Zhongyongdaoist

The lack of any visible action in regard to welkin has also been privately expressed to me, but having been a moderator I know that not all moderator action is visible and a lot depends upon the previous history of the individual concerned. Among other things if no one reported welkin's behavior it is possible that no action would have been taken on him. It certainly makes the moderator's job easier if they have a specific infraction to look at rather than have to go through several pages of posts just to find examples of bad behavior to see if a person whose behavior has been reported has any mitigating provocation for their actions. Maybe one of the moderators will indulge me and say if there were any reports about welkin's behavior in the thread, and if there were none the lesson is, if you want action to be taken about rudeness in a thread, report it. Zhongyongdaoist

Conspiracy theories were rampant in the mid-Sixties, Richard J. Hofstadter created the meme of "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" in 1964 and the John Birch Society actively promoted anti Soviet right wing conspiracies and on the left the CIA was suspected of having assassinated President Kennedy. The Shadows which have eclipsed the New Age were already gathering when Anton Levey declared the beginning of the Age of Satan on April 30, 1966, Walpurgisnactht, but also the day of the retrograde conjunction of Pluto and Uranus in Virgo. These outer planet conjunctions are very important, and if you actually follow them over time you can see some remarkable patterns that form. An amusing aside related to bookstores is that the most successful "New Age" bookstore where I live was started when a few friends bought out a right wing conspiracy bookstore in the mid Seventies and turned into a "new age" one. I could write more, but this is not the place for reviewing the history of the New Age and its place in the Occult Revival. ZYD

https://www.britannica.com/topic/New-Age-movement Wow, I never thought I could be so disgusted with the Encyclopedia Britannica, but this is a completer oversimplification and the meme "New Age" was in relatively common usage by 1970, when I first encountered it in a New Thought context. David Spangler only became will known because there was already a large audience for his ideas. Focusing on Theosophy is also a considerable oversimplification, there are many other influences that contribute to it especially New Thought and Ernest Holmes in particular, though it context as a "New Age" is provided by speculations from Esoteric Astrology that were a rising trend of the Nineteenth Century. The New Age was the "Age of Aquarius", popularized by a song from the 1967 musical "Hair", which was in turn popularized by the group The 5th Dimension as a medley "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In". Here are the lyrics to Aquarius: There is your "New Age" in a nutshell including crystals and superficial astrology. I could write a lot about this, because I both witnessed it as it was unfolding and was a critical observer of what was going on. I also am familiar with almost all of the strands that contributed to it. It's basically treacly junk food for for the "soul", you're better off with good old fashioned Chicken Soup. On a lighter and "Chinese" note,I am reminded of this: I guess I really can't put that in without letting the Fifth Dimension speak for themselves: ZYD

I have a toilet... 😁 Or would that be considered rude? Would it be haunted afterwards? Joke about the matter if you like, however,I have mentioned a little about this here: two dark wisps of smoke like things that sometime take shape around my bathroom area: This doesn't surprise me as bathrooms have long been considered trouble spots because of their connections with and to the underworld and decay, indeed in the large urban areas in which most of us live the only naturally occurring nature spirits are what, since I read this in the late 60s: I have called "sewer snoids". When the energy is bad, these guys will come up and cause problems, indeed sometimes they are specifically called upon to cause problems, or can show up when magic has been poorly performed and gone awry. I hope this is helpful. ZYD

The Heshang gong Commentary is one of the most important and earliest surviving commentary which looks at the Dao De Jing from a perspective of internal alchemy. I haven't read it myself, but It should be very interesting reading. The translator, Daniel Reid is well respected in the field. ZYD

Excellent. theres an undine named Istiphul. I would like to evoke her to ask a very specific question. I thought this seemed familiar, Istiphul, the eighth and last of the Undines listed in Bardo'ns The Practice of Magical Evocation, p. 125. Bardon warns not to fall for her charms. ZYD

Actually it is complex process with its its modern roots in the revival of Epicureanism starting around 1600 and developing within the context of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. It develops in a complex way with an important inflection point around 1800 and emerges in the Nineteenth Century as the conflict between "reductionism" the foundation of modern intellectualism and Romanticism, the rebellion against materialistic science and ideological reductionism. Explicating this would require a lengthy exposition which I don't have time for, but if someone is actually interested I can recommend some books that would be helpful in understanding the process. ZYD

