Acoustic Alchemy: January 2021

As a young man, Nguyen spent more than three years in a cave with the Fourth Uncle of the Mountain, Tuan Quan, the guardian spirit of the Seven Sacred Mountains, a series of hills in the western Mekong Delta. The man is called Fourth Uncle because he was the fourth to sit in a chamber in the cave. Not only did he train Nguyen, but he trained Nguyen's father and grandfather. While living in the cave, Quan seldom speaks, but he assigns Nguyen various challenges, testing his discipline and dedication. Outside the cave, Quan sometimes reappears in the form of a tiger.

unseenseer 11 hours ago

This sounds similar to the vietnamese diet of the barefoot doctors and shamans explained in the book "Fourth Uncle in the Mountain"

unseenseer 11 hours ago

The strongest shamans only ate herbs and then fasted and "ate" the internal light/chi.

Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang

11 hours ago

@unseenseer yes I don't follow this diet well so I eat tons of ginger (which also stops the pandemic) and also other herbs or tea tree oil. Terpenes.

"My father ordered me a plate of roasted pork with fried rice and salad. He ordered fish for himself. If it had been a fasting day he would have ordered tofu. In my religion there are certain days of the month when we are required to refrain from eating food made from animals and animal products. Most Buddhist people in Vietnam fast at least seven days a month, on certain days that are traditionally set aside for fasting: the first, fourteenth, fifteenth, eighteenth, twenty-third, twenty-ninth, and thirtieth day. I don’t know why these are the designated fasting days. "

https://www.scribd.com/book/182581331/Fourth-Uncle-in-the-Mountain-A-Memoir-of-a-Barefoot-Doctor-in-Vietnam

Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang

11 hours ago

"Imagine the warm energy from the sun streaming in from the crown of your head. Imagine the cool energy from the underground spring bubbling up through your perineum. These opposite forces will blend together in your body and balance your energy." p. 248 "Do that for two weeks and then come to see me."

AWESOME!! thanks https://southwest.mpls.k12.mn.us/uploads/fourthunclearticle_2.pdf

unseenseer 11 hours ago

@Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang He meets his father's teacher if I remember right. One of an ancient Chinese lineage. And this teacher fasts in a cave and has lived for 200 years eating herbs and the female light of awareness or whatever you like to call it. So that is part od the story. The author moved to New England eventually and I know people who have gone to see him for his herbal treatments. They are serious herbal protocols which most westerners don't enjoy b/c the herbs are often bitter and preparing them stinks up the house. I should try to track the guy down if this fiasco ever stabilizes to the point where everyone isn't losing their minda over a tenth of a single percent of the US population dying. The real pandemic is all the ecological crises of industrialization like you have been saying. But maybe if this virus mutates more effectively it will become a real mass killer. 385,000 ppl are born everyday and 4 million born every year in the US , so we have a ways to go to make the chimpanzees extinct here rona'. I'm all for a more peaceful solution though.

Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang

11 hours ago

@unseenseer seriously - I found that quote and it is amazing that it CORROBORATES what I said about yang qi from the sun and yin qi from the earth! haha. Awesome. thanks again.

Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang

10 hours ago

@unseenseer 200 years - that's amazing!

Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang

10 hours ago

"Fourth Uncle told me that a soul egg travelled up from my navel to the crown of my head. He said that it was gestating there. He explained that every time I circulated my breath to my crown, I was bathing the egg with the energy it needed to grow and mature. In a year or so, it would be fully developed, and then it would hatch from the top of my crown. (You can find your crown point by tracing a line straight up from the tips of your ears to the tender spot in the middle.) ... About thirteen months later, the top of my head started feeling tingly and itchy. Once, when I was meditating, I felt a sensation like ants crawling up my back and neck. I heard a loud sound, like a bang. I felt the top of my head blow open and felt the air was going in and out. Then I felt myself standing up. ... I turned around and saw myself sitting on my rock with my eyes closed. I was shocked to see how small and dirty and ugly I looked. ... I told Fourth Uncle about it and he said, 'Congratulations. You have given birth to your soul body. It is young and doesn't know what do do yet. You can let it out by concentrating on your crown. You can also keep it in, by focusing on your third eye. Don't let it out that much. Keep circulating the energy the same way as before.' ... I told him I still felt the air going in and out the top of my head. He said that was good and to come back in three months."

