Taomeow

However, "internal martial scientists" sound very intimidating! "Intercepting," well, don't take my word for it because my PH experience is very modest, but it is my understanding that it requires song and rooting developed considerably, peng if you want to return the force rather than merely neutralize it, and very high all-around sensitivity (to touch, which is what PH practice done correctly develops -- fine-tuned perceptions informing of the opponents' muscle tone, weight distribution, and any and all changes therein as they occur; also visual awareness toward the same goal; also psychological awareness, noticing the opponent's state of mind, breathing, eye movements... down to qi flow, which very sensitive and experienced folks "hear" and "see" and "smell" and ultimately "read.") These skills of course come after many prerequisites have been taken care of by enough correct practice -- postural alignments, precise weight distribution, the ability to open all the joints, kua mobility, yao stability, etc. etc. -- a LOT of stuff... every little accomplishment is, as a very accomplished guy explained to me, akin to a sheet of paper you are adding on top of a pile if the goal is to make a mountain... that's how taiji skill grows. Moment to moment awareness of the total picture comes not in sequence but all at once, and changes moment to moment also in its totality. If you perceive its totality, a pattern therein, and anticipate changes of this pattern because you understand the pattern and know what kind of changes it leads to, this "intercepts" any new change before it occurs -- that's one psychophysical component of it, weighed toward "psycho," but then you can redistribute the weight of "intercept" toward more "physical" -- i.e. when all of the prerequisites are embodied, all oncoming force can be transmitted down the skeletal structure to the legs and then to the ground and under the opponent's root (if he has any, or else under the unrooted structure which is oh so much easier to send flying ). So you intercept his onslaught and uproot him with his own force without having spent any of your own. That's when they go boink effortlessly when it's real, and that's what they're trying to imitate when it's not.

Effort is the end of it, definitely. I think a true master is as good at being effortless inside as a competent beginner can get outside in order to pull off beginner level fajin. Real, but not the whole story of what it can be. The guy I mentioned who is 80 and has been practicing for 75 sleeps till 3 a.m. and then sits in meditation for four hours -- every day. If you can do THIS effortlessly, this will teach you how to be effortless inside... and the kind of fajin that will result can't even begin to get comprehended by the "experts." I don't remember in which recent thread someone (sorry, forgot who) was advocating not being relaxed all the time with taiji, asserting you "need" to apply force in real fighting. Which is a clear indicator that no sparring, let alone fighting, with a true taiji master has ever been experienced by the author of this opinion. Nothing teaches like hands-on encounters. No studies at all can get the point across this fast and this cheaply.

Yup, and gives ample warning before he fajins, it's like someone who is getting ready to sneeze going aah...aaahhh...aaaaahhhh...choo! Well, if someone is going to sneeze in my face and gives all the indications, I'll protect myself... and if someone is going to fajin, ditto. As The Beatles almost sang, Hey! You've got to hide fajin away! There's many ways you can tell the real thing from the fake and the master from the trying-to-be from a cursory glance. E.g., no one who can raise his/her arms from the spine without the shoulders floating up even a millimeter needs to fake anything. Also, you can see when "the whole body is a hand," one of the celebrated taiji principles, is in action -- fajin can be released by any part of the master's body touched or about to be touched by the opponent as efficiently as with the hands. There's one video among those posted in this thread where this is crystal clear at one point... I wonder if anyone else caught it?

