Zhongyongdaoist

Sinfest! You seem to have the most humorous response, even if it is not original with you. Congratulations. There is only one problem. As the whole Platonic tradition from Plato's Parmenides, through the abiding, procession and return of Plotinus' interpretation of Plato's thought, up the dialectical ladder of Proclus' commentary on Plato's Parmenides and down the propositional ladder of his Elements of Theology, the Platonists have conclusively demonstrated that the one is eminently, if tediously, effable. To find something truly ineffable we need to dig deeper and find out what is really meant by ineffable. Obviously one meaning, the inability to simply utter the word, cannot be what is intended because one, syllablelistically speaking at least, is an example of itself, which is a complex and convoluted way of saying that it is just a dime a dozen one syllable word, not even a twenty-five cent four syllable one, and thus, it is eminently utterable. One, One, One, you just uttered in your mind, easy. Now try saying out loud, One, One, One, see easy too, no problemo. You could even compose a love song, well I could, I don't know about you, to it, which could be full of easily uttered ones, including crypto-ones, such as "Oh sweet and wonderful, one (did you catch the crypto-one there?), my praise for you has only just begun...", full of nice rhymes too. Sing it, sing it out loud now right now, to your favorite hummable tune or piece of toe tapping music. A hymn of praise I tell you, to the oh so very effable one. There is more to the song by the way, but you have to come to my $10,000 a spot weekend retreat. Here's a teaser, "I say you're name out loud oh one of wonder, a blinding flash, the sound of thunder... oh sweet, sweet effable one." So quid pro quo, oops, sorry, I got my Latin quotes which no one is supposed to know the meaning of anyway mixed up, so quod erat demonstrandum, simple utterance is not what ineffable means, but rather something more, like the opposite of the long drawn out account of the one which those tedious aforementioned Platonists provide, so that if something is a "no-account" then then maybe it is ineffable, because no account can be given of it. This I suspect is the original meaning of "there's no accounting for taste", seldom quoted in its original Latin these days because,well it would be pretentious and over the heads of most people reading this, but that has never stopped me, no siree, not ever, so here goes: de gustibus non est disputandum, which by the way rhymes with quod erat demonstrandum, Latin is so regular that way, no need of laxatives here, it may not scan though, at least not without a little work. I suspect that the real origin of this is not taste like, "wow, Lady Gag-ahs meat dress was in really poor taste", but rather more along the lines of "wow, this tastes awesome!" So here is an experiment for you, describe in twenty-five words or less the taste of a strawberry. Go ahead, it should be easy, after all this is a common everyday experience, no grand mystical attainments are needed here, but if you have never tasted a strawberry, how about a banana? By the way do you know what to do if someone comes at you with a banana? I sure don't, years of martial arts and the thought still FREAKS ME OUT. Well here is one clue, strawberries or bananas for that matter, don't taste at all like chicken! That said, is there a problemo here? Even if you use words like it is sweet, or it is sour, that essence of strawberry which separates it from the sweetness of banana, or the essence of raspberry which separates it from the sourness of strawberry, is that a problemo? Si problemo, It's almost like those strange occult virtues about which I have written at some length elsewhere, which cannot be known by reason, but only by experiment. And what, heaven forfend, if you find someone who hasn't experienced sweet or sour, much less strawberries? Maybe the lack of an argument in taste is because there is no way to describe it in words, it must be experienced, the experience itself escapes a simple recap, an easy description, strawberries are all a bunch of no-accounts. Well I guess they don't come in bunches, bananas do, so bananas are a bunch of no-accounts and strawberries are ...a box of no-accounts! Well at least that's the way I buy them, in boxes. So bananas, bacon, veal saltimboca, at least in so far as we are talking taste here, are no-accounts too, and just about everything else like that. Strange, it seems that all of these simple everyday things which no one pays any attention to are more of a problemo than meets the metaphysical eye. So something which cannot be easily accounted for, defined, or described, is this the sense of ineffable that we are looking for? Description is the beginning of definition and definition is the foundation of reasoning, the problem with the One and what makes it so effing effable is that it has so many logical entailments that if you are a verbose Greek speaking person more prone to splitting hairs than a bad bleach job, then it is easy to make the One very effable. It is in fact way more effable than readable. But those damned strawberries, well, there is no accounting for them, they are nondescripts of the worst sort. Based on the above I propose that for clarity's sake we replace ineffable with something simple and well, English, like indescribable, because indescribable is a simple word which conveys the sense of ineffable that we are looking for, something that escapes easy description. With our simple equation of ineffable is indescribable, my, my, that sounds wrong since we have just shown that ineffable is describable. Oh well, what I am trying to say is that Vmarco was actually wondering if there was something really indescribable. Quick answer the taste of strawberries. So this mystical stuff is supposed to be indescribable, but turns out to be really very describable, well at least if you read these old Greek dudes, but, if it is the indescribable that you want, why bother with mysticism and gurus, when indescribable things are all around us? Oh, but you still need to take my $10,000 weekend seminar, you want to hear my song don't you? I have a really great bass-baritone voice, I'll be singing it myself. By the way, the food is great! All this talk of strawberries, bananas and other delicious things, well I don't really like bananas, but hey, there is no accounting for taste, has made me hungry. I want something ineffably delicious! Glory Hallelujah, I have seen the light! Almond Joy, here I come! Got milk?