Wow - this is precisely what the Taoist Yoga book also teaches - the birth of the shen for astral travel.

What's strange is that when I did a very strong dose of Mimosa Hostilis and I was in full lotus meditation - I got this strong yang qi kundalini and then I also heard a loud bang in the center of my skull like a gun shot! And that's when the astral rainbow body light kicked in. Then a few years later I fell asleep in full lotus yoga and suddenly I sensed that there was someone with heavy weight in the body - and I looked and I saw myself in full lotus on the body - and as soon as I saw it was me then my spirit shot back inside my body. haha. I had been listening to Coasttocoastam radio - and this guy called in talking about how he thought a spirit was on him at night preventing him to move. But I had read Taoist Master Ni, hua-ching who explains that if you sleep on your back then your yin shen will feed off your yang qi energy - and this is interpreted as a ghost or succubi, etc. So ...

Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang

10 hours ago

@unseenseer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrY-wPYiLZY she tells her backstory to writing the book

Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang

10 hours ago

Master Quang’s grandfather found Fourth Uncle during the 1860s, meditating at the far end of a cave complex deep inside The Forbidden Mountain (Nui Cam) of the Meking Delta in the southernmost corner of the Republic of South Viet Nam. The author’s father, the Honorable Nguyen Van Thau, studied under Fourth Uncle for nearly two decades during the troubled end of French colonial times. The author was his student in his dark, dank, and silent cave for four years during Viet Nam’s most bitter civil war years."

wow - so he really was ancient

unseenseer 10 hours ago

@Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang Thank you. I had forgotten that she helped write the book and am going to watch this soon. I need to reread that book b/c it is really interesting. Picked up a used copy of "The Magus of Java" and the taoist yoga book b/c of your help. Thanks again.

Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang

9 hours ago

@unseenseer your welcome. Wow - so another example of a REAL Yang Shen - just like the original human culture stating that their most advanced masters would transform into Lions!!

"Outside the cave, Quan sometimes reappears in the form of a tiger. Everyone in the nearby village of Xa Ba Chuc knows about Tuan Quan, Nguyen writes in his book. One day, the old man visited a couple and slept in their guest bed. The following morning, the wife noticed the bed was empty, and assumed their guest was outside, using the outhouse. "Later that morning," Nguyen recalls, "the wife went into the bedroom to tie up the mosquito net. She called to her husband to come quickly. The bed smelled like a wild animal and it was covered with tiger hair." The husband and wife collected the hair and went to Bon Su, their village chief. The chief did not seem surprised. "It must have been Tuan Quan, the guardian spirit of the Seven Sacred Mountains. He has been visiting our homes in order to learn about us and our ways, to make sure we will uphold the values of the Buddha Master, since he is no longer among us…."

https://www.rutlandherald.com/news/a-new-vermonters-vietnam-memoir/article_2a823138-84a0-50ff-a6dc-0d31a96b22af.html What's funny is that people don't believe this stuff because obviously it's very rare but also they don't really study it for cross-cultural analysis, and the science behind it, etc.

Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang

9 hours ago

@unseenseer

A few weeks later, the couple invited another old traveler to overnight in their home. That night, a full moon shone in the windows and woke the couple. "The husband … thought he was seeing an enormous tiger asleep on the bed. He heard the power of the tiger's breathing, and he smelled his musk." He and his wife did not run away; they stayed up all night praying. The next morning, he showed the tiger hair to Bon Su and other villagers. "That is why," Nguyen writes, "everyone in my religion believes in Tuan Quan, our guardian spirit."

