lezlie

Nice video

Nelly Furtado Promiscuous

not a Nelly fan, myself... here's one of my favs:

Kelly - Shoes

It would be ideal to keep it in one central location (city) and not an event (Burning Man, etc.) for reasons of cost and interest.

And, just as Lozen stated Phoenix, I would assume most attending would want it to be in or near their current location.

If enough people have interest, members of the forum could suggest all their cities of interest and then Sean could run a poll to see what the majority selects.

I'm glad at least two of you are interested. I am, and so is Sean. I think Todd might be up for it, and surely Cam... and Yoda? I guess we'll see if it goes anywhere.

when i started using our netipot, it dried my sinuses a bit, which were typically runny. my sinuses felt really open and perfectly moisturized. i was happy with the results. but a few weeks later i stopped using it. we were in Mississippi and used some tap water in the pot. even after a thorough cleaning it would still burn me when i used it. after some time passed, i had forgotten to start using it again. now i'm reminded! so, thanks!

How many people would be interested in a TaoBums.com official meetup?

Not sure where chemtrails belong in the Gnosticism debate, but I'll bet the Christians would be against them and the Gnostics would be live and let live

LOL!

I don't mean to ruin your fun, but you shouldn't promote these things because they injure so many people and ruin their sex lives.

 

They also don't work.

 

no fun ruined, but to let you know - i'm promoting nothing. i think the fact penis pumps are being given away for free online is funny. this link is for entertainment purposes only.

I'm not even gonna ask how you discovered this

 

i was just, ya know, spending my usual friday night googling for "penis pump" - what i normally do to kick off my weekend.

(and I still drink coffee in the am - but it is now cold instead of hot)

why are you drinking this coffee cold? are you cold brewing it or is there a specific reason you are ingesting it cold?

I got a 6 fire with 0 water..and my dream is to live in a desert area..very attracted to it. All my life however, I've lived near the ocean. Life circumstances keeps me from the southwest, but would love to go there..can you ask about that..?

Thanks

T

but... you don't live in the desert, do you? you say you live near water... all your life. life circumstances keep you away. you long for it, but you don't actually live there. it's interesting.

yeah, i'm going to ask about people with excess fire and no water living in the desert and see what he says. i'm still so new at this, it might be no big. who knows? it just sounds funny. it sounds like someone who is purposely putting themself in an uncomfortable position. but.. it could mean nothing.

oh btw thaddeus, that tiger image you are using for your avatar is the same exact image i found on google and am using for my high school reunion forum. so random, just thought i'd mention, tho.

 

Also what do the squares around the central one mean? Like, in upper right corner of the chart (rabbit) it says:

ASSISTANTS

Wu Qu (Generalissimo)

Qi Sha (Seven Killings)

Di Jie (Earhly Loss)

 

The first two are also bolded. What do they mean?

 

those are your houses and we haven't covered those yet. we'll learn how to read them next class.

lezlie:

year - earth horse

month - wood rabbit

day - water dragon

hour - wood dragon

inner element: water

wood 3, fire 3, earth 3, metal 0, water 3

i lack metal -- which explains why i always want to live in the industrial/downtown areas of town, and why the view of a bart train chugging along in the distance interests me much more than that silly sunset.

Hmmmm,

 

Year: wood rabbit

Month: wood monkey

Day: wood horse

Hour: wood pig

 

Inner element: Water

 

Elements: Wood/5 Fire/2 Earth/0 Metal/2 Water/3

 

whoa.... so much wood. wow, that's amazing.

 

Year: Earth Goat

Month: Fire Rabbit

Day: Metal Rabbit

Hour: Fire Rooster

 

Inner element: Earth

 

Elements: Wood/3,Fire/5,Earth/2,Metal/2, Water/0

 

super whoa... you have 5 fire with 0 water and you live in the desert???? i am def asking Ming about you next class!!!

so funny..

