Ulises

I invite you to read the whole interview with Marion Woodman..that is what she (and R J Stewart, and the others, are saying...) Marion Woodman: Yes, I would say it's the laws of the universal feminine. Now, we're not talking about the universal masculine at this point, but they are in union. The two go together. We're focusing on the feminine because it has been so lost for 2000 years. But the masculine that has also been so damaged and so profoundly emotionally wounded by the patriarchy is now beginning to come forward. When those two energies start working together it is so exciting in an individual. It's going to happen culturally, I think, as well, ultimately. I think the people who will become the leaders in the new century will have a balance of those energies. Otherwise they won't be able to hold this country together, for example. We are so disparate now that we have to find our unity in our diversity. That takes masculine and feminine union to bring that about.

"When the Goddess and the Devil return to the sunlit world of human consciousness and are again acknowledged with the proper cults and offerings, they will cease to be demons and the embodiments of evil, the role to which patriarchal religion an d imperial monotheism now allots them. only then can the burdensome schism within humankind's psyche be healed., the split between spirit and nature. For both spirit and nature, masculinity and femininity, are part of human nature and they are complementary. The presence of both is necessary in order to realize our full potential. The one-sided exaltation of the spirit and the denial of the flesh is ultimately self-defeating because we are denying something that is part of our own being-- the external material world is not some alien planet and the physical body is not some prison of the spirit. Both the world and the body are manifestations of an inner principle that transcends the dichotomy of spirit and nature. The external is a manifestation of the internal. Monotheistic religions assert that evil and materiality will be overcome by a radical alienation-- there will be a cataclysmic end of the world, a resurrection, and a final judgment. For those judged worthy, they will thereafter abide in a purely sexless spiritual existence, in a new world of light without shadows, without evil, without matter, and without the feminine. But this scenario is not possible because both light and shadow are created by the Nature of Mind. The light and the shadow require each other; otherwise there would be only stasis, an endless boredom and ennui for all eternity. in Buddhist terms, both Samsara, the world, and Nirvana, the celestial paradise, are ultimately of the same origin-- they both proceed out of the Nature of Mind. Not even the gods know this, for it is the Great Secret of Secrets... Moreover, the serpent is the bearer of Wisdom and the Gnosis to humanity. Whereas the celestial God would have kept primitive humanity in ignorance within the gardens of paradise during the great summer time of the world before the ice ages descended, it was the serpent, called by the ancient Sumerians Enki, the lord of the earth, who gave humankind the Gnosis of self-knowledge, for only with self-knowledge could this walking hairless ape evolve into a god. An d the transmission of this Gnosis was only possible because of the alliance between the serpent and the woman. It is only the Gnosis that can liberate humanity from bondage and servitude, for the slave shall neither be liberated by faith nor by obedience to the tyrant in heaven. However, these are the images of myth and myth does not actually represent a factual chronology of events in profane history. Rather myth is a sacred history of the gods and their deeds at the very beginning of time, those creative acts which brought the world as we know it into manifestation. but at a higher level, myth tells us in narrative form something essential about the human condition. Myth is a primordial and fundamental way human beings organize their experience of the world and understand themselves. Theology and philosophy only came later; but religion and self-understanding began with vision and myth. Characteristically, as exemplified by the dragon combat myth, the patriarchal sky gods overthrow and suppress the older chthonic gods worshipped by the mothers. The great sea serpent Yam, otherwise known as Lohan or Leviathan in Canaanite mythology, was driven back and bound beneath the earth or else slain by the young celestial hero god Baal, in the same way as did the Babylonian Marduk with the dragon Tiamet, or as did Zeus with the dragon Typhon and Apollo did with the serpent Python, or as did Indra with the great serpent Vritra, and so on. Yet in the later Biblical religion, mighty Baal himself became demonized and retired beneath the earth to become a chthonic god of sex and death, banished from human consciousness by the triumphant desert god Yahweh. The prophets commanded that the Old Gods be expelled from the temple and their idols destroyed, being ground in to dust, so that non e might even know and remember their names. Yet the Old Gods have lived in the shadows for far too long, and now the stars have turned in their courses once more, and the priests in their temples shall have nightmares of their return." http://vajranatha.com/excerpt/Wicca,Pagan,Tantra.htm

"Did Jung give rebirth to a new God-image in his soul? No new myths present themselves in the Red Book. Its discussions of the Self, a unitary concept Jung took from Nietzsche and elaborated, restrict themselves to ancient imagery like Abraxas, Jung's Gnostic code word for the felt union of the Christian God with Satan, higher and lower, crown and serpent, into a deeper and more comprehensive if mysterious whole. The rebirth of the divine that plunged Jung into hell renewed God-images repressed into cultural and personal unconsciousness by millennia of monotheistic religion and centuries of scientism. With them had gone the verdant nature imagery that sprouted in Jung's imaginal garments and took root in Philemon's sermons. What Jung did do was dream the sacred imagery onward, taking his own later advice by giving updated form to the fruits of direct experience. Furthermore, Jung pushed past literalistic interpretations of myth by grounding his encounters with the divine in internal experience. Literalism is the letter that kills the spirit, imagination the word that brings it back to life, revivifying the soul as consciously directed fantasy, at last unchained from dogma and doctrine, melts the crude vessels of religion down into storied spiritual experience. It makes sense that the Red Book would finally be published in a time of warfare and global crisis. The narcissism it depicts was not that of Jung alone, but of psychiatry and psychology, of modernity, of a civilization cut off from its natural roots--its "animal" as he put it. Where Faust the alchemist sold his soul to the devil in exchange for carnal frenzy and mechanized might, our world-girdling civilization has altered the elements, the atmosphere, and life itself through the anti-alchemy of mutating toxins and genetic manipulation. The type of ego consciousness responsible for all this cannot tolerate anything wild, uncomfortable, or imperfect; it must clean, cleanse, fix, and solve instead of allowing what arises to open up and move from within. Mired in its own attempts to work on, toward, around, and though, the Faustian ego remains walled off from inner and outer nature except in rare individuals who make their own heroic descent into the depths. For them, the Red Book tells the inside story of Jung's painful evolution as he sat with what pinched and bothered him long enough to let it share its soul. In the wound, he found, was the voice of the divine, ever calling into presence a more spacious and heartfelt relatedness to an animate world, one whose creatures, liquids, fires, and minerals speak on their own behalf to anyone with ears to hear..." http://www.chalquist.com/redbook.html

