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I'm not sure what you are implying I haven't had in a while Just to clarify ... vajrayana is quite hermetic (with a small H) theurgy = sadhanas astrology = auspicious days and years, planetary influences etc. alchemy = internal mixing of winds, substances etc. ... also channeling by oracles and divination. Buddhist monks also practiced magic from the earliest times (despite what they would have you believe).

Yes, it does translate to metaphysics. 玄: dark, deep, hidden, or mysterious. 学: study, learning, or a field of knowledge. Historically, 玄学 also refers to a Chinese school of thought from the Wei–Jin period, and a scholastic approach to earlier Daoist texts. So our ability to determine whether all discussions of the Dao are "xuanxue" depends on which definition we use. Metaphysics is the study of the unseen, unknown, the mysterious. It is the study of the underlying fabric of reality. So all study of the Dao is literal 玄学. But the idea that the Dao is emptiness and ziran is the expression of this emptiness (the original inquiry of the thread), is strongly developed from the historical, scholastic 玄学 movement. This view influences much of how we discuss the Dao in modern context. Before the Wei–Jin 玄学 movement, Daoist discussion was framed less as an exact, comprehensively designed system, and more like guidance for living, governing, and cultivating life. As you know, in early texts like the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, the Dao is usually pointed to through images, paradox, and lived examples. You get lines like “the Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao,” or stories that show how forced control backfires. The focus stays on how to move through life: wuwei (not forcing), softness, timing, simplicity, protecting your vitality, and letting patterns unfold. Even when they use words like 无 (wu), it often works like “the generative absence that makes functions possible” (like the empty hub of a wheel, or the empty space in a bowl), rather than “emptiness” as a full metaphysical theory. And 自然 (ziran) reads more like “so-of-itself” or “things unfolding on their own,” not “the expression of emptiness." But the Wei–Jin 玄学 approach shifts the focus. It takes those earlier Daoist lines and tries to make them philosophically exact and defensible, which are later blended with Buddhist concepts: debates about 有/无 (being/non-being), what is “root” (本) and what is “branch” (末), and how a deeper “source” relates to the visible world. Commentarial reading becomes a major method, and the Dao starts getting discussed in more systematic, abstract terms–often as the underlying “non-being” that grounds “being,” with ziran framed as how that ground shows up in the world. That scholastic style is a big reason modern discussions of Dao define it as emptiness. So 玄学 describes the study of the unknown, and it also describes a historical movement that sought to define the unknown in exact, and yet paradoxically more abstract terms.

玄学(xuanxue) is metaphysics!

Agreed. I think most people FIRST encounter this kind of thing from a book or online now, and might take texts and teachings out of context, in an illogical order, or interpret them incorrectly and waste vast amounts of time. In my opinion there is also this addiction and attachment that people have to exclusivity, rarity, or how "secret" a teaching is that can derail progress. What is needed to practice and find some success is in fact very simple... and there is a reason that many of the most popular teachings REMAIN popular.

The use of the word Dao was fairly universal in Chinese philosophy wasn’t it? Like the other schools such as the Naming School and so on. So we would have to identify a purely daoist Dao distinct from others? And also where are we placing the origin of daoism anyway?

Yes, I agree. And I find the ‘emptiness’ translation of sunya / wu matters a lot. To me, translated as nothingness, Buddhist and Daoist concepts feel remote and purely abstract. When translated as relational reality/interdependence, the connection to daily life and practice is clearer. One small thread in xuanxue discourse was an effort to make Confucian social order and Daoist (Lao-Zhuang) ideals fit together. If the Dao is the root and ziran describes how life unfolds on its own, then how does mingjiao (Confucian rites, roles, and norms) align with that root and that natural pattern? Without the xuanxue filter, maybe publicly Daoism shows up less as ontological text for literati debate, and more as everyday life-craft and governance guidelines: emphasis on close seasonal and environmental observation, conserving vitality, aligning action with circumstances, and keeping rule light. I wonder, without xuanxue influence, would Confucian framing have been less dominant in how elites explained Daoism? And I wonder which Daoist strands might have become the “prestige” readings?

