44. Who shall overcome this earth, and the world of Yama (the lord of
the departed), and the world of the gods? Who shall find out the
plainly shown path of virtue, as a clever man finds out the (right)
flower?

45. The disciple will overcome the earth, and the world of Yama, and
the world of the gods. The disciple will find out the plainly shown
path of virtue, as a clever man finds out the (right) flower.
(more…)

A beautiful girl in the village was pregnant. Her angry parents demanded to know who was the father. At first resistant to confess, the anxious and embarrassed girl finally pointed to Hakuin, the Zen master whom everyone previously revered for living such a pure life. When the outraged parents confronted Hakuin with their daughter’s accusation, he simply replied “Is that so?”

When the child was born, the parents brought it to the Hakuin, who now was viewed as a pariah by the whole village. They demanded that he take care of the child since it was his responsibility. “Is that so?” Hakuin said calmly as he accepted the child.

For many months he took very good care of the child until the daughter could no longer withstand the lie she had told. She confessed that the real father was a young man in the village whom she had tried to protect. The parents immediately went to Hakuin to see if he would return the baby. With profuse apologies they explained what had happened. “Is that so?” Hakuin said as he handed them the child.

With the first step i feel compassion for all living things.

Moving the second step i don’t cause more harm or damage to the universe.

Performing the third step i am free from the three poisons of the mind: illusion, desire and anger.

On the fourth step i begin to better discern what is truly right and what is really wrong.

The fifth step will teach me that every dichotomy is false and empty. Good and evil, the self and the outside world, the white and black, are all abstractions of the mind.

Moving the sixth step I forget greed and envy and i behave always with generosity, sense of justice and positive creativity.

With the seventh step i forget selfishness, pride and false humility to act with honor and true perennial generosity.

The eighth step will teach me that happiness is the maintenance of a dynamic equilibrium, with loving detachment.

The ninth step will teach me to fight against personal pain with non-attachment and to alleviate the suffering of others with a deep sincere and disinterested love.

With the tenth step I return to the whole, to revive again on the road to perfection, a path with no beginning and no end.
So i start to walk another path made of ten steps, always improving, to reach here, in the eternal everchanging present, the enlightment.

(Free adaptation of the “Vote of the 10 steps” of the followers of Ch’an Tao Chia)

1. All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.
If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.

2. All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.
If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.
(more…)

21. Earnestness is the path of immortality (Nirvana), thoughtlessness
the path of death. Those who are in earnest do not die, those who are
thoughtless are as if dead already.

22. Those who are advanced in earnestness, having understood this
clearly, delight in earnestness, and rejoice in the knowledge of the
Ariyas (the elect).
(more…)

33. As a fletcher makes straight his arrow, a wise man makes straight
his trembling and unsteady thought, which is difficult to guard,
difficult to hold back.

34. As a fish taken from his watery home and thrown on dry ground, our
thought trembles all over in order to escape the dominion of Mara (the
tempter).
(more…)

To act and to think in private in a way, and to proclaim in public the contrary, is a symptom of a serious mental illness: it is called split personality, or simply: live in a constant lie.
And as the falsehood, illusion and hypocrisy have become the most common practices in our world that only means that we are, to varying degrees, all mad, crazy and dissociated from the real world.
Think about it.
We are educated, filled up, from an early age, by a thousand streams of fetid pernicious education, to consider good and normal what for real is absolutely crazy and absurd.
We accumulate, we hate our neighbor, we grew in a culture of violence fed by a thousand fears and illusions. We continuously soaked into anger and dissatisfaction, inflate our ego of millions of stupid unreal absurd desires, ruin lives with the cancer of envy.
Unfulfilled we sink in anger and frustration, falling into the black hole of depression.
Everything is normal, perhaps?
It ’s normal a world that celebrates the possession, the power, the strength, the desire and the illusion? Or maybe that world is a thousand times more suitable to beasts than to sentient beings who likes to think themselves “intelligent” and “loving”?
I see this nightmare populated by billions of mad people, and i am one of them.
It ’s a huge effort to lift the lids in the sleep induced by heavy sedation of the mind.
It ’s a hard unspeakable, but I have to awaken.
With all my strength, I HAVE TO AWAKEN!

Water that falls into the water, public domain photos on Wikipedia.org

Life, according to our knowledge, is possible only in the presence of liquid water.
From the black abyss of the water emerges, therefore, life.
The water element in the Wu Xing is the symbol 水 - Shuǐ.
Water is adaptability, changing, movement, mystery, life.

Water is the lowest point of the matter, the state in which things return to when they die. It ‘also said the hidden and dark status of the matter.

The ideogram (chinese: 水, pinyin: shuǐ) contains the meanings of “water, freshness, cold”. In the symbol of the water we find already one of the most important properties of water, which is the ability to cool down, freshen up, extinguish the fire. In the energy balance of the energy exchange between inside and outside of the body-mind, water is essential to calm, to soothe, to soften and to wrap.

