peter falk

yeah, people have all kinds o weird experiences during that class. seeing stuf, knowing stuff, mind reading, invisibility, etc. you can attribute it to alpha if you want. i prefer to attribute alpha to it.

it's a common food additive. indirect additive if i remember my FDA days correctly. i think it stands for dimethyl sulfoxide. it's a byproduct of pulp production in the paper industry. they used to trash it until new uses were found for it. do a google search and you'll find lots of info.

tom brown's scout class........

it's very shamanistic. most of the healing you learn is inthe philosophy classes, though he does teach a helaing class which is very deep and mysterious. before you take any of those though, you have to take the standard class. it's very expensive, but i think worth it. as jim hutton shouts to to david jansen over the din of a Huey in "the green berets:" "Mr. Beckwith, this trip is gonna make LSD seem like aspirin!" i haven't been there since 2001 or 2002, and the organization has changed some since i've been around. you can talk to redfox or lozen for more info on what the classes and camp ar elike now. tom is always evolving his classes and changing stuff around depending on the crowd. but you always seem to get what you need. he's a coyote teacher though, so you have to be prepared to really probe and question to get the juicy stuff. we can talk more about it off list or off topic if yer really serious about going.

over the last weekend i had the dubious pleasure of attending a wedding here in china. someone from michael winn's 2002 trip who moved here afterwards about the same time i did, married a sichuan girl who, incidently, was our interpreter during the trip. between him meeting her and me meeting mrs. columbo, you can see where much of my delight with michaels china trip and HT comes from. it certainly brought about very good turns of events in our lives. anyway, to the practice: my friends took enough care in the table artrangements to put me next to chen yuming, who is president (or something like that, doesn't exactly translate) of the huashan daoist association. he hooked us up with the monastery stay and cave meditations. he really is a gifted and highly evolved daoist practicioner. a monk on huashan. i noticed he wasn't eating anything at the wedding, only drinking orange juice or red wine. so i asked him if he had achieved bigu, and he said yes. then i asked him if he'd achieved immortality yet, and he said he thinks so. he's still a pretty young guy. we talked about nei gong for a while and then i probed him for some secrets to sun and moon alchemy or greater kan and li. he was very forthcoming. he told me there are several methods and would give me one of them. for the first few months, imagine there is a sun at the top of your head at the bai hui. do this practice during the day. at night imagine there is a moon there. after you've done this for a few months, see the sun in the bai hui and the moon at the perineum or hui ni. as this develops, see them both in the cauldron (he didnt specify which one but his hand movements indicated soalr plexus or dan tian) and coming together. i don't thjink it matters which cauldron the practice calls for as meditating with these celestial bodies for several months will develop enough communication for them to tell you themselves where they want to be. do this and the forces of sun and moon will combine in you and produce energy. that's it. the problem i'm facing is that the moon is already residing in my perineum, so i'm wondering whether just to proceed from that point or go back to the beginning just for the helluvit. the intent may have fired already to initiate the process to completion. i've also been working with the sun and moon a helluva lot already in the core channels to build the relationship while i was waiting to learn the next practice. so maybe sun and moon are happy with that and jump starting the process. didn't know whether to post this in articles, personal practice, or taoist discussion, so i reckioned its more accessible and discussable here. just thought i'd share.

just do what feels right. the shen will tell you. listening to them though is another issue.....

can't comment on that course as i've never taken it. i learned healing at tracker school and figured i got enough to work with there. however, i have said elsewhere that my overall experience at tao mountain has been very good. the HT stuff has worked well for me and meshes nicely with the other stuff i've learned. no matter what you study in this day and age, somebody's going to profit from it. but so are you if the techings are right for you. the big question is, how do you feel about it? does it feel right?

but you're so good-looking!

i remember when my uncle gene died. he was a very special guy with a great sense of humor. cussed a lot too. i wore orange pants and billy bob teeth to his wake and walked up to my aunt and said, "recklon i been in tennessee too long." she laughed so hard no one knew what was happening. "that's exacly how your uncle would want you to be here today!" she said. "but you better take those teeth out before you upset the people who don't get it." so i did. mission accomplished. that was an italian funeral. lots of drunk people telling dirty jokes and funny stories. getting hit on by cousins (not much different than tennessee). we had a great time. all the funerals on that side of the family are like that.

y'all wanna invest n real estate, try shenzhen, shanghai or beijing. sheeyit!

