katsura

You can make permanent changes in your body/mind with training (qigong and meditation.) It takes time and dedication, but it'll happen. Edit: As far practice and 'letting go' goes, there's the old parable about the sculptor who said his only skill was "clearing away the extra bits."

This style of meditation is known in most forms of Zen Buddhism as "observing the phrase" and doesn't entail intellectual examination, but the spontaneous contemplation that arises when the mind is emptied and quietly directed toward the koan.

It's impossible for me to know what phase you are in your development, but the non-dual awareness many of us are pointing towards typically only comes after a period of deep involvement with some formal method of practice (a technique, in other words.) There is a pivotal moment when all contrivance is abandoned, but only after many days of sincere effort. The techniques I mentioned aren't meant to obscure your experience of things, but to purify them. Now, from non-dual perspective, there is nothing to purify because there is no thought of purity or impurity, but the people capable of realizing this intuitively, from a conventional perspective, are quite pure! It's somewhat paradoxical, but if you're asking for motivation to practice then that would be it. Edit: typos, formatting

This appears to be a koan so I would recommend you meditate on it.

Please look into the secret smile exercise, or anything centered on cultivating bliss and jhana. I also recommend intoning the six healing sounds. Most of this should be available online, but let me know if you want more guidance. There is the Tibetan Chod exercise as well, which is explicated in Tsultrim Allione's Cutting Through Fear. I have serious issues with paranoia and I can state with confidence that when coming out of a bliss state, these feelings are muted in a powerful way.

I don't think you should necessarily feel pressured to conform to anyone else's standard of spiritual excellence, but the fortune of being exposed to effective qigong and meditation instructions is not a small thing, and will only enhance whatever you feel you already have. That said, if it's not time for you to dedicate yourself to practice then it won't do to force yourself either.

D.H. Lawrence said a bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever feeling sorry for itself.

Sikhism is a monotheistic religion theologically distinct from Islam and Hinduism, but shares cultural elements with both.

Imagine a world without culture or abstract thought--that's why the humanities are important.

Part of the reason why the lower dan tien is emphasized so much is because when you open kundalini in the higher centers first, it's not as easy to awaken it in the lower centers. The root chakra is our connection to the earth and what keeps us grounded.

Cycling the orbits seems to be what keeps me in check.

Chronic masturbators may feel a temporary high when they refrain from ejaculating for a few days, and this suddenly becomes an evangel for them, totally unmoored from all the actual internal alchemy practices that make celibacy relevant to spirituality. Yes, you're delusional. You're not going to hew to monastic vows for ten years in a non-monastic context, least of all in a committed relationship. You're a 21 year old child; you don't even know who the hell you are yet.

I take an analytical view of spiritual phenomena and I prize repeatability, but I don't feel any inclination to reconcile my experiences with a materialist paradigm. Qi is also a lot easier to type than "bio electricity."

A lot of it has to do with having a traumatic upbringing. Worldviews that offer a promise of inner piece are attractive to those who desire emotional stability, and those who've experienced terrible circumstances have a more pressing need to believe in a benevolent universe; a feeling of alienation may also cause one to seek out the least judgmental belief systems. The new age accordingly places a strong emphasis on the therapeutic, and proffers a fairly vast array of techniques to mitigate onslaughts of negativity.

Yes, of course you can reverse the MCO. All you're doing is sending qi up the conception vessel and down the governing vessel. It's a very natural, comfortable thing to do, and actually safer than the conventional fire orbit. Edit: typos

Probably just cleared a blockage. There's a Reichian aspect to qigong that will unlock deep layers of muscular tension, particularly when you start tapping into kundalini phenomena, which is a common effect of continual orbiting.

For what it's worth ZOOM did answer the OP, but I think the main problem is that few of us know what dzogchen is and the understanding of those that claim to is under heavy dispute.

So what are you willing to sacrifice to achieve this?

Then why are we talking about doing it outside of a monastery? Edit: Oh no wait, I see. We're going to play PlayStation and do our dzogchen all day. Got it.

If by enlightenment you mean disintegrating into light after death, then yes, that would be a wild claim, wondrous too. If you mean attaining to perception of the emptiness underlying all manifest phenomena (y'know like how the Buddha defined it), then it's not quite so lofty. I don't know how you prove something like this, but this a decent podcast on the subject: http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2007/03/bg-009-enlightened-teachers/ Lay how? Did they just work and sleep 16 hours a day and then spend the remaining 8 in intense meditation? Did they do this for decades at a time? Did they have the benefit of direct instruction at any point? BTW, this is all disregarding the various aspects of sila (purity of mind, health, and conduct.) You don't even want to do the ngondro. It's hard enough to even find out what dzogchen is without instruction and yet you feel qualified to judge the attainments of people you've never even met. I don't like to consider myself a defeatist in any sense, but it all just seems kind of silly to me.

ZOOM: People achieve enlightenment with conventional forms of meditation and yoga often enough, and some even do it without going on retreat. I don't see why western practitioners of dzogchen wouldn't be among them. Rainbow Body, however, doesn't sound like the kind of attainment even accessible to most monastics, least of all anyone expecting to lead a halfway normal life in between meditating. And all of this without the benefit of any direct oral instruction, just with a grab bag of cross referenced instructions from several Buddhist authors of varying experience. It's some off the reservation shit, man. Saving up to go live in Tibet would be way more plausible.

You might look into the practice of Hesychasm. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychasm

What's described by practitioners of qigong and yoga is pretty universal (we all have the same body), even if some spiritual and religious traditions aren't as adept at codifying and reproducing the phenomena. Prayer is underrated. It's hard for me to imagine a stable yogic practice not inclining one to prayer at some point, particularly in those pandora's box moments.

This is hard to explain, and I can't speak for dzogchen specifically, but in my experience with other practices, certain technical dimensions will not be open to you unless you cultivate broader virtues, even if you're getting all the right instructions. At a mundane level, love and devotion will give you a level of constancy that sheer willpower will not, but I think there's also subtler and more profound reasons as well. I have a friend who recently told me that what was driving much of his meditation practice was the hindrance of ill-will towards himself. That's interesting, isn't it? That a hindrance to meditation could drive us to meditate, and then further feed a hindrance to meditation. Vipassana is the kind of practice that throws a light back on whatever you're experiencing, so he was able to observe what was going on and make a breakthrough, but not all wisdom traditions work like that, especially not the vajrayana ones that spend a lot of time honing the mind's ability to shape reality before one even begins the process of seeing through it. You could make a real mess of yourself. Purification of karma is a major aspect of the path to enlightenment, and I suspect that it's the ngondro that ensures you've reached a baseline purity (not to mention humility and dedication) to truly begin in earnest. If one took the ngondro as seriously as the dzogchen, there's no reason to think that it wouldn't also take one through the stages of meditation, and even enlightenment as well.

Qigong means breath work so you're not going to get anywhere unless you spend time learning to breath correctly, and also to still your mind so your sensitivity to the inside of your body increases. Zen breathing with light focus on the lower dan tien will give you sensations in a relatively short period of time, but to do even that effectively, you need to have the right attitude. If you're impatient for results and lack faith in what you're doing then you'll continually sabotage your effort in small ways to the point of hopelessness. It takes a lot of humility to set skepticism aside and truly begin in earnest.