Orion

Not being sarcastic at all.

You won't get anything out of enlightenment. There's no reward, no prize waiting. It's anti-climactic, kind of the biggest sham and let down ever. If you're trying to become enlightened so that you can get something, you might as well go into finance. There's nowhere to "arrive at", nowhere to go. Enlightenment is a lot of internal work and often tooth-grinding death-like pain, with no result but emptiness. All you're doing is emptying a vessel of what is unreal. There is no attainment or final objective. And what you're left with, what is real, is completely valueless.

What happens when you die... There is confusion and disorientation for a time as your spirit becomes re-acquainted with its non-material form, including the return of its eternal memories. It momentarily continues to experience the suffering of the body it left behind, like an after image, because it still thinks it is the person it just was, who is now dead. That personality is gone forever. Once it remembers, it then undergoes the task of processing what happened during the recent life. Did it successfully complete the trials it set out to do? Its expiations and atonements (if any)? A new workshop is then designed based on its level of attainment, the next level of progression it can take, anything it has to atone for, etc. This is accomplished with the help of its advisors and God. It's then reborn into the workshop of life which is designed to progress it closer toward perfection. This is a crude way of describing it, but it's basically what happens.

There are many layers to this... A lot of big dicked guys like showing off their big dick, and you know what they get for it? Partners who are only interested in their big dick. Do you really want someone whose interest in you is mainly based on that? Our culture's body image is warped. Most guys have 5-6 inch penises, but pop culture, as usual, asserts the unattainable. A very small portion of men have penises above 6.5 inches. That demographic gets exponentially smaller the larger you go. A lot of younger women, I notice, fetishize big dicks, but a lot of experienced women will tell you that shape is just as important as size. Not to mention people with a modicum of maturity are going to look at the entire being and not just one piece of flesh. And anyway, sex is about creativity. There are lots of guys with big penises who don't feel they have to try because their size entitles them to automatically be awesome. Diversify your perspective.

Not everyone is afraid to die. There are cultures who are taught about death right from birth, and are exposed to it regularly, so that they know it's coming. People are afraid to die who have had no exposure to death, so they subconsciously think they're immortal... like the western world. This is a generalization of course. There's also the animal body wanting to preserve itself at all costs. We see this in involuntary responses, even in people with attainment. The body reacts to the stimulus of impending death quite intensely, with adrenaline and usually every fighting capacity at its disposal, which might make it seem like death is a major struggle. However, to the enlightened person, whatever's happening is just what's happening, and it's temporary. That struggle will end. In other words, we can't base our knowledge of death only on superficial appearances of death because we aren't seeing what's happening with the inner work during this phase. Nobody knows how they will react to impending death, but the hope is that life-long spiritual practices can form of a sort of spiritual pathway that overcomes some automatic natures, so that new roads can be taken. I for one don't believe we are just material, and eventually I'll shed this material envelope.

TheSunTheMoonTheStars asks for $700 if you contact him privately to find out more about this invisibility technique. Consider the OP to be vague solicitation. Always nice to have one's suspicions confirmed.

I'm happy for the UK... and my opinion has nothing to do with xenophobia. People are crying about their careers and ability to freely travel; big institutions are crying about loss of money. What nobody is talking about is that Britain now has its sovereignty back. It won't be dictated to by a foreign organization. A British vote means a British vote, and not an EU vote. The establishment just got told, and I couldn't be happier. Britain will survive and thrive. The neo-liberal globalists will have to regroup over another prize. The world's richest lost $120 billion overnight. Awesome. The EU has been a step toward globalized government and I am happy to see that objective get quashed. All of the really big problems in the world have been enhanced, not made better, by globalization. All it does is make the wealthier more wealthy and delocalizes sovereign power so that democratic process to stop it becomes weaker. Britain's referendum put a stop to it for Britain. Micro-economy is the future. It's the only way to avoid trashing the planet.

