三江源

this one! this is the one that happens.

oops. the essential question of yours Hagar - how pure is our understanding of what happens in cultivation - my hunch is we dont have any understanding... we have no perspective. we are the characters on the page. we feel the feelings and the effects, is all.

Hagar, yes. Your elaboration. I have a response! When I was with Dirk Oellibrandt, I experienced that there was no wall in my head when I was communicating with him. words fell out in a jumble, straight from my feelings and experience. I literally had no idea if I was objectively quite coherent. He would receive what I said ( not just hear it ) and say "you transmit that very well." I was told the other day by someone that when I spoke to Dirk in a wider group, others were non plussed by my irrelevance to what they believed to be the current topic. I felt I was utterly on topic and so did Dirk.. Others asked us "what is it with you two? were you together in a previous life?" I dont know if you know Dirk. But you perhaps know that he is a very gifted healer who can feel and sense what most of us dont. Therefore it is possible to convey all manner of things to him, with the total artwork that one can create through heart pulsations, throat openings, sexual arousal, shoulder tension... anythng and everything.. I do believe and know how much is usually lost in translation. And I think that the example of Dirk is a light that points the way to a different kind of communication. A more whole person telling and receiving. Perhaps it is a lost art amongst adults. Mothers have it with their babies, ideally. I could, btw, also receive information from Dirk without him verbalising it. So I think... I dont see any other thought is possible.. we are living with degraded communication habits. We lose contact immediately, when we try to use our usual communication techniques. We have the cheap scart leads.

Hagar, I like your posts too, and it's a good conversation that you've started. I'm going to unravel some thoughts, so bear with me. Or skip this post if you feel particularly yang. For myself, I am a naturally reticent person and not a thinking type. Therefore it is relatively easy for me to neither speak about what I experience nor intellectualise it. Being naturally reticent is either because of my sun in the 12th house and my moon in pisces ( ie my fate) or because I have been habitually disheartened in childhood by the experience of my reality being met with derision or confusion. My regression experiences suggest that I knew from infancy to keep quiet if I wanted to pass muster. One of the things I am aware of as a knock on effect of what I have described is that I lack self assessment skills. I dont know how much I know. I get feedback from the world on how much I know.. but it is received through a dark glassly as it were, because it is not a felt experience... I am not conscious of myself. So.. what I am coming to, is that I think talking about one's experiences and mythologising them is part of Being In The World, part of contributing in a yang way, to our verbal tradition, our thinking tradition.Our tradition of consciousness. Of Logos. I always consider this issue, when I am around Michael Winn, who is masterly at describing experiences and extrapolating from them. And people benefit a lot from that. The feminine is more secret, and yields up it's secrets as a process.. sometimes. If we only had the Yang style, we might be lacking depth, lacking roots deep in the soil of our psyche and soil. If we lived the Yin way... we would be how these traditions used to be : secret and hard won. So I think we have to consider this issue of Self -Talk and Self -Think, fom the point of view of our fate/astrology (the placement of our mercury, for example), our gender, the yang culture in which we live, and of our own personal balance of yin/yang. It would be a Yin practice, for a man, to sit with his experience in his belly and cook it inside.

I think the myth lies in the unspoken belief that the time frame of the path is knowable. a spit second for those unknowingly on the brink. for others A lifetime.. for others many lifetimes...

Very interesting and difficult, isnt it Dreamingawake? I agree with you.. it is a challenging issue. I was listening to a Byron Katie talk - and this issue came up... and she was very clear in the face of opposition that everything is perfect...... that is to say that, quite simply, everything is as it should be. "How do we know this"? she asks. The answer: "because it is happening".... She has a belief and I think a felt experience that everything is auspicious. She also takes the long view that each human is here to live and to die and it doesnt entirely matter when we die or how, as death is part of the deal and, really... everything is auspicious.... She also puts forward the idea that it is a concept that we have, that suffering is a bad thing, and that we shouldnt suffer.. and so she asks "Do we really know that we shouldnt suffer? Is it really true?" Her idea being that it is our thoughts and beliefs that make us suffer. And of course if you practise EFT you will know how much that is true. So in the instance you give of a guy beating up a child.... I think we go and challenge the guy and ask him "How do you know it is your job to kill this child? Is it your right? How do you know that is really true??" ...and we would find he is beating the child because the child is displeasing him. And we would find that at the root of his displeasure is his lack of belief that everything is auspicious.... So it seems, that if we all felt and believed that everything is auspicious.. then we would not be killing one another at all. And so it enlightenment that we need to spread.. rather than justice. Interesting, huh?

