Zhuo Ming-Dao

Carolyn Miss' book, Anatomy of the Spirit, gives a very good look at the different energy centers of different cultures and how they relate. For more specifically about the Kabbala and the Sephirot energy centers, you need to pick up some books of Jewish mysticism. Just about every books store has a whole section of books on the topic. For the Nagual system, you have to read the Dan Juan books of Carlos Castinada. He does not start talking about the assemblage point until the later books, though.

After my mother received her liver transplant, her personalty changed drastically. She became more happy and less angry, more academic and motivated, her taste in food changed completely, and she dropped a bunch of her old hobbies and became more physically active. Several of the foods that she started craving afterward, she had not even previously liked, such as fried chicken and chocolate.

What everyone was saying regarding pain is correct. If you are experiencing pain you need to switch off with a different pose for a while. Either do seiza or Burmese. If it is not actual pain, but just that your leg is sometime falling asleep, then that is a different story. You should just ignore it and keep going. Even an hour of having your foot or leg asleep is not going to damage anything, so I would not worry about a 20 minutes or a 1/2 hour. And with time your legs will adjust and they will fall asleep less and less. In this case, you treat it like you would an itch, and just ignore it and keep your attention elsewhere. Building this type of focus willpower will help you to deepen your concentration and stay in meditation for longer and longer periods of time. Also, some types of pain are a very good thing to work through in seated meditation, like muscle pain from holding a position for an extended period of time. As long as your body is properly aligned, this is like the "pain" you get from working out and it is totally healthy. It strengthens your willpower and resolve while conditioning your body for longer bouts of meditation. Just make sure that you know yourself and can tell the difference between pain that is damaging your body and pain that it strengthening it. It is not that hard to build up to the full lotus, but it does take a lot of time and patience. I personally think that people should not even bother trying to do it until after they have practiced with the butterfly stretch to the point where they can comfortably put both knees flush to the ground and pull in the heels to the crotch with a straight back. This stretch will open up the hips without putting any stress on the knees or ankles. Once you can do this, the full lotus will be completely safe and comfortable and it will be easy to go all the way into it without putting stress on the ankles or knees.

Ha! At first I thought you were being sarcastic. This is the nature of all monasticism, be it Buddhist or Taoist or Christian or otherwise. This lifestyle is set up so that the monks and nuns have every minute of everyday throughout the year planed out without any real down time. The Rinzai Zen tradition is designed, in fact, to limit everything, even your amount of sleep (to ~3-4 hours), while the practice itself pushes you into a corner. By having all of your options stripped away and by forcing your mind to stay in single pointed concentration while working over impossible problems (koans), eventually you bring your mind to the breaking point, where you either fall into zen sickness or break free into enlightenment. These are the only options open to you. It is a harsh system, but keep in mind that the model was finally developed and perfected by the samurai caste, and they were not exactly the touchy feely, do-what-feels-good type. Monasticism brings order to your life so that you can devote yourself to your practice. It removes the question of self-discipline and the ever changing whims of desire (in wanting new knowledge, new techniques, etc., without mastering the ones available to you). If anyone is curious about what this lifestyle looks like, read the book Novice to Master: An Ongoing Session in the Extent of My Own Stupidity, by Morinaga Roshi. It is a fascinating, quick read on the life of a modern, awakened Zen master and how the monastic system (and his own perseverance) pushed him to his enlightenment. What you are interested in, Findley, is the life of the mendicant priest, who wanders from place to place experiencing life and cultivating himself without any attachments to the world around him. Traditionally, though, this lifestyle only worked after you had gained the self-disciple that came with several years of monastic life. When lay people tried to live this lifestyle they tended to just become lazy, homeless vagrants because normal life does not often provide the conditioning of the will necessary to cultivate to such a high degree oneself while immersed in the world. Excellent post! Is that your poem? The play on words is wonderful.

You are right. Of the two major schools of Zen practiced in Japan, Rinzai Zen practitioners face toward the center of the room and Soto Zen practitioners face toward the wall while doing zazen. The reasoning in Rinzai is that you train your mind to be able to accept all things while in zazen so that you can carry the state of clarity into the world. The reasoning behind the Soto practice is that you want to eliminate as much outside distraction as possible in order to perfect your shikantaza. Remember that in both of these forms of zazen, the meditation is done with open eyes, so the question of visual stimulus is very important. In the end, a Rinzai practitioner (like myself) would not dislike it, it is just a question of skillful means. And as for the glasses, I will tell you from personal experience that it is often better to just leave them on. The moment that the bell rings to end the zazen you might have to read from a sutra, get up and do meditative walking, prostration, and so on. The time it takes to take the glasses on and off all the time is not really worth it when you trying to keep up with the fast transitions of monastic life, where idleness is not a virtue.