The doorway most people use today is books, translations, and philosophy classes, and xuanxue is the style that treats the Daodejing (and the Yijing and Zhuangzi) as high metaphysics. Xuanxue (Dark/Profound Learning) was a Wei–Jin era way of reading the classics, especially through big commentaries like Wang Bi’s Laozi. Those commentaries became hugely influential, got copied and taught for centuries, and shaped what later readers thought the text "really" means. So when people discover Daoism through reading, they often meet it through a lens already polished by xuanxue. Later Daoist traditions, especially internal alchemy and the Quanzhen world, developed emptiness / stillness / nonbeing language while in relation to Buddhism and Confucianism. Modern presentations tend to pull from that shared vocabulary. Not only that, but ritual Daoism requires extensive training, community, ordination networks, temples, and lots of context. Online spaces and modern education reward what’s easier to share quickly, like Dao = emptiness, ziran = expression of Dao, wu = the root, and other simple abstract statements. So modern Daoism looks like xuanxue because the most visible vehicle for Daoism is textual, and xuanxue is the most established, widely inherited framework for reading those texts that way.

That's done in a few minutes and a lifetime. You don't need a lifetime to ask your first I Ching question. You do need a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the foundational trigrams, sure, as well as with all the other "prerequisites." But then you need a few hours to familiarize yourself with their behavior in hexagrams, and then a few days to start grasping what a changing line means, and a few years to understand where it might be coming from and where it's headed, and a couple decades to learn to read the Changes in the hexagrams via the images without having to look at the comments, and then to discern those hexagram images in the real-life environments so your street might become your I Ching, and maybe master the Plum Blossom technique while at it, and then your familiarity with the I Ching begins. You will not only see its images, you will hear its voice. You will have gained a mentor and a friend. But if you don't use it as an oracle at all, the way its creators intended it to be used, it remains silent and lifeless to you. The dry, aged, dead and silent yarrow stalks will never bloom into flowers of wisdom in your hands unless you pick them up and use them. You may learn the theoretical part in your head, but if you study the map yet never walk the territory... that's a very limiting endeavor for a Traveler of Time and Space the I Ching has been created for. Also sprach Taomeow.

The common tactic among Western teachers is to take the simplest practice possible, overcomplicate it with made-up nonsense, create artificial barriers, and then sell it in tiny pieces for as long as they can. If they didn’t do this, they’d run out of material to teach in a week or a month. I’ve seen Damien “Standing Post aka Zhan Zhuang” course. For about 6–8 hours he teaches almost nothing of value with 99% of the information tied to basic physical posture. He has zero knowledge of the energetic aspects of the practice, no understanding of the upper and lower channels, and he clearly has no clue that you need a specific mental state and develop meditation skills to gain any real benefit from the posture itself. It’s basically like a kindergartener stealing a high-school math textbook written in a foreign language, ripping out all the important chapters, and then teaching other kids how to draw carrots and cucumbers so they can count to 10. In Chinese tradition it's very common to just give students the basic stuff like physical postures and hold back the real 99% of valuable info until the person proves they're trustworthy, loyal, hardworking, talented, etc. That's why you get all these "early graduates" who basically got kicked out by Teacher. The simplest way to ditch someone annoying is to pump up their ego: "You've learned everything, you're a master now, go spread the word!"

A Dialogue Between Carlos Castaneda and Coby Carlos ; '' The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or curse .'' Coby ; < deleated > Carlos ; '' A man lives by acting , not by thinking about acting .'' Coby ; < deleated > Carlos ; '' WE either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong . The amount of work is the same . '' Coby ; < deleated >

Xuanxue, unless I am mistaken, is interpreting the Dao de jing as a metaphysical, philosophical treatise? That Dao is emptiness and ziran is the expression of this emptiness.

Ahh, thank you!