It's the End of the World as we Know it... and I feel fine. R.E.M.arkable.

tummoessence, Thank you for the link above to the Archiv Hermetischer Texte. The material is truly interesting and enough to make me lament the rusty state of my German. What little I could gather tends to confirm my suspicion that, despite explicit references to Madame Alexandra David-Neel and the use of Tibetan terms and a description of some Tibetan ritual techniques, that there was a strong Hindu influence on his elemental theory. Also the reference to Sivananda and his 100 books in 'englishcher Sparache' lends credence to my idea that Bardon had had at least some familiarity with English, a notion also supported by a quote from a letter on Peter Koenig's site, http://www.parareligion.ch/sunrise/pg.htm, attributed to Martin Starr, dated 22.8.88: According to Koenig, Starr had connections with the OTO in the US, how reliable Starr's information is I don't know, but of course there are both obvious and subtle instances of Crowley's influence on Bardon's writings. I can only hope that you and your wife will translate more of this material for the benefit of people who cannot access the original German.

thelerner, Thanks so much for going to all of the trouble of posting this material. I read a book by Win Wenger, I believe it was call Your Limitless Inventing Machine, back in the late 1970s or early 80s and found it very interesting and the techniques useful. He provided some real insights into mind functioning for me, over time they were pretty much overlayed by my research and experiences with NLP, but I would not have been able to appreciate NLP as much as I did without good old Win. I have only scanned the material which you posted, but it seems much as I remember it. Should anyone be interested, Wenger is still around and has his own website at http://www.winwenger.com/. Thanks again.

The chant as a whole is just the name that appears at the top: 福生无量天尊 repeated continuously. The last two characters 天尊, tianzun, usually 'Heavenly Lord' or something like that, are an honorific for certain very high ranking Daoist deities. However, the rest is not a name with which I am familiar, but the characters, based on my limited Chinese are something to the effect of Good fortune, body, without, measure, so this might be a title like 'Heavenly Lord of limitless good fortune for the body', meaning maybe health and possibly immortality. There are some other possibilities though. In the video, the first picture to appear is the Three Pure Ones. These are the great deities of Daoism. In the Center is the Heavenly Lord of the Primordial Beginning, to the left is the Heavenly Lord of the Way and its Power and to the right is the Heavenly Lord of the Wish Granting Gem. (Lingbao, ling, magically efficacious, bao, gem, thus wish granting gem). These Deities are very important in Daoist ritual and meditation. The second picture is the Heavenly Lord of Great Unity. He is basically the Daoist god of mercy and universal salvation. He is a great protector and is also called upon to rescue the dead from the underworld. The text on it is what is called a Baogao, a type of Daoist invocation which recounts the qualities and merits of a deity and in a sense awards them a patent, gao, of a title, which they have earned because of their merits. These are recited as a part of Daoist ritual. The third picture is Chang Dao Ling, the founder of the Heavenly Master sect of Daoism. I am not sure who the fourth picture is. The final diagram is to blurred to make much out of it, but the five 'rings' are a spiral that begins at the top of its inner circle and goes outward and since something that looks like the character 乙, yi, the second of the ten heavenly stems, shows up in it at the second place and seems to repeat every tenth place during the sequence, I think it fair to say that it is the sexegenary cycle of the ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches, which is of course the complete Chinese 'Zodiac'. Since this cycle is 60 double characters which combine both the five elements and the twelve animals, several suggestions above are in a sense right. The character for Dao, 道, appears in the upper left hand corner. I don't recognize the other ones. Beyond that it sure looks interesting, but not much can be said because of how blurry it is, though the text might be about some of the relationships between the twelve signs. If its a loupan, its a very simplified one, because several things like the twenty-eight mansions of the Moon and the twenty-four solar breaths are don't seem to be on it. I hope this is helpful.

First, I have to agree with those who are more conservative about this herb. From the material quoted from Teegarden's site, it sounds like it is taken from his book, Chinese Tonic Herbs, which was one of the first genuinely informative books on Chinese herbalism that I read. However, based on my experience since then (circa 1990), I have to say that Teegarden is not at all realistic in his basic attitude of tonify, tonify and tonify some more. For the vast majority of Westerners this a 'prescription' for disaster because most westerners and especially Americans, who eat and drink way to much cold foodstuffs, not to mention the effects of antibiotic use, etc. are seriously out of balance and need to rebalance before they can do heavy tonification. Second, I have to agree with those who are not keen on lifting Chinese herbs out of their traditional context. Ginseng should not be added to soft drinks, this is simply a waste of ginseng. Not only will it not do much good, but in a person with certain types of imbalances it can lead to severe headaches. The worst case was the misappropriation of mahuang, ephedra, as an appetite suppressant, because it is a stimulant. This apparently lead to some real problems, which would not have happened if it had been used according to traditional usage. For almost 20 years now I have recommended Between Heaven and Earth by Harriet Beinfield and Efrem Korngold, a book which is not only a good introduction to the theory and practice of Chinese medicine, but most importantly has a questionnaire that will help someone discover whether they need to do some balancing before they start to tonify. There is also an interesting section on Chinese Therapeutic cooking with some good recipes. I have actually tried some of them. Some of these herbs actually taste good and the authors have a section of those Chinese herbs that are tasty enough to eat and recipes that include them. Schisandra is one of them. If you live in a city with a large Asian population Schisandra can often be bought in a Chinese or other Asian ethnic markets, otherwise there are a lot of online sources who may be more reliable than it sounds Teegarden is. Good luck with your herbal studies.

