Huai-Chin, Nan, and 2 of his books...

[ChiForce]

I really want to pickup both of his major writings..."To Realize Enlightenment: Practice of the Cultivation Path" and the other "Working Towards Enlightenment: The Cultivation of Practice." Does it matter which one to read first? They are kind of expensive even in used condition and I want to start with one first.

Edited March 20, 2013 by ChiForce

[voidisyinyang]

Read both of them three times each and then either sold them back to a used bookstore or gave them away -- it was in 2000. So now they're collector's items.

[joeblast]

Read Working Towards first, To Realize is the second more in depth one (and also more expensive, rarer...) Although...there are some overlapping aspects. I found To Realize to be a more interesting read, but maybe that's because there was more esoteric stuff in there. I'd compare the intros and prefaces, but I've lent to realize out

[idiot_stimpy]

Going by the price of these used books, the publisher really should do another production run.

[Jetsun]

I can host them here on PDF to download for free if someone can tell me how to do it, I assume its legal as they are out of print.

[voidisyinyang]

Going by the price of these used books, the publisher really should do another production run.

 

Yeah too bad publishers are too idiotic to know what are good books. haha.

 

Weiser almost published a book by me back in 1996 and then Weiser was sold to Inner Traditions I think -- no wait Hampton Roads and Red Wheel (never even noticed a book by them on any shelf!).

 

I'm sure Inner Traditions is clueless -- although they did reissue some of Stan Gooch's books if I recall -- as I was corresponding with Gooch, an impoverished independent writer who died alone in a wagon house in Wales a few years ago.

 

Yeah it's sad when these classics get locked away by idiotic publishers.

 

People should contact the publisher to ask for the books to be reissued.

 

[email protected]

 

Well there it is - red wheel weiser books.

 

Personally I would not rely on some money-minded business to take action on this.

 

Better for someone to load the books onto mediafire or some similar outlet -- ummm... 4share is a good one.

 

of course the link would have to be secretly shared on the internet -- to protect the moderators here. haha.

Edited March 20, 2013 by pythagoreanfulllotus

[Jetsun]

OMG! Saw your posts on 4shared. I LOVE YOU, MAN!

 

Everyone hurry up and click on his profile and look at the 4shared link and download before it's too late. I'm gonna be busy reading Working towards Enlightenment this weekend.

 

Can you upload the Diamond Sutra Commentary by Master Nan?

 

Wow your fast I only uploaded them a minute ago they are great books

 

Unfortunately I don't have his Diamond Sutra commentary, but I will see if I have anything else

 

 

 

I put my twitter in my profile now, I barely use it but I finally did a few tweets today

Edited March 20, 2013 by Jetsun

[voidisyinyang]

Awesome! thanks I got them.

[ChiForce]

Wow your fast I only uploaded them a minute ago they are great books

 

Unfortunately I don't have his Diamond Sutra commentary, but I will see if I have anything else

 

 

 

I put my twitter in my profile now, I barely use it but I finally did a few tweets today

Thanks. Got them. Yeah, I would want a hard copy later when the price is cheaper...After all, I am sure I would need to read them few times to digest the content fully....

[Mandrake]

I can host them here on PDF to download for free if someone can tell me how to do it, I assume its legal as they are out of print.

No it's not legal. Copyright is tied to the publisher, I'm afraid.

[Mandrake]

Going by the price of these used books, the publisher really should do another production run.

I actually wrote to the publisher a couple of years ago, pointing out that these books are in demand and command prices!

Well, I guess the email got stuck in some doorblocker's computer.

 

 

M

[voidisyinyang]

freeing slaves was illegal also.

 

70% of U.S. chocolate is from child slaves in West Africa -- I don't see hardly anyone complaining - all I see is child slavery chocolate constantly being pushed on people in all the stores for Easter, Halloween, Xmas, V-day, etc.

 

The law is bunk -- my dad was assistant attorney general of Minnesota.

[Inspired bum]

Jetsun. Thanks for directing us to your link on those books and thanks for introducing me to that site. I made an account and will explore it further.

