zerostao

yesterday afternoon either and/or the I Ching and my Fu Fak Shen stepped in to prevent me from doing something very insensitive, short sighted and stupid. in other words they kept me from sabotaging myself at a critical time over a very delicate matter that is very important to me right now. my attitude is grattitude, once again, amazed.

http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2024456540_apxunitedstatesukrainemilitary.html?syndication=rsshttp://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2024456540_apxunitedstatesukrainemilitary.html?syndication=rss

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because ahigh-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand: the bat holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base- ball fan, the statistician-- nor is it valid to discriminate against “business documents andschool-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be “literalists of the imagination”--above insolence and triviality and can presentfor inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry. marianne moore

+1 for doc watson +1 for appalachian state have to switch the tempo and theme to fit these days baguazhang play lol

"Joyas Voladoras, " by Brian Doyle Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests. Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery- tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled. Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles -- anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old. The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles. Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside. So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

on a practical level. TYS changes our mind, energy, and awareness which makes our life move in a better direction. i think ya'll can understand that i am reluctant to speak specific details about something this personal but the change in me has been profound and at a deeper level. the things in my life that had harm for me or potential for harm are no longer in my life. opportunities have opened that are beyond my wildest imagination. each day becomes a truly fabulous experience, it humbles me and i am grateful. experiences will vary from person to person and this is one reason i havnt spoken too much about my experiences with TSM/XYP, some Tao Yu have had obe at the initiation, i didnt. and i have posted about my initiation experience elsewhere. it was profound and confirming, it is felt. imo from my pov FFS will guide the individual in the direction or practice it is that individual is ready for. we do not all enter into this process exactly equal or exactly the same, and if the basic practices are the same for each Tao Yu what is felt/experiened is tailored made for each individual. but for anyone to enter themself with their own open mind and ready to begin a very personal journey with a spirit guide, well, that is a very personal choice

Satya, I will give one example for now. and also i am not good with the terminology so much myself. and if i speak about something as common as Qi somehow it leads to contentious debate ,,,,and i can understand why so many choose to remain hidden. but a couple of months after my initiation June 2012, which brings up something else i would like to mention,i have just over 2 years in with this system, and i have never ever claimed any knowledge and i am at very low rank in XYP, not even level 1 and from my pov sometimes knowledge can get in the way. ancient sages have always said as much, Lao Tzu being one. ok, 2 months after my initiation i was out on a friends back deck over a gorge in my local forest, so i was taking advantage of that spot and began meditation. the meditation didnt seem all that special, this is a very subtle and abstract energy though and it can be hard to judge, so there was a cat walking from around the front of the cabin, quietly, yet i was able to see its every detail, even if i was facing the opposite direction with eyes closed and i was able to watch the cat take its step by step and i watched the cat step from the yard onto the deck, still behind me until when i did choose to open my eyes there it was right in front of me in perfect step and every detail just as i saw it with my eyes closed. In XYP we enter into this with awareness and not in any trance state. we are fully aware and this is an example of what i experience in this practice.

i like this and its on sale http://www.wle.com/products/W023HQ.html semi-flexible made by the Shen family in Long chuan village.

i am going to step out of the neidan conversation, as interesting as it may be. in my experience with XYP my practice has been Tao Yin Shu. (literally guidance art) and my understanding is that with Hou Tian or Nei Dan or whatever name, you will need a Shifu to guide you. so, the Shifu will get us started and teach us but like swimming, it is up to us to get it right. the Shifu can not swim for us. we have to learn how to float on our own and propel thru the water on our own. and if we get it right, we progress thru jing to qi to shen which will activate the shen to connect with the Divine realm. then we can move from the physical and energy (jing>qi>shen) to the spirit cultivation (Yuan Shen) If someday when meditating your body moves naturally it means you are already connected with divine energy and start your spirit cultivation. It is a sign that you are on the right path. This is basic system in Taoist spirituality. All starts from physical and energy cultivation then refine it into spirit realm to connect with divine energy then use this divine energy and guidance in the next level. Why do we need guidance? Its because we actually know nothing about perfection. We do not know the way that we must walk on to reach it. Those who already achieve this level will agree with my explanation. But for those who have not achieved this level yet will never understand it and even deny this theory. I just hope any one to have an open mind. You must refine your Qi become Shen and your Shen will connect with Divine energy. Then you are on the Way to TAO. It is not the end of your journey but merely the beginning. In XYP we call this energy Shen Gong. It is transformational energy after Qigong. The energy of Qigong exists inside physical realm but Shen Gong exists inside spirit realm. That is the system that is used in most of Taoist school to develop ‘Shen’. And this only can happen if your method is based on ziran (naturalness) and wuwei (effortless). If not, you will never get it. In XYP we use a different way to develop ‘our shen’. the Grand Master in XYP is one who already cultivated. It means they already have Shen energy. At the initiation we are given ‘Shen’ energy that wrapped our body. Those who have clairvoyance will see it as golden aura that shields our body. How does Shen energy work? This energy will induct ‘our shen’. We are like steel and Shen energy is like a magnet. This energy inducts us to become magnet. This energy activates ‘our shen’ then makes a bridge into our our qi and our physical (jing). Once the bridge is developed it is easier to transform. So actually all systems will move into similar direction but in XYP our GM helps us with his Shen energy to activate our Shen energy then connect us with Divine energy (Shen Xian)