We can intellectualize what maybe happened, but ultimately it's best to just listen to your body. Tablet form of anything is usually not the greatest because there are fillers added to make sure the pill stays fresh and compressed... but I doubt that's what made you sick. I don't think humans are meant to eat algae, on the whole. We don't have a history of doing it. Sea weed, sure, but not algae. When I read reports that the UN was thinking of turning spirulina into a universal starvation aid, I cringed. The last people who should be eating algae are starving people with spleen qi deficiency. But that's what science and fractionated medicine do to people. Algae is considered "very cold" in nature to the GI, in holistic medicine. It's difficult to process. Most people I know who have been using it long-term combine it with other foods, they can't take it straight. People with robust digestion can handle it -- these are people with iron stomachs who never get food poisoning. Me, I get the shits from it no matter how much I prepare it. I've tried 1/10th of the recommended dose and it still happens -- and that was during a very robust time for me, And no it's not detox reaction or "die off". It's your body telling you that something isn't good for you. There's no greater confirmation than vomiting or shitting your ass off all day.

Refine yourself and thereby refine your spirit. The lighter you become the more you can help a person to shift their condition. Anybody can become a healer, but some are better than others. Others have been doing it for lifetimes and it shows in their spiritual life force as well as their capacity to help people. Others are just starting. You attract patients based on your level and potential. Those behaving or practicing as though they are beyond their pay grade are abusing authority and trust, and will have to expiate later. A lot of people do this, especially in the U.S. I find, where people learn 2% of knowledge and then turn it into show business. The best healers I've ever met in this lifetime appear totally mundane, until you interact with them and receive their gifts. When I started out as a licensed practitioner, I had in my head that I wanted to fix people. Now I realize that's pointless. Nobody fixes anybody, and nobody needs fixing. You just hold space, help them to facilitate their process, and offer knowledge and guidance based on whatever modalities you know. The lowest level practitioners (and their patients) are the ones looking to fix or be fixed. They tend to develop the most co-dependent relationships. I concur that seeing people as sick or diseased is not all that useful. What is the imbalance? What is the goal? If you look at it like... why did God design this situation for the person, or why did they choose it, or what happened to them that this was their response... things tend to become a lot more clear. I've met imbalanced people who, for various reasons, need to remain imbalanced. Their condition is still useful to them, in some way. They are subconsciously ensuring it happens because probably they are acting out a spiritual lesson that their human level reality has not yet integrated or learned from. It would be unethical (and usually impossible) to disrupt such configurations. Their personality level is saying "Help me!" but their spirit is practically shouting, "Please stay away." Yes it's true, some unwellness is accidental. People who think all unwellness is self-induced (like getting into a car accident, etc.) because every single thing in reality is pre-ordained are just as bad as people who don't see a mind-body connection. Discernment is required across dependent situations. Always. Most serious conditions are trials or wake up calls, at the deepest level. Sometimes you can help guide people through their trials and other times there is absolutely nothing you can do. To know the difference you have to be in good communication with your higher self, otherwise you will just see it as "disease" and not accomplish much. Healing takes place when the lesson is done. Sometimes a pattern sticks around past its expiry date and you can tell the person is so over it. Those people heal immediately, with a little TLC. Our modern society sees "illness" as inconvenience and it's treated like battlefield medicine, separate from ourselves. Patch the symptom and then send them back out into the battlefield. It's usually only when illness gets serious, like deathly serious, or suddenly disruptive to normal lifestyle in a way that can no longer be ignored, that people get drawn into the inner work. The most difficult lesson for both healers and their patients is that the vast majority of the time, we choose our suffering. We choose our poison so that we can evolve our medicine. People REALLY don't want to hear this. The ones that are ready have been dragged through the mud, or are conscious in the first place. Your task as a healer is to hone in on their choice, and figure out if you have their medicine or not. Realize that being a healer is a major responsibility. It's also a karmic burden to some. I say that not to frighten, but just to caution. If you really advance and start to gain a lot of talent, gift, and attainment, you need to be in your integrity and your morality, or you'll get a karmic infraction for abuse of power. Those who are wide eyed and bushy tailed about healing the world might be coming at it from an egoic place, only to not have the sustaining force to evolve a practice. I have seen so many charlatans or self-deluded "healers" that I consider the world of "healing" to be as dangerous as it is wonderful. If I had been born of lower moral virtue I'd be raking in thousands of dollars weekly on koolaid non-sense but instead I work with very few people, but to a higher degree, in relative obscurity. A friend came to see me last year talking about the $2,000 energy healing course she took over a weekend and how she had new abilities, and that she was now on course to fixing her longstanding issue. I told her that she had been scammed, but like most people who spend a lot of money on non-sense, they need to believe it's real to justify such an absurd expenditure. Two months later she came back to me complaining that it didn't work after all, and she was so disillusioned with her own path. Finally she asked me for help, like I was her last resort or something. All she needed was a very simple homeopathic that cost $5 and within a couple weeks of taking it, her shadow aspect had been dragged into the light and she had a million times more insight. No accolades or world tours for me though. Or better yet, shit gets real and the egoic ones awaken and become really good healers, beyond what their initial preconception was about. Kind of like how sometimes we bite off more than we can chew in our naivete, and it cracks us wide open. I guess you won't know which you really are until you try.

