Rocky Lionmouth

Well good and thank you! Down the mead and lets not tarry since Valhalla awaits, skål för Oden och Tor!

I dont know, i’m pretty sure you’re badass you but i’ve developed an allergy towards warriorhood as people have tried to sell me some sort of warrior ideal and identity repeatedly and over time i’ve seen them eat themselves in their struggle to embody the Warrior. It comes with baggage and my feeling is when it is shed in the motion of transcendence it leaves more baggage behind... your regimen sounds awesome and all power to you however, dont get me wrong. But a warrior? A warrior does war. Are you at war? I’d mos def empower my warriorhood if i were in a war. But in times of peace? Nope. What do warriors do when there is no war? Vikings traveled far and wide and made most of their connections through exchange and trade. Raids were for more desperate times, but a lot of the seafarers left their homes because their family or their land couldnt support them. I love the sagas and history, being a Swede it’s part of my cultural heritage and society back then seems fascinating. But what about the black wolf? You feed it when you feed yourself, it is because you are. The white wolf too! ”Do not recitepoetry to one who is not a poet. If you meet a swordsman, draw your sword.” Warrior at war, scholar at learning, student of all and master of you. A warrior could be someone who has lived and survived war. That brings out stuff in people, like trauma, clarity of purpose, self reliance and whatnot. Those are survival and thriving skills. But they are not always appropriate... idk, does it make any sense?

Don’t take this the wrong way but judging from the joyfully smiling man in your picture i get the feeling you’re easily amused. 😂

Marbs, are you actually saying you’re sorry for correcting my faulty and expressedly incomplete enumeration of these three esteemed treasures? Friend of mine if you ever need a second in a duel or something else, holler at me and i will talk you out of it to the best of my abilities. <3

In answer to the topic title this is what i got: Be quiet and don’t neglect anything. Keep at it. Caution: nothing is expendable and everything is a distraction.

Good question EH, our missing friend will surely appreciate. @Apech & @Marblehead i’d like to hear yours on this! bear with me... So knowledge is VERY important and it encompasses a productive attitude imho. Also, while on the subject of attitude: dont you need a certain set of attitudes to gain and develop knowledge? While some people who are into Daoism might argue both attitude and knowledge are of the conditioned realms and might even be hindrances to ones further travels on the Way i’m prone to a more ”yes but no, maybe but not so much and perhaps even if and then” type of rambling and fence-sitting. Knowledge is paramount. Of Self, of Humanity, of Sky, of Earth, of all the celestial subdivisions and phases etc. Attitude is equally important to me, especially when viewed as a mindset and the options to adjust it so that further insight and progress can be enabled. Not a particular one in general, except that Lao Tzus three treasures of humility, frugality and i forget the third are never wrong to adopt. What you’ll find with many Daoist scholars and teachers is their ability to discern context and bring the pivotal points out for a specific situation or person. They’ll follow up with some balancing info and perspective changes to account for the more or less obvious permutations and contraddictions but in general the attitude is to see what is there and what is in important relation to it. Like in the I King, the ”unnatural” changes are described by hexagrams and decoding those is an art and a science. There’s only so many but they reveal specific patterns and predict aberrant shifts to those in the know. So, knowledge and attitude are hard to separate if you want the first one to thrive and the second to improve. Also: we’re a Martial Arts community now??!! HOW MUCH HAS CHANGED THESE LAST FEW MONTHS AND WHY WASN’T I INFORMED AT LEAST a little earlier perhaps, pardon the outburst it was a mere jest.

Also: WTF IS BRIAN IN EXILE TOO?! I’ve been offline a lot so i hadn’t even noticed, that is a bad sign. Hope you guys are doing well at least. Never mind us, we’re still here, arguing and slinging it, filling voids and responsibilities, dont think of us, nono, never mind!

Taomeow is the cats pajamas and her advice is hard to rank, she always took great care with answering to the point and to whomever she was adressing in advice.