I don't have much time now to post more, but I did find the thread in which contained my earliest Dao Bums posts on this subject, and as I suspected it is one that I stumbled on and found many of my posts missing, which is why it doesn't show up when I search for yellow court under my own name. Here is one of the few surviving posts which has a lot of useful information about the middle dan and the yellow court: I hope this is helpful and I will try to get back to this topic soon, but this is all I can do for now. ZYD

The book that you mention, Jade Writings is one of the books that I have. It is a very "modern" interpretation, but is worth considering. On a more traditional level I have The Primordial Breath: An Ancient Chinese Way of Prolonging Life through Breath Control by Jane Huang, which has a more traditional translation in Volume 2 of the the Inner and outer texts of the Yellow Court Canon, if I recall correctly the actual translations are by her father and she just edited and prepared the translation for publication. Below is the Chinese text of the "Outer View" of the Yellow Court: I have forgotten exactly where I got that since this was some time ago and their were many sites that I mined for information over the years. Also I found my own notes on the discussion that I had on Dao Bums, it was back in 2012. From it I have copied this useful information from a paper by Louis Komjathy, titled "Daoist Texts in Translation": The complete text has a lot of valuable information about Western Language translations, as well as the complete Chinese titles which make it easier to search for them. It is easy enough for me to post the Chinese Text of the Inner Yellow Court Canon, should anyone want that also. I hope this information is helpful. ZYD Edit: The post required some adjustments to paragraph spacing.

As I noted here: Saso is a valuable resource, I would also recommend Taoism and the Rite of Cosmic Renewal, which I first read back in 1976 and was a major turning point in my life, as well as his The Gold Pavilion, a translation and meditation manual based on the two Yellow Court Canons, the usual way that these texts are referred to, which are two of the most important texts in Religious Daosim. I also learned a great deal about the higher levels of Daoist ritual from Taooist Ritual in Chinese Society and History by John Lagerway and Early Daoist Scriptures by Stephen Bokenkamp. There are two Yellow Court Scriptures, internal and external you have specifically mention the external one. The Wikipedia article is surprisingly informative and worth a read. I have two different translations as well as the original Chinese Texts which are available on the internet. Some years ago I had been involved in a thread dealing with the different translations, but I can't seem to find it, so I will have to dig these out of my library so I can let you know about them. ZYD

When I was a moderator we examined the idea of clubs, even going so far as to install it so we could see how it works, but we also examined the possible consequences of clubs with our "nightmare" scenario being the "Western Mopai" club, which would end out filled with and staffed by a group that has been a source of problems for Dao Bums for as long as I can remember. We concluded that a forum with even a few warring clubs would create an enormous burden for the moderating staff and risked fragmenting and polarizing the forum in undesirable ways. We certainly didn't want to deal with it. The new staff may wish to examine the idea, our own past discussions of the matter should still be available to them. ZYD

We have had this discussion before in regard to member deci belle, who had a similar request. The discussion of this request seems to no longer be viewable to non-mod Dao Bums. I know its not available because I remember posting in it and not being able to find those post now. A lot of the present mod staff have been here long enough that they may remember this discussion and may want to review it in light of this request. The problem with a "block" button is that it would stifle the give and take involved in discussion, which is as can be seen in the TheDaoBums' Three Foundations: Eclectic, Egalitarian, Civil. is not the purpose for which the Dao Bums exists: That my interpretation of this is the "official" purpose is confirmed here: There are two usual ways to deal with the problem of not wanting to take part in the give and take of discussion, first you have your own private feifdom in your PPF, and can delete any offending posts that happen to disagree with you. If you are only interested in Dao Bums seeing your response unfettered with disagreement you can put links in the thread to your PPF. If you want to have a public response, you always have the option of a blog on anyone of a number of sites, where you are also "absolute autocrat" of what is posted and responses to it, and you can put links to that for those who wish your unblemished exposition. Some time ago I experimented with a third alternative here: This reminds me of what I said here: A little ignoring goes a long way too. This is how I will implement this idea. When I make a new post I will edit my previous one with a link to it so that someone can follow my exposition without having it be broken up intervening periods of incomprehensible twaddle. I may add some links to parts of the discussion which I think are particularly worth considering, or add them to my new post like this: Apeiron&Peiron Brings up the relationship between the Republic and Laws Apeiron&Peiron talks about publication in ancient Athens both of which I intend to respond to shortly. This was during the period of "Owner's Permissions" where the OP was given extraordinary control over the thread, a feature which could not be implemented in the subsequent software upgrade, and if you read the whole post you can see the requests from other people to remove the spam-trolling posts, which eventually I did remove. As the thread is now it is only two thirds of what it was before, I had to hide over twenty post from a single poster. Overall I kind of like the approach, but it will not deal with a troll whose goal is not simply for attention, as I mentioned above, but for victory, to silence you and put forward their own opinion above all others. This is the type of troll who should be disciplined with suspensions until it becomes obvious to all that a ban is necessary, and believe me, mods get enough flack for just suspending someone, banning a member is one of the last things that mods will contemplate, when all else has failed. I am glad to hear that there is no way a "block" feature can be implemented, as I really do believe in the free flow of conversation as my own experimental way of dealing with it, illustrated above, demonstrates, but I also know how painful it is to deal with a determined troll who will not let go of the matter until you have been exhausted and given up. To protect us from such trolls is part of the reason moderators exist, and I wish the new staff well in their efforts to do so. Zhongyongdaoist, former Concierge Edit: After posting some Paragraphs and spacing needed adjustment.

