Zhongyongdaoist

I could say a lot about all of this from both Western and Chinese magic, but I don't have time right now. There have been many interesting observations here, but the business about light is important: Right at the beginning is something of great general importance “Light . . . is . . . a representation of the understanding”, thus light is not the understanding itself, but rather it is an image (“imago” in Agrippa's Latin is translated as “representation”) and it is “. . . diffused from the Mind of God into all things . . .”, in other words Light is not the understanding itself, but rather an emanation of that understanding that represents that understanding to imagination and sense. In other words Light in inner sense is definitely connected with very high entities, but it is an attribute of "representation" of them and is not their essence. Unfortunately appearing as Light is not limited to them and there are "deceivers" of a certain class who can appear clothed in glory and beaming love. Differentiating them from real ones is not always easy and as I said recently to a correspondent, "You are not really a real magician until you have vanquished your first Deceiver of Light". In other words, in general I agree with Spotless, and one needs to be very cautious in dealing with these matters. I apologize that this was posted in some haste and if I can I may be able to post more.

Famous quote from Hally's Comet: "Gravity waves to me every time I fly by, its gravity's way of saying 'come on down and see me sometime.'"

Yes, I came across this system in the late 90s, it is a really interesting system and seems to provide a lot of useful information. I have another friend who has worked extensively with it, also starting about the same time, she is a person with a lot of experience with Tarot Cards and the Yijing and she is also very impressed with them. Yes, there are several systems, but not as cards. There is a divination system related to Mah Jongg, which has been written about by Derek Walters, a well known authority on Chinese astrology: The Fortune Teller's Mah Jongg He also designed a deck to go with it, but traditionally it was done with the actual Mah Jongg set. It is a very interesting system also. On a more esoteric level there is: Taiyi Shen Shu Which is very complex, but is held in high esteem. There are links in the Wikipedia article linked above to other systems. There's more, but I don't have time to list them all now, some of them I have a lot of experience with, others little to none. Another very interesting Western system is Geomancy on the surface it seems very simple and I am not aware of any books that really plum its depths and it is very worthwhile to study.

You might want to expand your investigation into: Aquaponics on Wikipedia In which a symbiotic system is set up that simultaneously raises fish and does hydroponic gardening. Herbal medicine is just too big a field to answer easily, I have experience with Western systems going back to circa 1970 and they can work, but since 1990 I have used Chinese Herbal Medicine pretty much exclusively with excellent results, also it is a living tradition and at a good point in terms of available resources etc., but, at least when I was investigating it, the most interesting aspects of Western Herbal Medicine, the esoteric aspects you might say, were very obscure and hard to obtain good information on. That situation may have changed some, but it has also been over grown with a lot of new age stuff which would complicate getting to the interesting stuff. I couldn't give you much to go on in Western now, but for Chinese go to: Redwing Books Where you will find just about everything you could ask for, except of course the right way study it all.

