Daniel Reid Quotes

“Commercially raised chickens are also kept confined in cages and fed on denatured feed contaminated with antibiotics, hormones, and pesticides.

Chinese physicians have always recommended 'earth chickens' (tu-jee) as the only safe dietary source of chicken and eggs. Called 'free-range chickens' in the West, they run free around the farm, eating wild vegetation, insects, and worms, and getting plenty of fresh air and exercise.”

“Cow's milk has four times the protein and only half the carbohydrate content of human milk; pasteurization destroys the natural enzyme in cow's milk required to digest its heavy protein content.

This excess milk protein therefore putrefies in the human digestive tract, clogging the intestines with sticky sludge, some of which seeps into the bloodstream.

As this putrid sludge accumulates from daily consumption of dairy products, the body forces some of it out through the skin (acne, blemishes) and lungs (catarrh), while the rest of it festers inside, forms mucous that breeds infections, causes allergic reactions, and stiffens joints with calcium deposits.

Many cases of chronic asthma, allergies, ear infections, and acne have been totally cured simply by eliminating all dairy products from the diet.”

“Food enzymes are another important dietary element for cultivating vitality. The richer the enzyme content of food (such as raw and fermented foods), the less enzyme power the body must divert for digestive duty, resulting in an overall enhancement of vitality.

Eliminating 'enzyme robbers' such as refined sugar and starch, hydrogenated vegetable oils, processed foods, and overcooked meats also boost vitality.”

“For different reasons, pork is also a poor choice in meat. Owing to the pig's omnivorous diet, pork is even more acidifying than other meats. Pork is also very hard on the liver, largely because lard is difficult to digest.

Researchers in Canada have established a close link between cirrhosis of the liver and pork consumption in sixteen countries studied. In countries where pork is consumed together with alcohol (beer and sausage, wine and schnitzel, etc.), the likelihood of liver cirrhosis rises by a factor of 1,000.”

“In a chapter of the Internal Medicine Classic entitled 'The Oldest Truth', it is written: When one empties the mind and frees it of all desires, the genuine energy arises. If one maintains an undisturbed spirit within, no disease will occur.”

“In true, Taoist parlance, 'immortality' refers to a spiritual state, not a condition of physical permanence.

In his books on the teachings of Don Juan, Carlos Casteneda refers to the primordial source of creation as the nagual, the vast ocean of emptiness in which material worlds take form and dissolve like drops of dew.

Nagual refers to everything that cannot be expressed in words, which brings to mind the second line of the Tao Teh Ching: 'The name which can be named is not the real Name'.

Don Juan's teachings are remarkably similar to Taoist alchemy, and they both cite our innate awareness as the only bridge between the awesome emptiness and power of the nagual and its material manifestation in the temporal world.”

“Like yin and yang, the Five Elemental Energies maintain their internal harmony through a system of mutual checks and balances known as 'creative' and 'control' cycles.

Both these cycles, which counteract and balance one another, are in constant operation, maintaining the dynamic fields of polar forces required to move and transform energies. The creative cycle is one of generation, like the relationship between mother and child.

Water generates Wood by nourishing its growth; Wood generates Fire by providing its fuel; Fire generates Earth by familiarizing it with ashes; Earth yields Metal by extraction and refinement; Metal becomes liquid like water when it is melted.”

“Many of the Chinese medical texts dating back from 2,000 years ago lament the ills of 'modern times' and allude to the traditional 'good old days' another 3,000 years before that.

A common theme in these texts is the decline in human health due to careless lifestyles and the deterioration in human relations due to lack of love: degenerative conditions that Taoist alchemy as well as psychoneuroimmunology would link as symptoms of the same syndrome.

In his essay entitled 'Loving People' Chang San-feng, the thirteenth-century master, summed it up by saying: 'Therefore to those who want to know the way to deal with the world, I suggest, Love People.'

This is a potent description for health and longevity that generates positive healing energy throughout the human system by stimulating the internal alchemy of psychoneuroimmunology.”

“Most human disease and degeneration are caused by adverse external and internal energies created by noxious environmental conditions and extreme emotions, which lower resistance and impair immunity.