Hi, K...could you elaborate a bit more....? Well...She appeared in my dreams (8 years ago)...and it has been a ecstatic and challenging journey of dissolution & transformation...that keeps going on...it looks like the dissolution/rebirth/reconnection with the earth is deepening now for more and more people... "The Cauldron of Regeneration, so central to Irish and Celtic legends is nothing less than the regenerative power of the Land, of the Planet Earth herself. Nothing could be more important for us today than a sense that the Earth is sacred, and a source of spiritual power. Indeed, we must return to this: it is our greatest and most redemptive truth. The time for either materialist indifference or ethereal escapism is over and the time for realization is upon us. Kill the earth, and we kill ourselves. So what about the Light ? In the pagan myths and legends, and in folk tales that persisted well into historical times, the UnderWorld which includes but is not limited to the Faery Realm, is a Place of Light. To reach this Light, we pass first through essential nourishing darkness, sacred to the Dark Goddess who is known by many names. As the Qabalistic writer Dion Fortune said : we can only come to the White Isis by way of the Black Isis. This process of finding light within the Earth, after passing through darkness, is also one of inner regeneration for the individual. When the spiritual consciousness is told that divinity, that the Source, is “up there” and a long way away, we become closed to the nearest source of light, grace, healing, regeneration, which is just beneath our feet. This source of Earth light rises through the body, and energizes our inner meditations, our vitality, our own individual UnderWorld of consciousness, imagination, spirit. If only we pay attention to it..." http://www.rjstewart.org/reviving.html