I for one would and have done so since I was a teenager. Regrettably the Romanticist coopting of Kant's distinction between Reason and Understanding circa 1800 led to the final schism between reason and spirituality in the West. Compare the situation as described in The Platonic Renaissance in England by Ernst Cassirer, the source of the "I oppose not rational to spiritual; for spiritual is most rational" quote in my signiture, to the developments in the 19th Century described by A. O. Lovejoy in The Reason, The Understanding and Time. Romanticism nails the coffin of classical Rational Mysticism as it developed from Plato to Plotinus shut. We are all the poorer for that loss. Edit, changed 'Compare the situation as described in as described' to its present reading.

This information may be of interested and is from the Preface of Professor Jerry Alan Johnson's Chinese Medical Qigong Therapy Volume 1 p. XVIII to XIX Following a discussion of the differences between modern Western and TCM approaches, Johnson writes: Regarding the situation in the US he writes: Unfortunately he includes the following sad note to Medical Qigong's heyday in China: I hope that everyone finds this interesting. I also hope that this thread stays on track with medical qigong and avoids a degeneration into a discussion of Chinese politics so that useful information about medical qigong can be exchanged here without having to wade through a lot of political talk. If you don't like the politics expressed in the last quote above, you can always start a new thread devoted to such a discussion.

If you want to explore a TCM approach on your own, get yourself a copy of Between Heaven and Earth by Harriet Beinfield and Efrem Korngold. I have been recommending this book since it appeared in the early 90's. It is one of the best, if not the best, introductions to TCM around. It includes a questionnaire that will help you to diagnose yourself and even if you decide to seek professional advice will put you in a better position to communicate effectively with a TCM practitioner. My health was damaged by Western medical treatments that I received in childhood. By the time I was 40 it was starting to fail and had I not taught myself TCM and been lucky enough to live in a city where Chinese patent medicines were readily available, more than likely I would have been dead or severely disabled by 50 and almost certainly dead by now. At 60 I am, by many measures, in very good health. For example, from about 20 to 50 years of age I had about four cold/flu episodes a year. In the past 11 years I have had three cold/flu episodes, the last being in October of 2006. Also, for those concerned about such matters, who may wonder whether there is a 'tigger in my tank', no I don't need Viagra or any Western medicines like it. I didn't make any other changes to diet, nor have I regularly done qigong, or other such activities and most of the "diet is the only way to health" people would not consider my diet at all healthy, but then I don't consider theirs healthy either. I have, however, noticed changes in appetite that has correlated with improvements in health. In the early 90's I was a chocoholic who had been experiencing acid reflux symptoms for several years, long before it became the "in thing" to complain about. I now seldom eat chocolate, but when I do I can do so with appreciation and moderation. This compares favorably to having a panic attack in the mid 90's while coming home from work, when I realized that I didn't have any chocolate at home. I had to go the the store to buy some. My acid reflux symptoms were controlled by Chinese patent medicines and eventually I was able to stop taking them with no recurrence of symptoms for many years. However, because the fundamental damage to my system was done to Liver/Gallbladder function and Spleen/Stomach function, there have been some temporary appearances of the symptoms which have again responded well to Chinese patent medicines and subsided quickly and with no reappearance for years, for example in late 2001/early 2002, but clear until late 2010 and gone since the beginning of 2011. Based on my experience with TCM and Chinese patent medicines, and my considered interpretation of it, as far as I am concerned, any and all improvements in my health have to be attributed to the judicious use of Chinese patent medicines. This is my purely personal testimonial and is not intended as medical advice, other peoples experience may differ. Good luck with getting your Mojo back, however you decide to do it, though you may be out of luck if Dr. Evil stole it.

The following is provided for information purposes only and is not intended as advice for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical conditions. Regarding stress, TCM acknowledges such factors in its diagnosis. A successful TCM program will not only alleviate the symptoms, but can help people become more resistant to stress. Regarding Detoxification, the 'urge to purge' is deeply ingrained in Traditional Western Medicine and its survivals in alternate therapies with a Western basis. It goes all the way back to the Humoral treatments of the Ancient Greeks, but the purpose of such treatments was to reestablish balance. In the 19th Century this become rather unbalanced and one finds such authorities on "Western Eclectic Herbalism" as Jethro Kloss practically reducing treatment to enema's. The attitude carries over into 'detoxification' procedures and can sometimes create more problems. The Chinese ideal is balance and harmonize, and then strengthen. They will purge as needed as a preliminary, but they do that as little as necessary to prepare for restoring balance and strengthening the system. Eczema is of course a Western Medical term and TCM generally considers its symptoms under the heading of Heat disorders. Heat can be either excess or deficiency, excess being when the Heat is greater than a 'healthy' balance would require and deficiency when Moisture (Yin in TCM)which balances healthy levels of heat, becomes so low that the Heat starts to manifest as symptoms. The deficiency can be of Moisture or Blood (Capitalized because they are translations of technical terms and mean more than would usually be the case in common English usage.) From here the diagnosis can to to Heat in the Blood, Damp Heat, Wind Damp Heat, Dry Heat, Moisture of Blood deficiency Heat and a few others. There are herbal and acupuncture treatments for all of these and you have to be sure that you are using the right one, for example to treat deficiency heat with excess heat medicines will very likely make the condition worse. I would recommend that you get a copy of Between Heaven and Earth by Harriet Beinfield and Efrem Korngold. This book is an excellent introduction to the theory and practice of TCM and includes a questionnaire that can be used for self diagnosis. If you find a good TCM practitioner this will help you to understand what they are talking about and communicate with them more effectively. It also has a great introduction to Chinese Therapeutic cooking. From my own experience, a little over twenty years now, I can say that Chinese Herbal Medicines can be very helpful in dealing with a wide variety of conditions. Also, unfortunately, a lot of Western trained Acupuncturist are not good at using them. If you don't have a friendly neighborhood Chinese pharmacy, I recommend Maxnature.com. When I can't get something from my local sources, they are really invaluable. Best of luck to you and your sister.

