Zhongyongdaoist

Good old Draja Mickaharic! I used to recommend his Spiritual Cleansing to my students. Of course my treatment of it was all within the context of the first book of Agrippa's Occult Philosophy. I've only read his early books from the 80's Spiritual Cleansing and A Century of Spells and that some time ago. Still the natural magic procedure which he recommends have more value than people would think. The natural world is full of magic.

Here is one reason: It is from Corpus Hermeticum XI, usually titled Mind unto Hermes, the complete text may be found here: http://www.gnosis.or...H-v2/th223.html To the wise a single word is deemed sufficient, you have a whole paragraph. Live and Learn. Learn and Live.

OldGreen, thank you for your appreciation. Crowley has not been a major object of interest for several decades. He has some interesting things to say, but I came to the conclusion that the best of the Beast was assimilated by Regardie and well used in his works and adaptation of the teachings of the Golden Dawn. Based on my study of Crowley I would say that he never returned to following the original method of Abramelin, but instead chose to employ a version of an ancient invocation taken from the Harris papyrus and first used by him in print as "the preliminary invocation of the Goetia" in his publication of the first book of the Lemegaton in 1903. He subsequently wrote study of it which was titled Liber CCCLXV. On page 226 of Magick in Theory and Practice he describes if as the most potent invocation extant and used "by the Master himself in his attainment". He there refers the reader to the complete text and his analysis of it on page 265. Where it is made clear that the attainment in question was "the Knowledge and Conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel". Further in the commentary on page 274 in his commentary on Line 5 he makes a reference to the Neophyte ceremony of the Golden Dawn, "...the Hierophant is the perfected Osiris, who brings the candidate, the natural Osiris, to identify with himself.", to which I will return in a moment. Regarding his trip to China I read about it so long ago that I could not comment on it at this time. I might be more interested if I thought Crowley's attempts at Sino-Occidental synthesis was a worthwhile contribution. As it is I find it as sterile as a mule, the unnatural offspring of two otherwise very fruitful systems. The failure of which is made all the more ironic by his failure to recognize the inherent value of Western Geomancy and its applicability as a cross cultural bridge. In terms of traditional sources, no one makes as big a deal of the Guardian Angel as Abramelin, building a whole system around it. This could be because a significant subtext of the work is the notion of Religious conversion and the need to provide a procedure that can be used by any religion. This fact may indicate that the text itself may date from the late 16th Century when religious conversion was both figuratively and literally a burning issue. Aside from the spirit that I mentioned in my original post, the second section of the third book of the Lemegaton, the Pauline Art, has a procedure for contacting a zodiacal spirit ruling the degree of your rising sign. It can be found online here: http://www.esoterica...mon/paulina.htm The two Chapters that I cite from Agrippa can be found on the same site here: Book III, Chapter XXI: http://www.esoterica...pp3b.htm#chap21 Book III, Chapter XXII: http://www.esoterica...pp3b.htm#chap22 and contain some interesting information. If I have time I may post them and comment on them. The site itself is an excellent online resource. The Agrippa book that I mention both is and is not the one which you reference. The Agrippan text is worthwhile, the editor/commentator was not really up to the task. He comments copiously on irrelevancies such as the Paschal Taper (see note p. 572), but can't explain Occult Virtues, a fundamental and much understood aspect of traditional magic. He vaguely understands the importance of Plato to understanding Agrippa, but is blind to Aristotle. You have to know the material better than he does to know when to attend to or when to ignore his comments, but then you don't need his comments do you? When I was teaching Western Magic I emphasized an approach integrating Natural Magic, Astrological Magic and Ceremonial Magic in the Agrippan tradition. I did not emphasize the "Holy Guardian Angel" at all, though I did think about recommending the spirit Camael from the Grimoire of Armandel to some advanced students if they wanted to work with it. I never pursued the matter and eventually stopped teaching, largely because few people have any real vocation for magic and were wasting their time and mine. If you or anyone else is interested in knowing what approach I would use now you can read my posts here: http://thetaobums.co...gic#entry291148 Which begins a long series of posts where you will also learn about Occult Virtues among other interesting things. I would not recommend pursuing work with the "Holy Guardian Angel", for reasons that may be clearer after you read my posts, but if you or anyone else absolutely, positively wants to do that sort of thing I would recommend pursuing rituals of the type described in the Shin subsection of the Shin section of the Z2 documents of the Golden Dawn, the basic text of which can be found on pages 178-181 of Book Four of Regardie's The Golden Dawn. Regardie provides good example rituals on pages 248 to 265, the second one of which is an adaption of Crowley's "Bornless Invocation" in the format of the Golden Dawn Neophyte formula. Regrettable the more recent Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic does not deal with these ideas as well as the earlier work and is inferior in its treatment of one of the aspects of the Golden Dawn system which is, as far as I am concerned, the most interesting and valuable of the Golden Dawn's contributions to Western Esoteric knowledge. This brings us back, as I said I would, to Crowley's reference to the Neophyte Ritual. I hope that all this is helpful to you and anyone else who may read it. Edit: in reading the above for a quote in another post, I have noticed that I wrote ' . . . and much understood aspect of traditional magic . . .', where 'understood' should have been 'misunderstood'. I have corrected the text accordingly.