I'm still learning about this topic, and maybe I'm answering incorrectly. But is this what you mean? Each symbol is a representation of energetic activity. 乾 (Qián) ☰ is Heaven. It represents pure initiative: leadership, starting, creating, setting direction. It is strong, clear, and upward-moving, like open sky and momentum. 坤 (Kūn) ☷ is Earth. It represents receptivity: support, patience, carrying, nourishing, making space for growth. It is steady and downward/holding, like soil that receives seed and turns it into life. 震 (Zhèn) ☳ is Thunder. It represents sudden movement: a wake-up shock, a startle, a breakthrough that gets energy unstuck. It is the force that begins action after stillness, like the first spring thunder that pushes life to move. 巽 (Xùn) ☴ is Wind/Wood. It represents gentle penetration: influence, steady progress, spreading, persuading, entering little by little. It does not force. It works by consistency, like wind shaping a landscape or roots working through soil. 坎 (Kǎn) ☵ is Water. It represents depth and danger: the hard and honest part of life, risk, fear, and the need for skill. Water goes around obstacles and keeps moving, so it also means adaptability, practice, and learning to navigate rather than trying to control everything. 离 (Lí) ☲ is Fire. It represents clarity and brightness: seeing, understanding, attention, and what things “cling” to. Fire needs fuel and a place to hold it, so it also points to dependence and relationship: clarity comes from staying connected to what feeds it. 艮 (Gèn) ☶ is Mountain. It represents stillness and stopping: boundaries, rest, restraint, and ending a motion at the right time. Mountain energy is knowing when to pause, hold steady, and not chase, so a clean decision can form. 兑 (Duì) ☱ is Lake/Marsh. It represents joy and exchange: openness, conversation, pleasure, and shared spirit. Lake energy is mouth and breath, so it also means speech, persuasion, and the power of a warm, honest connection.

A lot of real world decisions aren’t just data problems. They’re value conflicts, timing, overconfidence, fear, distraction, mixed motives, and blind spots. On the surface, an oracle can be useful as a structured mirror: it forces a clear question and provides a framework, and then you have to do the work of mapping that frame onto your actual situation, working through internal and external factors. Personally, I believe a variety of divinatory systems to be more "divine communication" than a simple trigger for reflection, but the two acts are in relationship with one another. Especially if one believes that the source of all is within each of us. But anyway, observation and measurement can also be applied to divination outcomes, so the two aren't mutually separate.

Yes, I agree with you that the concepts are abstract at the core. It's just when lived meaning gets lost, nothingness language seems to easily slide into a nihilistic perspective. A teacher can prevent the confusion by showing, directly, that emptiness is not the same as nothingness. But many people don't get that kind of guidance, so they grab the bleak version and stop there, you know?

Ah, I see. My understanding of xuanxue is that it's a style of elite metaphysical reading and debate anchored in commentary work. A textual, scholarly movement and approach to pre-existing texts.

Of course, probably almost no-one encountered these ideas first in written text, if they could read at all. They would have encountered these ideas after seeking a teacher, who would have had a reputation OR have been recommended by someone with a reputation. The teacher they found wouldn't have given the student an impossible to find or buy text, they would have shown them what they were talking about directly. The concepts ARE abstract, but the reality of them can be demonstrated to be omni-present and real with practice and guidance.

In this context, I mean the Laozi / Zhuangzi presentation of the Dao. Dao as the root that precedes fixed names and rigid norms, and the practical orientation that comes with it; wuwei as non-forcing, ziran as self-so unfolding, and the wu/xu register that points to openness, absence of imposed structure, and the usefulness of what is “not there.” Of course Daoism draws on a very long prehistory of Chinese ritual life and spirit-facing practice (like you said, pre-philosophical shamanism, but there's also a huge span of time and a lot of change between early court ritual worlds, Shang divination practices, and the Zhou / Warring States philosophical explosion. So if we’re looking for Daoism without xuanxue, I'm not sure pre-philosophical shamanism gives us a good idea of what to expect. Maybe better to consider the Daodejing and Zhuangzi with the center of gravity on practice, governance, and cultivation language, before Wang Bi-style metaphysical framing became the default for educated readers.

Pre-philosophical shamanism????

