Zhongyongdaoist

I have followed this discussion some, and it is not a pretty sight. This isn't your fault and it doesn't strike me that you are getting good advice. From the perspective of traditional Chinese medicine, these are treatable symptoms of Kidney Yang deficiency and in particular sounds like called “Kidneys failing to receive Qi”, which has a strong mental/emotional component which Giovanni Maciocia describes as “listlessness” (Giovanni Maciocia, Foundations of Chinese Medicine, Churchill Livingstone,1991, p. 255), basically a mental/emotional indifference to well, life in general, which seems to be what you are describing. If you want to do something about this, or at least examine that possibility that this emotional state is a deficiency, you might try this Chinese Herbal preparation has been known to have a good effect on moods characterized by a sense of meaninglessness and despair: If you are interested in trying them, one place you can purchase them is here: Su Zi Jiang Qi Pian at MaxNature.com at a reasonable price. If you live in the US, probably about $25.00 for two bottles, including shipping and any tax. These pills are usually taken for things like coughs from asthma, but it is asthma from the deficiency syndrome I mentioned above, “Kidneys failing to receive Qi”, and thus they can effect the emotional state as well as coughs, etc.. They are not just "feel good" pills, they are not a euphoriant like uppers, they correct negative moods by rectifying the deficiency which is their cause. There are some other TCM patterns that can contribute to emotional states such as you describe, but based on what you have posted this seems the most likely and these pills the easiest way to investigate the causes of this emotional pattern and do something about it. Good luck.

Occasional use of cannabis is not harmful, but not necessarily beneficial either. The problems arise with cannabis when people use it as unwitting "self-medication" of either hyper-activity or depression, for bi-polar people it works for them either way, but which only masks symptoms that should be dealt with directly, and anyone who finds themselves using it too much, should take this as a diagnostic indication, and look into conditions that need to be dealt to restore balance, such as heart or liver fire in the case of hyper-activity and liver fire with some types of depression and imbalances involving Lung/Liver or Kidney/Lung, with other types of depression. These need to be dealt with on their own, and TCM has some good tools in this regard. Purely for information purposes, cannabis has long history of use in Chinese spiritual practice, and even has its own Goddess, Magu, who as a high ranking member of the Court of Xiwangmu, is very respectable. This group, the Way of Infinite Harmony, claims to be a surviving Temple of her traditional cult. Used in these religious ways, its possible effects may be very different, but only someone with real experience of them could comment on this. Professor Jerry Alan Johnson's book, Daoist Mineral, Plant and Animal Magic, has a long section, pages 262-277, on "visionary" plants, with page 268 devoted to cannabis, to which he gives mixed reviews. As a person with lot of experience in both Chinese and Western magic, I cannot recommend idle experimentation with cannabis and magic, you need to lay a real foundation first and by the time you have done that, you will not need it, but then if you wish to, you can safely explore it. As a passing note, NLP practitioners have a practice called Drug of Choice for reproducing the effects of any "visionary catalyst" which you might have taken in the past.

It may be easier if we start with a nice "gedanken" experiment, for which I hope people will be both thoughtful and thankful. Imagine a computer running a program. Imagine that someone doubts the existence of this strange, insubstantial thing called "program" and set up a device that manages in some unspecified way to map onto a display of lights the states of all of the binary bits in the computer, as lights on for ones and lights off for zero. How by the observation of these blinking lights, seemingly so random and disordered, could one ever even imagine the existence of a program that is the cause of their going on and off, much less demonstrate the existence of such a program? Yet a program can run the computer can't it? Everything in this video, is like those lights, looking at them one cannot "see" a "self" running them anymore than one can see a program in the lights of the display mentioned above. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, the self is greater then the sum of aggregates in the void.

The link didn't work: I corrected it above, so it works now.

Just a quick reminder about what she was saying even last January: and So it was not something that just came up, but her situation and been improving and becoming more demanding for some time.

