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Cool. I guess this means that I outta keep my very ancient diesel car - the one with nearly 300K on the clock. It would be a shame to ditch it now and use more resources that have been put into something new. Diesel fuel here is about to shoot up to 4 or 5 bucks. I hope they get this thing going soon. Managed along with permaculture, 3rd worlds might benefit in an astounding way. Thanks for posting this very good news.

Good video, thanks for the link! Well there is this paradigm: "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, it must be a duck." ~ my brother-in-law And this one: "....be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now." ~Rilke Fear or the lack of it, as much as anything, determines a person's actualizing of curiosity and creativity. Curiosity and creativity are not dependent on IQ. But I get his point. For some people every day is an Orange Alert day. Being able to recognize "ducks" is white knuckle survival business and positively not birdwatching. Survival is psychological survival first when all the necessities of materialist consumer society are fully present. However some things, all things, are not at all what they seem...not even close. To find this out or to re-cognize what is found, everything we think we know - all the answers - must first be lost. That seems to be the only place of aliveness, creativity and discovery. For far too many, this is the face of fear itself - not knowing - even for a moment. Actually it is all there really is. "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick (fearful) society." ~J Krishnamurti - ( I added the fearful thing)

Very nice metaphor, thank you.

Korzybski is The Man! Thanks for this! It is also quite an error to anthropomorphize 'humans'.

This is very helpful for me along with your later post and links. My current window into Tao as philosophy and history is limited mostly through the window of the Chan Buddhist masters who recognized the same sublime as Taoists find. Than you very much!

Amen Brother... John of the Cross found, as stated in his words: "Nada, Nada, Nada" which left his question unanswered but infinitely more alive than before. This is integrity, virtue, awakening, spontaneous being, Tao . I am more interested in the best question. Answers are a dime a dozen. They grow like mushrooms on the insentient trunk of my brainstem. They are curious, sometimes beautiful, compellingly narcotic and more often highly poisionous - deadly. Best wishes!

Thanks, nice, poetic. If you are very very lucky, you will have stepped into the Mother Of All Chaos. Once truth loses the unknown of the moment, it is no longer the truth. That is why it must never be spoken. If you can live with chaos, you live with the truth. No points removed for grasping at beauty of the moment. None taken away for finding that you actually don't know anything at all. Hang out there, in the unknowing, in the chaos so that true nature - Buddhist or Taoist or Hindu - can now finally locate you. You will have to turn in your personalized ID card though, because you will not represent anything more concrete than nameless, formless "being". If this is not the Mother Of All Chaos for you, then try to find it in the very moment of other places too - or even the very next moment of unknowing right here. That is where you are authentic, realized, independent and utterly invincible. Uncomfortable sometimes perhaps, if it is the truth, but authentic. Good luck! Nice to see you. I'm new here too.

I sincerely appreciate your thoughts here. Only would like to say that your description of Buddhism is a bit more like the understanding of Thereavada Buddhism. With your permission (I hope), I would like to mention that Mahayana Buddhism - most Buddhism of today - is very much more like Taoism as it has been so deeply influenced by it. There is no authentic desire in Mahayana to escape daily life into a nirvana somewhere else - in fact it is just the opposite. Many Buddhist masters stress the deep appreciation and involvement of everyday life - everyday mind. The "Ten Ox Herding Pictures" of Taoist/Zen lore clearly depict the realized sage having finally returned to the streets and markets of everyday life. This realized sage has an open and generous hand for all he encounters - his mind is at ease and no longer finds any difference between nirvana and samsara or life and death. Life, as it is perceived, is exactly what he wants and he or she is most often indistinguishable from the next person in line at the supermarket. I sense that this is the same spirit of Taoism described as WuWei. (If not, I'd surely like to know!) Like the Taoist master, she knows well what IT is. I don't know exactly what the Taoist master you quoted meant precisely, but It works well enough for me if I understand him to say: "By not having been born in the way you think you have been." Yes, already perfect! There was one of those little trees with branches trained into all manner of distortion just down the street from me. The neighbors called it "FrankenTree". Good luck!

I appreciate your thoughts here for sure. And I agree that we are not ever "free" until the mind is freed from it's white knuckle conceptual grip on whatever symbol or symbolic phrase it has latched onto. I find that the map is never, ever the territory no matter how compelling it first seems. Political (and spiritual) slogans are always a Heads-Up for a moment of mindfulness. It also seems to me that any spiritual slogan that does not, sooner or later, deconstruct itself into mindfulness is most likely just another trap. Take care.

Really enjoyed all your thoughts here...thanks very much!

