manitou

We have similar emotional backgrounds. For what reason, who knows? Have you ever been able to find the first moment in your very young life when you were told not to be prideful, not to boast; were you humiliated by this in some way? Did it happen at church, or something that happened with a small friend? Try to find this memory and when you do we can try to reverse it. Reimprint it. I'd be happy to help you with this, or you can work with it on your own. It's a dynamic that's rolled downhill since then and gotten bigger and bigger, and it's really getting in your way now. This is a false pride; it's not a good thing. It is way too wrapped up in what others think of you. Another way to reimprint this is to Never judge another human being again, if you can help it. If you can do this, then you won't feel that anybody's judging you. It just works that way. Then you won't worry about whether someone feels you're prideful or not. It just won't matter - you can just do what your heart wants to do. I think one of the ways we find our balance in the Tao is to do what is niggling in our hearts. Maybe to do it gently at first, but to do it. At the forefront of doing it must be love of self and love of others. I never heard what the original enigma in your mind is; I'm going to feel pretty silly if we've been talking about leaving your husband of 20 years and your 4 children for a young stud of a beachboy in the Caribbean, LOL. Whatever. Be kind.

Hello - I'm not sure who I'm talking to here - Sean maybe? I've been posting sections of the Nei-Yeh up in what I thought was the best place, in the Tao Te Ching category. It turns out I don't think it does any favors for either the TTC discussions or the Nei Yeh discussions, because when someone looks at the last post, even if someone posted on the Nei Yei 10 minutes ago, someone else would override the blue posting text if they posted on the TTC within the last 5 minutes. Anyway - what I'm asking, is there some way for you to collect the previous Nei-Yeh posts (it just started last month, we're only up to chapter 8 in our discussion) and start it as either its own forum, or its own category? I've tried posting it as a regular topic but that never works out too well either. Maybe either a pinned topic or a new forum? Thanks for your consideration, Manitou

And what if we are the Sage creating the outside conditions from within ourselves? Here's where we get many wonderful Christians who have climbed out of the box; to embrace the One within their framework, but to also know that as he embraces his fondly, perhaps just for comfort, so does the mature Sage. What sweet tenderness surrounds the heart at the viewing of the madonna and child, or a nativity scene. To feel the wonder of the innocence of young voices singing Noel. The Sage may carry the trappings of choice as well; for comfort, for symbol, for ceremony. But this is still the realm of symbol. No more is the mature evolutionary (again, the Sage) prone to taking lore as real or scripture by rote. Those of us with maturity have realized that the ability to think for ourselves, to fully use our brains, means to question everything; every book, every belief, every tome. To trust our inner journey to take us to the Center, the Source. The fact that many of us are here together is....well...wild and happy happenstance. All is embraced and loved.

That's the cool part. Like Snoopy sitting on top of his doghouse with the wind flapping his ears back. He embraces it all.

What a wonderful question. First mistake: calling it a spiritual mistake. It's all one. Your physical is manifested by your spiritual. The pride you feel for your talent is the same pride I felt before I started practicing my talent. I just said fuck it, as my sweet old grannie used to say. Yes. I play keyboard like an angel. There. I said it. I'm glad. Get over your pride. It is nothing other than the other side of ego. If Spirit, or Void, or It, or Whateveryoucallit wants to manifest through you, who do you think you are to think you know better, or deny it.? Now, if you want to get WAY honest we get into the arena for charging for talents, and that's a nightmare of its own. So much of a nightmare, in fact, I do most everything for free these days. How to put a price on free creativity? I really do not know. Every time I've put a price on a painting, or a piece of Joe's dremeled furniture, it's like it rips the life out of it by the throat. I'd rather give them away. Then there is love in the transfer, although of course we put Intent into each and every piece. Second mistake: Basing anything on fear. At the very bottom, we manifest from love or fear; gotta be one or the other. Fear of Karma is based on fear. Base it on love instead; your karma has a loving side that you have not been able to see because you have been afraid of its underbelly. Raise your eyes a bit. My actual advice, (as one who always Wanted To Be A Cowboy and never did), is to maybe devote 10% of your physical and your psychic energy to your dream. Then you won't feel like it's tapping behind you on the shoulder; you'll at least feel that you're doing something about it. The tapping will stop. Let the other 90% keep doing as it's doing. Then one day maybe you'll see that you'll be able to devote maybe 30% of your time to your dream, 70 to your other life. And so on. It's just Intent. That's all. Make a promise to yourself and take the tiniest of steps every day. Each and every day. It'll happen. Strike when opportunity raises its head, which it will. Trust the universe. Be kind to everybody. Short course in wu-wei.