Below is the product blurb from Amazon.com. This certainly sounds familiar and seems like a pretty tight fit to me. Could someone create a clever imitation on this forum to discredit the author? Maybe, but why? "Product Description How did the Mahasiddha Tilopa manifest flesh on a fish's bones and send it swimming through the air, or GI Gurdjieff put an elephant to sleep from miles away? Freethought Magick explores theprocesses that wields life force to influence duality, both form and emptiness. The author of Full Spectrum Consciousness expands on the Reality of Light, Mahamudra, and compassion through the wisdom of the Nine Magickal Perfections, the Nine Dakini Secrets, and the Laws of Magick. Freethought Magick is rich in Vajradharic perspective and is inteded to stimulate a practical understanding of the laws of attraction, cosmological influences, and freethought spirituality. Other key subjects in this book include: Bodhichitta, danjun, Densities of Conciousness, electrodynamics, Enneagram, Heart-mind, Hopi Day of Purification, Kalachakra, Ki, mc2<c, Sabdana, Shambhala, Tathagata, and the Vidyadhara of Longevity. Uncover Your Light...and Participate in the Co-creation of Peace on Earth. About the Author JV Marco lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he is writing Full Spectrum Consciousness 103."

Well Taomeow I'm not completely disappointed in you. I didn't characterize you as an 'intelligent person with an interesting point of view' for nothing and you have certainly come up with an interesting reason for your statement that 'Western zodiac is originally derived from taoist astrology', whether it's a good reason or not remains to be seen, but first I would like to point out some similarities and differences between our approaches: We are both 'generalists', people who look at diverse areas and want to see 'the big picture' and as such the results of our research is only as good as our sources. I will note that as far as I am concerned someone with 'an ax to grind' is a scholar in name only and goes against what I would consider to be the real spirit of scholarship. They are, to harken back to an old saying, an ideologue in scholar's clothing. Rather than pursuing research to find 'the truth' they are simply looking for whatever will shore-up their their own prior commitments. Regrettably this is not a failing limited to 'scholars'. Myself, I only do research when I have a concrete problem to solve, thus, for example I researched Platonism in the late 70s (very reluctantly I might add, my first exposure to Plato in my late teens left me rolling on the floor with laughter!) in an effort to understand the larger context of Agrippa's works on Occult Philosophy and also based on an idea that occurred to me in 1976 that based on what little I did know about Plato, indicated that within a platonic context Agrippa's system of magic was a completely rational system following quit logically from what we might call, platonic first principles. I even jokingly began to refer to Agrippa's three books as a treatise on platonic engineering. Several years of research not only showed the value of such an approach, but to my own amazement the value of Plato. We are both concerned with whether the authors to whom we turn have done the work which we don't have time to do, but here is where we do part company, I don't find anything trivial about 'precise dates' and 'exact places' and spelling can also be important, though especially with Chinese studies the shift to Pinyin has made recognizing names, even those spelled correctly in 'old school' style something of a challenge. Sinologists aside, someone could hardly be blamed if at first glance they didn't recognize Sima Qian and Ssu Ma Ch'ien as the same person. I don't memorize anything because I don't have to memorize, for good or ill I have an excellent memory and find myself remembering far too much real trivia! However, dates and places and even names I view as important data points which may allow one to expand ones perspective by making connections which would be quit impossible without such information. Indeed James Burke's original 'Connections' is very similar to the way I investigate things and my facility with dates and places and yes, even names, has allowed me to make all sorts of interesting connections, some of which I thought worth pursuing and others not worth the time and effort for one reason or another. I don't know if either the 'scholar with an as to grind' or the 'jeopardy like victories' were intended to be aimed at me, I hope not, but since someone may have taken them that way I have chosen to address them. I have never played 'Trivial Pursuits',either literally or figuratively, and I don't go around showing off what I know, people who know me superficially have no idea what I am into and I'm not talking about the 'weird spooky stuff' either, but I don't go around boring people with talk about how Einstein's work on relativity is directly related to Maxwell's equations, or Xunzi's conflict with 'Mencius' and its origin in differing definitions of both 'nature' and 'human', such behavior would be worse than merely boring it would be pretentious and I try to avoid both. People who know me from work or social contacts think of me as a friendly and witty conversationalist and I am very popular exactly because I have nothing to prove. I very specifically did not join Mensa, even though I could have, just to avoid the type of boring and pretentious people who derive their sense of self worth from a largely meaningless number. On a personal level I am very secure and have nothing whatever 'to prove'. However, on a forum like this I feel it my duty to provide the most accurate information that I can and as necessary to support that information with details and analysis which some people might find boring. As for not 'doing homework for forums', I completely agree, but then I don't have to, because I already have done it, decades worth of it, for myself. I chose to share it with others who may be interested both because I am a generous person and also because I consider it my duty to do so. Looking at the above I see that it has gone on long enough, I had hoped to get to more specific details, but I will start them in another post. Since I have already pretty much decided what to say it should follow on this fairly quickly.