If you are looking for a nice one word label, that sounds good and has established usage, you might want to use "pragmatic", and put it into a context like "a pragmatic approach to choice among an eclectic set of tools for success." Or something like that. I should have been in advertising I could have been a very rich word whore, but I have too much of a sense of personal integrity for that. ZYD

There are two words often used for this and they describe different approaches to such mixing, syncretic, such as virtue has already mentioned, and eclectic. There is a useful and fundamental difference between them. Eclectic is used to refer to an informal approach to a mix and match of ideas and practices, whereas synretic is a more formal approach in which there is an actual attempt to synthesize, to unify different approaches in a fundamental unity, whereas this is not necessary in a eclectic approach, only a borrowing from different sources. ZYD

Unfortunately finding the "original Chinese" will probably be very difficult. This is because the work was controversial and eventually proscribed: Ancient fragments have been found, but no complete text: As noted what has been found doesn't seem to correlate well with the English text which is claimed to be a transcription of an Oral Tradition: So the only people who would have a Chinese text of this version are Master Ni's sons who carry on his work here: the College of Tao and Integral Health Here is the quote in Master Ni's book, from section 45, p. 144: If you contact them they may help you, however there is probably no way of establishing the relation between this "oral tradition" which Master Ni translated and the original Huahujing, nor is there anyway to establish whether Laozi wrote any of it. Either text might have interesting information on different aspects of later Daoist tradition, but neither may contain anything written by Laozi himself. ZYD

For good or ill, I really can't let go of things until I have either found the answer or proved to myself that it can't be found. I looked at Master Ni's text and decided that it was too wordy to be the direct source of the quote and remembering that Brian Walker's text was characterized as sparse and poetic more like Laozi's writing, so I decided to look at it and here is the result: Walker credits Master Ni as his teacher who introduced him to the Huahujing and and it is easy to see how this is a simplification of Master Ni's text. Also this seems to be based on ideas in the text of Daodejing Chapter 66: Thus "rectifying oneself" by becoming like the "sea" allows one to receive "tribute" from all directions without effort. Now I can let go of this. ZYD

While it has been a while since I have read the Dao De Jing, from 1966 to 1977, it was fundamental to my approach to life and I read it many times in many translations, and basically this does not have the "feel" of the Dao De JIng at all. I did some searching and while it is everywhere attributed to Laozi, no one gives a specific source citation in the Dao De Jing, which made me even more suspicious. Digging a little deeper I found a likely source in the Huahujing, based on this: I have this translation, Ni Hua-Ching. The Complete Works of Lao Tzu: Tao Teh Ching & Hua Hu Ching, The Shrine of the Eternal Breath of Tao and the College of Tao and Traditional healing, 1979, however the text is 81 chapters and about 111 pages long and I am not going to try to find a more exact location for you. The Huahujing is considered authentic by many Chinese, but is usually considered to be a late Polemical treatise, AKA forgery, created to show that after Laozi arrived in India he taught the "Barbarians" all they knew about spirituality which was then brought back "home" to China as Buddhism. I hope this is useful. ZYD

I don't usually watch videos, they are usually sources of worthless sound bytes rather than good data and analysis. I did watch parts of the first video which was still up, and found it pretty worthless and not worth the time to take notes on and come here do a real criticism of it. This is what happened to the second video, which also apparently includes Dr. Erickson from the first, is listed as not available for violating Youtube terms of service: Dubious coronavirus claims by California doctors condemned by health experts This should settle the matter except for people who believe that anyone who disagrees with them is a scammer. ZYD Edit: added more to the quote.

