Being a bit of a spiritual forum geek, I often get to observe various “whose path / technique / teacher is better” arguments. Patiently reading each side, at some point I can’t help feel that my understanding of the most important thing is very different than what I am seeing represented by most participants. I admit, sometimes I find myself smiling and feeling, humbly, like I am watching children play fight with big colorful toys in a park sandbox. Or ultra-serious film students, berets prefectly cocked, arguing over who is the best French director of “all time”. What concerns me is that, unlike fun threads on, say, choosing deodorant or debating nutrition, in these threads some poor souls invariably imagine this stuff has a higher claim on anything to do with the Tao. Of course on some level it does, as everything in our experience is inseparable from the Tao. But beyond that … well, my felt sense is that there are deeply flawed assumptions going on here.

I like what Wayfarer on TTB said recently about how something crucial really goes awry when we strive beyond our given capacities. My preferred frame is that, in every single moment, each of us is one hundred percent enough, one hundred percent free, one hundred percent loved and getting exactly what we want down to the very last detail. This perfection includes all of the ways we convince ourselves otherwise and play unpleasant games with our freedom. A particularly unpleasant game is to believe there is anything fundamentally missing from what you truly are in any moment. And then how much more amplified is this unpleasantness, this disconnection from Truth, when this game is magnified — when the game says that not only is there somewhere to go other than here, but we must to travel to the other side of the world, be celibate for a quarter year, pay thousands of dollars, learn secret techniques, submit to Masters, shock people with elite chi and all before “level four”. All of this, of course, way before one is permitted to breathe the air of Truth that is already the very fiber of our Being. WTF? It’s like dying of thirst while in a beautiful freshwater lake, and then deciding you need to swim vigorously toward a mirage of water you are hallucinating as a rare and priceless magic-wine. Just drink the fucking water! The Way puts banana peels in the path of elitism, ties the shoelaces of qigong fetishists, giggles at a concept of tommorow and is at home for everyone right now. Young, old, lazy, rich, beautiful, brilliant, stupid. Seeking and expecting to find anything fundamentally different than what is available in the moment is a dis-ease. Our egos think there is a to-do-list for enlightenment because we are terrified at just relaxing into and being swallowed by the fullness of emptiness in this very moment.

All of us really, have probably created spectacular to-do-lists of our own before “then get enlightened” even shows up. Just a few more things to do first. But awakening happens in spite of ourselves, not as a result of a perfect formula. There is no fucking formula! The Guru is within you. Awakening is a sort of happy accident, and all the “best” technique in the world can do is make you accident prone. It’s up to you to finally trip up and fall. I really, sincerely hope our paths finally crack each of us wide open from all this nonsense and we can smile and realize that there are little old white ladies on crutches hobbling home from church that know the same exact undisturbed Truth that brilliant, mathemetically sophisticated Kabbalists are seeing and that perhaps Taoist human immortals from afar are embodying and on and on. I believe there are thousands and thousands of enlightened humans, most of them quite ordinary without any draw to teach.

The most fantastic path is The Way which is moving us Now. Anything that obscures that clarity disconnects us from Truth. PLEASE, follow your bliss. If it takes you to the Post Office for work everyday, or to this teacher down the street, or that teacher in a remote cave in China, or wherever! But find a higher vibration if for one second you feel the least bit bad that where you are at right this second lacks anything fundamental, that your path is somehow wrong because it doesn’t have pretty mandalas like so and so path or doesn’t develop cool X-Men powers like this other path. It’s not True. Every step of the Way is about what feels the highest, deepest, most important, most loving, most free to you. Could it be any other way?

Sean

“The heart of our [Taoist] view is the human relationship with Nature. When we self-reflect as human beings, we discover that being human is nothing extra-ordinary and, even more importantly, we discover that our existence doesn’t need to be repaired, fixed, or reunited with Nature. It is immutably part of Nature. It’s no use to imitate saints or act in a way premature to your own experience. Simply remain in your experience and feel its real quality. This is the path of immortality. In the West we are extreme idealists, expecting too much and in a constant state of failure because of it. We aspire and hope and fail. When we reflect and discover our own energetic reality, we can see that everything we do has transmission, has energetic effect. We needn’t struggle to be good rather than real, to remain young rather than growing old, to avoid making mistakes. The only point is to appreciate our actions in their largest context, without measuring them or looking beyond them to something better.” - Liu Ming

