simonpi

From the western spiritual science perspective you're refering to an over-emphasis on non-duality, avoiding taking any karmic action in the world - that kind of stuff. The Rosicrucian tradition has a nice phrase 'beings of love and beings of freedom'. What this poetic phrase is referring to is the balancing of non dual awareness with the fully individuated consciousness. You are attuned to the oceanic 'consciousness without an object' and have also fully developed your higher ego. Thinking processes are not denigrated or seen as an obstacle to spiritual progress. They are refined and developed into their full sacred potential. Sacred geometry especially is related to active mediating of patterns in the manifested world (whilst also pointing to the non-dual core of those emanated patterns) A lot of spirituality these days emphasis the non-dual to the exclusion of any of this. And so we get people doing things like praising their idea what 'pure' Zen is whilst denigrating things like Daoist magic. It seems to be the way the pendulum is over- swinging at the moment in reaction to to much new-age chakra affimrations maybe? Part of me wonders if it isn't the imbalanced aspects of Christian 'world denying' mentality filtering into misunderstood eastern teachings. Who knows... You pays your money you takes your chances... Mine is on 'beings of love and beings of freedom' as the most balanced approach. Of course we want to be very careful what we lump together. There's 'new age' sacred geometry where we have nice ideas about aliens: and then there's Pythagoras, Kepler and actually learning geometric construction.

I keep a smaller percentage of my attention available for 'experimental' approaches. This is due to my conviction that qigong needs innovation and scientific rigour if it is to progress. I've come to agree with those to argue a lot of the supposed research done on qigong on China is not up to scratch at all... My experimentalism may get me into trouble but i've learnt by now its not going to stop so there's no point trying to shut it down - only manage it. Anyway - Maybe this thread will show up on Google in time and we may get comments from someone who has actually had experience with the school. Which was what I really wanted.

Be interested to hear specificaly why you are unimpressed by it. Nerve fibre building happens naturally in the body as a proccess of repair but its often not that efficient. One thing that would be interesting is whether anyone has managed to find a way to consciously leverage this in the way Yogis have managed to take control of autonomic nerous system procceses including the heart.

Thanks for your response. That is indeed what I am doing - training under a solid Jerry Alan Johnson Medical Qigong School and have no intention of suddenly cutting my training short to rush off to this. I'm not actually looking for career/training guidance and what I should/shouldn't do. I really am looking for informed discussion of THIS system- people who have trained in traditional qigong cultivation and then switched to nerve fibre building excercises - and how they compare. Its a bit of a long shot but thought i'd try at least...

Hold on a sec, you trained with the Jerry Alan Johnson folks, and now you are falling for some brand new likely no real lineage, likely made up , online qigong system???!!! first, lets be clear we are talking about www.chienergyheals.com not chipower.com. Secondly I'm not 'falling for it'. I just said i'm interested in it. (It was one of those clever philosophers who recomeneded being able to hold an idea in the mind for a while without outright accepting or rejecting it). One of the reasons I signed up to TB is to try and elicit some opinions about this system because I can't find them anywhere else. Its certainly not the only reason I came here though. Whilst I respect lineage and Jerry Alan Johnson - by itself I don't don't care about appeals to authority and whether someone is a 'master' or whether something is online versus bricks and mortar. What I am interested is if is something works... My initial reaction to the material on that website was indeed similar - extreme skepticism mixed with some feelings of defensiveness about my existing practices which it seemed to criticize. And both of those remain. However some ideas interest me such as exercises to build up nerve fibres rather than the traditional approach of opening the lower gate /working with the lower dan tien. (traditional route works on a specific area df the body, this method works on nerve fibres throughot the body.) What i'm interested to hear from is people who have looked beyond a glance at this method or who have actually trained with the school. Including people who trained in it and were disatisfied. Maybe we will get some of those responses in time...and i realise doing this may give indirect publicity to the school but i'm not sure how to get around that..