Odds are yang and evens are yin, that much i know. What is the purpose of gendering the hexagrams? If you’re looking to divide them into pairs then Qian and Kun give you a heaven/male/yang and earth/female/yin ordering in the first two so that would make the odd numbered ones as heaven and evens are earth.

Light, is it even light that’s talked about? Having vision isn’t having A vision, wether the eyes are closed or open. Around from where? I’m thinking the light is Yi. Qi goes where Yi goes, put Yi in your belly and see what happens. The funny thing about some of this stuff is that the techniques are very specific and the descriptions are poetry on how to use it or what it does. Relaxation, intent, energy (both as fuel and as time put in), patience and practice with an open state of mind. There is so much to be found along the way i think, thousands of little tricks and knicknacks that are revealed. But there is the need to mix... Mix activity and rest, cultivation and harvesting, open eyes, closed eyes, sleep and wakefullness. Some of them dont mix simultaneously but cumulatively maybe? We spend a lot of time with our eyes closed, literally. Rest is one such thing. My head is spinning from thinking about this light and where it should be turned to and from. What does it even turn ON as a pivot? Is it a lighthouse? I’ve had too much rum. bye now.

We cant stop here! This is Nei Dan country! *gets out of the vehicle waving haphazardly in the air with a flyswatter mumbling something about ”those fucking pigs are everywhere” and ducking for cover*

Afaik, which is precious little if any, isn’t it also important to mention that TCM differs a lot from classical chinese medicine, neigong and qigong? As in the experiences of energy work and alchemy do not correlate exactly to TCM as the latter is kind of a remix of classical teachings having been purged of stuff deemed reactionary, antimaoist or just plain old silly hocus bogus? Plus, one tradition has a certain model of knowledge and ideation with variations in both path, tells and methods. Compare it to another system that differs greatly even at surface level and stuff will get doubly confusing twice as fast. Imo the term MCO and a lot of the correlated stuff seems to have a strong relationship to Chias stuff, and Chias stuff is problematic according to a lot of people, but i could be wrong.

I had no idea, thanks for that, i like the phrase and ignorant as i am i thought Oldman Man was the modern source for it. Well, sounds to me you’re saying that for someone with common sense and a little experience it’s impossible to just shoot someone by accident. The same is valid for a knife, it’s basically impossible to knife someone to death without intent, knowledge and/or effort. I’m prone to thinking theres accidents and ”accidents”, like say children and/or fools who don’t have common sense and end up shooting someone and those who claim that they shot such and such by accident to mitigate punishment or the like. Also, i think pistols ought to be more prone to fire wide spreads or strays compared to rifles, especially with inexperienced or careless shooters. Idk, i’ve never shot anything more serious than arrows and bbs, always for fun and focus.

Hey hey hey, are you quoting that-astronaut-who-got-in-trouble-with-the-apethorities-for-instigating-all-sorts-of-mischief at us? Guns dont kill people, monkeys do [if they’ve got a gun]

Of course, i didn’t mean to put words in your mouth, i was sharpening the semantics for pointmaking, sorry. Word up steve, that is very well put!

I agree and yet i cant help myself sorta disagreeing (i think Marbs might be a good bad influence on me) thinking that what you said also cuts two ways: Keep the original recipe lest it will be lost, but if you do not give it a little space to contract and expand as needed it’ll soon be lost as well. All recipes, strategies and ”truths” (looking for a better word so salt it to taste hehe...) have an end date, if they do not adapt they risk ending up hollowed out of the experience itself. You know how to make Gazpacho, you tried to make gazpacho a la freeform and it wasn’t that bad although it didn’t sing like the capital G one. Perhaps it needed something to balance the new addition a little? Respect the heart of the Gazpacho and, i risk sounding like a fortune cookie here but i go for the full Yoda or bust, everything you make from that angle will be Gazpacho at heart, even if it’s sizzling hot and full of ketchup. Thats what i think is the teaching. Certain things are strict but when strictness culminates it becomes stiff and useless. Attain the heart by compassion and understanding and there will be no need to forcibly conquer it... he said waxing poetic on the first night of waning moon this fine heatwave summer of 2018, Mad Dog year.

