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Hello DBT, Welcome to Dao Bums. I sometimes humorously refer to myself as a Confucian NeoPlatonist. Your description of your own studies in this area remind me very much of my own, with interest in Magic, Martial arts and other odd and obscure studies going back to my late childhood. I was probably one of the few twelve year olds in Southern California with my own copies of Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice and Waite's Book of Ceremonial Magic, among a few others, to thumb through. I don't have time to speak more of my childhood, much less the following sixty years here, though I have posted a little more elsewhere on Dao Bums, as well as many other things which you might find interesting. Sincerely, Zhongyongdaoist, AKA, ZYD, its easier to type.

If by Zhong, you mean me, I prefer ZYD, as I note in my signature "Zhongyongdaoist AKA ZYD it's easier to type", aside from that, thank you for your generous appraisal of my contributions to the thread. In one of my posts in this thread I bring up the notion of "formal cause" and I want to expand on it a little bit because it is a very important concept useful in thinking about both Chinese and Western traditions: And In traditional Western magic as expounded in the work of Cornelius Agrippa for example, the idea of Formal Cause is central to the doctrine of "Occult Virtues" an aspect of the tradition much neglected by the Nineteenth Century revival of magic. In a post which I made sometime back I examine this in detail: and related to such Daoist concepts as Wuwei here: As the above posts develop they examine the idea of Formal Cause and how it relates to the topics. I hope these posts will be interesting and informative. ZYD

Lynn Thorndyke didn't call his, literally exhaustive, eight volume history of science: A History of Magic and Experimental Science For no reason, he did it because he had to. By the way, my much used and well worn copy of the Key of Solomon, refers to its magical operations as experiments. Historically magic and also alchemy, were basically the "experiment science" of Philosophy, largely that of Plato and Aristotle, as it existed in antiquity and through the Renaissance and into early modern times. ZYD

Based on what you say above, you might find my posts in Confucian Qi gong interesting: The topic was started by our wonderful friend in the Dao, exorcist_1699, and I contributed to it. Confucianism is one of the most misunderstood Chinese philosophical schools in the West. I decided to investigate it in 2000 and I am glad that I did, it provides a useful framework, and actually complimented my years of studying and practicing Ritual Daoism and Western magic. I hope that you find the discussion and my contribution to it interesting and more importantly, useful. ZYD

More like voodoo than you might think. The Chinese have a long history of Spirit Boxing in which a spirit or god takes possession of the boxer and guides him in the appropriate moves to learn the art as well as providing a boost to the boxer's qi. Back around 1970 when I was first starting to research Chinese martial arts, I found adds for the Green Dragon Society. I wrote to get their catalog and more information and was astonished to find them talking about spirit boxing involving spirit possession by the "spirits" of the eight trigrams. Since I had started serious reading about magic, voodoo, Tibetan yoga, etc. as early as 1963, I was already familiar with the idea of spirit possession, but the idea of its application to martial arts training was completely new to me. I never followed up with it because my Western magical training, already well advanced and successful by that time, disapproved of spirit possession. I hope this information is interesting and helpful, ZYD

I taught myself hypnosis from an encyclopedia article when I was eight or so. I had a friend at the time who was easy to hypnotize and I had a lot of experience. At a certain point I realized that hypnosis could be dangerous and stopped doing it for years. I bought a lot of books to learn more at some point, and in my late teens was quite good at it and wondered if it might be useful in spiritual training. based on my own experience with the training that I did and some later experiments with another good subject I decided that it may be helpful, but was not necessary, so I left it alone until the late eighties or thereabouts when I met people into Neuro-linguistic programming. From them I learned that the techniques of Milton Ericson had been assimilated into and refined within Neuro-linguistic programming and set about studying and practicing that, and those techniques for hypnosis. Again the bottom line is that while such techniques are useful they are not necessary, nor are spiritual practices reducible to them. I said all the above to make clear that I have a significant background in hypnosis and related topics. Now for a quick look at the history of hypnosis. Modern hypnosis began in the late 1700s with the work of Franz Anton Mesmer who developed a healing technique based on what he called "animal magnetism" and using it to heal people, a technique which also could involve trance induction. Skipping over a lot of history to the mid 1800s, the idea of animal magnetism survived and was very influential, Poe for example wrote a story called Mesmeric Revelation, the link provides a lot of good good background information as well as the story. In the middle of the 1800s the skeptical Scot James Braid said that mesmeric trance was all suggestion and created the alternative name hypnosis and after that the notion of animal magnetism and thus energy tranmission, qi, shen, whatever, was banished from the field of hypnosis, this link to the Wikipedia article is also more informative than I thought it would be, I looked at it to remind me who that Scotsman was, and I was reminded of exactly how much interesting history I was only vaguely remembering, but was leaving out. So bottom line, hypnosis is not directly involved but suggestion may contribute to some aspects of the phenomena. All of that said, Shadow training is apparently in important aspect of Daoist training and mastering and using one's own shadow as well as the shadows of others is part of Daoist teaching. Professor Jerry Allen Johnson teaches in it his books. I have all of his books and he talks about it in two of them at least. I picked up my copy of Daoist Magical Transformation Skills: Dream Magic, Shape-Shifting,Soul Travel, and Sex Magic and found a section on it beginning on p. 72. So I guess Naruto is not simply inventing Shadow Clone Jutsu. I hope this information is interesting and helpful, ZYD

