Birch

"She just doesn't give a shit." I like her! No need to please:-) Most gods want stuff.

Good wishes go to tulku who is to renounce the world:-) Nah, I'm kidding. Do you know where the world is? I have an "ish" of an inkling of an idea:-)

Yes, Mr MH, agreed. And we don't seem (to me) to be doing a really great job of the caretaking. IMO. Although IME most folks I know are doing either the best they can or the best they've been told they can. So what do the bums reckon can be done about the latter. The former is taken care of:-)

Today I read something interesting about Kundalini being an "inflammatory" nervous/neural response. One could ask 'response to what?' "Damage", as would be the case for other forms of inflammation I guess? I don't mean this as an offense to the Consciousness aspect of it. My understanding in that respect is better explained to myself in other terms I like better :-) But I have noticed online quite a tendency to explain K in neural/nervous system/bio-energy terms most recently. Anyway, given that from what I've gathered through doing qi-gong: bringing attention to places brings qi and blood to that same area, I'm thinking in some cases, you really don't want/need any more qi and blood to go to certain places. And if it does go there, does it de-whack the rest? Perhaps per the 5E cycle? And would that be one of the "whys" qi-gong is a good 'antidote' to K-issues? This idea kind of suggests that qi in people is circulating inside the closed system of the individual. But as I've figured, qi is not just local. It gets transferred from people to people, from the environment to people. In fact, it really doesn't have any boundaries, although it does seem to have preferred patterns. I dunno, I'm in musing/questioning mode again. Any ideas?

The text link was good. What's "humility"? I recognize it as something that helps if you want other people to appreciate you but I'm pretty sure I have it backwards (as usual:-))

I'm enjoying being a human sub-loser city being so don't you go telling me it ought to be any other way for me. It will be if and when I want :-) This morning, for example, I'm going out of the city, but the weather's crappy so I'm taking my sweet time. Because I feel like it. Now you go do whatever you want. You don't need to convince anyone, unless you do of course:-)

I like Diana the huntress and I like being a yang water person (so I worship myself hahahaha) and sunsets and trees and beaches and oceans and, er "natural things".

hilarious:-) Sorry, hope you don't think I' blaspheming.

Do you want me to go get links that confirm your perspectives or ones that challenge them :-) ?

I reckon that stuff could be really dangerous. Too hot. Don't do it Not a joke, if you do qi-gong you can work out why:-) I'm not telling because it's a 42nd level secret practice so don't ask. (The last part was a joke)

Well usually :-) There is no usually. Lots of 'stuff' happens all the time. I pay attention to it and do whatever I feel needs to be done with it at the time. So for example, if I wake up in a grouchy jerk of a mood, I will take some time before actually getting up to recognize that and perhaps 'fix' it - or maybe just note that I'm in grouch jerk mode and so there may be some consequences to that that day. If I have time, I do a scan and melt off the worst, but to be honest, I rarely take the time to go all the way. So this is a good reminder :-) Rest of the day 'usually' involves basic mindfulness, some days I'm better at it than others. Depending, I may 'spin' a few MCO's here and there (which seem to have gotten a bit more 'full-body-meridians' recently) or 'do stuff' in a 'whatever works' frame of mind. Today for example, I went to a funeral. When my friend greeted me at the door to the parlor I got whacked by her grief, straight into the lungs/heart. I could tell it a) wasn't my stuff and was absolutely bloody normal, at a funeral. So as I sat through the eulogy (which was very nicely said), I did run some of the heaviness off. But the lady had had a sweet life and so people were not too unhappy in my opinion. When I heard the monks were going to arrive (it was a buddhist ceremony) I left, a) because I couldn't stay there knowing I don't believe in their religion and because I had to be somewhere else and c)I was not a close friend and didn't want to get all 'tourist' at the funeral (I've never been to a buddhist one and I was curious.) So maybe that counts as practice too? I should add that as soon as I got back home, I felt extremely sick and had to 'get rid' of whatever, but felt fine after that. I was pondering 5E to figure out whether the extra grief bomb had hit my stomach after the lungs but I keep forgetting which element the stomach is classed in so I gave up. I guess the other 'main' practices are recognizing when a 'negative emotion' is about to have its way with me with no apparent cause. And not getting caught up in 'effects'. Especially not the spontaneous golden ecstatic flying 'dreams'. Although that's pretty difficult ;-)

Well, you might. But I rather think that one's been sold off already. Imagine how much real meat is going to end up costing? Just look at what things are becoming more and more expensive. To be in nature, on a beach, eating real food, drinking water...