Hi ThisLife. Thankyou for thanking me, and thankyou too. Thankyou for the thought provokingness you have initiated. What I can say is only this : taoist practises have led me to experience that there is no 'ugliness' and no place 'better' than the other. This is when practises are being adhered to, and the results are being experienced. It is a very fortunate state to achieve and it is achievable. Taoism for me is not so much something that I think about, rather something that I live through daily integrated practice. It is perfectly possible to be moved to a state of awe or a state of cosmic bliss by contemplating a pile of shit. This is simply the case... if your practises are working, then differentiation is a mind game. I am, like everyone on the planet, all too fully aware of and ensconced in the dualisms that we live with, and like everyone else on the planet, from my usual ego point of view I prefer 'nice places' and of course I love mountains, and as I said, I crave them : they refresh the eyes and soul. That is clear to all. Dragons are everywhere. The shift from without created mountains in the first place.... the shift from within : imagine what that creates. Love to you all. Lovely thread.

You are mixing theory up with reality. The word/concept/experience/trap of ' illusion' does not belong to Zen. The flow of nature is in all things. The source is us and all around us. Your presumptuous statement that excess yang is deluding me for sure...

There isnt such a thing as "ugliness", actually, from the point of view of the tao. That very judgment is a sign of dwelling in the illusion of being split from the One.

ha, the face of the tao is all other things too. I dont think you can choose only the heroic images ...

I love mountains too, and crave them. I dont however, feel that I do so for the same reasons that the author outlines. I feel that a person, and of course a person who practises meditation and energy work, can get a sense of the earth and its history and our place on it from walking down a crowded street. From an urban stream. From a city river. From a peeled billboard. From the sight of someone asleep in a cardboard box in a subway. I think a mountain is also a dragon. This is why Taoists love mountains. Mountains offer a lot, and there is a vibrational level to mountain energy/spirit which is compatible with Taoists. That, and the purity of the air. Jungles are very wonderful too, and offer a huge amount. But they are not dragons of the same element and intention. Possibly a tropical jungle is actually the opposite of a computer. If one were interested in opposites.

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Self knowledge is integral to Mantak Chia's practices, and Taoist practises in general. It isnt possible to get a deep relationship with the hun and the po, the shen, the liver heat, the actions of the kidneys and the adrenals.. etc etc.. without self knowledge ensuing/ unfolding.

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Yes, me too. I went to a course by Juliet Sharman - Burke to learn about it from her. And I get my chart done by Liz Greene, too. I get The HIerophant a lot....... and ten of swords.. Ian has created a tarot reading site which is very good. I dont have a link, unfortunately. He used to be a tarot reader..

ha, Stig, that is the tarot deck that I use too, so that is the very image evoked in my head by this thread.

Hi Rookie. Interesting that you mention manifestation, because I was thinking of that in my previous posts. I dont believe that hope is an active enough virtue to be transformative enough to efffect change. I wonder what the active ingredients in prayer are, for it to be a prayer which effects change.... I dont think it is faith alone. I think the key to effective prayer - if I can speak in such a utilitarian way ! - is devotion. Devotion which purifies the heart and soul and allows an alignment between self and cosmos, in that moment or flow. Devotion is active and a practise in itself. With regard to the need for a sense of hope once one has children. Again I feel a little differently about that. I feel I have a sense of trust, instead. Thanks Stig, for this chance to think closely about what it is we are doing or not doing, and what affects it has. Thanks Rookie, also, for your kind wishes, they are most appreciated. xxx cat

I dont agree that hope inevitably includes a feeling of expectation. I may hope to fall in love deeply again, but I dont hold an expectation that I will. I hope for a beautiful summer, but no expectations will be dashed if it doesnt materialise. Hence "I hope so" and "I expect so" have different implications.

Hope is not the same as expectation. Expectation is active. To be without hope is to despair.. which is a sin, since to despair equals a denial of god. Hope therefore is a state of trust, rather than an active state, or a state of will.

what kind of hope? active 'hope' that hangs a wish mid air like a carrot, incentivising us. passive hope that allows us to not do a great deal other than 'hope for the best' and unengagedly *shrug*. hope as a deep and wide sustaining inner feeling of trust in 'everything is auspicious' hope as an escape from assessing reality : an intellectual evasion.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TRUNK!

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absolutely. it's a different world.

we cant make people that annoy us invisible. this is a fact of life.