By taking measures to counteract adverse environmental energies and control injurious emotions, and by cultivating pure energy, you can maintain a strong defence of resistance and immunity in order to prevent the Six Evils and Seven Emotions from disrupting your essence and energy and paving the way for invasion by germs, toxins, parasites, and other pathogens.”

“Nature has designed the human body to maintain its reproductive sexual potency at all costs, in order to ensure the propagation of the species. Therefore, whenever sexual essence and energy are depleted, especially in the male immediately after ej*culation, the body promptly tries to restore sexual potency by producing more sperm, s*men, and sexual hormones.

If any of the vital nutrients required for this task are missing or deficient, which is often the case, the body 'borrows' them from other organs, glands, and tissues, particularly from the cerebrospinal fluid and sexual glands.

Sexual excess therefore causes a constant drain of vital nutrients and hormones from the brain, spine, and adrenals as the body struggles to maintain sexual potency and fertility. This is primarily a male problem, because only the male of the species loses his potent s*men-essence during intercourse.

Nature has designed the female in such a way that sexual activity does no deplete her vital resources, thereby ensuring her ability to nourish and protect her offspring.”

“No two people have exactly the same view of the world. Therefore, the most important science of all is the science of perception and consciousness, which holds the key to all other sciences and which has always been of paramount importance in the traditions of the Orient.”

“On the fundamental level of essence, diet, nutrition, and tonic herbs have the most direct influence on vitality. The most important nutritional factors are essential amino acids and essential fatty acids, both of which are required to produce the hormones, enzymes, and neurochemicals upon which vitality depends.

These basic building blocks must be taken in conjunction with the synergistic vitamin and mineral cofactors the body needs to convert them into 'vital essence'. For example, zinc and selenium are required to produce antioxidant enzymes, and vitamins B5, and B6 are the essential cofactors the brain needs to convert amino acids into neurotransmitters.”

“Osteoporosis is caused not so much by calcium deficiency in the diet as it is by dietary factors which leach calcium from bones and teeth, especially sugar.

Sugar, meat, refined starch, and alcohol all cause a constant state of acidosis in the bloodstream, and acid blood is known to dissolve calcium from bones.

The best way to correct osteoporosis is to consume the non-dairy calcium-rich foods mentioned above, while simultaneously cutting down or eliminating acidifying calcium robbers from the diet.

A daily supplement of 3 mg of the mineral boron also seems to help bones assimilate and retain calcium.”

“Red meat should always be consumed as rare as possible, and preferably with horseradish or strong mustard, which stimulates the liver and gall bladder to secrete the juices required to break down the proteins and fats. Fresh ginger root aids the digestion of meat.”

“Spiritual masters claim that the insights obtained from the 'original mind' in deep meditation cannot be conveyed in terms of rational thought and language, which are products of an entirely different, much narrower mode of consciousness.

Only through persistent personal practice may one come to experience the awareness of 'original mind' and tap the vast trove of primordial wisdom and spiritual insight it holds.”

“Tap water is another example of a legally condoned public health hazard. As early as the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) in China, the imperial government strictly enforced laws which required the public to clean their wells and water storage facilities regularly in order to maintain the purity of public drinking water.

These laws also specified that pipes, vats, and basins used to transport and store drinking water must be made of clay, not metal, because the health hazards of heavy metals werw well known to Chinese health authorities.

Today, public water utilities poison our drinking water with chlorine, fluoride, aluminum salts, and other substances which they call 'purifiers', then run it through metal pipes which further contaminate the water with lead, iron, nickel, cadmium, and other metals that are extremely toxic to the human system.

Public utilities and private corporations combine to poison the food, air, and water upon which we must all rely to stay alive. Orthodox Western medical practice compounds these public health hazards by ignoring them as causes of disease, then further aggravates the situation by prescribing toxic drugs, injections, vaccines, and radical surgery as cures for the ills they cause.”

“The best choice in domestic meat is lamb. Sheep generally graze on open ranges, out in the sun and fresh air, and they are usually not contaminated with drugs. Lamb is the richest source of carnitine, which is required to deliver fat into cells for metabolism.