Hi Everything, If you asking whether the body might live forever - which I doubt you are asking - then I find that I am not this body in any way and so it is not worth thinking about it living forever. I am also not this mind - it is just the registrar of perception of up welling of causes and conditions from beginning-less time and innumerable universes. I don't find that there is a soul with an independent inherent existence either. However, what I do find in direct and also in intuitive experience, is an aware beingness which is alive as a kind of knowing-being and which has never been born and which will never die. In that way, there is a kind of immortality. How would my life be any different in knowing this? Hopefully not different at all because I find that it is in everyday life that there is this knowing as being presence. I don't have to change a thing for this to be the underlying truth of life itself. It is just not a special spiritual thing and yet it is a never ending unfolding of phenomena to be appreciated - even cherished. This is very briefly one Buddhist's view ( with considerable Taoist influence) of the misleading mental concepts of life and death and of the recognition of inexpressible presence as life just as it is. Even stardust is subject to change from unfathomable causes and conditions and because of that, it does not have any inherent existence that lives forever. This body of "mine" is stardust and is the energy of deep space as well. There is no real separation. I find that looking "out there" for clues to immortality is looking in the wrong direction. It is undivided consciousness itself that is unborn and so does not die and which holds all the ten thousand things before they are born into a divided everyday mind - as the Yin/Yang of perception. I do feel all the pain and hunger. All the fear and anger. I do not ever die from any of these. And neither, I am sure, does anyone else. Suffering any of this is entirely optional. Thanks and take care!

Hi Jetsun, .....and thanks for the comments. True that Maharaj and Ramana both died of cancer and you may well have a point about the kind of lifestyle. Would not be the first time either. On the other hand, they were advanced age and were going to die of something - a cold perhaps? Bombay, where Maharaj lived is not exactly the most environmentally conscious place and the Ganges river is (or has been) polluted beyond all imagination. Maybe all that adds up. I love what Maharaj liked to say when he was diagnosed with cancer. He barked: "They accuse me of having a disease!" His comment is both about the unrealized state of allopathic doctors in general and of his own recognition that what is alive is not the body nor does that aliveness - that beingness - constitute what gets 'sick and dies'. He is talking about the illusion of life and death. Or would we accuse the tree in the front yard of having dropped it's leaves too soon? Master LInji stresses this over and over in talking about the true man of no rank going in and out of that lump of red flesh. The Kalahari Shaman Bushmen would hilariously call the doctor's ignorance: "Insulting the meat!" They certainly know where the sapience lies. Best to you.

Ahhhh, Truth. Good one certainly. I am thinking that the truth of another is more important to me than my own truth. I sense that I have to look at what I am calling truth and at who is it that has this truth. And what, after all, is another's truth, to me when it is not something I choose to align or contrast in some way to my own satisfaction? On the good days, I can do that - not align it with my own for comparison. It is a given, in a Buddhist or Taoist context, that whatever I think is truth, has just immediately lost it's life. It has been forever memorialized in cast concrete and sunk to the bottom of the bay. And for me it usually has chains on it which are attached to my own ankle. Truth actually changes from this moment to the next or it is not truth at all. Moral and ethical action, in the moment, is literally a no-brainer. Legislating morality or truth is so very dangerous - even while only doing it in my own mind. When I can manage it, I find another's truth to be a kindly wake-up for awareness itself. It is not as if the thought that is now perceived to be "truth" is Out There somewhere! It is not actually some toreador's red cape. And there are those days I that might charge at everything in sight - those days when I seem to work painfully for someone else. Best wishes

Hi Non, As I see it, at the root of "things" there is no purpose, there is only being. You could say that the Tao just sort of bubbles up as deep wisdom and satisfaction with the way things are - that is until we start looking for purpose. Another metaphor is the stream that flows effortlessly, not resisting boulders and waterfalls but instead just enjoying its "beingness" on the way out to the ocean. To be awakened is to accept and appreciate what is at any given moment - any moment at all. To stop short of this realization is to fall into nihilism which you are describing quite well..."Why can't they just kill themselves then and everything will be "alright"?" To find out how this comes to be is to be able to live with the questions and to love it, rather than needing final solutions and answers. Every sage you care to check into, including Buddha, is saying this. It is said in so many ways but it is the same truth. Wisely negotiating the things that cause suffering, which are always the things we think we know the best, is like a dance and it is one that results in great compassion far beyond any personal reason for living. The Dalai Lama calls it the Art of Life on some older DVD recordings. We cannot know or do any of this except as human. Incredible opportunity here! Just pause....mindfully....at the very first next thing you think you do not like. Only humans can do this. In this very way, consciousness has the opportunity to recognise itself. If there is any purpose to life, this is it. Best wishes.