I had been concerned about her not posting for some time, so I and PMed her a few weeks ago to find out if everything was alright. She PMed back that things were going great and she didn't have much time for forums and chat now, especially with Spring and her garden. She gave no indication of whether she would return or not. Personally, while I will miss her presence here, and told her so, I am happy that she is happy and doing well. Maybe, she will come back again, maybe she won't, but in the meantime I feel that our loss is the worlds gain, and I am sure that I am not alone in wishing her the very best in the future, whatever that may be. ZYD

Who else? Though the life and adventures of Tully Bascomb is a close second.

Oh, I remember Napoleon, he was that little Corsican fellow who conquered France, you know Mouse that Roared, that sort of thing. Well, jolly good, and keep reading your Tully, remember, no Tully, no enlightenment. What, What?

It's even in the introduction of one of Regardie's GD editions: Actually it is were you would think it is in the section on Tarot Divination in Volume Four: Now, how this relates to this material: Is an interesting question and to be honest, the above seem to be in conflict to me, so the mess up may originate in ambiguities in Golden Dawn material itself. As for this discussion it seems to involve terminology disputes at the most superficial level of interpretation and doesn't seem suitable for a thread on supposedly advanced topics, of course this is inevitable when Nungali appears and grasping for any argument he can possibly lay his hand on, without consideration of quality or consistency, uses arguments that if applied to illustrations for the Major Arcana, as he wishes to apply them to the Minors, would reduce them to the most abstract levels of symbolism also, or if we applied the idea that the Waite deck is bad because bad use of it is made by New Agers, then we would have to say that Crowley's teachings are bad because of Anton Levey's Satanism, which everyone knows, grew out of O.T.O. activity in California, and other such tactics, which are simply a waste of time to consider, or reply to. To me the only thing that would make this discussion worth contributing to is to get off of terminology and onto function, what did the Court Cards mean in Golden Dawn system, and what could they mean in Waite based on what we can guess and then the most important thing, what an intelligent and well informed person might make of either, without making dogmatic and basically fundamentalist pronouncements about the wrongness of one way of referring to the cards titles and the absolute correctness of another, such discussions are always based on appearances, not matters of substance and are on no interest to me. However, to toss an interesting point in the midst of this otherwise lackluster discussion, and I don't really know if anyone here or elsewhere, has commented upon this before, I will note that the symbolism of Waite's Sun card has a possible relation to the Golden Dawn Practicus intitiation, when, during the section on the Thirty-first Path the Hierophant, quoting from The Chaldean Oracles, says: While the Sun card is related to the Thirtieth Path, it should be noted that in Waite's deck the Sun is in the background and the foreground is a very similar image, thus possibly tying the symbolism of the card in with the initiation ritual and possibly indicating the power of the Sun controlling the energy of the spiritual fire manifesting on the lower level: So, like it or not, there may be deeper meaning to the Waite deck then many people see, and it may relate to the Golden Dawn more than people think. Here is a link to an interesting article which covers a lot of the basics: The Tarot of the Golden Dawn Edit: The Sun card did not line up correctly with the text once posted, so I corrected that. Edit: Since I basically like Nungali and find other aspects of his posting on Dao Bums interesting and stimulating, I softened my characterization of his basically lame criticisms of Waite and his deck.

Going back to this part of what I quoted above: Lest anyone think that this is only something that only Tibetan Nyingma teachers can do, it is a teaching and practice of traditional Western magic as shown by this quote from Book Three of Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy: a man only who is dignified, and elevated to this vertue by some divine gift, or sacred authority: The key being that one must really have reached a certain level of proficiency before this will work, but it does work and is amazingly useful. Now this definitely belongs in General Discussion because it deals with Daoist, Buddhist and Western magical teachings.

This, reminds me of what I was trying to say here: Since these things are so little understood, but of great general importance, I think this is a good place for this.