Could it be we are manifesting her? As above, so below? And ad finitum upward, or downward? If we were all getting along as one big One, where all the resources went to all the people of the earth, do you think the inner earthly turmoil would stop? Are we not all one? Are we not of the Earth? Is the Earth not of the Sun? Do we have the flame in us?

The core of most of us seems to be the trend upward. Upward in understanding, upward in tolerance. Upward in compassion. This happens to be the dance floor we landed on.

This site could just as well be called the Evolved-Bums. It doesn't matter, lol. My inner journey led me to the One; the inner voice said: Hey! There's some Tao-bums over there! Never thought about those guys before! My Castaneda journey taught me the art of Do-Nothing, or the Power of Silence. The inner voice, delighted, shouted: Hey, they have this thing called wu-wei! and Holy Smokes, it's the very same thing!! All these years of metaphysics are actually paying off! Inner voice: Gee! These TaoBums get out there as far as I do! They understand me! Yeehaw! I'm glad I found the TTC at a yard sale! Inner voice: Wow! I would never have met these souls if I hadnt! We are all evolving together!................Wow! We are all evolving together!! Wow! Love you guys. Well, I guess this doesn't make me a Taoist at all. But even if I'm not, I'd sure appreciate it if you'd let me hang around...

Songs said: Especially since I had fallen 10 feet in a canyon myself in the same mountains while hiking alone a few years before and broken my arm. I had a frightening vision after that of falling of that boulder and breaking my leg or pelvis and not being able to get out, and lying there waiting to die (I had stupidly told no one that I was even going out hiking by myself). I somehow had an 'experience' of my own death.... Maybe this is where Schroedinger's cat steps in! Maybe you got a glimpse of the separate reality, the 'what if this had happened' and gone a different way! Isn't the current thinking that there are zillions of these separate realities playing out on different planes as per Steven Hawking?

How funny the differences in upbringings. I thought God could hear my thoughts too because that idea was shoved into me from others around me. It was more of a control thing, like keep your thoughts pure, after all, God can hear them. How I envy the gentle understanding that you had in your youth, Michael - and you too must know how to get back to that. These are the memories I was referring to earlier. You somehow are transpiring backwards, back to those moments when your thoughts and God's thoughts are one. This is what we actually aspire to. Only the vocabularity is no longer the same; we are hesitant to call it God because of all the old spoon-fed baggage. I know I am. Now I'd rather say Intelligence. Love. Gravity. Positive attraction. More often than not, just IT. IT. I-T I-M I Am.

Another niggle. Does all this physical phenomena have anything to do with the 2012 alignment?