Yes if you read the biography of Phra Acharn Mun - he takes his monks into the most tiger infested parts of Thailand because he says the fear of death makes for the best meditation. But then he secretly communicates with the tigers to make sure they don't eat the monks. haha

unseenseer 9 hours ago (edited)

@Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang Wow that is some incredible backstory. Holy smokes. I read that book -- thanks to my mother -- when I was a teenager and haven't read it since. It gave me a profound sense of dread at being a westerner. Around that time I met a profound healer and my first partner. I'm going to have to try and interview her.

https://www.lotussia.com/place/forbidden-mountain-nui-cam/

The topography of the region, which is primarily flat, the majority of the land has a slope of less than ~8°, further helped construct the paddy (NASA JPL, 2013). An exception to this predominantly low slope are a series of small mountains in the western portion of Tịnh Biên district within An Giang province. These mountains, known in Vietnamese as the Bảy Núi (Seven Mountains) range, are heavily forested and rise from the paddy covered plains that surround them. 2019 field work in the study area showed that these mountains were the center of a tourism industry focused on them, a fact backed up by the national English language publication, Vietnam News (“Tourism Hopes for the Mekong Delta,” 2019). Dong Thap also exhibits a landscape divergence from agriculture located within its district of Tam Nông. Tràm Chim National Park, located right outside the city of Tràm Chim, is the current 7,500 ha remnant of the once 700,000 ha “Plain of Reeds”— a wetland teeming with grass, fish, and bird biodiversity (Shepherd, 2008).

Bảy Núi, the Seven Mountains mentioned above, are a tourist hotspot partly for their natural beauty, but they also are popular due to their importance as being home to various religious sites and traditions (Nguyen, 2003). One of these faiths, Hòa Hảo Buddhism (hereafter referred to as Hoa Hao), is an anti-colonial, activist faith constituting the majority belief system in An Giang and Dong Thap. Hoa haoism arose from the Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương tradition, a “patriotic” Buddhist movement that emerged in the mid-19th century as Vietnamese settlers spread throughout modern-day southern Vietnam (Nguyen, 2003). This sense of patriotism increased further as French colonizers arrived in Vietnam, eventually peaking in 1939 when Huỳnh Phú Sổ—a 19 year old man who’s divinity was supported by possessing a profound knowledge of Buddhist doctrine and recently overcoming a “chronic frailty”—declared the beginning of a new religious tradition he called Hoa Hao Buddhism (Hoa Hao, 2018; Nguyen, 2003). Phú Sổ would go on to form a Hoa Hao armed force that would resist the Japanese occupation during the Second World War, the French colonization in the period following the war, and the Communist forces from Hanoi after the French exit.

This resistance would cause the Hoa Hao to be treated harshly by the victorious Northern Vietnamese forces, particularly in terms of infrastructure development (Dang, 2010; Nguyen, 2003; Raymond, 2008). Hoahaoism is a faith that lacks a hierarchy, minimizes the role of monks, and extols the value of “ritual frugality”; these tenets appealed greatly to the poor peasants that were heavily present throughout the Mekong Delta region. Hoahaoism further garnered the support of the peasant masses by celebrating their predominant occupation—farming. This belief is perfectly illustrated by the well known phrase in the faith: “Practicing Buddhism by farming your land” (Cách Tu, 2018). By lauding the traditional practices of the farming community and making them a sign of religious devotion, Hoa haoism helped the practices survive the period of military and policy-based conflict that would erupt in the decades to follow during the Second World War and the victory of the Northern Communist forces. One of the most obvious results of this tradition preservation is the amount of paddy that continues to dominate the landscape of An Giang and Dong Thap.

...combined Buddhist ideology with a strong sense of patriotism, a necessity to the settlers living in a difficult and unstable colonizing region (L. T. Nguyen, 2003). Đạo Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương was a millenaristic faith that sought to eliminate superstitious beliefs in favor of abiding by Buddhist doctrine, a necessity given that it also preached an end of end of days scenario with a final day of judgement and deliverance for the true followers of the faith (L. T. Nguyen, 2003). The faith rejected a formal hierarchy, but did have a leader in the form of “spontaneously enlightened” prophets, or living Buddhas, whose authority was not limited to religious matters, but included the social movement that Đạo Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương instigated throughout the region. One interesting item of note is how many of the prophets possessed healing capabilities and had a connection to the Seven Mountain range—this is a pattern continued through the advent of Hoahaoism (L. T. Nguyen, 2003). Of final note of this faith is its message of the importance of a connection to the earth, particularly through the peasant farming that was so prevalent through the area (Cách Tu, 2018).