New York Times "Physicists put single beryllium atom in two different places" This was twenty years ago, but many people have not heard of this. Most of this discussion is marred by real misunderstandings which Brian is doing his best to clear up. His patience is admirable, and his exposition is very good, but I don't think these types of misunderstandings can be cleared up in a format like this. Not only is this a matter of science as understood today, but there are important historical aspects to it also and these need to be addressed in order to show that most of what people believe to have been pre-quantum science wasn't science at all, if by science you mean something that has been rigorously tested and demonstrated by "scientific method". Almost all beliefs about matter and atoms before 1900 was simply some minor changes in speculations that went back to ancient Greece and there was precious little to support these speculations and no means of testing them. When the necessary mathematical and experimental tools became available in the late Nineteenth Century, these speculations had largely and in the midst of considerable controversy within physics, be abandoned. This interesting, semi-technical article summarizes conclusions that I reached after a lot of reading in the History of Science over many years: Atomism from the 17th to the 20th Century Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy To quote from its conclusion: In short Quantum Physics, like it or not, was the first genuine result of scientific method applied to and rigorously testing traditional "metaphysical" speculations about atoms. The article should be read in full, and as it makes clear there was little that could scientifically be said about atoms until the later half of the Nineteenth Century with the development of Kinetic Theory and Statistical Mechanics, but that didn't stop people from making all sorts of grandiose, but basically unscientific, claims about them and the "Mechanistic Philosophy" from 1700 onward, but which remain staples of thought today, such as that people are machines, that machines can think, etc. all taken for granted in far too many circles, especially Biology, but where exactly are the observations and experiments that demonstrated these "doctrines" rigorously?. The article covers the "scientific" and philosophical issues well, but completely leaves out the Religious context in which they occurred, which dealing the the Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the very bloody and bitter intra-European wars of Religion contributed a great deal to how some of these issues developed from 1500 to 1800 which was much more influential than the popular histories of science like to admit.

There really is no problem looked at from a higher dimensional perspective. A fifth dimensional being would see your whole life as a finished and complete four dimensional object even though each part of it experienced by you as a series of three dimensional sensory spheres encapsulating your consciousness strung along a timeline would be experienced “in time”, a lifetime to be exact. Each change in the direction of this timeline could be a completely free act along that timeline, but to the Five dimensional intelligence it would already have happened from beginning to end, and if we communicated with this intelligence what would seem to us as prediction based on predetermination would simply be a description of things that were already a finished product as perceived by a Fifth dimensional being, even if they were yet to happen to us. I suspect not many people will be able to understand this as written, because they are not used to thinking in these terms, but it is based on the mathematics of hyperspace and not mere fancy, and as a view of reality is at least implied by every form of physics since Special Relativity and therefore far more likely to be true than not. Unfortunately I don't have time to turn this response into an introduction to the type of thinking of which it is an example, that would take a small book and as such couldn't be posted here anyway, but for those hardy souls who take it as pointing in the direction of a solution to the problem of “free will vs. determinism”, a little research and then practice of some relatively easy “thought experiments” will make it clear enough.

I don't know how I missed this one before, but bearing in mind your first post: This prescription makes a lot of sense to me: The emotional extremes and anger and sadness which you mentioned in the beginning are very much associated with Liver/Gallbladder stagnation which can both be caused by feelings of frustration, but can also turn into a chronic "mood" of feeling angry and frustrated and moving the qi/blood is a good single herb to start treating this. The Liver and Gallbladder hours are 11:00 pm to 3:00 am (Local Mean Time, not standard time) and problems with them have a well known association with insomnia. Good luck with your treatment.

Since I started back in the early 1970s, things have become very much more confusing than they were. This post is very good for a beginner to bear in mind: In the early 80s the scene was changed significantly by the appearance of works by Mantak Chia which emphasize the Microcosmic Orbit, or MCO as it is often abbreviated, and has created a climate in which this simple good advice has been neglected. When I started the only serious work of theory/practice was the Taoist Yoga text (Taoist Yoga; Alchemy and Immortality, trans. Lu k'uan yu, Weiser, 1970, reprinted many times since) which had a different emphasis, including the idea that the MCO developed naturally as a result of making progress in meditation and the importance of the Lower Dan Tian in the lower abdoman. Because of that I did a lot of breathing to the lower Tan Tian in the 70s and there was a lot of benefit from it. It is good to have a moving meditation also, I worked with Tai Chi Chih as popularized by Justin Stone, though his version seems to have been derived from a system that uses an actual wooden "ruler". You can find some details here: Taiji Ruler There were other things that I did, Eight Pieces of Brocade, etc. The best thing to do is find yourself a good teacher, next to that a lot of background reading can be useful, in particular a familiarity with the basics of Chinese Medicine helps, that way you can be aware of situations that might arise through meditation and how one might deal with them. A good introduction is Between Heaven and Earth by Harriet Beinfield and Efrem Korngold. This book has a self-evaluation questionnaire that is very useful and it is helpful to know if one has any types of qi problems already, in which case you need to proceed with caution and definitely look for a teacher or find a good TCM practitioner to help you clear it up. There has been an appropriation of these ideas by "energy workers" who were very influenced by Mantak Chia and the result has been, like some of the abuses of Chinese herbs, such as putting Mahuang in diet pills, that have led to problems and misunderstandings of the natural development that is part of the Daoist approach have caused problems also. In a short space this is the best advice I can give. Edit: Corrected a spacing problem.