?

i don't get it.

hey sean, i reworked the header like you asked. let me know what you think...

this is the image livejournal uses to distinguish paid members:

What if we just have each post on it's own entire page with the butterfly at the top AND the bottom. Then we could even make the butterfly bigger. Like I am thinking at least double that size.

fuck it. just delete the forum and please post a huge photo of the second butterfly on a simple white background. that's your new index.html

Actually I think I will add that butterfly to everyone's profile this weekend. I will have to widen the forum so that it can be that big too, I don't want to resize it at all. Do you think it will look wierd having a butterfly that huge though under everyone's avatar?

it will look fine if you just increase the size of the avatars. although, the avatars might get a bit pixelated in the resize. how hard would it be to get everyone to send us the originals of their avatars so we can resize and repost them?

hao about a graphic that says STFU

all joking aside how about a butterfly... animated, like this:

or this:

i think i speak for everyone on the forum when i say the butterfly animated wing flutter is the best idea that has been presented thus far.

Been reading a bit about this lately and it sounds sort of like the stunts Sean and Lezlie are gonna be able to do.

wait a minute... which one of the stunts in which video am i suppose to be able to do, because i was wearing heels today and i almost slipped and fell down twice -- not exactly insect-climb-the-walls girl... i can do backhandsprings, front walk-overs, perfect cartwheels, and make cam laugh with my chi kung impressions... not much more.

 

"OUR RACE IS THE MASTER RACE. WE ARE DIVINE GODS ON THIS PLANET. WE ARE AS DIFFERENT FROM THE INFERIOR RACES AS THEY ARE FROM INSECTS. IN FACT, COMPARED TO OUR RACE, OTHER RACES ARE BEASTS AND ANIMALS, CATTLE AT BEST. OTHER RACES ARE CONSIDERED AS HUMAN EXCREMENT. OUR DESTINY IS TO RULE OVER THE INFERIOR RACES. OUR EARTHLY KINGDOM WILL BE RULED BY OUR LEADER WITH A ROD OF IRON. THE MASSES WILL LICK OUR FEET, AND SERVE US AS OUR SLAVES."

 

Menachem Begin

(Israeli Prime Minister, 1977-1983)

wait a minute.... are you sure the Israeli Prime Minister said this? does he like to visit Tao forums and assume the identity of overweight porn stars?

I am kind of scared to do things like this because I did a sigilization exercise that is the entry prereq. to get into T.O.P.Y. and it worked. I wasn't trying to join them i just decided to do it. It worked and I got into alot of trouble. I am still recovering. So now I am very careful about thinking of and asking for my ultimate dreams or desires. What if you get them and its not really what you want? or can handle?

 

Some of the exercises were very close to chaos magick practises and that interested me and also made me waery.

How did you get into trouble and what is TOPY? What do you mean by not trying to join them, but it worked, exactly? How (are you) and what are you recovering from?

I'm not trying to critique or anything, I am just genuinely curious, you are speaking my language... sort of, but I don't know what any of that info means.

One of the things I've learned about magic in general is that you don't intend huge things into your life, say a career change. You intend a good day or more energy or something basic, so that can boost you to make the changes that you make when you are ... full of energy or... you know... having a good day. But, yeah, you don't want to be living an existance that say your 18 year old self wanted you to have... your goals/etc have changed since then, since life is always changing.

What makes the ideas from the movie specific to Chaos magick and not just magic in general? I don't know very much about Chaos magic...

Caroline Myss really inspires me and I'd like to share two of my favorite quotes from her...

"At the end of the day, if it isn't funny, I don't need it."

"The greatest gift you can give to the world is a healthy you... and that's it."

The second quote is actually how her CD on self esteem ends. It's a beautiful listen.

i want to know who complained.... so i can give them death stares

do not underestimate the power of a death stare

i want to try that lavlin stuff someone mentioned earlier at the beginning of this thread.

i started wearing deoderant a couple of years ago around the time i started dressing nicer, but i've always felt extremely BLEH about it. none of that hippie shit in the whole body section does anything but make me sweat more. so secret has been my guilty pleasure....

we had an employee spoken to in our offices, but it wasn't about BO... BO is pretty much tolerated. the employee I'm speaking of was talked to for wearing too much cologne.....

who is going to complain about BO? that's so stupid. as long as you don't smell like you've pissed your pants it should be OK... it's not like BO can induce a headache in someone else, jeez...

