Easy

Thanks. That's all I wanted to know.

I cannot help but notice here a distinct sense of certainty in that statement. It is written with the same conviction that one could hear from a Christian (holding four aces) saying 2 + 2 = 4. In order for me, a newbi, to get a perspective on your 10 (+) posts per day, I wanted to know how you come by the confidence to tell me, unequivocally, that these realms exist. (And I am not saying that they don't. You have no argument from me, as yet.) 1) Was this a direct observation? Do you have photographs? Or perhaps you have a physical address to which I can travel and take photos of my own. 2) Do you have this information on authority? Whose authority? 3) Do you have this one on faith; the faith in whom? 4) Are you making this up out of whole cloth or patchwork? 5) Are you feeling the need to write some kind of coy evasion? Will you write it? 6) Are all those teeth in your icon really yours? Sincerely, Easy

What M and Y said!

A life that can grace my perception of it like a work of art.

Equally Nice! Remember in Wu's Journey to the West (written by a Taoist and based on Chinese folk tales) the T'ang Emperor had a nightmarish vision of souls suffering in hell and he could only redeem them by sending the Monk to fetch Buddhist scriptures. And Quan Yin sent the Taoist cultivated Handsome Monkey King along as his protector. A hell was the start of it all.

Hey, I agree with Carson...they are not magic. Though they could be treated as an entheogen. It is best to gather them yourself since they grow in the same habitat as the often fatal Amanita Pantherina, although the bulk of pantherina in an area will be found just a little lower in altitude...if one finds pantherina walk up hill and there is sure to be A.M. also known as Fly Agaric. Gather the Fly Agaric above the highest pantherina. because the two can cross fertilize or whatever it is that 'shrooms do. I have seen prodigious examples in the shared growing environment that have distinct characteristics of both species. Always gather your own so if you make a mistake your death will be on no one's head but yours. (Oh yes--in the Western US they will be found from 8'000 to 10'000' ft in the same environment were the aspen merge uphill into spruce.) I have heard that species in central Asia are stronger than those of North America and I have heard that those found in far northern latitudes are stronger than those found further south. There is no need to wait for them to dry. Slow roasting is better though it smells like braising questionable beef. In that respect, watch your dogs. I've seen a cocker spaniel ripped to her follicles on a couple of pieces she managed to swipe. Expect to be disappointed. They don't always work. Or one can expect, on the other hand, to be bodily mobile but mentally comatose for twelve hours, in convulsions at least once, and having near death experiences. (I was invited in to a very contemporary Valhalla, introduced to Wodin in his aspect as The Lord of Death, shown the ultimate Valkyrie--Goddess Liberty--passed my how-not-to-get-killed test, and was given a standing invitation to come and go there as I pleased.) At the time of this experience I had been suffering bad, almost debilitating sciatica pain for a couple of months...a periodic problem of some20 year duration. But at the end of that session it was gone and has never return in the 20 years since it happened, apparently this was the facilitated by my partner in this little escapade who could not remember anything about it at all either. The best book on the subject is R. Gordon Wasson's Soma

Adding the word spiritual to the discussion puts yet another worm in the can. Without a decent definition it can get pretty fuzzy and shifty also. I think that those who subscribe to the Spiritual But Not Religious Religion (which is steadily being formalized, not in churches but on the workshop circuit) have a strong affinity for the numinous, but an aversion to authority and solidity. I am sure someone has defined spiritual to everyone's satisfaction on this site, but being new I haven't had the opportunity to read it. Can anyone remember?

Carson, thanks for the kind words. I can agree with what you say regarding the categorization of that which you call "Unbound Awareness." (I've given up naming whatever it is that I have experienced that is probably analogous to your Unbound Awareness.) I really can't say I know that to be true. I try to stay away from metaphysics. But I certainly see no reason to argue with it. The fact that you wrote it tells me a little bit more about the workings of this process and so I am grateful. Easy

Sorry, we're talking two different things. You're talking metaphysics and I'm talking being there. You do reason and I just get around.