Despite what some have said about this the main problem is that we have created categories like 'religion', 'secularism', 'superstition', 'philosophy', 'folk religion' and so on and then try to fit various ways into them. For instance people look for pure original Daoism (or Buddhism) - these never existed. Most of these labels are not useful or even unhelpful. I would say that the only useful label that can be applied here is between Theory and Practice, that Daoists practice their "folk magic" within an framework provided by Daoist authors and Buddhist within a framework which they believe is provided by Buddhist texts. There is a lot more that I could say about the history of these distinctions in the West, but that would take more time than i have now, involving as they do a long a digression into the religious conflicts of the Reformation and Counter reformation, contentions within the Catholic Church between Nominalists and Scholastics, and the rise of such libertines as John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, and its continued development among the Baron D'Holbach and his coterie. As you can well imagine, the explication of all of that would take much time and lead us far afield. ZYD

When I said this: The above is fundamentally correct, though I will try to expand a little on it in a later post. Right now it is almost one am where I live and time for me to head to bed. I meant that I thought that dawei had mentioned the basics, but I was not completely happy with with how he had written about them. In particular "Mencius said, Qi flows from intent.", puzzled me. It has been twenty years since I did my principle study of Mencius and qi and I don't remember anything exactly like this, but dawei may have been hurried and working from memory. However dawei does mention intent, derived from the Chinese 意, yì (idea / meaning / thought / to think / wish / desire / intention / to expect / to anticipate), which is used as a technical term for an ability inherent in 心, xīn (heart / mind / intention / center / core) to use imagination to "form" qi and to imbue it with a specific intention or purpose. A typical example of this would be the creation of a "thought form" examples of which can be found in the books of Professor Jerry Alan Johnson. This ability is used in Daoist Healing, Martial Arts and Magic and becoming skill and adept in its use is an important part of Daoist training. As far as Mencius and qi goes his quote about the "floodlike qi" is well know and I quote it in the topic "Confucian Qigong": There is another quote which I will look for and post. as regards this I agree with that. The question then is: does that intent arise before Existence? I was only quoting dawei and as I noted above I am not in complete agreement with it, however what you seem to be asking is if there is something real that precedes existence which can in some sense have "intent" and possibly even be a creative power influencing existence. Is that a correct interpretation? ZYD

You're certainly welcome. I'm glad that you found it informative and hope that others will too. There is a reason why I chose that long quote, aside from it aptness as an example, to illustrate the Great Chain of Being and I will return to it later when I examine how reading Agrippa's First Book of Occult Philosophy was to open up a hole new way of looking at magic and how that was to affect how I thought about the Golden Dawn and ritual. ZYD