I'd go for the cannabis. I too have 30 years without booze, had 25 without pot. I reintroduced it 5 years ago for management of my PTSD condition, and I also found out that it was an amazing adjunct to shsmanic ceremony and getting instantly into the 2nd attention, if that makes any sense to you. The general well-being that the cannabis will give to you lessens every type of pain you have in your body, including mental pain. My husband is a bipolar and, as such, he just refuses to do anything to make himself feel better, like take a Prozac or anything. He revels in his depths. Until he smokes a joint - suddenly it's as if he can't even remember what he was in such a snit about. At this point in my post-police career (lol) I just can't say enough for the stuff. I wish to hell they would just legalize the stuff - I can't help but believe that every single person who took just one or two drags would see instantly what the benefit is - it puts us in a separate perspective from which to see anything, whether it be sickness, wellness, or just a problem in front of us. Sure, I abused the stuff when I was a kid - always looking for the party - but this is not the Intent with which a mature person uses it. As for the addiction part of it? Yeah, I guess I'm pretty well in its grasps. But the wonderful thing about it is that when you run out there are no side effects. It's just another day. Now with booze....that was a totally different thing. At the risk of sounding like Charlie Sheen here....I'd say that the time has come to take what you want from AA - you have gained in ways we couldn't begin to count, haven't you? I think you're mature enough to step outside the boundaries that were pounded so necessarily into our heads when we first walked in through the AA doors. Release the fears that deny you the opportunity to experiment a little. Are you aware that Bill Wilson ingested LSD (probably with Carl Jung) at around his 25th year of sobriety? He did this for spiritual purposes; he had outgrown the structure of the AA form, even though he was the one that started it. What an ego bending he must have taken when he did that! I do recall that maybe he stopped taking cakes or something for his birthday - I've done the same; I stopped taking cakes when I reintroduced pot, only because it would upset so many people within the program. And the newcomers certainly don't need to hear that it's possible to transcend the structure - at least not for quite a few years. But this is where we truly have to ride the ox and find balance. Very best wishes to you, friend.

When there is thought, there is knowledge, But when there is knowledge, then you must stop. Whenever the forms of the mind have excessive knowledge, You loose your vitality. This part of chapter 8 has got to be good for a few pages of discussion. I so fully agree with TianShi's translation; it flows impeccably from one idea to the next. But I still think I can see something in this translation as well. "When there is knowledge, we must stop". Maybe this means, keep being a student! Don't consider yourself a man of knowledge; if you do, your brain and ego will suddenly set in cement and you will egotistically become the man with the answers. Perhaps when we put a PhD or any other combination of initials behind our names, we must be very careful to not consider ourselves the know-all and be-all. Perhaps this is what is meant by excessive knowledge. It reminds me of once 'religion' sets in as a concept, all growth toward the sun stops. It becomes immediately caged. This to me is the most Taoist concept of Taoist concepts.

Marbles! I couldn't agree more. I second your description and each and every word of it applies to me as well. I could throw in shaman, artist, musician as well. We are here because we all see the beauty of formlessness and the freedom it creates. Call me optimistic, overly-simplistic, naive, or whatever: I really do see an Order emerging through all of this; the separateness of the religions becoming One - yes, even the Buddhists - and the separateness of the citizens of the world all becoming One. Did anyone catch Mr. Obama saying 'At the bottom of everything, We Are All One', yesterday when he was talking about the conditions in Japan? It is happening. It is gelling, somehow. Although it appears that things are exactly the opposite sometimes, that thing we call Intelligence or Spirit or God or Whatever seems to be continuing in its upward journey, upward toward the light. My guess is that It Knows What It's Doing. Does anybody want to sit here on the corral fence with me and watch the rodeo go by?

NeiChuan - could you expand on your first comment on feeling like you've died before? I do have a very foggy remembrance of some sort of death, like it's something I'm familiar with - and my near death experiences have had a strange familiarity to them. I've been strangled several times, once I had to pretend that I was dead to stay alive. I just have one of those pasts. I think if I were to try and put a finger on it, I most sense that I've drowned before. But maybe that's just because we had fluid in our lungs as embryos?

