Yoda

LOL I'll second the motion. Yoda

Seriously, if my schedule permitted it, I would be honored to go. I would learn a tremendous amount. We definitely need a taobum or two in the mix, but it looks like we've got three all lined up. That's extremely impressive!! I hope you all share your experiences! I don't know how I feel about the whole subsidizing thing... I think that paying for the teaching is often an important part of the transmission process, plus if we should subsidize a taobum it should be the first taobum who actually made the commitment to go as that individual is our best, most serious representative. Regardless, it's a cool project. If we were to subsidize someone along the lines being proposed, I would rank candidates along the lines of volubility and since I'm out of the running (I'm too busy posting things), Cam is next in line with over 2,200 posts. All that hard work should be rewarded with a trip to China. With the exception of SeanD, I don't think the taobums will donate enough jet fuel to clear the border, so this project is really just for a little spiritual boost. Yoda

Sean, That is a good idea... could be the next big Youtube saga! It is tempting. Just one hitch... if the immortals were a bit iffy at times on David Shen's participation, they'd definitely frown on mine. One ill-timed quip and I'm toast. And I don't do wildernesses... that's strictly cybertalk. I'm hoping that Cam will be the ambassador for Taobums. If he came back able to shoot lightning out of his ass, I'd have to take my chances at that point. Cam and I would really do the youtube thing justice, too. Cam, what do you think? Yoda

I think SeanD is the spiritual successor of ex-taobum Ron Jeremy... both have valuable access to taoist related information and enjoy presenting it aggressively and are quick to sharply dismiss other perspectives. From the glimpses I've gotten of various taoist lineages, this sassy style is more the rule than the exception. It makes me wonder about the teachers who don't fit the mold... Is Ken Cohen really a taoist? Maybe aggressive Taoism simply has a larger appetite for cyberspace. Yoda

I think that's the reason lots of us jump around... we can sense that we aren't getting as far as desired with the xyz path.

and you can spend 20 years in just one MA, get the black belt, and still can't fight worth beans.

Cam, More specifically, a lot of us here aren't beginners but to find a practice path that really holds one's attention and gets results is so rare that it keeps the vast majority at beginners level. I've been meditating for 20 years for instance... 20 years should have rewarded me with at least 10 hottie followers but it hasn't. I think that is true. I think people are getting beyond just the gee whiz level of haphazardly playing with this stuff and wanting to drill down to the next level of actually getting somewhere with it. And I think the quality of teachings is dramatically improving in all the camps as a result of that... Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, etc. Yoda

Anyone know anything about them? Effective? Placebo? Quackery?

Cam, I'd agree that the desires expressed in the Secret are relatively petty and that there's a bigger game out there. But I'd also say that cultivating the nervous system so that one can be enlightened/egoless/desireless/can chat with God/be God/etc is still a desire and plays by the same rules as manifesting. Spiritual teachers tend to focus on the "egoless/let go and let God" aspect of manifestation and business gurus emphasize the focus and passion "ego" side of the equation, but both elements are required to fulfill any desire whether it's for a breath of air or a huge, transformative insight. Yoda