The Dark Goddess Returns An Interview with Marion Woodman by Michael Bertrand MB: Your book is called Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness. I think that there's a lot of people who don't know what or who the Dark Goddess is. Why are we dealing with this image at this time? MW: Well, we're dealing with it because so many men and women are having dreams with a dark female figure, often bigger than lifesize and chocolate coloured, and they don't know what to make of this figure in their dreams. I think it's exceedingly important that she should be recognized because she's a transformative energy. In the book we're trying to trace that Dark Goddess back to Isis in Egypt or to the Dark Goddesses that were brought over into Europe when the crusaders went to Africa. What did those Dark Goddesses mean in the medieval period especially in contrast with the chaste, pure White Goddess up on the pedestal--what is the difference in the energy represented by those two images? The Dark Goddess has to do with the Earth, the humus, the humility, the human. She has to do with sexuality, with the sheer joy of the body, with fecundity and the lusciousness of the Earth and with the love that can honour the imperfections in the human being. Whereas the White Goddess tends to make people idealize themselves and therefore develop a huge shadow, the Black Goddess, through her sense of humour and immense love for humanity, helps us to accept our imperfections. Not only that, she helps us to see that a lot of things that we may have considered shameful in ourselves are not shameful at all. MB: So she's very accepting. MW: Of human beings, yes. She's very accepting, but in loving and honouring her we can accept our humanity. This is what is at the root of so many addictions and so much shame and guilt in our society. People cannot accept their humanity. They cannot forgive themselves for being human. If this figure comes into a dream and is kind to you or takes you in her arms and holds you, it is such a shocking shift of energy that I've known people who've radically changed after such a dream. It's not orthodox Christianity, but on the other hand in Europe many churches do have a Dark Goddess or Black Goddess right within the church walls. I've never seen one in Canada or the States, but they're not uncommon in Europe and they have been beloved for centuries. MB: Well, this accepting energy that allows us to be human is different than the all-encompassing Mother Goddess energy, I gather? MW: Yes, because she's not only mother. She does have a child always with her and that child is a god. We have to remember that. She is a madonna, but also, certainly throughout the middle ages, people worshipped her in their sexuality, in childbirth. They prayed to her that they would have children in marriage--very much related to sexuality. MB: So, one of the things that leads to transformation is this great acceptance of our humanity, and that's . . . MW: Yes, that's right. You see she's also a Goddess of chaos. Chaos is darkness. In India, for example, they call her Kali. We all know the pictures of Kali with the skulls around her neck and dancing on a dead corpse and carrying the knife and the cupful of blood and the head she's carrying--she has four arms and she carries the head and the cup underneath it with the blood. This figure is beloved in India because she lives in the moment. They will spend weeks in an Indian village creating a mud statue of her. They work very very hard to make her as beautiful as possible. Then on her day they celebrate and they sing and they dance and they carry the statue through the streets and when the day is over they throw it in the water. It's gone in a minute. That's their acceptance of death and the realization that life and death are two sides of one coin. That is something we have yet to learn in our culture. In our culture death is taboo and we don't really believe that new life comes out of death. So, we're very liable, when we lose our job or our marriage or our partner in death, to think that our life is over and we tend to get caught in dead imagery. Whereas with the honouring of the Dark Goddess we can accept life and death, rebirth, as part of an ongoing pattern. MB: When you say honouring or worshipping what do you really think we here in the West, in Canada, now in 1996, need to do to make that happen and why do we need to do it? MW: Well, we're faced with the breakdown of our old civilization, I think, and the institutions are collapsing. The morals and ethics that I valued throughout most of my life are not valued now. Our own country is collapsing because we cannot see anything but the opposites. The feminine perspective, the Dark Goddess perspective, would hold the opposites as paradox, not as oppositions. Death and life are simply the paradoxical reality. It seems to me that if we cannot move to that place, if we stay with our either/or patriarchal vision, our country is going to break apart. At a planetary level what possible hope is there of ever bringing anything together? How can we live on this planet if we don't develop a both/and vision. The other thing that's so important with this Goddess is her honouring of matter and her love of the Earth, this humus, this humility, the Oneness of every living thing, that we the animals and plants are all part of her. So, in honoring her you can't take a buzz saw and go out and start sawing down every tree you feel like massacring. You can't bear to see the sap weeping down the side of it, because you're cutting down part of yourself. That may sound exaggerated, but we have lost the unitary vision on which this planet depends. We are a global village now and we have no idea how to deal with that. MB: And to make it even more impossible to deal with these huge changes, much of the local has broken down. There are moves to amalgamate towns and school boards into greater and greater areas, to make society even more impersonal. There's such a huge tendency to go against what needs to happen instead of, for instance, honouring the local. MW: And honouring the individual. There's a huge move on the part of corporations to simply fire a third of their employees. What are those people going to do? There aren't going to be jobs for them because machines are going to be able to do those jobs. So, we're going through an immense transformation. I think it's even bigger than the industrial revolution. We have no idea where we're going. All we know is what we're losing. Our leaders don't know where we're going, obviously. So we're dependent on our own imagery to guide us. The BlackGoddess isassociated withchaos, but peoplewho don't go intochaos never findtheir owncreativity. MB: You see the Dark Goddess imagery emerging in dreams trying to tell us something that we need to have in our individuals lives. You're saying we need to move beyond both matriarchy and patriarchy. MW: That's right. A matriarchy was never brought to consciousness in the world, and I don't think patriarchy was very conscious either, but certainly patriarchy has become a controlling, power-over principle, and that cannot work any longer on this little planet. It will only destroy both the tyrant and the victim. MB: Many people, if they let this awareness in at all, know that everything is being destroyed and they are, I think, quite shattered and brought up short about what to do. MW: That's right. I think they're falling back into addictive behaviour as a result. They find it very hard to face the reality of what's happening. MB: Eat, drink and be merry. MW: Well, or even just depression, drinking or drugs. I think many people are isolating themselves because they are so frightened and with a patriarchal vision, for good reason, because they are losing their homes and jobs and identities that made them who they thought they were. The feminine principle will look to the being of the person, not to the persona or the doing. It will honour the beingness. This, of course, is where so many people feel empty. MB: Because they don't have a sense of their beingness? MW: No, they don't. They will say to you that they can't go home at night because the apartment is empty. I say, "But you're there", but to them that means emptiness, nobody there. Now that is tragic, for a person to experience themselves as nobody. We've lost the feminine you see and now that our structures are collapsing where is the beingness and where are the values of the feminine that could take hold now and make it possible for people to live in a different way? That's what this book is about. MB: And those values are the ones of honouring body, Earth, self? MW: Body, Earth and also honouring paradox. That's extemely important. If you get into either I have a job or I don't, and you've lost it, then you've got nothing but despair. Either I do or don't have my wife, there again despair if you've lost her. But, if you can accept paradox you can say, "Well, yes maybe I have lost this but maybe there's something else in my destiny here and maybe I can find the light in the darkness. Maybe there's another job that would be creative and if I go into this chaos I'll find the creative seeds." You see, the Black Goddess is associated with chaos, but people who don't go into chaos never find their own creativity. They follow the train tracks. They follow the collective values. They may never find themselves, but if the train takes off and starts going through the bush, they'd better find something else or they're going to die. MB: You're basically saying that in order for human beings to survive the only choice we're being offered--and I guess that's the paradox in the situation--is that we find ourselves so we will act in a way that is in accordance with the energy of what you call the Dark Goddess. MW: Yes, I would say it's the laws of the universal feminine. Now, we're not talking about the universal masculine at this point, but they are in union. The two go together. We're focusing on the feminine because it has been so lost for 2000 years. But the masculine that has also been so damaged and so profoundly emotionally wounded by the patriarchy is now beginning to come forward. When those two energies start working together it is so exciting in an individual. It's going to happen culturally, I think, as well, ultimately. I think the people who will become the leaders in the new century will have a balance of those energies. Otherwise they won't be able to hold this country together, for example. We are so disparate now that we have to find our unity in our diversity. That takes masculine and feminine union to bring that about. MB: The words masculine and feminine, like Goddess, are quite loaded, not necessarily understood. MW: In the lecture, I will carefully define what I mean by those terms. It's a whole different way of thinking. The feminine is interested in process, in living right here in the now. The Kali is here right now, she's thrown in the water, she's gone. You have to live in the moment. People who have lived through an addiction or faced death through an illness (and I think many people are facing that now with the immune systems that are breaking down), have to live in the now, right here, because there is no future. It just makes life so exquisite when you have today and maybe not tomorrow. Then you begin to see what you do have. That's the present tense feminine. It's based on matter and matter does not live forever. It is subject to life, death and rebirth.

" ...Oh, I understand! Because it's true, you know, that an Asura is behind it all - not Christ! Sri Aurobindo considered Christ an Avatar (a minor form of Avatar). One emanation of the Divine's aspect of Love, he always said. But what people have made of him! ... Besides, the religion was founded two hundred years after his death. And it's nothing but a political construction, a tool for domination, built with the Lord of Falsehood in the background, who, in his usual fashion, took something true and twisted it....The only common ground is the divinity of Christ, and it became asuric when he was made out to be unique: there has been but ONE incarnation, Christ. That's just where it all went wrong. We'll see. It is resisting, resisting everywhere. It's even more resistant than materialism. Of course! Nothing is more terrible than idealists, they're the worst. They're worse than the bad people. ...(they) turned back to the Father, and so their worship became exactly the worship of a one and only, personal God, an asuric God. And they have fabricated and distorted everything: like asceticism, for instance, and all that sort of thing - everything they touched was twisted and spoiled. " -The Mother (Mirra Alfassa),"Mother's Agenda: Agenda of the Supramental Action upon Earth" http://mother-agenda.narod.ru/Agenda_3/1962-12-15.htm