Properties of water

Intrinsic properties of the Water element are: wisdom, flexibility, softness, indulgence, understanding; this is because the shape of water is ever changing and in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) this is synonymous of maximum adaptability and return to the lowest point of potential energy (because the water tends to fall down to the absolute best point of equilibrium).

Water is the lowest phase of matter (maximum Yin, the lowest and the emptiest point), which is the fifth phase of the Wu Xing (the five movements more commonly known as the five elements).

The character of water’s Tao is maximum Yin.
Its movement is internal mutation. There’s not movement from external to internal, but only a huge mutation inside.
Its energy is at the minimum level, is rest, stillness.
The energy movement of water is low because the breath is in the deep of Hara (in japanese means: stomach); the breath is held inside to oxygenate well the body cells and tissues.

Water is also associated with:

• north
• winter
• death
• venus (the planet)
• black, blue
• adaptability, flexibility, compliance, emptyness, calm, quietude

The positive emotion is acceptance, appeasement. The negative emotion and sensation is fear, anxiety.
By movements: earth controls water, water controls fire, water feeds wood, metal feeds water.

Meridians

The meridians od Chinese Traditional Medicine (CTM) associated to the water element are: Urinary Bladder and Kidney.

Urinary bladder holds liquids needed to transport the waste, toxins and water-soluble pollutants of body. It receive incoming water and dissolved pollutants from the kidneys to expel it from the internal body.
An imbalance in the urinary bladder may be due to the need for an urgent need to get rid of anxieties and fears, retained in the body-mind, or toxins and poisons of the mind that we are unable to break free. In parallel, the stagnant urine, due to an inflammation of the organs related to the energy lines of the connected meridian, causes pain and distress.

The kidney meridian is the other master-channel of water.
Here is the acceptance of what more dirt comes from our body fluids, blood and lymph, the greater and more noble character of the water.
In the kidney is the cleaning, washing, made possible by the very purity of water.
The lack of balance in the functioning of this organ and meridian line means you can not purify your body and mind.
This causes a slow accumulation, a sedimentation of poisons in the body-mind.

Lack of water is accompanied by problems in the bladder meridian.

Excess of water is accompanied by problems in the kidney meridian.

Water is the path that carries the nutrients in our body, it is essential to the life and influence the pace and intensity of our vital energy. For example, a proper supply of water in the body is essential to provide nutrients, salts, metals and gas to the cells. Many precious metals and salts are dissolved in water only. The vital energy of the mind-body is inextricably linked to the balance and purity of water.

Other important features

The person characterized by the water is calm, maternal, parental, trust in others, accepting, yielding, changeable, unstable, focused on travel and movement.

The individual in harmony with the water is very calm, easy-going, slow but determined, is detached from the rest of the world, deep in thought, wise. Also welcomes the change and diversity, accumulates and stores energy, so those who come into contact with “water people” can draw on resources and see their lives transformed.

The agitation, anger, haste, attachment to material things, lack of trust, rigidity are obvious symptoms of disharmony with this element.

The vegetative soul of the water (it is the soul that drives the nature and influence our human traits) is partly Yi, and partly Zhi, Yi for deep thought and wisdom, while Zhi for the will and determination, two significant aspects of the Water element.

We said that the negative emotion of fear is linked to water. This is because in winter, the living die, slow down, hibernates. The fruits of life cease to grow and the same element of water freezes and changes state from mobile and adaptable to rigid and brittle. This sudden change has caused anxiety and fear, this collapse to the lowest energy state makes us think that nothing can pull us up and restart the vital mechanisms (usually due to ignorance of the fact that the other elements control one another and feed the whole in a constant cyclical change).

The color is black or dark blue, colors commonly associated with the darkness of waters of the sea or the cosmic void, metaphorically associated with the element water (the sidereal space without gravity is similar to water).

Black eye sockets, dark urine, are physical symptoms of obvious imbalance in the Water element and the relative meridians.

The sense organ is the hearing, a symbol of listening and receptivity. It is also curious that the ears have a morphological similarity with the kidneys.

The physical and solid part of the element are the bones, while the liquid part is connected to urine.

The smell is rotten, putrid, the smell of ammonia which refers to diseases of urinary incontinence.

The flavor is salty, the taste of mineral water and sea water, a person who loves the salt is in disharmony with the water element.

The climate is humid cold.

The peak energy of the two meridians is:

• Yin meridian is the kidney, from 15 to 17
• Yang meridian is urinary bladder, from 17 to 19

So the acceptance phase is related to the kidney, which filters body fluids while the expulsion is naturally linked to the urinary bladder.

The sound associated with water are groan and scream, sounds typical of the fear and terror (feelings associated with the water element). A voice moaning, anxious, screaming, full of fear indicates an imbalance in the water element.

External links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Xing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ki_(filosofia)
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicina_tradizionale_cinese

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