sean

Our resident Moose from The Contemporary Taoist has contributed a new article called Everything is Appropriate. Be sure to check it out. And if you haven't already read Yoda's excellent Sungazing Quickstart Guide you are missing out on one of the most exciting ways to juice up your cultivation that I've come across in years. Sean.

Hmmmm... it should link to his own personal blog. It does for me. Maybe his site was down. Try again and let me know if it's still a broken link for you.

Re: Aleister Crowley I studied Aleister Crowley heavily in my late teens and early twenties. It's odd to hear these opinions of him because in my my broad readings across a great deal of his his very very prolific body of work I've never come across anything that struck me as remotely "evil". I've always heard that there were negative opinions of him "out there" but just never came across anyone that held them. I imagine it's fairly common to think poorly of him though. Crowley's writings certaintly have "shock-value" on the surface and he also wasn't afraid to delve into some dark places most teachers would rather cover up with flowers and platitudes. A lot of the misinterpretations surrounding Crowley stem from the fact that a good chunk of his writings are, in my opinion, autobiographed attempts at therapy to recover from a brutal, fundamentalist Christian indoctrination. The "Beast" identification started because his mother would refer to him as The Beast from the book of Revelations whenever he made the slightest error in childhood. Eventually he just decided to run with it, partly in spite I'm sure, partly as a form of self-therapy, and partly (and especially later) as a genuine attempt to re-integrate Earth-based, ie: horned-God and pagan principles back into mystical-magickal systems of the West; something he felt was definitely lacking in the castrated, repressed and corrupt Victorian-model Christianity of his day. Giving a fair look at the modern history of mysticism and magick in the West, I think critics would be shocked to discover how huge a role Aleister Crowley played in the wisdom he brought from his world travels and relentless exploration. The seeds that he planted that continue to grow to this day, often times with little or no awareness of their roots in Crowley's work. For instance modern Witchcraft, or Wicca, has most of it's roots in Gardner's "Book of Shadows" which was probably either written in collaboration with Crowley, or was just flat out stolen from him. So there you got Crowley's face at the resurgence of Wicca. Now considering the bulk of the neo-pagan movement draws heavily on modern Wiccan research, you can clearly see Crowley's role here as catylist for a huge huge chunk of the New Age movement; and it all reads like just watered down Crowley. Crowley is also reponsible for the promotion of the Kabbalah as a mystical system useable outside of an orthodox Jewish context. A concept that plays an important role in nearly every modern occult group. And on and on. His life work is similar to what Bodri is doing now, only he was doing it 80 years ago; attempting to synthesize mystical-magickal systems from all over the world, past and present. Anyway, don't take my word for it. If you are interested here are some of his major works online: http://www.hermetic.com/crowley/ ... You'll get a great understanding of him and what his intentions and life work were about by starting with his autobiography here: http://www.hermetic.com/crowley/confess/index.html Re: Taoist Alchemy vs. Magick. This seems to keep coming up again and again and it has me confused. It's a discussion I'm very interested in though. Because for me, Taoist Alchemy is Magick. It's Eastern Magick. Simple. And as a system of magick, it's principles and processes remarkably parallel the Western Alchemical and Hermetic traditions. Alchemy with Intent vs. "Emptiness" This sort of brings me to the whole Emptiness vs. Alchemy-with-Intent debate that's been dragging on and on in the forums the last several months. The "Bodri crew" is of the understanding that all internal alchemy should occur spontaneously as a result of "emptiness practices". On the "other side", what I'll call the "Alchemy-with-Intent" school, no reason is seen not to get your hands dirty and move Chi around and direct the alchemical process with the mind. Why leave everything up to nature? If that were the case I wouldn't wear glasses and I'd walk around naked in the cold bumping into shit. Reframed, this is just a "Pure Mysticism" vs. Magick debate. And reframed another way, it's actually a Religion vs. Alchemy/Shamanism/Mysticism/Magick debate. Because not only do I feel that Alchemy-with-Intent is in no way whatsoever different than Magick, I don't even actually see a real distinction between so-called "purely Mystical" approaches and Magick. So called "purely mystical" approaches to enlightenment are only named "purely mystical" because a group of people decide they are "straight arrow", acceptable, or "moral" approaches to attainment. But these "pure mystical" schools are still just systems of magick rituals. What is the Catholic Mass but a magick ritual? What is the microcosmic orbit and Kan and Li, etc. but magick rituals? What is the feeding hungry ghosts but a magick ritual? What is a sun salutation but a magick ritual? What is sitting in the lotus position and practicing "emptiness" but a magick ritual? So my question, on my path, is not should I choose magick or mysticism or alchemy or religion? It's always been, what magick is the most effective in helping me live and be the realization of my purpose? ... Or something like that. Sean.

Oh, ok. I'll look into that. I need to customize a lot of the default language files anyway. Thanks for the heads up. I should also probably fill out the COPA compliance stuff also, so parents can block this site if they want.

