Earl Grey

How much of what he said that was mere parroting and how much of it was actual insight from understanding is up for debate. What is constant, however, is people love to attribute to him things he said that he didn't actually say, and things he said that were actually said by someone else.

"Ignorance" you say? Hmm I not only studied it formally and am able to apply them to my arguments, but you're making shit up as you go along. Who's ignorant now? Improvements with regards to what? If you're talking about skill, it's daily. If you're talking about acquiring knowledge, I read many books and the newspaper while engaging with other intellectuals of all walks of life around the world. Normally, when we reference something, we give it context and explain and apply it to the argument. Here, you sound like one of those hipsters talking about esoteric bands nobody has heard of and acting like they have more "indie cred" for listening to more "underground" acts that aren't the mainstream. You have yet to explain what the context is or how it applies here, because it's open-ended and you give no room for an answer. I could ask you, "Do you know Mark Twain said at a party?" and there would be no right answer because I didn't tell you which party or to whom he spoke with and for what this example has to do with our dialogue (or in this case, your diatribe). Posting the Tree of Life and the Sephiroth, nice. Do you know that the common understanding of it is still very much the tip of the iceberg because Hassidic Jews themselves don't even study until they are in their 60s due to how complex it is, and this is from people who speak Hebrew too? A Google search won't give you any insights nor will YouTube videos and a few memes demonstrate your understanding, and what is publicly available is still quite laughable according to the Hassidics I know in Queens. Reword this because it sounds like you failed grammar school. And you are a monkey-spanker now, I take it? If you only knew how many fallacies existed in your weak arguments. I did successfully debate you, you just aren't willing to give up the ghost. Ignoratio Elenchi; Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc; Ad Hominem; Non Cause Pro Causa; Reductio Ad Absurdum....The list goes on, little Welkin. Here's an article that shows how your lack of language and experience or even actually reading the damned text is why you are so passionate about proving your point: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2016/03/21/donald-trump-will-win-in-a-landslide-the-mind-behind-dilbert-explains-why/ Donald Trump needs no facts because he makes emotional appeals, and your main focus is on feeling good and assuming anyone attacking you is making you feel bad, and in going with emotions, facts are irrelevant because emotions trump all. You're now involved in a cult: a cult of ego and self-importance. Here's the danger of cults: So you are following the masses over the cliff because you believe you know more while rejecting the pillars which hold up knowledge and knowing. Have you read any Platonic or Aristotelean theory? Any Zhuangzi or Laozi? The Kojiki or any of the great conversation? Develop an informed opinion or dedicate yourself to a stagnant bog of mediocrity, with one extreme being one who needs others and their opinions to make up his own, or one which rejects all other forms of knowing in favor of his own assumptions. I will leave you with several examples relevant to you: imagine someone whom you met, an Anglo lad, who says because he dated a Chinese girl, he knows how all Asian girls are like, whether they are Japanese or Indian or Burmese, completely disregarding the nuances not just among those national cultures, but within even the borders themselves are their differences in cultural groups from language to class (or caste) and histories. Now, think about this: another lad applied to our program in history for China and said that he had perfect authority because his parents are from China, having studied no Chinese language, history, or culture, and speaking only English at home, coming from an economics background. He was quickly rejected and couldn't understand why a bunch of academics rejected him when "only a few of them are Chinese and the rest were white and Latino plus a Japanese guy" even though they all spoke and read Mandarin, they know Classical Chinese. Saddle up, Welkin!

And your response shows you don't understand the quote or the points being made.

Yes, because you are making shit up and have no formal basis to talk about it when you have no understanding of it besides what you're assuming and making up. None of your points are valid because they aren't about Tao but rather your personal conjecture, and the OP is asking about the "true heart of Tao in a nutshell" as said above. "If someone calls it Tao, that doesn't mean it's Tao, and just because it's not referred to directly as Tao doesn't mean it's not Tao" in a nice little summary of the first two lines of the first chapter of the TTC, which I can quote because I've read it and many translations of it multiple times. And you've read all the texts to know this or are you going by this made-up pattern that many New Agers talk about in their attempt to appropriate and amalgamate it all into their feel good philosophy that eliminates nuance and context for the suburban industrial economy's privileged? Deciphering text with the logical mind is only part of it, you're not even grokking the meaning. It's also in the TTC when it is written about a mediocre man laughing at Tao, an average man studying it, and a great man living it. All is Tao, and you may argue, "Aha! You prove my point!", but you wouldn't have known this without reading it, and even then, you are a parrot repeating a phrase which you don't even grok yourself. Level of understanding varies between people--you might think you understand, but what you demonstrate is that you frankly don't, honestly. In science, they call it, "Independently arriving at similar conclusions" but the methodology is as important as is the answer. How does one learn mathematics if they know the problem and look in the back of the textbook to see the answer, you won't know how they arrived at it without struggling and appreciating the process, which can then be applied to other similar questions. No, it's from having an informed opinion, which often comes from reading and formal study--none of which you have. Do you have a tertiary education? It doesn't matter if you do or not because I know many well-read and fantastic individuals who don't have the college degree, but they applied themselves and studied hard for their craft--my teachers in particular in Taijiquan. I know a guy who talks about how there is a conspiracy to create a world of elites based off of degrees that mean nothing when he looks at how many morons come out of university--an observation that isn't totally wrong when I consider whom I met in my university in undergraduate and graduate days, but the counterpoint is, he wouldn't make those strong criticisms and hold delusions of grandeur if he 1) had a degree, 2) had anything to show at the age of 40 where he is still stuck in the same dead-end job and living with his parents and nothing to show in skill or achievement.