Lamb has always been the meat of choice in the Middle East, Mediterranean, and Himalayan regions, where asteriosclerosis and heart disease have never been major problems. Even better than lamb is wild game, such as deer, elk, pheasant, and quail, although these products are hard to find these days.”

“The best rule to follow with fruits is 'Eat them alone, or leave them alone'.”

“The great alchemist and Taoist sage Lu Tung-pin wrote: Although the span of human life is finite, the spirit is infinite. If we view the universe in terms of our human life span, then our lives seem as brief and fleeting as those of flies. But if we look at the universe in terms of our spirits, then the universe appears as finite as the life of a fly.”

“The original mind of Tao is like an immaculately clean mirror, clearly reflecting everything towards which it turns its attention. The human mind, by contrast, is lime a dirty mirror, bespecked with the dust of greed and lust, smudged with the grime of conflicting emotions, streaked with the haze of conditioned thoughts.

The process whereby one recovers the original mind of Tao and restores primordial awareness is called 'polishing the mirror'. This is an introspective process by which one gradually clears away the emotional obstructions, mental obscurations, and physical defilements accumulated since birth, so that the original mind of Tao may once again shine forth and reflect the world as it really is.”

“Today, Americans spend billions of dollars every year to maintain a strong national defence as a deterrent against external attack by foreign powers, but they fail entirely to apply the same principle of preventive defence to their own health. They eat, drink, and live indiscriminately and treat their bodies as engines of pleasure, without the slightest regard for the damage their habits inflict on their health.

When they get sick, they run to the doctor or hospital for a quick fix and never imagine that their ailments are self-inflicted. Those ailments are then further compounded at the clinic, because more often than not they are not correctly diagnosed owing to the lack of a comprehensive and systematic view of the human body and human health.

Western medical practice has become increasingly fragmented into narrow fields of specialty, and patients are referred to 'specialists' based entirely on what parts of the body exhibit their symptoms.

It does not occur to Western medical specialists that symptoms may appear in parts of the body far removed from the root cause of the disease, although this remains a fundamental tenet of traditional Chinese medicine.”

“US cattle also absorb all the herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers used to grow the feed crops on which they are forced to gorge, and a high percentage of these hapless creatures arrive at the slaughterhouse riddled with cancerous tumors and tuberculosis.

All this poison is passed directly on to the consumer, so if you like to eat beef, be sure it has been organically raised without drugs and hormones, and preferably range-fed rather than pen-fed.”

“Viewed from the Taoist paradigm, the utter emptiness of space is a state known as 'extreme yin'. Taoist texts state; 'When yin reaches its extreme, yang spontaneously arises as a point of light within yin'.

All Taoist meditation manuals refer to this sublime state of utter stillness, emptiness, and silence, a state attained by virtue of the fusion of primordial energy and spirit in meditation. When that state reaches its zenith of stillness, a point of light suddenly appears within it, causing thoughts to stir, energies to move, and forms to appear again, in a sort of psychic re-enactment of the creation of the universe within the microcosmic inner universe of the mind.

Chang Po-tuan refers to this moment as 'the instant of utter silence preceding the resurgence of positive energy'. Positive energy is light, heat, motion, and other active yang energies, which arise spontaneously within the utter silence, stillness, and emptiness of 'extreme yin'.”

“Vitality manifests itself on the level of spirit as jing-shen ('essence-spirit'), which may be cultivated by the practice of meditation. In Taoist meditation, sexual energy from the sacrum is raised up along the spinal channels into the head, where it is refined into cerebral energy and transformed into spiritual vitality.

The enhanced cerebral energy derived from meditation stimulates production of vital neurochemicals and improves all mental functions, including memory and learning, intelligence and awareness, perception and thought. Like physical vitality, spiritual vitality is fuelled by the pure, potent energies associated with secretions of vital essence in the body.

While the jing-chee of physical vitality comes mainly from the energy associated with hormones and enzymes, the jing-shen of spiritual vitality is generated mainly by the cerebral energy associated with neurotransmitters and secretions of the pineal and pituitary glands in the brain.”