PPFs are not public. If you want to have what you say reach a wider audience than Dao Bums members using the PPFs will not work. I don't think that you have had to deal with a spammer since "Always Spamming" was banned. I recently had to deal with the last of the "Red Hot Spammers" on the Dao Bums, a person who had ruined every thread about Plato and Platonism ever started on this thread for the sake of his conspiracy agenda. Frankly, I would not have started it if I had not known that I had the ability to remove his posts, because I knew exactly what would and did happen, that he would do everything in his power to ruin the thread. That fear of having a thread ruined was the censoring power that he had over anyone who was familiar with his posting history. I would not have applied for owner permissions without this fear in the back of my mind and he was warned about the possibility that his posts could disappear early on in the thread. I tried out a strategy for allowing for free posting and at the same time maintaining the integrity of my posts by posting around his interference with "bridging" links to my own posts and links and references to others posts that were "under the bridge". The thread was considered interesting and informative by many people here, and eventually some of them asked publicly and privately for me to moderate his content. I tolerated his attempts to ruin the tread for as long as I could, the final straw was when he posted his intent to get the thread "back on topic", his topic. At that point I hid 32 posts, slightly over a third of the number of posts in the thread, mostly long rambling posts, quoting secondary sources, most of which would have disagreed, if quoted wholly or in context, with the whole conspiracy worldview which was the basis of his attacks. What I am most thankful for was the ability to lock the thread so that I did not have to keep monitoring it over and over to "police" its content. After I closed the thread over 1,000 new "views" (Whatever that means ) were recorded indicating that people were actually interested in my content and commentary. Now, when the idea of owners permissions was first broached I considered it a mistake and said so, and I am still not convinced that it is a good idea in itself, but it certainly worked for me and while I can still see how it can lead to problems, I would have to say it is an imperfect solution in an imperfect world. No moderators, nor moderation by others would be necessary if people moderated themselves in threads started by other people. Generally speaking the people here are open, curious and tolerant, those few who were not have either been banned or left of their own accord, it may be that this process of self moderation through owners permissions can work, but it certainly won't if it is not given a chance. Edit: Corrected spelling in first paragraph.

I can just hear the mind control villains, "Rats, foiled again!" (Well, rats, I was foiled myself since the editor would not allow me to reproduce the ever so chic foil headgear.)

Thanks for the clarification.

Yes, just ask the ghost of Yamamoto about Pearl Harbor: Yamamoto and Pearl Harbor (I intend this as my second wry observation of the day on Dao Bums, not as a serious critique of the present policy. Though I do have as I have said reservations about it.)

I'm sorry, but I find this ambiguous, do you mean that there is something wrong the board policy that someone should be concerned about the disappearance of their posts, or that someone who is worried about losing a post on the Dao Bums has a personal problem about their posts that they should be addressing? For anyone who puts in a lot of time here posting well thought out and referenced posts like I try to do, there is a lot of time and work that goes into them that isn't reflected in the time it takes someone to read them. I insure against loss of posts by doing almost all editing offline using a word processor. A good free one that amounts to a free office suite is: Apache Open Office If I am replying to a post I will quote that post and then use the little toggle switch in the upper left of the reply editing box to go from formatted text to HTML code and then copy the code into Open Office, in that way I have a complete record of the post to which I am responding, then I start to prepare my own response and at some points may copy it from Open Office and past it into a response window which I have already switched to to "code mode" and then switch to displayed text, here I will do such things as italicize or bold text, experiment with pictures, and also with links when I like the way it looks I will click back into code mode and copy that code text back to Open Office, this gives me a complete record of what will be posted including the necessary HTML codes to reproduce it exactly, Only then do I post the response online. In this way one has a record of one's posts and can access them at any time and also use them for other purposes, such as collecting the really good ones into a longer discussion. This is a little time consuming and requires a little thought and practice to get right, but if you "lose" a post on the Dao Bums through it being "hidden", you really have no one to blame but yourself. I have seven years of files like this. Also remember that the Dao Bums exists somewhere between the whim and the good will of Sean, and could disappear at anytime. So if you value the content which you have contributed here, you should make your own backups anyway.

Posting this is a bit of a wry observation. As a child in the fifties the Golden Guides were my little "bibles" of science. Seeing this appear in the late 70s was a sign of how much the world had changed. It can be downloaded here: Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants on Scribd Like any book in the series a valuable beginners guide to the field, though a field that one should be very careful exploring. Judging by some posts I have read here, other people here may have good practical advice.

You're certainly welcome! Straight from the Fourth Heaven he came to us.

Here are two Mozart Piano Sonatas that I used to play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZep2PH0kHE I love the beautiful series of variations that begins this one: I consider myself one of the world's truely great fifth rate pianists. I can however call myself a pianist and not a piano player, because i actually studied with a concert pianist, a remarkable Russian woman who had studied in the old days a the the Imperial Conservatory, who when I brought in a copy of a Debussy prelude to the lesson said, in her soft Russian accented English, "Oh, I remember when this was published", her "touch" was fading, but her soul was still bright and she taught me what playing the piano was really all about, a largely wordless communication. I will never forget my afternoons with her, so many afternoons ago.