“Before, man studied to learn more. Now he studies to show off how smart he thinks he is.”

What is silly is that you’d rather ignore any actual research or reading because you hold your opinions sacred and before you vent your spleen further, understand that I write this for the benefit of others who shouldn’t be subject to misinformation, no matter how idealistic and well-intended. You could benefit from actually understanding than just making things up.

That you didn’t read the text of the philosophy you cite or demonstrate any sort of understanding of it. You’re not even talking about Tao, but your idea of Tao, besides the fact everything you wrote is totally inaccurate (as usual). It’s simply put your uninformed opinion. Seriously, go read the texts or actually take a class before you give out this misinformation.

Not reading the cornerstone philosophy makes it a lot harder for someone to digest the misinformation that comes with what you’re saying, which is rather ridiculous given that you’re commenting on what you just admit you haven’t read. Not reading it then becomes a means of giving your own interpretation and review of a book or film after not even reading a Wikipedia article, but conjecture from other people talking about it—the kind of feel good new age agenda that tries to make everyone feel good and like a master without actually fulfilling the criteria that the many appropriated traditions have set. It neither imparts the wisdom of the philosophy or helps either the speaker or listener with any understanding. To the OP @Boundlesscostfairy, stick to reading the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi and the different translations with commentary, then sit on it a bit. Bruce Lee cited Buddha more often but had very Taoist insight from martial culture, so his exposure was both scholarly and through cultural osmosis.

A constant in the forum: many people parroting what becomes disinformation and misinformation, and others being affected by it. Honest question and by no means an attack on you: based on earlier threads you created such as "Buddha Did Not Know", you seem to have an opinion of Buddhism that doesn't sound like you enjoy it. So now how did you arrive at such a conclusion that Walker's opinion (a well-informed one, too), from citing texts he's read and vernacular apropos the context of the material, is an opinion that is not worth sharing? Sadly, today, any disagreement is interpreted as a personal attack because people view their opinions--factual and reasonable or not--as sacred and a means of diminishing their relevance. An informed opinion does not trump emotional appeal, as emotions overlook facts, and emotions fuel delusions of relevance for many.

How about "New Age is Bullshit" and "People who try to learn from pirated PDFs and YouTube videos for free are Bullshit"?

Some more Bukowski for ya, Steve, to see how his style actually really is a good parallel. Some of my favorite poems read by him, especially. I’ll leave you to look up Bluebird and The Genius of the Crowd—those two are brutal.

Yeah thanks for elaborating what I was getting at for the audio because while everyone says it sounds fine, whether I listen on my phone or computer, something is a bit off, and couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Hell, I think he should market himself as the Bukowski of internal martial arts. That would be an honest and unique way of positioning himself.