I’ve read different claims on what turning the light around means and few are clear in the translations. I think it’s one of those sorta hermetic things, if someone gives you a teaching on what it is then you use that. It’d be interesting to see the characters for the phrase ans see what could be gleaned from that? If light needs to be turned i’m betting my stake that it’s supposed to turn inwards.

Well, i’d be wary of trusting direct experience as truth without cumulative knowledge and distilling wisdom from it. It’s like say: never trust your eyes, they are easy to fool. Trust your ears but not the words they recieve. Trust your heart and not what you think it’s telling you. Taste can hide and transform, smell is hard to disguise. Kinda the thing about the five tones deafen the ear and the five colors blind the mind. I’d say there is a boatload of refining, counterchecking and manifesting true nature in both ourselves and our senses before direct experience is to be trusted. I understand what the quote is aiming at (i think) but i’m still prone to choose to believe this and that than having faith i’m seeing the truth as it is.

Marbs, i think you just won the internet.

How could a mind create the perception of a tree? I mean unless they were hallucinating? Sensory input and the mode of perception (to a person a regular domestic cat has fur and it feels and smells so and so) are limited to our hardware and firmware, sure. The world looks like it does and sounds like it does to us in a specific way because of our setup and individual variations but the solipsist and/or nihilist interpretation just doesnt ring with me at all. There’d still be someone there experiencing that created perception of a tree and that tree is deemed as such because it fits the generalized idea of a tree in that, albeit hallucinating, mind. Like @Limahong picture says: Change your perception of things [...] Its not so much the PERCEPTION thats the important bit, its rater like Change YOUR perception of THINGS […] etc etc because you as the active agent in the mix play a significant role. Emptiness is the preparatory resting stage, nothing and no-thing and wind moves, flag moves. Sure, MIND moves and knock over quarreling monks but dont get caught in the illusion of everything in our perception and sensory experience to be the proverbial pointing finger. (You know, to the moon?) Theres this other Zen-deforestation tale that recounts the misfortune of a brat who was an impostor to this Zen-lumberjack who explained Satori by raising one finger. That Zen brute chopped the kids finger off and then he was enlightened. I mean the kid. He lost a finger but attained One Finger Shooting Star realization. I’m not saying mutilation helps but there is only so much staring and intellectualizing you can do before the observer will not stand to be observed and makes a triple left turn and is suddenly looking at intellectual concepts again, using words to delineate and exclusive induction to say ”this yes but this no.” I use martial arts training to keep that monkey tired and distracted.

Lerner jokes but hitting the head is good, but be sure not to leave the power there. Bounce off the strike and be sure the magpie bridge is supported by your teeth, for obvious reasons. Gentle and assertive strikes about three cun above your eyebrow line is a good place, you’ll feel it when you find it. Use a drummers roll technique for inspiration. Do ten to thirty reps on the exhale, rest a cycle or three, start again. It really clears the head. What else is there to do? Idk, when the work is done Lao Tzu says to retire and leave it be. Breathwork like Lerner said is good stuff too, quiet everything down, listen to the faintest. When the outer is still the inner moves about a lot. So for that balance you want to be almost perfectly still, without overdoing it. So you’ll experience inner motion but not cranked up to 11. Other general tips: have a cold nice beverage, relax and never worry. Loss of control is only a problem if you cling to the loss.

Please do ZYD! I’m delighted trying to digest Saso one subchapter at a time, that stuff is pretty dense already!

Thanks for the link! Well, ritual instruction and prayer as far as translateable go a long way to understand certain things, as i’m interested in gleaning some ideas behind more orthodox practices and liturgy. Not for use but context.

Oh, i think so, i’d say that question has the answer of ”i’m stuck in my head” for me, since harmonizing is necessary with everything and it is the tendency of every movement really. @Marblehead i’m right there with you disagreeing, don’t worry, you will never walk alone nor disagree alone. <3