Dainin

Basic training, U.S. Army

Why settle for anything less than the Supremely Powerful?

Tibetan Buddhism (and Bon) does include several forms of physical (and breathing) exercises, including Trul Khor (aka Yantra Yoga), Kum Nye, and Lujong (there may be others as well). I get the impression that these are more commonly practiced in the Nyingma and Kagyu schools and less in the Gelug school. Also, I believe that the Theravadins are strictly vegan, while the Tibetans (including HH) may eat meat and other animal products.

I heard this song today while driving. The lyrics seemed relevant to some of the drama here on TTB:

I seem to wake up naturally around 5:00 AM. At times I've used these hours to practice, more recently mostly just to relax and drink tea.

Well, if we're talking hot sauce, I have to advocate for my favorite: Cholula Hot Sauce The hottest thing I ever tasted was home made pickled vegetables that one of my father's Jamaican friends made. Unbelievablly hot, and he would eat them like it was nothing...

What, no JOHN CHANG on the list???!!!!

If the Gnostics thought that Yahweh was the Demiurge, and since Yeshua (i.e. Christ) was the son of Yahweh, how can you have "Gnostic Christianity?"

This was filmed in Tibet or Nepal in the mid 60s, and did not involve marketing to Westerners. It is on a DVD called "The Message of the Tibetans."

"The Shift" is happening now, and always has been.

If the rooster did not come first, the egg would remain unfertilized and there would be no chicken.

The Buddhist part of Russia: Kalmykia

Older Bums might remember a similar "event" called the "Harmonic Convergence" back in the 1980s, a galactic alignment that was supposed to be the start of a new era. Shirley MacLaine and lots of other new agers went to Sedona and other "power places" to meditate on mountain tops to welcome this event...nothing happened. The same guy that promoted the Harmonic Convergence idea was also one of the major promoters of the 2012 idea. His name was Jose Arguelles. He died in 2011, so he missed out on nothing happening again.

I read a biographical profile of him somewhere a while back, and he studied a large number of different martial and meditation systems. I think that he created his own school eventually based on these studies. I believe that one of his teachers was Rudi (aka Swami Rudrananda aka Albert Rudolph) an American from NY who went to India back in the early 60s and was associated with Muktananda. He died in a plane crash in the early 70s. A few teachers are carrying on his lineage. I think that he also studied quite a bit with Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and maybe Kalu Rinpoche. I took a series of classes on Flying Crane (i.e. Soaring Crane) Qigong from one of his former students a few years ago. He sounds like an interesting character.

http://youtu.be/UVZZAUmRYDE

I imagined that this group would be able to zap offenders with their wei qi!

Is expecting things to be a certain way truly Taoist?

People have been saying this throughout recorded history, in many cultures. Last year during the "2012" hysteria, I read a small interesting book, "Apocalypse Not" by John M.Greer that described the history of this line of thinking. The challenges facing the world today are very real, but so were the challenges of yesterday, and those may have been even worse: plagues, rampaging hordes, feudalism, etc.

Qigong Teachings of a Taoist Immortal: The Eight Essential Exercises of Master Li Ching-yun by Stuart Alve Olson

Here's another forthcoming book on this subject: Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches - Tiangian Dizhi: The Keys to the Sublime by Wu Zhongxian. Also, in some schools of Bagua and Xingyi there seems to be training exercises based on this concept: Tien Kan: Heavenly Stem Exercises

The title of the chapter (actually a section of a chapter on Chi Sickness) is "Breath Work in Chi Kung and Greek Orthodoxy" and talks about breath patterns, physical posture, Prayer of the Heart, etc. He gives some comparisons with the chakra system.There are some references to additional readings on this subject in the bibliography (Morris always had great annotated bibliographies in his books). I suspect that this part of the book may have been written by (or at least was influenced by) the guy who wrote the forward (also very interesting), Dr. Kevin Menard, who mentions that he is a follower of Greek Orthodoxy .

There's an interesting section on this topic in Dr. Glenn Morris' third book "Martial Arts Madness". I guess that you probably already know about the books by Kyriakos Markides, but if not, you'd probably find them very interesting. There was also a really cool episode of "60 Minutes" a year or two ago that visited the monks of Mount Athos. I don't follow a Christian (or theistic for that matter) path, but this seems like one of the more appealing ones.