GrandmasterP

Santa is a Sufi As any fule kno

By the amount of porno on t'internet, might one suggest... Wood?

It's a mess and no mistake that bleddy gift shop takes up half the ground floor now. I was at Ruskin just down the way on Walton Street we have our fellows do's in the Randolph.

I knew Maxine better than Alex back in the day when she lived at Notting Hill Gate after they'd split up Happy times. That Karma Kagyu silk is a panoply of Heavens tanka thingy, likely they wouldn't have used the word 'lineage' for it in the context our chums on here are doing. Ashmolean has Dr Dee's scrying table with the original angelic sigils. Pitt Rivers covets it.

I wish this cold would go. Man Flu... Nothing worse.

...... Winning lottery numbers please, any six numbers between 1 & 49. I'll see you right K, :-)

Cool. Old Asian guy sees a queue outside a brothel. Asks the last guy what they are queuing up for. Embarrassed the guy says.. "It's a temple and they are giving away free oranges today so we are in line waiting for a treat" Liking oranges the old guy joins the queue and then the cops turn up and everybody except the old guy legs it. Cop says to the old guy... "You are a bit ancient for this sort of thing aren't you sir". Old boy smiles and replies... "Too old! Never! I just take out my false teeth and suck on em son".

If you play Perry Como backwards he's saying "Baby Jesus wants you for a sunbeam"

Yoga Classes pong. All those ladies bending over then farting. Pooo!

Ahhh those two sweet princes in The Tower of London. Many a long night's guard duty in that spooky edifice I chatted to one or t'other of their wistful, plaintive shades. It was Wyndham the Page of the Closet wot did for them and that's from the horse's mouth.

It's all fiction, some of the Mr Jesus stories are older than others but all of it is re-imagined or simply made up. No born again pastor worth his or her salt who hasn't had a direct revelation from the lord and written it up or popped it online at some time or other. Cumulative fiction.... One story on top of another for 2,000 years.

Yep but can it cook?

Addendum for chums over the water... The Daily Mail is a rabid right wing scandal sheet full of lies and as such, beloved of the parasitic English bourgeoisie . It also has the funniest columnists currently writing in the English Language on staff along with the very best Sudoku (according to Mrs GMP)

Peter is a smarter name than John any day. ;-)

Matthew 16 verse 16 mine's from. Nestle interlinear Koine Greek/English edition. Canonical means approved by the Roman Catholic Church canon law, same outfit who ascribed the authors of the Gospels as no one actually has any idea who wrote what so the church divvied up the texts under various apostle's names to lend weight and cachet to the bits they'd chosen for inclusion.

It's the same with Tai Chi and QiGong but if teachers had to rely on the few spiritual cultivators paying subs then there'd be no classes. The keep fit brigade subsidise the serious cultivators.

Good points all. Whatever validity is claimed for any lineage those claiming it enact whatever it has transmitted in the here and now. Lineages drift in and out of fashion. The Theosophical lines claimed direct descent, flourished for a while and are now moribund. Gardnerian Wicca came and went as did Alexandrian both the Alex and Maxine Sanders lines which both Josephine and I are familiar with. The Bradford Golden Dawn was a Theosophist/ Masonic splinter group that was popular amongst the younger wilder sons of prosperous wool merchants up to but not beyond the first World War,. Nostalgic echoes remained into the forties and there was something lf a mini renaissance in the flower power sixties but that came and went as it was mainly one intake at the School of Art over three years between 1967 and 1970 who were involved. The real , vitality; money and interest in Bradford Hermeticism died in the trenches of France. Hermetic lines pop up and disappear regularly. sometimes it's just one man and his hermetic dog and a website, now and again a few friends gather around a figurehead, it rocks on for a while then Folk fall out or move on and it disappears, sometimes leaving a book or two behind. There is no encultured concept of lineage in Tibetan Buddhism at all. Tibetans belonged by birthright and as nothing else was available locally to the sect representing their tribal linguistic grouping. Lineage narratives emerged when Buddhism came west and as it first came through Theosophical Lodges the idea of lineage via hermeticism was cobbled in and has stuck. I am assured that there is no word as such for 'lineage' in that Western-transmission context in either the Ritual Tibetan or Pali or Sanskrit languages. Same in Chinese and Japanese, no concept of lineage as it seems to be presented in some threads on here as something magical that is transmitted by mystical osmosis or ritual. That idea is simply Apostolic Succession rebranded and has no foundation whatsoever in the Ur sources where that root-Xtian idea never existed. As I am the current Southcottian medium for the last prophetess Octavia... Here's my 'lineage' should anyone be interested... http://www.panacea-society.org/visitati.htm And if you consider that claim to be potty then please do so through the same lens used to examine others' claims to a 'valid' lineage. Frankly, my dear; there's no such thing. Taken to their logical conclusion some of the arguments put forward by pro-lineage wonks on here might be summed up thus... "I have a lineage, you do not. I am right, you are wrong. Only those in MY lineage know anything worth knowing, all those outside know nothing . And that includes YOU , you no-lineage puppet!"

No disrespect K but you have had some poor teachers.

Which ones?

Robert (Grandmaster) Rankin's The Witches of Chiswick 1p plus post & packing via Amazon Partners. A useful reminder that much is seldom necessarily as straightforward as it might superficially seem to be.

Hello Mrs Shen. The trash needs to be taken out tell him.

I expect that the Sufis in one particular group would describe themselves as True Sufis but maybe Sufis in another group might disagree and say.. "No you're not. We are the True Sufis", bit like some of our Buddhist chums do in all their different groupings. Thing is, as long as each bunch of Sufis are happy with whatever Sufi it is that they are Sufi-ing; then who is to judge?

Yep, spirituality as such does seem to flourish better outside of the institutional walls somehow. Most of the folk who come up with something useful tend to be either outsiders to begin with or folk who were excommunicated by the mainstream religions. I'm thinking Francis of Assissi, proper rebel and animal rights activist he was by all accounts but since he left his body the church just institutionalised him and brought his cult back into their fold.

"You tried, you failed. Let that be a lesson to you Bart my son. Never ever try". (Homer Simpson).

I know it's daft but these days we are such a litigious society that I suppose someone has claimed . I expect Tai Chi ruler to be next on the list. At present we are covered to teach it but I reckon it's only a matter of time before that goes on the banned list too. Dojos are fine, they have the income and member numbers to cover insurance costs but we are a small voluntary centre so it's just out of our financial league. Odd times we book a major player, we have Kevin Magee coming to teach a Cheng Hsin workshop next March, they bring their own insurance cover with them but as far as us running weekly classes in anything even vaguely martial we just can't afford to.