I came across this school quite by accident when I was looking for something else. I stress I am not trying to secretly promote it. As you will see I have some fairly sharp criticisms of what i’ve found. But its also very interesting and approaches energy work in a way i’ve not seen before. I’m somewhat intrigued but also torn by their material. http://www.chienergyheals.com/ I tried doing some research on them but these guys seem almost unknown. The head honcho ‘situ’ Rob jones claims to have trained in martial arts for over 40 years and was involved in a previous site - chi power.com. He no longer affiliates himself with that site and considers its methods no longer up to date in the light of further research. (personally that chi power site is the sort of thing i'd usually run a mile from. Horrible presentation. But maybe I have to look past it being marketed like diet pills...) Outside the site itself i’ve found no independent opinions on the chi energy heals school (it seems to have a few different names) yet it claims a 90% retention rate. On TB forum there only seems to be a couple of indirect references to Rob Jones which don't give much away but actually sounds pretty positive. There’s much more that could be said about their material. But the salient points of the school's method are: - making use of modern research into biomagnetic research. - main exercise is in building up nerve fibres throughout the body rather than any approach which concentrates on energetic structures in the body - i.e. lower Dantien. - focus on building stable energy that becomes very tangible. - no preoccupation with building heat in the body as a sign of chi development. Students learn precise temperature control of the body to avoid damaging glands. Something called the ‘tri concept’ is used to keep energy development in balance. - working with bioelectricity and biophotons as opposed to affecting hormones in the body which many energy work methods do (apparently). Claimed that systems that work with the body’s hormones can cause problems that most of us associate with ups and downs or ‘healing crises’ of cultivation work. PRO - from the outline of their 3 year course it has some amazing sounding stuff that might genuinely come at energy work from a new empirical angle. They provide a full course catalogue of what to expect in the training. I’ve done a little research on biomagnetism and the work of people like Dr Robert becker, James L. Oschman and some of the work of the French physical radiastheesia researchers lke Chaumery. Its enough to know that when they talk about ‘bioenergy’ and bio-phtons’ the school is not just making up a load of 'new age' psuedoscience. There can actually be some basis to this. - The fee structure is transparent and pretty reasonable. About $950 for a year of training - which includes some mentoring. - overall the presentation of the school is quite low key. CON - no matter how cleverly they dress it up all of their open door material amounts to ‘our system is better than everyone else’s’. This wold normally cause me to dismiss something quickly. Its a big no no. - this means a student is asked to stop doing other forms on energy work when doing this one. This seems an unfair request when the student doesn’t know at the start whether this system has any worth. - related: For all the material they have on their site they are very effective at not giving away a single practical technique to try. They seem to imply this is for safety of the student as even the first nerve fibre building exercise is strong. - they lump ‘qigong’ into one thing as if all 9000 styles were the same. They also use the word ‘chi’ and lots of nice pictures of Chinese bridges etc in their marketing and yet essentially seem to reject traditional approaches to cultivation. The is what pushed me closest to ignoring them outright. - they invoke quantum physics. Its a big red flag. There are very divided opinions on whether quantum physics demonstrates anything one way or the other about esoteric matters. …and yet there is something in the material which suggests they might just be onto something. I’m not about to change my practise over night - but neither will I fight to defend what i currently do just because i’m emotionally invested in it. Ultimately if these guys really do have a valid scientific approach to energy work then i’ll listen and adapt. Thoughts, experiences…?

Hi As a general rule I avoid forums as they are mostly too much of a time and energy sinkhole. However I think, if dealt with carefully this one has some value to it. So here I am :-). In one way or another I have studied esoteric maters for 10 years or more. But I still consider myself a beginner in so many ways. And that's not false modesty or poetic 'we're all perpetual beginners : it means I've spend a fait amount of those 10 years going round in circles or stagnating. But somehow I've at least learnt something. I strated serious training in the western mystery tradition (magick) for some years before moving in a roundabout way towards Daoist approaches. At that point I got the qigong bug and spent a few years training under a student of master lam. Then, once it became apparent Lam was not going to give anything more useful out, my teacher and me moved on. (though I still practice standing and have taken up Tai Chi with a very good teacher. Actually now the 'western spiritual science' has come back for me. Sacred geometry and Biogeometry are two aeras I now can't leave alone. I realise I will never be just a 'daoist' or just a Tibbetan Buddhist or anything else. The nearest I come to is really a Hermeticist on the independant spiritual path. Though its unlikely qigong or Biogeometry are going to go away at this point.