Even later Daoist schools such as Quanzhen seem to be Xuanxue. I asked chatgpt if Quanzhen is xuanxue, and it said it wasn't, yet they seem to follow Wang Bi's interpretation of the Daodejing. Indeed, I've read the Heshang gong commentary by Dan Reid and it's confusing since it seems to add his commentary to a Xuanxue translated daodejing. I am starting to wonder where exactly is there original Daoism without Xuanxue?

Nagajuna's shunya and Xuanxue match quite closely and in a way Wang Bi and his school paved the way for an easy entrance for Buddhism into China. I wonder how different Daoism would be without Xuanxue? Can we ever know?

This class is being offered by the Sanctuary of Tao (the late Stuart Alve Olson's school) today. FREE LIVE PRACTICE OPPORTUNITY: We are excited to announce the Eight Brocades Seated Qigong Review Session! Taught by Patrick Gross, this is an opportunity for us all to come together to practice as a community, and for those who haven't learned it yet, to try it out. This upcoming two-hour workshop will take place on Sunday, November 30, at 11:00 AM Central Time and is open to everyone—members and non-members alike. It's designed for both beginners and advanced students. These are gentle movements suitable for all fitness levels and can be practiced from a chair. Even if you've never done it before, you'll be able to follow along during the group session. While the movements are easy to learn, there are many nuances and details to practice as you continue, and this deepening work is what makes Eight Brocades a foundation for Internal Alchemy. If you can't make it live, we'll send the replay out afterwards. If You’re New to the Practice: If you'd like to familiarize yourself with Eight Brocades beforehand, you can find simplified guidance and follow-along videos in the membership practice area. (If you aren't a member yet, you can learn more about membership here.) That said, no preparation required—you're welcome to join us live and get acquainted with the practice through the workshop itself. If You'd Like to Go Deeper: Whether you’d like to prepare for the review session or continue your practice afterwards, we're offering the Five-Week Eight Brocades Program at a special price of $200 (regularly $300) for a limited time. This comprehensive course guides you through the practice in detail, so that you can use it to the greatest effect—whether that's to support your health, clarity, and tranquility or to prepare for Internal Alchemy. Learn more about the program here. Sunday, November 30, Zoom Meeting Info, 11am Central TimeMeeting ID: 858 6291 5477Passcode: 347499 --- One tap mobile +13052241968,,85862915477#,,,,*347499# US +13092053325,,85862915477#,,,,*347499# US Join instructionshttps://us02web.zoom.us/meetings/85862915477/invitations?signature=mw2VQN-AgNNXJ7RKQD-QWpdMUektuvVOJ4GptkNCGQw

To be more precise, it make more sense to familiarize with the foundational trigrams first.

Stories matter. Cultures like japan are heavily influenced by stories about robots, science, engineering and technology. For decades, americans have tried to recreate that type of pop culture movement in the USA. In an effort to encourage youth to be more interested in science & tech. To avoid having to outsource a high percentage of R & D to places like israel, japan, india, etc. I seem to remember Aleister Crowley criticizing others in the movement for "playing at magic". If Crowley were still alive maybe he would laugh his ass off at modern day magicians who might have derived their core terminology from children's dinosaur movies. The idea of magic users possibly borrowing terminology from Jurassic Park -- makes me laugh. It doesn't matter to me if its true or not. It makes me laugh. And that's all I care about it.

Combining narcissistic personality disorder with drugs and greed? SOTG tried to sell his dusty, dirty room as a “powerful spiritual ritual summoning millions of ghosts.” A deranged cult leader. None of the traditions mentioned above are easy to join or master. Most genuine internal teachings have rigorous screening processes that can take years or even decades, plus mandatory in-person meetings. When you see someone casually combining all of them like it’s nothing, the odds are overwhelming that they just downloaded a bunch of random PDFs online and convinced themselves that’s the real thing. Truly the bliss of ignorance.

I do see the Dao De Jing as one person's metaphysical, philosophical, treatise. One that has many layers and meanings for the reader, regardless of where they are, among the food chain.