I just got Winn's post about "The Secret." It's a nice response and there's lots of truth in it. The Secret doesn't work easily for most of us... Hagar's experiences are like the experiences found in positive thinking and business achievement books: they work for a gifted subset in an aspect or two of their lives. If it was easy to manifest, it wouldn't be up for debate in the first place. (As an aside, people who are good at manifesting things are more likely to buy into "The Secret" type of a theory than are people who poo-poo it. They might change it from new agey to a more traditional religious flavor, but you'll find it.) Winn says that the meditative approach is the long term answer. (Although the same argument could be made about meditative practices... they work great for a gifted subset.) The nice thing about the meditative approach is that the pleasure is here and now whereas most people understand the Secret to imply that the pleasure will come from the manifestation of the house, relationship, state of health, etc. Here's the post: "The Secret" - A Harry Potter Manual for Adults? That is where so many of us fail to grasp the real Secret of manifesting something new. The popular film "The Secret" buzzing around the internet and Oprah these days gives the standard channelled new age nostrums: visualize what you want, and build a new energetic thought form. By seeing your thought as real, and relying on the Law of Attraction to get support, you will manifest the $3 million dollar dream house with the pool (that cost $300K a decade ago). There is nothing new here, this is an Old Secret, variations of which appear as sexual magic (charge up a thought form with sexual energy). The only thing that it is really new is that New Age visualization is getting into the mainstream media as a sign of changing times. The public is over its head in financial debt, and the film offers a magic solution to becoming one of the wealthy, worry-free elite. Its a Harry Potter manual, packaged for adults, promising instant riches. The focus is on material, not spiritual development. But the advice offered is useful in getting people to focus their energy, as many problems do arise from the fragmentation and scattering effects of modern life. What's not being fully dealt with is Our Resistance to Change. That is the main impediment to manifesting the life we truly want. No, Resistance is not a dark cloaked evil figure. It's not Satan trying to make our life difficult, forcing us to have a nervous break down, and then sobbingly surrender our free will to some religious group claiming a power greater than the Darkness. Our Resistance is Invested in the Past Our Resistance is the shadow aspect of our self, a.k.a. the Self-Saboteur. It is actually the part of our Energy Body that is invested in the past. The past represents the Known. The Self-Saboteur is a junkie for what's known, even if what's known doesn't really work and has us mired in suffering. Same problem arises when our past pleasures no longer really give us pleasure. The sex becomes mechanical, the rich food tastes like cardboard. Our past attachment becomes future suffering as our Shadow Junkie puts us through withdrawal pains if we try to change from what is known. So what's the Real Secret to manifesting while living in a habit-encrusted body with rigid personality traits? It's pretty simple, but there are three steps. The first step is to realize what and where you are currently investing your energy. Once you can see your old investments, you can choose to re-invest. But unlike investing money, where we have the feedback of numbers in a bank account to tell us if we are winning or losing, our Energy Body keeps tabs of its investment invisibly. We could say sexual bonding, emotions and mental beliefs are the most tangible aspects of those invisible energetic investments. What happens is that people want to invest in having new lives, new jobs, new homes, new relationships, new spiritual paths. But they forget where their past capital is unconsciously invested. It's like forgetting the number on your bank account, and never withdrawing the funds. Banks make a lot of money this way in real life. And the same loss occurs with our psychic capital. For the person trying to change, half of their "energetic money" is still invested in the past.This reduces by 50% the amount of energetic money they have available to invest in a new future. So when folks try implementing "The Secret" and visualize a new life, they may be dealing from half a deck of cards. It's hard to produce a royal flush or four aces playing with a half a deck - even if you are the dealer and the only player. That is why, by process of trial and error, I've concluded that Taoist energetic practices are the most valuable tools I've discovered for managing my "unconscious money". The money is hidden inside our body, in deep energetic patterns - right where we invested it and stored it years ago. Lots of people try to get rid of that money in therapy, because they don't recognize it as money. They try to discard the old self or deny the self even exists, or try to heal the old pattern by surgical-energetically removing these dysfunctional patterns. I've found you are best off simply remembering that the old pattern is there, and re-invest its chi into a new pattern that is now unfolding in your life. You turn what is a useless self-sabotage into something productive. Breaking the Vessel of the Old Self Sure, there is "big new money" floating all around us, in the general chi field of Nature. We could say infinite amounts of chi money has been pre-printed by Nature, waiting to be spent, if only we could attract it. Just like there are trillions of dollars floating around in the global economy. But there's no point chasing after those trillions until you break your old piggy bank and create a vessel that is big enough to hold what you really need. But if your Energy Body is habituated to being the size of child's toy piggy bank, then that is how much "money" you will allow yourself to receive and spend. Because that tiny piggy bank is the vibrational vessel for your wealth. You have to break the old toy piggy bank and build a bank-sized vault as big as the sun, moon, and stars if you want to hold the vibrational wealth of Nature. But again, visualizing the sun and moon won't do much if the tiny piggy bank is still the core investment that you are holding onto in your deep unconscious. The piggy bank represents something valuable to the subconscious child in you. That child is holding tight in its fist the first nickel you ever got, and only lets go of the nickel to store it in that little plastic piggy bank. That nickel seemed like huge wealth to the child - and back then it bought a juicy handful of candy. We know from the Law of Compounding that energy, just like money, grows over time if undisturbed and allowed to multiply steadily. Our Energy Body acts like a focusing vortex for the Life Force, and it will grow exponentially if we don't disperse it. That is why alchemists