The flu vaccine is 50% effective. Yes, I am familiar with the relative effectiveness of the flu vaccine due to the extreme mutability of the flu virus it is the least effective vaccine in general usage, but even when people who receive it do subsequently get the flu it is usually mild and not the worst "flu" of their lives. ZYD

Here is an article from CNN indicating that the virus may have been around earlier than thought and apparently confused with the flu: 2 Californians died of coronavirus weeks before previously known 1st US death My neighbor has been talking about this possibility for the past couple of weeks because she had the worst flu of her life in January, and talking about it to her doctor learned that there had been a whole outbreak of "flu" that was not prevented by this year's flu vaccine and her doctor thought the vaccine had been incorrect, but now it seems it may have been an early covid infection which would explain why the flu vaccine didn't work. ZYD

Thanks for letting us know, I'm sure I was not the only DB getting worried, but recovering from a couple of gut punches like job loss and spouse loss, as well as the general difficulties besetting all of us is certainly a good enough reason for some time off. After all real life is more demanding and almost as important as the Dao Bums, even for the owner. ZYD

Good work gatito. You and other Dao Bums have no idea how sad I am that it had to be done, that I have to call "Western MoPai" a cult, but that is what it has degenerated into and here on Dao Bums it became a constant source of controversy and wasted time and cyberspace, that I could ignore until I became a Mod. After that for three years it was something which I could not ignore and which created the vast majority of complaints and a great deal of our internal Mod discussions. All of which was sad because I personally liked Mor_Pie_Guy, and was interested in his opinions particularly his posts on Gamma Waves and a six dimensional Cosmology, which were valuable contributions to the wealth of interesting discourse on Dao Bums, I liked him and along with BaquaKickass, opposed his being banned, even though he routinely dismissed everything that I had spent my whole life studying as "cosplay", something which he didn't and probably still does not realize is a personal insult, both to myself and just about everyone else on Dao Bums because of their beliefs and practices. I am secure enough in the results that I have gotten from decades of "cosplay" that his disbelief and his stated insults didn't bother me at all, but they did bother a lot of other people, and still do when his minions show up here to repeat the insult, over and over again. I could say more, but the fundamental point, of why I cannot support the idea of MegaMind as the doorkeeper of Dao Bums, and the possible flooding of Dao Bums with "MoPai Witnesses", has been made. However I do want to clarify why this makes me so sad. In the weeks before MPG, then posting under Thunder_Gooch, was banned I made two posts which were written as evidence for his defense and were intended to be a forward to a plea that he not be banned, those interested can find them here: and here: and I was working on the third, what I hoped would be the concluding part, of this defense on the morning that he was banned. I couldn't argue with his being banned, he had done more than enough to deserve it, but I did not want to see him banned. After I read about the ban I stopped working on that third part, since it would not have meant much at that time anyway, but I wish that I had been able to post it before that ban, even though it probably would not and maybe could not have made a difference, but at least then I could have felt a little better about knowing that my stand on the matter had been made explicitly public. My apologies to all for going on in this detail, believe me I could have said more, but as I said, I wanted to explain why I consider the business of "Western MoPai", and how it has turned out to be such a sad affair, and regrettably I don't know anything that can be done about it now. Thanks for your time if you have gotten this far. May all of us, every one, find true blessing in the Dao. Zhongyongdaoist

