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March 25, 2005 at 9:15 pm #3666spongebobParticipant
ok, so this terry schiavo thing has gotten way out of hand in the media. however, there is something interesting in al this as it relates to taoist alchemy and qigong. a really really important question comes up that is mever really addressed adequately in the classes. what exactly is the brain and how important is it?
we talk a lot about the body-mind, the brain cells in the abdomen, the shen, and kind of dismiss the brain as a “sea of marrow,” as not really that important, at least form the alchemical perspective. yet medical science has studied the brain extensively, located active centers that correspond to various physical, mental, and emotinal operatioons. without our brains, we are vegetables, like ms. schiavo. there are rare instances of people doing these they shouldnt be able to do after serious brain traumas or even partial removals. but why aren’t terry schiavo’s shen keeping her conscious and active?
Western alchemy focuses a great deal on the brain. they “semenalize” it. they work the glands that lead to psychic development. the vocalize and energize the chakras that relate to it. and yet, they largely ignore, ion their prctices, the other organs.
so what gives? i’d like to hear anyone’s views on this but especially michael’s and other senior HT instructors.
March 26, 2005 at 2:49 am #3667oldhParticipantO.k. I know that many will have a difficulty accepting this possible explanation and I know that Michael has a different take on Karma. But one person I understood as a teacher of mine during a certain period said, that people born like this are paying a lot of Karma being in this state. As bad as it looks from the outside, it might be the most beneficial thing happening seen from a different plane. That could be a reason why the Shen can not be that active in her. I mean: the shen do need a functioning body to move arms atc. equally they need the brain to do their work through it, like my computer would never write without me but me not being able to write if my computer is damaged in any way.
Do the practitioners really ignore the things you mention. As the body is interconnected one can work on something to affect the other either way… I think…
March 26, 2005 at 10:07 am #3669BeginnerParticipantHey. I didn’t know that about the western alchemical emphasis on the brain. I guess it is the fire method of raising energy up into the higher centers for enlightenment? I am not sure they ignore the other organs as much as use them as fuel for the ascending fire?
My first response to the Schiavo incident is that the focus should be more on the nature of western medicine to mechanize our bodies and torture a natural process until it generates more suffering.
To put this as a result of Terry’s karma, that she had to experience living in a world without her brain awareness, makes me consider that suffering in my life has purpose and ultimate balance is being made on the inside. I can hang out there and explore that more. I see injuries in my own life as condensed teachers when I can be present without panic or revulsion.
However, to then be in the hands of people who are terrified of the natural impulse to die….who devise methods that prolong what may have been the shen’s initial choice to disband, in the taoist mindset, adds another layer onto this that isn’t about Terry anymore but our culture.
Recently, I have seen two movies that approach this from a different point of view. The Sea Inside is about a man who broke his neck and lived for 28 years as a quadriplegic with the wish to set himself loose from a body that couldn’t respond to his passions. It asked wonderful questions, was pro choice, but made me wonder about the situation where the brain is unaffected but the body is without its nervous system.
I depend so much on my sensations and movements to bring me out of my brain. What would I do if this were taken from me? Consider it karmic rebalance and lay there? Or choose to disband?
In the Clint Eastwood movie it is from the Point of view of the one who is asked to be the moving arms for death to come. It is very touching and difficult.
I watched my mother ebb over a 10 year period with Alzheimer’s. Her headaches grew into name loss to mindless singing to a feeding tube. Every time I visited her I grieved the loss of another communicative part and traveled to the inner planes to meet her.
My father had the opportunity to pull the tube but couldn’t starve her to death. It appeared to me that she was first in a mental prison, one getting smaller and smaller, and then in a physical one–in the name of love.
I know Michael has spoken about suicide as the worst choice from a taoist perspective but when medical science, which is based on a mechanical model of how we work, enters with their divine resuscitations that never restore the person’s willful pulsations toward integration, the core impulse of alchemy and why we are here, but is moving into dissolution…then maybe suicide is the natural alternative.
We all die in so many unique and interesting ways, when it enters the cultural psyche like this, something big is happening that is beyond me. baba
March 26, 2005 at 11:34 am #3671oldhParticipantBaba. What did your Mom tell you in the realm of the inner planes?
March 26, 2005 at 11:45 am #3673oldhParticipant…and: if Karma exists in the way meant, than in this case culture is part of it and a necessity for Karma to fullfil its way… without culture and people being afraid of the natural impulse to die there would be no way for Karma in that way to work… it would then use different means…
March 26, 2005 at 1:04 pm #3675TrunkParticipantI think that there’s a lot to it, that popularly often gets only brief mention. The lobes and sections of the brain, how jing fills and moves through them, the various glands and how that relates to channels and transformation.
