sean

One of my favorite videos of one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists: Windowlicker

I think Tao is beyond and within everything including thought. I think Tao is initially approached as beyond thought because our thoughts currently aggregrate around a false perception of personal body-mind as Tao. But even this illusion is Tao.

Great post Rex, really interesting distinction above. Active and organized sources of anti-life. Would you elaborate on that more? As a non-dualist I tend to perceive the intentions of all sentient beings as all sharing the same core yearning for Oneness, toward Happiness/Enlightenment, just with varying levels of ignorance. I see "evil" as merely being on the super-ignorant end of this spectrum of approaches to Happiness ... to the point where there is actually a turning away from Happiness in a convoluted and confused effort to find Happiness which leads to deepening suffering and hell, and the vicious cycle of samsara. It's scary to think how convoluted this confusion and ignorance can get though. To the point where we have mafias and drug addiction and people raping, and killing each other every day on this plane and, as you allude to, beings forming coalitions of hatred and cruelty on other planes. In some way though these dualities are just increasingly intense pulsations of the original love making of Chokmah and Binah in the unity of Keter, boiling over into the Fire and Water of Geburah and Chesed, and just continually intensifying as polarities down the Tree until we have Jesus and Satan, hippies and fighters, lovers and criminals, etc. Sean.

Just my opinion, but I'm highly skeptical of that teacher and that school based on those videos. To the point where I would not take that guy or his (IMO) hypnotized acting students hopping around very seriously. In fact I would assert that he is doing a massive disservice to his students by promoting such unrealistic ideas about self-defense. Fighting a serious aggressor for safety or survival is not pretty and I think it would be a real shame if someone were in an actual situation and with loved one's and they tried to pull off stuff like this, especially in my hood. You know what I mean? Sean.

There's a free online Astral Travel and Dreams Course at Gnosticweb that I signed up for and was thinking about going through... doesn't start until January, but register and they'll send you an email when things get started. Sean.

OMG. You mean that link wasn't a deliberate joke?

http://www.ilram.com/M_taichimasters_temp.html

If anyone is wondering why I'm the only egomaniac with the bigger avatar now it's because I just checked out the bandwidth usage and we can handle bigger avatars no problem ... let me know if it slows things down for anyone, especially users on dialup or something. Also, remember ... there is always the Lo-Fi Version of The Tao Bums that is always pretty zippy. Sean.

I just figured it out. It won't let you enter a custom member title until you've gone through all the "ranks" via post count. Let's come up with something more creative than the stupid ranks I thought up in like 2 seconds when I first installed this software. Here is the way they are now: Member, -1 Tao Master, 25 Tao Addict, 40 Tao Wizard, 65 Tao Bum!, 100 I was thinking instead of making it not so difficult to enter a custom title. As it is now you have to have 100 posts to be able to edit your title. Maybe we could make the top rank 50. The # of posts per rank is completely arbitrary. So whatever we come up with. This is REALLY exciting. HOT topic. Just realized how incredibly dorky this conversation I am starting is. But whatever, let's think up new ranks. Sean.

I've never specifically done any "formal" type magickal workings with these entities. I guess I've mostly worked with them indirectly, through contemplative study. Reading about Satan and Lucifer from different points of view, contemplating them as mythological structures/living archetypes, seeing how other culture's anthropomorphisms of similar archetypes did not include such fearful reactions or compulsions to literally demonize, ie: Pan and the more sensual Horned Gods in general. This kind of study helped break up some of the repressive Catholic worldview I was raised with. I think that attempting to actually directly work with these Christian archetypes, ie: YHVH, IAM, Jehovah, Yahweh, Yeheshua (Jesus), Satan, Devil(s), Lucifer, Gabriel/Michael/etc Angels, Mary Magdalene, Virgin Mary, Peter, etc, etc. would be an overwhelmingly powerful experience for me. Key word "overwhelming". Maybe one day I will have enriched my perception of these beings with enough diversity to approach them in a balanced way and without fear of being overtaken in literalness and then swept away in sociopolitical Christian cults as I fear happens to many ungrounded "born agains". And honestly I fear I might not have the power to avoid the same fate were I to begin having extreme spiritual phenemona arise in symbolism I was taught was the unarguable truth since birth, and everything else being lies of the Devil more or less. Kind of a freaky thing to admit, but it's a weakness in myself I acknowledge and respect. One piece of Christian imagery that I do love to look at though, and that brings me a certain amount of bliss without scaring me into thinking I am going to freak out and start preaching to the unsaved is the sacred heart. Sean.