Thanks Infinity Truth for the links to the shamanic roots of Taoism. Very interesting. My 2 cents while wandering about....harmless, I hope...... I've had a Chan/Zen/Non-Dual practice for several decades now. I always wondered what to do with this physical body - mainstream Buddhism does not have many suggestions at first except to: "Get over it - it is not what you are." I eventually decided to look into Buddhist and Taoist Qigong because for over 26 years I kept bumping into this body and it just seemed to want to be included in the program. So I got some qigong DVDs and looked up one of the local Taoist teachers. Right away I was impressed with the extent of trance induction suggested in order to just first feel the chi. I was immediately reminded of Shamanic practices - and really intrigued now. I've studied NLP under Bandler and Grinder, hypnosis, Ericksonian methods and I know what a trance is - light or deep - and I have witnessed ("caused") a few remarkable things to happen for another's health. And yet, all these years I sat on my meditation cushion tediously exposing all the karmic roots of the limiting hypnotic trance that is culture, language, and the default paradigm. Qigong was such a turnaround from that and I feel very fortunate to be able to still listen to the trance, to recognize it, when desired and to be independent of any kind of conditioning while still deeply hearing the body/universe too. ----NLP is an extremely powerful set of understandings of the way society and culture is a massive trance inducing program. It should be taught beginning in grade school as protection against all manner of social ills - up to and including political tyrants and "Final Solutions." of any kind or magnitude. Unfortunately, once learned, it is just as easy to manipulate people as it is to recognize the manipulation. Shamanic trance has quite a lot in common with the way that NLP works. ---- I'm finding that Qigong is deeply shamanic without a doubt. The recent Chinese Govt has not been exactly friendly to shamanism. So it seems to me that it has found its natural way back into society as "Medical Qigong" and it still has all the shamanic aspects - as they work reasonably well regardless of the hats, horns and drums thought necessary as accessories to the trance. And so too, it comes to the US acceptably dressed as medical qigong alongside some other acceptable names for it. Hopefully it can continue to flower in the west with helpful accessories - beyond just the body and 6 senses - and in a culturally recognizable way. I know I'm looking forward to learning much more about this shamanic root aspect Qigong out the open light. I sense that if in the open light, there will be a more appropriate level of awareness when newcomers engage a teacher and teachers will hopefully be expected to speak about this aspect of the practices. Freedom - Liberation is what is desired here and trance induced without disclosure is only just more imprisonment of the same kind that every society offers. Just speaking about it does not diminish its potency and surely will thin out the charlatans and outright liars. Of course there is science. But science has never ever been separated from it's ground, consciousness, regardless of what the cultural trance insists. Western "medicine" is certainly a science grounded in consciousness and, to me, is about 50% shamanic trance as well. "Medical" Qigong, "Religious" Qigong, Shamanism, Buddhism or Taoism....not getting forever entranced by the words is real freedom. "The reason for a fish-trap is the fish. When the fish is caught the trap may be ignored. The reason for the rabbit snare is the rabbit. When the rabbit is caught the snare may be ignored. The reason for language is an idea to be expressed. When the idea is expressed, the language may be ignored. But where shall I find a man to ignore language, with whom I may be able to converse?" ~ Zhuangzi I like this (Chan/Taoist Buddhist) story too - When Ananda asked Mahakasyapa what the Buddha's transmission was, he answered, "Go and take the banner at the gate down!" Ananda was awakened. It was a tradition to have a banner outside the temple where the Buddha taught. Same thing today in many places. To take the banner down meant to recognize that we actually live, hear, express within and from the place of no words - from the Tao. Resisting this is deluded and often painful. Additionally, it meant the teaching of Heart/Mind is handed down successively by direct original mind-to-original mind transmission. Certificates are meaningless. Chan Master Linji called any such certificates: "Hitching posts for donkeys." There is not one word that may describe the Tao. There are quite a few different ways to point to it though and always including the very words that will eventually be discarded. In this context, the trick is described as not believing, for one moment, what you think you know. UhOhhhh, quite a ramble..... Best to you.

Quotes from: Joseph Rael Shaman Picuris Pueblo, New Mexico, US "The oneness is, actually, the only thing that exists. It is the only reality. And it is nothing. Yet from that nothing comes all that is." "There is a supernatural power that every human being has, that cannot be cultivated by reading and writing. (To cultivate,) We must do something with our physical bodies and natural elements of the land, the fire, water, air, minerals and wood." "We came into this physical form to express an individual, particular vibration or essence." "Ceremonies we do intentionally as ceremony focus our energies on certain acts and lift us powerfully into states of consciousness through which we are literally drinking light." These quotes are from just the first few pages of Rael's book: CEREMONIES OF THE LIVING SPIRIT Enjoy!