I have given a lot of thought to these books and how they might help you and came to the conclusion that what you want to do is research is an idea called The Great Chain of Being. The Wikipedia article deals with it in the later Judeo/Christian form, but the ideas go back to Plato and Aristotle and the efforts by the Middle Platonists to unify the thought of both Plato and Aristotle into a unified cosmology, thus the references in my post below to "ideas" derived from Plato and "forms" derived from Aristotle are placed in a cosmological structure the maps out a descent from the highest levels of the Cosmos to the earth where the ideas become forms which are made manifest in our world. The following post is the first post from: Agrippa's Doctrine of Occult Virtues, a core concept examined and explained First I would like to quote from Thomas Kuhn, the man whose book, The Structure of Scienfific Revolutions, introduced the concept of the paradigms and their shifts: After finishing his discussion of the elements with a discussion of the Virtues dependent upon the elements in Chapter 9, Agrippa introduces the Occult Virtues in the following way: to attract Iron: the attraction of iron to a lodestone was one of the primary illustrations of occult virtues, while we now explain this in a certain way, there is no rational reason why considering it also a manifestation of the "virtues" or "powers" inherent in lodestone and iron is not valid and an example of looking at things in the context of a different paradigm. these vertues are a sequell of the species, and form of this or that thing: Though I was not completely familiar with Aristotle's Four Causes at this time, I was reading texts in alchemy in which Aristotelian terminology was used and in which the medicinal "virtue" of an herb could be viewed as the result of extracting its "form" through "spirit of wine", i.e. alcohol. I will examine the most important of these texts as I go along and this idea will make more sense after the second post in this series. these vertues having much form, and litle matter, can do very much: It is a matter of learning to extract the virtue or power or to enhance the activity of the virtue through appropriate action. Again more in the next post. they are called occult qualities, because their Causes lie hid, and mans intellect cannot in any way reach, and find them out. Wherefore Philosophers have attained to the greatest part of them by long experience, rather then by the search of reason: They are "occult" because hidden and unlike elemental virtues, which can be deduced from the qualities of the elements and the proportion of their compound, the occult or "hidden" virtues must be found out by experience. Those who were following my discussion of Aristotle's Four causes may now realize why in a humorous response to Descartes criticism of Formal Causes I said: Agrippa outlines the cosmological setting for this in Chapter 11: Platonists say that all inferiour bodies are exemplified by the superiour Ideas: At the top is "God" or "The One", depending on ones ontological commitments, the ideas as conceived of by Plato, are rooted in this one and then they exert an influence all the way down, through the forms as envisioned by Aristotle and into our world, where they manifest as the occult virtues or "hidden powers" of natural things. Ideas in this sense are active and creative powers, not mere abstractions present in our consciousness. they define an Idea to be a form, above bodies, souls, minds, and to be one, simple, pure, immutable, indivisible, incorporeal, and eternall: On the highest level they are simple, but as they descend they mix with each other and become more complex. they place Idea's in the first place in very goodness it self (i.e.) God: While Agrippa my mean God in a circa 1500 Roman Catholic sense, this is not to be confused with god as thought of by your local neighborhood fundamentalist yahoo and it can also be separated from any taint of Abrahamic revelation by being conceived of as Plotinus' One, or even the Dao. In the second place, they place them in the very intelligible it self (i.e.) in the Soul of the world: Here they are on a lower level and are a part of the animating power of the Universe. It must be remembered that a Platonic world is a living soul, filled with souls, not a mechanical universe consisting of dead matter. They place them in nature, as certain small seed of forms infused by the Idea's: Here we start to get closer to our own world and this idea of a seed of forms was to prove “fruitful” as I began to look at them as “seeds of power” which the Platonic Magician learned to cultivate, both in him or herself, but also in the external world. For Idea's are not only essential causes of every species, but are also the causes of every vertue: This simply reaffirms what I said before, the causal efficacy of the “ideas” is manifest all the way down to our world, where they manifest as “power” that can be harvested and harnessed. This cosmological structure going from ideas in the “Mind of God” to their manifestations as physical objects here on earth, is called “the Great Chain of Being" and was the fundamental idea of how the Cosmos functioned from the Hellenistic period to about 1800. Its History and development have been admirably chronicled by A. O. Lovejoy in his book of the same name, The Great Chain of Being. For the moment skipping over chapter 12, we will quote from Chapter 13, where the Great Chain of Being is further examined: Therefore Plato, and his Schollers [scholars] attribute these vertues to Idea's, the formers of things.: Again affirming the causal power of the ideas. The Form therefore, and Vertue of things comes first from the Idea's: The form in the Aristotelian sense is the idea manifesting as a "formal" cause. There is therefore no other cause of the necessity of effects, then the connexion [connection] of all things with the first Cause, and their correspondency with those Divine patterns, and eternall Idea's, whence every thing hath its determinate, and particular place in the exemplary world: Again the Great Chain of Being. At the top is the One, which differentiates on down the Hierarchy to manifest in our world. And every vertue of Hearbs [herbs], Stones, Metals, Animals, Words, and Speeches: It is noteworthy that Agrippa includes words and speeches as a potential manifestation of “hidden powers”. He ends his First Book on the subject of "Words, and Speeches" and then expands on it in later books. These two sections are Agrippa's basic exposition of a cosmological structure that occurs in other places in the Three Books and is an important part of his “theory of the practice”, the base cosmic circuit board, you might say, of Platonic Engineering. All cited references to Agrippa's Occult Philosophy are from Joseph Peterson's Twilight Grotto, a very useful site. So to get back to your question the basic ideas go back to Plato and Aristotle, they were worked into a cosmological model "the Great Chain of Being" and this cosmological model became a standard one during the Hellenistic period which would have been used by anyone wanting to rationalize and explain all sorts of things including magic and alchemy. One primary example would be the integration of the Chaldean Oracles with late Platonism with the development of Theurgy in Iamblichus and Proclus As long as the above is, it just scratches the surface of the subject, but I hope that it will prove to be a helpful and fruitful starting point for you. ZYD

