Zhuo Ming-Dao

Creation, thanks for calling me on my over generalizations. I think so many weeks of 115+ degree Arizona weather has had an effect on my brain. And thanks for teaching me a new word! I was not aware of neshama.

In Christianity, this is The Word, or the logos λόγος, from the first line of the Gospel of John. Logos literally means word, reason, or thought. "In the beginning was the Word/logos, and the word/logos was with God, and the Word/logos was God." And again, "And the Word/logos became flesh." I emphasized the use of the original Greek word logos, because it seems to carry more of the idea of the impulse before speech. In Zen this is called nen, and it is the underlining pressure that gives birth to the discursive thinking mind (and therefore, it also gives birth to the separation from unity into duality, multiplicity and form). Now compare this to the Tao Te Ching, where one gives birth to the two (yin and yang), which births the three (heaven, earth and man/flesh), which give birth to the ten thousand things/everything. And all of this is triggered by ming or the named (logos), which the TTC tells use in chapter 1 gave birth to the 10,000 things. Remember also that the very word Tao can also mean "to speak."

Actually, if you know any Latin, the work "spirit" come directly from the Latin word spiritus, which means "breath," or spirare, which means "to breath." This is just like chi, ki, or prana, which all literally mean breath, but also mean energy or life force. Here is what Etymology.com has to say: Simply calling it the "Holy Spirit" carries a huge amount of theological meaning. It is clear that the reason it was so called was because God breathed into Adam and the breath was what gave him life. When you die it is the breath, or the animating principle/energy, that leaves your body. Just from the words "holy spirit," it cannot reasonably be imagined any other way than as a particular type of divine "chi" that animates or moves through a person. I personally think that it relates best to the Taoist idea of Te (roughly Virtue), or the manifest principle of the Tao that resides in cultivated individuals. I think that is why I prefer the translation The Classic of the Way and Its Power for the Tao Te Ching, over The Way and Virtue Classic. _____________________________ But anyway, I defiantly agree with the many people who have already said it: You are not going to be able to convince someone of something that they do not want to hear. If they are open, these are things that you can talk about, but if they are just trying to strong arm you into compliance... then trying to push back will not accomplish anything. It will only ruin friendships and harm familial relations. This is why I do not talk politics with many of my co-workers (I want to discuss and they want to convert or fight, so I walk away).

If they were Catholics, I would have a TON of material for you. The Christian mystics for the medieval period have some really great stuff. Unfortunately 7th Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses tend to have a lot of hatred for the Catholic tradition, so I do not think those texts will necessarily help you much. For your own personal practice, though, you might want to pick up a copy of the works of Meister Eckhart, a Christian mystic who really brings all of the spiritual enlightenment stuff together with Christianity in a beautiful way. And like it or not, all of the religions to come out of the Millerite movement were heavily influenced by the mystical traditions of old. Maybe it would be fruitful to bring up Ellen White, the co-founder and prophet of the early Adventist church. I have not read her collected works, but from what I know she received many visions of the kind received by the medieval Christian mystics (Jesus as the bridegroom, etc.). If I know more about the tradition I could giude you further. As for meditation, the defense that it opens you up for demons is very stupid when you think about it. It is based upon a misunderstanding of what meditation does to the mind, which comes from the phrase, "emptying the mind." Of course, though, the mind is not empty at all during meditation. What happens is the mind becomes radically stilled, like a pond with no ripples. If you believe in demons then, this is what would happen: A demon enters into a meditative, still mind and creates lots of ripples. The person instantly notices and uses their mental power/will power and pushes the influences away with ease. Now, a demon enters the mind of a normal person and creates one more wave among thousands. How could the person tell that they were being attacked? How could they tell if they were hearing their mental voice or the demon's? How could they even tell if they were controlling their actions or if the demon was? In reality (again, if you believe in demons - even if they are archetypal) the person who does meditation has created the perfect defense. If he then couples it with faith, the light of God will shine through the stilled mental space without any doubt or other thoughts to hinder it.