Discipline is creating to and adhering to a structure in your life, through dedication and determination, through thick and thin. It's a commitment. Weakness is having the discipline, but not the energy. You want to do it and may try to do it, but can't generate power to initiate or complete the task. Laziness is having the energy, opportunity and even the necessity, but opting to be idle. Laziness is actually an evolutionary advantage in the wild because it conserves energy. Most animals won't do anything that doesn't have a net gain, and sometimes doing nothing is the best approach. Humans are lazy out of complacency though. There's also restfulness that's not being lazy at all. I just spent 3 days being super busy and today I did nothing but sit here eating and reading. Yang must be balanced with yin and vice versa. Sometimes laziness is due to excess yin. Discipline also has its shortfalls. Something may no longer be suitable for us but we continue to pursue or apply it with rugged determination, like in relationships. Sometimes things are meant to fall away so new things can appear. Being disciplined in a stagnant modality is harmful. It's about balance.

Forget the word awakened. What is your true nature? Being realized doesn't make you separate from the world, or above it. It makes you exactly who you are, at your core, free of competing egos and delusions. If your true nature is extroverted, then so be it. After all, we have realized people leading large groups of people and we have realized people living in isolation for decades. It takes all kinds.

Just putting this out there... the state of a person's gut affects a huge amount of their day to day mental-emotional states. Your body is something like 90% other organisms, and only 10% is your cells, by DNA. My mood can change on a dime if I eat the right or wrong food, but it has taken me years to develop that kind of body awareness. It's not all biochemistry and physical stuff. There's the psychic level too which can impact things. The gut plays a huge role though, so much so that my sense is that the vast majority of mental health problems in our society are related to it.

We live in a dream and this dream is capable of producing anything. I've studied astrology for years and it's fascinating to watch the trends, it's a super useful tool. At the ultimate level, there are no planets and nothing is really going on here. But on a relative level, in this dream, there's something called astrology and it's a tool that we can use for various things. I see personal choices like that. In this dream, you have a will and that will can be used to have different effects on your life. Karma may even be part of the dream. So, we do cause our own suffering, in a relative way, and you are just part of the divine doing itself. It's useful to see things this way for the sake of non-attachment. At the same time, even with the yin method of living, you can't be too laissez-faire about it. Yes, the divine is orchestrating all this, but you're a part of the divine that has the power to choose, and if you abdicate that then you're choosing to be at the whims of the world. That may cause suffering.

Using tonic herbs outside of an energetic understanding of what they do can be dangerous. OP, I'm glad the teacher took your pulses and did proper syndrome differentiation. Schisandra astringes qi. It's meant to be used when there is leakage in the body from deficiency. If the leakage is due to excess, or there is another excess present (parasites, dampness, liver fire, heat, etc.), schisandra must be avoided. In my past practices, schisandra was sort of like the cherry on top after a long series of other protocols. Once the body was strengthened and balanced, I would use a bit of schisandra just to tone the tissues to their maximum. Goji is OK... but it's mainly a food anyway.

There are also immortal cell lines used in science to study cancer. They never die, but they are hopelessly malignant. There is a good reason for things to die. One reason is to prevent them from transforming into something heinous -- on a cellular level anyway. Physical immortality... I'll believe it when I see it. There are lots of tales around the world about immortal people, and there are a lot of people who really believe in that. They just say the immortals are in hiding because they don't want to be known. I'm dubious.

You can undertake the path anywhere. It's location independent. However, if your spirit is calling you to travel somewhere else and it feels right, then listen to it.

