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This a more complete reposting than Simon offered of the bagua question that accidentally got deleted by webmaster while getting ready to upgrade the Forum software. Simon’s post had the nice description by max of the problem created by our confused minds.
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>Taoists use different methods to accomplish the same thing- their success or failure depends on allowing this process to happen naturally instead of forcing it.There is a difference between looking within your body and observing energy sensations AS THEY ARE and WHAT YOU THINK THEY SHOULD BE.
>Human mind is the key on any spiritual path. The moment it perceives any combination of 5 elements through your 5 senses and attaches an emotional response to it, you create karma. If you don’t stop this process, all your spiritual practices will have only a limited effect- just like cutting the weed without removing its root.
All of the excellent discussion about shen theory in this and the earlier thread are dancing around a hidden center of gravity without actually naming it. I will name it. It’s called Free Will.
Free Will notion arises from the idea that the primordial, undifferentiated being had the WILL to polarize itself (yin-yang octaves) and then began playing with these polarities in five phase cycles/harmonics/tones.
So that whatever got created in this process also has a tiny piece of that original free will. Including humans, that by design (as things evolved, and challenges arose) got a pretty high degree of free will given to them.
The five shen are sometimes called the Five Wills. They simply represent microcosmically the relationship between original will (here Original Shen) and its manifesting process (here Five Shen).
I think Max gave a good overview of the process, but drew the wrong conclusion.
Possibly because he’s influenced by a tradition that thinks the self is illusory and thus how could it have any free will?This is not too different from schools that believe all Will and thus all action is taken by God, thus human salvation relies on giving up your individual will and surrendering it to God. The belief blurs the simlultaneous co-existence of Original Will and its manifest forms expressed within the 10,000 things. There is not a conflict between the two; there is a process.
“Allowing” something naturally and “Responding actively” to an energetic sensation are both acts of free will, one is yin, the other is yang. Responding to an emotion does create karma. Karma just means action. So yes, response is an action to another action.
Nothing wrong with action – taking action is an essential aspect of free will. If we cannot take action, we don’t feel free. All outer action is preceded by inner action, which could also be called imagination – the activity of the five shen together creating a reality as an act of personal will. A perfect reflection of the action of the greater (cosmic) self in creating the reality in which it can also microcosmically act.
Inner Alchemy simply trains one to take action on higher levels of the chain of “self”, from lesser personal self to greater cosmic self to original self. To take higher action, one has to integrate the lesser 5 wills and act in a unified and harmonic manner. That brings one into closer allignment with Original Will and leads to greater trust.
When greater trust exists, more chi is released to flow into the lesse levels of self, and thus more power to exercise more free will. “Spiritual immortality” is simply a way to conceptualize/describe this process of developing responsible individual will that is allowed to exercise its creative imagination in more dimensions.l
When you birth a child, you hope the child will love you, and you encourage that response, that the child will acknowledge the love (yi, creative imagination/personal will needed to create another being) and sacrifice (giving of one’s sperm/egg) in order to birth. But you also know that you cannot force the child to love you, otherwise its mechanical (unwilled) expression of love would be meaningless.
The question, do the 5 shen have any reality? is really asking, does any level of the cosmic process have a reality? Or the underlying question really is, what can we say about that “reality” that would deepen our experience of it?
Of course, an ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory.
But perhaps still useful to have “dry runs” here in mental/cyberspace.
A “reality” implies a center of perspective, which requires a center of gravity to hold together the process (yin-yang and 5 phase); so gravity defines a sense of self. Any “reality” thus is held together by gravity.
Is gravity real? This is the greatest mystery of both physics and metaphysics – we know its real, but its source is elusive.
The embracing of Earth’s physical gravity (starting with lower dantian) and Heaven’s spiritual gravity (beginning with upper dantian) will eventually awaken the true center of gravity of Humanity (middle dantian).
These are the Three Ones, the trinitarian processs inseparable from the Original One which mysteriously arose from the Supreme Mystery, wuji.
Lovely how every small question leads back to the same mystery.
michael
Nothing wrong with action – taking action is an essential aspect of free will. If we cannot take action, we don’t feel free. All outer action is preceded by inner action, which could also be called imagination – the activity of the five shen together creating a reality as an act of personal will. A perfect reflection of the action of the greater (cosmic) self in creating the reality in which it can also microcosmically act.
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How is “activity of the five shen creating a reality” an act of free will? Who’s free will?— You are not a puppet, there is no God outside of you creating your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. You self-create. You missed what I wrote. Let me say it a different way: There is only ONE will that exists, but it has many ways of experiencing and shaping itself, ranging from Original Will to Collective Will to Individual Will. All wills co-exist simultaneously and influence each other, as they have common origin. Your perspective on will depends on your level of cultivation.
—–When greater trust exists, more chi is released to flow into the lesser levels of self, and thus more power to exercise more free will. “Spiritual immortality” is simply a way to conceptualize/describe this process of developing responsible individual will that is allowed to exercise its creative imagination in more dimensions.