I was the one who originally posted this on a related thread last year. Yes, I had been asked not to post it because of politics. those who know me here on this board know that i disregard politics. I posted it in order to reach out to friends here on the board, i was "recruiting" and it was I, acting alone doing the recruiting. And rather than recruiting, it is/was more like me just wanting to share. On this board there are many who do advertise and recruit, there are those that sell glass saying it is a diamond, etc and I have been on this journey awhile and became a little zealous when I experienced what I did with XYP. I will double check about your other questions Walker and let you know. it was 3 Quanzen priests and the tour guide. i do know that. and they were not the only Priests initiated, but for protection of the others privacy, there will be no more photos published here. In my own defence of this, let me say this. from my own study about XYP, I found that in 1970 the GM of XYP decided to accept some disciples and then those disciples begged the GM to accept their family and friends and it began to spread. In 2000 there was plea for the GM to open to the west. He refused, but after persistent begging from the higher level disciples, in 2007 the GM agreed to open to the west. In 2009 the first event in the US happened and i attended the 2012 event. From the Initiation till now it has been amazing. So, my intent wasnt anything bad, i just wanted to share with my friends here on TTB and most likely Effilang is motivated along this same thought line as I am. I am not judging any other's systems or schools, i was and am only trying to share this delicious practice with my friends. Also, i was a little naive about the level of control that the Chinese government has over religion there.

whatever greenery that little feller eats its worth the entertainment value. besides, i live in a lush vast natural wonderland where more grows naturally that could be consumed, let alone what some of us others may choose to grow in gardens, fields, out in the woods far away from the watchful eyes of law enforcement helicopters lol ummm nevermind that part. JK JK we also have some woods hare that does like to travel alone and there was that raven waiting on me as i left town...if i thought i could grow a garden to attract these little dudes, i would put out their favorites just for them.

i went by mom's and she always has many birds visiting her patio and yard, a bunch of finches, some bright yellow ones and many others. cardinals, bluejays, towhee and doves on the ground. she has like 3 different types of woodpecker. and some bird about the size of a wren tried to scare off a woodpecker and the woodpecker just looked at that bird, then looked behind himself, as if, surely you're talking to some other bird that way ? lol but the star of the day was a baby rabbit that had just come above ground maybe for one of its very first times. it wasnt hopping so much as it was jumping, boing boing' but the rabbit wasnt much bigger than a wren either. those ears were laid straight back.

wind element [ spoiler ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBLgIFAVi_4[ /spoiler ] water element [ spoiler ] [ /spoiler ] edit>> hahaha this is why i dont use spoilers

"Guys, you are like drug dealers:" really opendao ? do you ever see any XYP members bad mouthing any other schools or systems on any of these threads on TTB? XYP respects other schools, we are not critical or insulting to anyone. I had been hoping we could have a discussion here and I welcomed your questions and concerns. but, I will not continue to discuss with those who will drop to the level of insults, I think your own words are sufficient to reveal your character, Te, tactics, and level of your shen. edit>> and there are no other schools or systems on ttb trying to recruit members or students? only XYP is doing this? cmon man, lets keep a certain standard of civility here, ok? surely we can have a decent constructive discussion.