create inside their body a vessel for the elixir. They know the Life Force will compound over time if allowed to "cook" in a strong container. This internal cauldron space is the equivalent of the alchemist's piggy bank. Whatever we focus on, chi will keep pouring into it until we tell it to stop. We forget what commands we've issued in the past - but the Life Force doesn't forget. It keeps feeding your request until you take responsibility for changing it. That's how it gets us to grow up. So our first job in overcoming Our Resistance is recognizing what form that piggy bank takes inside us. It could be encoded as a small or weak self-image. It could be from a phrase like "You are worthless!" that someone unconsciously imbedded into our field at a vulnerable time. It helps to locate where in your body these old energies are stored, and note the shape, feeling, color, size, etc. Second step is to break the old piggy bank, now a dysfunctional energy pattern, but still a controlling one. There are many methods for this, available through study of qigong and inner alchemy and certain kinds of healing. The third step is to re-invest that nickel and the hundreds of dollars in interest it has unconsciously accumulated over the years. You invest the past "stuck" wealth into your new direction in life. Then you are investing from inner strength, not struggling against your old investments. You are putting the Shadow energy to work for you. In terms of Taoist energetic practice, you won't be able to hold much chi until you clear your inner space of old energetic patterns - it's like furniture blocking free flow of chi inside your body. That is what the Six Healing Sounds, Inner Smile, Orbit and Fusion of the Five Elemetns are all doing - clearing out old patterns while something new simultaneously is invited to flow in. Become a Moving Vessel for the Life Force In this way we each become a Moving Vessel for the Life Force. This is a flexible, process-centered identity that eliminates the rigid psychic battle between the dark Shadow Self vs. the good Light Self struggling over what gets manifested. Instead, we become aware of both aspects moving through outer time and space, while inviting the Life Force to move through our inner space. It's a dance. We wake up to the possibility of having a vast, spacious cauldron in our center of gravity, where before there was just the blood and guts of our physical belly. The notion of "dan tian" takes us into a deeper dimension of ourself, beyond the physical. The ancient chinese characters for "dan tian" are best interpreted to mean the "open field in which the elixir completes itself". The spiritual science of manifestation is focused on completing our soul's destiny - not on satisfying mere culturally stimulated desires - like chasing after 3 million dollar homes with swimming pools. Many people manifest the dream home, but how many also end up in divorce, loneliness, and dissipating their energy through drugs, power, lust, etc.? Ao one Secret is not to chase after the cultural dream, but to listen to your inner soul's desires. The inner elixir sought by alchemists is your soul's wealth, gathered from your life's experience. We can concentrate this essence in one very pure point of consciousness that fuses our yin-yang identity into a third force. But we need a very dynamic space, and that is why I describe it as a Moving Vessel, because the Life Force is always flowing in and out of it. When we are children, it feels like there's no past, so our chi is free to flow in all directions, a time of wonderful exploration. Because kids have no past to get attached to, little resistance has developed. It's easy to change direction, and do it often. But our Way in youth is a unrefined, unformed, a lump of clay waiting to be sculpted. Lao Tzu might say youth is carrying within itself the uncarved block - the pure potential of the situation or one's life, before we've shaped it into something new and beautiful. One translation of "lao tzu" is "ancient child", implying a sage that has learned to live in the moment with a child's fresh joy and wonder. Yet this child-sage simultaneously holds the wisdom of the past and future in this present moment. The Law of Attraction is also working on us, even as we think we can manipulate it. It is a difficult force for us adults to manage, because it impacts onto our own (unconscious) sexual energy. Sexual chi holds the yin-yang poles within our core self identity. They are constantly magnetizing everything in the field around us. Yin-yang sexual force causes the chi to flow towards us or be repelled out of our personal cauldron. Once we can witness this sexual inner push-pull, we can begin to shape our manifestation process. But that is not a quick visualization. It takes years of serious qigong and meditation cultivation practice. This is one application of the Kan & Li (Water and Fire) alchemical process. The Lesser Enlightenment of Kan and Li harnesses your sexually polarized soul force to re-shape your reality. It converts the yin-yang forces into neutral force, and then allows that to spontaneously unfold as needed in our body and our life. Because it works at the deep jing (sexual essence) level, I find all the Kan & Li meditation practices to be the most powerful way to shape the Law of Attraction and thus manifest what your soul REALLY needs. Visualization is Limited - Use Your Whole Energy Body Visualizing the manifestation process is too mental and too partial to produce the most profound results. We have to gather and reinvest our sexual and emotional and at higher levels of practice, our ancestral and astrological soul energies if we really want to shape the process of manifestation. This involves deep and long training of our energy body. We invest decades in school to acquire outer knowledge in order to earn outer wealth. Why not invest a few years to learn the secrets of your internal process, and how to invest your inner wealth? Otherwise, many spiritual seekers settle for becoming "spiritually detached", mere passive witnesses to the unfolding of life. This is first stage, letting go of their past. But they never get inside their body and its spiritual secrets - they have forgotten where the "money" is hiding in their little piggy bank. I feel many may never realize the next stage, they never re-invest their chi. Some become spacey and lacking worldly direction, pretending it doesn't matter, as long as their head is in the clouds of some other higher world. That is when their Self-Saboteur, The Resistance, starts acting out and they wonder why physical life doesn't conform to their idea of spiritual life. But in reality they have yet to learn the True Secret, the need to reinvest their old stuck energy into Life's new direction. This involves learning energetic skills that make this process much easier, like qigong. And developing skill in recognizing what you are really invested in, so you can re-direct that energy. Then we can realize the creative potential of the gift of Free Will that we each have.

