Michael Sternbach

Two poles of equal strength, but opposite in sign, indeed beget the manifestation of action between them, once they are sufficiently separate from each other. I agree that zero is a kind of infinity (the infinitely small). Original 'null state' tends to split up into a positive and a negative part of equal size. From the connection of the two, a third is born. So teaches the DDJ, and Hermetism as well. Many examples of this principle can be found.

Action is faster than retaliaction.

Capricorn

Rumour

Even light has a mass and kind of belongs to the physical realm, as do space and time. Pure consciousness, however, belongs to the dimensions of subtle energies and is therefore not subject to the restrictions imposed according to SRT, which only apply to material things.

And since the essence of Being is to be grasped in the Here and Now, becoming an Immortal would be of no consequence according to the understanding of Zen.

Zen meditation indeed involves the correct posture to activate all dantians, and some say it leads to a naturally occurring MCO. Even though emphasis remains on the LDT, in practice.

While its practitioners do seek a state of transcendence, Zen is quite different from some other schools whose aim seems to be deliverance from the world of phenomena. More along the lines of William Blake:

Well, to some degree, the meaning of the term in India seems to be coloured the specific school we are looking at. Quoting the Wikipedia article on Śūnyatā: Enlightenment via the LDT is most definitely central to Zen Buddhism, at any rate. However, Zen/Chan was influenced by Daoism some time after its foundation in the Shaolin temple by Bodhidharma, and it could be debated if aforementioned emphasis was already part of its original Indian form Dhyana. Although Daisetz Suzuki certainly brought forth some arguments in support of an essentially unbroken tradition.

This topic only illustrates that the extremes always touch one another.

I would call the former explicit emptiness, the latter implicit emptiness.

According to quantum mechanics, particles do those things naturally. And I imagine those sages do them the same way - on the macroscopic level!

Space itself expanding faster than the speed of light (and carrying along whatever is in it) is not a violation of SRT, as the latter only applies to objects moving in space. Here, however, we are dealing with the same kind of phenomenon that makes a so-called warp drive possible (in principle, anyway). This is rather Scotty's area of expertise than Major Cartwright's, though...

Futon

Well, since (as far as I know) you don't believe in the existence of a non-physical self or soul, wouldn't it be more appropriate for you to say, she is a sexy body?

There are indeed different levels of infinity. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-different-sizes-of-infinity-2013-11

I was laughing at the thought of having to self-restrict our access in order to stay away from the Trump discussion.

For the most part, I agree to this. Although there are not a myriad different things that can grow from a single seed. Say, if it's an apple tree seed, expect nothing other than an apple tree to grow from it! That said, different ways are suitable for different individuals. Moreover - and kind of paradoxically - the more they develop their individuality, the more universal they become. For the Divine resides at the very centre of any individual. As an aside, 'vasishta' phonetically coincides with the question "what's that?" in Swiss German. A mere coincidence, but kind of a funny one...

Well, the difficulty may be that our understanding of these things is just too limited in order to define them more rigorously. The Great Attractor is a term from Cosmology which I used metaphorically. It's a place where all local galaxies are headed to for some not completely understood reason. A fascinating topic in its own right (for Marblehead anyway ). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_repeller But I could just as well have used Aristotle's Final Cause, Entelechy, Telos, or even Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point - although the latter specifically refers to the time when the whole Universe will come to realize its identity with God. But maybe there is less of a difference between our topic and that state than it seens. What if the realization of one is the realization of many?

The spiritual self is many things. But it's worth bearing in mind that time flow is more or less limited to the physical system. Thus, the spiritual self may at once be the goal of the current self's evolution as well as the Great Attractor that acts backwards in time and quickens it towards its ultimate fulfillment. Whereas looked at from a different perspective, all manifestations of the self exist simultaneously.

I am not quite sure how this ties in with the question of how the spiritual self relates to the empirical self - is the former the lotus flower in your view, and the latter the mud? At any rate, I do think that this analogy has its use, and indeed, every so often it seems like our self is some kind of transformational mechanism endlessly pumping up 'karmic' (?) stuff that needs to be processed and refined. - This is actually a pretty strong picture. That said, the way I look at this model, there are no dividing lines within the self, and it is the empirical self itself which is refined and becoming the spiritual (or 'higher') self in this process.

It is relatively rare that you find any instruction in a style of traditional Karate with so much emphasis laid on qigong and 'internal aspects' in general. And yours sounds rather sophisticated. I think you are really lucky. My own background in Kyokushinkai and Shotokan did not include much of those aspects initially, though over time I got to work with various martial arts styles and instructors that introduced me to them. I am currently practicing a variation of American Kenpo which incorporates those elements from Taiji and some of those styles of Karate that do have them. Your description of your training sounds like it may have some direct basis in Fujian White Crane (one major source of Okinawan Karate).

I would agree to this as far as it goes... However, it seems to speak to a certain lack of respect for our empirical self, typical of some spiritual traditions. Whereas others (which I feel more in tune with) uphold its uniqueness and eternal validity.

Another example for virtual particles turning into real ones would be the case in which a pair of the former manifests from the vacuum right at a black hole's event horizon in a fashion that one of them escapes while the other one gets sucked in even before they had a chance to reunite and annihilate each other back into the nothingness they came from. According to spooky quantum logic, since one of them now flies off with real, positive mass, in order to keep energy conversation intact, the other one (the one that gets sucked into the BH) must get a negative mass, which means it will actually subtract a minute - but real - amount of mass from the Black Hole! Which is in turn the reason why a Black Hole that runs out of a constant supply of matter is expected to evaporate over (extremely long) time. I believe that their meditation revealed the nature of the universe to them directly (without the necessity for complex theories). Moreover, it did so not limited to the physical plane alone, but on multiple levels (as per Wuschel's comment). What comes to mind here is the Kabbalah according to which at the origin and 'behind the scene' of manifest reality, there is an ocean of infinite light (ain soph aur), which is also commonly referred to as a zone of 'negative existence' (emptiness).