Hello SirPalomedes, These are good, readable translations, but they embody the old saying about something being lost in translation. This is not your fault, the translation of Li as "ritual" is acceptable, but the connotation of Ritual in most English speaking countries starts with "empty ritual", and goes downhill from there. I don't have time to comment in detail, but without some context to give a deeper meaning to the notion of "ritual" it will be very much misunderstood by the average reader of Dao Bums, so I will endeavor to give at least a little context for the Confucian concept of "ritual" by citing two quotes from the Li Yun the "Origin and Development of the Rites" chapter of the Liji, the "Classic of the Rites" gives some idea of the deep cosmological root of the concept of "Li": First of all note the use of "propriety" for Li instead of "ritual", this is the core meaning on which I focused in my thinking about Li. Propriety is "proper action" and this "proper action" is not merely the proper performance of arbitrary social conventions, but rather it is the proper enactment of the "ways of Heaven". Later we find a common aspect of Confucion Dao, the notion that the Sage forms a "ternion" or "triad" with "Heaven, Earth and Mankind", making clear that it includes the "spiritual beings" the "rites" are then devised by Sages according to their Heavenly Principles: With the result of what should be the "happy exercise of that in which they (the people, ZYD) find pleasure", the rites should not be stultifying conventions which impose a purely artificial order, but rather enactments of the creative power of Heaven, which should resonate with and help awaken people's "heaven conferred" True Nature and elicit spontaneous assent while at the same time developing the true potential of human beings to realize their Heavenly Nature. This is the Confucian context in which the whole notion of "ritual" should be contemplated, and seen from that perspective it become clear why: Can be followed with the profound "spiritual" instruction that follows, which most people would see as anathema to the notion of "ritual". I don't know if you needed this information, you seem to have a good understanding of these matters, but in general your readers would not have such an understanding and I hope this helps them to see the deeper level at which "ritual" is conceptualized by the Confucian Dao. I wrote this before your second post and it only considers "ritual" which is the focus of the first. Similar unintended distortions occur in relation to your second post, but they are unavoidable because univocal translations of these terms fail to convey their deeper meaning. For example the concept translated as "sincerity", 诚 ( chéng ) is so profound that, as wonderful a personal quality as sincerity is, even in its usual mundane meaning, hardly even approaches its wider meaning in Confucian thought, any more than "Benevolence", does justice to the notion of rén (仁). ZYD

This is something of a complex issue, and I am busy and can only give a cursory answer. How some ordinary thing, like a stick becomes a magic wand, or a knife a magic dagger, and not just in terms of say its official "consecration" or "dedication" for the magician's use, but how some ordinary thing, such as a fan becomes part of a tradition which prepares it and uses it as a magical tool is interesting. The most obvious are such tools as have an origin as weapons and are used as noted above in military magic, but they can also derive from other sources which differentiate along class and occupational divisions, and depend on functional and symbolic aspects of the prospective "tool". In the example of a fan, its obvious use in controlling the direction of air, would indicate it use to control the element of air in general and possibly more specifically weather, and who would use it would depend on social circumstances. A bellows also has a function of controlling the direction of air, but would not be used by a court gentleman or lady, but rather would be something that would arise from craft and folk traditions of magic. A soldier might think in terms of a magic sword, but a woodsman of a magic axe. Something like a scepter though has its derived meaning from it symbolic setting in such things a court ritual, where it is a symbol of power or authority. At a historical distance it may have actually been something that a chieftain might have used to bonk a disrespectful subordinate on the head, but as things become more orderly, it became much more symbolic. So magical tools start as ordinary things which are "pressed" into magical service because of their mundane function, such as fan or bellows, or their symbolic meaning such as a Scepter. At their base they become props in a ritual drama, and some people think that is all that they are or can be, but anyone with real experience knows that they can be more, much more, but that is a whole other subject. I hope this is helpful. ZYD

I have posted on the military origins of the sword in magic, especially in evocation in several places on Dao Bums, here is one: So that the Wand and Sword represent the different aspects of the divinely bestowed authority of the magician, the wand authority and the Sword his threat of force for noncompliance. While this Military context is not clear from the grimoires, viewing Goetic Evocation within the context of military magic has suggestive implications for the notion of spiritual warfare, and also to the references in some grimoires to the operator and exorcist, or the probably related karcist (I am relying on my memory, which is generally reliable, for this, but given time I could come up with suitable references. I remember being puzzled by the usage when I first saw it in my teens a long time ago.). (Emphasis added ZYD) Modern magicians have a tendency to ignore this aspect of magic, thinking that it originates with the Christian suppression of paganism. The matter is much more complex than that and originates in ancient Greece and the war between the Olympians and the Titans, and is thus pre-Christian and similar stories a feature of mythologies around the world, however the matter is too complex to enter into greater detail here, as it would derail the thread. ZYD