vonkrankenhaus

Infinity cannot be "one", or "any". If it was, it would be "Finite". The infinite cannot grow or wither. 1 + Infinity = Infinity. 2 + Infinity = Infinity. As many as he wants to add. -VonKrankenhaus

I think that would be a misunderstanding if anyone does conclude that. I'm not so sure those are even "relevant" issues to the technicalities of Neigong or Qigong. Or even to the reasons for undertaking these, except for people taking up something that they don't really know what it is. -VonKrankenhaus

For one, he mixes up the 8 extraordinary meridians with the 12 organ channels. For another related error, he mixes up arm and leg channels. People who cannot spot such errors, do not have the medical knowledge to do so, maybe should not be using that book to think they will develop their Neigong. -VonKrankenhaus ADDENDUM: I thought you meant "Taoist Yoga", but now I see you meant Damo Mitchell book. THAT book has too many basic errors to get into.

All of this was developed during the time of building civilizations, which followed a long time of human development and observation. The change to "patriarchal" society is a result of increasing trade, and distance of that trade, and this is trade between factions of civilization. The YinYang of "Human" is Male/Female. Woman is the center of human creation. Man comes to the woman. The woman with children will stabilize within the richness of her environment and feed the child. Man has no internal experience of direct creation like this, so is less attached to any ground, and must seek that kind of involvement with the world externally, in actions and interactions with others, including with Woman. Natural order shows that the baby is not the expert. The oldest people are. Fu Hsi shows us the progression, and associates it to seasons and all other phenomena. In modern people, this natural order has been destroyed, and families separated into consumer/citizen "individuals" with all the attendant propaganda required to achieve this. Modern order uses TV to bring the opinion of the baby into the forefront, ruining the judgment, the discerning ability, of the whole family. Father is made to be "Homer Simpson" - an idiot. So, with discernment gutted, and natural human growth hierarchy re-arranged into nonsense, they are put into "houses" - each with their own room, as "individuals", now hooked up to their own electronic consumer "feeds" of influence. You can spend a lifetime sorting through the leaves of that tree. Better to examine the roots and trunk. People today who want to understand natural order in humanity need to study and understand the past very well. And to be able to distinguish what is real, and what is just a popular or common "idea". -VonKrankenhaus

This is pre-historical: Fu Hsi. "Among his inventions was the Yellow River Map, from which he derived the first trigrams". -VonKrankenhaus

None. Dot patterns, then solid and broken lines. All text was made much later, by entirely different people. -VonKrankenhaus

I Ching originally had no text. These are all from much later. Same way with HeTu and LoShu. So to understand what these are, study them without any of the added texts whatsoever for some time. After you do that, you could understand exactly what the texts really are. -VonKrankenhaus

Yes, that was basically next door. A few strip clubs, some porno theaters, etc. Not too big of an area. Donnie Yen's mother Mark Bow Sim sent him out of there to study back in HK & China - too much potential for trouble. I heard once Chan Pui was knock out by a guy in a bar there. That was a story circulating among students of other clubs. Our club at that time is 3rd floor, broken windows, and we hear drunken fights going on in the alley all the time. We look over at each other, shrug, then just keep class going. -VonKrankenhaus

I know him from the early 70s in Boston. And lots of other people from the Boston Gongfu scene in the 70s - Mark Bow Sim, Kwong Tit Fu, Tang Kwok Wah, even Lee Yat Ming, and others - and their students. Great people - all of them, and a fun time there with them. -VonKrankenhaus

If there is YinYang or "polarity", then movement is going to be movement between the poles of a polarity. That movement is "energy" - as per thermodynamics. Qi is not a substance or material "thing". That is why scientists continue to fail in finding it as one. So Qi cannot "contain" any thing, and anything posited to be happening "in" Qi would be happening "nowhere". It is just the movement between the poles of any polarity, and that's all "energy" is. In what we call "electricity" or "electronics", the polarity is the plus and minus electrical poles, and what is moving is electrons. The movement itself is referred to as "energy" or "power", and this is Qi, which is just the Chinese name for that movement. There must be polarity for anything to move. There must at least be a Here/There, for example. More polarization = more or stronger movement, or "Qi". Qi is not a material thing or substance. Qi has no existence at all outside of a polarity. -VonKrankenhaus

I simply mean "A-Z" alphabetic literacy and western ideas about causality and order. As distinct from the pre-literate and simultaneous view that created Taoist philosophy. This is not a "value" judgment. It's a "technicality" about assumptions and interpretations. -VonKrankenhaus

It is a fact though, that sex drive and actual reproduction both decline in starving populations, and that farmers generally have the biggest families by having immediate access to more food. I have been studying Internal Cultivation and Qigong since the early 70s. For the past 40 years, I have researched and studied also Chang Ming Shu - Long life techniques, including understanding the environment and "food" in relation to cultivation. In terms of how important this is: There is not any part of us or any organ in our body not made of "food". The brain we are thinking with is 100% made of food, which means made of specific parts of the overall environment. So food is a way of working with the polarities we are in with the overall environment, and movement between the poles of any polarity is "energy" or "Qi", which is what we work with in Qigong and cultivation generally. -VonKrankenhaus