You quote @ralis but you characterize him completely different, again, misrepresentation of what someone says. Typical gendao, distort and divert, as well as fail to understand context. Shit for brains who still won’t show what his qualifications are: no other languages spoken, no academic or professional skills and experience, and no fact checking. The OP and topic here is no different from us going to Drew and his thread on sexual predators and pointing out he’s a fucking pervert, and him bitching about it. Or Mskied and his shit and us pointing out how he’s totally mental with all the disinformation and misinformation he’s posting. Well guess what? Welkin, Mskied,and you and Drew and Everything are all part of the same mindset of dump your nonsense everywhere regardless of whether anyone wants to hear it, and only serve to show your idiocy. The only people who have any remote interest in what you say are the mental and those who have no fucking exposure to real power, real travel and work experience, real academic and primary sources for facts, or any actual insight. Comparing your New Age Retro Hippy trip to actual traditions and retrofitting your Sitchin garbage to make it suit your conspiracies will never make the disinformation there any more factual just like enough people saying the world is flat won’t ever make it flat and change actual recorded empirical evidence. And so far, neither you Gendao or Welkin have answered what the fuck your language, professional, or international exposure have been, leading me to conclude that you have no idea what the hell you are talking about yet bizarrely love to misinterpret through memes (hardly a tertiary source), and even if a meme quotes newsweek (a SECONDARY source, you idiot) you obviously haven’t read that article linked in full. Or quoting a meme of the constitution, your citation to it is as ridiculous as fundamentalists citing it to shoot people up at schools. And oh look: right here gendao says he is in accord with the OP rather than the flow but goes against the OP when it’s Drew in his full lotus thread—both Welkin and Drew are insane in the membrane, yet you still can’t seem if you’re part of the crowd or iconoclastic. “Mirror mirror on the wall yourself”, little man. Think you’ve got experience, skill or logic and authority? Talk is cheap. Prove you can back your shit up, otherwise, you’re no closer to the truth than your pubic hairs are to Uranus.

Riiiiignt posting memes is “truth” just like the far right and uninformed new age retro hippies like to use that promote an argument they subscribe to but can’t even elaborate on it if you were held on stage in front of a mic. Again, where’s your skill? Where’s your ability to back up your claims? Neither of you have demonstrated any academic or professional qualifications on the historical things you misquote, neither of you have language skills or travel experience, and somehow, you’re more authoritative? Yeah. Not buying that, when I’m the guy who fucking lived in those countries and learned those languages, and spoke with the people rather than getting a bunch of memes or complete misinformation and pass it as fact.

Yeah, you aren’t presenting primary documents, moron, you’re presenting citations or quotes from it. Presenting and organizing facts is another manner of distorting them, much like people love to cite the same goddamn American constitution to justify their left or right wing views, or, in your case, talking about China and Sumer or colonialism while never having any formal academic or in-country experience. And before you go speaking on behalf of @ralis, why not shut your goddamn trap and let the man speak for himself? You’ve got a serious issue with thinking you’ve got insight that so far nobody on this forum in their right mind will ever see (thereby excluding the OP who is not in his right mind and liking your comment being beside the point). And once again, ad hominem arguments and strawman bullshit isn’t pushing me out of a colonialist foxhole, because YOU are the one who thinks anyone who doesn’t agree with you is stuck in that foxhole. You still have yet to prove you have anything of value aside from showing yourself as having a colonialist mindset for assuming others can’t think because of history, which is itself a form of colonial mindset thinking you’re above others when you haven’t been colonized and yet come from the colonizer culture. Woke much? Hypocrite much? And you call ralis woke? Get fucked. You are extremely rude. It ain’t just this thread, it’s across the board. Fuck your Sitchin and your colonial argument for everything wrong with the world agenda. You haven’t got a goddamn clue and we work in the world you’ve yet to see or have anything to prove you’ve done anything for outside of your computer screen and conspiracy theory cork board and pins.

There are a myriads of reasons why this “futuristic warfare” argument is ridiculous is because of the larger number deaths and also the complete lack of accountability due to being not part of the Geneva convention stipulations for warfare and conduct. In case you’re too young or uninformed to remember, Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq along with drones are the reason there is NO accountability for acts of war. Silicon Valley and its disruption ethos in war is a terrible reason why breaking conventions are not always a good thing. Tsk, tsk. Uninformed opinions yet again.

Ha, every now and then I use the Thoth deck, but among my 40+ decks, I treat each deck like a different tool for each situation. I generally don’t use it much unless I need a Crowley flavor to my readings, which these days is one voice among many. Maybe one day I’ll show my collection. And yes, teen magi? No need for them. I once knew a gal whom I gave the original mythic tarot as a gift to, and she would not just lend the deck randomly to people, but individual cards... and wondered why her readings didn’t come out well. I actually had one crowley deck stolen and one lost. My current one is literally under wraps now and doesn’t go anywhere but my bag and my room.

I personally got far simply sitting in a chair as our lineage teaches that alignment, and half lotus for Flying Phoenix. My interest in half lotus personally is because of the feeling and because there is a kind of “radio antenna adjustment” like reasoning for us when doing ANY adjustments, even a mudra or breathing pattern when meditating. Repeat: in our lineage, not a universal rule.