Well, onto the precession of the equinoxes. The precession of the equinoxes was known antiquity and was referred to as the motion of the eighth sphere. In the 2nd Century C.E. Claudius Ptolemy more or less summarized and finalized the cosmological thought of the previous 500 years in a book called the Almagest in which each of the seven know 'planets' from the Moon through Saturn were given a different 'sphere' for their motion, these were the first seven spheres and the eighth sphere was given to what were called the fixed stars, because they seemed at that time to have no individual motion of their own, but the totality of the fixed stars did have a motion and this motion, which Ptolemy thought to be a degree for a century (the actual motion is less than this), is what is responsible for the precession of the equinoxes. Ptolemy also wrote what become the authoritative text on Astrology, the Tetrabiblios, or Four Books. In this book Ptolemy specifically says that the beginning of the Zodiac, 0 degrees of Aries, is the Vernal Equinox, the day that the Sun crossed the equator on its journey north (I will return to this later). Centuries later a discussion of the motion of the eighth sphere is given in Johannes de Sacrobosco's De Sphaero, which while written in the 13th Century became the standard textbook of astronomy through the Renaissance and into the 17th Century. During this period there was no difference between astrologers and astronomers, so astrologers knew of the motion of the eighth sphere in the middle ages. In his book The Secret Zodiac Fred Gettings explores the Zodiac symbolism of a Medieval church and comes to the conclusion that the architects knew about both the signs and constellations and used different technical terms for the sign and constellation. Cornelius Agrippa mentions the motion of the eighth sphere in both his Three Books on Occult Philosophy and in The Vanity and Uncertainty of Arts and Sciences. So there was an awareness of the precession of the equinoxes from Antiquity through the Renaissance. One of the interesting things that I remember is that someone in the late Hellenistic period proposed it was part of a cycle in which the fixed stars would move first one way and then would reverse its direction until the equinox was back where it at 0 degrees of the constellation Aries. It obviously hasn't, at least not yet, but i always thought this was an interesting speculation which might have been inspired by one of Plato's 'stories' in his dialogue The Statesman, which involves a periodic reversal of the flow of time.This motion was called 'trepidation' and in the 9th Century Arab astrologer/astronomer proposed that it might be cyclic on a shorter scale and not completely return to 0 degrees Aries until it had gone all the way around the fixed stars to return to its beginning at 0 degrees Aries. This theory was apparently very influential during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Issac Newton put an end to the motion of the eighth sphere and explained the precession as the result of long term changes in the earth's rotation. It is an interesting irony that the author of an early 19th century translation of Ptolemy's Tetrabiblios, both mentions the criticism based on the precession which is the reason for this digression and also Ptolemy's insistence that the signs are defined by the solstices and equinoxes as a rebuttal to it, so the criticism is not new and any astrologer who is caught flatfooted by it has only their own ignorance to blame. Though astronomers who use it can be accused of being ignorant of what they are criticizing and attacking a straw man. The revival of 'Sidereal' astrology in the West during the Twentieth Century is largely inspired by Indian astrology and its advocates being ignorant of the history Western astrology have promulgated the myth that Western astrology was ignorant of the precession out of their own ignorance. What is fundamentally at stake are theories of causality and many astrologers, myself among them, have rather different models of how and why astrology would work, which in my own experience it certainly seems to do, in which something like the precession would be quit irrelevant. That is why I concluded in my previous post that neither Bazi, nor Western astrology is much affect by the precession of the equinox, but this post has been long enough and I will have to return to that another time.

Alright Stigweard, you asked for it, so now your going to get it! About the time I mean. I am assuming that you mean 12:00 midnight GMT going from Thursday to Friday, if so then the EDT (for the US East Coast) would be Thursday 8:00 pm, you are not allowing for daylight savings time, otherwise you would be correct for the East Coast of the US. For the other US time zones it would be 7:00 pm CDT, 6:00 pm MDT and 5:00 pm PDT. In all of the posts related to this I seem to recall that the problems started in the US Southeast, which would be EDT, but I believe that I recall something about Gossamer relocating to the Midwest, but I'm not sure. If this is correct then it would be CDT or MDT depending on where Gossamer is now located. In any case, now any US Tao Bums who want to send a happy thought to help this along will have a better idea of the timing. Good luck with this.

LoneHaven, Your general understanding of the matter is good so far, so keep up the good work! Regarding why there are four dimensions and time is the fourth of them. This is because classical physics used equations based on three directions, up and down, right and left, forward and backward, this was satisfactory to describe all of the Newtonian world. Four dimensional Space/Time was made necessary by theoretical and experimental problems with the theory of Electromagnetism as formulated by Maxwell around 1870. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity solved these problems. The introduction of four dimensions was the work of Minkowski, who reformulated Einsteins Special Relativity in four dimensions, because the mathematics worked so much better in four dimensions. So in physics time was added to the long established three as the fourth dimension. Interestingly Einstein at first rejected Minkowski's four dimensional space/time, but later embraced it and it became fundamental to his formulation of General Relativity. It is important to realize the distinction between a fourth dimension and a four dimensional space, any single 'dimension' is a line, a four dimensional space being defined by the intersection of four dimension lines serving as its axes. A 'sliver of the fourth dimension' would be a point, in this case a point in time, or a moment, but a sliver (to use your terminology, not quite standard, but a good image) of a four dimensional space would be three dimensional space. Interestingly Einstein at first rejected Minkowski's four dimensional space/time, but later embraced it and it became fundamental to his formulation of General Relativity. Regarding your speculations about a five dimensional space, you are basically correct. Interestingly a mathematician named Kaluza showed around 1920 that if you created a five dimensional space you could unify both Gravity and Electromagnetic Theory. One of these five dimensions was time. This lead to the Kaluza Klein model in which a physicist named Klein, kind of, swept the extra spacial dimension under the rug, by saying that it was too small to be noticed. While Kaluza's work was pushed out of the limelight by the development of Quantum Mechanics, a lot of modern physics, including such theories as Supersymmetry, extend the fundamental principle, including the one of sweeping extra dimensions under the rug. So much for the physics of the matter. Now as to the metaphysics. I have thought, and I am not the only one, that 'mystical' experiences are an intuition of higher orders of space, such as four dimensional space, or higher. On a thread here I proposed to look at wuji as a four dimensional space, also the 'akasha' as used by modern occultists could be viewed as a four dimensional 'substance'. I have occupied myself with such curious notions as modeling Plotinus' Nous (Mind, in this case, one might say absolute cosmic mind, cosmic mind in itself, etc.) as a six dimensional hypersphere. So there is a lot of fun stuff that can be done with this, not the least of which is that it may possibly provide a language for talking about mystical experience and a guide for those perplexed by what they may mean. Such talk is of course no substitute for experience, but is not useless either, since theory and practice are intimately linked and experience is the fruit of practice.