In my opinion there is and was really no other choice ever but to mix ‘n match practices and philosophies. Partially because “you” and your thoughts and beliefs are an alchemy of the moment you are in; your history, your culture, your memories, your attitude, the philosophies you’ve been exposed to, your genes, etc. With mass communication nowadays we are all more of a melting pot so syncretism is more apparent. But ancient practices likewise. Including so-called “pure practices”. The Tao Teh Ching did not just jump out of a vacuum. Taoism was mixing and matching elements of Chinese shamanism from the start. Should we try to tease that out? And we could go further back. This gets fun. Trying to find the pure essence of a form. But ultimately you are turned inside out in your search … for true essence is Nameless, no?

The best we can do is intelligently co-create our own Integral Path, which I believe is mostly a matter of getting out of our own Way. :)

Personally, I am more drawn to paths that lay most of the details out up front for me. Fuck this inner secrets shit, it’s for geeks. Even if I need a teacher for minor or even major guidance in applying the techniques, give me a thumbnail sketch of what I am getting into. I am too hip on cults to sign up for something without a sense of what it’s about. I can fully accept a layer of secretiveness. Particularly as an effort to maintain the sacredness of particular teachings, rituals, etc. or to protect the group from opression, say, if there are techniques involving fun illicit drugs, yogic sex with porn stars, clowns, midgets … :)

I am also not a fan of the “it’s secret so you don’t hurt yourself” card. I assume a certain almost magical quality to naive sincerity. Even a worthless technique done in the right spirit is better than the perfect method done for the wrong reasons. Hurting oneself is an act of ignorance, of unconsciousness. And we are already doing this in every moment! Ask the Buddhists, they will tell you. But it’s this thread of nearly foolish sincerity that guides us IMO. It’s a very personal thing. My Taoist teacher Liu Ming tells me human beings can not even consciously kill themselves. Taoists believe suicide is a case of unresolved ancestral qi. In effect, an enraged demonic ancestor killing you with your own hands. Whoah. But to find a place of sincerity, where you consciously want to become a more evolved being, or even just want to have more fun, genuinely, to get in touch with the tiniest sliver of intuition, and follow this thread of bliss, even if there is a big pile of karmic crud on top of it, well I believe this is the whole path. It’s when picking a flower for your lover is as powerful a qigong as flying to China and meeting a new super advanced teacher.

It’s so simple. We can have a blast concocting elaborate rituals, learning to shoot qi balls, flying … it could all even be part of our evolution. And Still there Is Silence the whole Way. Debating over a hierarchy of spiritual advancement is bizarre. There is no hierarchy. Evolution and progress are a function of time. What is Timeless? Nothing. Silence. And there is literally Nothing but Now. That’s it. Now you are reading this. So this is That. Maybe you will be cooking later. That will be It. Completely and totally It. Maybe you will be in China with an extraordinary human being. That will be It. Up and down, moods change, your memories shift, round and round. What remains still? Can you see?

Honestly I only catch a glimpse myself. :p But how it feels! It’s surely Truth.

I am aware that traditionally the Chinese sages were highly secretive. So it’s possible that taking Taoism “all the way” requires a deeper embrace of this feature of the path. I’ll stay a bum as long as I can though. Really many paths from all culture’s including the West have been traditionally structured in a way many today would consider shockingly secretive, exclusive and elitist. For all number of reasons, good and bad. I think it’s intriguing to meet people who are completely sold that their gurus and sifus are the cream of the crop. It’s always the same too. No one is left like them. They are the only authentic teacher in the tradition left. There are only two enlightened beings left on the planet, and their teacher is one of them. Honestly, I would be curious to meet these fellows and their teachers. But I can never shake feeling they are projecting a decent amount of their own love outward as more objective features of the world than they really are. When you have powerful experiences with someone it can be like that though. For example, I can say with certainty that having sex with my girlfriend Lezlie is way way more high level than with ordinary women. She has many secret powers I have never seen demonstrated before. Only read about in books of legends. I consider it very unfortunate that none of you, my poor readership, will ever be enlightened in this secret and powerful qigong, but it’s an elite path reserved for only one man. hhhaah… Oh man, I crack myself up.