Thank you! 3. What I have come to believe is that if you are going to access a different timeline, it will let you know that you might... that you can, you should, you have a chance, you have a need, etc.. You will get some nudges from there. E.g., I've been working on gaining access to a timeline which I initially started dimly recalling for the way it smells -- olfactory memory triggering jing-level memory, not personal and not genetic and not even DNA-level -- inclusive of these but spanning far, far beyond -- billions of years. Jing has access to that level, in fact most of it exists on that level. Jing and cosmic memory are synonymous interchangeable notions. So, OK, from either a different time (a past life or a future one) or a different timeline (a parallel one), I remember the way the steppe smells when set on fire. When wormwood burns, it smells of -- um, moxa. That's why burning moxa in this life, smelled for the first time, triggered that memory from a different one. Well, nothing would happen if I just noticed that "this smells familiar and tantalizingly so, beyond just the smell of burning moxa," but then I grab the spontaneous trigger and add the learned tools of cultivation. I add meditation. I add dream-consciousness access techniques. I add past life regression techinques (which can be used for parallel and future lives too). The trick, the difference between it working and it not really working, is to find the spontaneous personal "gateway." I suspect everybody has those but we aren't taught to notice, much less use them -- we are taught to ignore such things. Well, that's why the majority of the population does not time travel. So, the discovery that the smell of burning moxa triggers a memory of a life where there's steppe wormwood on fire is mine alone -- no one else can discover THIS timeline using THIS method, or others I've gained some access to. You have your own to which no one else has access. Well, actually I don't know if that's true, maybe people move through timelines in clusters (Edgar Cayce asserted they do reincarnate in more or less simultaneous clusters -- families, nations, races -- because of collective karma shared by all members of a family, nation, race, etc.. -- species for that matter ). But personally I have no access to someone else's jing-level memories, only my own (well, that's not exactly true either, but I can't explain in few words and don't want to spend many), and these are rare and precious. They are triggered by whatever "nudges" them and then they get somewhat expanded in a dream spontaneously following a trigger, and then it's up to me to put two and two together and start working on gaining more access. So, e.g., the technique I suggested earlier -- "look at your feet in your dream's eye, see what you're wearing, watch where your feet are going" -- is something I used with moxa, and I saw boots of leather as soft as kid gloves, crimson in color and embossed with gold, and the word for the material was "safian." I knew I was someone wearing safian boots. That was the beginning of a beautiful "know thyself" journey that is still going on. I can't tell you more about that woman, but whatever she's doing with her life has no applications for my current one -- none. It's just great to know her for a part of me, is all. There's no way I can "use" her, or she, me. It's more like... if you see a magnificent landscape at dawn and it takes your breath away, it does something for you, to you, through you -- but you can't "use" it, you can just... well, experience it and be changed favorably for the experience. So, the best use I've found so far for timelines I can access is like that. It's a bit like finding your lost family... it makes you more complete, but a child separated from her family is not looking to "use" them once she's found them -- just to be herself, and "herself" means "part of my family." The flower of your timelines is your family in a sense -- the family of one who is also infinite. It's just cool to get to know some of its members, for its own sake.

Evermore complex is the DNA of plants. Ours is much simpler. (True story, seldom told. http://www.skeptical...ca-complex-dna/ )

Anyone serious about taiji, yes. As for studies, have you seen this one guys? http://www.youtube.c...feature=related

Well, if you're going to try working on this as a pragmatic task, I applaud you... Sorry I can't give you an exact protocol, but I can offer a few pointers, FWIW... Here goes, in no particular order: 1. The kind of time travel you have in mind (which I personally never attempted, for reasons I will explain below) is, according to people who assert they have done it (Andy Basiago, e.g.), can't change your position in your current timeline without changing the timeline itself. So it's not as easy and reliable a way to get rich and famous as it might seem -- in fact, it's more labor-intensive than most ordinary ways. The more different the "you" of the different timeline from "you" of this one, the more the presence of the modified "you" in this timeline will change the timeline itself. E.g., if you become so rich as to bankrupt the Federal Reserve, you might come back to a timeline whose economy is being dismantled so brutally as to render your billions not worth the paper they're printed on -- and god only knows what else, famine, epidemics, Justin Bieber our new president, whatever. So if you want to stay in the same timeline, your best bet is to never leave it. Once you leave it, you change it. You can't come back to the one you came from. So -- there's a timeline where you're master of medicine, computers, chemistry, etc., but you will come back to a timeline where you still don't have either the knowledge or the credentials, so what good does it do you? And if you don't want to come back, what is the you of a different timeline going to do about a double who has neither his knowledge nor his credentials? You better make sure you ask him... chances are he'll tell you "get your ass back home," only home won't be there anymore, because you're coming back to a timeline where Sloppy Zhang is a time traveler, and a time traveler humiliated by Sloppy Zhang the master of computer science, chemistry and medicine from another one, and no one seems to have gained much from it having been changed this way. Time is not easy to fool. 2. This does not mean that you can't "jump ship" and come to the timeline exactly of your liking -- say, just the same as the one you're from but with a rich and famous you replacing the current you without anything else having changed. This trick is most difficult to pull off because of what I call "the Law of Bifurcations." The Law asserts that timelines are created by free will and in fact the only function of free will in the universe is to create timelines. (No one in the universe is interested whether decisions you or I make make us rich and famous or poor and obscure, but timelines we create every time we make a decision do matter -- they are the flowering of the tree of Time, its leaves and branches and petals, its perennial evergreen glory, its eternal spring.) You can use your free will toward an outcome you envision, but you have to take all the correct steps at every bifurcated juncture leading toward such an outcome, or else you will deviate to a different timeline, the one where you don't make the choice leading to your chosen outcome. I wouldn't undertake something like this because of its staggering complexity. If you think it's a task you might want to take on, you will have to start by designing such a timeline theoretically at first. I for one can't get past the point where I would be having a totally different life while my children would have the same ones ('cause we're not changing the timeline in this scenario, remember?) I couldn't figure out how to pull this off -- or why. So, if you have anyone in the world you care about, you would have to figure out either a way to change things for the better for them too (which complicates the unchanged-timeline-but-with-the-changes-I've-chosen paradoxical task exponentially) or else a way to change everything for yourself alone while everybody you care about is unaffected by these. Very difficult -- much more difficult than improving your situation by scores of more mundane methods... ...to be continued...

