Birch

Why would the thoughts be considered "perverse"? - I found that part problematic. Ok, so the guy gets night and morning wood. So what? Means the man's alive. I'm obviously not an expert in guy's biorhythms but I find it intensely disagreeable to read a judgment call on a natural occurrence. BTW as much as I would if you called me out for bleeding every month and sent me to go sit in a hut for a few days because you just didn't understand what's going on. No, I'm not in the process of polluting anything, neither am I dying or wounded. Duh. Anyway, after all that, go "channel" it wherever you want. But there's nothing perverse about it at all...IMO.

I think it's way too complicated to do well without hitting some form of malnutrition issue along the way. Why do you want to do it?

"Things like Reiki can cause a spontatneous kundalini awakening" THIS! Thanks so much Susan! I was convinced from the start that this was what "set me off". But it got wonky after that, hence finding TTB's, hence finding KAP and other things etc. I really appreciate this validation. All this stuff IS "technical" (I'm having a conversation right now on that very topic). Yes revere it, but do not cloud it. What's interesting is where it's taking me. Fear drops away daily. I hope at some point I'll get good enough "technically" to do some good things for other people. Also what Kameel said. I'm starting to feel the need to tread more carefully on that front.

I think that practicing "morality" probably just makes some aspects of meditation easier. No "moral" judgement per se, but if you're "strung out" on something you might not have access to your essential "baseline" consciousness quite as easily. Paradoxically I've found meditation to have more effects that drugs (small experimentation here and there ;-)) I've also found that my small experience with altered states actually made it easier to accept some meditative "experiences". In addition keeping one's body "cleaner- running" whether though nutrition, exercise, qi-gong or just what you focus on in behavioral/thought/emotional terms on a day to day basis can be crucial when certain things come up (like pain for example). The other reason for "morality" practice is IMO (and small experience) is as a safeguard during certain phases that are linked to some meditative practice. Falling back into certain "foundations" can help when (if) the proverbial "shit hits the fan". Which it might not for everyone, but IME certainly did... Finally, I'm coming to "get" that "morality" in some respects is also a byproduct of (some) meditative practice. So might as well get to it both ways

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppository not very popular as a delivery method in Anglo-Saxon countries. Suggestions why = welcome. I also read some stuff on here about coffee enemas. Dumb question of the day "What do you want / need to "cleanse" ?"

"Kali is not a joke" Nope, she's blood-red and has red eyes and she scared the shit out of me Oh, I ought to add to the dreams - those nutcase Siberians. However it's starting to seem that all these "folks" are coming up because I'm practicing (or will at some point practice) their techniques. Thanks for your reply Susan. I think I wrote it in another thread that I know you can do it too (the electric blue ray thing) but I'll add my 2 cts from someone who has practiced KAP and has experiences with it since it was asked for by another poster. Actually, it's pretty cool that we're talking about this weirdo stuff out in the open. Another reason I like TTB's

Alright, so how close would you say the Yi Jing is to the actual structure? It's like asking how close quantum physics is, perhaps? Both of these fall into the realm of "applied" theories (and it would seem that Bohm actually had an interest in and experience with the Yi Jing so basically we should be laughing at ourselves right now for going around in pretty circles with this;-) However, as I mentioned in another thread, there might very well be more effective ways of viewing things and talking about them. I see Yi Jing, Taoism, shamanism, 5E etc as sometimes (although not always) "better" than some other ways (like mind/body splitting philosophies and some "medical" approaches.) Oh, plus it's just so easy to appear genius to some people who are using one system (highly flawed) over another (less flawed). "only the results count" So why are we wasting billions of dollars (and lives) barking up the wrong research trees when we have a potential fasttrack right here with Taoism (and other related techniques?)

"don't think you're diminished in the eyes of anyone. that is, until you start pushing back at the small stuff" THIS! Definitely a good call Hundun. I'd suggest this is a neat indicator of lots of things. In my case it shows up sometimes when I am concerned that what I'm doing is not a) up to scratch and b )is not pleasing the people I want to please (to whatever end) I don't think this is Susan's and Santiago's case and I won't speak for either of them but it does look that way a bit. And as we know and spend large amounts of time discussing here, perception is everything As some folks know I've trained KAP with Santi who is a great teacher of techniques and IME has a gift of transmission. I don't have enough experience yet to distinguish between different types of transmission so I can't talk to that part of it. At the same time, IME with other very "technical" domains (I guess it seems weird to suggest it's technical but I see it that way) an argument between "specialists" can often look like a slapfest to non-specialists Going further, what do such arguments actually say about paths and techniques? It would seem to me to suggest that there might be more effective (I won't get into "truer") ways of doing things than others. There might also be more effective ways of talking about things than others. Cultural and dogmatic add-ons aside. Which is where IMO the interest in TTB's lies for me. This is still a cool thread.