Well WhiteRabbit, I see you are the fan of many of our Fury friends, a pun which I suppose is apropos as long as you have your 'temporary' Bryan Fury avatar. Which brings up an interesting point, in posting, like comedy timing is everything, so if you thought that my post was an oblique way of introducing my little writing on apology and then posting it, well, no, the timing was no longer right. What at the time when I wrote it, maybe two weeks or so before my post to you, might have seemed a witty and ironic parody, would now be worse than whipping a dead horse, it would be like whipping a dead horse whose corpse bloated with decay was ready to burst, a rather stupid thing to do. Rather, a big pit needs to be dug and a bulldozer hired and that dead horse needs to be buried and if not forgotten, then remembered for whatever good lessons can be learned from it. No, my thanks to you was quite sincere and meant sincerely for the reasons I noted. For the junzi of any age sincerity is an important concept and one from which I would be hesitant to depart. It has deep personal meaning (by which I mean not just to me personally, but also to the notion of a person as a microcosm), but in Confucianism, also has deep cosmic significance. Let me instead take advantage of this opportunity to pimp my own site and say that I created a mandala called the Sincerity Mandala to represent aspects of this and wrote a commentary on it, oddly enough called the 'Sincerity Mandala and its Structure', which can be found at http://innersagetao.net/page14.html. This little essay needs some work, which is why I took it off the sites menus, though it is accessible from points in the site, and as for my site, well, it needs a lot of work which is why I usually don't mention it! It's a bit of embarrassment as it is, but I simply can't find the time to bring it up to snuff, so for now it stands as it stands. In any case it explains why sincerity is important to junzis (how do you make something like that plural!?) of any age, and why my post, as it stands, was therefore sincere. Well, maybe a little overdone, but a little ritual politeness never hurt anyone. Oh, one more thing, I liked your previous signature in which you corrected Billy Corgan's characterization of the world as a vampire, by comparing it to a video, though I like to think it's more like one of those, what do they call them, massive online multi-player role playing games (or something like that), that we have become just a little bit too involved in playing. It's something that we need to step out of from time to time and remember our real life.

Thank you, White Rabbit, Thank you! I missed the whole the whole fray to which you are referring, but I thank you for being 'manly' enough to do this and set a golden example for all of us to follow. Far from falling, you have risen considerably in my own estimate, not only for your forbearance in any discussion with Mak Tin Si, but also for this apology. This old junzi bows to your humanity (Jen), and thanks you again! During a recent and apparently continuing exchange on this site, which I can only compare to a bunch of primates throwing their own excrement at each other, I actually wrote and thought of posting something which I called 'Apologetics:the Manly art of Self-Defense', but in the spirit of forbearance I decided not to. Maybe I should have posted it, because this mess continues, to the mutual disgrace of both parties, though I wrote the post with only one of them in mind. Once again, Thank you!

goldisheavy, The applicability of a formal system to life is seldom obvious and the magic square of 3 is a formal system. Among other things is has a formal analogy to the matrices used to solve linear equations, but I am sure that I am only pointing out the obvious to you. It is also unique among the families of 'magic squares' in being the only one with one member and if I recall correctly also being symmetrical in all transformations. Now symmetry is important, for example: 'Some of the most basic aspects of physics follow from looking at symmetries. The symmetry under translations in space implies the conservation of momentum, while symmetry under translation in time implies the conservation of energy. The relation between these conservation laws and the symmetry transformation is much more direct in quantum theory than it is is classical mechanics.' Peter Woit, Not Even Wrong, p. 36 and more interestingly: 'The SU(2) transformation properties of a particle have become known as a particle's spin. This term comes from the idea that one could think of a particle as a spinning particle, spinning on some axis and thus carrying some angular momentum. This idea is inherently inconsistent for a number of reasons. While the spin is a quantized version of the angular momentum, there is no well defined axis or speed of rotation. Spin is an inherently quantum-mechanical notion, one that fits in precisely with the representation theory of the symmetry group SU(2), but has no consistent interpretation terms of classical physics.' ibid. p. 46 In other words formal mathematical systems could be seen to determine such macro properties as why tops spin, and such necessary phenomena as the conservation of energy and motion. Particle spin even explains why we have 'matter' and 'energy'. The magic square of 3 could be just such a formal mathematical system whose importance was discovered 2000 plus years ago and whose area of applicability happens to be to spiritual cultivation and a description of humanity's spiritual potential. The applicability of such systems to life is determined by their 'fruitfulness' and generations of Daoist practice could be used as an argument that this system is very fruitful indeed. I leave your other questions for another time, but the most important one has been addressed.

