Rocky Lionmouth

Seems like this caste had a lot of range in social status, going from downright nobility with feudal districts under their responsibility to ”lowly” servants who still ranked far higher than ”common folk” in rights, assets and possibilities. Promotions, status, yearly income etc could be increased and become hereditary, while incompetence, politics or personal chemistry could ensure beheading, execution and purging of entire bloodlines. But in a sense they were always servants under someone. Just to add a few cents i mean

I love how the guy is so excited and hypes it up, i thought maybe there would be some huge cermony and pompy dress and whatnot. Then lady pops half the door open, starts fussing with scarves and pleasantries, all very undramatic and just being herself i’m having a lateral flash to all the senior shut-ins and well to do slackers who eat delivered takeout all day just doing their thing. They are SERIOUSLY underappreciated.

It could be obvious that i am. But then, going back to the child example, it takes kids a while to even develop a sense of i and being. Before that it seems much more primal, they’re not used to being an identity or a person. Stuff just is. Relationship, interrelatedness or something. Hard to even call it awareness, i think the fish and water thing is good, omnipresent somehow. Its just a thereness that is utterly subjective without having a subjective to reflect on. It is not made, not unmade just unexisting as of then. I try again: The most obvious is not that i am, rather that it is.

Yup, many folks develop their own things. Friend of mine is good at taking his me-time and against stress or hard to deal with anger or frustration he always recommend his ”two-step proprietary practice which is free for all to use”. It’s part of his semiofficial ”Church of Johan” project. There is no god but dancing and having a blast is sacramental. Dress up, preferrably in white and green, and go bananas with your friends. His sermons always contain Northern Soul, classic Doowop, Motown bangers, Rocksteady mashers and ballads etc... 1. Dance. Put on your favourite music, especially a genre that either contraddicts or complements your state of mind and start to dance. No shame, no awkwardness, all dances are good. Go with it. 1. Lie down and close your eyes, immagine you are looking down on yourself from above and then zoom out slowly, first the house from above, then the block, then the area, then the city, country etc until you can see earth, moon spinning around it and consider the vastness of proportion and the apparent peacefulness of empty space. Then return. both are 1 because you can do them both in any sequence you like or just one and neither have priority over the other. Dance or litterally space out...

Awesome thread. This, so much. Advanced level practice is the kind you get to by doing what dear sir above wrote. Studying the basics can be fun and a whole universe of discovery. Later on when someone says ”this the advanced practice of doing this”all that basica training will leave the path open for nailing such methods down easily. Any system will do and for me, imo, is to just stick to one teaching. Do that for long enough, refining the basics and building a house from the ground up and you’ll soon see what the system can offer and for you.

Thunder my dear friend, that is the most exquisite koan i’ve laid eyes on. Merits one of those ”so the guy put his sandal on his head and just left.” kind of answers. Mine is very unpoetic: What is the most obvious? There is no rest, there is only noise.

Nailed it.

Jumping hunter-spiders sometimes seem to levitate when they jump in upside down position in the cieling, i dont know if they use a light wind in the room (notice the gratuitous opening for fart jokes there) or use a thread or something. Looks neat though.

I wish people would tell me that irl sometimes... how sad is that? Wait, were you being ironic? I would like to thank my parents for making this possible and all those who contributed to the process leading me here, the mods for allowing it to happen and the good folks over at th- *que the wrap-it-up-orchestra swell* Thank you bye!

Well, it sounds like the wiser option Marbs.

Void the Shitter?

Thought so, about the going back issue i mean. There is no back, forget the fish trap because your fish has already been cooked, eaten and the bones are about to spoil Ok, blockages... uh... right. I’m no expert or anything but anything can become a blockage. I consider a blockage a hindrance for things that have places to be. Say like a blockage could be a chronically stiff muscle, it accumulates more waste than it can dispense with, drains energy, doesnt get properly oxygenated because blood cant pass, lymph neither so there is no replenishing and so it functions poorly and affects the whole of the complex to which it is linked, usually the entire person if left untreated for long enough. That experience or event can become a blockage if it is your standard of comparison: ”THAT felt like This, should feel like Thus, Should Result into These Things.” If the sentence above here stops being a guiding principle or just a quick mental note to save for later or never and instead turns into a dogma, not unlike what you describe about organized religion, then that event and your subsequent clinging to it has become a blockage. Its the diametrical opposite of the quote about the fish trap, you’re already doing just fine, you have that quote in your post so there is no real need for me to explain a blockage per se See it as massage for your cultivation. Massage everything, let no part of you dissipate or wither, even your mind and its biases. They are all akin to tools in a maintenance kit, some are levels and plumbs to correct angles, some deal with nuts and bolts etc. Pragmatism in absurdum kinda. Sadly no wu-shaman books. I have no reads on the connection with Wu-shamanism except what can be traced through wikipedias article on daoism in general and its historical roots i think. Its in a section about the development of a pictogram that started out as a depiction of a person adorned with feathers and whatnot. I’ll be looking back on the subject, if i find something more concrete regarding scholarly delvings on it i’ll post it here. I can recommend the book ”Taoist Master Chuang”by whatshisname, its an account of a guy who studied with a high ranking daoist ritual priest. There is a chapter on the Rites of Renewal where the main operator summons The Whole Pantheon around a symbolical representation of constellations and directions to present the contract that ensures heaven, earth and humanity are still connected. Riveting stuff, very detailed rubrics of spirits and envisioning are part of it, it’s a voyage to the Heavenly Court as well as bringing it here to earth. A bridge of sorts. I think you’ll like it. Gotta run, bye for now friend!