"I meant people don't read and understand classical books," thank you for that clarification, that does make more sense to me. "Don't you get yet that Dao is not a religion? " opendao, show me one time where i said that Tao was a religion. spiritual and religion are 2 different things. "And I don't tell that "our school is the best", stop your boring political games." i never said that you did say that. i dont even know what school you belong to. why do you even comment to it? but here on ttb there have been those that did say that. i wont say who, becoz just about everyone knows already. i was referencing how i came to make my decision. "I don't write it to discuss." thats a bit disappointing . i was hoping we could discuss. @rbv, "zero, do you know the answer yourself?" good question.

about a year after my initiation i started posting about XYP and my experiences here on TTB. I was faced with the same criticisms as are being expressed on this thread, one member that was always very cordial, and very well versed in Taoist canon that was saying things similar to the criticisms we read here was Effilang. but for some reason Effilang did try XYP out for himself and there is a change in his view now. interesting, isnt it? i always had a great respect for Effilang and his knowledge of Taoist practices were far greater than mine. Effilang was one of the members whose posts i always enjoyed to read. One thing that was obvious to me was Effilang's posts were based on his knowledge from the classics and his own practices and experiences, if i recall, correctly , he was thinking of joining some temple , maybe even a Buddhist one idk and it doesnt matter really to me , except that it shows how he was determined and dedicated and had an affinity to find the way that would suit him am improve his life. Now a year later it is Effilang that once questioned very frankly about XYP but after his initiation he is now posting about XYP. Many members here have greater knowledge of what is written in the classic books than i have or that i will ever have. if you want to rely only on books, thats your choice. if you feel you need a real life in person teacher to guide you, again that is your choice. but consider this, the masters that wrote the books, who were their guides? your current teacher, who is his guide? from my pov, the ones of you who refuse to accept anything except what is taught only by your school, i am not trying at all to reach out to you. your opinions are already formed and you are confined by dogma, your beliefs and faiths. i speak about this from time to time under the topic of mental illusion. Effilang had the guts to to enter XYP with an open mind. we are now in the same clan and i still marvel at some of the things he shares with me.

"The difference between Yangshen and Yinshen is obvious, but people don't dare to read." opendao feel free to pm to me your elucidation on this if you feel it is too daring for many members to read. or were you just dodging ish's direct question? i am interested to hear what you have to say about this and other things that you have brought up. i also see that you liked LaoZiDao's "Out of 1000 people who try to achieve Dao, 1000 will fail." what an attitude and approach that is. what type of results do you achieve that way? we all have different backgrounds and experiences on this board. and many members here are open to hear about new concepts and we also have a few that are very narrow and restricted in their view that refuse to accept that anyone other than their school has 'the only one true way'. XYP has never ever said that XYP is the only way. When I first saw the little plain brown paper bag announcement about the XYP Initiation event, the fact that they were not making grandiose claims about the school or method was part of the allure for me. I had grown tired of hearing different schools claiming that they were the one true only way and the super powers one could gain if you joined there school hahaha but guess what?? my experiences at the initiation and since have been beyond my imagination. such things i never ever considered or had encountered previously. they didnt even charge for it, i just had to get there, which is another topic for another time lol but i did get there and i am very grateful that i did.

in my little corner of appalachia there has long been welsh influence, and weve always been able to relate with those from the Maes glo De Cymru http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa5kKnRwgcc did "killer" say he didnt drink?? wth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Lee_Lewis some interesting tidbits there The Killer is still going strong http://jerryleelewis.com/?page_id=4

what i would like to know, is who put those on her?

ive always thought that before anyone begin any qigong or energy work, that they need to know how to properly relax first.

I bet they didn't have 'bird shot' in those shells either. you are familiar with the phrase "loaded for bear" ?!

aleksandr pushkin The flower, very dry and scentless,I see in the forgotten book;And now, with the strangest fancies,Is filled my soul’s every nook.Where and in which spring was it grown?And how long? By whom was cut?By a hand known or unknown?And why was put this page behind?To the recall of the love-talking,Or separation forced by fate,Or quiet and alone walkingIn the fields’ silence and woods’ shade?Is he alive? And his sweet lady?And where is now their little nook?Or maybe they had both faded,Like this strange flower in this book?

listening to nature observing the qualities of clouds wandering in wonder (sometimes beyond yonder) remaining carefree and nonchalant playfully existing savoring the exquisite moments as they unfold