Just a quick note to summarize, expand and correct a bit. The popularity of the concept of Guardian Angel in modern Neo-magic is due to Aleister Crowley. Crowley was dependent on his knowledge from Macregor-Mathers. Crowley's original attempt at the Abramelin operation was in 1900, not 1907 and its interruption was hardly mere organization matters with Mathers. It was in point of fact the "Great Schism" of the Golden Dawn which lead to the founding of the Stella Matutina and the continuance of the Golden Dawn as the Alpha et Omega. Delilo is using Crowley's The Vision and the Voice as a guide, the vision of the eighth "aethyr", just one of thirty, which is derived from the Golden Dawn's version of the Enochian Magic of John Dee, Edward Kelly and their Spiritual Interlocutors. Part of Crowley's experience with the 30 Aires was in London Circa 1898 and the rest was in the Sahara, circa 1909, where he and Victor Neuberg were doing odd and peculiar things. The link which provides to the Wikipedia article seems on my cursory examination to be a satisfactory introduction to the matter, however the notion of a Guardian Angel is hardly unique to Abremelin as Agrippa writes on the matter in Book III Chapters XXI and XXII of his Occult Philosophy. In the Grimoire of Armandel, also translated by Mathers, there is mention of a Spirit, Camael, who. "giveth unto you a perfect knowledge of your Genius, who will have the power to grant you everything that you shall demand of him." (P. 42). Seems a little easier than Abramelin's approach. The topic of Guadian Spirit was also an important one in Platonism, as according to Plato, Socrates professed to have one which guided him. The late middle Platonist Apulius of Madura, best know for his Metamorphoses or the Golden Ass, also wrote a work On the God of Socrates examining this in the light of Middle Platonic ideas. Porphyry in his life of Plotinus recounts the following in relation to an evocation of Plotinus' guardian spirit: "In fact Plotinus possessed by birth something more than is accorded to other men. An Egyptian priest who had arrived in Rome and, through some friend, had been presented to the philosopher, became desirous of displaying his powers to him, and he offered to evoke a visible manifestation of Plotinus' presiding spirit. Plotinus readily consented and the evocation was made in the Temple of Isis, the only place, they say, which the Egyptian could find pure in Rome. At the summons a Divinity appeared, not a being of the spirit-ranks, and the Egyptian exclaimed: 'You are singularly graced; the guiding-spirit within you is not of the lower degree but a God.' It was not possible, however, to interrogate or even to contemplate this God any further, for the priest's assistant, who had been holding the birds to prevent them flying away, strangled them, whether through jealousy or in terror. Thus Plotinus had for indwelling spirit a Being of the more divine degree, and he kept his own divine spirit unceasingly intent upon that inner presence. It was this preoccupation that led him to write his treatise upon Our Tutelary Spirit (Enneads Three, Treatise Four, ZYD), an essay in the explanation of the differences among spirit-guides." I hope these quick notes are helpful.

