Apech

Hi, When I was in the 'mod squad' I used to use the blue/red escalation thing - in fact I might have invented it (but I'm not sure about that). I thought it worked quite well considering - especially when the mod team were charged with the very task of allowing the conversation to continue while keeping the lid on some kinds of attacks and so on - not to sanitise the board but to make sure the conversation did continue. There was never any objection or limit to people disagreeing about ideas or systems. It was supposed to be what Trunk called a level playing field - without abuse, dog piling or personal attacks. This was so people didn't have to wade through the pools of explosive diarrhoea which you seem to enjoy. Where the moderation went a bit wrong was the real and perceived preference/protection of Trump politically and Jeff/Light Group in terms of practice. Then Sean stepped in with a completely different philosophy (from his previous one) and we are where we are. Which is who knows where to be honest. I always thought that the mod team should treat everyone exactly the same and by objective rules which people sign up to when they join. Apart from that they stop spam and get rid of trolls and sock puppets.

Voidness was what I was getting at.

The cold rush could be accompanied by insight. Just wondering what happens to you.

Existential angst or anxiety is based on unformulated conflicts in energy - a tightness or narrowness i.e. constriction or knots in energy. We all have this - but in many people it's covered up until a low energy state or bad experience lifts the cover and they emerge. This cover is our civilised selves, or our ordinary social selves where we present a persona to the world based on self concepts (about being a certain type of person) - while in our unexamined mind there may be many 'dark' things which we have not assimilated. The 'voice' of this collective of unassimilated experience runs a commentary on our experience as you suggest - a narrative. This creates a general feeling of unease. I think your observations are very good and correct. Again very correct in my opinion. The energy conflicts self-resolve on examination. This is the true meaning of the term 'nirodha' in yoga - as in 'yogas citta vritti nirodha' (from memory - hope I got that right ). Mindfulness has allowed you to de-stress those energy knots or to not identify with them and they self release. This produces a flushing energy in the body usually experienced as a shiver or cold stream - this as you say can be quite extreme accompanied by twitching or even violent body movements sometimes. Kriyas (?) and shaking are a common thing with meditators. Do you get feelings/visions around space or emptiness - maybe a kind of dark clarity?

I can't PM or send Paypal at the moment cos I'm in full lotus and my hands won't reach the keyboard. Sorry.

Where we you in 2007 when all this kicked off. Eh?

Nope.

This thread is turning out well.

Most of the books which I have which are introductions are about either Tibetan Buddhism or Mahayana - and are also mostly academic - I don't know either of those books you quote - but the first one has good reviews on Amazon.

Do you know what school of Buddhism you are interested in? and do you want academic or popular?

OK. Then I wonder if anyone would like to purchase a quantity of copper wire? Reasonable rates apply.

Instead you could give us a breakdown of the Mo Pai system.

War (or military action) is the continuation of policy by other means. The problem with violence is that it has violent (and thus chaotic) results. So the use of violence has this level of unpredictability. But measured or controlled violence can sometimes be used to bring about multiple aims - and if you ride the chaotic cloud which results you can succeed. The trick is make more than one side the winner in a pluralist battlefield. Then you have the chance of sowing the thing up quickly before it gets out of hand. But it's always a percentage chance.

It's all a dance (the Iran thing) - see who benefits. (not just Trump)

ugh!

Its quite usual for polytheistic systems to have some account of creation which goes infinite/void - oneness - two - three - many without collapsing this into monotheism - I think that the key is whether or not one's One God is identified with the infinite or not. Even in Christianity you can have the Godhead beyond the One God - and then as you mention the 'God in three persons' of the trinity - which is itself a way of dealing with the divinity of the person of Jesus (I and my father are one). If we use the popular term 'energy' for the root/nature of everything and by analogy with physics say that energy is a measure of both motion and potential for motion (kinetic and potential energy) within a system - then if that system is infinite - then it is both infinite motion and infinite potential for motion - without becoming two infinites. Polytheism solves this by seeing reality as an infinite number of overlapping domains - circles whose centres are everywhere and circumference nowhere (quote Bruno et al) - which can individually or collectively stand for the whole continuum - which has the potential without a great deal of painstaking clarity of seeming confusing and even arbitrary, Monotheism is touted as superior to polytheism - mostly I feel because it is simpler. But then it is in the end a concealed duality - because if god is good then how do you explain the existence of evil? Without demoting your god to one of a pair of opposing forces of light versus dark and so on. Whereas a polytheism allows for say a positive dark and a positive light in relation to each other and ultimately non-different within an infinite field of 'power' (?) And the dark is then something like the unknowable, the mother of all things etc. Bedhety? with curly things like the Egyptian red Crown?