A little "eye candy" for us Taoist Texts?

This was why the agreement to "abide by the rules", there is no way to give people this type of "mod" power over their own threads without opening up such a possibility to others who also have owner's permissions. Messing with other people's threads or posts will get you in trouble and you will lose those powers, but yes, you can really mess with other people's posts the whole idea was that people would exercise such rights responsibly. I didn't like the idea of owner's permission's and I still don't, but I had a thread that was being ruined by a well known conspiracy theorist here, I tolerated it as long as I could, and even experimented with bridging over his long rambling posts, so as to maintain a certain level of continuity to my exposition, but his trolling spam eventually got to be too much and I had to remove it. I only did this after several requests that I remove it for the sake of the thread. I even locked it so I wouldn't have to worry about it. Since then I have not been able to get back to working on it because of other commitments. I hope to get back to it eventually.

Some misguided member of the Dao Bums "Silent Majority" was kind enough to PM me allowing as how he thought I was such a clever fellow for my cursory comments on divination and information theory and other aspects of high mathematics as it might be applied to this weird spooky stuff and wanted to learn more. Foolishly I said, "happy to oblige as long as I get your first born child for ghoulish experiments." Well, bottom line, said person did not go for that deal, but after some haggling I did manage to get approval for the Idea of posting part of our exchange for the benefit of others as long as it did not betray his true identity, miffed but unbroken, I agreed and what is posted below is the first fruit of our discussion, which is mostly some references to other threads which people who have been following my wild ramblings will already be embarrassed enough to admit they have already read, but for those new to my posts they may prove useful: You have to understand that I am not talking about merely conceptual and logical properties, the verbal and numerical representations of the actual Formal System, but rather to Formal Causes in the sense of Aristotle and a review of this thread might be useful: Agrippa and Aristotle the Aristotelian Background of the Occult Philosophy I have humorously dealt with aspects of this here: Since Magic in Agippa's sense is fundamentally tied to a world-view based on Aristotle's forms, the interpretation of physics in terms of Aristotle's forms, puts them on the same level as Aprippa's explanation of magic, thus magic is the proof of science. QED. (Emphasis added, ZYD) Thus, I see gravity and electromagnetism not merely as mathematical models of physical phenomena, but rather as Substantial Forms which manifest in all gravitational and electromagnetic phenomena and have received mathematical form as part of the explication of their properties. To put this in terms of astrology for example, both as divination and magic, Mercury is a Substantial Form that includes both the Form of Gravity and the Form of Electricity, but also consists of an "Information ordering" Form-al property and it is this "information ordering" form which is the object of Astrology and also by extension Astrological magic. Part of the traditional framework is explained here: Agrippa's Doctrine of Occult Virtues Traditionally the "Information Ordering" properties of substances were referred to as "soul". Keeping the above in mind will make what otherwise seems mere "talk" and "mental conceptualization" something of much greater significance. Please bear in mind that even the reference to this person by the masculine pronoun "he" is not intended to confer any information about this person, but is just a convenience. He has requested time to review the posts that I have linked above and some here may wish to do the same. More as our correspondence progresses and yes, I am still busy and will have to stop this if it gets too demanding on my time, but I do like to keep the illusion that I really am generous with the fruit of my labors alive, in so far as possible. Edit: I hate the way the editor here ignores my wishes and arbitrarily adds or subtracts line spacing as it sees fit. I have a certain way that I want my posts to appear and I sometimes have to make adjustments, in the process one of the links at the top of a quote got seriously messed up in appearance, oddly enough it still worked, but I have tried to correct its appearance. I hope that has worked, but if not ignore its deformed appearance and try it anyway. Edit: I added "and wanted to learn more" in the first paragraph above, the above didn't quite make sense without it, not that it makes much sense anyway.