"Taoism doesn't necessarily speak about the Ego/Self/Atman" Are you putting all of those in the same boat? I was under the impression they were not the same "pointers". I was going to say 'comparable' but then I realised the trouble that might get me into. Because they've been compared (and therefore said to exist as separate thingamajigs) over and over again. In fact, whole religions attend to separating them and then explaining why (or not) they ought to be that way. Yep, I reckon the Taoist stuff doesn't bother imposing distinctions on the human form, although it does seem to clearly make distinctions between "human" and "earth" and "heaven". But then it mentions they all follow each other and that there's 'microcosm' and 'macrocosm' so really, no escaping huh?

Right, so now is not the time to post a picture of the beauties that live in your eyelashes then

Righto :-) So, just to go further there, are 'artificial beliefs' apart from Tao? I see this as akin to the Sophia story where at her birth she also produces a bunch of non-organic somethings or others. I guess in today's vernacular, one might call them 'memes' and as such they inhabit the organism (probably to the detriment of the latter, but not always, I mean, we people are quite the bacterial culture aren't we :-)?)

" trying to protect you from the unknown" Um, nope, I'd suggest it's the reverse. It's your mind's way of trying to protect you from what it 'minds' you 'know' already. Which BTW is why all the 'unlearning' is referred to. Happily, seems there's another aspect of oneself (IMO/IME) that is unconcerned with all of that stuff. Jeez, how we humans made it this far with all of this stuff just blows my mind

Sounds a bit like 'As below, so above' to me. I dunno, if for example a monarch is 'enthroned' by 'God' - what does that do for the legitimacy of the monarch? Does nothing at all for the 'god' IMO. I've already wondered why the Taoist immortals might have a specific political formation and why they might have very specific characters in there, and where are the animals? Dragons maybe? From what I've gathered, many North American cosmologies include animals. Many Europeans used to. Also plants. Where did all of that go and why?

----cheerleading alert ------- Sure, but what a lot of awesome posts have there been in response! Chi-Dragon is like an anti-shill/non-cheerleading, "yang" to the "yin" of qi-nei-gong info. IMO :-) I've been reading this forum for what seems like ages and until folks started being a bit opposed to various stuff from a practice POV it was starting to get a bit wishy-washy (IMO) Happy to see some stepping up as a result :-) ----cheerleading alert -------

Awesome Scott! Yep, TTB's still rocks :-)

"One perspective you can adopt is that you simply have much deeper challenges to work through in your current lifetime. Thus, any side issues like problems with women don't mean you're some inferior beta, it just means you have more on your plate. " -----personal opinion------ That was very good IMO :-) I reckon it's a neat halfway between 'you're karmically damned' or 'you chose the whole thing before you were born' or 'just wish weally weally hard on a positive star and evewyfing will come true because of vibrations'. ----personal opinion----- IMO/IME what your life wants from you (ever figure it that way round?) is resolution. And you want that from you too :-) So you/life will put you in varying positions to heal/resolve. I figure that as 'love'. And if I stretched it a bit, I could suggest that 'resolution' is related to the 'return' of Tao. But that would really be stretching it :-) I once thought I'd had that one figured out. Turns out that no ;-)

I was going to respond to this this morning but since 'thoughts' were asked for, I couldn't, because 'uck' was my immediate reaction. If I think about it, I'm thinking what kind of qi would lab-grown food impart to a person? I mean the animals in industrial farms are already sick. And I'm thinking, is the 'feeding the world' problem really about food shortages? Oh, alright, I'm biased, I think it's not. Sorry. Edit: except I could probably make a shitload of ca&h if I opened a 'real meat' restaurant.

Dude, it's actually his face most women like. Why are some TTB's men obsessed with their LDT???

Oh? I didn't find it extreme at all, quite to the contrary. I suppose because I've personally (yes, me) had enough of the -ists offering up their own particular brand of 'catch all' to folks that experience what I'd call 'extreme' stuff in meditation (not a negative judgement BTW, plus I should talk with all my sharing of weirdness on here ) In fact, the extent to which they seem to know the experiential meditative terrain is IMO/IME scary " It's all about expectations" - and, I'd offer, giving over your own sense of subjectivity and personal experience to someone else's descriptions. Look, only recently there was a poster here asking 'What should I think?' or something to that effect, not 'What do you think?', if you get my drift? While I believe that's a self-comforting thing to do when you've just got back from dropping off into some kind of void (or having your heart broken by a ruthless woman) I think it becomes a trap in the long run, which I suppose the big B himself referred to in several of his sayings, calling this stuff a 'vehicle' n all. But I happen to be biased in the non-religious sense and so there you go :-) Open-source, I say :-)

Hi JayST! I wish teachers would be more precise sometimes:-) Joe Blast here is very good at explaining the LDT stuff:-) Yes I was referring to the lower "centres". Me too I learn something new every time I read the TTB's :-)

"Scientists have formed a particular general view about human history ... they are confident that they are right about how we developed. But I think we can say without a shadow of a doubt that they are wrong ... simply because every theory is displaced sooner or later by a new one. " Oh that was very good:-)