March 26, 2005 at 11:36 pm #3677Michael WinnKeymasterSpongebob,
I was deep in an Easter petting reverie with my rabbit whenI heard your question on the inner planes. Easter, by the way, is an old pagan Water and Fire celebration of the Oestrus, the rebirth through sexual conjoining of natural forces….Back to Terry and others in a coma. Their shen are fully functional, they are perfectly awre of what is going on. Personal body shen are just the end point of a stream of cosmic consciousness that can’t die. Whether it expresses itself in the post-natal realm is a different question, and here the brain plays a major role as the expressive pathway for the shen.
I’ve worked with people in comas and they will communicate if you know how to talk to them. A lot of work has been done in this area by Arnold Mindell, a Taoist neo-jungian psychologist who calls his work ” Process work”. His books are available from his imprint, Lao Tse Press. He’s brought people out of comas after twenty years, etc.
The brain is one of six extraordinary or “curious” organs, others including the spine, blood vessels, female uterus, sometimes the gall bladder is defined as one, and another that escapes my enfeebled brain at the moment.
The brain is important to Taoists, but it just doesn’t have an inner will of its own; its will is just an expression of heart fire rising up to be radiated out to the post-natal realm. Its also the landing pad for the Great Spirit, Da Shen, descending from the “vault of heaven”, the dome of skull. All covered in formula 5.
The brain is highly respected in the sequential training of inner alchemy, and hence is cultivated directly only after the proper foundation has been laid in the earlier formulas leading up to the Sealing of the Senses. Otherwise, you are fooling yourself into thinking you have penetrated its operating system – just like the scientists who probe it externally with MRI machines haven’t a clue as to its invisble (non-cellular) intenral dynamics. If you even believe in the dinosaur age theory that the brain communicates via nerves only, well, that pretty well dates you to the last century. Read the article on my Science and Tao section by Mae Wan Ho on liquid crystal pathways of communication….
Short story: don’t confuse the primacy of the brain and our face attached to it with the inner workings of the soul and energy body – they control the brain, not the other way around, although if you remove the brain it certainly makes it hard to communicate with this physical dimension. But you can be leglaly brain dead, and still have your heart beating, i.e. alive at core.
March 27, 2005 at 3:18 am #3679Golden SunParticipantHis liscence plate reads LAPLANI, which is his bunny rabbit.
Or atleast it did when I saw his car years ago.
I am a Rabbit(born ’75) Do Rabbits have any special qualities that you got one or do you just have a special relationship with your pet?
March 27, 2005 at 3:32 am #3681Simon V.ParticipantVery good book that speaks to and supports much of what Michael just said here (and which cites Mae Wan Ho) is “The Biology of Transcendence” by Joseph Pearce, usually known as ‘the guy who wrote The Crack in the Cosmic Egg’ (not to be confused with my lesser known ‘poached egg’ theory of the universe).
March 27, 2005 at 10:39 am #3683Michael WinnKeymasterJust to update you,
My wife’s license plates are LOPLANI and mine says LAO TZU.Loplani is a rabbit immortal. He ascended into the higher realms after living 9x longer than ordinary rabbits int he wild.
Rabbits are the best pets for serious meditators because they don’t bark or meaow. Silence is their modus operandi. They are in deep constant meditation with the earth, and Loplani is one of my best teachers (and also a teacher to many other humans, but that is a longer story).
My wife Joyce and I at first thought Loplani was just a dumb bunny, so it took us a while to catch on to how smart they are. Had to get over our attitutde: just because you have a small body, doesnn’t mean you don’t have a Great Spirit. Eventually we discovered I could train Loplani to meditate with the heaven side as well.
When it came time to depart, Loplani made it clear he had no interest in following the mass of other rabbits into the Great Hole that led back into the center of the earth. He showed it to me one day, gave me a glimpse of the millions of dying rabbits all funneling into this hole, where they would recycle back into the Great White Rabbit Stellar body of consciousness before reincarnating. Basically, Loplani wanted to transcend the limitations of his rabbit form – and did so, energetically and spiritually. He took a different journey than most rabbits.
Loplani never really died. He was old, pushing nine years (a lot for a holland lop), having, health problems, and I think was ready to leave. One day, I fed him some high voltage chi following a workshop with extensive practice of the wudang spinning pearl method of circulating the orbit that mixes the blood and chi very powerfully.
I am not sure whether I fried his heart or whether he just used it a catalyst to make the Great Leap Forward. But Loplani suddenly went into shock.
I had my hand on his head, just as I always did when we did long meditations together. Then, as the chi built up, he suddenly screamed, a terrifying scream, like a samurai warrior – the only time in his life we heard him speak. Then he dramatically threw himself behind a couch, and lay there, stretched out and breathless. We couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive. He wsn’t breathing, but his body was pulsating palpably.And we could tell he was still Present. His shen weren’t ready to leave yet.