There is a large literature of scholarly work on the subject. I was always interested in history, however, especially after I read the first book of Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy and realized that there were significant differences between traditional magic as practiced in the Renaissance and magic as it developed and practiced in the "magical revival" of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, I became very interested in intellectual history and the practice of magic in the Renaissance, and I read widely in the history of magic in the Renaissance and Middle Ages. About 1976 I realized based on what I knew of Platonism from this reading that Platonism seemed to provide a rational framework for the practice of magic in the sense that Agrippa wrote about it, and widened my historical reading back to the Hellenistic period and I am quite familiar with the literature written before 1990, and I am sure that the literature has continued to expand since then. Offhand I cannot think of a single work that details the whole of the period that you mention. As an overview of the whole period Lynn Thornike's eight volume History of Magic and Experimental Science was and probably still is considered to be the scholarly standard, and can be downloaded from Archive.org, this will link to Volume One. As an overview and possible source of more recent scholarship the Wikipedia article on Western Esotericism and a special article on the Academic study of Western esotericism look like a useful start. I hope that this is helpful. ZYD

Lesser Banishing Pentagram Ritual In the original Golden Dawn it was the first ritual that the member was taught and has become kind of standard starting point for the Western Ritual tradition. I first came across it in Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice which I bought in the Summer of 1963 when I was twelve as I have mentioned elsewhere on Dao Bums. I did not actually start using it or doing any magical practices until the Summer of 1968 because sometime in 1964 I looked at my cute little library of magic books which I think at the time was about ten to fifteen books, and decided that it was too early to start doing things like that and I stopped buying books and just did Hatha Yoga, which I had started in the Summer of 1961 watching Richard Hittleman's Yoga for Health television program. I became interested in Yoga because of a Superman comic book that I read in which Superman had had to deal with an alien from a distant galaxy who practiced astral projection to explore outer space and came here to earth. In a note the c0mic mentioned that Yoga practicioner's practiced astral projection, and I decided I want to do it too. By the standards of the time I was a strange kid, there was no Harry Potter then like there is now to inspire young would be magicians, with twin interests in magic and science and intended to be a physicist and magician when I grew up. In the Summer of 1966 my brother came back from college and brought with him the Tao Te Ching, as it was still called at that time, the I Ching and Tai Chi Chuan, which started my interesting in Daoism and Chinese training methods. I started buying books again that Summer and started practicing magic using such things as the Lesser Pentagram Ritual and the Middle Pillar exercise in the Summer of 1968, when I figured I was old enough to start training in magic. I will explain more about what happened from 1968 to the early Seventies in later posts. ZYD