 

Sharing is caring.

 

Rich

[Mandrake]

freeing slaves was illegal also.

 

70% of U.S. chocolate is from child slaves in West Africa -- I don't see hardly anyone complaining - all I see is child slavery chocolate constantly being pushed on people in all the stores for Easter, Halloween, Xmas, V-day, etc.

 

The law is bunk -- my dad was assistant attorney general of Minnesota.

But we are not speaking about slaves here Drew; killing people is also illegal etc.

 

I've worked as an editor and even translator of all kinds of books - spiritual included. One shouldn't expect that we only live by our writing - we need money and food too!

At the moment I'm translating a book on meditation, but I seriously reconsider it. I could use the time better and get much more appreciation elsewhere. People are such cheapskates - especially "spiritual people" - and the last thing they want is to part with their money for things that they otherwise claim are invaluable.

 

 

Mandrake

[voidisyinyang]

But we are not speaking about slaves here Drew; killing people is also illegal etc.

 

I've worked as an editor and even translator of all kinds of books - spiritual included. One shouldn't expect that we only live by our writing - we need money and food too!

At the moment I'm translating a book on meditation, but I seriously reconsider it. I could use the time better and get much more appreciation elsewhere. People are such cheapskates - especially "spiritual people" - and the last thing they want is to part with their money for things that they otherwise claim are invaluable.

 

 

Mandrake

 

Well I hope it's worth translating!

 

The Theravedin monks are required to provide their spiritual books for free.

 

Are their readers too cheap to find them of value? haha.

 

In the West "spiritual" books are crap because "sex sells" and spirituality is the opposite of sex!

 

So Master Nan, Huai-chin is out of print and unknown in the West -- compared to the whole fake spiritual white male guru scene like Andrew Cohen or Andrew Harvey or Ken Wilber or Eckart Tolle, etc.

 

I would be more concerned about why Master Nan, Huai-chin has been out of print.

 

For example why is it that the parapsychology scene ignores qigong masters even though there is randomized controlled "gold standard" science research proving "external qi" energy is real! Why? Because it doesn't sell to find an answer that requires mind celibacy! It's just not "sexy." haha.

 

I know this is true because I have tested it out! I have been -- on the contrary -- censored because it's claimed I am "selling" something.

 

Another thing is that if a person puts forth the same information consistently then they should be censored because it's spam. So if someone is ignored repeatedly then it justifies even more censorship because an attempt at repeated communication means spam.

 

Religious tracts are not appreciated because mainstream culture does not understand logical inference and how it works - for example Einstein stated doing the same thing over and over and expecting something new is a sign of insanity. Well then religion is "insane" -- for example repeating the I-thought over and over to find its source as logical inference -- or repeating a mantra. But that's because Einstein did not understand nonlinear chaos dynamics -- that the feedback of a nonlinear cycle does not produce the same result - on the contrary the information is evernew and everfresh to quote Yogananda.

 

Bibles are free for the most part - in hotel rooms -- but big deal - it's the most genocidal book in Western history as Noam Chomsky states.

 

But originally the Bible was considered to be only understandable by those who could read latin - and so clearly it was a case of elite knowledge -- and so the printing press as a new technological innovation then drove revolutions against the Catholic church and for a new bourgeois working class.

 

So the internet is a similar revolution against knowledge being unattainable due to price -- it's a revolution now against the bourgeois class and against money itself.

 

"So many libraries are now getting rid of books and saying you need to read it as an e-file, etc."

 

The problem with that is that the technology is not helping us with how the language changed in earlier editions of the books, etc.

 

I am quoting a linguist I am listening to now in cspan Booktv.