I think Art-as-Alchemy is a definate reality... just listen to Beethoven's 9th... or a bit of Aphex Twin.

(aphex twin)

ah! ain't that the truth

I recently rented a DVD entitled The Illuminated Chakras. Anodea Judith guides you through an open-eye mediation with visuals created by Alex Wayne and music by Robin Silver. The DVD was returned with intention to purchase my own copy.

Today I came across these two beautiful pieces, found on YouTube on a search for "magick", and though I'd share them here with the question "What do you get out of visuals such as these?"

Are you turned off by them, turned on by them, or indifferent to their existance... do you prefer to use only audio for your practices or do you find the created visuals help you in some ways?

(since I cannot embed the videos in this post, you'll have to click through to watch)

Cam, Sean is your man for that question, since he knows much about both.

I am tempted to say they are basically the same thing, or they access the same things, and whatever terms you choose to wrap the practices up in, depends on your character, coupled with the language and attitude you find in the literature and teachings. What appeals to you, that is... I am assuming you are referring to Taoist Alchemy, which is most likely borrowed and put in some type of rituals and practices in magick, or at least I would think.

It's weird, the first practice in Kraig's Modern Magick book that he has you do is called the relaxation ritual. You take golden light or a golden glow and imagine it at the base of your feet, then you pull it into your feet and up the legs, and up the entire body. Then he has you send the light to anywhere in your body you feel tension building.

The week before I began his book, my acupuncturist had me do THE EXACT SAME THING, except she had me use purple since it is my "color". I looked up more about this online and found the chakra cleansings with colors information. I am quite sure my acupuncturist is not teaching me to do ritual magick. She was having me focus on my chakras, my third one in particular.

After studying what I have so far about magick, it reveals itself more and more in every little thing, from Tony Robbins teachings to the plan I hear my friend lay out on how she's going to approach her boyfriend with a sensitive subject. It's everything we do.

Way late in the game and probably a good thing for me.. I don't typically play well with others when everyone is suffering from a post retrograde hangover.

Although, I didn't read every single word in the thread, because of well... WORDS WORDS WORDS, I did pick on the general theme.

That being said I did want to comment on this quote (said early on by Freeform):

"Ok... One of my favourite of his practices was to not use the word "I" for long periods of time... He managed to do it for two years apparently... of course the classic Crowley twist was that if you did utter the forbiden word you'd have to immediately punish yourself - such as biting hard on your thumb. I tried this for a week - for the first few days I had my thumb in constant pain - but after a while you start to learn and the effect was fantastic... I had to become much more creative with my language and way of speaking, and I found myself losing my rigid identity and ego..."

Just yesterday I was talking to Sean about something along these lines. I was part of a meeting at my job last week where I noticed the "uppers" kept chiming in with "I think" to introduce their statements. It was really confusing to me at some point, because I couldn't get a real grasp on what needed to be changed with the tool we were discussing. My brain was like "ok, he thinks this, and he thinks this, and then the other one... he thinks this WTF?" It didn't really matter what any of them thought and it became overwhelmingly obvious that opinions from these individuals weren't going to fix any problems we were going over. The only thing these "I think" statements were presenting were cover-ups or "quick fix solutions" to a much much bigger problem. Granted, in certain situations what people THINK is vital and important to understand, say in a theraputic session with someone who is trying to peel away your layers, etc., but in a professional setting they really have no place. What the trial and error results are thinking, would be much more useful to consider... if they could think. So, my musing was how to get this "I think this" type of mindset out of my interactions, especially when it comes to subject matters where emotional involvement is not useful or needed. I wasn't aware that Crowley had practiced a ritual to relieve himself of this very thing. Very interesting! The ritual of biting the thumb wouldn't work for me (I would do better with a reward system instead of a punishment system), but gives me something to think about, or look more into, at the very least.