The Rottweiler of Heaven?

I agree, but: This is a perfect example of someone dismissing shanlong's posts as "anger issues", but there is more to them, and I agree that he needs to let go so he can expresses his views a little more like this: If shanlung had expressed his opinions this way, no one would be talking about him being suspended or banned. Now, shanlung does have anger issues and I suspect that he can't let go of any of this very easily. So if I was his Chinese doctor I would be telling to take this when he starts to get angry: Xue Fu Zhu Yu Wan Which can have an amazingly powerful effect of calming angry people, and possibly this: Shu Gan Wan which can be used to treat Liver stagnation which is a frequent underlying cause of this type of rage. The company cited is a great source for these here in the U.S., but I am sure shanlung has local sources if he cares. As things are now he could easily suffer a stroke other serious health problems if he doesn't do anything about this. But, please note that aside from whatever relevance it may have to problems with refugees, his post is "oozing sarcasm out of every pore", over being called a xenophobe and inhumane, among other things, by a moderator here on the Dao Bums. As is clear from several passages in his posts, such as this one: Believe me, I don't like harping on this because, as I have pointed out elsewhere, I do like and respect this person, but not how he handled this case, something which I have tried to point out elsewhere. I believe a more neutral treatment could have avoided or at least toned down shanlungs intemperate and justly controversial responses, or if in a worst case he reacted this way no matter how he and his posts were treated, the Dao Bums could with good conscience suspend or ban him without the least appearance of contributing to his fate. As it is now, I wonder.

While thinking about the most resent problem with moderation here, one issue that has occurred before, did stand out to me and that was the complaint that one party was a moderator and also that moderator type admonitions were interspersed among more personal responses, and that the non "official" party could not block them. What I am proposing is the idea that people who are filling the office of moderators be given a special moderator account separate from their personal account from which and to which all "official" business should be undertaken. Some people and I suspect more than the average number here have issues with authority figures and that may cause issues to flare up more than the might otherwise. There are of course details that would need to be worked out, but this might be helpful and I thought I would put it before the forum for consideration. ZYD

Well, I see your eigen and raise it an augen and now if we see eye to eye, eigen state if for a fact.

Thanks UFA, I appreciate your understanding and the similar understanding of others. I also want to quote this: which I consider to be worthy of much reflection, another very mercurial activity, and reproduction, again since mercury is the “seed” or "sperm" of things, also very mercurial, lest it suffer this fate: and be lost to us. The only clarification which I would make is that it is absolutely essential to make a well formed distinction between the functions and meanings of the planet Mercury in astrology, with both the common metal mercury and mercury in the alchemical sense. Then these meanings can become a source of edification and not confusion. I will point out that another name for metallic mercury is quick (-ened) silver, that is living or animate silver and that silver is associated with the moon and that the teachings of the Qabalistic Alchemists, as found in the Aesch Mezeraph , attribute it to the Sephirah Yesod associated with the Moon and also with the Phallus of the Microprosopus. I bore all of this in mind when trying to unify my thought about Qabalah, Alchemy and Astrology in my early twenties and in terms of the Cosmological function of the planet mercury as a manifestation of the Sephirah Hod, the best single word I came up with was "representation". It is possible to take this one word and come up with almost all of the important ideas associated with Mercury as a planet. For example, words are representations of things, and images, such as paintings, signs etc. can also be representations of things, but on the most profound level all of the world which we apprehend through sense can be viewed, literally as well as figuratively as “representations” of those things invisible and unformed which are the “archetypes” of things seen and heard. I had this meaning in mind when I said: So there is my little nugget of the day for people to reflect on. And now for a humorous observation: Summarized in this inversion, “funny, I learned about matrices as kid and magic squares as an adult.” An observation more true than false since I learned about matrices in high school (still a kid by some standars) “Algebra 2” and pursued the subject with determination at the time (More wordplay guys, which if you're determined to fine out, go here.), and seriously pursued Magic Squares as an adult, doing some thinking about the "problem" of magic squares in my early twenties and more serious thought and investigation in my thirties. The false part is that I had an early acquaintance with both magic squares and magic squares from early readings in math and magic, including Donald in Mathmagic Land, (Yes, it was available as comic, I probably did not see the cartoon until later.), and bought Aleister Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice among other books on magic, when as young as twelve years old, when I was actually more of a “kid” kid then a teenager. I will keep trying to refine the principle example which I am thinking about now, because not only could it be a good example of a modernized mathematical magic, but also demonstrate the usefulness of a well formed body of theory, such as that provided by Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, and help to illustrate how one can use such a body of theory to investigate the morass of radionics and especially the theory and design of radionic boxes. So much, and maybe too much, for now. Edit: Corrected UFA in "Thanks UFA", it was YFA.