Yes, this is the one that was from the original deck that I had with my dad before he became a bit crazy and threw it away saying that it was "evil" because he read a story about Crowley dissecting a live cat and said it was tainted with that energy. This was after using it for over 30 years too, and he believed something he read on the Internet. My deck has this ghost card and all three magi. Some people say it means nothing, but one method I was taught was to use this as Crowley's signifier to show the later synthesis of all knowledge he had corroborated together. But it also could mean absolutely nothing. The way I was taught to use these cards was that from left to right, one was the "baby" magus, the right one was the teen, and the middle one was the adult. Another method a friend promised to teach but never did was to use the left two cards separate from the deck and the far right one as the main magus card. The left two would be used to find missing cards. Never learned it though.

Do you ever realize how fucking rude you are when you do this? Besides invading a thread to push your idiotic broken record of an agenda on colonialism and Sitchin shit, whether it's my service or ralis's, you may think you're criticizing the structure, but you're not, you're also doing the equivalent of telling someone "You're a doctor? Doctors are just businessmen and part of an industry that is out to oppress people while bringing money to the pharmaceutical companies." It is extremely rude because you don't seem to acknowledge ANY of the sacrifices or work that has been put in. And yes, I'm used to your ridiculous "You're just brainwashed" or "I speak the truth [even if my truth is based on memes and completely disregarding all empirical evidence or sources]" rhetoric (or lack thereof). Besides the fact your facts are wrong and you’re being condescending, you contribute absolutely nothing of value to a thread other than to reveal once again how nobody on this forum is able to stay on topic when the likes of you come in and interrupt the flow to unload your usual dinosaur diarrhea. Have you ever actually traveled to another country, learned another language, or developed any sort of skill that gives you the authority to make your bold and absolute statements? Do you have any sort of qualifications or experience in anything in the sciences and histories? Or just like others have pointed out several times across multiple threads on your inability to reason anything of value, I now ask if you are the typical busybody who hangs out in bookstores and bothers people with unsolicited opinions on the books they read and food they eat while being completely oblivious to their obvious disinterest that quickly becomes disdain because you won't shut up? When you have the ability to actually say something of value that doesn't relate to your alien colonialism and western colonial explanation for everything, you might have something interesting to say. But you're neither interesting nor enlightening, and adding nothing to the flow of things here as you bring everything off topic and right back to what's already been established as nothing more than a gross oversimplification of things that have already been debunked and ignores all complexities.

Yes, he is covering Morrison.

No offense taken. It is also an often-misunderstood system because most people look at the free pdf or videos that list none of the nuances that were taught formally. No need to edit too.

Spirit possession is not what I’ve seen or heard from Dolic my teacher, but spontaneous movements can happen during catharsis or improper practice. It is also a Buddhist style that even Ji Gong was a lineage holder.

Usually the people who go by that tend to be privileged and wealthy white western capitalists who were "born on third base but think they hit a home run" and have ZERO ability to understand the many fallacies of "I am responsible for all suffering in my life and create my own reality". Whether it's the people who were fucked over by Pol Pot in Cambodia for the crime of wearing eyeglasses to other systematically oppressed peoples such as the Rohingya in Myanmar or the Uighurs in China. I would love to create my own reality, which involves a harem, a jetpack, and a special section of hell for dictators and people who play their mobile speakers aloud in public, and hey, while we're at it, let's re-engineer the planet to grow hotdog trees! But until then, reality is not some guy listening to cheesy New Age CDs in his car talking to himself while he drives 15mph on the highway, totally oblivious as teenagers flip him off and moon him while birds shit on his dashboard and highway patrol is preparing to club and pepper spray him and the Scientologists offering personality tests find him annoying (though I suspect this might be a close approximation...).

First you go saying you're happy having accomplished nothing in life, then making more platitudes about war in the typical New Age diarrhea. I wonder if you're a trust fund kid ("kid" because them 50+ year-olds are still childish) who has all the time to sit and ruminate on nonsense they've been sheltered from or someone who read a few articles here and there and made up his own shit without ever actually buying anything or attending any classes from the metaphysical bookstore or section of a store. In any case, no life experience to speak of for all the crap that comes from your mouth or give it any weight. You've got "floaters" it appears. As of now, there has been absolutely no value in anything you've said across threads and use the usual secondary pronoun garbage as though you were a teacher with authority lecturing others, which was eloquently elaborated on by our fellow Nungali. All conjecture, vague and meaningless statements that go on and on, and platitudes with no relation whatsoever. I wonder if people who talk to you in person glance at their watches or pull out their phones in utter disdain of what you're saying because they don't know how to get you to shut up, or if they've flat out told you to or walked away. ...then again, this is probably the reason you're on a forum because it's harder for someone to reach for the rope and gag...