Hey Bob! Nice! "we could all use some help from beyond when dealing with him." In my case, "help from beyond" is actually my everyday life and all the people in it. I guess I might see and talk to more of them than might be "normal" for other folks but I've noticed that life has this way of running into me (or I'm smashing into it, or both?) And in fact, at some other juncture, I figured that my lifestyle was directly related to K. If K wants to be up and running in the world, will she go hang with hermits, or people that meet and talk with a lot of people? Yeah, I know, it sounds silly. But I can't help but wonder I guess internet would do it too. Waddya think?

Right, uh. So I'll take that as "Thanks Kate, glad you noticed something"

This is such a cool thread! How about what I just figured up. As follows. Free will has nothing to do with any of these consciousness systems (because consciousness may very well be its own undoing;-)) Plus, one (oh, ok, I'm referring to myself;-)) can be "free-willing" in some aspects and absolutely not in others. But how much of each is actually acting on any situation? I had a fun experience the other day that proved it to me. It was changing keyboards on a computer from one sort to another. So is it potentially a sliding scale? I'd say yeah. Maybe not all of the things are "important" (read back to the idea of looking at the effects rather than the will, this is borne out by some social science dogma, basically we don't don't care about belief but we very much do care about the effects of such.)

Wow, Spectrum. I just noticed your full-on stream of consciousness-type posting. I can't recall if your other posts were like this. But I think they weren't. Are you ok? Not that you wouldn't be. But I figure I ought to check, just in case.

Oh cool thread! I figured a while back that it was my ego that was doing a lot of the "killing" from a conceptual standpoint (really I'm doing it to myself and other people and the world) and I figured myself and other people and the world simultaneously alive and dead all at the same time. Yes I know it seems weird but it's a sort of another version of the above, which I like a lot better. So paradoxically if you can drop the ego off itself faster then you get to be more "alive" or maybe just less "dead" ;-) Ok, I'm rambling

Thanks Sloppy! "he says that aside from divination one should study each of the hexagrams, what it is, how it develops (changes) into the next one, and learn to recognize it in your life." Yeah, well here's the reason I'm reading this latest book. I'm struggling with the correct perspective. It's a different approach to perspective-taking. I think it would be worth doing as the book suggests and start with weather prediction with it. It seems to me to be a more "scientific" and less subjective way of learning. The danger of seeing the trigrams (or hexagrams) in one's own life without sufficient knowledge of them is the fact of making up a new story as to why things happen/happened. Something I'm trying to stop doing Besides, right now I'm concentrating on conduct (the very least I took away from the Joel Seigneur website was that this year I should behave like "heaven" ) I didn't get that he was describing each of the hexagrams in those lectures, he was talking about 5E which involves trigrams and bagua but not the 64 hexagrams. Is there another lecture I'm missing? Thanks!

I think "free will" as we might conventionally describe it is very much something you can train yourself to have more of a chance of getting to. But the work that might need to be put in (as another poster mentioned) is still work. I think many people (including myself) refer to their free will as the capacity to not do something within a really (self)restricted system of options (dualistic in fact). Mindfulness practice IMO will make this clearer. Yoga also helps with this. I believe in many practices the goal is unifying bodymind (or realising it is unified anyway). The "seat" of the "will" is often cited as "third chakra" - which is also where a sense of self seems to lie for me. Indeed when my ego feels bashed or hurt or scared, this is where I feel it physically.

"if you smoke and have sex all day long" It depends on what you're smoking and who you're having sex with? I know I might sound silly when I write stuff like that but I think there might be a lot of stuff to understand there. What you wrote sounded "moralistic" to me, when, with experience it just becomes, well, trial and error. Besides, I don't think I've met anyone of note who spent their entire days smoking and having sex all day long. Sounds pretty cool to me ;-) But the smoking part might affect the lungs?

Dumb question of the day, why do you want one?.

