sean

AMEN! Your whole post! Sean

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Cameron deleted his Myspace profile. He is trying to act like a grownup or something. So now there is a gaping hole on my Top 8 where my dharma brother Cameron used to be. Cameron, why have you forsaken me!?! To drown my sorrows I need more Taoist Myspace buddies. So if you have a Myspace account, be my friend! http://myspace.com/somlor Sean

Is this via AOS?

Active Chinese http://www.activechinese.com/ Hello! Mandarin http://www.hellomandarin.com/courses/course-survival.html Modern Chinese Learning http://www.modernchineselearning.com ChinesePod http://www.chinesepod.com/

Been meaning to reply to this. I love this contemplation here, so honest and direct. I would ask - Are you sure there is a center? Can you answer: Whose pain do you really feel when someone strikes you? Whose pain do you feel when you see someone struck? You and I -- separation -- a personal self -- they exist in the sense that they are visceral. The sense of them certainly arise and aren't clarified by pretending they aren't there. I am looking out of my eyes at you and you are over there. There is an overwhelmingly strong sense that I can wave my arms around and have no control over your arms whatsoever. Yet can you get a taste that these are just qualities? Manifestation has particularities or else it would be unmanifest theoretical probabilities. So there becomes near and far, black and white, hot and cold, here and there ... among this arises an experience named and felt "what I think I can directly control and call myself, at the center here" and an experience named and felt "what I cannot control and refer to as out there - other". But what (if anything) precedes this? In a way the answer is nothing does. This is it. But can you taste that there is something closer and more immediately true than your experience? Before thought, before feeling, before perception ... yet also right with them. What are you really? Sean

Hahah, welcome, I enjoy your blog, been reading it for awhile now.

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Arrggghhg..... I remember this site I had bookmarked a few years ago that had a pretty detailed breakdown of various phenomenon of the subtle body and I've been searching for it for like two hours and I can't find it anywhere. One of the things I remember was that the author felt that tan tiens and chakras are referring to very different things ... possibly that they even existed in different bodies or planes, I forget his exact cosmology. I vaguely remember he referred to Tan Tiens as being more like batteries / storage centers whereas chakras were vortexes of some sort. I dunno. It was interesting but dense and I liked returning to every so often but I can't find it anywhere now. Anyone remember this page? It got posted on HT a few times over the years. Oh well, even if you don't have the link, what do you think? Do you find chakras and tan tiens to be descriptions of basically the same subtle body phenomenon? Or are they different, and if so how? Thanks, Sean

I think this is just the way the gallery software works unfortunately.

San Ba wSULuVeeAmU

Looking forward to meeting you too. And nice idea with the group meditation.

Wow, I've had that at the top of my reading wishlist for awhile. Glad to hear you recommend it, I will bump it to the very next slot.

I found this site recently called Urbis and I thought of you Thelerner. It lets you upload pieces of your writing to a community and receive feedback. It's based around an interesting credit system that requires everyone to participate and review each other's work. Sean

Dammit, sorry I forgot about you too Lozen. Ok, to ALL the writers here, more cool links: StorySquared - Fun site to engage in collaborative story writing Language is a virus - a bunch of writer's block toys

Either of these are great to start with: The Wisdom of the Enneagram The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others In Your Life

Yes, I am always so annoyed when I have to turn my computer on and manipulate my fingers on this stupid keyboard to type messages here so I know how you feel. Reality making us do all this shit, it's just frustrating.

Wow, well said freeform, great post and great advice. The difference that I've noticed between 2's and 4's ability to emotionally connect is the 2's MASTERY of when and how to smoothly disconnect. I am always amazed by how gracefully 2's can connect and disconnect (and everything in between) with people at the appropriate depth and timing. I think fours struggle with the transition from the really deep connections we are capable of (and crave) back to "ordinary" practical communication "ok, but what do you want to eat?" and even worse to disconnecting, ie: having to walk away or say goodbye after a connection. I feel this difficulty especially around the eyes. This difficulty with emotional transitions I think is one of the factors that can lead to fours getting into a pattern of being either fully on or fully off in connecting, our eyes functioning as a major component of our on/off switch. What I love about you 9's is your incredible selflessness, empathy and ability to really truly, and very naturally, create a neutral space to listen to other human beings. I typically feel very much heard and accepted when communicating with a 9, especially one on one. But I also tend to feel a little guilty afterwards because it's like I get so excited by the neutral space created that I end up dominating the conversation and you 9's are so damn nice you just patiently tolerate my repeated interruptions. Sorry about that. Sea

4w5 = 4 with 5 wing = introspective, moody, analytical, melodramatic, melancholic, sensitive, romantic, artistic, addictive, searching ... tend to feel as if something is always missing, oscillate between feeling defective at a core level and feeling distinctly special and unique even in a superior way and sometimes for identical reasons as they felt defective. When I read the description of a Four it was like getting punched in the stomach. I couldn't believe how accurate it was for me. I felt embarrassed actually. Since then I've read just about every Enneagram of personality book/article I could find and feel like I have learned a lot about myself which in turn has helped me to grow. I also want to second freeform's point ... taking one of these online test is not the best way of discovering your number or getting the most from the personality Enneagram. The best way is to get a good personality Enneagram book, read through all of the type descriptions until one of them freaks you out with how much it nails your hidden agendas. Sean

7! I am a 4w5 btw. As if I haven't made that completely obvious.