 

The book industry -- I have read books about publishing -- for example how Pantheon Books went under when there was all these consolidations in the book publishing industry -- it was taken over by Knopf owned by Random House:

 

 

Pantheon Books was founded in 1942 in New York City by European intellectuals who had come to the United States to escape fascism and the Holocaust.^[6] Pantheon is currently part of Bertelsmann, a publishing company known to be actively involved in the Holocaust. Important early works published by Pantheon were Zen and the Art of Archery by German scholar Eugen Herrigel, the Bollingen series (composed of C.G. Jung's collected works in English and books of noted Jungian scholars), the first complete translation of the I Ching, and Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.^[6]

When Random House bought Alfred A. Knopf in 1960, the front page of the New York Times reported that the merger "united two of the nation's most celebrated publishers of quality writing"^[7] The following year, Random House would buy Pantheon, which would be moved into the Knopf Publishing Group. Also in 1961, Pantheon hired Andre Schiffrin as executive editor of Pantheon Books.

O.K. this is fascinating as Zen and the Art of Archery was actually a fake spiritual book written by an ex-Nazi! This fake spiritual book was then plagarized by the fake spiritual writer Carlos Castaneda! Rodney Needham proves this.

 

So we can see that the loss of Master Nan, Huai-chin's books is a byproduct of Samuel Weiser merging with Red Wheel and Hampton Roads.

 

These bigger publishers then go for "economy of scale" which means mass prints of lower quality books because again "sex sells." People now judge a book by its cover so you need that photo of the "sexy" Ken Wilber with his bald head -- even though his wife is dying of cancer since Ken is unable to heal her despite marketing himself as some spiritual guru. haha.

 

I find it hilarious how authors basically sell their books now based on the covers or else just some impulse idea -- a sound byte. Sai Baba, the most famous guru of India, was marketed by his big Afro despite him being a fake child homosexual molester.

 

Authors are required to promote their books by themselves - go on book tour and more importantly do a dozen podcasts on shows reaching a couple hundred people each if that.

 

So print-on-demand and e-books - I don't have a Kindle or anything like that - but now it's considered required to sell a book in that format for the most part.

 

The linguist is talking about all these devices causing people to be constantly distracted and then ignoring the people around them in real life.

 

I know how creepy it is to be in a coffee house and everyone is silent, alone, in their own cyber world of their lap top.

 

I hung out with an 85 year old beatnik who was a bibliofile like myself and we just harangued the crowd around us -- lost and silent in their strange artificial world.

 

So now she's talking about how faculty are supposed to have lots of office hours but now the students don't have to show up physically but the students expect an immediate answer via email even if it's sent over the weekend. Face to face exchanges have a loss of understanding -- a different dynamic now -- because the person can no longer look another in the eye, etc.

 

She says students no longer understand punctuation -- how to use a colon or semicolon or spelling because they just use spell-check.

 

I now watch people use computers -- the ipad -- without even typing - just the touchscreen as a mouse, scrolling.

 

I think books are dumbed down, and people are becoming more right brain dominant but in the sense that the machines are in control, telling people what to think and do.

 

In the 1930s the Twin Cities had at least half a dozen daily newspapers -- now there's just two of them. Noam Chomsky says how a worker would be assigned to read to the other workers -- so education, literary knowledge, was valued more.

 

The "spiritual" books are basically low brow new age books -- like the largest new age publisher is in Minnesota and I consistently found their books to be what I called "anti-books" -- I would page through them and find literally nothing of value in the book. It was all just filler fluff material. http://www.llewellyn.com/

 

Let's see what that Christian publisher in the Twin Cities has to offer... well anyway I consider the biggest book market to be what I call the "bored housewife" market. So the author needs to be "sexy" to prove some marketing value to the bored housewife -- but the bored housewife is a declining market as the economy is so bad that most females need to work even if they're married.

 

Books are considered a type of spiritual death -- the Doomsday book was a death book because recording peoples' names in a census list meant those people could be spiritually controlled through magic.

 

This is how the Bible is used by missionaries going into oral shamanic cultures -- even Buddhism spreads this way.

 

Consider antisemitism shot up in Eastern Europe as the Hapsburg Empire spread literacy so that ethnic languages became written down and then enabled nationalist movements to grow which then considered the "secret" literacy of Jews to be a threat.

 

This is all due to left-brain dominance from the written language -- left brain dominance shuts people off from the lower emotions and so people become possessed by their lower emotions because they can't go beyond book knowledge.