Yes, that's definitely true. At the same time, things we enjoy are a comfort zone, and comfort zones are easy to sink into in a non-resistant way. Our real work arises when we are confronted with things we don't like, which challenge and stress the organism. There is discomfort and then there is suffering, the latter of which tends to arise from attachment to narratives. On another level, living a life that's completely out of alignment is bound to breed resistance, but even so, if one is restful, one can spot the areas of true resistance and make changes accordingly. Not saying that it's easy, just that restfulness is practically a virtue, like patience is. People who live so completely out of alignment tend to not have awareness practices or there is attachment to a belief that it has to be that way. No judgment intended there either... living a life of resistance is about learning through contrast, which is a valid method for wisdom gathering. A mind that is turbulent is not going to be able to discern one way or another though.

Enlightenment, or awareness of what is real, seems to be about restfulness. Concepts are important in order to provide guidance and structures which in turn point us toward specific experiences, but without adequate surrender, the overlaying complications keep asserting themselves. It's a form of resistance. The word surrender triggers a lot of people, but perhaps the word "restful" is more easy to sink into. When we are at rest, we are peaceful. When we are peaceful and quiet, we are in our truth. Restful doesn't mean that you have to literally be physically inactive. It's a state of being. It's perhaps about not taking things on, or at least not taking on what is unnecessary, and through this practice developing the wisdom to discern the difference. You bring that restfulness with you anywhere, even into your busy life. One thing that's cool about observing nature is that animals only expend energy when needed. Everything is about that. Where is the nourishment, and what is worth expending nourishment on. Have you ever seen rock climbers do what they do? They climb sheer rock faces, which is a tiring feat, but they find micro-rests along the way. I've noticed that the biggest obstacle to feeling restful in any situation is attachment.

I don't wear watches, period. They generate an energy field regardless of what is powering them. Stainless steel I have found to be the most innocuous of the cooking materials, in terms of non-reactivity. You absolutely must avoid using metal utensils with it though, or the coating will scratch and the regular steel beneath it will be exposed. Stainless still is usually steel galvanized with chrome. It's the chrome that renders it non-reactive. Raw steels does leech things into food. A lot of ancient herbal decoctions tell you to avoid cooking in steel pots because it affects the medicine.

My understanding is that it's about balance. Sometimes fire is called for, sometimes water. If you become too far flung in either direction then it can be a problem. We also have natural tendencies, it's true. But my understanding of depression is that it's neither fire nor water, but stagnation. Water isn't about not changing or laziness, it's about flowing into change through the path of least resistance. Fire is about creating the path, through directed action. Both can be passive or active, depending on what is called for. Both have power.

I promise I'm not trying to be semantic, but I'm not even sure what the binary of spiritual vs. non-spiritual means. Is a spiritual relationship one where you both talk about spiritual stuff all the time, or do activities together that you'd categorize as spiritual? I guess my problem is that I'm at the point now that I don't even know what "spiritual" means. It's all one reality, in relation. Whatever is, is. I can sit with most people and accept them as they are. The ones that I still have difficulty with are pointing me toward the work that remains. Is that spiritual? When I was younger I tried to have "spiritual" friendships and partners, but in hindsight they were disastrous due to how contrived they were.

If you feel de-energized from donating, you might have some deficiency in your body. If you feel energized, then you may have excess, and removing the blood brings balance. These are generalizations, but. If you're in perfect balance then ideally you should feel no change.

I grew up with fluoride in the water and I still use it on my own teeth occasionally, but not daily. I'm super sensitive to chemical exposure and I don't notice a problem from infrequent use.

Seems like the presenter is creating a polarity for the sake of teaching a coping skill. In that context, reacting is more instinctual and automatic, whereas responding is more measured and reflective. It's a "think before you act" sort of lesson.

This is too semantic and arbitrary. The values espoused are all based on external appearances but we can't assume the root reasons for them based on those appearances. That's just projection. It's best to find the points of resistance and suffering within yourself, and debunk those. Simply categorizing behaviors and beliefs as strong or weak, divorced from context, is not going to yield much ideological fruit apart from maybe temporarily make yourself feel like you're controlling an experience. One person's weak is another person's strong, based on environment, circumstance, upbringing, and many other factors.