I can read the Chinese titles of these mudras, but what do they do? Without that the "small golden heavenly right" is no different from the "spirit tiger left."

I have some experience with them, and it was a pretty terrible experience (if you value your money, that is). They have some very interesting and effective techniques, but their organization is set up to make as much money off of you as possible. It is very similar to Scientology in the way that they set up ever escalating spiritual problems for you to correct with escalating price charts. And when I quit they called me dozens of times and would not take no for an answer...

Mandarin tools has all kinds of excellent functions! Its character translator saved me countless hours of dictionary time during grad school. Remember though, in China it is a very serious honor to ask someone to give you a Chinese name and it makes for a much more meaningful story to say that your master gave you your Chinese name than a computer

If the Dao De Jing was helpful to you, then you will love Chuang Tzu (who was a like minded contemporary of Lao Tzu). He writes in prose instead of poetry, but his philosophy is quiet wonderful. He elegantly attacks all of our preconceived, relative notions of our life through a series of great little allegoric stories. He profoundly changed my outlook on life after I first read him in collage. Like the Dao De Jing, you learn something new and appreciate him more every time that you come back to the text. The Yi mind can be found throughout most Taoist texts, but sadly, different translators render it differently in most books that I have seen. Will, mind, focus, and so on. In Robert Bruces work, he calls it mobile body awareness, which is the most precise way to put it that I have seen. Basically, if you concentrate on the inside of your finger until you felt the skin, pulse, nerves, etc., that would be your Yi mind. It is a type of movable, one pointed focus. In Taoist thought, the chi follows the yi and the blood follows the chi (which is pronounced yi yi chi, chi yi chi in Chinese ), so you can directly influence your physiology by focusing your awareness on specific parts of it. In acupuncture, the needle replaces the Yi mind.

You should, of course, begin by reading a good translation of the Tao Te Ching (Dao De Jing) and the Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi). I am also rather partial to the Lieh Tzu. These very ancient texts (plus the Nieh Yeh, I Ching (Yijing), and the Yellow Emperor's Classic on Internal Medicine) will give you a grounding in the classical philosophical ideas that gave birth to Taoism. For more of an overview on how these original ideas came to be (over many thousands of years) what we see today, you should look at some of Dr. Livia Kohan's work. Daoism and Chinese Culture is a good start and Daoist Body Cultivation puts all of the different practices into good perspective. The best way to judge these things, in my opinion, is to try some of them out. Start by trying to experience Chi (qi). This can be done by simply rubbing your hands together and feeling the tingle. Then make the tingle move with your mind. With a little practice you will be able to cause physical sensations throughout your body simply by placing your awareness on it (this is called using the Yi mind). Once you can move a little energy, try doing a few chi kung (qigong) practices and you will find that you experience even more sensations. Taoism is not a religion to be accepted or denied on faith but a spiritual system to be proven or disproven through personal evidence and experience. As you progress you will find that many practices work for you and some will not, but you will be able to feel it directly rather than purely intellectually. For a good introduction to energy work techniques, which will help you to understand all the other Taoist practices, I recommend Robert Bruce's work. He is a wonderful gateway drug for westerners . http://www.astraldynamics.com/tutorials/ne...ways/index.html Also, as I said before, get an acupuncture and herbal treatment. Most major cities have a TCM collage where you can get a student treatment for very cheap (or free if you say that you might be interested in studying there). While books are wonderful (and I have read a lot!), I still find that experience is the best teacher. .... For fun you might want to read Opening the Dragon Gate:The Making of a Modern Taoist Wizard, translated by Thomas Cleary. This biography will give you a very good, though romanticized, view of how all of these various Taoist practices and techniques come together. Even if some parts of the book are hard to believe, it provides a glimpse into a very interesting and tempting world of spirituality. In fact, I think reading a book like this will give you your best look into the motivations and aspirations (even if sometimes misguided) of many people on this board.

If you want broad knowledge, I can suggest a variety of books. Of course, it depends on what tradition you want to understand. Each tradition approached the ultimate in different ways, but all of their very different approaches were with the goal of providing tools to aid in the understanding of the self and its relationship with the world. For instance, while the Taoists monks developed many techniques to strengthen and harmonize the body, the Hindu Yogis performed sever asceticism and mortification of the body in order to transcend the physical. Extremely different tools, with essentially the same purpose.