khecari mudra...forced technique...or spontaneous unfolding of "post-genital puberties"...? ...For, in energetically based Yoga, the teenager's vibrancy blooms on and on in what I have termed the "postgenital puberties" of the spine and the rest of the body (via spontaneous asanas, bandhas, and khecari, shambhavi, unmani, and other esoteric mudras). Kundalini's spinal awakening is just the first to become known in the West..." - Stuart Sovatsky, "Kundalini and Sahaja (Spontaneous )Yoga:A Next Step for Yoga in the West" http://www.cit-sakti.com/kundalini/sahaja-spontaneous-yoga.htm "FOURTH DECADE Dharana begins: the dawning of awesome awareness of/as endless impermanence and soteriological radiance-secretions of tejas ("brilliance-radiance" of spiritual zeal) and virya ("virtue-secretion/ radiance") emerge; advanced asanas, mudras, bandhas (inner yearning-contractions) and shaking mature the body for more intensified energies; dhyana begins: devout and unwavering appreciation of the flow of endless impermanence and the poignant grace of life; the puberties of the linguistic anatomy (tongue, larynx, brain centers) underlying further meditative/mental maturation begin: simha-asana (tongue-extended "lion-pose" seen in certain goddess images) and nabho mudra (inward-turned tongue, "heaven-delight gesture") precursors of khecari mudra (tongue curls back in delight above the soft palate), initiating the puberties of the hypoglossal-larnyx, hypothalamus, pituitary and pineal; anahata- nada, known rudimentarily as "speaking in tongues" and resounding in the sacred chantings of numerous cultures, emerge; FIFTH DECADE The desire-self identity matures toward the immortal soul-self identity; auras (auric glow of spiritual maturity) emerges; continuation of khecari mudra, culminating in the subtle pineal secretion-radiance of soma or amrita ("immortal-time essence," revitalizing melatoninlike, endorphin-like hormone)." - Stuart Sovatsky, "Mother Kundalini and the Far-reaches of Human Maturation" http://stuart.kzar.ru/node/48

"...two approaches where in the embodied self can experience the disembodied — or the manifest self can experience the unmanifest. 1 – Spontaneous Qigong – Riding the Dragon, Dissolving into Light, Trance Dancing, Qi Rave 2 – Wuji Gong- Primordial Qigong – a Qigong form from Wu Dang Mountain, based in a time reversal counterspiral motion." http://drjahnke.feeltheqi.com/2012/06/heaven-in-earth-primordial-qigong-3-wuji-gong-alchemy-the-practice/

Interesting new insights about Wu Ji Qigong... http://wuji-gong.org/newteaching.php

so what do you call this "orthodox mastery" versus "false reality" (baguazhang is amazing, these words are plain stupid): "it's said that if the mastery of vortexes are not accomplished, false reality comes in the form of prophetic speech, strange visions, convulsions, speaking in tongues, quaking, shaking, spinning, jumping, emotional fits." bewildered...? yeah, I guess the "heretics" burning in each age for holding to "false reality" were "bewildered"...that is the result of this kind of stupid, irresponsible dualistic game...I grew up in a land where many people died horribly because of this..."bewildered"...? Oh, sorry I tresspassed the baguazhang fence. I play whatever spontaneous complexity wants to be played (including spontaneous baguazhang), I don't need to put a name on it, and most of all, I try not to denigrate what I don't understand and at the same time vindicate "Bon shamanic roots" in the website... good day

this is dualistic bullshit: "it's said that if the mastery of vortexes are not accomplished, false reality comes in the form of prophetic speech, strange visions, convulsions, speaking in tongues, quaking, shaking, spinning, jumping, emotional fits." it's unfair and/or dishonest to play "let's go primordial", but ONLY THIS way... if we are going to play the soul retrieval game "let's dig the primordial, shamanic roots", one of the first things to do is to throw to the dustbin of History the "inquisidor mindset this is the right-one-and-only way" I've been lucky to learn QiGong and initiated into "Shaking" lineages and now both ways co-exist in my practice, cross-pollinating, interweaving from the subtle taichi-like to the raw very earhty shamanic like..the kinetic/energetic/emotional/spiritual ecology is diverse, like wise its physical counterpart... "...the trembling, shaking, and quaking associated with the experience of ecstatic bliss. This major transformative experience is an entry into the numinous – the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Arguably all religions and pre-religions initially felt this ecstasy and regarded it as an awakening of the original mysteries, the most extraordinary experiences possible for a human being. The emergence of social institutions to house ecstatic rapture - whether as temples, ashrams, churches, synagogues, medicine societies, shaman guilds, or pagan societies - resulted in the quieting of the originating experience in exchange for uniform narrative understanding and maintenance of social hierarchy. The ecstatic experience was sacrificed for normalized belief and group conformity. This was true for shamanism as well as the major world religions. In the sociology of religion this social process is called the “routinization” of the founding charismatic experience. Wild ecstatic experience is replaced by standardized ritual that overturns spontaneous play and improvisation. Guided imagery, clichéd patter, and loyalty oaths overtake raw unadulterated creativity, free expression, and heightened emotions. The shaking traditions propose that we most deeply thirst and hunger for an ongoing immersion in ecstatic experience. The source of this shaking bliss is what the Ju/'hoan Bushmen call n/om. They wisely never give a totalizing definition of n/om, but respectfully allude to it being a mystery responsible for bringing forth life’s vitality and acknowledge that its root is open-ended limitless love. When you have n/om, it makes you shake with ecstatic delight. For members of textually constrained cultures, it is often difficult to loosen the cognitive habits and tightly constructed belief systems that inhibit fully awakened feelings. We rarely are encouraged to stand under the sky with raw and naked presence, available to be hit by ecstatic lightning. Even most shamanic cultures, old and new, became “tamed” and conducted in a calm routinized manner. The shamans of old were wild, unpredictable, and appeared out of control. No one, including the shaman, knew what would happen in a ceremony. The so-called “spirits” took over. The same is true of early religious ceremonies. Then Buddhism chased out the Bon shamans, Christians went after their ecstatics, and shamans became reduced to hereditary entitlement or homogenized, standardized training. Ecstatic shaking radically encourages the practice of wild shamanism, wild religion, wild spirituality, and wild transformative performance. This does not refer to trivial, irresponsible, or unethical behavior. The deep wild involves hyper-complexity, the greater mind of nature that holds our psyche as a small part of a more encompassing interdependent though always-changing network of relations. We can choose to move toward the unpredictable, unknowable, and untamable wild. The sacred lives in the wild. The sacred constitutes the wild. The problem began when someone said that words and meanings must explain, domesticate, and cover up wild experience. Within this hegemony of words, we demystified whatever was mysterious and walked away from the wild in order to become semantically tamed. We sacrificed our link-to-the-universe-heart for a delusional body-less-head-trip that has imprisoned us far too long. Consider a re-entry into the wild. Become a wild shaman, a wild pagan, a wild Christian, a wild Buddhist, a wild Jew, a wild agnostic, a wild artist, a wild performer, a wild whatever you want to call it because the name is less important than the experience of being wild in this natural though always uncommon way of giving priority to mystery over mastery..."

