Why Taoism is different

[Mark Foote]

Just to share a contrast because it was brought up.

 

The Vajrayana system has 84,000 nadis or currents and then the many different chakras and Tibetan Medicine uses the findings to cure patients with the body, prana or winds, energy currents and mind system framework.

Tibet actually was the center of the major trade routes and also shared information with India. Tibetan Medicine is a mixture of Chinese/Ayurveda of the Indians the Siddha medicine, Bon... etc.

 

Ok, so there we have a three-some that I think is a pretty good match to jing-qi-shen: body, prana or winds, energy currents and mind system framework.

 

There's a fascinating quote in gospel of Thomas purported to be from Jesus where he says something like if the body comes out of the spirit, that's a miracle, but if the spirit comes out of the body, that were a miracle of miracles. I think he adds something about how he's always amazed that "such riches can come out of such poverty", or words to that effect. Most folks I talk to about my practice are so concerned about what happens to their mind after they die, they cannot stand to look at the body at all. I'm wondering what cures are effected with the body, as opposed to winds or energy currents, and what that's like, if you know (or maybe you just misspoke?- that would be my luck).

[Marblehead]

Most folks I talk to about my practice are so concerned about what happens to their mind after they die, they cannot stand to look at the body at all. I'm wondering what cures are effected with the body, as opposed to winds or energy currents, and what that's like, if you know (or maybe you just misspoke?- that would be my luck).

 

Now there is a concept that most of us Taoists don't have. We accept that the body will one day die. That is a given.

 

Chuang Tzu told a lovely story about a deformed man who all the women loved because the beauty of his heart was so much greater than the beauty of the body of any man they knew.

 

Peace & Love!

[Vajrahridaya]

Most folks I talk to about my practice are so concerned about what happens to their mind after they die, they cannot stand to look at the body at all. I'm wondering what cures are effected with the body, as opposed to winds or energy currents, and what that's like, if you know (or maybe you just misspoke?- that would be my luck).

 

I'm not sure I understand your question? Do you mean how the physical yogas cure ailments? Well through stretching and opening up the blood flow and other elements of the body, but the physical yogas work directly with the winds or energy flow as well, the channels and chakras.

 

Can you clarify your question please? Thanks.

[Mark Foote]

I'm not sure I understand your question? Do you mean how the physical yogas cure ailments? Well through stretching and opening up the blood flow and other elements of the body, but the physical yogas work directly with the winds or energy flow as well, the channels and chakras.

 

Can you clarify your question please? Thanks.

Hey, Vajrahridaya,

 

I was referring to this part of what you said: "and Tibetan Medicine uses the findings to cure patients with the body..."

 

I'm aware of hatha yoga, and the first part of your statement was about Indian healing systems, presumably including yoga for the body, but I don't think of hatha yoga in connection with Tibetan medicine. So your statement made me wonder if you were referring to some aspect of Tibetan medicine I wasn't familiar with.

 

Beautiful night here in Petaluma, CA; hope you're having a fine time, wherever you are.

 

yers, Mudlark

[Vajrahridaya]

Hey, Vajrahridaya,

 

I was referring to this part of what you said: "and Tibetan Medicine uses the findings to cure patients with the body..."

 

I'm aware of hatha yoga, and the first part of your statement was about Indian healing systems, presumably including yoga for the body, but I don't think of hatha yoga in connection with Tibetan medicine. So your statement made me wonder if you were referring to some aspect of Tibetan medicine I wasn't familiar with.

 

Beautiful night here in Petaluma, CA; hope you're having a fine time, wherever you are.

 

yers, Mudlark

 

Thanks Mudlark, LOL!

 

It's gorgeous here in Florida. A very nice night indeed. Cool breeze with the window open. Yes!

 

The Tibetans use a different type of Yoga, Yantra Yoga or Turl Khor Wiki Link on Turl Khor

 

The Tibetan Medical system uses the chakras and meridians too. Also the Tibetan Massage system called Kunye, sometimes it's written kanye. They use the pressure points and meridians, it's very interesting.

[voidisyinyang]

You're in the same state as the OTHER V -- you too need to get together and upload some youtube so we can be sure you're not the same V.

 

Thanks Mudlark, LOL!

 

It's gorgeous here in Florida. A very nice night indeed. Cool breeze with the window open. Yes!

 

The Tibetans use a different type of Yoga, Yantra Yoga or Turl Khor Wiki Link on Turl Khor

 

The Tibetan Medical system uses the chakras and meridians too. Also the Tibetan Massage system called Kunye, sometimes it's written kanye. They use the pressure points and meridians, it's very interesting.

[Vajrahridaya]

Wow, my 2 favourite systems of medicine. Interesting.