I posted the following on the subject of the Middle Dantian in a thread on the “Huang ting wei ching”. The above referenced work is a must for anyone interested in traditional Daoist esoteric anatomy. Through years of reading and study I managed to get large parts of the most important information scattered among a dozen books. This book is much more convenient and a real bargain in comparison to the amount of money I expended over that time. As before I have bolded certain sections in the hope that I will be able to reference them in some future posts explicating this material. The post and its subsequent discussion may be found here: http://thetaobums.co...dantian__st__16 As is usual in such matters after a certain point I had to break off the discussion because of time constraints. If I have the time I may post more in this thread about some of the issues raised here. If not, I hope that the above is helpful.

And the point which you wish to make here is what exactly? I'm afraid that as it stands it leaves one hanging with a lot of potential implications and I want to know what you personally make of this. Why you consider this worth mentioning. The "a seemingly unrelated science, genetics", certainly "seems" to imply that there is some connection between this "Taoist Legend" and genetics. Do you maintain that there is some significant correlation between these two and if so what exactly?

thelerner was kind enough to "like" my previous post in this thread (http://thetaobums.co...2039__hl__world), sooooo... I thought I would add something else. I watched this movie the other night. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tix1JEqIjJs Power to the asteroids.

The following is from Chinese Medical Qigong Therapy, Volume 1, by Professor Jerry Alan Johnson, The Internal Institute of Medical Qigong, Pacific Grove CA, 2005 The above referenced work is a must for anyone interested in traditional Daoist esoteric anatomy. Through years of reading and study I managed to get large parts of the most important information scattered among a dozen books. This book is much more convenient and a real bargain in comparison to the amount of money I expended over that time. As before I have bolded certain sections in the hope that I will be able to reference them in some future posts explicating this material.

Thanks Joeblast, looking forward to your response, promised post follows.

Josh, In Journey to the West the original folklore surrounding Monkey is harnessed into a pro Buddhist/anti Daoist polemic, so for Daoist purposes he is not appropriate, though he is beloved in China, and so a part of Chinese popular religion, which could care less about theological niceties. If you want to be proper, your choice would be Xuanwu: This is one of my favorite pictures of him by the way. The Wikipedia article is a fair introduction to him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuan_Wu_%28god%29 It is his temples which are on Mount Wudang and he is the patron of all purely Daoist martial arts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wudang_Mountains He is also very important in Daoist ritual and meditation, being one of the deities who rules the North of the five directions and the kidneys of the five yin organs. In internal cultivation the kidneys are the seat of original jing and qi. In so far as Hanuman is trickster there is some correspondence, because above all else Monkey is a trickster. On a purely personal note, I love Monkey and have since I was a boy and saw Alakazam the Great: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alakazam_the_Great I sometimes even watch Dragonball Z because of its relation to Monkey, but it's not my favorite anime. I wish you well in all your studies.

Thanks Creation, when you said that you would put it in the queue, I didn't think that you meant at the top of the stack. Anyone who follows the discussion can see why I would nominate renormalization for a fudge, but whether it is or not, or just a very creative way of working around an infinity of difficulties is another matter. I am pressed for time, but wished to express my thanks in a timely fashion. There are many interesting aspects to the matters raised here and If I have some time I may come back to what you said about units in the equation for G. It raises some interesting points which many people don't understand because such equations are written without the units, but the units are an integral part of such equations and how they interact and are an important part of manipulating equations which cannot be ignored. The part which units play is one of the fascinating aspects of that "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" which I have mentioned.