Hi, you are too kind, I think and yeah, been lurking a bit. :-) I mean to say that intellect or the never ending thinking mind is like the incessant busy waves on top of the deep still ocean. Ocean is Being without all the discrimination. In this metaphor, the Tao is the deep implacable oceanic source without bounds and as yet without an object of it's 'attention' - "pure potential" some say but I say less than even that. This intuitive - the Tao - is always underneath the intellect. One instant way to find this Tao is to ask yourself a question such as "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" You don't know, cannot know, but there is wonderful non-dual undivided intelligence and intuition intensely present in inexhaustible supply. This is what is actually alive and we miss it again and again. Yeah, that jealous god is such a clear window into delusional invention of self satisfying mythology. Yes? Best wishes!

Amitofo, I'm new to the energy arts and I am interested in learning here. Well, not entirely new to energy arts as I've been an active meditator for roughly 25 years in various methods including abstract painting - last 10 with a Chan/Zen group and have found discursive mind to be quite an energetic mercurial thing - and nothing else. Before that and concurrently as well, I studied the realization of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj and his lineage. I find little difference between him and the Mahayana. Very curious to find how he might be like Daoism. Specifically, I'm interested in Qigong for health reasons. I'll start out looking about for the connections to shamanic trance and practices - the relationship to hypnotism that is the default trance of everyday life. Also looking to find where/how the clear undivided one mind is unobstructed by trance or dualistic striving in Qigong. I describe this as bare consciousness that is present as life itself but which is without an object...is not identified with anything. Chan elders call this, 'Mind that is not based on anything'. What schools of practice, if any, recognize this to the extent that it is the foundation? There is a healer in my family - Southern US, Christian, Caucasian - who is quite the iconoclast and reminds me of Linji. Politics are a lot more like Confucius, but I won't go there. Enjoyed this person for so many years and now beginning to get a sense of what he is up to.....as much as is possible to do so. I have no personal interest in healing except perhaps myself. Not looking for magical thinking or new age dualistic narcissism. Just interested in the question, but not the quick answer to: "What is this?" Well that's a lot, not too much I hope. Any leads to like-minded threads here would be appreciated. Best to you all.