endurance:

thank you for your tolerance and understanding toward our policies here at taobums as we strive to make this a forum that is as agreeable and accessible to a broader range of participants with wisdom to share. it is much appreciated. tolerance and understanding is always a two-way street. that's what makes them so damn difficult. and yet so rewarding. gee, this is topical to a discussion of marriage.

why would ronald reagan be onthe cover of the phone book? what's the connection? (haha! connection. get it?) i remember when the republicans wanted to change the name of washington national airport to ronald reagan national airport. all the locals were against it. washington national airpoort was the perfect name. it's in washington and near george washington's home. but they had to make their point and prove that they were in control of congress and had the power. name and airport after the guy who fired all the air traffic controllers. go figure!

i'm sorry you feel that way. i love having you on the forum. i think all the moderstors do, but they can speak for themselves. btw, i agree with your assessment on marriage with one modification. i would say two SOULS become one not two egos. the ego is what imprisons the soul and stifles its true expression. and the alchemical marriage requires give and take. much like on this forum we need to give and take. some participants don't like pornographic or otherwise disturbing material and those of us who enjoy it need to compromise with them in order to allow their productive and useful presence here.

here's an article i came across in the washington post, which i can inexplicably access from china. the article reviews the most compelling questions unanswered by science. jusdging by the one on longevity, i would say they haven't investigated taoists cultivation or the legendary adepts who live very long. a guy at wudang assured me zhang fengseng is still alive and kicking. questions more pertinent to daoists (well what isn't pertinent?) excerpted below.

any david attenborough would be awesome, even his "private life of plants" has things you could apply to the martial arts. that guy's a genius. he's rally been led by his discoveries into places few venture. national geographic is another great source. anything about african wildlife. theyw ere pioneers in wildlife cinematography. some realy good stuff on noprth amercan wildlife too.

magnificent (and hysreical) statement of marriage of heaven and earth!

sometimes i used to stare at the ground, use a mantram, or sing to myslef. oftgen visualized things that helped me run--animal forms, exciting scenarios, etc. quiet mind, focus on breath. not idle talk--i've run two marathons.

i've been to tao mountain and i think your impression of it is not correct. in fact, i was indigent at the time and michael set up a work-study for me so i could afford it. i also made friends with the resort owner, corky jeronimo, a real down-to-earth guy, and quite funny. i think the environment is set up more for the students than for michael. retreats for tao mountain are cheaper than tracker school, and the lodgings and food are far better, though by no means luxurious. i stayed in two different rooms and neither one had a beday. also, one guy camped out that week. don't know how he set it up ahead of time. in ancient china inthe day of hermits, masters typically passed on what they knew to one or two studnets, that's it. the reason so many of us are able to learn qigong nowadays in the West is because people charge money for it. the world is a different lace nowadays and we live in a different culture. michael actually charges less than a lot of chinese people here in china. two stories about china, both about guys who are taoist priests and qigong adepts. the first guy wanted to charge me 200 US DOLLARS PER HOUR to teach me chinese medicine. the second guy lied about the room prices at a monastery on qingcheng shan and charged us DOULBE THE PRICE in order to pocket the difference himself. so there ya go. being spiritual and being rich are not mutually exclusive, but being spiritual and being crooked or greedy are. wealth does not come from greed, even though it often does. it could just come from hard work and sound financial planning. b ut that's a another story. i've known lots of rich spiritual people.

yoda--at least you won't get crabs! soy--http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/Soy%20Allergens.html http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/soydangers.html the same website also has an interesting article about the myths of vegetarianism and the dangers of canola oil. also discusses the helath benefits of tropical oils like coconut.

the moderators have talked about this before too. origianlly it was nixed because the suggestions led to unreasonable complications of the list. certainly adding one more forum or subforum wouldn't be too much of a problem--it's just a matter of sean's time. perhaps an index of interesting topics would be better where people could request an interesting topic be added to the index so it could be easier to find and the moderators could share responsibility and time for entering the topics as they are requested. it could be cross referenced as well so that topics dealing with, say, both running and weightlifting, or integrating sungazing and nutrition into a taining program, could be found in more than one place of the index. indexing could be a simple matter of pasting a link with a title. the real time-consumer would be sean's set up of such a service. and that's up to him.

buddhists? or just hippy posers?

almost every occasion. i woke up one morning and realized it wasn't! but that's antoher story....

so why not work on the vanity instead? the benefits are far more numerous than just stopping baldness......the liberation from vanity! think of it, man!!!!

BINGO!!! "when the process is finished, abandon the process." --tom brown, jr. (a guy from new jersey)