Heh. You Taoists and your Crowley misgivings. I don't get it. IMO Crowley is mostly misunderstood. His work is dangerous in the sense that it is powerful and real, thus can be abused or applied wrongly; much like Taoist Alchemy. There are undertones of megalomania and misogyny in Crowley's work for sure, but that's about the extent of the disclaimer I'd give him. And that's a criticism that could be placed on a fair number of advanced male teachers in the last century. I'm genuinely interested in what you mean though. Have you or anyone you've known had bad experiences with Crowley's work? Sean.

Good point. Pietro can host the Wiki just as easily on his site. What's the problem with that? I will happily put a link to the Wiki in the Links section. I meant traffic in the sense that not even Tao Bums visited the Wiki. What's the point? Why not just post an Article? What advantage does the Wiki have over the forum? Sorry, I just don't get it. For all the reasons I listed above, the Wiki just seems like a piece of drift wood that is completely disconnected from this site. Every single link on that top menu quickly brings you to a section of TaoBums that is integrated and has a consistent look and feel. If I put a Wiki link up there, it loads this slow-ass software that looks and behaves completely differently, is based on an open-shared-space concept that just doesn't apply to a public system like TaoBums IMO, and is impossible to template. Not really. That is Pietro-speak. TaoBums isn't Pietro's socio-political experiment. It's also not really a democracy. It's just a forum I started to meet a need I saw. I want to make everyone happy. I do. But I am not the slave of every member here's whim. Sorry. I put the Wiki up because Pietro and you asked. No one used it very much, including you two. And look at it now! It's friggin' empty! Why is it empty? What's the point of the damn thing? In my experience HT was and remains one of the least moderated forums I've ever been a member of. Also, for the record, I didn't leave HT. I just created a new forum because HT crashed and it seems to meet a need so I went with it. HT and TaoBums are not exclusive. I still post on HT and so do many members here. I have no hard feelings about HT, Michael Winn, or James. I even link to HTUSA in the links section. Regarding TaoBums moderators. Their role is very laid back. Basically approve News and Articles, delete spam and posts with illegal content (see FAQ), and move posts to the proper forum. That's about it. As long as a post contains no illegal content it will probably stay on TaoBums, it's just a matter of where; in other words, Taoist Discussion, Off-Topic, or Tech Support. If someone posts some crazy irrelevant shit on Taoist Discussion, it's likely to get moved to Off-Topic. That's about the extent of moderation you will see here. Thanks! Sean.

I dug up some old magick books and found Crowley's Liber Resh vel Helios which, believe it or not, I used to do every day back in my mid-teens, but had somehow completely forgotten about it even in the midst of all this sungazing obsession. I was reminded of if actually when reading the "Solar Trinity" section of an article Yoda posted in his blog called The Sun, A Universal Deity. The exact quote was: Crowley's adoration ritual is actually based on four phases of the sun; it includes midnight as a phase, which provides a perfect opportunity to moongaze and also allows the adorations to have the Four Elements associated with them. The Sun at Dawn associated with Air. The Sun at Noon associated with Fire. The Sun at Dusk associated with Water. The Sun at Midnight associated with Earth. In Donald Michael Kraig's excellent Modern Magick he illustrates poses to go with the adorations. Here's a crappy scan: Notice the idiots in the illustration have their eyes closed though. Sean.

It's wierd, I change the mail settings to allow 100 messages but it won't take. It's stuck at 50. I'll have to look into that. Anyway, I deleted a bunch of my old mail so you can PM me now if you want. Sean.

I'm sorry Yoda, what do you mean by "Intro Section" ? I'm still learning my way around this software also. Sean.

Ahhh.... I'm not having that problem, but I think I know what may be causing it. I will look into it as soon as I can. Sean. PS - have you tried deleting all your cookies and starting fresh?

I dunno about the Wiki yet. It literally was just mostly Pietro using it, it got very little traffic, was completely insecure from having all content deleted at any moment, it got hacked constantly with spam by pharm companies, etc., it is extremely unwieldy to template or modify and damn near impossible to integrate into the other 99% of the site. I think the Contributed Articles and News sections fill the role of the wiki better. The idea of the wiki was to take ideas that keep popping up, summarize them intelligently, and create coherent articles about the information. That is exactly what can be done with the Contributed Articles section. And in your contributed article you can link directly to all of the relevant threads, people can reply and build upon the information in your article, you can go back and edit your article anytime, and no one can just randomly delete your article like on the Wiki. Unless a really good case against these points is brought I doubt the Wiki will live much longer. At least not that software. Maybe if you can find something that integrates with Invision Board somehow but I still don't see the point. I'm willing to send the Wiki files and database to anyone else that wants to host it though. I was wondering the same thing. The Blogs are sort of disconnected now and you can't immediatly see if someone has made a new entry. I'll look into this. Sean.

Yeah, sorry about that. Once again I had to switch things around on everyone due to the new software. Anyone having login problems should update their bookmarks to: http://www.thetaobums.com and http://www.thetaobums.com/forum and pretty much scrap using the forum.taobums.com subdomain, at least for now. Sorry for the inconvenience and definitely let me know if you still have troubles. Sean.