"Its said that if the mastery of vortexes are not accomplished, false reality comes in the form of prophetic speech, strange visions, convulsions, speaking in tongues, quaking, shaking, spinning, jumping, emotional fits..." I'm sorry but this is not correct, to put it mildly...if you go to the Kalahari, you'll meet "full cooked" medicine people that quake, shake...once a qi gong teacher went to meet them..they were so happy to meet a fellow practitioner...when in the n/om, this guy flew back to the ground, because of the intensity of Qi of the Bushmen... There's a big prejudice against the spontaneous expression of Qi in the West...and in the East... ; )

Hi everyone, I've learnt the form and am doing it morning/night, instantly in love with it. Stunning. I remember that somebody mentioned a recommendation to practice it 4 times a day...anyone, some feedback about this...? many thanks!

very interesting... Series 1 * Part 1: The Maya 2012 ~ Is it Relevant?: Series 1 * Part 2: The Transformation of Earth ~ The Newer New Order: Series 1 * Part 3: Protests in the Age of Aquarius: http://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/

Hi Dear "Chikuneros" (as we - the Spaniard Sevillian Qi Gong pracititioners - used to call each other affectionate way), I discovered recently that the Mojo Doctor has some seriously heart-opening audio offerings in his website. I thought it was fair to share it with those who could resonate (pun intended) with this ecstatic mojo... ; ) A Big Qi Hug, Uli "I had a personal experience . . . Brad placed one of his hands on my upper back and the other opposite on my upper chest. He began to shake vigorously and apparently involuntarily throughout his entire body. His face, shoulders, torso, and feet were vibrating in some invisible power, like a wave that was continuously cresting in his body and crashing and rippling in his fingertips. I felt the trembling power pass through me . . . While receiving this beautiful 'gift,' I was transported to the Kalahari . . . I was in Africa as truly as if I had opened my eyes and found myself physically there." KENNETH COHEN, author of The Way of Qigong: The Art and Science of Chinese Energy Healing "Welcome to the spiritual classrooms. Find yourself in a praise house, mojo clinic, spiritual spa, ecstatic church, kundalini musical, chi cabaret, life force theatre, holy ghost party, New Orleans second line, and university of God's transformative love. We joyfully present teachings from the spiritual classrooms. They are offered as a gift to you." http://mojodoctors.com/spiritualclassrooms.php

great article "Strong spiritual elders talk this way. They can smell another spiritually developed person, while seeing their light and hearing their song... When all the senses are dancing well together, you also pay less attention to one being developed over the other or any dissociation that encourages you to say you are seeing sounds or feeling shapes... You are experiencing everything at once with no need to distinguish. The highest spiritual experiences feel, see, hear, taste, and smell at the same time wihout conscious differentiation. It is synesthesia with no conscious narration about it being synesthesia. No distinction. Only whole experience." "Bushmen don't talk about synesthesia per se, he explains. They don't use that word. "They talk about 'kia,' becoming awake. In this heightened awareness they say they get 'second eyes, second ears'... Now they see what they sing or feel all the other synesthetic combos. Hearing the sounds may drive the visionary experiences. Songs become called 'lines' or 'ropes' that take you somewhere. Scholars, especially David Lewis Williams, have compared these experiences to a general set of entopics (simple geometric shapes) produced in hallucination, whether inspired by meditation, psychotropics, or madness. Here brain malfunction is emphasized as the inventor of hallucinations. It is arguably better to see the entopics as driven by sensory-motor coordinations that are always present, but habitually ignored. Neurologically, Maturana and Varela argue there is no difference between an everyday perception and a hallucination because of the closed organization of our neurological dance. All this discussion leads to the radical constructivist notion that we actively participate in constructing our experience (drawing the distinctions) and this includes synesthesia." http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/tasting-the-universe/201202/the-shamanic-synesthesia-the-kalahari-bushmen