Rainbow and Infinity, I'm not sure this is the same place. The place I'm talking about lies at the dark bottom of a cornucopia of consciousness which involves our memories in time, back into our childhood. Have you not noticed that occasionally you'll have some Eureka! moment, only to realize that this very truth was said between you and your 8 year old friends in the form of a very short and terribly direct fashion? Of course right now at this moment I can't think of one. But I will. Probably a bit down the road. Okay. I've got one. "It takes one to know one!" What kid didn't say that? We'd get it right out of our systems at the time. Everybody knew what that meant. But here we are, our head in the ethers, our mystical elements finally coming to the mutual cognitive understanding that we are indeed mirrors of each others because lo and behold, we are joined at the hip by the Essence, whether we want to or not. We can cogitate this around for 3 or 4 pages, or we can say "It takes one to know one!" in the first reply. It just seems to me that the answers are somehow contained within our growing backwards within ourselves; and to truly do this, we must refamiliarize young conclusions and feelings that evolved, except in reverse! It's just a funny sense that I have - I wouldn't expect anyone else to believe me for a second. Unless, of course, they've been there. It's that type of a question.

No, but I've been in the collective, which may be the same - bright shining gold, warm, humming, weightless, loving?

What the heck are you talking about, personal practice forum? Have I never explained to either one of you that I found a copy of the TTC at a yard sale? That's it. I don't know squat from half the stuff you talk about around here. I mean really, semen retention? If you could hear my thoughts, they'd be chuckling.

I wish I had an answer for these words, but I do not.

LOL. Oh god I love this place.

And I'll go one step further. Think in terms of triangulation, a skill which I refer to as shamanic, but every other adept tradition has the vocabularity for the same thing. But for my purposes here and now, I'll call it shamanic. When a discipline is ascended to the point of nothingness; the point of elimination of the 10,000 things is where we all meet. By transcending ego, we can admit that our path is but one of many; some traditions have hard headedness wired into them; they too must transcend that in order to evolve upward. The mere and humble question that binds together in our hearts is the desire to know Why? Once we figure out Why (a left brain pursuit), we then turn our sight inward to Who? (a right brain pursuit). The answer will surprise us. Once this level is achieved, we develop the eyes and ears to see it in others. We see differently the little black dot in the middle of my eye and your eye and even the eye of that insect over there on the wall; we see what that web of awareness, really is. Awareness will always seek awareness.

You're right, green-thumbed one. I am guilty of posting two at a time because there was absolutely no response on nuthin, and I was thinking Jeezuz Christ this is going to take forever at this pace. But these two are too meaty to pass over, so we can dwell here until October.

This odd theory seems to be coming to the front of my mind more and more lately. 1) All is Tao. 2) We are Tao. 3) Tao manifests in 10,000 things. 4) Tao is within us. 5) We are the communicator of the Tao on this level. 6) We as a people are churned up and explosive. 7) The earth as a result is churned up and explosive. 8) We manifest All. 9) We gotta get our shit together 10) Or all is lost.

Or someplace like on a lake in the Adirondacks. Depends on where the would-be participants lived; I'm in Ohio, so midwest or northeast is fine for driving. But then there are always planes too. Any Bums RV'ers? Many campgrounds (NICE ones) have places for huge rigs (like ours) and also have pretty cheap rental cabins.

(From Sean's previous post; this translation will hereafter be included with the current Roth translation we're using) zhang 8 "Alignment" 1 If able to be aligned, able to be calm, 2 Only then can you be stable. 3 With a stable heart within your bosom, 4 Eyes and ears acute and clear, 5 Four limbs firm and sure, 6 You can thereby make a dwelling-place for Essence. 7 As for Essence: 8 It is the Essence of Energy. 9 Energy's Dao is to flourish, 10 To flourish is to think 11 To think is to know 12 To know is where to stop. 13 All forms of the Heart 14 Crossing over to knowledge lose life. zhang 9 "One" 1 Those able to transform One thing are called 'Spiritual'; 2 Those able to change One affair are called 'wise'. 3 To transform without expending Energy; 4 To change without expending wisdom: 5 By grasping the One only the Master is able to do this! 6 Grasp the One; do not loose it, 7 And you will be able to master the myriad things. 8 The Master acts upon things, 9 And is not acted upon by things 10 Attain to the guiding principle of the One.