The following presumes a good understanding of the Microcosm/Macrocosm relation as I outlined above. In this discussion I will be looking at two principles fundamental to Sadhu's Hermetic perspective and which he talks both about and around in many places in the whole book, which taken together actually give a fair picture of what he is trying to both convey and hide. These terms are defined in a glossary that is part of the introduction as follows: Page 26: Egregor: is a collective entity, such as a nation, state, society, religions and sects and their adherents, and even minor human organizations. The structure of Egregors is similar to that of human beings. They have physical bodies (that is, collectively all the bodies of those who belong to the particular Egregor) and also astral and mental ones; the Egregor being the sum total of all these elements. Page 29: Tourbillons or Vortexes: are astral creations of force which are the bases of all astro-mental realizations. Tradition ascribes the funnel like forms to them. Knowledge of the laws ruling over the tourbillons and their construction, is one of the foremost principles of magic. Although it CANNOT be given in open language to the public at large, it has been sufficiently described for initiates in this course, under the veil of Kabbalistic structures. The most guarded secrets of Hermetic magic are: finding the point of support for the tourbillon on the physical plane, and the formula of transition from the astral to the physical world. The first thing to note is that egregor as used in this classical sense is not to be confused with egregor as used in Chaos Magic. In chaos magic an egregor is solely the creation of human beings which starts out as a "thought form" and evolves to higher levels until it becomes a "god". This is a collective entity like a classical egregor, but a classical egregor is considered to also consist of spiritual beings who have an independent existence and are not considered to be creations of human beings, and can range from Gods and Archangels down to elemental and nature spirits, as Sadhu says on p. 250, "into the Egregor—apart from the pentagrammatical beings of evolutionary type (living men and elementars)—the energy of the elementals, Spirituum Directorum (leading spirits) and even Angels should also be attracted." The modern tendency is to dismiss such notions as irrational fantasies, but there are worldviews such as Platonism in which they are parts of a very complete and rational model of reality. The concept of egregor, sometimes spelled with a final "e" as in the link I am about to give, is quite common in occultist circles as this site on Egregores outlines. As I studied Sadhu I came to the conclusion that an egregor could have only a single incarnate human. as he says on page 80 in an analysis of magical operations, “the person acting uses as his starting point of realization, just the third, that is, the physical plane. it can be the body of the operator himself, or outer objects.” and the rest of it be made up of spiritual beings, thus a single person performing a ritual such as the banishing ritual of the pentagram could be viewed as creating a temporary egregor for a specific magical purpose and I started to view ritual as creating a "unification" of microcosm and macrocosm which was in a sense special, and to which I gave the name of "intercosm" to represent its aspect of unifying microcosm and macrocosm in a single cooperative action. The training which Bardon gives however, does not involve this type of interaction, but rather a training of the microcosmic abilities of willpower and imagination. Even the parts of Bardon that do mention "ritual" training are not training like this, but rather a conditioning process within oneself. The procedures which he gives for manifesting "god" are more complex and their application in his book on magical evocation does involve summoning a spirit, but the core is still purely an exercise of the power of the microcosm through willpower and imagination. I will deal with these practices in a separate discussion due to their complexity. As I thought about these things I began to wonder if there was something special in ritual training involving this union of microcosm and Macrocosm that was unique and could not be duplicated by the purely microcosmic training of Bardon, or for that matter similar training in Crowley or other authors, though the matter is more complex in Crowley and will require its own discussion. Just to make clear Sadhu himself taught exercises for development of the microcosmic development of willpower and imagination and had a book titled Concentration which was devoted to such exercises which he considered essential to mastering his Hermetic teachings, but it existed in a wider context than Bardon, so such exercises can be used with material such as I am expounding here, but they should also be complemented by the ritual experience such as I have outlined above. This is part of the reason why I believe that Bardon type teachings and Golden Dawn practices are not mutually exclusive, however, as I will develop in future posts, they are not necessary to success in these practices either. As for Vortexes in Sadhu they are closely related to egregors though the relation develops in various discussions spread throughout the book which the reader must synthesize through diligent study and reflection. They are an important part of manifesting magical results in the physical world, which is Sadhu's reason for talking around them so much. They are important in the Golden Dawn and I will be dealing with them in more detail in future posts, mostly from a Golden Dawn perspective, which since it was originally not intended to be made public, is more revealing than Sadhu's discussion, though all taken together reveals a clearer picture and I will examine them more in future posts. I realize that the above is rather condensed and I hope that I have been clear enough. Question are naturally welcome and will be answered, just as further posts will be made, as time permits. ZYD