Edited March 24, 2013 by pythagoreanfulllotus

[voidisyinyang]

What is your take on Islam? I hear you talk about christianity but not much people talk about Islam and the Quaran.

 

The interesting thing is when Master Nan pointed something about people who study Buddhism, he said most people read about Buddhism and say they're a Buddhist. Yet they don't even read the Sutras and Shastras! I find this interesting because he's right. I have found myself shying away from reading the Sutras at time because I don't have it printed out and have to rely on the computer to read them. I hate it when that happens. I rather have all my ebooks printed out.

 

Well Islam has advantages over Christianity because the name of God as Allah means that the tongue is against the roof of the mouth every time the name of God is stated and so this connects the main front and back energy channels by stating Allah over and over again.

 

Also if you read the Hadiths -- Mohammed understood that the right and left hand are male and female and sun and moon energy -- which means that he was taught real alchemy.

 

The rise of Islam was based on the tribe around Mohammed newly utilizing iron technology which then enabled the religion to spread via stronger weapons.

 

Basically book cultures -- the earliest texts are about collecting taxes and this is for irrigation empires of Western Asia.

 

If you look at the origin of agriculture in Western Asia - what happened is that the agriculture caused deforestation since people were burning wood to make water proof housing by lime casing the houses.

 

So then pastoralism evolved as a crisis after agriculture had already caused desertification.

 

This was claimed otherwise in the traditional religious writings - for example Rene Guenon and other traditionalists argue about which came first - agriculture or pastoralism in terms of Islam and Judaism and this is also the focus of the Daniel Quinn book which calls the two cultures "takers and leavers."

 

In Greek the origin of the word "goat" is the word "tragedy" because we can see the goat used in desert cultures. But again what is really true is that agriculture caused the need for pastoralism - even though pastoralists are considered barbarians or something.

 

O.K. so in Islam, unlike Christianity, there is not allowed images of the religious prophet or God, etc. So this reveals a stronger understanding of logical inference -- that pure consciousness as God -- can not be seen.

 

The word God actually is from the Indo-European word meaning "Bull" - this is why in Sanskrit God is Braham which means Bull.

 

So in plow-based agriculture the Bull was worshipped as God - as in Egypt it is Hathor the cow.

 

So basically this plow-based agriculture relies on rectilinear geometry which uses the Solar Calendar.

 

Islam still relies on the lunar calendar - and actually the origins of the Kaaba -- how ever people want to spell it - is from an older matrifocal - female based -- lunar worshipping culture.

 

So for example in Theravedin Buddhism when it is the full moon then the monks meditate all night long with the community including the females.

 

This goes back to the original human culture - the Bushmen - which has the females singing all night long to transmit their N/om energy (kundalini or jing energy) into the males.

 

In Kenya we can see this with the oldest pastoral religion among the Turkana people -- so they sacrifice a goat when there is a lunar eclipse of the Sun -- why? To protect the Son of the family against the lunar female energy of Nature taking over.

 

So there is this fear by the males about Lunar energy controlling Nature and so the Male Solar religions are attempting to "contain" Nature through right-hand dominant technology and left-brain dominant language -- written language.

 

So consider non-traditional Islam as Sufi -- for example Somalian is a tonal language and actually sufi religion was dominant in Somalia -- and so Sufism uses trance and also female energy.

 

Like in Sudan the Zar trance -- which is also found in Egypt - it is a subversive female trance dance for exorcising the lower emotions.

 

And so in Europe we have the Black Madonna which is really from Egypt as the worship of ISIS which is really from the use of meteor magnetite as the black stone - -the Cosmic Mother as a reflection of the lunar energy and this Black stone meteorite magnetic energy is the secret of the Islamic Kaaba of Mecca.

 

And so in Sufism the males are required to fast for 40 days in the desert - away from the females - using celibacy - but this tradition has become lost for the most part -- I'm sure it exists hidden here and there. I heard it happened in Morocco sometimes.

 

But anyway Gurdjieff tapped into that tradition also as he discovered it in Central Asia....