I think there's a distinction between a polytheism which takes one god to be the top or ultimate (which changes over place and time) and monotheism which doesn't tolerate the existence of any god but the 'One' - even if there may be saints and angels and wot not.

How many mo pai adepts does it take to change a light bulb?

If we send six PMs a day then he will be permanently in full lotus. OK that's 120 dollars but we could ask for a discount.

Was this truly monotheistic? Or was it more henotheistic?

Steiner and his ilk are products of the tendency to project Judeo-Christian beliefs onto ... well everything they studied. The left hand side of that list is unrecognisably Egyptian apart from some (not all) of the names. For instance one main theme from Horus myths is that in his conflict with Set he tore off his testicles and threw them into the marshes - I find that hard to fit into the life of Christ (!). But no blame to Steiner et al, they were trying, and not for the first time to marry Christianity or at least Bible studies to ancient history with the aim of giving authority to Christ as the fulfilment of prophecy. But what they may have been pointing to, with which I have some sympathy, was a lineage stretching way back of mystical kingship and the like. What they failed to grasp was that apart from a 20 - 30 year period Egypt (and everyone else) was not monotheistic. In fact I think that this tendency was just a continuation of the fact that early Christianity actually had no philosophy or metaphysics and just lifted most of it from Neo-Platonism (many of whom were pantheist) which was actually in a tradition which does go something like Babylon-Egypt-Greece-Rome via Alexandrian mixing. You can either say its a mess - or multifaceted depending on whether you are feeling positive or negative about it. Even Thelemic ideas can be placed here - but then Crowley was a practitioner and not an armchair mystic. The focus on Akhenaten is a good example of this tendency - because they believed that they had found something akin to Judaic monotheism among a people who otherwise worshiped animal headed gods and so on - which deep down the Victorians found distasteful - they dealt with Indian tantra in a similar way dismissing it as some kind of barbaric aberration (until proved wrong). Egyptian religion was very broad, encompassing everything from state religion to what we would call shamanism, and the best way to study it is to let it speak to you through their art and texts without any grand theory or wish fulfillment.

Not really it is based on my own research.

The essence of Ancient Egyptian mysticism lies in the double soul. The two souls emanate from the absolute, which is itself ineffable and 'unknowable' but is sometimes understood as a kind of core or centre around which the universe rotates. But care has to be taken not to conceptualise the absolute and so this core should be thought of as being everywhere simultaneously and not as a distinct place. Being, in the sense of 'a being' like you and me, or in the sense of 'being as such' arises from the interaction of the two souls. One soul can be said to be awareness and energy – or more precisely energy that is aware. Energy, or motion or vibration which has sentience. This soul is solar. In fact the sun itself is called the Great Eastern Soul. The other soul is substance/power which like water has no form itself but is capable of taking up all possible forms of existence. As 'substance' it lies behind all existence, it is what remains if all the veils of form are stripped away or dissolved. When these two souls meet, they embrace, and their interaction is life. While the energy of the first soul is also awareness or light, when it embraces the second soul it becomes reflexively self-aware, it revives or wakes up whatever is latent in the substance soul and allows it to express or come alive. Also as a result of this embrace two other 'fledgling' souls come into being. These two new souls are the result of awareness looking in two directions. One looks forward to the sun-soul as its origin and is said to face the East - towards the sunrise. The other soul looks back to the substance being – which is symbolically the West the direction of embodiment and death. The result of these two souls it to stabilize the embrace of the sun and water souls. This has the effect of placing the moment of embrace in the flow of the two types of time understood by the Egyptians. One flow is continual re-presentation of eternity in the 'now' moment of the embrace and the other is the present moment seen in the context of a 'snake' of history stretching back to the 'first time' or beginning. From this comes the idea of a journey – a movement from place to place over time. The type of this journey is the sun's movement from East to West during the day and from West to east at night. The fledgling souls who look East and West respectively not only can represent eyes but also boats (as the principal method of travel). One takes you to the East, to the origin – the beginning, and the other to the West, to death, the end. This journey is the one we must all undertake, either in life or after death. It traverses both the earth and sky and involves terrains of all kinds, obstacles, dangers as well as places of rest and ease. While this journey occurs naturally of itself, for a being, such as ourselves, there are risks of getting bogged down, lost, obstructed, attacked by negative entities and so on. And even the so called second death where we as a being simply cease to be. This is why the Egyptians wrote guide books, maps, protective spells and so on to help guide and protect us on the way.

The book is a doctrinal thesis and therefore rigorous in its research.