Fire, you are a little vague in exactly what you are criticizing, but I will try to comment on what I think you are noticing. You are right; it is both fruitless and sometimes detrimental to pursue a practice that you do not really understand and that you do not have proper guidance through. IF, though, you are under proper guidance and are being initiated into a particular system of wisdom, then there is often a lot of valuable techniques and knowledge to be learned. There are many superstitions out there, it is true, but you often cannot judge what is superstition and what is genuine without looking to the progress of your potential teachers and asking yourself if you believe in their spiritual accomplishments and trust your progress to them. For instance - For a very long time I believed that seated meditation was pointless. I could meditate very effectively while lying down in my bed and achieve great things. I thought that the formal lotus posture, stiff back, and hand seals were just extra tradition and baggage to the true meditative states. After many years of meditating my own way I followed a trusted friends advice and spent a months at a zendo learning formal Zen practice. At first I was vindicated. This posture seemed pointless, since I was not able to get deep with it and my body screamed against it (since I was out of shape). As my body got used to the posture over the months of daily practice, I found that it helped me to go much much deeper than before. The combination of static and relaxed muscles, plus the increased alignment of my spine and pressure on my dantien from my diaphragm all worked together to significantly transform my practice for the better. Some things that you encounter will just be cultural relics or specific period rituals designed to focus the mind and intention [ritual magic], but other things are there for a very significant, time tested purpose. If you discard everything to find your own way, you will also lose all of the genuine tools given to us by the ancients for our practice. Have you tried the exercise or the herb? There are many qigong exercises which will help you significantly in understanding how your energy moves through your body and in how your mind and will interact with your body. Herbs are medicines, and they help to heal or balance the physical body with the mind, energy, or spirit. They are one more component of Traditional Chinese Medicine and there use for spiritual practice is much older than the Tao Te Ching and has always been a component in Chinese spirituality. For the Chinese, you must have a healthy, balanced body and mind in order to safely pursue higher truths. If you haven't done it before, I suggest that you try going to a TCM doctor just for the sake of having them balance your energy. It is a wonderful experience and you cannot discount it until you have tried it. How can you know anything about yourself if you neglect your body. You body is a very significant part of who and what you are in this moment and its condition largly influences your mind and your emotions (through hormones, endorphins, spacial sense, pain and pleasure, etc.) I would counter your comment on the emotions by saying that we have little control of our emotions until after learning more about our relationship to our body and our inner physic world. Without some inward reflection, you cannot achieve harmony with the outside world, because the outside world will push you around and "cause" you to get angry, ecstatic, lusty, violent, suicidal, and so on. It is true that such relatie concepts have no ultimate meaning, but that does not mean that I am morally free to kill, rape, or otherwise harm another human being. Yes, you should understand and accept all of the aspects of your psyche as part of who you are, but you should not act on those base, selfish instincts. By sitting and forgetting, as Chuang Tsu calls it, your mind becomes calm, clear, and steady. The self diminishes and eventually vanishes and you are able to act in a state of wu-wei, or do-non-action. Everything that you then do will be truly natural. If you try to be amoral without first returning to non-being and being in harmony with the Tao, you will just be selfish and self-serving with thinking yourself "natural." This is excellent advice. But you cannot ask the right questions unless you have all of the information. And unfortunately, in esoteric traditions you get new information only when you have mastered the old. So you cannot judge the whole system until you have mastered the whole system. [This is one of the big reasons that the ancients kept the practices secret. Today you can learn about advanced sperm retention techniques and do them without the background, guidance, or experience needed to perform them properly. This goes doubly for Taoist alchemy, which is deliberately veiled in allegory and symbolism in order to protect the uninitiated from themselves.] A very big part of questioning everything is in first understanding the technique and understanding why it was used and pursued. The chakras, for instance, may seem superfluous or silly to someone who has never experienced the sensation of having them open and active. To those who have felt this, even if the feeling was psycho-somatic, the practice of working to nderstanding them leads to much greater discoveries of the self.

I was also rather upset at his treatment of Yogi Bhajan. His whole argument is founded primarily around a a couple of claims of sex and misogyny, but one of my very close female friends studied yoga and reflexology for over twenty years with Yogi Bhajan and his wife (before his death) in Espanola, New Mexico (which was where they lived...not California as the writer claims). She never saw anything like what the writer claimed in his expose and only had wonderful things to say about Yogi Bhajan's teachings and personal character.