I am glad that I could be of help. Like I said, the many ways of enlightenment (such as astral projection) from the Lankavatara Sutra are not the most direct, quick, or even effective paths, but they can help some people along the way. Because there are so many different types of student, though, many paths are needed. Not everyone is necessarily capable of or ready to experience formlessness. That does not mean that they are lesser, or wrong, but just that they need to explore other routes in order to progress and settle their wandering minds. I cannot remember who it was that said that sometimes you need to try a hundred paths before you get fed up and naturally fall into the formless. But the endless seeking itself is what leads some to giving up and giving in. I do not think this is a bad thing at all, since if there was no at all seeking, no form, there could be no entrance into the Mysterious Gate. This sounds like the practice of becoming the watcher. While it has many names, basically it is what you describe. Osho used this method for achieving his enlightenment. Here is an essay by him on it that you might enjoy: http://realization.org/page/doc0/doc0016.htm Yep, me too. Well, that and closing the books on spirituality sometimes and actually meditating everyday That took more years to learn than it should have... but that is just the particular type of person that I am. I just found an online version of the Lankavatara Sutra: http://lirs.ru/do/lanka_eng/lanka-nondiacritical.htm Oh, the things you can find online these days!

The Secret of the Golden Flower brought together many different ideas from older Buddhist and Taoist texts. This idea of Turning the Light Around came originally from the Lankavatara Sutra. D.T. Suzuki has an excellent translation of that text, if you are interested. In it, you turn the light around to the inside of your body and gaze gently. Eventually, the best students are supposed to automatically "turn around in the very seat of their consciousness." Since not every student is capable of achieving this, the text offers hundreds of what it calls lesser ways. Many of the other methods listed involve using dream yoga/astral projection to directly engage the store house consciousness... but since this psychological stuff is very deep and tangled, it does not make for a quick enlightenment in this lifetime. It also discusses many watching the mind, the various forms of prajna for enlightenment, the jhanas, giving oneself up to other power, and others.

This simple fact is why you need to use form in order to reach formlessness. You cannot start at formlessness (or else you will get nowhere, or just turn formless into another form to get attached to). So in Zen you follow the breath and gaze gently at the dan tien. Eventually you can give up all forms and just BE, which is called shikentaza, or Just Sitting (emphasis being on just). It is impossible to start at this stage, even in an individual meditation session. As Dogen defined it: first the body will fall away, then the mind will fall away. But this is not void meditation, it is just Being. You cannot force it or reach for it, it must come on its own. I use the Zen model to reach achieve the formless, or the Mysterious Gate, but you could just as easily use qigong (or even Tai Chi or other kata at the higher levels) as long as you do it in such a way as to move without thought, gaze at the chi softly without fixating or controlling. Eventually the rhythm will carry you to the formless. Obviously, sitting and being still would be easier, though, since it can take many years to get that fluid with a physical practice. I considered discussing this on your Kunlun thread, but you did not seem to be in a mood to have a mutual, friendly conversation on it at the time.

I just added a bunch of books from the Grand Historian, Sima Qian. Unfortunately I did not find any descriptions that I really liked so I had to write my own...which took a while. I was not totally sure what to put in the Suggested Categories, though. Could you give a few example categories to get us (maybe just me) more ideas?

In the scholarly circles, Taoism is divided into Philosophical Taoism and Religious Taoism. Philosophical Taoism was practiced by many people throughout China, but primarily by Confucians, scholars, politicians, and artists. In fact, Neo-Confucianism was very heavily influenced by Philosophical Taoism, containing yin/yang, wuji, taiji, qi (as an underlining principle rather than an energy per se), and many other traditional Taoist concepts. A part of the philosophical Taoist tradition also included scholarly qigong, which was a form of just sitting and emptying the mind and being aware of sensations without attaching to them. Religious Taoism is further divided into Folk Taoism and Monastic Taoism. Folk Taoism is followed by the lay masses; it does not include any cultivation practices, and it is involved in charms, prayers to divinities, divination, and going to festivals. Monastic Taoism is practiced by the truly devoted and it was/is involved in the cultivation of the intellect through Taoist, Confucian and Buddhist philosophy, the body through diet and Taiji/Qigong, the energy through Qigong/Neigong, the sexuality through celibacy or single or dual cultivation, the heart-mind through stillness meditation, and the spirit through inner alchemy. Different monastic sects placed more or less emphasis on each of these aspects. The goals of the practice varied, but usually included enlightenment, becoming a true man/man of the way, achieving wuwei (action-less action), attaining spiritual immortality, or attaining physical longevity (or maybe true immortality). So by irreligious, I can only assume that the person meant Philosophical Taoism.