Well, i dont see how saying all them texts there are total bullshit makes them any clearer. @rideforever as much as i consider you a bigoted choleric weirdo with immensly troubling views on humanity and our universe i have a tip because i think these practices could do worlds of relief and benefit for you. Get one of the translation of ”Cultivating The Dao” that Liu Yi-Ming wrote, he pretty much spells stuff out clearly. I think F. Pregadio wrote the one i have, it’s in the bookcase and i cant be arsed to go get it, google the thing, Amazon probably still sells the hardcopy. It’s not very confusing and there are plain explanations of terms and what they signify or reference. The translation is well arranged. He’s done a lot of work for us, the only thing we need to do is to follow the steps in studying the foundation (aka Setting Up the Tripod i think), later Gathering the materials, after that Firing it and so forth. Decibelles thread regarding 400 Words on the Golden Flower gives you a ton of clues and confirmations when you’ve begun digesting Lius work. Never mind your eyes or tilting the head or that fancy stuff. Sit, close those lids, breathe and stay relaxed. Dont think, dont form words, dont imagine no light going anywhere, like Awaken says dont focus on the sensation of qi, leave that to do its own thing. There is no magic to it. You wont learn to levitate as a byproduct of sitting in stillness and alchemically developing the elixir. I cant say what it does afterwards but the simplicity of the method is only surpassed by how challenging it is to realize. Frustration will grow and ebb along with much else. There is no learning or theory to extract and understand, there is only realing the benefits of such a practice and putting it to good, compassionate use. There is no moral to extract, no right and wrong of external essentialism and there will be no enmity left in you when the work is complete. I wish you good luck and speedy results mate.

I reiterate: I had no idea, i was ignorant of these things concerning the issue. Nobody is beyond criticism nor do i wish to start yet another ”X vs Y” feud, i will redact the post in question so the issue will hopefully be ignored, i am sorry i brought it up.

I think Integrateds post is far more relevant than considering the state of the arts today, since so much of those explanations also revert to the level and skill of the individual practitioner. The watering down of certain arts and styles might have to do with cultural affirmation or establishing identity, but such is not the case for all styles and it is important to remember that many lineage holders fled persecution because of their arts. MA in the west is similarly not subject to any fair generalization as it again boils down to individuals studying, interpersonal chemistry, all sorts of things. The Middle Class is a societal group and exonomic strata that are on one hand responsible for supporting the economic development and influence its direction, but they are also the spearheading cadre upon whom a certain mass production or demand vs quality is tested and spurred on when the economy is at a climactic phase (up or down). Martial arts has in part been fetishized and the dilution of the skill is partially blameable on wether or not practicioners approach it as a learnable and developable skill or a commodity. In the case of the latter skill is of lower priority than the associable meaning of owning such a commodity. This is NOTHING new. Styles have been born and died since forever, people who think they can buy real progress of skill get beaten up for wanting to show off and confident people of moderate skill get a nice boost to their sense of purpose and the relevant need for acknowledgment satisfied. Complete merrygoround of bleh for the sharp-eyed observer. Thats a generalization, but i’m trying to explain how it can appear that a classical or traditional MA seems bogus when tested. If the testee is a buyer of MA their skill is probably not noteworthy however meaningful for them. If they instead reveal themselves to be actual students their skill is far more likely to demonstrate something that satisfies the onlooker. Thats right, because it is a question of what spectators see and what test-subjects are able to project that satisfies their (spectators) standards for what an effective MA is. Bagua vs MMA is such a case, and the ongoing talk about results in a mess imho.