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Is the followong another way of saying this, “Individual will attunes to the cosmic self/creation/intelligence”, so attunning is an alchemical process, and as you mentioned the taoists have lots of ways to attune?
———-Attuning can only happen by resonant rapport (in chinese, gan ying). It is the fundamental principle of how the life force works. It is an alchemical process if you are using the principles of the life force to guide your process, to resolve apparent differences and bring out deeper truth and give it greater substance.
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Special and important question!!!!!!!!!!!!!!The question, do the 5 shen have any reality? is really asking, does any level of the cosmic process have a reality? Or the underlying question really is, what can we say about that “reality” that would deepen our experience of it?
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Ssome taoist literature seems to imply the five shen can scatter at death, implying they are not really you/self???— false conclusion. 5 shen are the awareness PROCESS of your local human self, a process that is by definition cyclical and thus temporary in form. Its illusion to consider the physical self permanent, but also illusion to consider the process illusory. the Process is REAL.
Are the five shen inseparable from the individual self?
— they are one set of parameters to define the individual self, give it boundary and direction and body. but that doesn’t make them separate from the collective or original self.
At death does the individual self split too?
—vague question. split from what? probable answer: you shift to other levels of self, there is no “split”. The “individual self” is just a mini-collective mirror, and at death it gets recycled to the macro-collective self.
If the five shen scatter into the collective, what happens to the individual self?
— depends on its level of integration and free will attained. If shen and jing have not integrated in the alchemical marriage on earth, they will not stay integrated in heaven. As above, so below. and vice versa. Its why alchemy stresses so strongly creating a vessel – the integration of jing, chi, and shen – while still in a body. You have greater free will in a body than in the sea of spirits.
That’s why spirits come to earth – to learn to manage free will. You have a mission/destiny to complete; completion brings integration.Opponents of Free Will comes from those aspects in heaven and earth that believe in Celestial Hierarchy, rule from above, and granting of power to individuals below who serve the Hierarchy.
They hate free will, and offer power to tempt many from the Right Use of Free Will in order to prove it is a failure, that it results in chaos and war and violence.
If that sounds like a religion/priest hood/political structure you know….time to wake up.
…and use your free will to smell the roses and embrace the unique freedom you have to live in harmony and balance with the whole, to love it without being controlled by any level of it. Your free will comes from Origiinal Being, and cannot be taken away by any Deity or Power structure on earth or in heaven.
That is my interpreatation and experience of the spiritual freedom offered by realization of the Tao.
Michael
Missing posts don’t matter much.
Plato just wrote a new book- check it out.
Prostate orgasmOne’s opinion only. Not to be taken as all sacred.
Allowing god to guide you is only allowing your higher self to guide you since god and you/me/self is one. And this I believe is a complex issue not just related to ego, etc. but rather deeper cellular/DNA connection. Praying and giving to “god” is not such a wrong thing. It gives our higher selves permission to change things that we cannot do on this level. Put simply.
trying to understand everything is basically a waste of time. However trying to do everything you understand … ahh, now that is a real task.
Mr. Rosinke’s products are damn powerful, good for the prostate overall but they also gave me gas and intestinal distress.
Ricky from Singapore
Plato,
glad to see you’ve harnassed your scorpionic powers to penetrate into the depths of prostate hell
and back.Questions:
1. What’s your definition of a neo-Taoist?
2. What appears to be a thorough table of contents about all aspects of prostatology is mis-matched by a book blurb that makes it seems as if you’ve put every idea you’ve ever had into the book.
However, those ideas, i.e about matriarachy, etc. don’t seem to appear in the table of contents.
What gives? Is there a real table of contents, or are we looking at a spoof blurb?
Glad you appreciate my attempt to ferry the fabled scorpion without getting stung. Of course, some scorpions should be allowed their sting–or so I have discovered in my life.
1. Are you adding “dictionary publisher” to your long list of achievements? I ask because I am unsure about your intentions in asking for a definition of the expression “Neo-Taoist.” I do not intend to be snippy for the sake of snip, but rather as a defense against what I suspect may be coming up the Winn-pike. That was pretty funny, huh? You could say that I have cut you off at the pass just now by manipulating the limbic brains of those who read this post. Unfortunately you’ve already beaten me to the punch with your use of ridicule. Very clever. You could have been a politician. Such is the tragedy of the human condition for as you said so beautifully in your anti-suicide post above, we do not yet own our own lives. Anyway, I just know you well enough to have the thought that I know where you are going with this and so I had the thought not to give you the opportunity. 🙂 See, Nan Huai-Chin’s first book was “Finger Pointing at the Moon” which sold so bad he had to sell it to butchers who used the pages to wrap meat. I find this very ironic because the expression sums up one of the big problems with the world, which is that people play too much with the definitions of words (fingers) instead of focusing on the truths they may point to (the moon).