You also need to make sure that you are in a school that nourishes and nurtures you. Personally, I would never have made it if I had gone to a big state school. I went to a small private collage for undergrad with 20 students or less per class. I took classes that interested me and that furthered my spiritual practice (I was an East Asian Studies major) and I became very close friends with several of my professors (who had the time for their students, because they were not required to do research). Grad school was even better, because I was able to go to St. John's College for their Eastern Classics program. So I was in beautiful Santa Fe, in the midst of their spiritual culture, studying all of the ancient classics, first hand, and talking about them with like minded, scholarly people. No tests, no pressure; just read the classics and have Socratic seminar discussions. It was an amazing program. Now I am teaching at a Great Books high school, so I get to spend all day reading Socrates, Nietzsche, the bible, etc. (unabridged!!) with these kids and have meaningful, critical discussions... everyday! My point is just this: Do what you love and be where you love to be every step of the way. Never turn any major part of your life into a means to an end. Every part should be the end in itself and every part should bring you joy.

It is looking very good so far. The topics bar looks quite comprehensive. I am really looking forward to the American Taoist Centers section being up and running. While there are hundreds of such resources out there for Buddhists, the Taoists have nothing substantial as of yet. It would be particularly nice if you could eventually set it up with a click-able map of the U.S. Maybe it would also be fruitful to set up somewhere a listing of major college/graduate school Eastern Studies programs for those of us interested in pursuing our Taoist studies in academia. Oh, maybe we should add the Baopuzi to the list of Masters. I need to figure out how to work edit Wikipedia...

Sacrificing to the ancestors was a very important practice to Confucius, since it was a traditional practice by the ancients (who were ancient from the perspective of someone alive in 500-600 BC). Also, the practice reaffirmed the debt that a person owns to his parents and ancestors, so it had double the philosophical import for the Confucians. Even though Confucius did not necessarily believe in ghosts or afterlife, he believed in the necessity of that ritual, and so the court Confucians have always promoted it since then. It traveled to Japan and Korea through Confucianism at court and then spread out, where it mixed with indigenous folk practice.

....... Edit: On later consideration, I decided that participating in this tread at all was an unfortunate mistake.

@ Steam: Very interesting experiences. I have also experienced the sensation of being both out of body and traveling and at the same time, still being in the body. In my case, I wandered back into my bedroom from flying around outside and as I got close my body, "I" began to wake up. It was very disturbing being in two places simultaneously. The physical me then opened my eyes, turned my head and looked in the direction of the astral me. For a moment we looked at each other, and it created a horrible bouncing feedback effect before it finally ended with my astral self reentering. Before I had this experience, I assumed that my soul left my body during astral travels. After this I sided with Robert Bruce's interpretation, that the consciousness somehow generates a copy or double, which it sends out from itself. Therefore, the astral body contains a copy of the consciousness, not the original. Then when your astral body reenters the physical body, the travel memory is downloaded back into waking consciousness. He claims that this subtle memory transfer is the reason for many of the ephemeral quality of dream and astral memories (he also says a similar effect creates an inwardly projected dream body). One would think that Occum's Razor would kill this theory, but I have yet to come up with a better explanation for the experience of being consciously aware in two places at once during the astral projection phenomenon. I am sorry that you had several not-so-fun experiences. The majority of my experiences have been very positive, and I have been privileged with the opportunity to visit several heavenly realms. I have encountered some unpleasant beings as well, but they tended to stick closer to earth. If decide to pick up your practice again and engage in astral projections, you ought to focus on trying to travel to one of these realms. The best way that I know to do so is by flying so fast the everything becomes a blur. This tends to shift you to a higher realm. Also you can try teleportation, by closing your astral eyes and visualizing where you want to go (this is a little harder because it takes a lot of concentration).