Intriguing post Michael. Lately I've been seeing the key issue in sexual alchemy as being how open the spinal and perhaps front channels are, and how prepared the system is to handle sexual energy moving upward, catalyzing increased internal purification, instead of shooting outward to generate new physical and/or astral life. So I see the two approaches you presented more as techniques than paths, both being useful means depending on the alchemy of your situation. The purification/transformation process of upward moving sexual fluids can be more blissful and grounding when done at the proper pace and more painful and disorienting when done too rapidly. (My braces analogy) Sexually active alchemy probably accelerates the cleansing process, like putting water on the stove, but only if your channels are open. Otherwise it's just retention and all this energy is just backing up in your balls for no useful purpose (actually the opposite, it's the cultivation of chaotic, pent up aggression IMO). Avoiding sexual stimulation, physically or even via excessive fantasies, pictures, etc. I believe calms down the cleansing process a bit. Taking the kettle off the stove. Brining in some more yin, as you said. So if you start getting burned by the spiritual fires you are igniting, you don't retain. You don't throw gas on the fire. Simple. This actually leads me why I don't really buy into the whole "when you ejaculate you are losing months/years of progress" idea. The point of retention IMHO is to provide energy for spiritual transformation. Period. (PS - The point of spiritual transformation IMHO is to Awaken to Happiness as your True Self). If you are cultivating properly, you are transmuting all of the time. And if the proper channels are open(ing), when you have sex and don't come, those fluids are transformed and used for purification right then and there. I haven't even gotten to Yogani's lectures on Tantra yet, but he uses a car analogy a lot so I will borrow it for a minute. (BTW - I have no idea if he would agree with my theory here at all). The way I see it is that having sex with an open(ing) spinal channel is like hitting the gas on a fuel injected car. The sexual fluid is going to get injected right into the engine and burnt up completely in that moment to increase your overall speed. This is in proportion to how open your channels (read: fuel injection tube) are. If you are going too fast (or your channels are just so closed the fuel doesn't even have a path to an engine at all) you always have this safety valve to fall back on that ejects the fuel out of you. And I think it should also be obvious that this fuel-ejection process is not just a safety valve. Ejaculation can ignite new physical life in the female womb and/or also create "astral entities" shaped from your psychic impression at the moment of climax. This external alchemy of semen is not discussed by the Easterns much at all (to my knowledge) but is a big piece of inner Western occult traditions. My two cents. Which I hold more humbly than I've written perhaps, I just get sick of writing IMHO, the way I see it, I think, etc. over and over. Sean.

Nope, I haven't done anything at all yet. Are you seeing the avatars ok now? That is really strange that Norton or whatever would block an avatar. And so sneaky, pre-emptively snipping the <img> tag right out of the source like that. Crazy. Are you able to see the "Custom member title" yet? Under "Edit Profile info" I see: Custom member title Your Date of Birth Your website url Your ICQ UIN etc etc Thanks, Sean.

Great post affenbrot. One thing I wanted to add is that I also think the dark things around western religion and magick maybe are also more resonant with us because they reflect the particular karma and sins and fears on the cultural layer of our collective psyche (as Westerners) back to us. It's our cultural Shadow (via Jung), our repressed dark side underneath the so-called "good" of our values (ie: individuality, youth, progress, technology, etc.) that we emphasize in our memes. Could be why they scare us so badly and maybe why they are potent symbols and archetypes to work with. It's super taboo to say that you are working with Luciferian or Satanic archetypes, but in some ways I believe this can really be legitimate Shadow work, and a genuine move toward the proper resolution of fracturing dualities passed on to us by a very dichotomized and linear Western religious model. Simon, do you still work with Dion's material? She strikes me as a very balanced and saner Crowley. Does the material in this book provide anything over learning banishing rituals? Thanks, Sean. PS - Another rushed lunch post. Apologize for any incoherence.