Highly recommended. SOVATSKY, STUART. Words from the soul: Time, East/West spirituality and psychotherapeutic narrative. Albany, NY: State university of New York Press, 1998.$59.95 cloth; $19.95 paper; 241 pp. In this pioneering interdisciplinary book, which integrates in-depth existential andanalytic philosophies and transpersonal psychology with the developmental theory of kundalini yoga, Sovatsky draws from decades of kundalini yoga practice, 28 years directing Lee Sanella's Kundalini Clinic for Counseling and Research (the world's first spiritual emergence service), and 10 years of social work. More interestingly ,the book abounds with stylistic experiments capable of inducing a personal transformation in the reader during the very process of reading the book. The book's reformulation of the psyche as a reunification of ego and superego offers a new and clearly "spiritual" vision of the therapeutic process grounded in the unrelenting impermanence of now, now, now (known in Buddhism as anicca). After examining the limitations of past-oriented psychotherapies, Dr. Sovatsky discusses the fallacies of many largely taken-for-granted therapeutic assumptions, as well as corresponding linguistic devices used in therapist-client interaction, including the metaphors of "depth" and "shadow" and commonly used terms such as "needs," "depression," "anger," and "self." He follows this critique with a global revisioning of psychopathology as entirely a matter of "spiritual emergence-struggles with our existential situatedness in time-passage and with the soul's variable powers of faith, gratitude, longing, forgiveness, contrition, and, most centrally, with awe. Awe, he muses, might be a better term for human sentience than "consciousness, "for it retains a hint of the emotionality of truly lived consciousness and, thereby, a heart-filled sentience. Thus, increases in consciousness entail increases in awe, a mood closely related to fear and even terror and thus prone to confusions that can lead to panic, anxiety, and dissociation. The book goes on to offer an alternative clinical language. For example, what mightbe called "anger" by a conventional therapist, the soteriological (soul-focused) therapistmight see as "frustrated hopefulness." Psychosis might be renamed "overwhelmingawe of the infinite." Depression might be seen as "frustrated longing."Such soteriological renaming begins the transmutation of "psychopathologies" intomatters of great spiritual import. These sentiments emerge as the "light" hidden within "the shadow" of pathology; as each person's struggle toward balanced, harmonious,and mentally healthy life (called in yoga santosham or sattva). As the curative value of such positivity is established, the author reorients the therapeuticprocess toward such simple matters as giving and receiving love, confidence(faith), and happiness-an almost forbidden word in the clinical vocabulary-and eschews the more abstract and moot issues of "self-restoration" or "individuation." What surfaces as profound and perhaps rescues this positivity from superficiality or mere preaching is Sovatsky's concern with impermanence and with the elusiveness of "name and form." These temporal and linguistic focii are clarified with references from Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach (arguably the first transpersonal psychologist), Wittgenstein, Whitman, Rilke, and Buddhist and yogic doctrine. Furthermore, the book is filled with clinical vignettes that bring the theory to life bymapping it onto the fleeting phenomenology of blushes and tremors of newlyembodied hope, faith, shared longing, and so on.The poetic yet precise prose of the book is ready for contemplative "consumption" similar to the Lexio Divina or the internalizations via Buddhist koan practice. A multidimensional philosophical fabric is thus woven into the units of meaning, aiming to foster in the reader the same awe-filled states of consciousness that the text describes.Thus, the book's intentionally run-on sentences, typographic experiments, and linguistic deconstructions can put off the too-casual reader. The effort required, what Wittgenstein called "perspicuity," is matched by what can be attainment through such effort: a freedom within the realm of names and forms, known within "real" or "living" time. The awakening process is right here, available now, while reading this review. The book also discusses many critical but little known bodily manifestations of kundalini (e.g., urdhva-retas, khechari, shambavi, and unmani mudras) and raises the transpersonal discourse on this topic to a new level of yogic authenticity. For kundalini is too often shallowly associated with personal empowerment, energy manipulations of chakras, and hyperdramatic states of "spiritual emergency." Thus, the depth of Shakta philosophy is not fully known in the West: the spiritual potential of the glands, fluids, and tissues of the body as "precipitates of temporality," as the"ensouling" of the body, along the meditative path. Sovatsky thus urges that kundalini"awakening" be renamed the "postgenital puberty" of the neuroendocrine system in respect for the depth of its maturational effects upon one's identity sense, glandular functioning, love sense, and sense of life-purpose. Examining psychopathology through the combined filter of phenomenology and kundalini yoga, the author postulates that resistance to the passage of time described by Nietzsche as the "spirit of revenge" is the ultimate form of psychopathology. Sovatsky develops the first transpersonal interpretation of suicidality-of trying to "end" time-by employing a Wittgensteinian analysis of suicidal thoughts. Impermanence proves to be both the "cure" and the "problem." 0. Luchakova. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2001, Vol. 33, No. 1

You are welcome. Lorin's translation is a labor of love...a sadhana in itself...