Yet G is just a fudge created to mke the equation work (emphasis mine, ZYD)...is there evidence of ths gravitational constant beyond the realm of balancing out the equation? dwai, I hate to point out that, had you even bothered to follow the link which joeblast provided you might have save yourself some embarrassment and discovered the distinction between a mathematical constant, such as Apech describes and a physical constant, which is derived from actual observation, preferably under experimental conditions. As a physical constant, G is the worst example which you might have chosen and thus indicates your basic ignorance of the subject which you wish to criticize. I might have chosen renormalization in quantum mechanics as a possible example, but to be honest I don't understand it enough to be able to be able to do anything other than be a little suspicious of it. Maybe at some point Creation can address it. I have pointed out one of the most famous examples of a scientist introducing a constant into the mathematics elsewhere ( http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?/topic/7654-chi-in-nature-taoism-and-mak-tin-si/page__view__findpost__p__307052__hl__Einstein__fromsearch__1 ), and that is Einstein's fooling with the equations of General Relativity to support his belief in a "steady state" universe rather than the expanding universe which the pure mathematics of General Relativity entailed. Had Einstein kept faith with the mathematics he would have predicted the expansion of the universe more than a decade before it was observed. The relationship between observation and mathematics in physics is one of the most interesting aspects of the scientific endeavor. The famous physicist Eugene Wigner wrote a paper examining it in 1960 called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences . You are an intelligent person with interesting things to say, but please, in the future avoid embarrassment, follow the link before posting. While I have a good understanding of mathematics and physics, the passage of time has made it vague enough that I will always review my understanding by looking on the internet before posting on these subjects. By doing so I have often refined my understanding and learned new things, both valuable on their own.

Apech, It was Richard Feynman and it was part of a longer quote expressing Feynman's warning about the deleterious effects of thinking about quantum mechanics, exactly that mystical sounding stuff that you note. Combining your paraphrase with one from http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=2791842&postcount=41, we get something like the whole quote: "forget the theory and do the numbers, If you try to understand it, it will drive you crazy." I remember reading it twenty to thirty or so years ago as one of those quotes that often begin chapters in books. I have regretted for almost all of the intervening time that I wrote down neither the original quote's source or the book in which I read it. I found it a fascinating quote at the time because it reminded me of nothing so much as what a teacher of astronomy in the late 16th or early 17th centuries would have said about heliocentrism and the dangers of descending into heresy. Unfortunately a web search does not pull up the original, perhaps because it shows how backward looking the 'great innovator' was. Feynman was never comfortable with the implications of quantum mechanics, or for that matter any interpretation of physics that undermined 'common sense' interpretations of the world. I had gone back to review a great deal of this because of your own post (http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?/topic/23026-anybody-care-to-comment-on-my-metaphysic/page__view__findpost__p__330124__hl__rutherford__fromsearch__1) which helped to create this thread: Rutherford was looking backward to the reductionist determinism of Laplace. Feynman was still in thrall to Laplace's demon. Regrettably, because I am too busy to take the time to pursue either of the posts In the detail I might wish, I must be satisfied with clarifying the source of the quote you mention. Anyone who can source the whole quote would be doing us all a great service and should they chose to post it, I thank them for it in advance. Creation, Thanks for an excellent post and for the willingness to create this thread. I look forward to reading more.

Like the pull of a black hole when you are too close to the event horizon, I couldn't resist posting this. It's a scene from the very odd series Lexx. The planet that they are talking about destroying is earth and its possible destruction because of experiments related to the Higgs boson forms a major subplot in a long series of episodes. You might say it is a major source of conCERN.