I'm reminded of a character that believed exactly that -- and came out of many adversities just fine

I see it more as a meta-theory about how magic works. Basically, it puts the center of power in the individual instead of external authorities or powers, such as God, gods, planets, archons, correspondences, etc. So if you can invoke a proper state of mind summoning Cthulhu, it doesn't matter whether or not here is an external being that matches it. I don't think it (or any magical system) generally works because I don't think most people honestly think it will work. I think the mental habits need to be a bit more fluid than average.

Apologies if I am repeating anything here, a bit late to the party but tried to have a good read through. I spent a lot of years in this scene and most chaos magicians would describe it as a type of paradigm surfing, as in imagine that the sky is green for a day and work with that and see the results, then jump to something else. But in reality when the rubber meets the road it appears to be more just an eclectic system and has the pop culture aspect where you can work with pop culture spirits and artifacts. My favourite book on the subject is Hands on Chaos Magic by Andrieh Vitimus. It still suffers from the same issue as most other Western magic systems as it lacks a body method to safely channel and ground energy which is where I place myself in the Tai Chi/Qigong world, supporting occultists in this way. Just a little aside on the subject of the HGA; if you haven't seen it watch the movie 'A Dark Song', it's a fictionalised take on the Abramelin ritual. One of the most powerful endings to a movie I've ever seen, still absolutely blown away by it and have to take a while to gather myself after watching. Happy Saturday all!

Even the tech industry’s top AI models, created with billions of dollars in funding, are astonishingly easy to “jailbreak,” or trick into producing dangerous responses they’re prohibited from giving — like explaining how to build bombs, for example. But some methods are both so ludicrous and simple that you have to wonder if the AI creators are even trying to crack down on this stuff. You’re telling us that deliberately inserting typos is enough to make an AI go haywire? And now, in the growing canon of absurd ways of duping AIs into going off the rails, we have a new entry. A team of researchers from the AI safety group DEXAI and the Sapienza University of Rome found that regaling pretty much any AI chatbot with beautiful — or not so beautiful — poetry is enough to trick it into ignoring its own guardrails, they report in a new study awaiting peer review, with some bots being successfully duped over 90 percent of the time. Ladies and gentlemen, the AI industry’s latest kryptonite: “adversarial poetry.” As far as AI safety is concerned, it’s a damning inditement — er, indictment. “These findings demonstrate that stylistic variation alone can circumvent contemporary safety mechanisms, suggesting fundamental limitations in current alignment methods and evaluation protocols,” the researchers wrote in the study. Beautiful verse, as it turned out, is not required for the attacks to work. In the study, the researchers took a database of 1,200 known harmful prompts and converted them into poems with another AI model, deepSeek r-,1 and then went to town. Across the 25 frontier models they tested, which included Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, OpenAI’s GPT-5, xAI’s Grok 4, and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5, these bot-converted poems produced average attack success rates (ASRs) “up to 18 times higher than their prose baselines,” the team wrote. That said, handcrafted poems were better, with an average jailbreak success rate of 62 percent, compared to 43 percent for the AI-converted ones. That any of them are effective at all, however, is pretty embarrassing. https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/universal-jailbreak-ai-poems

One more thing. I find Dvd7 med #4 good for awareness meditation. Do that first or end your meds with #4, then abide in pure awareness for the amount of minutes you like doing.

I'd be interested. I'm starting to think that the Yijing is more foundational than the Dao De Jing. Also, how would one approach it? Would it make more sense to familiarize with the foundational hexagrams first?

This paper basically states that Daoism and Yijing comes from Indo--Europeans. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350522856_Indo-Europeans_in_the_Ancient_Yellow_River_Valley?_sg[1]=

It took me more than few minutes to familiarize the 8 trigrams. BTW the intend of the Yijing was not for fortune telling in the first place. If someone start using it to predict the future, one is only picked up somewhere in the middle and skipped to learn what Yijing was all about.

What is going on with me? Its only basic evolution. Nothing you need ever worry your silly head about.

Look, the universe answered your question. Before you had even asked it: