konchog uma

hahaha its not yours its just an avatar

hahaha i will change the colors you can have the blue one now you can put your big boy pants on and stop frowning! yays!

i am curious as to daoist (or anything else since this is in the general discussion forum) understanding of crystals and stones. when i was a kid i was drawn to them, and i still wear a pouch around my neck with crystals in it. i guess i just resonate with them. does anyone have information about them from a "spiritual" perspective, not so much a "magickal" perspective? cause ive read a lot about crystals and their metaphysical purposes, but i ask because in the intro to fusion of 5 elements, mantak chia said that daoists used crystals to aid their practice as part of external alchemy. "For more than five thousand years, Taoist masters researched and developed various methods to attain such desirable achievements as long life and happiness. Some of the methods were called External Alchemy, and these included the Immortal Pill, magic potions, crystals, crystal essences, flower essences, precious stones, etc. The highest Taoist masters realized external methods offered only limited help while building dependencies on materials that were difficult to come by." does anyone have any leads on information about what these masters did with their crystals? i am curious. thank you! my newest crystal! an amethyst with a nice phantom that my friend dug out of the ground in thunder bay ontario... too bad my phonecam liked the plant in the background better!

i dont think they're mutually exclusive. when i practice "attitude no attitude" or dispassionate acceptance, i am full of love cause im calm and balanced. i think its More unconditional from that place

well thats pretty cool. i have had the privilege to sweat lodge with some indigenous americans but never really talked to them about the spirituality of stones. i have read books from NA perspective, but they say the stones are the intelligence of mother earth that are given to us. in hermetic thought the mineral plane was a plane of consciousness like plant, animal, and human. as you went up the scale, you found beings more capable and less wise. so stones can't do anything but they embody the highest wisdom. for that reason i think its good to cultivate relationship with them as a human. for me they help me get in touch with subtle vibrations and remember that life is strange, i treat them like they are alive, and i talk to them. i dont care if i sound wierd, a person can talk to anything, and if they invoke it right it will respond. you could have a psychic conversation with the chair youre sitting on if you wanted to, its just how the mind works. but annnyway, i just wondered what daoist masters did with crystals... auric healing? meditations? grind it up and drink it? im really curious

oh very yes! i might add parks, especially with wooded trails, and woods in general, for city dwellers. all those places make my energy feel expansive and connected. boxes made of bricks make it feel constricted and distant. i digress

to a dusty hell

i have been taught right behind the teeth to close the small orbit. the soft palette on the top of your mouth is used for drawing symbols and such, and im sure, for other things as well. but thats the only use i have ever put it to. charging the tongue with energy and drawing characters or symbols with light up there is something i found in a daoist book.

thats the spirit! i think that it all ties into one, so you can use the bedroom arts to nourish your spiritual practice. jing to qi, qi to shen and all. besides, when did it ever hurt anyone to understand the arts of love? probly never! (i have reached my quota of absolute statements for the evening... )

check out daniel reid's book "the tao of health sex and longevity" for the good breakdown http://www.slideshare.net/guest80125e8/daniel-reid-the-tao-of-health-sex-and-longevity-300-b-n-texto-foto http://www.amazon.com/Tao-Health-Sex-Longevity-Practical/dp/067164811X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314914314&sr=1-1 used copies on amazon for $1.12... thats awesome

so i just talked to my teacher on the phone, and he didn't want to answer my questions over the phone but we're going for a walk in the woods tomorrow evening. so i will ask him about qi/light and dantiens/chakras, and i will post here tomorrow night. also i am going to check out a qigong class tonight to see if i want to join this school http://www.stillmountaintaichi.com so if i have a chance to ask the teacher anything i will ask him about the middle and upper dantien and how that all works. if he has anything really neat to say i will post that here too. but for NOW i don't have anything to say except that i will say more interesting things later! hahhaha stay tuned

i just wanted to see that again.