I started with the post on the Microcosm/Macrocosm doctrine largely because of the influence which Mouni Sadhu's the Tarot had upon me. While it certainly deals with the Tarot, it deals with the Tarot as a guide in symbolic form to the "Hermetic Mysteries" and analyses all of them in some detail while describing their relations and how they relate to Hermetic theory and practice in as much detail as he thought possible. He did not believe that such things should be revealed clearly in a public form, but that such things should be the fruit of study, hard work and disciple. So the book is not easy reading, but as I noted here: I put a lot of study and work into it. I even used to dream about it in that period. I consider all of the work to have been worthwhile and for reason's which I noted above: was to prove very valuable in understanding aspects of the Golden Dawn that were not well understood by later members because as the Twentieth Century developed in English at least the field was dominated by authors who insisted on psychological and even neurological interpretations into magic. The approach to magic that Sadhu espoused was maintained in French in the works of Papus and other authors who names are sprinkled throughout his work. Among other mysteries of Twentieth Century magic that are clear to a person who understands Sadhu's material is why Mrs. Macgregor-Mathers expelled Dion Fortune out of the Golden Dawn successor group, the Alpha et Omega, or a least the reason she stated, there may have been other issues in the background. I'll talk about that shortly. ZYD

Yes, I would be happy to enlarge on these comments and in the process make clear why I chose the Golden Dawn techniques over those of Bardon and others, such as Crowley. The first stop on that will be a discussion of a real hermetic author, Mouni Sadhu and how I learned from him what real Golden Dawn magic is about and how the founders and early adepts of the Golden Dawn thought about and practiced it. ZYD

Bardon's system and the Golden Dawn System are not mutually exclusive, particularly when you realize how dependent Bardon is on Aleister Crowley's version of it. While Bardon calls his system Hermetic in the text, its English title adds the Hermetic to it, the original German Der Weg Zum Wahren Adepten obviously doesn't mention Hermetics at all and it is also a purely modern work which has precious little to do with the historical Hermetic tradition, but seems to be a very creative, expansion of ideas derived from reading Crowley and Alexandra David-Neel, whose works were originally published in French and Bardon could have read them in French or they may have been translated into German, a quick search did give evidence of that, but not enough to substantiate a significant number of translations at an early enough date to have been an influence on Bardon, as Crowley's books were, having been translated into translated into German by the Swiss OTO. That said Bardon's system, is safe and practical, though hardly Hermetic in any traditional sense of the word, and it is shaped by and limited to the perspective of the magical revival of the Nineteenth Century, which threw out many "healthy babies" with the bath water because it did not understand them. Back in the late sixties I was interested in and practiced together Bardon and Golden Dawn techniques, I was also interested in the qigong aspects of Taiji Chuan and its possible uses in magic, a subject I have dealt with in other posts on Dao Bums. I eventually dropped Bardon for a qigong approach after analyzing Bardon's system, at least as it is in the first Book and deciding the qigong would be better for my purposes. As for the advice about psychoanalysis, while I agree that a lot of people have gone totally bonkers by ill conceived and worse executed explorations of magic in its Golden Dawn form, there are ways that one can prevent such unfortunate results if one is actually sensible and careful, but few people who are interested in magic are either. I can expound further on any of this if you are interested, but this is all I have time for now. I hope this is helpful. ZYD

I'm sorry to hear that you think so little of yourself: If I had anything of value to offer I wouldn't need the demon's help! You are a good person and you have your soul, which is worth more than anything thing that a demon might offer. Read this and find hope in your heart: The path of the Magician is to go from this: But if thou lockest up thy soul within thy body, and dost debase it, saying: I nothing know; I nothing can; I fear the sea; I cannot scale the sky; I know not who I was, who I shall be to this: Make, [then,] thyself to grow to the same stature as the Greatness which transcends all measure; leap forth from every body; transcend all Time; become Eternity; and [thus] shalt thou know God. Conceiving nothing is impossible unto thyself, think thyself deathless and able to know all. As one grows in ones apprehension of True Divinity, one can embody it in any name system one may wish and even create new ones to serve ones needs, for such names are merely tools which the magician uses. Those who fear any egregore will never know true magic, in so far as egregores are useful, they serve the magician, the magician does not serve them. I hope that you find inspiration in the above and rise to the challenge before you. ZYD