Hmmm. The thing about these experiences (i’ve had a couple while stone cold sober and a couple while crisply baked off some trippy white strain of weed) is exactly what you’re already describing: they rush on you and while it happens it’s all good and fine no matter what the experience itself brings out emotionally, but afterwards you can spend half a life trying to come to grips through your every-day mind. It sorta turns everything to a before and after. And one treacherous thing is the wish or compulsion to try and repeat that experience. It has passed, you got a call from ”somewhere” and your Dao-mind answered it. You put the phone down already, that is good. Now dont build a universe from a single glimpse of something that is basically impossible to describe. I’ve long since quit smoking weed and went through a couple of ”shedding” periods where i disillusioned myself from a longing for some magical shift and that nauseously naive hippie-perspective i was trying to force into existance. Then i shed some more and some more more over the last ten years and i started treating seemingly revolutionary experiences or flights like taking a shit. Defecating is everyday, sometimes it feels painful, at other times its a relief, sometimes its intense, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes urgent etc etc. I’ve never heard anybody say they just had a life-changing dump-session, i’ve certainly had dramatic ones but they are faint memories that say little extraordinary about poopage or the central essence of excrement that other ”run of the mill unsurprising shits” dont say also. I think your experience was radically important and good for you, it gave you a whole perspective on basically everything i guess, but leave it be now. The change happened, you saw and lived a void and chaos, blockages were undone, it was cathartic and traumatic enough to leave you psychotic for a while. You passed that so that in itself is another transformation. Now you are doing other stuff and have transformed who knows how many times since! Keep going. Beware to let experiences that register high on certain scales become a new type of blockage. Daoism is said by some scholars to have sprung from the wu-shamans and their practices, there’s a whole thing about wu shamanism and stuff thats pretty interesting. But daoist roots are not the practices of today. Zazen is good stuff, kung fu of either internal or external beginning helps, everything can be used. Alchemy is not what it seems, it keeps dressing up in weird robes and seems to talk a lot of woo-weird-woo but thats just to keep those who arent ready for it chasing after that something. None of us can really know the Dao, i think. There is no way to have a glimpse and then understand it, thats impossible. It can not be named and it cannot be described. Naming and describing are part of the conditioned/post-heaven mind, that empty awareness is the gate to the pre-heaven stuff, beyond that gate you gotta go live it. Its by practice they unite, not by understanding. Like chan-speak uses ”realization” because approaching the reality and living it is far more productive for us all rather than understanding it. I think at least, who knows really? Btw, GREAT thread and read folks, thanks!

That bad huh?

I like how you refrain from saying if those memories are fond or not, very gentlemanly.

One to the sky for Wei Boyang, credited for creating the Zhouyi Cantong Qi in original before transmitting it. All of the major traditional lineage holders count as Big Shots for me, meaning those who have dedicated themselves to ensuring the transmission. They may only be of real importance to their students and not gain any fame, they may be world famous. That is irrelevant. If they are ensuring the transmission of their living art then their effort is immortalized for as long as their art still lives. That is of course merely my thinking and of no consequence, but since the question was open i spoke. Ploughs to rust, swords to the sea. 5k

Ah! Sorry i was a bit thick but i get your perspective a bit better now. That is interesting and i think mr Effortless Cat above had a nice point also. Would you elaborate a little more please? This perhaps overly OT but I’ve always had problems with the concept of a subtle body, i never seem to be able to grasp what the term indicates. My impression is that the subtle plane is separated from the physical, sort of our own metaphysical body, or would it be more of a flow-chart in real time? I’d appreciate any input. I like the idea of yin and yang to describe our mental capacities on a brain level. Personally i’d say right is yang for its creative and lateral fame while left would be the sequential processing, receptive yin of reason. There is pure creativity and order in both but the left-right lobe idea seems to be pivoting on their dissimilar characteristics. Linking physical structure, especially of systems we dont really control so much, to yin and yang is of import i think. I’ve been mulling over the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous systems enter and shift with yin and yang regulation of our bodies and functions, balancing and shifting. Idk if it could be relevance for others, it’s not well formed as of yet

Dualistic monism and dialectical monism seem clumsy, a little ad-hoc or forced definitions. Paradoxicality of the whole business is off for me also, the Dao is and yin and yang are within it, like house with host and guest, a wave on the sea (water, motion, air etc in interplay). It seems to be a huge fuss to start to label differently. Honestly yang could be yin and vice versa, it’s just a naming of things interplaying within oneness. Yin is it by virtue of being in relation to yang and again, vice versa is also true. We breathe in and out, that is not paradoxical is it? There is a body which air enters and leaves, there is air and so on... that is a yin-yang relationship description. Theres plenty of Gods in the traditions and beliefs, but if there is Tao they are within it also. God the Almighty of the tradition of Abraham also existed within a nothing before xhe became Logos. God is creator of creation, creation is not God (in the monotheistic abrahamitic mainstream ideas at least) and together they’re there, somewhere. God is greater as the takbir says, but the existence of God is not complete on its own. Like the sum of all sums is always X+1... or what am i missing?