yep eben ip it mapes you halk lipe ish you'll know you've attained enlightenment when you stop caring about the funny looks people give you! j/k and poking fun i hope dawei doesnt mind its good advice

that doesnt really negate what i said. and what i said isnt narrow. what i said is that water is more yang than ice in the way of temperature, and more yin than ice in the way of hardness. its just an example that points to a principle. extrapolate. Thats whats worth focusing on, not whether or not you agree with me. i know that warm = yang is simple, but its not narrow because thats not the breadth and depth of my understanding. i was trying to illustrate one point. it was Supposed to be simple hahaha vmarco i see it in my way, you see it in yours. maybe we can talk as long as we aren't trying to convince each other. i was talking about not getting lost in abstractions but seeing things in holistic way. thats all. i don't personally care whether you believe me or not, im not trying to convince you. also "that is meant to be disrespectful"... well thanks, i think i know what you meant, but nice freudian slip! ahhahaah i think that there are probably as many versions of string theory as there are capable physicists. that is to say that when you get to the fundamental levels of reality, things are SOOO basic (yin? yang? oneness?) that they become open to multiple interpretations. so you have yours and i have mine, and thats fine. nothing i said was really meant to negate your interpretations, just to remind you that thinking in dualistic terms leads to mental rigidity, which is very un-dao!

breath and mindfulness are good tools for that. i agree that frustration comes from stress, your mind invents the stress in most cases. you don't have to be sitting with your eyes closed and incense burning to practice breath and mindfulness. maybe next time you feel tense and frustrated, stressed out, you can practice watching your breath and keeping it deep and slow. see if that doesn't help you have some better feelings. it'll give you something to do thats relevant to your cultivation so thats nice. but with practice, you can also make stress go away, or stop it from starting in the first place.

well water is warmer than ice. so thats yang. well, i think your mixing metaphors, trying to bring eve and lilith into a discussion of daoist principles. theres little reason to believe anything in the bible literally, even the first 5 books. lots of metaphor, lots of regurgitation of other culture's mythologies, i don't know if lilith or eve really existed at all, and i'm inclined to stay out of the discussion. i think i already said my contribution with the 'everything is both is some way' bit.

youre welcome

@ sloppy zhang: you make a good case. thanks for the counterpoint. my personal experience with NLP is that a lot of creeps use it. i think bandler and grinder were shysters (although the structure of magic is a good read), and although milton erickson was a true mystery of a genius, those who have been inspired by his work have sometimes gone down a darker path. i don't find (and this is just my personal experience) people who want to use NLP to heal as much as i find people who want to use it to influence others and get what they want. so when someone says "oh i can offer this NLP technique that will help you get Whatever you want!", i automatically cringe. i personally still think what i thought up there, but i am glad you made such a strong case for your views, it is eyeopening to consider the value of what i tend to dismiss. thank you. i will only add that there are a lot of ways to become more assertive and attractive to others, lots of methods to practice and in the end its all about being yourself and true to your own heart which you can't learn in expensive videos and seminars. you can only learn by doing it.

just like cellular division, and daoist cosmology, one divides into two. but nothing stops there. 2 divides into 4, in cells, making a neat little tetrahedron, and in cosmology, adding "both" and "neither" to the mix. 4 divides into 8 and i think the bagua has that covered, and before you know it you have 64 but my point isnt numerological, because it never stops. if you had the time you could find a way of dividing things sensibly into five million parts and classifying them thusly. but you don't. annyway my point is that things don't stop with yin and yang, or with the ideas of both and neither. life is fluid and nothing is binary without being quadriary<sp> and on and on, so all this philosophical debate is nice but... you guys are never gonna figure it out hahahahha

yin and yang are indeed found in all things. i think instead of classifying this thing "yin" and that thing "yang" its more beneficial to say that a thing is yin because _______ and yang because ________. if you are comparing directly water to ice for example, you would say that water is yang to ice's yin, or of course, in some ways, yin to ice's yang (hardness for example). in the case of fire one has a pretty clear yin/yang pair, but in most cases things go both ways. that is to say things always embody both, as you pointed out. i used to look at things and say "oh thats yin" or "oh thats yang" which is good in the beginning... but now if i identify a yinness about something i look then for its yangness. just 2c, a healthy reminder...

@ sloppy zhang: i see your points, i guess to me, its all about outgrowing techniques like that and becoming natural. if a person is sitting with a woman and theyre thinking "now im going to impress her with cocky comedy" or "now its time for this routine" i think there are levels beyond where they are at. i can't speak for every woman who is looking for spiritual consort either, maybe some like em a little NLPish who knows. its a big world. im no expert, what i said in response to immortal4life is just my impression (and experience)

me too! also i officially agree with your take on siddhis. hahahaahha just so you know!

i do that too. "the movement of the way is reversal" i also circulate in both directions at once. but i didn't chime in cause i don't know why i do it either. just for balance i guess.

youre welcome! i don't understand what you meant at the bottom there tho