So anyway, my Taoist teacher Liu Ming is the best. Cream of the crop I tell ya. He teaches zuowang, “sitting in forgetfullness”, an emptiness meditation basically indistinguishable from zazen. Later I believe he introduces alchemical meditations, but in a similar spirit that he teaches cooking clases and Taoist astrology; useful details to enrich the core process of embracing the ordinary that is engaged through zuowang. Honestly, does it need to be fundamentally more complex than this? Is there really so much more room for “irony and missteps” intrinsic to so-called “spiritual practice” than that which is inherent in any moment in life?

Via The Teachings of Jesus blogspot.

Let me begin by asking this question: Did Jesus of Nazareth hold a philosophy compatible to Lao Tzu’s Taoism? The foundation question that must be asked before asking if Jesus lived by a “Taoist” philosophy, is to ask if Jesus was a “Christian” in belief and practice. This question probably evokes laughter from some, and others would exclaim with contempt, “Of course he was! The Christian Religion is founded on Jesus and his teachings!” I beg to adamantly differ with you. Read the rest

So was Jesus a Taoist? Well, I might say his teachings are more resonant with what we know of Taoism than they are of what has become of religious Christianity.

I recently checked out a DVD by Stephane Hemon called “Intro To Female Ejaculation”.

On the surface some might judge Stephane to be a part of the “pick up artist” (PUA) scene or even just a downright chauvanist. But I really like Stephane. He is totally different than the pick up crowd. He has been there though and is very familiar with the language which he uses it sometimes. But he is reframing all of it. He actually reminds me of David Deida, although Stephane is a bit more rough around the edges, especially his sense of humor.

I really welcome post-conventional men like them talking about male-essenced (yang) issues. I think it’s sorely needed. Many of us guys have already gone through the growing pains of evolving upward from what we saw as the “typical macho jerks”. We’ve been thinking of the “other side” (sometimes more than our own), we’ve been getting in touch with the feminine, gone through the sensitivity training, read feminism, etc. But at some point I think these lessons have been integrated more or less and there is a next step. A time to move past the watered down sense of equality that has become so PC and embrace the truer polarity of one’s nature … be it more yin or more yang, or in some cases maybe more naturally just neutral. Guys like Stephane and David Deida can at first glance remind people of pre-conventional macho jerks, sometimes they even talk and act similar, but they are just embodying their strong yang nature.

A lack of a concept for this “next step” is a big monkey wrench in the evolution of gender roles/relations. “Macho jerks” looking for role models will most likely not look to feminized conventional men and so stay pre-conventional until they hit the bottom of the control issues and misogyny that breeds in them from being left by dozens of women for being such selfish assholes. This could be smoothed out if they had guys like Stephane in their life. He can come off just as macho and tough and talks dirty about women and has a really hot girlfriend that is apparently really submissive in a preconventional way (only apparently) but he talks about all this “unconditional love and chakras shit …. Hmmm… but maybe chicks dig this stuff?” So they go and pick up a book on chakras and suddenly they are reading all of this sensitive material and evolving to the conventional level and then postconventional more rapidly.

Then there are already conventional men without these roles models … similar thing … hit bottom at trying to be so nice and pleasing and everything equal and sooo in touch with yin that women are completely bored with them or bitchy women take advantage of them. So they get frustrated and angry and attempt to retreat back to the macho jerk role, which is impossible because they’re more evolved than that. I can’t tell you how many times I see this one, it’s really a painful conflict to witness.

So, my experiences with this DVD so far. Well, the thing I was most impressed with, besides Stephane’s girlfriiend Ghita’s beauty and breathtaking orgasms, was how dead-on Stephane shows you exactly where the deepest tension spots on a woman’s body are. I’ve been giving my girlfriend Lezlie massages ever since and it’s like magic, every spot, exactly as he shows, I can feel SO much tension there and Lezlie is screaming. Well, she was. Now things are smoothing out nicely. And the more I massage her I am actually noticing clear visual changes in her posture, and even body shape … not to mention her stress levels.

I have only just barely tried the technique he shows to make a woman ejaculation, called “yang fingers”. I am still just pushing the massage angle, but naturally I’m curious to see if I can take this process the whole way. :)

Go here to see an embedded preview of Stephane’s DVD, to save you the step of downloading it. (Not work safe by a long shot! Well, heh, depending on where you work anyway)

Bottom line: I’m very pleased with this DVD and plan to pick up more of Stephane’s material.