 

Indeed! One of my Vajrayana teachers, Lappon Namdrol is becoming a doctor in Tibetan Medicine. He invited me to study with him as his student/helper. I still want to take him up on the offer, but I have to do my thing here first before I transfer to a school near him in Massachusetts.

 

You're in the same state as the OTHER V -- you too need to get together and upload some youtube so we can be sure you're not the same V.

I don't know where he is in Florida though.

[voidisyinyang]

So you're not him? haha. It's all ONE BIG FLORIDA ain't it -- just jump on the freeway and you'll find him -- or PM or google "KAP" haha. He invited me to his house already so you're practically a prodigal son I imagine. Other Taobums have been uploaded already by him -- having their shit kicked out of them. haha. NOT! haha. Seriously now's your chance to get that knee fixed....

 

Santiago is in MIAMI. I just googled Kap training, florida -- no prob V.

 

Indeed! One of my Vajrayana teachers, Lappon Namdrol is becoming a doctor in Tibetan Medicine. He invited me to study with him as his student/helper. I still want to take him up on the offer, but I have to do my thing here first before I transfer to a school near him in Massachusetts.

I don't know where he is in Florida though.

Edited October 24, 2009 by drewhempel

[Mark Foote]

 

The Tibetans use a different type of Yoga, Yantra Yoga or Turl Khor Wiki Link on Turl Khor

 

The Tibetan Medical system uses the chakras and meridians too. Also the Tibetan Massage system called Kunye, sometimes it's written kanye. They use the pressure points and meridians, it's very interesting.

 

Thanks, Mr. V- now a beautiful afternoon, think I'll go to the sugar-skull making demonstration in Walnut park today, part of the "Dia De Los Muertos" fun in Petaluma in October. Cheers! ('..')

[luis sancho]

The existence of a much bigger , everlasting Mind outside us , in the universe , or even as the Creator of this universe , is the common belief of most of the religions . However, only Taoism explains it

 

Taoism is not different of anything, the Universe is made of self-similar parts of a self-similar organic whole.

And that is waht taoism tried to xplain, including the TAO AS THE GOD/MIND/LAW OF TIME=CHANGE OF THE UNIVERSE:

http://www.unificationtheory.com/god/buddh...0taoism%20s.htm

What happens though is that through history there has been a movement from organicism (the belief in a complex organic universe, made of energy and information yang/yin networks and social waves/herds) into mechanism (the machine as a model of te Universe, whereas a machine is a simplified organism, either an energetic mechanism/weapon/transport or an informative one). Only now and with a massive opposition of organicist science, complexity, duality (the science i have renewed, which translates taoist concepts or it is self-simiarl), we are opening our view to a Universe more complex, at the same time that mechanisms evolves into organisms (robots)). Now all this is a historic needed perpective beause what hpapned when we enter the cycles of 'metal-wars' s a degeration o human knowledge:

http://www.unificationtheory.com/war%20cycle.html

in this graph you can see an up wave of 800 years of discovery of weapons of mass-destruction now accelated to 80 years (fractal decametric pattern) and below an opposite wave of cuoltures. The firs is taoism, that comes from shamanism and neolithci, fertiity godeess cults. All those gaia ages died away as metal castes, western cultures, go(L)d religions aryan cults to weapons make man feel superior and different from the Universe. What happen i china is that till 300 bc, iron and horse waves of death didnt arrive. So neolithic religions had longger time mature and that i why taoism is the deepest one in the understanding of the organic systems of the Universe, its self-similarities etc.

http://www.unificationtheory.com/iron%20cycle.html

in this graph, tht widens the precise 'iron cycle' inwhich chin destroyed the taoist cultre you can see the 3 tao ages of taoism (yang youth, maturity or yinyang and yin 3rd age of information) and how it died away.. What remains is a magic taoism, a series of misconceptions some deep insights and a ppular yin/yan culture.

Foor thoe who need to refresh and purify back taoism and its principles this link is a good one that illustrates the great findings o the '3 phases of yang, yinyang and yin' at the core of the i ching and all the scientific laws discovered by earlie taoism of which so little remains:

 

http://www.unificationtheory.com/laws/Ages_and_cycles.html

tHIS IS MORE COMPLEX BUT IT is the key to decipher the trigrams in scientific trms.

A simpler text:

http://www.unificationtheory.com/laws/3_ages_simple.htm

apologies if some text dont work or have bad ennglish. Amateur physicists had been hacking my webs for very long and of lately i dont care anymore.

[exorcist_1699]

Tao , identified by some Chinese Taoists as pre-heavenly qi, can be said to be the Trinity of jing-qi-shen ; it is only after having embodied in the physical world , does it split . The grasp of Tao does change the time-space of our existence , at least the existence of that individual who practices it. For example , all people get aging, he doesn't. All people 's hearing ability are limited by physical obstacles, his doesn't . Nobody know things going to happen in the far future, he does...