Best revision to decades of pompous Victorian megalomania: With It" Magic A few years back I was a presenter at a conference on the Western Magical Tradition held at the Findhorn Foundation Community in northern Scotland. Both practitioners and scholars of various forms of magic came from all over Europe and North America to attend. Like so many conferences in which there are more speakers than anyone knows quite what to do with, the afternoons were taken up with panels in which five or six presenters are jammed together and given a few nanoseconds each to present the breadth and depth of their knowledge before being exposed to questions. As you can tell, though I've both been on and seen some very good panels, I'm not fond of the form. At this conference, one afternoon panel provided a bit of unexpected drama, though I imagine not in a way the organizers appreciated. It was a panel for which the theme was "What is magic?" As I recall, there were four or five panelists, and the first speaker was a man who had written a beginner's book on magic and spirituality. His definition was that magic was very simple, a kind of "playing with energies" that everyone could do. This went uncontested until the last panelist had his turn to speak. He was a well-known and respected author of many books on magic, as well as a competent practitioner. He had been quite visibly restraining himself from saying something until his turn came, but then he practically leaped out of his chair in agitation and said, "Magic most certainly is NOT playing with energies!" Then, shaking his finger at the first panelist, he proceeded to verbally demolish him, stating that magic was anything but simple, and that it was a deep and profound discipline that was not for everyone. He let it be known in no uncertain terms that his fellow panelist had no business speaking in this conference if he was going to spout drivel. This in turn led to a shouting match between the two which eventually led to the organizers' coming on stage and shutting the whole thing down. I hadn't realized till then how much fun a conference of magicians could be! I have to admit, though, that even after that, the definition of magic remains elusive to me. The word magic is used loosely in a number of different ways and contexts, from the excitement and wonder of a romantic evening to stage illusions to the profound spiritual disciplines of alchemy and hermeticism. If I say I'm a magician, then just exactly how am I describing myself? What really is magic? Perhaps behind the disciplines and the rituals, the techniques and procedures, it does come down to a play of energies innate in all of us, though now I might think twice before saying so on a panel! I once had a conversation with a non-physical being to whom I asked this question of the nature of magic. He seemed puzzled and asked me what I was talking about. So I explained to him what I had in mind and he said, "Oh, you mean life!" Another being was more helpful, but only just. "When you pick up a glass of water," he said, "for you it's simply an act of will. You wish the water and your body responds by picking up the glass. It seems instantaneous to you. But at the level of your cells, a great deal more goes on in the form of energy exchanges and molecular alterations, all of which you don't experience. What you call magic, with your rituals and correspondences, is to us equivalent to these molecular activities at a cellular level whereas what we call magic--the magic of the soul, if you wish--is like the direct experience of will and its consequences. We will and it is done." Nice trick when you can do it. At the heart of what this being was saying was relationship between two states for which will was a bridge. In his case, the bridge was direct, but in our case, the relationship or connections needed to be built up between ourselves and the object of the magic, hence the use of ritual or correspondences. The image was like the difference between teleporting directly between San Francisco and New York on the one hand and traveling from one city to the other through a series of connecting railway links. His point was that as we were able to form deeper and better connections or relationships, our magic would change. It was a matter of the wholeness in us matching the wholeness of the cosmos. Thinking of magic as relationship and connection has been helpful to me, more helpful than thinking of it as ritual or alchemical processes on the one hand or playing with energies on the other. More precisely, it gives me a starting point in thinking about magic and the making of magic. I can think of it, for instance, not simply as the use of the will to produce effects in the world but as the forming of relationships or connections co-creatively with the world that have consequences, hopefully desired ones. Why is this important? Because I believe as human beings we need to move to a partnership model of our relationship with the rest of creation, not simply for moral or spiritual reasons but because it works better. It is closer to the truth of things. If I think of magic as the projection and imposition of my will upon the world, whether through the astral light or the etheric plane or some other intermediate dimension, I am acting as a separate agent. I am not really engaging the world. I am acting upon it but not with it. I am making links through correspondences and rituals, but I am not making wholeness. I am not participating. In the end, whatever the success of my magical operation, the world and I remain separate. We remain strangers to each other. Whatever magic is or can become, I believe it calls us to be not just in the world, or even less to have power over the world, but to be with the world in spirit and in wholeness. It is a "with-it" magic. ~David Spangler *** "Environmental magic": "...the traditional concepts of Faery and UnderWorld magic are reassessed for the 21st century, wherein Earth Healing is the task before all members of the Threefold Alliance of Human, Faery, and Living Creature" http://www.rjstewart.net/well-of-light.htm "The Sphere of Art is the result of a lifetime of dedicated sacromagical work in the Western esoteric spiritual traditions." http://www.rjstewart.net/the-sphere-of-art-II.htm

my favorite version: gorgeous, juicyly devotional, alive... The Radiance Sutras 112 Tantra Yoga Teachings For Opening to the Divine in Everyday Life A new version of the vijnana bhairava tantra by Lorin Roche http://www.lorinroche.com/radiancesutras/radiance/sutras1992.html

an excellent workout to expand your "reality tunnel"... http://www.verticalpool.com/8circuitbrain.html