Nothing symbolic at all. In Agrippa's worldview these were fundamental explanatory categories in nature, which included physics, alchemy, psychology etc. This post is a useful preliminary to cross cultural elemental study and with the staggerring difference between Agrippa's worldview and ours studying him is a cross cultural study: As a starting point. First I would like to point out that neither is the same as the system of elements introduced by Plato and Aristotle, but for the sake of developing the discussion I will use that of Aristotle, which unambiguously contains five elements and is often conflated with the yogic one. Second, I would point out the analogical resemblance here to what I said about alchemy and chemistry here: The shared “elements” are earth, water and fire, the Chinese system (It is common to Confucianism too by the way.) adds to these two metal and wood, the Indian system (It is shared by Buddhism also.) has air and akasha, and the system of Aristotle share's air with the Indian system, but has ether instead of space. Now aside from this each of these systems creates “models” of these elements and their interactions and these models are a fundamental part of a paradigm. Models are logical/systemic structures that map out a set of relationships between the elements of the model, thus the Chinese system has the generation/destruction cycle as part of its model. It also has a probably older model based on the four seasons and the earth as center, further behind that is the primary systemic substrate the Trigrams. I am already in a sense simplifying for the sake of discussion and will really not go into the Astronomical cycles which may be part of the background, etc., but limit myself to Chinese five element theory for this discussion. As with Alchemy and Chemistry all of this background means that the apparently common elements are conceptualized very differently within the logical/systemic model of the “Five Elements”, than they are in either the Indian or Aristotelian systems. Despite their similar names, the four elements earth, water, air and fire are also conceived of very differently between the Indian System and Aristotle. Without going to much into detail, I will base this description on the account given by Rama Prasad in The Science of Breath … Nature's Finer Forces, a work published by the Theosophical Society and usually referred to just as Nature's Finer Forces. This book was very influential and was the vehicle by which the “Tattvas” (or tattwas) entered the Golden Dawn system and eventually formed what we might call the “new age” version of elemental theory. In this theory the “elements” are viewed as vibrations which form “solitons” in five standard shapes, each with different properties. These five shapes are the primary tattvas which can be combined, but that is outside of the scope of the discussion. Each of these five have different attributes of which we will focus on these five; to akasha, space, to air, movement, to fire, expansion, to water, contraction, and to earth “cohesive resistance”. These are all well known to people who have studied Bardon for example. Now all of this exists within a bigger context, just as Chinese elementary theory does. Now let us compare this to Aristotle. In Aristotle all manifestation is because of “substantial forms”, which provide all of the attributes of a manifest thing. For the elements the there are four attributes, two primary, heat and cold, and two secondary, moisture and dryness. Every manifest thing on earth will at least to a certain extent manifest these qualities, in their purest form, Fire is hot and dry, Air warm and moist, Water is cold and moist and Earth is cold and dry. Everything that exists on earth will be more or less hot or dry, etc. whatever else it may be. Each of these also has a “natural motion”, Fire and Air rise and Earth and Water descend, that is why the elements have divided themselves up into layers surrounding the earth The fifth, Ether is in a sense the odd man “out”, who does not fit into this because it is not part of the earth, but of the heavens. I won't go much into Ether's qualities, but is natural motion is Circular and is the “cause”of the “circular” motion of the Planets and stars. All of this also exists in a bigger context just as Chinese and Indian element theory does. Now most people just stop here and say, well they can't all be right, but the conclusion to which I came very early, like before I was twenty, was that they could all be right to a certain extent, by which I mean, that if we look at their logical/systemic forms as being like a lens that when it brings somethings into focus, but blurs other things, or like a color filter that separates out "information" about a single color, each of these might be viewed as complementary systems that bring out different aspects of reality, just as the experiments of quantum mechanics brings out the wavelike and particlelike properties of “particles” on very small scale. For some of these it may even be possible to do what I mentioned here in regard to alchemy and chemistry: Which would be like bringing together the results of a red filter and a green filter and a blue filter (RGB) to create a full color picture. This is type of rigorous intellectualism that I have pursued for decades and because it has always been pursued as complementary to practice, rather than being mere mental self-abuse, it has been very fruitful. I hope this is helpful. I will post more if I have time.

Briefly, I did business with him last year, (I had some books he wanted) and he is a really great person, understanding, patient, courteous, etc. You may or may not be correct, either way it's not very cool to defame someones character who is not present to counter such claims. If Frater UFA is referring to this book: Kabbalistic Cycles & the Mastery of Life Then he must be referring to this book: Self-Mastery and Fate with the Cycles of Life Which Albertus did use in his teachings, and was very open about his source, so Lisiewiski might have written on it, though it is AMORC and not Church of Light. I never cared much for the system and I have not read Lisiewiski's book, so I cannot comment further and leave it to someone else to confirm or refute the charge of plagiarism.