I have spent enough time here and reading about moderation to be familiar with everything mentioned here, but I do not have time to respond in detail to all of the points raised here, but for example, I had thought of the problem of transparency before posting and had already thought that more than one "mod action" account is required and that an account name such as "so and so acting for he mod team" for each moderator with a fair amount of "canned" responses and a as part of the signature, "please don't shoot the messenger, respond through official channels", etc, etc. would help address that problem. I can't put any more time into my suggestion, take it and this little note about creative possibilities as my final words on the matter. It is also a lot of time and a source of aggravation to spend hours offline writing informative, well written and well researched posts which are the result of decades of study and practices, only to have them dismissed in a few lines that took minutes to write by some tyro who thinks they know it all, or to be harassed to the point of exhaustion by a spamming nut case with an agenda, but it is a job that, so far at least, I have found worth doing and it is a job worth doing well, and also, it is just as voluntary and unpaid as being a mod. I appreciate the humor, but please note that the words themselves would not break my bones, but only any concrete actions taken after the fact. Particularly concrete thrown at me. As I noted above I have spent enough time here reading about moderation to know how much time is spent behind the scenes. I did not make my suggestion out of the blue or as an idle comment, the result of more time on my hands than I know what to do with, but because I have spent time thinking about these things and am well aware of the issues involved and have spent some "time behind the scenes" thinking about them. And now I have absolutely to take my leave from this topic. As anyone can see what could have been a simple response has blossomed into several. Good luck to the administration with whatever use they make of my suggestions. I hope that it was not a complete waste of my time.

Thank you UFA for an excellent discourse! It is certainly worthy of an equally excellent response, but to extract and distill down to an essence the major reason for why I cannot enter into a longer discussion, it is time. I had to boil down a lot to post what I did post and left it at a certain degree of abstraction because further elaboration would have required more time. As it is the post was the result of hours of reflection which is not reflected in its length or breadth. Even after posting I have continued to ask myself if there is anyway that I could come up with some good examples in a short enough space and a reasonable time and I will probably continue to spend time on the question, that may never be reflected in posts here. A good example of this is the work of C. C. Zain, I remember your posts and prepared at the time a partial response, nothing negative by the way, but I simply did not have time to polish it up to the sheen that I like and thus it remained and remains nothing but a few kilobytes on one of my hard drives. That has been the fate of many things that I have thought to post on the Dao Bums, around 90% of things that I have thought of posting here remain in an unfinished state and remain much more than a few kilobytes on my hard drive, and they represent hundreds if not thousands of free man-hours of thought given to the Dao Bums that are not reflected in my posts here, which after slightly over seven years are finally inching up to a thousand, and certainly are not reflected in my cash flow, which constrains me to put in time to other more remunerative pursuits. I would just as soon write, but it is the wrong thing to do at this time. Well enough time spent on this lament. (See guys word games.)

Such word games are very mercurial, so regrettably not off topic, if somewhat off color.