Thank you for your interest Rain. Let's look at a difference between a 2D space (though we would usually call a 2D space a surface, surfaces in higher dimensions become more complex, the surface of a 4D hypercube for example is made up of eight 3D cubes, thus to anticipate myself, its applicability to the pre-Heaven pagua, so I have just simplified down the notion of 'space' and made it applicable to lower dimensions), like say that bottom of box. The box itself exists in 3D space, now imagine that the bottom of the box is inhabited by some insects, these are crawling insects and they think of space solely in terms of 2 dimensions. Here you are, a cool and groovy 3D being (actually you are a 4D being, but because people usually define themselves from the perspective of their 3D manifestation, i.e., their bodies, I thought I would only emphasize that) who is watching these insects crawl around on the bottom of this box. Suppose two of them, say, George and Fred, were talking to each other just at the moment you decide to pick one up and put him down in another part of the box. Let's say it was George who was picked up. Suddenly, George, much to his astonishment, who just a moment ago was speaking to Fred, finds himself face to face with Joe, much to Joe's astonishment. Joe is flabbergasted to see George 'appear' out of nowhere talking away in mid-sentence, Fred is nonplussed at George's disappearance. When George realizes that he has been miraculously transported to where Joe is, both are amazed because George got there without going through the intervening bug space(!?bug space is the two dimensional space that bugs experience as reality, which of course to us is only the bottom of the box), because neither of them has any knowledge of a third dimension, though they are familiar with the wild ramblings of Bill, the resident nut case, with his unbelievable stories of alien abductions and other such nonsense. Immediately Joe and George go off to find Fred and to find out what has happened to him. After walking three bug hours (Bug hours are of course one of many divisions of bug time, one of the major divisions being how long it takes a rational bug, in a sound bug body, to walk across all of bug-space, otherwise known as the bottom of the box), they find Fred surrounded by a veritable throng of insects, listening to his wild story about how there he was talking to old George when suddenly George up and vanished completely. Well, just imagine what all the bugs thought when George and Joe showed up with their own astonishing tale! Maybe that Bill wasn't so crazy after all, or maybe its a disinformation plot by some sinister bug government organization, and who, or perhaps more important and at the same time more sinister, what ( , Oh No!) are those gray bugs anyway? Well, I hope that makes things a little clearer, most of the points I am trying to make are simple analogies between dimensions and starting to think about them in relation in terms of 2D space and 3D space is a great way to sharpen any dull knife. That is the whole reason behind Flatland and the other books I mentioned, to start one thinking about the relations between higher dimensions as being similar to the relations between lower dimensions which are part of our everyday experience As to why it would require a 5D being to manipulate a 4D object, that is because just as we can only manipulate 3D objects as an event sequence on a timeline, so there would need to be a timeline in which 4D objects could be manipulated as an event sequence, and thus the need of a fifth dimension which would serve to create a 5D space/time continuum, just as we experience 3D objects in a 4D space/time continuum. Answering your deeper question about how a 5D being might be able to know the whole life story of a 4D being, is a little more complex, but if there is enough interest I may attempt to answer it.

I have taken a quick look at the whole article and I have to say that the author makes reckless generalizations about complex subjects, for example, he speaks of Confucianism like some ignorant critic of Biblical fundamentalists might speak of 'Christians' without realizing the diversity of 'Christian' belief and practice, such as the distinction between Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and mainline Protestantism. Thus the radical distinction between Mencius and Xunzi is glossed over completely. Worse than that, this confusion seems to be exploited for polemical purposes to create an invidious comparison of Confucianism to a simple minded and chimerical unification of Legalism and Daoism, but the whole point of 'the Dao which cannot be spoken' is to subvert the core of Legalism which is the notion that exact and well formed definitions of, for example, political offices can be created so that exact and well formed rewards and punishments can be administered by the state. This sites apparent advocacy of Lord Shang is even worse, since he is not even an example of 'philosophical' Legalism as exemplified by Han Feizi, rather Lord Shang is basically a militaristic protofascist, whose ruthless doctrines may have helped the Qin State unify China, but also lead to the tyranny of the first emperor's reign which caused the dynasty's downfall as soon as the first Tyrant (On a personal level I am not sure he really deserved to be called a 'Di', but in this case the usage is rhetorical/polemical and not historical) was dead. On the other hand the Mencian branch of Confucianism is quite mystical. In my own research there is a strong link between Mencius and the Neiye, and this also seems to be connected with aspects of early Daoism. It is the authority of Mencius that allows the Song Confucians to assimilate Daoism and Buddhism into that great body of thought usually referred to as Neo-Confucianism and raises the question of whether Confucianism ever departed from the Dao, or whether its profound name was simply kidnapped by Xunzi, who from this perspective should be viewed as the founding robber baron of a long line of 'thieves of virtue'. For an enlightening discussion of the early history of the 'Dao' see A. C. Graham's Disputer's of the Tao, which should be on the reading list of everyone who is interested in Daoism and how the various daos became the eternal Dao.