This looks like fun. When one starts talking the ego and the subconscious and true self and Mind of Tao and Buddha Self, one is talking about structures. I don't like structure, and when it really gets down to nut cutting time I would guess they don't exist. I like process in the sense of "far from equilibrium thermodynamics" and its self-organizing systems. (The classic self-organizing system is a hurricane.) And I also like to quote myself from time to time and here, by way of a preface to the rest of this rant, is a segment from an old blog post: "There is a stretch through the Grand Canyon where the river has sliced deepest into earth and running flat pushes swiftly through sheared strata that are a bazillion years old and have names like Vishnu Schist, solid, straight up, uncracked rock. There are no sand bars, no falls or rapids, or beaches, no gravel, no boulders and nothing sharp to slice the water so it sucks up air and turns white. The surface is flat and dark; from a distance it looks placid. These vertical walls narrow the channel so the passage of the river is like forcing a fifteen-amp charge through a ten-amp wire; things get ftritzy inside. The river has scoured and sanded the rock into polished deep undulations, tunnels, pockets, caves, ramps and corners that shape and push the water into too many conflicting directions; it tangles the flow for miles into a turbulent, multi-skeined knot of insane subsurface hydraulics: roils, eddies, backwashes, under tows, whirlpools and cross currents heaving against cross-current, against the walls and boats, boiling to the surface and sucking downward, forcing past each other with enough velocity to shear a wooden oar in two if it is caught between. Shallow fissures suddenly snap open between the currents, hiss across the surface like snakes and then as instantly disappear. It is a welter of over wrought, omni-dimensional ripples, reverberating at the power of 10. This simple landscape of dark flat water and black vertical rock is called The Inner Canyon. "Of the various meditation techniques that rely on energetic movement, I lean toward the more subtle fringes of Taoist Spiritual Alchemy and these have a historically documented root in shamanic practices. Looking at the phenomena from either position, alchemy or shamanism, it does not take long to realize, apprehend visually, the finely wrought, omni-directional, eternally reverberating, multi-skeined knot of turbulent energy and information that is the Whole of It engulfing Ourselves, the universal Inner Canyon, where ambiguity resonates to the 10th power. Nowhere can one take a core sample or cut a cross-section that will dependably tell one anything except how that specific location used to look, nowhere is there solid predictability, nowhere is there anything that can be made discreetly identifiable as one's own, nowhere is there knowledge or experience or their feeble, schizoid cousin, memory, that isn't constantly mutated beyond the recognition of the day before. Anything other than the liberating reconciliation to the omnipresent hegemony of ambiguity is a fantasy." That done, I'll drop in a few comments: 1) The standard well used phrase "ego consciousness," says pretty much all I need to know on the ego thing. Everything of which one is conscious in the moment (including of course the sense of "I") is ego...if it isn't conscious it isn't ego; from a strictly perceptual point of view if it isn't ego, it does not exist. The only things that one can truly perceive are the surfaces and the ego does nothing but surfs the surface. 2) I recently read where Tor Norretrander's The User Illusion, Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, made some expert's list of the top five scientific books of the 20th Century. In it he presents a fairly convincing argument that that of which one is conscious at any given moment represents about one-one/millionth of the totality of what the system senses in that moment. A lot of that of course is redundant, but the point is that the full psyche feeds the conscious ego just the minimum of what it needs to know. Which means that the conscious ego is nothing but a little tag-along that is always about one-half second behind what is engaging the rest of the being. This in turn means that one can talk all they want about "experience," but how is one going to say anything definitive about an experience when one is only conscious of one-one/millionth of the thing? Illusions that are cobbled together as coherent through such things as consensus in an internet forum. 3) The only things that remains marginally consistent throughout one's life is DNA and fingerprints and the like, everything else is made up of and by an infinite number of contingencies as one goes along and this includes the illusion of a Self. Maybe more later. Maybe not.

...its the dyslexia.

Indeed! Whatever gets you closer to what it is you want. A bow to you. A bow to the kundalini.

What he said!

Cabeza Marmol (your handle in Castellano), No way! Fear gives one power. Check the adrenals. Or go below that and check the kundalini. I want you to read this essay (I apologize because it is a little long), but I spent 18 years in these situations and I learned that fear is not to be overcome, but to be utilized to the fullest. Or for a shorter take, I wrote the following on a forum post elsewhere years ago: I am a sensualist and I like living deep in the world to which I trust my life. When a nondual experience arises out of an intense worldly situation I trust it is giving me the consciousness of the most profound trust of my essence and the essence of all that is around in the absolute harmony of time, place, action and identity. I know I have forgotten any number of these events but I can list a few: waling into a cold, storm torn sunset at what seemed like the end of the world, listening for the first time to the ballet music for Daphnis et Chloe, stalking elk, running damp streets at dawn in D.C., realizing a guiding, life-long truth when hitchhiking east out of Flagstaff at the age of 17, realizing the liberating value of human insignificance while driving down a back road in southeast Wyoming, waiting for a gunfight, doing shamanic style energy healing, racing horses, racing cars, driving a much too tiny boat in profoundly bad water when one second finds me in abject terror of a standing wave I can't see around, I can't see over because I can see nothing but all that thick brown water and dirty white foam curing back down upon me...but the next second I am assured that I am immortal and that mistakes are impossible, I can read every molecule of water in that wave, time stands still and allows me to do everything I need to do with no effort at all because the world has changed. Fear is not to be overcome but pushed and pushed into kundalini ecstasy. If one can't learn what the Berserkers knew what is the point of living?

Correct, sorry for the misspelling. Thank the Jade Emperor for 'do-overs."

That is unless one is wondering whether the guy out there is better with his knife or his 9mm or his bomber squadron than you are with yours.