Shanlung has returned and has made perfectly clear why I proposed this: in this quote: As I noted this has been an issue before and some may remember “Buttercup” who had a similar complaint about this situation in regard to a moderator, I remember the moderators name, but I don't see it as relevant here because I don't see either that person or Michael as being directly responsible for the problem, only that giving their personal accounts high level status makes it impossible to use the ignore feature to not have their ideas thrust upon one. Granted the “ignore” function is not as useful as self-control, but if someone can't resist using the “peak” option they can only blame themselves and not the board. As he does here: Myself I was raised on a simple motto: “Sticks and stone may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” With the implication that they can only hurt me if I let them, with the stronger implication that they could only hurt me if I was of “weak” enough character to allow them to hurt me. Personally, I simply refuse to give another person that much power over me and would council other people to do the same, but that doesn't mean that the board should do what it can to avoid this type of confusion of personal opinion and official power which seems to be a strong part of the problem here. Please, to make completely clear, I am not taking any sides in the details of the dispute, only pointing out an aspect of it in which the board and its "admin and owner" are implicitly complicit and which it might be a good idea to avoid the possibility of such an impression as much as may be practically possible. Such an impression was also part of the charges of the Mo Pai advocates that their was a conspiracy against them, and the board has had to take a lot of remedial action to repair the damage that was done by that misapprehension. It seems to me better to avoid such problems in the first place.

It's mathematical magic my friends, magic squares that is, and neither Israel Regardie, nor the Golden Dawn knew much about either, though the originators of the Golden Dawn were perhaps more savvy in their own thinking and practice than their successors and 'tis a magic most Mercurial, dealing as it does in the formal properties of Systems and most appropriate to this thread. Magic squares are a well formed set of mathematical objects called matrices and matrix mathematics is one of the most important mathematical studies because of its importance to Linear Algebra. One of its most significant uses in the Twentieth Century was it application to Quantum Mechanics, where a some clever matrix mathematics turned out to be the equivalent of Schrodinger's Wave Equation and these two together tiled the floor of the Temple. Now, just as a point of continuity here, I will note that the swapping of rows and columns is an important aspect of using matrices in mathematics, and in their application to solving systems of, for example, linear equations, aiding greatly in simplifying the problem. Their application to magic is another matter, and rather complex and I cannot enter into any detail great detail, but such magic squares are used in Chinese, Indian, Arabic and Western magic. I made a considerable study of them in the 1980s as part of a project of applying modern mathematics to magical practice which I first started pursuing in my teens in 1967 to 68. Among other things that I discovered pursuing that larger project is that information theory can be constructively applied to maximizing the results of Divination and has suggestions for improving the technique of various types of divination. My application of these ideas to Geomancy was very fruitful and demonstrate that criticisms made by Aleister Crowley are more a lack of his imagination then of Geomancy's potential. I will note that the extensions which I made did not require information theory, and I started them before I started to use information theory, but it did require some insight into the logical structure of Geomany and how it called out for such extensions. I wish I had more time talk about this, but it really could fill a couple of books, and even a cursory outline might be more a source of confusion than edification. As a note astrological magic is one of the major applications of Mathematical Magic. Astrological magic was largely neglected in the magical revival, but was considered essential in traditional magic. Interestingly, I was first drawn to Astrological Magic because of my study of the "Church of Light", teachings again largely in the late Sixties. Anyone interested in whatever happened to the "Hermetic Brotherhood of Light" (hint, hint Nungali, if you haven't realized this before.) could do worse than scratching around there and seeing what turns up. Though from the perspective of post Golden Dawn English speaking magic it is widely off the mark, it is much more compatible with the Continental systems of Papus et. al., though unique in its outlook. Edit: Added ". . . and most appropriate to this thread" to the first paragraph, a change which I had made, but there was a passing squall (get it? squall = sql error) that blew it off course. The squall lasted only for a few minutes.