 

O.K. so the Abraham teaching of not sacrificing his son -- even though he would have sacrificed his son if God had really wanted him so -- basically the secret origin of left-brain dominant Solar religion is as mass ritual sacrifice by ritual Solar priests attempting to "contain" infinity through right-hand dominant technology. So this is called the "separation of heaven and earth" through mass ritual sacrifice and so in the Lunar based religion the males like in Buddhism practice celibacy and become monks -- in the Solar based religion the males are sent off to be sacrificed in war and so the imperialism can spread rectilinearly -- as spatial control of three dimensional space for logarithmic-based technological extraction of Nature.

 

So Islam is really the cutting edge of this Solar religious trend - it is the fasting growing religion -- why? Because Islam goes beyond protestant religion which previously had made the secular culture religious by the fanatical pursuit of money. Islam creates even more powerful money transferring cultures - with the informal banking that wires money as community endeavors - just as happened with the funding of 9/11 by a wire transfer from an I.S.I. agent or just as the Somalian banks have been shut down because their wire transfers were considered to be spreading Al Qaeda to Somalia.

 

So Islamic culture with its religious training required for females then enables the females to compete better with Western educated "liberated" females who think pursuing male ejaculation is being more powerful than males. So Islamic females then pursue University technical educations since they have their sex energy sublimated by their religious education that is stricter than a Christian church education. So then Islamic females will ultimately become the top technofeminists - using technology to attempt to liberate their countries from despot male-controlled regimes as we have seen with the Arab Spring. But the problem is that those revolutions are really driven by the famines and food austerities due to the dependence on importing Western subsidized wheat and other grains.

 

Basically the oil industry is a male dominated technology so this extended the male polygamy culture of harems and controlling females as just another domesticated animal and then the profits from oil were required to be invested in Western banks - as U.S. petrodollars and in turn the U.S. dumps tax-subsidized grains back onto the Arab countries which then undermines their local autonomy. For example Mogadishu was controlled by Somalian farmers but then Cargill a Minnesota based corporation that is the largest private business in the world but actually relies on huge tax subsidies -- so Cargill then dumped food at one ninth the local farmer price in Somalia thereby driving out the Somalian farmers and fueling instability of the capitol and then a civil war. This international trade secret of war rarely gets covered in the MSM.

 

So as a Solar-based religion Islam is the cutting edge of apocalypse but Islam at its secret mystic core retains a stronger alchemical lunar jing energy component despite the sufis being increasingly attacked by the fundamentalists who were created by the West and as a reaction to the West increasingly attempting to extract more oil and other natural resources through imperialistic "primative accumulation" as Marx called it.

 

I therefore highly sympathize with the traditional Islamic female utilizing technology to undermine Western imperialism and attempt to liberate females from Islamic misogyny based on the female giving a more accurate interpretation of the Koran, etc. But in the end this effort is futile - even Islamic females who then reject their religion -- as the wife of the imperialist British economist -- she is Somalian - anyway obviously they are forced to align themselves with the worst of Western genocidal imperialism - the corporate-state -- while pretending to be libertarian, etc. Essentially like a variance of Ayn Rand - -just as some Somalians want Somalia to be a complete free market -- and so what does that require? Piracy as revenge against the West destroying the traditional fisheries off Somalia and so piracy has become a dominant economic force in Somalia despite the pirates having no real affinity for human values - it is just a desperate attempt for quick money when no alternative exists. A post-apocalyptic culture.

Edited March 24, 2013 by pythagoreanfulllotus

[joeblast]

Religious tracts are not appreciated because mainstream culture does not understand logical inference and how it works - for example Einstein stated doing the same thing over and over and expecting something new is a sign of insanity. Well then religion is "insane" -- for example repeating the I-thought over and over to find its source as logical inference -- or repeating a mantra. But that's because Einstein did not understand nonlinear chaos dynamics -- that the feedback of a nonlinear cycle does not produce the same result - on the contrary the information is evernew and everfresh to quote Yogananda..

I sometimes wonder if einstein truly believed that, or if that was simply a platitude-deflection as a simple reason why quantum mechanics "didnt make sense" but he didnt know why.