Note: I had intended to post these two last Monday (9/12), but other matters came up. A few days ago I had edited this post some, but when I came back my edits were gone and these bare bones were all that was left. Right now the "New Age" is being discussed and I have a good post on it from several years ago which I wish to put in, so I am posting these two as they stand and will edit them in place shortly. What I principally wanted to make clear was the basis of my response here: and with all due respect to the poster, who does claim that this is their experience, is not an approach that i would use, or did use in what I did. It has all all the appearance of a "New Age" approach to the matter, and I am not a new age practitioner, as any one who has read my posts on magic on Dao Bums for the past thirteen years or so will surely know. If the above poster has had success with the above approach, good for them, but in terms of my own opinion, is more inline with these posts: I can think of several ways that what the poster first quoted above could be accomplished and if they would care to clarify their position they are welcome to do so. ZYD The Consciousness of ordinary people who are bound by three dimensional sensory experience is largely useless, however the emotions that they can generate are not, because these emotions are manifestations of personal qi, which can be directed and used, groups can form large energy fields under the right circumstances and this energy can be harnessed for various purposes, such a rain making, by someone who knows how to do it. There are ways that individuals can harness their emotions for different purposes and that is a study in itself, and also ways that they can learn to control their consciousness, such as I talk about in the following quote which examines a little more about my model of Human Potential and its possible grounding in a scientific worldview. This is important to me because, as i have noted elsewhere I was a Science/Magic nerd as a kid and creating non reductionist models, models meant to explain not explain away the possibility of mystical and magical experiences has been a very real part of my research over the years. I hope that the following is interesting and thought provoking: Space/time is our ordinary awareness in which there is one dimension of time and three of space, however no coherent model of matter and motion can be created within space/time, but it requires the introduction of the notion of at least four dimensional space, to even begin to make sense of the world. Also, as the quote says, this was originally developed for Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism and then applied to special relativity, indicated that the matter energy equivalence usually attributed to Einstein and Special Relativity was already implicit in Maxwell's equations (Einstein's two 1905 papers that deal with this were basically papers dealing with electrodynamics, so this is no surprise.). In my interpretation of this I view space/time as broken symmetry of four dimensional spacetime which results in space/time, matter/energy, and more importantly for us here, body/mind, in which a fundamental four dimensional unity is experienced as a body with consciousness in it, and that meditation states are those in which awareness is regained of this four dimensional "being", which is what we truly are, in Daoist terms, experiencing "sitting and forgetting" our Body/mind to experience our real nature in wuji. Someone who is experiencing "wuji" would be experience the "causal" level of the elemental level, much like the akasha training which Franz Bardon gives in his book Initiation into Hermetics. A book and author that were very influential on me in the late Sixties, though I moved on to the greener pastures of the Golden Dawn magical system starting in the Seventies. I had originally made more changes to this that, as I said got lost, but I just want to get this posted rather than having it hang over my head and these were the most important things to note. ZYD

I will be perfectly happy to help fill in gaps in your knowledge, here is a link to the search results for my posts which mention "magic": ZYD's posts which mention magic, all twelve pages of them You will note that I do not use Crowley's "k", that is in part because of this: I may reply to more specific matters which you raise as time permits. ZYD

Since any effects on weather than may or may not be created by HAARP would be the effects of scientific procedures and not magical ones, they are not relevant to this Topic. Whether and in what way such effects would be different from those that occur "naturally" and might require a different magical approach to dealing with, is not something that I have investigated. I don't do a huge amount of weather magic, though I think for reasons which I pointed out in my first post, that will change. I may post more about the matter in my PPD, but not publicly. I do not wish this Topic to be clogged with speculation about conspiracies, and I ask everyone to respect that. If that is not respected I will shut this topic down. ZYD

Just to add some clarity, the notion that: "weather can be quickly changed by changing the consciousness of the local population", was introduced here: and with all due respect to the poster, who does claim that this is their experience, is not an approach that i would use, or did use in what I did. It has all all the appearance of a "New Age" approach to the matter, and I am not a new age practitioner, as any one who has read my posts on magic on Dao Bums for the past thirteen years or so will surely know. If the above poster has had success with the above approach, good for them, but in terms of my own opinion, is more inline with these posts: I can think of several ways that what the poster first quoted above could be accomplished and if they would care to clarify their position they are welcome to do so. ZYD

