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If you believe in immortals in your alchemical practice, must you believe in the entire model of the taoist universe. This would include all the gods, demons, realms, etc. Can you take out this from one tradition and that from another and decoct your own theory and call it the tao or reality?
bagua,
lao tzu’s opinion, from the first line of the tao te ching:
“the tao that can be spoken about is not really the tao.”
would seem to be that anything that can be called the tao is not reality or the tao, no matter what method is used or where one “takes” things from.
why be upset about the idea of tao immortals?
if they don’t exist, then there’s no reason to be bothered.
if they do exist, but you don’t want to experience them,
then they surely would not intrude upon your experience,
so again, what could bother you?if one part of you wants to interact with tao immortals but another part doesn’t, the you might be bothered,
but not by tao immortals but by the tension between conflicting desires within yourself.
perhaps one part of you wants to BE a tao immortal, while another part does not.
then the argument over whether or not immortals exist would really be the battle over whether or not you should become one…
Yang1:
Interesting post. I do not know what it has to do with my question. I just asked if you believe in immortals and cultivating to become one, do you need to accept the other aspects of the taoist tradition/philosophy that is part of system? There is no judgement on whether they exists or not?
lao tzu’s opinion, from the first line of the tao te ching:
“the tao that can be spoken about is not really the tao.”
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Another translation of spoken is named.My understanding of this is when the intellect becomes active it can not express reality; it is before thinking. That your thoughts/imagination is not reality. This state of awareness is tao and it is here all the time. No where to go, found in your current home/body.
bagua
would seem to be that anything that can be called the tao is not reality or the tao, no matter what method is used or where one “takes” things from.
why be upset about the idea of tao immortals?
if they don’t exist, then there’s no reason to be bothered.
if they do exist, but you don’t want to experience them,
then they surely would not intrude upon your experience,
so again, what could bother you?if one part of you wants to interact with tao immortals but another part doesn’t, the you might be bothered,
but not by tao immortals but by the tension between conflicting desires within yourself.
perhaps one part of you wants to BE a tao immortal, while another part does not.
then the argument over whether or not immortals exist would really be the battle over whether or not you should become one…
“If you believe in immortals in your alchemical practice, must you believe in the entire model of the taoist universe. This would include all the gods, demons, realms, etc. Can you take out this from one tradition and that from another and decoct your own theory and call it the tao or reality?”
Based on your reply to yang1, you meant the first sentence as a question, but it ends in a period, so it looks like an affirmative statement, which lead to a miscommunication.
So to an your first question (you wrote two) I don’t think you have to believe in the other aspects of the Taoist universe too because of several reasons:
a) all the aspects of the taoist universe came from multiple facets of tradition, there could be a taoist school completely oblivious to some of the aspects
b) there could have been immortals before these ideas where intellectualized out of the experiences who had not heard of them from other humans on their way to immmortality
c) if you look at different taoist systems, they can contain different things. a person who follows “Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality” and becomes immortal can do this without knowing about a lot of Taoist stuff that is not included in that system.
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Your second question
Can you take out this from one tradition and that from another and decoct your own theory and call it the tao or reality?
That only looks at one way of approaching alchemical traditions.Ryan and friends
Hello Ryan:
Thanks for your good response.
So to an your first question (you wrote two) I don’t think you have to believe in the other aspects of the Taoist universe too because of several reasons:
a) all the aspects of the taoist universe came from multiple facets of tradition, there could be a taoist school completely oblivious to some of the aspects
b) there could have been immortals before these ideas where intellectualized out of the experiences who had not heard of them from other humans on their way to immmortality
c) if you look at different taoist systems, they can contain different things. a person who follows “Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality” and becomes immortal can do this without knowing about a lot of Taoist stuff that is not included in that system.
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It seems within the taoist practice of seeking immortality, there are explanations of how the universe functions; how a human functions, how an immortal functions, how the tao functions. The heart of my question is where do we look to find more clarity of how this universe functions and how an immortal and non-immortal exists after this physical form?If one scans some of the taoist literature, there are realms and gods/deities, etc., how do they play into these alchemy you practice?
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Your second question
Can you take out this from one tradition and that from another and decoct your own theory and call it the tao or reality?
That only looks at one way of approaching alchemical traditions.
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Sorry, I don’t understand what that means?regards,
baguaThe angels cannot transport combustion bodies-flesh and blood-such as you now have, but they can transport all others, from the lowest morontia to the higher spirit forms. They do not functionin the event of natural death. When you finish your earthly career, your body remains on this planet. Your Thought Adjuster proceeds to the bosom of Father, and these angels are not directly concerned in your subsequent personality reassembly on the identification mansion world.
-URANTIA PAPERS: 39:2.13…burning life is your choise…Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism… they are all the same.
-w.burninglife.dkI don’t claim to know much about religious studies or comparative religion or semiotics and so on, but my impression is that instead of becoming believer of this or that, one should try to develope first of all right kind of attitude to all these different belief systems.
Attitude of Robert Langdon, maybe one could say.
What makes difference, for example, is that some of these old traditions are so strangely adversary to yoga type of practice and ascetism.
Everybody should have right to choose.
HOWDY
Ah, Bagua is stirring up an old pot of mischief. But I feel it’s mostly linguistic mischief, based on past conversations.
The hidden discussion here: consciousness itself being “immortal”, i.e. it never dies, and it precedes human birth, vs. human beings “achieving” immortality while in earthly form. The two types of immortality are using the word in completely different ways. The latter (personal achievement) is what the Taoists are seeking to cultivate, and the existence of the former is something I doubt that they would contest. But there’s no contradiction between the two.
-michaelThey masquarade as dragons, but are mere toothless worms.
-SHAO KAHNMany of the scientists of the nineteenth century believed that what is now considered to be empty space was actually occupied by a “substance” called ether, which was the medium through which light waves traveled. The famous chemist Lord Kelvin (William Thomson, 1824-1907) thought that atoms might actually be vortices, or knots, in the ether. He therefore asked the mathematicians Peter T. Gait (1831-1901), Reverend Thomas P. Kirkman (1806-1895), and C.N. Little to create a table of knots with the expectation that this would eventually become a table of atoms.
The ether hypothesis was abandoned in the early part of the twentieth century, and with it went the possibility of representing atoms as knots. Still, the question raised in the process of organizing this knot table caught the interest of the mathematical world and gave birth to the new discipline of knot theory. Several of these questions have been answered, some very recently, whereas others still await resolution. Moreover, while the original idea of representing atoms as vortices in the void has gone the way of the geocentric and phlogiston theories, chemists, as well as physicist and biologists, are currently investigating a variety of other applications of the theory of knots to their respective disciplines.
-SAUL STAHL, Geometry from Euclid to KnotsOne could maybe ask what would be Dao of symbols, Dao of imagination, Dao of thought activity etc.
It seem that many Daoist lineages really teach that imagination is not important for serious practice as has been remarked also on this forum, but is it really so?
For Buddhist tantric meditations mandalas and their thought contents are important, but somehow those visualizations are simply silly as their are, IMO, they seem to suit for other time, other place.
HOWDY
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