We laid him on a fancy bier (cardboard box, draped with silk and covered with rose petals) for a few days. His body refused to decompose, a sign that the shen had successfully fused into one. Dozens of people – many of them his students or people he had healed – came by to pay their regards. An animal psychic visited, and said he had never seen an auric field so large and powerful, that it was not that of an ordinary animal, or in his words, “not the aura of animal, period”.
When we realized that Loplani’s body was still not smelling or decomposing after several days, we decided to speed the process of release for him and had him cremated. We stayed present with him throughout the process, and were able to monitor his transmutations as he shifted vibrationally. It was very intense, and joyful in a biter sweet way, with Loplani communicating the experience for as long as he could.
Several other odd notes about this story, which I assure you is completely true and not exaggerated. I am born in the year of the Rabbit, and had been guided on my first trip to China in 1985 to adopt my taoist name, Moon Rabbit Half-Immortal.
The Chinese see a rabbit on the moon, holding an alchemists mortar and pestle where he compounds the elixir of life. There are many ancient myths about this, and undoubtedly the rabbits ability to have a litter EVERY MONTH was a hint that they have extremely abundant jing (sexual-soul essence) and are able to transmute it into lifeforms easily.
The arrival of Loplani in our life had been predicted by an old woman, who was channeling Thoth. I went to see her before a trip to Egypt in 1992. Thoth – or Te-au-te in Atlantean lingo – gave me lots of tips about my upcoming trip that proved useful and true, including how to find a piece of the original alabaster covering the Great Pyramid. That piece of worked stone opened direct memories of the construction of the Pyramid….but I digress.
But the one thing Thoth said that was most puzzling was that my wife and I would soon have a child, “a small boy”. When I pressed him about this utterly unlikely (in my mind) prediction – whether it was by birth or adoption, he was silent, other than to adamantly repeat the prediction. Anyway, Loplani arrived in our life 7 months later….
….and today spiritual Son of Loplani, called Leilani, has incarnated. “lei” is hawaiian-lemurian for “flower”, and “lani” is heaven or sky. So he is Flowers- sent-from-Heaven. Leilani is still in his hormones-on-four-paws stage, but we have high hopes for him becoming another great meditator and Rabbit Iimmortal. He is showing early signs of seeking after Heaven, as he tries to climb to the highest position he can reach, no matter how precarious – window sills,the high point on couches and chairs. A mountain climbing bunny.
An explorer rabbit, one after my one heart.
May your Easter-Estrus bear immortal children,
michaelMarch 27, 2005 at 11:26 am #3685Golden SunParticipantThoth gave you guidance on how to find a piece of the missing alabaster? Did you get into learning about Egypt or Atlantis through past shen memories or did an Immortal or Thoth contact you? Does this stuff appear to you when you are in meditation or do these beings just appear to you when your out in nature or something? I am guessing you communicate with them on the “inner planes” somehow rather than just materializing in your living room?
Care to share your memories of building the Pyramids? Also, are their any books you would specifically reccomend that exist on the subject. I don’t think Atleantean Alchemy is somehting that has been really written about publicly, has it? Most everything I have seen about the subject is from New Age sources that generally lack credibility.
Then again, I guess it’s hard when information is coming from a source that doesn’t exist phyisically and is being channeled from another dimension.
Loplani sounds like he was a very special rabbit. I love animals but couldn’t deal with the noise of dogs and am allergic to cats, maybe I should look for a rabbit..
March 27, 2005 at 3:47 pm #3687Michael WinnKeymasterTo digress further might spoil your pleasure in reading
Stellar Mind Speaks: Spiritual Science of Shaping the Life Force
(rough working title).
michaelMarch 27, 2005 at 4:25 pm #3689Golden SunParticipantI would buy your book if it was a work of fiction. but to think you have actually experienced these things and are going to write about them is pretty wild. Did you recieve a oral history of practices and human history from Thoth ? I know “New Age” authors like Drunvalo Melchezdek says Thoth gave him the history of Atlantis but always seemd pretty “out there” to me.
I think his version says we were created as slaves to an “alien race” or something, and thay were rspinsible for destroying Atlantis with their technologies of control.
And how does this correlate to people such as the Native American Indians who have been around for 30,000+ years.
Thena gain, the Native Indians and South American tribes do have some wild stories about creation.
Well, I thing I first heard about you writing this book like 5 or 6 years ago so I am guessing you are putting alot into it.
are you looking for a publisher for it or planning on releasing it as an E book?
March 28, 2005 at 11:11 am #3691spyrelxParticipantAnd the chewing.
Rabbits might be great pets in Asheville but I wouldn’t recommend them in a small apartment. They chew EVERYTHING, poop somewhat indiscriminately, and molt a few times a year. (Molting by the way is not like a cat shedding, it’s like 50 cat’s shedding).
No disrespect to Lopolani or any other member of his species, but I’m sticking with the chocolate kind.
March 28, 2005 at 7:36 pm #3693spyrelxParticipant. . . uh, what “poached egg theory of the universe” might that be?
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