[Harmonious Emptiness]

Just want to say, if you've dedicated yourself to living in a monastery where all your living expenses are provided by those you benefit by doing so, then sure it makes sense to write and publish and not keep profits.

 

However, most people writing nowadays are not living in monasteries with all of their expenses paid. Does this mean only people in monasteries should write books? Should nobody try to market their books to (as they hopefully see it at least) spread the information in them for the benefit of those who can gain from this information?

 

If we all just want to denigrate and insult anyone who writes something meaningful and charges a small entrance fee (the small cost of a book) then who is going to write anything of this sort? The cost of an online book now is even less expensive. We want to enjoy the company of these writers while reading their books, and turn aghast at the thought of even paying for their next falafel. How does this make us worthy to judge them again now?

[voidisyinyang]

Is the rule about not having sex before marriage something to do with Lunar Based training?

I noticed that sex before marriage is something looked down upon in many religions. I never understood why.

It's quite funny because as you pointed out with enough training O at a D happens.

 

Oh yeah note this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8fGHq_oyOE

 

Note how Allat was noted as the ultimate reality in female form.

 

Oh they still do the fasts. It's in the summer. Like you pointed out, it's dependent on the Moon. They fast for a whole month. It's called Ramadan. My dad does it but since he doesn't do meditation with it, he kinda waste the jing.

 

Yeah Ramadan is great -- depends on how strict people are about how much food they eat after sundown but I'm talking about a total fast -- for 40 days - not sure if it's a dry fast or just without food...

 

1. Chilla-nashini - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilla-nashini

   The nashini is the person who does the 40-day fast and remains seated in the circle of seclusion. ... Chilla-nashini is known to both Sufi and Vedantic ascetics.
2. Technology of the Heart: A Sufi Master's Advice on Fasting

   www.mysticsaint.info/2009/09/sufi-master-advice-fasting.html

   Sep 13, 2009 – The practice of fasting is highly esteemed by the Sufis. .... Who of you can give a guarantee that by just fasting 40 days Allah will be seen?
3. Amazon.com: Forty Days (9781590300534): Michaela M Ozelsel ...

   www.amazon.com › Books › Religion & Spirituality › Islam › Sufism

   Rating: 4.4 - 5 reviews - $18.96 - In stock

   Mine was the Sufi Order International. So in order to better understand Sufism I got this book which describes a woman's 40 day fasting and isolation as she ...
4. Fasting - the Chishti Order of Sufis

   chishti.org/fasting.htm

   The accounts are legion of Sufi shaykhs and disciples who endured fasts of varying ... restrains himself from low desires, the paradise is surely the abode" (79:40-41). ... Generally, to perform a fast day the following conditions must all be met: ...

Solitude in Sufi Tradition - Articles - House of Solitude - Hermitary

www.hermitary.com/solitude/sufi.html

The mysticism of Sufi tradition is strikingly animated by its literary color, often expressed in ... is sought within traditional devotions: ablutions, prayer, fasting, reverence. ... The formal 40-day retreat described by Ibn Arabi represents the practical

 

 

Yeah so 40 days without food in isolation meditating....

 

halvet is Turkish for solitude... so drink as little as possible and have food only every 10 days but as little as possible...

 

http://books.google.com/books?id=sdpp1rWiAj8C&pg=PA8&lpg=PA8&dq=halvet+fast+sufi&source=bl&ots=4FjeBohwId&sig=KfpGavp3dzVsRgHjgNy4L04WKLE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Q4hPUaf6DYiU2wWun4Fg&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=halvet%20fast%20sufi&f=false

 

http://chishti.org/fasting.htm

[thetaoiseasy]

...

Edited March 24, 2014 by thetaoiseasy

[voidisyinyang]

Awesome! Something to bring up to my dad when Ramadan comes up. Oh I was wondering about the answer to "Is the rule about not having sex before marriage something to do with Lunar Based training?

I noticed that sex before marriage is something looked down upon in many religions. I never understood why.

It's quite funny because as you pointed out with enough training O at a D happens."