2. Have you bought the book? I ask because I have not processed your credit card and I do not list my book’s table of contents on the website. Nonetheless, if it seems like I’ve put every idea I ever had into the book, your intuition is correct. It should feel that way. Still, somehow I get the impression that you are making it sound like it is a bad thing? 80% of me is in that book. What sparked the thing was that originally I was approached by Scott Sonnon to write a series of articles on cultivating the body–to put it in “Neo-Taoist” terms. LOL!!! So I wrote them, and filmed videos to go along with them. Apparently Scott Sonnon felt threatened or something because he not only rejected them, he would not even talk to me about his rejection! I was a little hurt but saw in his rejection both the energy and the opportunity to write “Prostate Orgasm, Prostate Cure” and create http://www.nyctaoist.com because it seemed to me that everyone, be it you or Scott Sonnon, is more interested in protecting their respective empires of dirt–be it for financial or intellectual reasons.
“Prostate Orgasm, Prostate Cure” is a cultivation method for our times. Straight from the New York City Taoist Underground. On the surface it is about a timely topic–the epidemic of prostate cancer, and sports a salacious hook–the notion of prostate orgasms, but I have in actuality seamlessly integrated an entire method of cultivation into the book, it is my gift to the world–a solution in a world where nobody offers solutions anymore, just words. One of the misconceptions is that Zen is all about the mind and neglects the body. The reality is more like Zen is for those who can go no further with their bodies. These days people jump right into Zen and this is stupid. For some reason this is not conveyed effectively in Nan Huai-Chin’s books and neither is it in Bill Bodri’s. Nan Huai-Chin made it very clear to me in person, though. Zen is the highest level of practice and parallel to pure Taoism. Unfortunately these days Taoism has become a corrupted shadow of itself. Taoists have to embrace Buddhism in order to advance in their practice. Eventually they make their way to Zen. The only danger in this is that they get lost along the way. They play so much with form-based methods (and you can’t blame them because the state of modern man DEMANDS a form-based method) that they forget that the form-based method is just another finger pointing at something. To put it as simple as possible, a form-based method is nothing more then a means to offer yourself opportunities to change your thoughts by temporarily dissolving their expression in your form. This is the window where you can exercise your free will. If you do so and change the thought behind the form, then you are cultivating yourself. What my book does it put forth a form-based method that PRECLUDES all other form-based method because it focuses on the true root of the man, which is the skull.
Really Michael, does it matter if my ideas about matriarchy aren’t listed in the table of contents? I am not in university anymore and thanks to the bad habits engendered by e-mail I could probably author a book in ebonics and win a Pullitzer Prize! I mean, have you ACTUALLY authored a post centered around whether I have a REAL table of contents or not??? What gives with THAT? 😉
Nope, http://www.prostatesecrets.com is not hosting a “spoof blurb.” Are you calling my well-written book synopsis a “spoof blurb?” Anybody with wisdom will immediately get the gravity of my work. Since you do have wisdom, I must question your intentions.
You don’t have to attack Plato’s book, Michael. There is no spoof blurb.
Or is it one of your attempts to get a free copy- just like with Bill Bodri’s books?All you have to do is ask for it without going around with unrelated questions.
After I took your ProstateMagic© I can’t neither shit nor piss, and my breath stinks like my wife’s yeast infected vagina.
Are you going to compensate my damages or???
Scoundrel!!!
Ricky from Singapore
You damn Devil Advocate, you Jozef Mengele of Taoism, you brute!!
You and your accomplice Plato Rosinke’s ProstateMagic© forumula fucked up my kidneys and you’ll pay for it now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ricky from Singapore
Do you have comment:
I bought Nan’s book on enlightenment on Yudelove’s reading recommendation.
It shows Nan in one meditation pose.
Book recommends some others.
Only a noname woman is demonstrating it.Both you and Max are a bit paranoid. I can understand it, allowing types like Ricky from Singapore to hang out in parts of your brain.
My questions, believe it or not, were straightforward, not the prelude to a sneak attack. I think we are in a new phase now where its more fun to play different games. So no need to go into a pre-defensive pre-emptive statement about Nan and the Only Way.
Behind the question on definition of Neo Taoist was curiosity why you don’t choose to identify yourself as a Chan Buddhist.
I think its great you’ve expressed yourself in a book and was planning to buy it to support your creative expression. I normally can get review copies, and was sure you would give me one, but I am not asking for it.
Books are a lot of work. And the prostate is hidden in darkness, and well worth bringing into the light.
But I followed the link posted on your book and it gave what appeared to be a long table of contents on the left side about all aspect of the prostate and blurb on the right side that didn’t match that table.
Before I buy something, I like to know what its about. You might straighten that out. Unless you just wanted to pull in all the men with prostate issues and then sock it to them with a surprise attack on their psyche…..
Have to run now, time to order the first of many eccentric best sellers from the Plato who Escaped from his Cave.
🙂
MichaelI see what created my confusion.
When I followed the link posted for your book, the page popped open part way down the page, obscuring the title at the top indicating this was your website homepage. So I thought the links at the left were the table of contents to your book which was featured on the right.
I assumed this was a site dedicated to your book. I clicked on the links on the left side and thought I was getting teaser sections of the book chapters.
so now what you need to do is publish a table of contents and a sample introductory chapter or two.
People need to know that they are getting new and deeper info by buying the book than what is on the site.
Free advice.
m
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