Wow.

I could swear I read somewhere about a study done where monkeys were presented with two switches. For some time only the first switch worked and it delivered the monkey its food. The monkey learned to flip this switch and be fed. At some point the second switch was activated. This switch was hooked to an electrode connected to a part of the monkey's brain that stimulated an instant orgasm. The monkeys would push this orgasm button until they passed out from exhaustion only to wake up again and do it over again. This to the point of starvation and near death, the food button completely forgotten. Does anyone remember this study or am I making this shit up? In any case, I think "bondage to our DNA" is an extremist way of organizing the information. We aren't monkeys, we have the capability of a more refined consciousness. And deeper still, DNA is merely an expression of the spiritual, matter a thought in the mind of God. I find the depth of sexual desire, or any desire for that matter, to be intimately related to the intensity of our longing for reconnection with Truth. MichelleD, I hope you share a complimentary copy of your book with us when it comes out. Maybe there is something we can learn from it. But I think your conclusions are premature and overdrawn. This thread shows nothing inherently wrong occurring and certainly nothing that could rest your case. It's not a failure that men have to consciously cultivate selectivity. Man's lack of selectivity had an evolutionary purpose. It's why we are here! But something new is evolving. And perhaps ironically I think it's the highly selective men nowadays, the men that can find a girl incredibly sexy and simultaneously brush her off because she is lame that get the most women and the sexiest women. Sean

Assuming MichelleD is really a girl, I think it's very interesting that Max was the only one who bothered to qualify her, a concept Stephane Hemon places at the center of his heart-centered pickup work, and that this is when her false identity broke down immediately. I think it points to an interesting flaw in the way men tend to relate to attractive women, myself included. I think women are used to getting attention and having men more than willing to sleep with them, love them, etc. before any real criteria on the man's part is applied. Men too easily assume because there is attraction that a woman has something we want or is worth our time whereas I think women tend to learn very early on the value of selectivity. Imagine if a man went onto a contemplative Taoist forum whose membership is comprised of (guessing) 95% women and made the proposition MichelleD made. My guess is that sexiness, fitness and youth on the man's part would not be enough. Max's question would have been in the post of any slightly interested female, maybe not as directly as Max put it, but in some form or another. In my own life these observations point to where I want to cultivate deeper sexual honor. Women already have to get by Lezlie to have sex with me, a trial in it's own right, but it's not enough. Who are you? What kind of energy do you have? What are you about? Etc. Sean

Taomeow, I'll really have to forward your thoughts to my friend! We turned the idea around more than once over more than one beer but never articulated anything as bright as this. Maybe we should have stopped after the first Tecate. I do want to say though, I think there are critical problems even in "pointing to". The problems may not be as obvious. A more sophisticated smokescreen can be created pointing out processes. Process language is fuzzy and groundless (like reality) so it has a seductive quality that can more easily pass for reality itself. Whereas it's more readily apparent that intellectual definitions break down easily under scrutiny, in contrast even the most intelligent may create a beautiful web of shimmering translucent concepts and get stuck in it. Common sense tells us translucence is closer to clearness/clarity than that which is opaque, but I am reminded of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. That the more one pursues and understanding of the momentum of something the less one can be precise about it's position (and vice versa). Perhaps, by analogy, the more one becomes proficient in understanding the process of Tao, the less sure they are of what that Tao IS, whereas the more precisely one knows what Tao is, the less aware they are of where it is going, what it is BECOMING. I am just being spontaneous and playing with words here though, so don't be too hard on me, I'm not a philosopher. Love your whole response here Yen Hui. I can't think of anything to add to it, but I wanted to say I was really moved by this part that I quoted above. I think it's a crucial crucial piece of Taoist/Confucian wisdom that takes one beyond the mind when contemplated. Sean

The sense I get is that ... the best we can be is what we naturally are. Imposing an intellectual ideal of, say, duty and responsibility on ourselves is actually counterproductive in the longterm compared to just resting, abandoning, forgetting and allowing our innate goodness to arise and express as it will.