Listen, i do not mean to define who you are or what you think but you seem to be in a place where confrontation and defensive anger is driving part of your reasoning lately, as if the world around you is closing in with its oppressive rigidity and despair. What you wrote the other day about how you see parts of the world (OT i know but bear with me) made me so very sad, you obviously have drive and discipline but choose to fence you potential in by clinging and drawing boundaries that reinforce and help create those very horrors. This is not an attempt to jumble or confuse, i think you agree that we create our own reality in part, its just a very dark place for you and i dont think it has to be. The movements that you speak of and the knowledge are not necessarily relating to eachother as you describe them. What you say of us knowing ourselves directly in a truthful manner is correct, and the movements that the arts incorporate are not magical or mechanical, they are not conductive towards that goal by themselves. All movements a human being can do are natural, quite literally. Especially those weird ones that seem to be unique for some people, they are very natural. Even those movements that involve bizarre and repulsive actions, effects or results. If a human does them they are natural. The movements, our teachers (the good ones moreso of course) and all are methods of exploration. The movements, teachers, schools and ideas are ”merely” the means by which the investigation, observation, experience and insight are enabled and contucted. Since time immemorial humans have had an unnerving talent for being stubborn, self decieving, impatient and suckers for the easiest explanations and reasonings. We, as a spieces, are insanely intelligent and creative while we are also about as clever and disciplined as a bucket of jello. Funny thing is that one of our most despised (periodically at least) traits, namely Lazyness, could be said to be our foremost motivator for creative and honest invention and scrutiny. But there is another kind of lazyness that is part of vanity, fear and self centeredness that drives us to not look closer and integrate but rather discriminate, falsify and favor essence over suchness. Some of us have to reinvent the wheel, some understand the transmitted design, some are just fine seeing a wheel turn inside their minds and believe they are cleverer than Einstein, many more yet do other stuff. But that discriminating mind who extracts theoreticals and tries to abstract generalized truths out of specifics, summarily destroying its connection to reality and its power of influence and action within reality itself by its own potential and existing means is what makes these programmed and seemingly unnatural movements necessary. Most of us do exactly what you speak of, refuse to listen and get in the way. I do it, you do it. The more we are conditioned into it the harder it is for us to just suddenly snap out of it. Methodology helps us keep track of the work. A set pattern of something helps us keep ourselves in shape and organized to develop our ability to see clearly. Neidan classics and commentaries refer to what i talk about in the above paragraph as the conditioned state the remedy for which is the Inferior Virtue of practicing Nei Dan and studying it by the transmitted methods. What you are talking about in your OP is called the Highest Virtue, meaning exactly that any person is fully capable of doing exactly all of it without the mysticky, woo-y, weird movements while wearing pajamas and saying gibberish stuff. Yet, very few people actually do so. Those that do often dont even recognize that they have realized a firm Unity and maybe never even lost connection to reality. I do not know anybody who has, i’ve never met one. I have however met people who have realized the Golden Elixir by other methods than cultivating the Great and Small Medicine. The ultimate goal is to know ourselves and our place in reality, gain real knowledge and stop being a false self in a deluded world. This means washing away everything we hold for true, everything we feel and have opinions about because its impossible, in the beginning to see whats whatand whats false. The methods of chinese classical study are superficially false, but transmitted by those who have learned to use them to enter the not-false, the no-thing etc they have value as gates toward exactly the goal you speak of. Imho. 5k, ploughs to swordshards.

Complementary yes, united yes, by necessity in both cases imo. They cannot complement if not united. Harmony and balance are not necessarily opposed to disharmony and imbalance. Yin and yang are always shifting and always moving which entails that there always is a tiiiny bit of imbalance lest it becomes completely balanced and therefore immobile. And that stillness wont last forever either.

Nope, they are not to be extracted from anywhere if we’re still talking about Th Tao. If you are thinking of the Tai Ji Tu (aka the Yin Yang symbol) the dots signify different things but a major one is that yin and yang interplay and shift towards, and in fact become, eachother at their culmination. What you speak of in the quote above is closer to Nei Dan practice at the initial level where Water (postnatal, manifest Yin) is cultivated and from which True Yang is extracted to replenish the Original Breath, which is said to be the energy of the prenatal state. While this is done True Yin is extracted from manifest Yang (postnatal Fire) to balance and replace the inner yang line of Water when it has shifted to the central place in Fire, thus resulting in a reestablishment of Heaven and Earth. These are the early stages of Internal Alchemy as described through the symbols of Yin Yang and the Bagua. Sort of, ish and hamfistedly explained. The Tao was before Yin and Yang, then when the stillness of Tao climaxed a movement initiated within Tao and when it had gone through its growth, climax and decay it returned to Yin thus repeating the process. This why the Tao (One) gave birth to the Two (Yin and Yang). They are both Tao together in ever shifting and ever transforming phases of eachother. Inshallah I tried, if it makes any sense then mazel tov!