Deci Belle returns to the Dao Bums in a triumphal procession.

I have given considerable thought to the above request, as well as reviewing a few books in my library and trying to find some online references that might be good. I found this site which is a fair, quick scratching of the surface: Hen scratchings on the subject of Plotinus The links on the site go to relevant quotes from Plotinus' writings. Plotinus work, the Enneads is best considered a collection of lecture/commentaries on aspects of Plato which Plotinus, after his years of teaching, thought were most significant. I have books that have sections devoted to the “Soul”, but the “Soul” only makes sense within the context of his whole system, some are good some are fair. I chose two to recommend, one in particular after reading this: Which is Form and Transformation by Frederic M. Schroeder, I thought of this particularly in light of your experience because he deals with Plotinus' aesthetics and has created a work that is both profound, well written and even in some places, beautifully written. Google Books page on Form and Transformation Here is the summary, which is worth quoting: The other book is Nature, Contemplation and the One, by John Deck Nature, Contemplation and the One on Amazon The second review, by Brian C., is very good. At the beginning, my serious study of Plato and the Platonists, which started around 1977, was purely for historical reasons, in order to better understand the worldview of the Renaissance author on Magic, Cornelius Agrippa. During this research I read an essay by Harold Cherniss which was to open up the prospect that there might actually be some intrinsic merit to Plato, et. al., this can be read here: The Philosophical Economy of the Theory of Ideas, by Harold Cherniss on scribd And is definitely worth a read, because it shows how the Platonic doctrine of ideas can unify ontology, epistemology and ethics. I thought this idea was worth investigating and over a period of several years realized that Cherniss was correct in his assertion. This was an important part of my taking Platonism as my basic “working model” of reality. I hope this is helpful.

From what I can tell, based in his posts, maldor, has already been "over the cliff", he wants to "get back what he had", but he wants to have a good reason or reasons to believe to believe that it is "real" and not just the delusions of a brain gone wacko. It is only because I think that this is probably true that I am at all willing to post in answer to him and would ask that people assume that this is true, at least for now, and be a little more patient here.

In discussions of this type energy is often used in a metaphorical sense and not as a strictly "physical" concept. This harkens back to its original meanings: It is better to try to understand the usage within the context and in discussions like this: Energy is used almost as a stand-in for "spirit" in which the only thing in common with its meaning in physics is "the ability to do work", like the ability to create form and substance.

Try Latin Days of the Week for a short discussion and convenient summary table. Wednesday is Woden's (Odin) Day, changed to Mitwoch (mid week) in German to suppress the Wodenist cult. I am sorry that I have not been able to post much recently, but I have been very busy and have not been able to post here as I might wish. I hope to return soon.

I just noticed this. Seems like a good way to "reframe" the "like" button. Thank you.

Back circa 1970 some friends and I found instructions for what claimed to be the original "Tarot" game. Basically it was a three handed game similar to Bridge, but in which, surprise, surprise, the "trump" cards were the trump cards. I didn't find it particularly interesting, but then card games never interested me that much. I don't remember much more about the game,nor the source for it, it was after all a while back.

Maldor, you may find the link to the Van Dusen paper which Nungali posted here: interesting in light of your experiences recounted here:

Thank you Seth Ananda, the respect is mutual. Unfortunately I suspect the irony of this: was lost on a lot of people because Plotinus psychology is a real psyche-ology, a study of Soul that includes the soul of the world among others. I have a book whose charming title Soul-Sisters, certainly belies its dense text and scholarly rigor. Probably a published doctoral thesis, its full title is Soul Sisters; A Commentary on Enneads IV 3 (27), 1-8 of Plotinus (Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1980) by Wypkje Helleman-Elgersma. It is a work on what I call the communion of all souls, for in Plotinus all souls are of the same essence and form a great family, sisters in this case because of the feminine gender of psyche in Greek. What a difference from the confused "collective unconscious" of Jung, to say nothing of the many "still stuck at the beginning of the Twentieth Century neurologists" who still dominate the field. There are of course exceptions among neurolgists and I have posted a little on them, but I don't have time to look those up, still, I did want to make a little time for you. From the Plotinian perspective even "physics" is "psychological", but nonetheless "real" and "objective" as a class of interactions between our souls and the soul of the world manifesting in a rigorously mathematical form. The series of posts that I have been doing here: Astrology: Overlaying Four Directions, Zodiac Signs & ... the Tarot?! Will, when I can get back to it, deal with these issues in more detail.