Sinfest! You seem to have the most humorous response, even if it is not original with you. Congratulations. There is only one problem. As the whole Platonic tradition from Plato's Parmenides, through the abiding, procession and return of Plotinus' interpretation of Plato's thought, up the dialectical ladder of Proclus' commentary on Plato's Parmenides and down the propositional ladder of his Elements of Theology, the Platonists have conclusively demonstrated that the one is eminently, if tediously, effable. To find something truly ineffable we need to dig deeper and find out what is really meant by ineffable. Obviously one meaning, the inability to simply utter the word, cannot be what is intended because one, syllablelistically speaking at least, is an example of itself, which is a complex and convoluted way of saying that it is just a dime a dozen one syllable word, not even a twenty-five cent four syllable one, and thus, it is eminently utterable. One, One, One, you just uttered in your mind, easy. Now try saying out loud, One, One, One, see easy too, no problemo. You could even compose a love song, well I could, I don't know about you, to it, which could be full of easily uttered ones, including crypto-ones, such as "Oh sweet and wonderful, one (did you catch the crypto-one there?), my praise for you has only just begun...", full of nice rhymes too. Sing it, sing it out loud now right now, to your favorite hummable tune or piece of toe tapping music. A hymn of praise I tell you, to the oh so very effable one. There is more to the song by the way, but you have to come to my $10,000 a spot weekend retreat. Here's a teaser, "I say you're name out loud oh one of wonder, a blinding flash, the sound of thunder... oh sweet, sweet effable one." So quid pro quo, oops, sorry, I got my Latin quotes which no one is supposed to know the meaning of anyway mixed up, so quod erat demonstrandum, simple utterance is not what ineffable means, but rather something more, like the opposite of the long drawn out account of the one which those tedious aforementioned Platonists provide, so that if something is a "no-account" then then maybe it is ineffable, because no account can be given of it. This I suspect is the original meaning of "there's no accounting for taste", seldom quoted in its original Latin these days because,well it would be pretentious and over the heads of most people reading this, but that has never stopped me, no siree, not ever, so here goes: de gustibus non est disputandum, which by the way rhymes with quod erat demonstrandum, Latin is so regular that way, no need of laxatives here, it may not scan though, at least not without a little work. I suspect that the real origin of this is not taste like, "wow, Lady Gag-ahs meat dress was in really poor taste", but rather more along the lines of "wow, this tastes awesome!" So here is an experiment for you, describe in twenty-five words or less the taste of a strawberry. Go ahead, it should be easy, after all this is a common everyday experience, no grand mystical attainments are needed here, but if you have never tasted a strawberry, how about a banana? By the way do you know what to do if someone comes at you with a banana? I sure don't, years of martial arts and the thought still FREAKS ME OUT. Well here is one clue, strawberries or bananas for that matter, don't taste at all like chicken! That said, is there a problemo here? Even if you use words like it is sweet, or it is sour, that essence of strawberry which separates it from the sweetness of banana, or the essence of raspberry which separates it from the sourness of strawberry, is that a problemo? Si problemo, It's almost like those strange occult virtues about which I have written at some length elsewhere, which cannot be known by reason, but only by experiment. And what, heaven forfend, if you find someone who hasn't experienced sweet or sour, much less strawberries? Maybe the lack of an argument in taste is because there is no way to describe it in words, it must be experienced, the experience itself escapes a simple recap, an easy description, strawberries are all a bunch of no-accounts. Well I guess they don't come in bunches, bananas do, so bananas are a bunch of no-accounts and strawberries are ...a box of no-accounts! Well at least that's the way I buy them, in boxes. So bananas, bacon, veal saltimboca, at least in so far as we are talking taste here, are no-accounts too, and just about everything else like that. Strange, it seems that all of these simple everyday things which no one pays any attention to are more of a problemo than meets the metaphysical eye. So something which cannot be easily accounted for, defined, or described, is this the sense of ineffable that we are looking for? Description is the beginning of definition and definition is the foundation of reasoning, the problem with the One and what makes it so effing effable is that it has so many logical entailments that if you are a verbose Greek speaking person more prone to splitting hairs than a bad bleach job, then it is easy to make the One very effable. It is in fact way more effable than readable. But those damned strawberries, well, there is no accounting for them, they are nondescripts of the worst sort. Based on the above I propose that for clarity's sake we replace ineffable with something simple and well, English, like indescribable, because indescribable is a simple word which conveys the sense of ineffable that we are looking for, something that escapes easy description. With our simple equation of ineffable is indescribable, my, my, that sounds wrong since we have just shown that ineffable is describable. Oh well, what I am trying to say is that Vmarco was actually wondering if there was something really indescribable. Quick answer the taste of strawberries. So this mystical stuff is supposed to be indescribable, but turns out to be really very describable, well at least if you read these old Greek dudes, but, if it is the indescribable that you want, why bother with mysticism and gurus, when indescribable things are all around us? Oh, but you still need to take my $10,000 weekend seminar, you want to hear my song don't you? I have a really great bass-baritone voice, I'll be singing it myself. By the way, the food is great! All this talk of strawberries, bananas and other delicious things, well I don't really like bananas, but hey, there is no accounting for taste, has made me hungry. I want something ineffably delicious! Glory Hallelujah, I have seen the light! Almond Joy, here I come! Got milk?