Wow, that e-book was at the academic level of of those "The dollar bill was made by space aliens!" books. His scholarship was very poor as he pulled liberally from many biased and often twisted the material to make it say what he wanted it to say to make his point. When he was attacking a single person, it was mostly libel, but when he attempted to attack a whole religion... it was just kind of sad. I was particularly astounded at how he decided to attack the entire Zen Buddhist historical tradition. His proof that all Zen Buddhism is corrupt? Some young monks in the past have slipped out to party and stuff. And the kosaku stick is EEEVVVIIILLL. It kills people. A guy I read heard from a friend who was told once about someone who died. And, and, and..homosexuality in the 1800s! Oh, and someone said that they are the Buddha!1!! *cough* Buddha Nature *cough* The whole piece showed a complete lack of historical, cultural, academic, philosophical, Buddhist, etc. understanding from the writer. And by the way, the kosaku stick is intended for striking the back of a monk who has been doing a long bout of seated meditation and needs some relief. I have received kosaku in the US and in Japan, and it feels good after a few hours of sitting. If it is ever abused by some monk somewhere, somewhen, this is an aberration not an epidemic problem. There were some very valid points throughout the book, but how could one accept anything he has to say when all of it is presented in such a smarmy, sarcastic tone and when the whole thing is so clearly filled with bad scholarship and deliberate exaggeration and misquotation. His main point is very true (even if he makes the point poorly). The human condition is such that we desire our teachers to be perfect and we expect perfection from a religion's disciples. This, of course, is an unrealistic expectation. And as my own point of extrapolation: When you have a hierarchical institution (which may be the best way around to help the greatest number of people) designed around seeking spiritual enlightenment and non-duality, you are just asking for trouble. Any human institution, since it inevitably involves some form of power, is susceptible to corruption.

Most exercises out there designed to "close" your chakras will only stimulate them further. Your best bet is to do some serious grounding work. Take a cold shower, eat a heavy meal (ideally with some red meat), walk barefoot in the grass. If you want to work more on the energy level, direct your energy down your legs and through your feet into the ground. Feel the energy moving down and branching out like roots. You can also try some visualizations. One that worked for me in the past involved imagining and feeling armor form around me separating me from others around me. Also breathing into your energy field and imagining the breath fill up and charge the aura is very helpful. I would finish by imagining a mirrored bobble around me that reflects others emotions and stuff away from me. The more time and intention that you put into visualizations, the stronger that they become - so they will be more effective after some practice. Hope this helps

I know a man who is former Air Force and was a part of the project back in the 80's. They recruited him because he occasionally had prophetic dreams. They trained him to increase the frequency and duration of these dreams and recorded all of the results. They also had him working on a project to achieve lucid awareness while in the prophetic dream state. The idea was for him (and the others in the project) to try and consciously alter the outcome of the prophetic dream and see if the alteration effected the real world outcome. He never learned the results of the experiments as the funding was cut before the study was finished.

While micro-vibration devices are perfectly safe and useful for your practice, do not ever place an actual ultrasound device (like the ones used in chiropractic clinics) on your sacrum. If the waves strike your nerves anywhere on your spine, they can cause serious and permanent spinal damage. Ultrasound machines are contraindicated for virtually anything other than muscle tissue and joints. Also be careful because if you have cancer that you are not aware of yet, an ultrasound machine will break the tumor and release the cancer into your lymph system. This will spread an otherwise benign cancer throughout your body. Again, this does not apply to micro-vibration devices, just real ultrasound machines. I thought that I would put that out there for safety sake.

And as of this archeological find in 2008, we may just have some evidence that the biblical King Solomon may have existed. At the very least, the years seem to match up with the biblical references to the building of King Solomon's Mines. This of course says nothing about whether he wrote the songs attributed to him, let alone all the later apocryphal legends surrounding him. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...e-missions.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1504...-by-dating.html http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/10/28/solomon.mines/

This is more or less true, but keep in mind that when you are doing any lotus position energy meditation, you are making it so that you are no longer receiving earth energy through the bubbling spring in your feet. You are instead pulling in heaven energy from multiple places and the earth energy is coming in directly through the huiyin point (base chakra), and so the energy is more intense but also less refined. This can be unbalancing if you only do energy work in the lotus position. I would balance it with standing and other positions that allow the bottoms of your feet to touch the ground.

I don't know quite whether I am supposed to b taking this thread seriously or not, but I will operate as if I am. If anyone else is interested in freemasonry, all of the rituals revolve around the legend and legacy of King Solomon and the building of his temple (which is, of course an allegory for the building of the inner spiritual temple, allowing the body to be come the tabernacle/housing for God). It is very fascinating stuff, and I would be happy to talk more about it if anyone is curious. Despite what people say about Freemasonry's secrets, the only thing that we cannot share is the secret words and handshakes (and those can be found in two minutes with Google anyway!)