This morning we had rain showers all across Southern California, a day before the Weather services predicted. I have "broken" two droughts before, the first in 1991, the second in 2014. What I mean by that is that If it hasn't rained in three or four years and I do some magic to end drought and it rains within a week max, and then regular rain patterns continue thereafter for some time (years), then there is certainly correlation, and a strong possibility of causation. The one in 2014 was less than 48 hours from operation to precipitation, the one in 1991, was "several" days, but not more than a week. I started this one last Saturday night. I called this "experiments" in Weather Magic because my interest at this time is whether weather magic can be used to address the issue of climate change, which is why climate change is one of the tags of this topic. ZYD

I have just finished the first major weather spell in what I hope will relieve the Drought and excess heat in the Southwest of the United States. I hope I will not have made a fool of myself by posting on this here, but I have had success breaking droughts before and doing some weather magic on a smaller scale, and I hope that success can be scaled up for the sake of the lives of millions of people who will otherwise suffer terribly. ZYD

as I said , its a long tradition that winds through good and bad ... you didnt even mention Sir Francis Dashwood and 'The Good Nuns and Knights of 'St Francis ' Rabelais yes, Rabelais ... and others , in ONE focus .... and right back to whatever religions influenced early Zoroastrianism . By the way ..... who gives a 13 yo that as Christmas present ! My earliest was around 16 when a copy of The Book of Lies fell out the library shelf into my hands when I was rummaging through other books near it - try starting with that ! (Emphaisis mine, ZYD) I was looking up some past posts of mine when I came across this: By the way ..... who gives a 13 yo that as Christmas present ! My earliest was around 16 when a copy of The Book of Lies fell out the library shelf into my hands when I was rummaging through other books near it - try starting with that ! Why Santa Claus, who else? In this case, it was really Mrs. Claus, AKA, Mom. She was a very loving mother who would do almost anything for her genius son. As it was she worked in a book store and since I could not find some of the books that I was interested in, in the bookstore which I mentioned, I started looking up book titles in Books in Print and she was very happy to comply, I was also probably the only thirteen year old who got the Greater Key of Solomon, and the first book of the Lesser Key, AKA Goetia, Dion Fortune's Psychic Self Defense, maybe some other books by Fortune and probably some books by W. E. Butler. At this late date I can't remember all of the details. I had wanted The Equinox of the Gods , hoping that it would be the Equinox to which Crowley was always referring in Magick in Theory and Practice. Needless to say I was very disappointed. I stopped buying books in early '64 because I didn't see much that I could do with them at thirteen. I will leave out interim details, but I do remember buying the Book of Lies and Liber Aleph at another bookstore probably sometime in late '66 or early '67. I really liked the The Book of Lies, though I am rather embarrassed to admit that it took me a second reading to understand the meaning of the "Gnostic Sigil" in Mandarin-Meals. I should add that no one in my family had any interest in magic or such matters, the closest that anyone came to occultism was my dear Scottish Grandmother's interest in Astrology. I could elaborate on all of the above, but I have other, better, things to do, but I hope that this long delayed reply is helpful. ZYD

I need to preface this post by saying that I am a very busy person and can't see spending the time needed to make long contributions to this topic at this time. I have spent sometime since its appearance thinking about it, reviewing some aspects of previous research and wondering how I might be able to contribute to it. Here is the first thing that I wanted to add: Since this is the "classic" in the field, then this link to a downloadable PdF would seem to be in order: Toshihiko Izutsu Sufism And Taoism I have not had time to read all of this, though i do have some ideas about its proper use and potential abuse, but i will have to do more reading to see if my first impressions are accurate. As for this: I am in complete disagreement with the notion that "Daoism is a religion". As far as I am concerned as a practitioner of what is usually referred to as "Relitigous Daoism", that it is a complete misnomer to call it such foisted on it by Western scholars of "religions", that it would be more properly referred to as "Ritual Daoism" and its structure would be better modeled by something like Freemasonry. Basically Ritual Daosim was developed by Fangshi for Fangshi, as a combination of professional guild and teaching hall and has nothing to do with the "worship" of gods in the sense of a grovelling submission to such beings motivated by threats of punishment and promises of rewards for such behavior. It's all about learning and practicing magic, which involves a great deal of time and study as anyone who has read and studied the works of Professor Jerry Alan Johnson can amply justify. This is all I have time for today, and all that I can say is that I will try to respond to any comments in a timely fashion, but I cannot guarantee that what I consider to be a timely fashion will be the same as yours. As for what I might like to see here, these would be of interest to me: Zhonyongdaoist usually ZYD for short