I just posted this in my personal practice forum: Those interested may wish to keep an eye open for it.

First of all "psychosis" needs to be looked at. Within the reductionist materialist framework of most modern psychology, experiencing oneself as a being whose true nature is existence beyond life and death in a multidimensional hyper-space is probably going to be viewed as psychotic. These people want to domesticate meditation as "the relaxation response" a pleasant non-drug way for hominids to become happy productive citizens, perfectly adapted to the reductionist social order, anything outside of that is an undesirable side effect which "good meditation teachers", that is those how practice it as a discipline of neurology, can and will avoid, or lose their license to teach and practice. This is the danger faced by the spiritual traditions, that of being reduced to neurology and written off as an adjunct of modern psychology, with more and more restrictions on who can teach it and under what circumstances.

There is a great deal that is available on the timing of meditation, ritual, etc., though regular meditation is always the basis of success, however just to give an example off the top of my head, every Thursday is connected with the Planet Jupiter and element wood, but there is also a larger four week cycle of the Lunar Constellations, in which each week corresponds to one of the Four Protective Animals, the Green Dragon, Red Phoenix, the White Tiger and the Black Tortoise, so during Black Tortoise week wood the liver is nourished on Thursday, in Green Dragon it Grows, in Red Phoenix it nourishes heart and other fire aspects and in White Tiger it is Controlled, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. High level Doists mix and match these cycles and gather harvests in all seasons.

Judging by the past posts of some of the people who have posted here the idea of being on "substances" when they have experienced these things is not worth discussing because it goes without saying that they were not on "substances" so that they haven't mentioned it. They don't need to be on "substances" to experience these things, nor does anyone else who will train properly. As for hallucinations, anyone who has worked seriously with this type of thing over decades has had the sense to check these things out with disinterested third parties and has a vast store of experiences which convince them that these things are not a "play of the mind". Recounting these experiences over and over again for the edification of doubters gets boring after a while and whether the reaction to them is continued skepticism or a repulsive type of adulation from people who "want to believe", it is not a very rewarding task.

I am sorry to be so long in posting more here, but both the correspondent I mentioned and myself have been rather busy and we have been talking about meta-issues related to scientific method applied to these esoteric matters and there has not been much of interest about Mathematical Magic and magic squares, however in the process I was reminded of this post which has some interesting things to say and shows at least one example from Chinese Astrology in which a whole system of Astrology is derived from the mathematics of the 3x3 magic square which is so fundamental to Chinese Esoteric Cosmology: I was replying to one of our members who is fond of asking questions, some very good and others, such as the ones he was asking in this case, not very edifying. The thread ended at this point and I have not had time to return to the topic until now, and the reason why I bring it up now is that, had I continued with the above thread, I would have cited this Yi Jing astrology as just such an example of the application of the formal system embodied in the he/luo diagrams. The technique of the astrology is hardly the type used to solve a set of linear equations, being simple arithmetic, but it does show that interesting and useful information lies in the most unexpected places and only waits for the right analytic system to bring it shining forth. Occasionally there is talk on the Tao Bums about Sacred Geometry, Sacred Linear Algebra anyone? Since you had relocate the thread which I reference in the above quote, I thought pulling this up would be useful and interesting as illustrating one application. Most of my work would take us well outside the area of purely Daoist Magic and is highly technical anyway, but basically it is possible to create magic squares of just about any size and to represent just about any complex magical system on them. Regarding uses within Daoist Magic, years ago I took the material in Saso and Lagerway (a less well known academic authority on Daoist ritual who covers much the same ground) and let my fingers do the walking, creating a basis for Daoist ritual in which one has 'the whole world', if not exactly in one's hand, at least on one's fingers. While I was reading some of Jerry Alan Johnson's material years later, I was amused to discover that this is a Maoshan Thunder Magic technique. The above touches on several interesting aspects drawn from Chinese Tradition and the subsequent content of the thread, albeit short clarifies them to some extent and is worth a quick read.

Reminds me of me.

Let's not be too harsh on Aristotelian physics, the formulation of gravity in General Relativity as a "least action" principle moving to minimize the energy by having masses move in the direction of the "deepest" gravity well has a rough equivalence to Aristotle's principle of "natural place". I wish I had more time to comment on this but I don't. If I do I will come back to this thread and make waves of considerable gravity. Edit: Changed "have" to having in the above.