Oh, and an Illuminati run government would be built upon the idea of a meritocracy. So instead of being oppressed because of your race, gender, religion, politics, country of origin, caste, or financial class, you would be oppressed based on your intelligence and education - or lack thereof. Specifically, only the intelligent would be allowed to have any governing power. This type of system worked very well in China for thousands of years through the government exam system, which was open to anyone. In pre1900s China, a peasant with no political connections could take a series of tests and rise over a few years to the upper ranks of government. Now compare that to the hundred million dollar beauty pageant we have every four years in the US. Unfortunately, when people think of the Illuminati, they tend to only think about the "power behind the throne" style of governance, because that was the technique that the Bavarian Illuminati used (since they were not in a position to found their own new government). I think that people tend to get a little uncomfortable when someone tells them that they should submit to a governing body because they are your intellectual superiors. Sometimes it is just easier to swallow the divine right of kings Edit: I really hope that I don't come off sounding like I support intellectual elitism! I was just trying to give another perspective.

I think the core of the problem stems from the fact that the European enlightenment movement of the 1600-1800s used the images of light and enlightenment (illuminatus or illuminati) to describe the act of coming to greater levels understanding regarding the human condition and humane studies. There were many facets of this illumination (artistic, political, societal, philosophical, scientific, literary). The enlightenment movement gave birth to people like Francis Bacon, John Locke, Marry Wollstonecraft, the founding fathers, and many many others, who in turn gave birth to the modern scientific method, feminism, humanism, equality, liberty, and so on. This was the Age of Enlightenment. And like it or not, the Rosicrucians, Freemasons, and Illuminati all played a significant role in offering an environment where there could be a free exchange of ideas without fear of reprisal from local tyrannical governments or an angry church. Without these organizations, it is quiet possible that the enlightenment movement (from which America was born) would never have had the opportunity to build the kind of critical mass that it did. The Illuminati may have had rather strong opinions on the questions of government, but those opinions were actually grounded directly in the idea of the philosopher kings from Plato's Republic. I am not saying that I prefer the idea of a global Republic governed by the most wise and intelligent men alive that is free of war... but some days it does sound like it would work a little smoother than our current tattered democratic republic. The place that I am really opposed to the ancient Illuminati ideals is in their stance against religion, though given their love for reason and science and the pressure that the church put on such ideas at the time, it is perfectly understandable.

The short answer is that it was during the 1970s-1980; it was during the Cold War; the Russians were doing it (and we did not want them to have an edge); Congress did not know; and when Congress found out they immediately shut it down. On the other hand, several of the double blind experiments worked consistantly and yielded good info (though it was only with one particularly gifted psychic). Also, are you really worried about a few million from ~ years ago after we just spent more than a trillion dollars on a bill that did not specify where tens of billions would even go? (I should avoid politics, ) Edit: Though it is rather interesting to note that the man who founded and was in charge of the RV project is now the directer of Los Alamos National Lab's top secret weapons division. This is the group that is so top secret that not even the Congress or Senate are debriefed on their current projects. Fun stuff... ________________________________________________________________________ Back on topic... Does anyone else here do Taoist/Tibetan dream yoga and have some experiences to share? The question of whether or not astral projection, OBEs, NDEs, or shamanic experiences are "real" is a very relative question, since we are not even sure that waking life is objective real and not illusory in some sense. As to the question on the waking shamanic experience, I would say that it makes for a good experience to relate as long as you perceived it with your senses (specifically, saw it with your eyes as you see normal objects) and not just in your head (third eye visualization or what not). These types of experiences are quiet common in the anthropological research that I have read on shaman (specifically Korean and Native Alaskan Shaman, though I suspect it is common in most forms of traditional Shamanism). I personally have seen some pretty amazing things in the awake, eyes open hypnagogic state after waking up, but not in the middle of my waking day.

Nice quiz, but the thread should be, "Are you a REALLY a Philosophical Taoist?" From the description of what a Taoist is for the sake of the quiz: In fact, I think they also missed the boat on the Te part of Taoism as well, but oh well. It tried.