Very well put, and I could not agree more. The Western trained philosopher in me always seems to want internal consistency, but the Taoist in me far prefers to revel in a Tao that cannot be spoken of, and which is thus always in flux and encompassing all the range of possibilities.

Just to strengthen my point on how non-unified even early texts are, lets look at the Chuang Tzu. The text that we call the Chuang Tzu (Zhunagzi) was written by many different authors. The Inner Chapters were probably all written by Master Chuang, but the rest of the book was written by people from all different schools. There are chapters written by Confucians, Naturalists, Legalists (!), Huinan Masters, Syncratists (wow, the last chapter is crazy), Yin Yang School people, and so forth. Read the Graham translation... it is enlightening. This book is a compilation of many texts from many Warring States schools and some of the chapters are outright and violently opposed in philosophy to others. Early "Taoism" did not have a clear unifying thread running through it.

The idea at play here is that the body is composed of a variety of hun and po spirits (yin and yang). The po spirits represent your base, animalistic nature and will go to the yin realm when you die, while the hun will go to the yang realm of the ancestors in the heavens. All of these parts of you need chi to survive. When they run out of chi they are recycled and reincarnated. They can continue to feed off of chi by staying on earth and vampirizing chi off of humans (po spirit) or by being feed by their ancestors through sacrifices of burnt food and paper money (hun spirit). One of the goals of (at least) Tang Dynasty and later Taoism is to unite all of these spirits through alchemy, which causes spiritual immortality. The resulting whole spirit will not burn through its chi and can continue to cultivate itself in the afterlife. In the popular (folk) Taoism, practed by average people (even today) these higher ideals are not really considered and people just try and avoid Hell and feed their ancestors and hope their children will feed them after death.

Who are the Taoists that you are talking about? The school of Taoism (Taojia) was first recognized in writing by Sima Qian, the Grand Historian, during the Western Han Dynasty. When Lao Tsu, Chuang Tsu, Leih Tsu, ect. were writing (300-400 BC), there were no formal groups of people that called themselves Taoists. By the time that people started referring to themselves as Taoists (~80 BC), the school/religion encompassed shamanistic folk beliefs, Yin-yang school ideas, Penglai hygiene, health and longevity techniques, and Fengshi external alchemy. This Han dynasty amalgamation looked to Lao Tsu and Co. as their forefathers and grounded their beliefs in that naturalistic Warring States period philosophy. In 142 AD, Zhang Daoling founded Way of the Celestial Masters, which developed into its own theocratic country inside of China. They believed that if your chi was not perfectly balanced at death, you would be be transported to an earthly prison to face eternal torment. The Taoist hell became a much more popular and pervasive concept after Buddhism fully entered China and Taoist monasteries and temples began to appear throughout the country to compete. By the Six Dynasties period (265-420 AD) there was a very sophisticated afterlife cosmology and hierarchy of deities in place, involving heaven and hell, the Jade Emperor, Lao Tsu as an omnipresent god, Yama (imported from India) casting judgment over the dead, and immortality peaches ripe for the stealing. All of these elements survive to today, meaning that for the vast majority of the time that people were calling themselves Taoists, there was an idea of Hell in place. To your original point, if you are just talking about what a few thematically linked philosophers during the Warring States period believed... that is a much harder question. Though, through books like the Nei Yeh and the Songs of the South, we can tell that these early philosophers were mystics and their ideas and practices were probably influenced in some ways by shamanism and divination (I Ching philosophy). Otherwise we cannot say much more about their beliefs until they developed into a wide spread movement. Maybe the Huinan Masters (~150 BC) is the earliest you can look. They were organized, practiced mysticism, sought the immortals and immortality, and took up Lao Tsu and Co. as there guiding philosophy. The Huinan Masters spoke at length about the Islands of the Immortals and other heavenly realms that they traveled to in vision quests/dreams/astral projections, but I do not think they ever directly spoke about Hell. Keep in mind though, during that time period, Han Fei Tsu was also very heavily influenced by Lao Tsu and Co., and he went on to founded legalism. In the end, the problem that you are running into is that you are trying to cleanly equate Taoism with the people who wrote their founding texts. This might be akin to trying to equate the many beliefs of Christianity to the philosophy and outlook of the early Semitic writers of the Torah. It is not to say that there is not a connection, it is just a complicated one.

Just for fun, since you brought it up... Michael Jackson's ghost! http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story...019114,00.html#