Good thread. I read the article that was referenced at the top. The author has a sound point, but one that is all too typical, too easy: A scholar looks with dismay at popular versions of what they have been working on in 70, 80 hour weeks for the past 18 months all for the sake of their doctoral thesis. Has anyone here read Anthony Yu's translation of Wu Ch'eng-en's Journey to the West...all four volumes ? It has it all, philosophical Taoism and Buddhism and religious Taoism and Buddhism, martial art fantasies, exotic recipes and menus, healing hints, folk lore, sex and low-down bathroom humor...it is the greatest novel ever written. (I spent two and one half years reading it out loud to the woman I was living with at the time.) Most folks in the west don't know about religious Taoism with its kind of dress-up-and-go-to-church-on-Sunday-morning rituals in elaborate temples with priests in fantastically embroidered kimono kind of robes and every0ne praises the Jade Emperor, ruler of the Ninth Heaven and on and on. This is stuff that Western mystics just aren't really going to relate to very well at all. But when Wu Ch'eng-en was writing his novel in the 15th Century (CE) this was what was hot across the board. Wu Ch'eng-en, a Taoist, worked all of these elements into a seamless whole 100 chapters. (Somewhere in the first volume is a fantastic translation and contextualization of The Heart Sutra.) But there is nothing in there that looks much like the Taoism of the typical 21st Century American Taoist. But who would want it to, and why does it matter if it doesn't? That was then, this is Tao. I see no reason why I should pay any attention to anyone's tradition or religion. Tradition says I should bow to someone dead. I'm not going to do it. Like the Christian Bible says, "Let the dead bury their dead." I read this sentence: "So what you and the Philosophical Taoists have done is to separate what you consider to be the best bits of the holistic tradition of Taoism, sanitize it so that it more suits your sensibilities, and yet still call it 'Taoism.'" And I think two things: 1) This is the kind of intra-faith inclusivism (my Taoism is better than your Taoism) that matches the inter-faith inclusivism of that troll Buddhist gentleman who constantly writes that only through Buddha and codependent arising will one find salvation...wait, I'm getting things mixed up...it was Jesus that talked salvation and Buddha talked enlightenment...I think that was how it worked out, but then again all cats are gray in the dark. 2) Why does a dog lick its ball? Because it can. Why would one want to call their sanitized bits of cherry picked Chinese philosophy "Taoism?" Because they can! There is this thing called The Free World. I certainly wouldn't want to call myself a Taoist any more than I would want to call myself by the name of anything that had to do with metaphysics. But, nonetheless, whenever I'm in a tight situation I find myself asking, "What would Zhongli Quan do?"

I'm a little behind you...34 years...sometimes when the times were right, or maybe the times were wrong, three or four hours a day. This way, that way...it does not matter much. One finds the groove that is best for them. Gurus suck. Teachers suck. The point is to trust the instincts that support that righteous ground of one's own being. Always go below those other grounds because Gautama is dead and so is Lao Tsu and there is no reason to pay them obeisance. Dead men don't count and neither does their Dharma.

Thanks again. Just wondering for now but maybe a comment of my own later if time permits. Easy

Marblehead, This is interesting. With all due respect, I would like to know if the commentary on Chapter 6 is: 1) your own, 2) a more or less objective, academic style interpretation, or, 3) a more subjective, perhaps inspired, interpretation. Thanks.

This is so goddamned funny-- I just signed up yesterday morning and tonight I get a email from some guy named...wait...I have to go back to my email page...Sean, his name is Sean. I suppose y'all know him, and he wants me to tell him my perspective on why Taoism is Different and he encourages me to click on a link that will put me in a favorable position to do so... Like I wrote...so goddamned funny... And I have to imagine that Sean wants me to get really earnest and deep--as if I didn't know this was just standard boilerplate hoop-la that was programed as a send-out to all newbies. So, here goes: Taoism is different because it is not spelled C*H*R*I*S*T*A*N*I*T*Y or S*C*I*E*N*T*O*L*O*G*Y. Sean, you'd better watch where your programed emails are headed. What would Zhong Li Quan do?

S-Blue Far from serene it sounds. You asked: How can you tell when your experiences are real v. being another manifestation of Ego trying to trap and stall you into feeling special? How does one guard against this? My humble guess is that all experiences are real. They just have to be put into the perspective that your experiences are really a dime a dozen and that a third of everyone you ever knew and their cousin's dog has been where you just were, maybe a couple of times, maybe four or five. I once spent six weeks in ecstasy over the realization of the bedrock insignificance of my being and the screaming insanity of the vanity I was anything more than nothing. For an egoist that's a trip. But that was nothing. Enlightenment? What would it matter? I've been putting my pants on one leg at a time every since. I still need to drink water and I still need a warm place to sleep. I am not omniscient or anywhere close and I have never encountered anyone who was. What do you seek? What does it matter? I might suggest that instead of maligning your ego you give it some thanks for keeping you from being autistic and knowing how to balance your check book and it is that which really knows that you are just one of an infinite many and none of us counts for nada.