Loka 2 A Journal From Naropa Institute Edited by Rick Fields NONDUAL POLYTHEISTIC PLURALISM By Lex Hixon The deity Manjusri appeared in dreamvision to the great Buddhist teacher Atisa, revealing to him that the school of prasangika madhyamika contained the fullest expression of truth. This is a good example of the peculiar functioning of tantric, or nondual, theism: the deity appears and reveals a truth in which all concept of deity is undercut. Due in some measure to the vigor of Atisa (and the grace of Manjusri), the prasangika madhyamika became the universal basis of Tibetan Buddhism. One could translate prasangika as "avoidance" - the avoidance of assertion through the discovery of the void or non-binding nature of any particular assertion. Leaving aside the fact that followers of the prasangika madhyamika often become strangely assertive, the prasangika approach provides a void basis for the free pluralism of tantric theistic practice. When there can be no binding system of assertions, there is no limit to the number and nature of revelatory deities which can flourish in emptiness without holding rival ontological claims; the function of these deities, which are nonentities, is to reveal the unbound, free-form nature of all form, to reveal truth. The vajrayana, or "way of tantra," is theistic and pluralistic. Theism and pluralism are the two issues we want to discuss briefly. Among the forms of theism, tantric theism is indeed somewhat unconventional because it springs out of the nondual insight which clearly recognizes no differences in essence between worshipper and worshipped. But it is not merely a provisional theism, cleverly designed to destroy itself, because the deities do not become obsolete to enlightened practitioners. Atisa did not consider Manjusri simply as his own mind revealing to him the truth of prasangika madhyamika. Manjusri is undoubtedly buddha-mind, but so is the Crab Nebula, and as no astronomer considers this giant cluster of stars a fiction or projection of his own mind, in the same sense, no tantric practitioner considers his chosen deity a fiction or projection of his own mind. Actually, it is the deities who project us, rather than we who project the deities. Also, the tantric practitioner does not seek to merge with the deity in a monistic sense. There is a proud exhilaration of nonduality of essence between practitioner and deity, but the reverential relationship with the deity is maintained and deepened. The deity is not a cardboard container for the nectar of nondual insight or bliss-void, to be thrown away after the nectar is consumed. The deity is a permanent expression of insight, emptiness, and bliss. Actually, it is the practitioner who is a cardboard container, whose body and mind are eventually thrown away in death. The tantric experience of theistic relationship in the minds of nonduality is perhaps best expressed by the symbol of sexual union. The playful twoness is an essential expression of the nondual bliss. But the image of biological human sexuality is not entirely apt because it brings together two elements, the male and the female, into ecstatic union, whereas the Great Bliss of tantra is not a joining together but the discovery of an innate, natural nonduality which playfully projects from itself the elements of male and female, worshipper and worshipped. The play does not create the nonduality; the nonduality generates the play. Theism is the play between worshipper and worshipped, seeker and sought; many spiritual traditions accept the imagery of lover and beloved - though often not in the overtly sexual mode - as the most accurate description of the play. For advanced practitioners, this play deepens and intensifies. What becomes realized cannot be put into words. To state it as a philosophical doctrine of nondualism, qualified nondualism, or dualism, and then to argue about it, is somewhat beside the point. We can only say that intimacy intensifies to the point of identity, steps back to enjoy itself, and then reintensifies in a kind of endless sexual rhythm. This structure and rhythm can be discerned even in such an overtly nontheistic atmosphere as zen koan practice. The zen master Hakuin had five ecstatic great enlightenment experiences in this loveplay with the truth. Even in the absence of a formal deity, the ecstatic spiritual play which is theism manifests itself, not abstractly through concepts, but concretely as divine-human energies. The guru, lama, roshi or tzaddik often takes the place of a transcendent deity-form as the beloved. All worshippers or seekers (those of Dionysus, Christ, Kali, Allah, Bodhi, Brahman, Tao, Torah and on and on) are channels for the theistic playfulness of the truth, which is itself void of structure, yet full of energy. This brings us to the issue of tantric pluralism. Countless sadhanas or formal worship of deities are recorded side by side in the Buddhist sadhanamala, or "garland of sadhanas." There is no sense that the practice of one deity is fundamentally superior or contradictory to that of another, yet at the same time, there is a fierce mood of total dedication of one's energy to the particular sadhana in which one is engaged. The fullness and accuracy of practice is considered a life-and-death matter; partial and casual experimentation with several sadhanas, serially or simultaneously, would be unthinkable for the serious tantric practitioner. Thus tantric pluralism is very far from the uninformed, unprepared for, uncommitted, and therefore irresponsible experimentation with various spiritual practices which are coming into fashion in the West today as a kind of cross-cultural theater of religious liberalism. But distortions of the pluralistic approach should not blind us to its essential truth. Tantric pluralism is based on the prasangika madhyamika: if no formulation of the Real is accepted as accurate (simply because of its very nature as formula), then countless formulations can be freely allowed to exist side by side as vehicles for the awakening to the Real. One does not awaken to the non-formulatability of the Real by simply and abstractly contemplating the assertion of its non-formulatability (which is itself nothing but another formulation). One realizes nonformulatability concretely by penetrating deeper and deeper into one or more particular formulations, by living them with total intensity. Why not regard all the authentic spiritual traditions of the planet as a sadhanamala, a gigantic garland of sadhanas? Each of these sadhanas, when undertaken with total dedication and thorough preparation, leads to an overtly or covertly nondual intimacy with a particular mode of playfulness, energy-current, or deity-form of reality itself, if one has the courage and strength to pursue the sadhana to its root or to surrender to it with complete abandon, rather than adopting the practice in a mild, conventional manner. Sadhanas are like children. One can have several children, fully loving and nurturing each one; in fact, an only-child does not always prosper psychologically. But here we must point out a common error in the understanding of spiritual pluralism. Religious traditions do not "say the same thing in different languages." They each say something unique. Nor do the spiritual exercises of the various traditions "lead to the same ultimate experience." Enlightened persons from different streams of spiritual practice do not readily agree on the nature of realization. Each enlightenment is a unique flowering of truth. Pluralism goes right down to the root; it is radical pluralism. All spiritual practices are independent currents or tides in one planetary ocean. The Gulf Stream is not equivalent to or interchangeable with some current in the Indian Ocean or some tide along the coast of Japan. Because of the tremendous development of planetary communications, radical spiritual pluralism is emerging now for the first time in the history of human civilizations as a concrete cultural possibility. But if it emerges simply on the cultural plane, it becomes merely a form of diplomacy or theater, not a transforming realization of nonduality. Pluralism must discover its own spiritual authenticity, and this authenticitv is available through the prasangika madhyarru:ka and the practice of tantra (but not exclusivelv there; the potentiality for it exists in each spiritual current). The fact that Indian culture has provided useful initial modes for spiritual pluralism can be seen as a confirmation of the potency of tantric pluralism, because, as Trungpa Rinpoche and other tantric practitioners and scholars have observed, there is little spiritual practice on the Indian subcontinent which has not been subtly imbued with tantric influences. On the Indian subcontinent religious paths are indeed regarded as a sadhanamala, although bitter quarreling among adherents of the various sects is also prevalent. We have to carry this attitude of the garland of sadhanas further and develop it more consciously, dissolving the idea that Christianity and Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism are solid, mutually exclusive entities; religions are not solid entities, any more than cultures or nations are. When the nondual insight into emptiness has revealed the void, non-obstructing nature of all categories, then various cultural, philosophical, and religious forms can stay in play, now transparent and therefore free from mutual antagonism. The countless deity-forms are not to be discarded after they are discovered to be innately transparent to the formless truth. A harmonious polycultural world-view can be created with these transparent forms - a polytheism which is nondual. This is the vajra path as it manifests in the planetary age, moving in new cultural directions with the same nondual insight and with the same deities, such as the marvelous Mahakala-Mahakali, who appear revealing a truth in which various spiritual traditions flourish even as the very concept of separate traditions is undercut. Loka 2 A Journal From Naropa Institute Edited by Rick Fields Published by Anchor/Doubleday 1976 ISBN:0-365-12046-x http://www.lexhixon.org/simplesite/simplefrm.html

Yes, you might want to read/listen Jorge Ferrer: http://integral-options.blogspot.com/2011/05/jorge-ferrer-phd-transpersonal.html Now: where to put Ramakrishna...? Kabir...? Were they "Abrahamic","Dharmic", both...? How to classify the growing numbers of mystics that practice a "garland of sadhanas" (Lex Hixon's term): f. e. Vajrayana/Mystical Christianity/Shamanism...are they "Abrahamic", "Dharmic"..both...? Just open questions to ponder us all... ; )