Varies from day to day, week to week. I'm usually on here at least an hour a day reading and posting and will patch little things I see wrong here and there, move a a post or two, welcome newcomers, etc. As far as the bigger site projects I have so much Fire in my sign it's a good metapor for how I work which is usually in immense bursts of energy and then rest. I have so many cool plans for this site though I've laid them out over a multiple year timeline ... This place will be the #1 non-sectarian spiritual discussion community on the web in a few years IMHO, if not already. Sean.

Charlie, this is really strange. I'll have to look into this more when I have a bigger block of time. So you are saying you can't see my avatar anymore at all? Sean

That was wierd. There was the same custom field in two places that you could update. One would update the top title as Lozen and I did, the other would update the title at the bottom, as you and TwoTrees did. I removed the latter. Try it again. This time go to My Controls>Edit Profile and edit that top field that says "Custom member title". Should do the trick.

*bump* Good topic that got kind of lost sitting in the root of of the PPD. Lot's of parents here, should be a good chat.

Also, I had a nice back and forth with Yogani regarding self-pacing that I found helpful. Here is a piece that I wanted to share: I wrote: "I'm keeping steady with just these first two practices, as is suggested, and in this last week the intensity has settled which I am actually taking as a good sign. But I've gotten sick, or at least have flu-like symptoms with a bad sore throat manifest since yesterday. I have an intuition it's from too much purification occuring. Actually, this may sound crazy, but on Friday I kept trying to do Kechari mudra. (Jumped way ahead). Kept playing with it all day. I managed to push my tongue back to my uvula and it was so pleasurable I kept doing it the whole rest of the day. Eventually I managed to get to the point where I could do it without pushing my tongue with my fingers. Every few minutes I had this compulsion to stick my tongue back and touch my uvula. As if a plate of chocolate was in front of me. Later that evening I got an intense headache (not common). The next day I had a bad headache and my throat hurt and I had a very strong intuition to avoid more kechari attempts. My headache got worse and then eventually went away, but now I have flu-like symptoms. Is it possible this is a result of jumping the gun here?" Yogani wrote: "Sorry to hear you are a bit under the weather there. There is no doubt you got off to a very fast start in AYP and that can cause some imbalances, as I am sure you have read in the lessons already. With so many practices freely available in AYP, understanding and applying the principles of "self-pacing" is of vital importance. It is like learning to drive. We learn pretty quickly that having the "pedal to the metal" all the time is not the best way to drive. So, just slow down and take it one step at a time is my advice. That includes letting go of the urges for "automatic yoga" (not acting on them all the time) in favor of a more systematic approach. Automatic yoga has no regard for your health or well-being. It just wants to open everything right now. That is fine, but it needs to be regulated if you are going to make the long term journey with any comfort while continuing to function in the world. Yoga is a marathon, not a sprint. You know the story of the tortoise and the hare, right? On the flu symptoms, actual flu (which you may or may not have) results from a combination of our immune system's condition and and whatever is in the air. By overdoing in yoga maybe you compromised your immune system -- that is temporary. If that happens, you can "catch" something when your natural defenses are down. Maybe the imbalance in yoga was not a factor. It's hard to say. The other possibility is that this is yogic purification only. If it clears up in a day or two, you can assume the latter. In the meantime, back off on practices until you are comfortable in daily activity. Find a steady platform of practices that gives you both growth and stability. How we feel in daily activity is the real measure of our practice, not whatever whiz-bang experiences (or lack of them) we might be having during practices." I like the emphasis he places on proper self-pacing. It reminds me a lot of two other important teachers of mine, Scott Sonnon and Kathleen DesMaisons who both place equally strong emphasis on going slowly. The analogy Kathleen would use, in the context of healing sugar addiction, is that this work is like getting braces. You give yourself a simple, basic structure and slowly you tighten it up. Every few weeks, you tighten a turn or two. Eventually, after a few years, you don't need the braces. Your teeth are growing in the right direction naturally now. Without a clear goal and a simple plan you are just kind of randomly putting some sort of home-made brace contraption on, twisting it way too tight, taking it off for a few days, putting it on again, but backwards, putting it on your feet one day. Just kind of all over the map. Or maybe you decide to "be a man" and buckle down and fix these damn teeth once and for all. You stick the braces on and tighten them, tighten them, tighten them and then *snap* you broke all your freakin' teeth out, dude. And that's not the point. So I'm heeding Yogani's advice. Slow and steady wins this race. Sean.