He's back! Wuji Space I prefer to think of a 'wuji space' rather than dimension, this is more in line mathematical usage. Such a wuji space would be four dimensional, but not 'a fourth dimension'. In ordinary usage people often speak of the fourth dimension when they are really meaning to refer to a four dimensional space being considered as an 'alternate reality', however a 'dimension' is only a straight line, thus in our ordinary experience we experience three dimensions as extended space and one dimension as extended time. For shorthand let's call a four dimensional space a 4D space. So I tend to think of wuji as a 4D space, such a space is called a hyperspace to distinguish it from the ordinary 3D space of our sensory experience. This is actually leading somewhere so if you have some patience and a little curiosity you can start learning how the mathematics of hyperspace can be used to 'model' traditional 'mystical' notions and lead to an illuminating way to speak about them. In our 3D space we experience space as extended about us and time as a line of experience which is extended through this space. This 3D space is filled with 3D objects, some of which are so big that they define our experience, others are small enough to pick up and look at, in that that series of events which we call a 'timeline'. In a 4D space the 'fourth dimension' of time could be experienced as as an extended part of an object, just as we can pick up a three dimensional object and pass it around among ourselves. Something like a universe could be thought of as a four dimensional object, in such an object all of space/time would already 'exist', all of what some resident of this universe would consider to be their past, present and future, for example, could be examined from a 4D perspective, and the whole of that future accurately 'predicted' and that without even raising problems about freewill and predestination. For good or ill, only a 5D being could pick up say, our universe as a 4D object, and be able to give such infallible 'predictions' and whether they could or would even care to communicate such information to us is another matter entirely. Originally, I had intended to go a little further with this and show how one could use such a 4D 'wuji space' to model the 'pre-Heaven' diagram of the eight gua as a hypercube in 4D space, but to go further would involve some significant digressions and I am not sure that anyone is really interested in me going further. Also I am not sure how to proceed. I was never completely satisfied with my series of posts in 'Demons' as a vehicle for my thought. In my little vacation from The Tao Bums I have been thinking about better ways to do this, and I may have come up with one. So if anyone would like me to continue along this vein post a reply here and I will see what I can do, right now I do have some time on my hands, but his could change shortly. Anyone wanting to pursue this on their own might find the classic, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott, a place to begin. In using hyperspace to model mystical experience I am only following the lead of Ouspensky's Tertium Organum, which introduced me to the concept some forty odd (some might even say very odd) years ago. For a more up to date version of Flatland, you can hardly beat Ian Stewart's Flatterland. By the way, Stewart has written an excellent introduction to the mathematics of symmetry, Why Beauty is Truth. Symmetry, in the mathematical sense, is a study of how some things can keep changing and always remain the same, a rather suggestive concept in itself.

Daoist religious meditation/ritual is all based on a simple diagram of nine squares, with the numbers 1 through 9 arranged in it so that added horizontally, vertically, or on the diagonals always add up to 15. This is the simplest of a large family of mathematical objects known as magic squares. This is the basis of the famous Ho t'u diagram, many Tao Bums may know it as the basis of Nine Star Astrology, and in the West it is known as the the magic square of Saturn, part of a family of magic squares of from 9 to 81 squares associated with each of the Planets. This square becomes a means of organizing the primary symbols of Chinese Cosmology, such as the Five Elements, the Eight Trigrams, and the Nine Stars. In Daoist ritual it is combined with the Twelve Earthly Branches to give the basic plan of the ritual Dan (Tan) and is also the basis for the Mudras that the Daoist initiate makes with his left had and uses as part of his ritual and meditation. In these meditations Heaven, Earth and Man are united, for the five elements exist not only in the world around one, but in ones body as the five yin organs, in the earth as the five Directions and the Heavens as the five Planets. These five aspects of the elements are personified by the Emperors of the Five Directions. These Emperors are given a place within each of the Five Yin Organs as well as a space in the Dan, thus indicating the fundamental relation of similarity between man and the cosmos. The Three Pure Ones are the personification of jing, qi and shen and are to be found both within the Lower, Middle and Upper Dan of the initiate, but also along the North Wall of the Dan. Even the Ling Bao True Writs which are the talismanic basis of the meditation/ritual are planted in the cross quarters of Northeast, Southeast, etc. where the four earthly branches that correspond to earth, the Ox, the Dragon, the Ram and the Dog are to be found. This is in part what I refer to as the systematic basis of Daoist rituals and it is very precise. There is more to this systematic aspect but that gives an idea. When I first read about this in Michael Saso's Taoism and the Rite of Cosmic Renewal back around 1976 I was completely fascinated by it and saw ways that it might be integrated with another similar structure to which I had been giving much thought, the Temple patterns of the Golden Dawn initiatory system. They seemed to complement each other nicely since the Golden Dawn system is based on an East/West pattern and the Daoist system a North/South one. In any case such thoughts became the basis of my efforts to integrate Chinese and Western esoteric systems. For those not familiar with it the Golden Dawn was a group formed in the late 19th century, its best know members being the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, and the occultist Aleister Crowley. In one form or another it pretty much dominated the whole of the 20th century esoteric revival in the English speaking world, though Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society was to have a huge influence on a more popular level, making karma and reincarnation notions practically taken for granted by the 'new age movement'. See Charles Luk Taoist Yoga, p. 4, '...the wondrous light of (essential) nature which is symbolized by a circle which Confucius called virtuous perfection (jen); the Book of Change calls it the ultimateless (wu chi), the Buddha perfect knowledge (yuan ming), and the Taoists the elixir of immortality or spiritual light; which all point to the prenatal One True Vitality.' Qabalah is a huge subject some of which is very systematic and some of it not, but I was particularly referring to the Tree of Life as understood by the occultists of the Golden Dawn, of course their version has its roots in the Sepher ha Yetzirah, the Book of Formation which goes back to Hellenistic times.