dude.

Idiots guide does look good... I'm excited to get an understandable intro to Feng sui.

Nice! If somebody would like to come over and help me straighten out... that'd be a plus!

Well, the problem with these systems is that there is a good place for a toilet and a bad place for it too. If you add up the same thinking with every single part of a house, then you can't but find some inauspicious factors that you can't do much about aside from a massive remodel. Like Taomeow suggested, I've never been able to figure out Feng sui theory but I've grokked Vaastu due to its simplicity. I'll do what Mrs Yoda allows to improve the Vaastu of the pad, but to get to perfection I'd have to buy land and custom build on it which is just too much. Here's a sample Vaastu system: http://www.truthstar.com/vaastushastra/vaastuforhome.asp

So the Vaastu recipe for arranging a home office: put the desk in the SW quadrant of the room and have it face north or east and keep the NE of the room as empty as possible... Sounds odd, but I just tried it and it's good. I think it's important not to get too caught up in this sort of thing as it's impossible to get everything perfect per whatever theory unless you custom build.

Rex, On the animal side of things, she would often communicate with animals to find her next meal, shelter, etc and sometimes even sleep with them if it was very cold. She was in a temperate forest, not the jungle setting. Yoda

Rex, Sorry, I can't find her. Korean zen abbess/sunim/nun, wasn't googling for me. Published in the late 80s I believe. There's a chap at forestsangha.org that I found. If he's the same guy I remember reading about... he's pretty hardcore when it comes to the tigers, cobras, and mosquitos of the jungle. Somehow he totally had the situation mastered, but many students lost their lives following his "go to the forest" recommendation. He said that's fine and that his students understand that losing their life to a snakes or malaria is just part of the path. He was cool with it. In the book that I can't find is a photo of her and President Bush senior which is very amusing looking. Yoda

Darin, It's extremely impressive to see somebody actually go after and attain much of the textbook Taoist path. I get the vibe that you did this sans teacher too... pretty sharp. I haven't the foggiest idea of what your next move should be, but I'd be inclined to go teacher questing if I were in your shoes. If that's not to your taste, then it may well could be time to wander the earth. I read an inspiring account of a South Korean Zen nun who did have a teacher but she also wandered in the forest for a couple of years... lots of fasting, food synchronicity, and experiences with animals taking care of her. She wrote a small book about her experiences out there in the wilds of Korea. Let me know if it's of interest and I might be able to google it up. I think she teaches in the US now. I'd read up on the forest hermits past and present to get the tricks of the trade. Yoda

How long, all-in-all did it take to go from beginner to advanced? I didn't stick with it to make those kinds of strides, but that's a vote for the 'hot yoga' approach as being a rapid way to build flexibility.

You must be a natural asana master, yes? What level were you able to jump in at? I just did intuflow for about 6-8 weeks and definitely improved but I never raised out of the intermediate.

Holy Shit!!! That's amazing!! You da man!!!

When going #2 in a portapotty, ego is what says, "That one is mine."

You are already a world class dad!

I dig taichiforenlightenment.com, but it isn't really tai chi. There might be some stuff on youtube too.

Damn Cam, You know how to keep Yoda in suspense!! Get over this here ego thing quick then!