Reproduction is just the casting off of excess into another being. Eating and Sexual Function are linked. So to control and refine eating will produce sexual control too. Then you do not need so much work to put this excess energy here, or there, or sublimate - why have it at all? Better to understand the balance between the individual and the environment, and that "food" is the most concentrated form of the environment that we are taking in. -VonKrankenhaus

Yes, Qi is the movement between the poles of any polarity. That's the interplay. The interplay is play of polarity. The TaiJiTu is simultaneous. It is not like an animated movie. The western idea of "Animation" of it makes it seem like there is a "timeline" of YinYang, and there isn't. One thing appears, and this one thing does not "grow" or "acquire" this Yin and Yang. It HAS YinYang - it HAS "Polarity" - a beginning and end, inside and outside, etc. The way that Human HAS Male and Female - simultaneously - and doesn't "acquire" these. These do not changing or transforming into each other. Only at the extreme does the energetic reversal happen. As you point out, this is not physical. Male is not changing into Female, for example. And we never see anything ever get "un-burned". That's a mistake from a materialist view. -VonKrankenhaus

YinYang is about polarity. Qi is movement between the poles of any polarity. Humanity is also exhibiting Polarity as Male and Female. The development of Humanity is the Movement between these two poles. The degree and kind of movement depends on the nature of the polarity. If we destroy the Polarity, we destroy the movement. No polarity = no Movement. No Movement = No Qi. No Qi = No Life. -VonKrankenhaus

"Is semen retention aligned with the Tao"? If the first semen was retained, who would be asking? -VonKrankenhaus

Apple cider vinegar is acid. Acid is Yang, and Yang penetrates Yin. People who like drinking acid have Yin sludge in their body from bad fats and too much protein, etc. Acids help denature and dissolve this. Eating modern farmed and tortured animals is never a "good idea". All people doing that are trying to do is get ordinary minerals. They use up their minerals in buffer reactions and dealing with ketosis if they are starving, which is what ketosis basically is. Anything that causes metabolic imbalance will require more minerals to buffer in the body - sugar, alcohol, meat - all these produce acid reactions and waste the body must neutralize and excrete. There are better sources of mineral to be found in plants and seaweeds, and avoiding the "foods" that cause extra need of them. All diets today are merely "feed systems" made-up from "ideas", that generally produce abstract people unable to live in nature. Human beings have a hard time if they try to invent the Dao. They should maybe just watch and learn for a while. Even if they are now destroying what they would watch. Nature provides the entire environment, "food", and beings, all at once, and this must be studied to find the place and functioning of the human being in it. -VonKrankenhaus

Only as random as Wu Xing or YinYang are - which is not random at all. All things happen in accord with natural order. And thus can be studied, observed. Like studying the heat or water being released from the body after death. Thermodynamics isn't really "random" either. -VonKrankenhaus

If you think about this in terms of other aspects of the body, like heat, water - these also leave the body and become part of new patterns. Other aspects function similarly. -VonKrankenhaus

Qi is movement between the poles of any polarity. In the body, there are many polarities working, all exhibiting movement. Qigong is the practice of altering some of these polarities, and the movement between the poles of those polarities, to increase or decrease certain natural functions, and thereby to produce certain bodily effects. -VonKrankenhaus

Many people assume YinYang is commutative, symmetrical, and "reversible". But it cannot be. YinYang is not about equation, and is asymmetrical. The upper and lower parts of your body are a YinYang polarity, but are not mirror images or even "equal". Neither are the right and left sides of the body. These even have different organs in them. Day and Night are not a symmetrical polarity either, and Day is not a mirror image reversal of Night. You have to get into western abstraction to find truly symmetrical divisions of anything, and these are actually imaginary anyway. There is no perfect circle in nature to split exactly in half, for example, not even the rotation of a planet is that. So even if Matter and Anti-Matter were created exactly equally at the beginning of the universe, the first Movement was asymmetrical and prevents this polarity from "canceling out" as "equal". -VonKrankenhaus

They can experience "the way things happen". As such, this is no specific "thing". And they can experience non-dual awareness, experience the Unity "before" the Dualism of Polar Existence, or YinYang. They can see that opposites are complimentary, and every polarity (Two) is actually "of" a One. -VonKrankenhaus

Dao isn't a location. Dao isn't any kind of physical "it". They mean "back to the source" where this is not a linear voyage to a physical "place", but means transcendence of Polarity - transcendence of Good/Bad and any other polarity. That's what they are trying to experience - transcend duality (polarity) and unite with the One, the Universe. Looking at Zhou Dunyi's TaiJiTu, this transcendence could be seen as a "reversal" of that, which is why this concept is there. -VonKrankenhaus

Tao is the Way. The way things happen. "The way it goes" or "as things so happen". And, as things so happen, the only constant is change. The only way "No-thing" can Change is to become "Some-thing". Any "Thing" will exhibit Polarity, or YinYang, and HAVE "Two" - two sides, an Up and a Down, inside and outside, etc. Qi is just movement between the poles of these polarities. -VonKrankenhaus

Of course, right now I am using computer. But that is not how to develop intelligence. That is just how I am communicating with you, the technical means. I have been in this forum about 3 years. Before that I spent many decades doing exactly what I wrote about. And aside from using computer a few times in a day now to communicate, which I find to be fun too, I am still basically living like a monk or student. And I will write that if you find and develop real human living and food and functionality, intelligence will go up. To the degree you actually do it. -VonKrankenhaus