 

Well the original human culture from 100,000 BCE was very strict -- no sex before marriage and when the male wants to marry he has to live with his future wife's family for three years -- hunting for her family and providing them with food - before he can consummate the marriage (have sex)....

 

So yeah that is about the lunar energy -- respecting it - the females "own" the land also....

 

The males have to learn to sublimate their energy.

[Mandrake]

Well I hope it's worth translating!

 

The Theravedin monks are required to provide their spiritual books for free.

 

....

Drew:

You miss the point. As somebody already wrote, the monks have their upkeep paid for; they don't need to fret over retirement, how they will take care of their children, survive the next five years etc.

Bibles at hotels are paid for by donations, and so on.

Writers, editors, translators et. al. need food on their tables. People paying for books is their water basket, their harvest for the winter.

 

The book I'm translating is one I wish I had when I started on my path many years ago. However, I have better use of my time which saves me from a pauper-lifestyle, and am considering passing the information through word of mouth instead.

 

 

Mandrake

[ChiForce]

I thought I do an update on my reading. So far, reading the Working Towards Enlightenment first, the first 50 pages. It is very understandable. He is basically saying that one has to walk the path in order to derive the wisdom and knowledge of the scriptures. Just memorizing and knowing the scriptures won't lead to enlightenment. Then, he went on to talk about the skandha of forms. If you close your eyes and meditating and not seeing lights at all, you are still trapped in the skandha of forms. Then, he went on talking about the skandha of conception which is like the dream and reality are the same but you don't know why they are so.

Edited March 27, 2013 by ChiForce

[voidisyinyang]

Drew:

You miss the point. As somebody already wrote, the monks have their upkeep paid for; they don't need to fret over retirement, how they will take care of their children, survive the next five years etc.

Bibles at hotels are paid for by donations, and so on.

Writers, editors, translators et. al. need food on their tables. People paying for books is their water basket, their harvest for the winter.

 

The book I'm translating is one I wish I had when I started on my path many years ago. However, I have better use of my time which saves me from a pauper-lifestyle, and am considering passing the information through word of mouth instead.

 

 

Mandrake

 

yeah it's your call obviously! I always provide my research for free.

 

Writers are supposed to get advances but I signed a contract once for a publisher and the contract stated the advance could be demanded back at any time. haha. So that would be quite a bind if a writer gets an advance, spends it, and then the publisher demands the money back.

 

In my experience publishers are too idiotic to know what are good books or not. I spent ten years reading one scholarly book a day -- and also going to all the libraries and bookstores.

 

Books are supposed to fit into certain genres otherwise they are "too religious" or "too academic" or "too philosophical" etc. haha.

 

A good book in my opinion should defy all those genres -- mix them all up - and laugh in the face of what is supposed to be considered good writing.

 

The only thing I could recommend for you is to try "Kickstarter" and so that way you can get pre-funded to do the translation work provided there are enough readers interested in pre-paying for the work. This is very similar to Community Support Agriculture -- where the farmers are pre-paid so they have money for seed and tools, and to feed themselves while they work, etc.

 

But I wouldn't take books so seriously - there are something like nine stories underground in D.C. full of classified documents and the amount of classified information is beyond anything the Library of Congress has.

 

I provided a whole free library of books relevant to my job place and hardly anyone read them. haha. I quit my job without notice and left the library of books for the workplace -- kind of a joke.

Edited March 27, 2013 by pythagoreanfulllotus

[ChiForce]

I wonder if any of you received interesting dreams or visions after reading the works by Master Nan??? I just ordered his Diamond Sutra because this morning, I had a dream. I dream that an Indian woman handed me a copy of the Diamond Sutra while I was desperately searching for the right clothes to wear. What is even strange was that in this dream I felt a sense of deja vu. A deja vu within a dream. I felt that someone has given me copy of the Diamond Sutra to read before. Once I realized I have a copy of the Diamond Sutra, I stopped searching for the right clothes to wear and to move on. Then, this Indian woman said "let's go." Now, she looked very familiar but yet I don't know her. Oh well, my copy should be here on Tuesday from Amazon.