The magic books that I have been reading lately are Modern Magick, Modern Sex Magick (both written by Donald Michael Kraig), and then 777 and other Qabalistic Writing of Aleister Crowley, which includes Gematria and Sepher Sephiroth. The majority of the content in the 777 book is WAY over my head, but gives a better glimpse into Crowley's workings and teachings than reading about him in an article or hearing second hand from a friend. The book talks about why he choose 666 as his symbol, partly being because of what is talked about in part 1 (666 representing last of the mystic numbers of the sun, the spirit of Solomon, the Satanic trinity, and also the name of Jesus, then examples of the number in 4 parts of a divine name, an angelic name, a name pertaining to the fomative world, and then a name of a spirit or blind force) and partly to do with the apocalypse, him seeing the beast as a lion and leo being his rising sign. He writes much more on the number 418, if anyone is interested...

The other two books mentioned above (again written by Donald Michael Kraig) are an easy to read introduction into understanding magick and how to start practicing today. His thoughts and views take into consideration Crowley's teachings, but pulls references and resources from everywhere, since magic isn't something that came from one specific source. Kraig is also really into tantra, so that influences the Sex Magick book greatly.

Here is something that can be shared, but would be trite for me to try and sum up in my own words, so I'll just quote it:

(From Modern Sex Magick)

Because every action has a magical result, it is hard for a non-magician to deal with the seemingly unknowable reality of the universe. How many times have you heard someobody say something like "Just when everything seemed fine, it all fell apart?" If that person had been a magician, he or she would have been able to either prevent the disaster through magick, ease its effects, or at least see that it was coming. But that did not happen.

 

That is because non-magicians believe we are dependent on chance happenings: fate, luck, kimset. By not being able to tell what will happen as a result of their actions they are spun around helplessly by the results of those actions. Everything in life seems a mess, alternatively by doing little, a person can live a peaceful life. No actions, no magical reactions. But also no personal control or adventure.

 

... A magician will accept or deal with any problems he or she creates. It's called "Personal responsibility."

 

... To make a comparison a non-magician is like a person falling endlesly through the air. Spinning and flipping, he or she is out of control and at the mercy of gravity and winds. The position of his or her body is a result of being out of conrol. The magician, on the other hand, is like a person in a hang glider. He or she must also deal with gravity, winds, and the position of the body, but the magician uses magick (the wings of the hang glider) to control the fall, move up and down, move to the sides, and do whatever he or she desires.

 

Being a magician... does not make one superior to others in any way. A magician just has a differnt way of appreciating life and the universe and interacting with his or her environment.

This speaks to me in many ways. An individual really must read it with an open mind to fully appreciate the message. The message is there is a path of ritualistic work that involves an energetic expansion of the mind to embrace responsibility of your life totally and completely. This is not unlike the work that many life coaches will teach you. Magic (magick) is a simple fancy word that gets you interested in a system that brings more awareness to your being. It's a symbol, a tool, coming from a single place. You can use this tool to find the center where everything meets. You can use this tool to bring wealth and health into your life. You can use this tool to get off your fatass and start exercising. You can use this tool to try and make bad things happen.

You can do all of these things without magic, and your results could possibly be the same.

A passage that fits in with this thead of good / evil, in regards to magick:

(From Modern Sex Magick)

Theorem Seven - Magick is magick

Nobody talks about good electricity and bad electricity, yet people often talk about white and black magick. In Modern Magick I talked about white, black, and grey classifications of magick, but only for communication purposes. Even so, I still get letters from people attacking me for believing in different shades of magick.

 

I don't believe that way. Magick is magick. People can use magick for different purposes, some good and some bad. Likewise, you can use electicity to light up a dark room or to kill a person.

 

A trained magician has no desire to do magick that will in any way harm another because he or she knows that the result will bring harm back to the magician. To do so would simply be stupid. The question is, how does a magician avoid it?

If you are interested in the answer, then pick up the book

Magic is not something you do, it is something you are.