 

Pre-heavenly qi is also repeatedly described as " nothing can be smaller than it "("其小無內") , and "nothing can be bigger than it "("其大無外" ) ; quite a contradictory saying , yet it conversely tells us the grasp of it leads to a capability of restructuring the time-space structure of our existence that hardly can be accomplished by other material means ( not to mention the fact that accelerating a big object close to the speed of light or producing any anti-matter is beyond the reach of any individual ) .

Edited November 6, 2009 by exorcist_1699

[luis sancho]

looks like the link to the meaning of god in taoism and its difference with the christian god got broken in my previos text:

http://www.unificationtheory.com/god/buddh...0taoism%20s.htm

[Luo]

Why it's different...

I can't quite describe what I feel about it...

it's...life; It's being the eye of the storm, centered while experienes swirl around you; you partake of them and yet they don't drag you into the game. The game remains...a game; and this Great Game is called... "Change"!

yes folks, the Dance of Shiva or whatever-you-wanna-call-it; I recently decided to just call it Change (capital C).

You know...there's a Something about Chinese thought that makes it special to me...even those silk paintings seem so...etheral and yet rooted in the earth we walk on. I became interested in Daoism and Neo-Confucianism relatively recently (4 months-5 tops) .

 

Daoism has this feel of lightlyness around it; whenever I think "Daoist Sage' I picture this serene figure somehow doing a float-walk (walking and yet floating); not flying but not walking with that tone of thought and wories on his/her back...Clouds follow their course, seasons do the same. The Sage simply admires it all... this "all" being Change.

i think my central atraction to this line of thought is Pu and Ziran. I never though of "religion" in such terms before..."Simplicity and Spontaneity"....the life-blood of all Change and hence, of existence (for the later IS the former).

I'll think of some more concrete way to say this if possible, but for now...that's it..

 

Luo

[Marblehead]

I'll think of some more concrete way to say this if possible, but for now...that's it..

 

Luo

 

Well, I think you did a great job and I enjoyed reading it. Thanks for sharing.

 

Peace & Love!

[Luo]

I found something that perfectly elucudates my point (or points, rather)

 

http://taoism.net/theway/

 

Read "The Modern Taoist Sage" under "Insights"

In gasho,

Luo

[Marblehead]

I found something that perfectly elucudates my point (or points, rather)

 

http://taoism.net/theway/

 

Read "The Modern Taoist Sage" under "Insights"

In gasho,

Luo

 

Yep. That is a well-written piece, I think.

 

Peace & Love!

[LINGGUZI]

TAO can not be described. But Taoism aspired YANGSHEN(阳神）living forever.

Edited December 18, 2009 by LINGGUZI

[chegg]

Wow, this is a nice forum topic. Lots of explanations about what Tao is/isnt.

 

I've been studying shamanism, gnosticism, theosophy, theology, esoteric christian mysticism, buddhism, witchcraft and a few others.

 

Finding answers seems to be rather a matter of "will" and "direct experience" rather than trying to understand lots of written material. The teachings seem to be secondary. You either want to "do it" or you dont so-to-speak.

 

So forums are good for corroborating experiences or purely for entertainment purposes :-).

Edited December 18, 2009 by chegg

[Marblehead]

 

So forums are good for corroborating experiences or purely for entertainment purposes :-).

 

Yes, I think that discussions such as this help us, individually, to better understand what it is we each believe and therefore how we feel we should live our life.

 

Peace & Love!

[triestestudent]

Does Taoism teach one can go beyond Mind. The Tibetans in The Book of the Dead give quite specific details on the Bardos...and part of what i understood is that the Bardos are projections of the Mind. But my question is what is projecting the Mind? Also...can we weave a tapestry that avoids being limited by any ism?

[Marblehead]

Does Taoism teach one can go beyond Mind.

 

I will speak only to this. In my understanding of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu never spoke to this concept.

 

Chuang Tzu did allude to it in a couple of his stories but to my knowledge never spoke directly to the concept.

 

Alchemic and Religious Taoists got much closer to that concept but it might be because of their integrating Buddhism in with their belief system.

 

Peace & Love!

[exorcist_1699]

On 7/1/2008 at 2:42 AM, Taomeow said:

...almost as strange indeed as modern physicists using such officially scientific terms for the behavior of some particles as "strangeness" and "charm" (I kid you not), or describing "strings" (which don't seem to be any more visible than "dragons") as "made essentially of a kind of bubble gum" (I kid you not again), or using any number of made-up words that don't mean anything until they are invented as labels for some phenomena we need to name "something" --

phenomena, furthermore, of which most are not observable at all, whose existence is theorized only on the basis of their impact on something scientists CAN observe ("neutrinos" are not observable, only their behavior is, to an extent); while others are not only not observable, but not even discernible in their effects and are pure speculation on top of being named a made-up name ("quarks").