Yeah, it's a weird little ranking system that I couldn't figure out how to turn off yet so I just went with it for now. I spent about 15 seconds making up the ranks. There can be more than 5 also, probably up to 15 or twenty. So here's the ranking I came up with: # of Posts Rank 0 Member 25 Tao Master 50 Tao Addict 75 Tao Wizard 100 Tao Bum! Feel free to think up something more clever. Shouldn't be too hard. Sean.

I should have been clearer on the forum descriptions. Contributed Articles is for article submissions relevant to cultivation written exclusively for TaoBums by a Tao Bum. I'll move your article to Taoist Discussion if you want though. Sean.

Thanks Ron! Yeah it was a bit of work. I hope everyone likes it. PS - You're Popeye animations are hilarious. Sean.

Thanks! Yeah, lots' of fun stuff. My head is still swimming with all the features. Sean.

Anyone wants to give Gmail a try, it's by far the best webmail I've ever used, but it's invite only. I just realized I have a bunch of invites so here ya go. Please don't be a piggie though. Only take one or two. Thanks! http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-dc447f6588...e3f2-2159018557 http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-dc447f6588...4d59-19af0f807e http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-dc447f6588...f13e-7eeb0ce486 http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-dc447f6588...c906-d1ec380332 http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-dc447f6588...1458-2d1d019125 http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-dc447f6588...bdfd-fa354956c1 http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-dc447f6588...afd4-e500da7790 http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-dc447f6588...be29-ccd84dc733 http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-dc447f6588...9d13-9941badd11 http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-dc447f6588...2ebc-331319aaeb http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-dc447f6588...c6dc-3d3b7be2a4 http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-dc447f6588...a534-122b94ce62 http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-dc447f6588...f834-8a1f021a67 http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-dc447f6588...5ff8-dd83c60148

Wicked fresh. RESPECT.

Really good point Chris. Thanks for posting that.

From Essential-Skills website: "The 3D Mind tm works on the following principle. Problems are the result of a specific formula of associated states that create an unbalanced relationship between the primal brain and the creative adaptive brain. These create an entire environment that the world gets sorted through. In the past I described it as a filter but I think 'environment describes it better because it is an all encompassing reality not just a filter." So I just got the two 3D-Mind videos and so far I am really impressed. It's an incredibly simple NLP-style process you can learn in an hour and describe in three paragraphs but it seems very powerful and flexible. I've only been playing with it for about a week but with pretty amazing results. It may not seem relevant to Taoism or whatnot but I've found it very easy to integrate Chi circulations and even movements into the process. I think it has a lot of potential for integration into our spiritual practices. Yoda has first dibs on this since he sent me WSM, so if he doesn't want to borrow it right away then it's up for general grabs.

Not to bum you out sunshine, but I lived and worked in Germany for awhile and actually moved to California mainly because I knew I couldn't handle another winter there. It's weird to think about this now in the context of my sungazing practice, but I remember telling people that it was like the winter sky in Germany is so inpenetrably grey and for such a long period of time, that a part of me began to doubt that the sun was even behind it. I had never had the experience of having the "of course the sun is behind that" intution challenged. It was obviously not a logical challenge, but a description of how it felt emotionally to be confronted with such persistent darkness. It's funny because I was recently thinking about how I would handle living in Europe again if I ever decided to in the future. I realized that it would be necessary for me take weekend flights to Spain or Greece for prolonged sungazing/sunbathing at least twice a month. In between trips I would go to a tanning salon for 5-8 minutes once a week and make frequent use of a SAD lamp. Of course this regimen would require some financial abdundance I haven't achieved just yet. :? And I would spend the entire summer outdoors. Summers in Germany are absolutely beautiful, albeit short, and actually came very close to making it worth the winters for me. Sean.

Yeah Photoshop is unbeatable IMO. But you can still run it on Linux via VMWare or Codeweavers. Last time I looked into it that's how Disney and Dreamworks use Photoshop on their all-Linux pipeline. Most notable graphics studios use Linux for three major reasons. It's free, massively scaleable and open source. Some studios are surprisingly throwing G5's into the mix since OSX is at least Unix based now. But it's actually extremely rare to see a mid to large size graphics house use Windows in any major capacity. It's just too much of a hassle to get under the hood and build an efficient pipeline with it. Longhorn may change this though, particularly with the introduction of monad. If you are a command line or shell script geek, definitely check out the videos in the preceeding link. Sean.

Where is the list of each of these user's individual blogs? No, I'm not kidding. In fact I think the current setup works very well and I actually like it alot. I also prefer it over what I've seen of WordPress. The current setup is also not confusing at all. Each person has there own thread that is their blog. Simple. Anyone can join in on that thread and it creates some of the liveliest discussions here on Taobums. Discussions that would quite possibly not occur if the comments were buried. I don't care about "rss feeds". And if you can find me five people on here that think this is a real issue I'll be surprised. We'll see Pietro. 4 votes has me hardly convinced that radically altering the entire site layout and losing months of people's journal entries in the process is an "action of the community". In the meantime why don't you spend more time actually using this forum for it's intended purpose. Sean