There is nothing particularly new or bold about this idea. Its precursor are the model's of magic rooted in Mesmerism such as Joseph Ennemoser puts forward in this early Nineteenth Century book: The History of Magic (This is only to Volume One only) Purely hypnotic interpretations of magic appeared very early and even A. E. Waite puts forward the idea in his Book of Ceremonial Magic ("Concerning the Mirror of Solomon", p. 318, University Books, 1961) over a hundred years ago. Carroll Runyon has made it, and Jungian psychology (which you have brought up in other posts) the cornerstone of his version of magic in his Church of Hermetic Science. Download a copy of an article of his that appeared in Llewellyn Publication's magazine in the late 1970s here: Magick and Hypnosis I don't doubt that magic is psychology, but it is a question of whose psychology. Personally, I prefer Plotinus' psychology: Plotinus on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to Jungian or any reductionist psychology, derived from the Seventeenth Century revival of Epicureanism and based on unexamined presuppositions deriving from Nineteenth Century materialism. As far as I am concerned Jung is a confused thinker caught between Nineteenth Century materialism and Romanticism. This confusion, often not clearly defined, is one of the characteristics of a large spectrum of Western thinking from the mid-Nineteenth Century to the present. And I also prefer the middle Platonist use of the term Archetype, which they originated as a reference to Plato's ideas: A good introduction to Middle Platonism on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy to Jung's also. Oh, and to make it clear, I don't particularly like Runyon's version of magic either. I don't have more time to devote to this, having worked these issues out a long time ago. I have posted upon these issues here on the Dao Bums many times and anyone can use the search function to find these posts, but I hope that this short discussion is helpful to you and anyone else who may read this thread. Edit: Added link directing to Wikipedia page to "Plato's ideas" above.

Spotless - If you merely wish to insult me then that is your choice. I find it very strange though given that you know next to nothing about me. Is the usual and acceptable behaviour on these forums ? Actually it is not considered acceptable behavior and as a member of this forum you have a right to report it. To do this copy "Spotless" post and then once you are in the editing box use "control c" to copy his post, return to his post and hit the report button, then paste your copy of his post in the report form, write your own comments and then submit it. The Mods will investigate such reports as time permits, they are after all only unpaid volunteers whose time is a precious to them as yours is to you. As far as I can figure out the "report" function only gives the thread, but not the specific post to the Mods, when they post about reports they always say to give a specific post reference, thus the procedure I outlined above. Just letting you know about one of your rights as a member.

I am probably totally wrong here but are most western systems based on solomon , jewish quabalah: Lucky for you you're only partially wrong. The question is where does "jewish quabalah" come from? cribbed from . . . Greek: While the sources mentioned also contributed to it, the important part, its formal and logical structure is almost purely an adaptation of Greek thinking as it developed from Plato, to Plotinus, Iamblichus and Proclus. It is a very useful adaptation mind you, and one which I prefer to those that these last named philosophers attempted to created out of traditional Greek mythology. Those parts of Qabalah that have been assimilated into Western Magical practice since 1500, are logically clear and elegant once you start to understand their fundamental structure and a study of those Platonic philosophers that I mentioned is an excellent way of understanding that structure. I came to these conclusions after a lot of study and research, conducted decades ago and which I assimilated into my practice. The research was based on sound academic sources, not occultist or new age woo woo, much less anti-Semitic tracts. If you want to deprive yourself of the benefits of using Qabalah as system, that's your choice, but it is not one that I would recommend to you or anyone else. If you actually want to practice Magic and understand Western alchemy you should pay attention to what I have said, if what you want is to practice some form of quasi Nordic or Celtic Shamanism, while studying magic would help you their more than you might imagine, you should pay attention to some of the other posts and you might find the thread on: Traditional Witchcraft is an excellent place to start data mining.