Thanks Susan for telling us your experience! If you read through my private forum (which I was contemplating closing yesterday until Scott and Mal swooshed by and made some convincing noises about it being interesting for some people maybe) you'll read I had "experiences" (I call these "dreams") with a variety of "folks". The Tibetans, Kali (who scared the shit out of me) and the Bon Shaman in his weirdo shack. I have a bias against Christian images because the culture of it IME has been so dogmatic and harsh in my life and so I suspect I'd reject anything that so much smacked of a saint Although recently I've been catching similarities between the cores of each major monotheistic religion (IMO they actually aren't monotheistic, but I'll leave that up to the scholars;-)) Go see the door of Notre Dame in Paris and you'll find some symbolism that seems very "Shiva"-ish (Saints standing on top of their egos). There's a definite physical component to all of this. To respond to the poster who asked if anyone had "achieved" active K in 3 months, I think that I "woke something up" prior to taking KAP (check out the chronology on my forum) and that KAP is a great container and system (including support) from which to approach whatever was going on.) So what's going on? I'm still not sure exactly but it includes a shift in perspective and a dropping away of many "certainties". It's still happening and there's some amazing stuff going on almost all the time. Sometimes I just have to sit down and take it all in because it's so, well, nothing like I'd expect (well, duh;-) by definition;-))

Hi Sloppy. i don't know if the book exists in English. I need to check! It's a scholarly deal but I reckon very good to read. What I'm trying to get better at is the "feeling" of the things. So say if a certain situation has X inherent in it (tends to be people), you can "feel" it stretching through time (of course the feeling is an illusion;-)) towards an outcome. But what about the things you can't feel?

"probably a whole other can of worms" Looks from what I'm reading that that ain't the half of it! The book has a special section on medical divination. Until I started reading it I'd been a definite "party trick" I Ching reader (for own vain purposes) and this latest text has cooled my heels severely. It's like studying math/physics/philosopy all at once.

I reckon putting a bagua wheel in your pants is asking for trouble ;-) Unless you need it The divination mentioned in the audio on Chinese Shamanism seems very obscure to me. But I just put my paws on a related book about the Yi Jing (note the syllables) that would confirm. It's very complicated to read, but pretty in-depth and well-done. I guess I have 5 -10 years of study before I could even pretend to use it properly (the first basic exercise is weather prediction).

Heh. This is a GOOD thread.Awesome teachers on it too! Ever figure there was a way of dropping every single thing you ever knew (including yourself) and gaining it all back tenfold? I have no idea what Shakti is. And that's the best thing about her;-) Yep, and the blue ray stuff is also cool;-) Thanks to Santi and Susan and others;-)

"We just have hang ups in different places." This and the stuff about brain surgery. Neat. What's doing when one is meditating? I think that what's doing is a)the increasing (of awareness of) of neuroplasticity b)the intentional reworking of existing networks towards specific ends Well, I guess for qi-gong anyway. What one is doing when "emptying" mind isn't really clear for me yet, I guess just creating an artificial "clean slate" because there must still be material under the radar so to speak (I know this because it gets activated the rest of the time). I mentioned to someone else, it's like taking the insulation off the wiring. Sparks may fly.

Hello Mr Cow! Thanks for the kind words. I was travelling for a short while (it's almost as good as meditation - sometimes even better ) One reason was that I got to see some major Taoist artifacts. OT, they had pictures of naga (I think they are called?) there too... Interesting post. I haven't spent time with people who are dying in the final phases (although I could also argue that everyone is dying all the time as they follow their path through life) so I can't speak to what I feel in their presence. I was told that a relative had wild hallucinations before her death. I heard there is a special university/college class taught by a woman somewhere in the US which deals with all kinds of dying-related things. I can try to dig it up (no pun intended;-)) The bit I'm struggling with is the "remainder" part that people leave behind. Certainly I've had the experience of "bad vibes" from specific places where I later learned uncool things went down. But the person it happened to wasn't dead so maybe that's a different case. I've had the experience of a dying animal communicating "something" to me, but that's hard to distinguish from how I felt about the animal so maybe not a good example either. I think a key when it comes to getting a handle on this is to eliminate the passage of "time" from the equation. I reckon a neat comparison could be weather systems, but I digress...

Oh go on! It's pretty cool! Naturally banal. Don't dig it too much