Hey Harry, Yogani has responded to your questions about the amazing sperm journey. Check it out: From http://www.aypsite.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=561 Sean

That's a ringing endorsement RedFox, I'll have to check that one out. Here's the link: Your Money Or Your Life

I've flipped through that E-myth Revisited book Tenguzake. Looked good. I am trying to get my finances in order more lately. Get out of debt, etc. I'm reading Get A Financial Life and Multiple Income Streams. I like both of them so far.

Really? Email me the pic and I'll take a look at it. [email protected] Sean.

I had some ideas for changing the registration and forum setup for membership to The Tao Bums a little and I would love some feedback. Here is a loose sketch of what was on my mind for forum structure: Tao Lounge ----Open Bar - Anyone, even people w/ out usernames can see this forum. Only members can post. ----Inner Cauldron - Only validated, logged in members can see and post in this forum. ----Personal Practice Discussion - Only validated, logged in members can see and post in this forum. Basement ----Forum and Technical Support - Anyone, even people w/ out usernames can see this forum. Only members can post. ----Off Topic - Only validated, logged in members can see and post in this forum. The process of validation I was thinking about, was the same as that on Scott Sonnon's forum. I don't think we need to go as extreme as forcing real names, but at least we can require that, if you want access to the deeper areas of The Tao Bums, you gotta register with a valid email address, and you gotta at least say Hi to us in the Lobby and tell us a little about yourself and what your intentions are here. My idea behind this is that it will help get people out of their shells that come here often but maybe are hesistant to say hello for some reason. And also it will prevent the stupid stuff that I'm sure you can imagine goes on in the back end ... multiple usernames from the same IP, dozens of logins not validated because they used a fake email address, etc., etc. The process of validating existing users would have to be determined. I could turn all members that have never posted into "waiting for validation" status and send them an email to let them know about the update. Maybe there are other options... Thoughts? Thanks, Sean.

Michael, so one way you, or anyone else interested in this type of work could get started on this (and I would LOVE to see this) is by picking a subject, let's say "Five Animal Frolics" or "Sungazing" and then opening up Notepad or whatever on your local computer and using the forum search feature to find and comb through all of the posts on the forum that discuss this topic, copying and pasting useful quotes, links to the posts, links to other websites, etc. that you find into a local document ... and slowly collating all this information, organizing and crystallizing it into something that distills all of the information on TTB about that subject. Then you have an awesome article and, until I find the time to investigate and implement the technology to do this otherwise, you can just post this article in the Contributed Articles section. This is the temp solution a bunch of us Concierges came up with in our little dark, sinister little secretive chats about these things... see Yoda's post here. Then if enough users are interested in combing through and distilling the information on TTB into coherent articles about those subjects we can easily transfer these articles into a new format with, for example, it's own section, a table of contents, etc. But if the interest is not there beforehand, I'd rather not have, ie: a Wiki with barely anything worth visiting in it and that no one goes to and that is just sort of floating along with us like barnacles. (Heh. I'm a little dramatic, I know). What do you think? And we can warn each other beforehand that we are grabbing a subject so we aren't duplicating research. I think any of us could bang out an article a week like this and we'd be on our way to The Tao Bums Handbook in no time. Sean.