I think we should probably limit the discussion to astral projections or dreams that were clearly of a visionary, revelatory, or unusually lucid nature. I think that people might mistake "sleep travel" for ordinary strange dreams. I think that what is being explored in this tread is the places that might be less than simply subjective. Here is one of my astral adventures. It is a classic Askashic Records experience. Unfortunatly, I have only had the opportunity to go there once. After leaving my body and flying through my bedroom wall to the outside, I looked up into the night sky. Within a few moments a tunnel formed, which sucked me in. I rocketed down this surging tunnel toward a bright, white light. When I entered the light there was a flash and I found myself standing in an octagonal room. On each wall was a door with a bronze plaque above it. Although it was hard to focus on the words (the letters danced a little before my eyes), they read things like "Devas," "Faye," and so on. I went in the door that read "library." Inside there was a Victorian style library with countless level reaching up to dizzying heights. The center of the room was open allowing you to look up. There were brass, circular staircases and walkways intersecting the library complex. On each level were thousands of bookshelves containing old looking, leather-bound tomes. There were many people of all races and elasticities, with clothing from many time periods, wandering about and reading at the large wooden tables. I approached a librarian, an unnaturally pleasant woman in a uniform (who was also strangely pale with washed out blue eyes), and talked to her about the place. She told me that all knowledge could be found recorded here. I took her on her word and she lead me to a higher level of the library. Here I spoke to several other people before looking through a book. The words swam before my eyes and before I could focus on what it was saying I lost focus and control over the projection and was sucked violently back to my body. As always, I then sat up and recorder the experience in my astral travel journal. I do not know if these trips are actually helping my spiritual progress, or just further enmeshing me in illusion. The spiritual masters that I have met, though, have given me some wonderful energy attunments and some useful advice, so for now I am continuing to explore.

Yes, I was referring to alaya vijnana (storehouse consciousness) when I mentioned the collective unconscious. And it is of course true that all of the aforementioned techniques and philosophies were geographically available to Chan and Zen practitioners. Chan had very close ties to Daoism, and Japanese Zen arose side by side with Shingon vajrayana/tantra, Tendai, Pure Land, etc. There were also many onmyoji (yin yang sorcerers), mountain hermits, and exercists/energy healers in medieval Japan. It was a conscious choice for the Zen school to disavow these techniques as superfluous. They claim visions and appearances of deities to be mikyo (illusion) and they focus on purifying the mind only through chant, zazen, koans, and samu (physical work/cleaning). So my question was whether this decision was a wise or effective one.

Could you elaborate? I am curious as to what deficiencies you see in the Chan/Zen approach, and how those problems might be mitigated or avoided. Or perhaps: what do you think is a better way to go directly to the primal essence? In addition to zazen, I also do additional stretching, qigong, and some depth meditation. This combination has worked very well for me, and I can see how only doing zazen all the time would not exactly be very gentle on your psyche (zen sickness being the biggest problem). In my opinion, the zen tradition probably has the most powerful methods for developing the surface mind and transitioning the mind into the alpha state. It does not, however, have any tools for accessing the deeper levels of consciousness (theta or delta states). Instead, the alpha "heightened awareness" state seems to subsume the entire mind during the kensho experience and presumably it does so permanently after satori. These are only my current observations and theories from the glimpses of these states that I have had so far. The question that arises for me is, do we need to address and work with unconscious/collective unconscious/archetypes (as in the Vajrayana tradition), or the jing, qi, and physical body as in the Daoist tradition? - This is a genuine question I have, not a rhetorical one -