 

Taoism is different from the rest of them all in that it is, first and foremost, a science. Don't let "strange names" for "strange phenomena" which "may or may not exist" fool you. It is a science of the superior kind, the one that doesn't take the observer out of the phenomena observed, thereby avoiding a false postulate of "objectivity" our own science rests on -- as though the scientist isn't there, doesn't matter, doesn't skew the outcome, interpretation, application of phenomena under observation by his or her being smack in the middle of them. The extent of unreality that allows for our science to have some auxiliary universe on the side, unaccounted for, where all the scientists purportedly go so as to objectify themselves, take themselves out of the universe they are observing so as to draw 'objective' conclusions about it, is mind-boggling. Taoist sciences were never make-believe to this extent, never played this let's-pretend-I'm-not-here game our own scientific games are based on. They never attempted any science that is only true to the extent the scientist himself doesn't count as part of what's going on.

 

It is for a very good reason that Niels Bohr chose the taiji symbol for his coat-of-arms when he was knighted.

 

Modern physics, especially quantum mechanics  , make  emptiness and consciousness / observers   factors  or issues that need to be considered when studying the essence or basic blocks of the universe ;  they are , in fact  , two , out of other few topics like qi,  most heavily  talked topics of  Buddhism and Daoism as we can find  , in Daoist cannons and  Buddhist Sutras , millions of pages  devoted to  them  . Although modern science thinks that this  Consciousness (  in reality, expressions of the Buddha Heart or Cosmic Mind* in minds of the crowds )  something intelligent arisen on planets billions years after the big-bang and the cooling down  of those solar systems , Buddhism and Daoism think that intelligent Mind  exists right at the beginning , everywhere , it is only its expressions that look seemingly  after time and look required happened under certain physical conditions, for example , in the habitable zone of a solar system . 

 

*Cosmic Mind ( '天心') , Daoist term equivalent to the Buddha Heart .

[Taomeow]

8 hours ago, exorcist_1699 said:

 

Modern physics, especially quantum mechanics  , make  emptiness and consciousness / observers   factors  or issues that need to be considered when studying the essence or basic blocks of the universe ;  they are , in fact  , two , out of other few topics like qi,  most heavily  talked topics of  Buddhism and Daoism as we can find  , in Daoist cannons and  Buddhist Sutras , millions of pages  devoted to  them  . Although modern science thinks that this  Consciousness (  in reality, expressions of the Buddha Heart or Cosmic Mind* in minds of the crowds )  something intelligent arisen on planets billions years after the big-bang and the cooling down  of those solar systems , Buddhism and Daoism think that intelligent Mind  exists right at the beginning , everywhere , it is only its expressions that look seemingly  after time and look required happened under certain physical conditions, for example , in the habitable zone of a solar system . 

 

*Cosmic Mind ( '天心') , Daoist term equivalent to the Buddha Heart .

 

Thanks for a blast from the past.

 

I don't think I was making any statements about emptiness and consciousness.  I was talking of observers taken out of the equation as a matter of routine operations of what we are told is scientific objectivity.  What I seem to remember having in mind was something not as grand as the cosmic mind but, rather, things very mundane that we accept as objective scientific approach.  Not the elephant in the room but a herd of elephants, in fact.  The non-independence and non-freedom of any "objective observer" from all things subjective.  From their very own personality traits ("gotta prove it to mom and dad and the world that I'm important, that I'm worthy") to hopes of tenure or grants given or not given based on how well the results dovetail with the granting party's agenda, to the general reluctance to rock the boat that carries the "observer"-- hierarchy, career, non-alienating the peers whose careers and incomes might depend on no "independent objective observer" rocking the boat, down to the price of publishing one's scientific observations when not sponsored/desired by anything big and powerful and incorporated (a minimum of $5,000 out of the observer's pocket these days, per my scientist friends) and ad infinitum.

 

  

Edited May 13 by Taomeow

[snowymountains]

On 13/05/2024 at 7:32 PM, Taomeow said:

 

The non-independence and non-freedom of any "objective observer" from all things subjective.  From their very own personality traits ("gotta prove it to mom and dad and the world that I'm important, that I'm worthy") to hopes of tenure or grants given or not given based on how well the results dovetail with the granting party's agenda, to the general reluctance to rock the boat that carries the "observer"-- hierarchy, career, non-alienating the peers whose careers and incomes might depend on no "independent objective observer" rocking the boat, down to the price of publishing one's scientific observations when not sponsored/desired by anything big and powerful and incorporated (a minimum of $5,000 out of the observer's pocket these days, per my scientist friends) and ad infinitum.

 

  

 

Peer review as it's done today has failed to uphold standards