Taoism

I think it's ... it'll get people excited.

Freemasonry, dark Taoism, Mandela effects, grid work, pocket dimensions, Orion wars, Draco portals, false New Age dragons, the higher self and healing, higher self trades and healing, and, uh, v- a few other things.

But I think if we have time, I'd like to at least touch on all of that.

But welcome to the show, Joaquin.

this is a...

Okay, so this is kind of the interesting...

So with my experience with Qigong, I s- uh, so w- with Taoism, if we look at it as there's multi-def- there's multiple layers to it, where we have, like, Qigong practice, and then we have, um, you know, if we have philosophical Taoism, but then we also have just basically Chinese shamanism.

There's, um, an element of this, is that there are basically dark, [laughs] basically dark, uh, wizards who are practicing, um, dark shamanism essentially.

And, you know, I see, I see a part of, you know, part of real character development is, you know, humor and the ability to, to, to, to really live on fire, to have energy and, um, and, and, uh, and so, um, and in vitality, vitality is really central to my view of, of the good life and of character.

Um, so, so character probably, um, with a lot of different influences from, uh, Taoism and Stoicism to, to, to really like honor cultures, you know, that, that warrior culture, uh, not war for its own sake, but, but, you know, that, that, that sense of thriving and competition as being, you know, fundamental to, uh, to the life well lived.

So, um, that's, that's a long winded way of saying that, that, that, uh, character can be misperceived, but I think I am obsessed with it.

Um, I, my father was a philosophy professor, um, a doctoral philosophy professor.

It's a time that historian Andrew Seth Meyer describes as one of the most important revolutions in world history.

The fall of the old aristocratic order, with the Confucianism, Taoism, and legalism, and the creation of the imperial system that would shape China for over 2,000 years.

Andrew put together one of the first comrades of history to the Warring States period in his new book, To Rule All Under Heaven, a history of classical China from Confucius to the first emperor.

Andrew is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the author of The Tao of the Military, Liu An's Art of War, and co-author of the Hui Nan Zi, A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China.

I want to drill down on something because, you know, one of the things that triggers this, again, this assassination is the elevation of one of Confucius' disciples.

And this whole period is a real, it's a birthplace for all of these different, you know, philosophies and political traditions.

I mean, Confucianism, Moism, Taoism, even, you know, I remember studying about legalism, which is, you know, a much more harsh, heavy-handed political philosophy, but a philosophy nonetheless.

Right.

Not in the library.

I don't remember what bookstore it was, but it was called Dancing Mind, Thinking Body, A Taoist Way to Succeed in Business and Your Personal Life.

And it wasn't a book that you read cover to cover.

It was one that has...

It comes by no effort.

Now, if we follow that path of no effort, which is similar to the path in Taoism known as wu-wei, the path of non-doing, non-interference, intelligent spontaneity, then obviously how could we accrue more karma? Because we are following our path, we have surrendered to the world, but we are not acting as a jiva.

We are not trying to influence reality.

We are not trying to promote our agenda.

The idea that they had was that all the wisdom traditions are necessary and that there was a higher state beyond the salvation that Christians sought and beyond the moksha that Hindus sought.

There was something much greater that could be achieved when we brought all the views together, not just the Christian and the Hindu views, of course, but all the views, but especially the coming together on the rainbow bridge of the cosmic covenant that we see in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Native American revisions, and so on, and the Daoism and the Abrahamic covenant that shines forth first of all from Judaism and then following that from Christianity and Islam.

And when these two covenants come together and we can dance on the rainbow bridge that unites these two great ways of seeing the world, something amazing happened.

How does it get to be a rainbow bridge? We have to think about Noah.

There's DMT, which I mean, we'll get into that a little bit if you want.

But there is the possibility... of what like Enoch did, what the OG philosophers were talking about, the Zen masters, the Taoists, the original alchemists is, physical immortality, which sounds naive and it sounds almost like sci-fi, but what they're reflecting is the ability for physical matter, the atomized world itself, to actually come alive and be awake from that divine spark, imbued with it permanently, as opposed to something that comes and goes like a vehicle.

This is where things get really tricky.

And this is where you might even try to differentiate the difference between spirit and soul, which are overused buzzwords.

So I actually footnote every reference in all of Ramanuja's works to the Upanishads and track what he was saying about the Upanishads.

And I couldn't do it as closely with Shankaracharya, but the point is that... any hermeneutical tradition, you can take the Jewish tradition or Islamic tradition or the Taoist tradition, now the commentators will always revise views in accord with their era, you might say.

And that's what happened with Vedanta.

The freewheeling consciousness of the Veda, which I think is one of the things I'm trying to make clear here, was a wondrous realm that showed you a polyverse of reality that was just extraordinary.

It's called the Vegetarian Festival?

It's called the Vegetarian Festival, [laughs] yeah, which seems a bit weird as it's a little bit grotesque, but, um, it, it goes back to, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Taoist monks who, who were on the island and encouraged everyone to eat vegetarian food.

This is many years ago when there was some outbreak of some disease on the island.

Ah.