The written Chinese language is a very interesting thing. As I am sure that you know, it is not constructed from phenoms (like our letters). Instead it uses ideographic characters that primarily represent ideas. This means that the spoken language is able to change over time (as languages always do) without the writing having to change significantly. To give you a feel for this in modern times, consider how Cantonese, Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Mang, and several other languages all use the same set of characters and can all read each others writing, even though they would probably be unable to understand each others speech. It would be as if someone who just spoke Italian could read a French or Spanish book without even being able to tell necessarily that it was written by someone who spoke another language. When we say "the Chinese language," we are really saying, "the whole Sino linguistic family." The reason that we group them together like this, interestingly, is because of the common ground they share with their written language. Similarly, this distinctive feature of the Chinese written language also allows us to go back in time and still be able to read the writings fairly easily. This is greatly aided by the fact that the Chinese, through the influence of the Confucians, all had to read the ancient texts as part of their education and they all had to mimic Classical Chinese grammar and word constructions for all of their writings. This was the sign of an educated man. Therefore, after the ancient period, no one in China wrote like the spoke. This traditional convention was in place right up until just before the cultural revolution, when some people first began playing with alternatives before outlawing the old ways altogether (and "simplifying" the characters). The characters themselves went through several slight changes throughout the millennia, which were primarily stylistic. The Chinese people, again due to the traditionalist Confucian bureaucrats, usually noted the changes and preserved the older texts as is. The biggest single shift occurred during the Qin Dynasty, when the First Emperor executed tens of thousands of Confucians, outlawed and burned all books not having to do with farming or medicine, and standardized the characters over all the different linguistic groups of China. Luckily, this dynasty (which ended the Warring States period) only lasted about 30 years. By the time the Han dynasty was able to form in its place, many (but not most) of the ancient texts were reproduced from memory (they were all written in poetic form, which aided memorization). We have also since uncovered pre-Qin dynasty texts in tombs to compare against (see the Muwangdi scrolls among others). Some ancient characters have fallen out of use, some have come to mean different things, and some have stood completely unchanged. The study of this is actually a huge academic field. I have several Classical Chinese dictionaries on my bookshelf, in fact. But it has not changed so much that I could not pick up a modern dictionary and translate most of the Tao Te Ching or the Annals of Confucius (as long as I knew the very basic grammar rules). The biggest problem that you will encounter is typically in specialized terminology. For instance, "What does virtue mean in the Tao Te Ching, because it seems to be different from the way Confucius uses the word." But this is more of an interpretation question than a translation one. Chuang Tzu is quiet a bit harder than most of the other ancient texts, because he would make up his own words and deliberately try to use language to make you realize that you cannot trust language. The spoken Chinese language has gone through a large number of changes over the centuries, and it is very difficult to academically reconstruct what it might have sounded like. There have been attempts, and most scholars agree that it would have been closer to Cantonese (with fewer tones) than Mandarin. A lot of the work to reconstruct the language, interestingly is done by first looking at the modern reading of the characters and then looking at the rhyming schemes of ancient texts (since the majority of the classic texts were written as poetry). This has yielded so-so results, but we cannot know for sure. ___________________________________________________________________________________ I hope that wasn't information overload.

I suggest reading this thread on the Taoist conception of Hell and its historical origins. http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?showto...;hl=taoist+hell Also, the land of the immortals, Peng Lai, and several other heavenly realms can be found in references from the most ancient Taoist texts available. See the Lieh Tzu, sections of Chuang Tzu, the Huinan Masters, and the Songs of Chu. All of these texts are from the Warring States period and are not later "additions" by some outside group of religious Taoists. Granted, in the early texts, they do not make a strong distinction between the dream state and the afterlife/other world, but then Chuang Tzu famously put into question the relationship between waking life and dreaming (in the butterfly dream), so it is still a valid and important line of spiritual inquiry. For the ancient pre-Taoists (Taoism did not exist until the Han dynasty) the question of dogmatic belief did not play in at all. It was simply important to question and explore these things for oneself through meditation, dreams, astral projection, visions, and other mystical means. To explore and to wear down any artificial boundaries that we put upon ourselves through self-limiting and ultimately relativistic beliefs.

http://www.dharmanet.org/listings/ Follow the links to where you live, and look at the centers that offer Zen. Usually you are better off if they just teach one school of Zen. If they teach a number of different styles, it probably means they are not part of any direct lineage. Once you find a couple, go visit them, meditate with them, and see if you like the atmosphere.

I think you will also have trouble "relating" experiences with many authentic zen practitioners, since the zen tradition puts all of its emphasis on the doing of zazen... not talking about what altered state you reached, dream you had, or the energy sensation that you felt. The zen tradition says, "yes, those things exist and are surprising and sometimes interesting, but they are not special. And if you focus on them, set them up as goals, or place other importance on them, they will just hold you back." You tell your teacher/roshi about the experience, he tells you that it is just illusion, you go on with your practice and stay in the moment. And you will quickly find that anyone in zen tradition who has gone through many years of meditation under their roshi, and done many sesshin or sanzen retreats, will not be interested in talking to you about their experiences or in hearing about your experiences, because that just builds ego and pride in both practitioners. In zen, you just sit. Visions, qi surges, heightened states, lights in your head, and thoughts from the monkey mind: you watch it all and not become wrapped up or caught by any of it. Eventually all of it will stop and your mind will become perfectly still, stable and quiet. That is when the real magic happens.