You make perfect sense to me as well. I grew up in the middle of the "Bible Belt" of the US - a fundamentalist and concrete thinking womb of all that is birthed literal and therefore stilborn. At about age 7, I mentioned that I thought I was just like Jesus to my grandmother. I was quite proud of the notion and I instantly got my mouth washed out with soap for my trouble. Fundamentalism is one way of spirituality. At it's best, it starts out from the notion that thinking is the key to finding the inborn spiritual urge. It works in it's way for some people and their description of heaven will be in intellectual terms. When we are lucky , such people are tolerant of other ways of Knowing as Being. When not, they look like those I won't name here as the bots pick up the terms and, well....you know. When a church or a culture is fundamentalist, it is usually threatened by outsiders, by the antichrist or anything else that could upset the cannons of belief. (By the way, when given insufficient justification for telling a lie, for inventing literal truth out of intellect and for repeating one not proved to be true, for believing in the face of evidence to the contrary, the natural tendency is to convince ourselves it must be true. This artificial reinforcement of belief results in serious and painful cognitive dissonance - good that you see through it!) You, me and all others look for liberation from one painful thing or another, and then something else after that, and the mistake is to look around in the personality or in the world of the 6 senses for a better situation. It is thought that by improving something with religious practices that something will bring relief if it can just be improved or brought under control, re-arranged, re-cognised or otherwise willfully manipulated. Feeling crappy about the apparent uselessness of any spiritual manipulation is universal. Eventually nothing at all works. Or if it does, we are asleep, deluded, dead. Jodo Shinshu is very much a faith based religion and it unfortunately becomes a belief base religion depending on who runs the local show and mostly upon whether there is a consciously liberating basis for faith. Faith turned over to belief can enslave for sure. Shin has this tendency because it never forthrightly de-constructs itself into Shunyata - except in terms that are difficult for Westerners - and specifically for Western fundamentalists. Shunyata or emptiness is present in Shin, but is concealed by cultural differences. Disappointed Christians tend to love Shin because it seems so similar and the differences are attractive. With the faith thing, It's kind of a Chicken/egg proposition. There needs to be understanding of experience before authentic faith is realized, otherwise it is only belief. So then in Shin, it requires faith in order to come to understanding of experience - exactly the same understanding that is critical for faith. Hmmmmmmm Too often, but not always, some kind of feel-good belief is substituted for real wisdom, as is typical of most people in any religion. It is almost a cliche now but it is still true that the Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao. This is not the intellect working here but it is an intuitive mind that has reached the end of thinking. It is now mind that is Knowing as Being. It has no objects of knowledge. The Tao is what recognizes itself as the Tao. It is thought to be emptiness that is conscious or aware of itself and which appears in form as everyday life. (Mention that to your old pastor and then cool-ly watch his reaction ;-)) There is nothing at all to believe here. It is only to be known in re-cognizing itself. Taoist meditation is one path to this - just please don't get stuck in the quiet, cool, still emptiness as it is also just another dead end. Bring it back to the "world" as the phenomenal evidence of this evidence, knowing itself, is as the you experiencing it! You get to be "God" but certainly not the Abrahamic one. Actually you have no choice - right now this very moment. Buddhist paths are good too. About belief, Chan master Linji said: "Those who leave attachments (mental formations such as religious belief) must then master real, true perception to distinguish the enlightened (states of mind) from the obsessed, the genuine from the artificial, the unregenerate priest from the sage. If you can make these disbarments you can be said to have really left dependency. Professional clergy...cannot be really said to be independent. If you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, you are still bobbing in the ocean of delusion." It is the ordinary that is true mind as itself. There is nothing else somewhere outside just this. It is you looking yourself in the face, so to speak. The fencing-in that you feel is universal. Buddha calls it suffering but it is also just dis-ease or ill ease or even deep dissatisfaction. To come to recognize that in everyday perception is the evidence of what we are as Knowing-Being. it can be shocking too. Blood on the butcher shop floor - Knowing-Being. War in Iraq - Knowing-Being. Efforts to stop the war in Iraq - Knowing-Being. Daosit and Buddhist meditation are authentic paths to discover this for yourself but they should not be used to escape all that knowing being has in everyday life. To do that, to try to escape is just one more religion with rules and abuses of the Tao. Don't stop until you get to the end - the end of you as personality. Don't settle for a philosophy or belief, practice or even faith that will not happily de-construct itself. Very best wishes. edited: Linji I mentioned and all other Buddhist Chan masters were deeply influenced by Daoist consciousness. It is not something diluted when the source is found by finding itself. Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christianity - all are the same Knowing as Being at the incomprehensible awakened root of it.

We can come to the direct intuition/knowing of this nothingness or emptiness that is empty of even itself. As it is the nondual state of being-ness, it is not recognizable by the discursive mind. It only recognizes itself as itself. Looking directly for it is like trying to look yourself in the eye or to shake your own right hand with your right hand. Not possible. Not possible because it is already what you are. OK with me to call it God or god...whatever..... Naming it does no good and does not help because naming and believing in it is not ever it. If we find first, in meditation and then eventually in everyday experience consciousness, that all phenomena are empty phenomena, we have begun. As phenomena, they are real phenomenal form - including thinking and other mental stuff. (It is all mind anyway...) However they are empty of anything whatsoever - they have no inherent existence at all. They are exactly the emptiness itself. Impossibly they are both form and emptiness and we can, and cannot, know this. When this is recognized, it is recognized by itself, as Knowing Being. This is the thing called prajna in Buddhist practice. It is the fusion or the synthesis of emptiness and form in everyday life 'right in front of us'. This is why an old Chan master says: "Not knowing is most intimate." When the discursive mind is not knowing something, it is the Knowing Being. The old, now almost extinct, tradition of Christian contemplation is about just this Knowing Being. Also, the Christian Gnostic Gospels are clearly describing Christ as the one consciousness. The Advaita Vedanta taught by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj and by Kashmir Shaivism is close as well. There are some authentic paths today, but any path that requires belief of any kind or any path that does not de-construct itself is not the path to go "all the way." Faith fits in here because it is different from belief. Faith is based in experience - experience gained in meditation and the observation of the phenomenal world which is always referring back to consciousnes but not back or out to anything else. Belief is based on rumor, gossip, myth...on everything that is always subject to change and is always changing. Belief is the barrier that prevents direct experience of what IS at any given moment. Belief is what we are doing when we hit the wall. There is a clear graphic description of this nothingness or void or God that is the source of everything. Besides the Tao symbol as a graphic, the Zen Buddhist Enso - that empty circle that is drawn boldly and intuitively with the inkbrush - expresses the nothing from which come all things, "The Ten Thousand Things" with direct influence from Daoism. Nice topic! Best wishes