Well, I for one would be unable to tell a fake from a no fake from a video, I don't know enough about video-making techniques -- make it "nothing at all" -- and that's not the only problem. My teacher sometimes does a thing in class when he's in the mood, e.g. he will show a move slowly and then go, "but you can speed it up like this" -- and next thing you know is, he's disappeared from where he was in a blur of confusing something or other that does not resemble the human form, and resumes talking to us from a different spot all the way across the room, and all his students just look at each other and nobody understands what happened in between. I have no idea how a video could capture this moment of utter cancellation of all laws of physics we all know and love. If someone caught it on camera, however, I'm pretty sure it would have been declared fake. The ubiquity of youtube-derived pictures of the world makes one feel as though the world is reducible to a youtube video. This, on top of all the other reductionist goodies that have reduced what we experience to what we are "allowed" to experience, goodies that masquerade as "modern science" and have already curtailed the possible and the probable to fit in whatever they can handle on a nine to five schedule of comprehending reality. But it's an old conversation actually... experience vs. evidence vs. interpretations of someone else's experience vs. censorship of evidence that does not fit in with the dominant baboon's paradigm. Plus, of course, the inevitable fakes. I think reductionists ought to be grateful to fakes who are the only reason their paradigm appears strong -- it is strong compared to the fake stuff to be sure, but very weak when trying to tackle the real stuff. Very, very feckless. I wouldn't bother with "studies" because where live phenomena are concerned, the reductionist approach can't yield any results meaningful on any terms but its own, and its own terms demand a rigorous "study of songbird from a collection of stuffed nightingales," to quote Alan Watts.

"Evidence shows" is what a mathematician would call an "empty set." You would need to be more specific to fill the statement with any substance. Evidence I have shows nothing of the kind. Evidence YOU have is not "evidence shows," it's just "evidence Stig has noticed or was shown or has to show to date." D'accord? As for showing you a clip on the net, you must have missed what I was saying. You can't find a clip of a psychosomatosensory experience on the net. You can have the experience or not, but you can't show it to others. What I CAN do is introduce you to at least three people who can give you the experience. Come visit, I'll put you in touch. One of them is 80 and quite likely to give you the full monty rather than just a taste if you ask him nicely, because by this late in the day he's run out of patience with all the perennial beginners, dabblers, holders of opinions and non-believers in this and that that are the current Western and Westernized Chinese taiji scene, on top of which he doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks of him. I guarantee you don't have to believe in anything to experience him, or your money back.

Thank you for sharing. This closely matches my own experience. The impact you feel from short jin has absolutely nothing to do with the usual sensations from a blow. It is a disorienting blow to the way your senses are organized, more like. And precisely because the real high-level thing is what it is, the entrenched "nonbelievers" fall apart from its application way more readily than do open perceivers (who are sensitive to reality as it happens rather than locked in the prison of their own ideas about reality). Unlike the urban legends about "cooperation" required to experience it (born of many fakes or wishful thinkers out there perhaps -- however nothing is rendered nonexistent by the sheer fact that it can be faked or wished for by those who don't have it), it's the other way around with the real thing: it is most devastatingly efficient against people who "don't believe in it" and have some serious mental investment into the "non-believing" belief system of theirs. That's because the non-believing systems are very hard and rigid, and are the psychological counterpart of the physical hardness and lack of song in taiji, i.e. something that renders one incapable of either mastering the art himself/herself or preventing its true master from using their hardness and rigidity against them. There's a great story I remember, told by Hong Junsheng explaining fajin to his students. He was one of the greatest Chen masters of the 20th century and the only long term one-on-one student of Chen Fake if I remember correctly. So, once, coming home late at night, Hong had to walk through a dark alley on a moonless night. Suddenly the earth slipped from under his feet and he went flying, momentarily disoriented and confused. He hit the ground, braced himself for the unknown attacking enemy, groping in the dark. His hand landed on a watermelon rind. He realized that he had stepped on it and there was no other enemy. Whereupon Hong knelt and bowed and said, "Oh great and mighty Master Watermelon Rind who defeated me tonight! I humbly thank you for the lesson. I will not forget it." And he didn't, and the accounts of folks who pushed hands with him occasionally went something like, "all of a sudden I somehow got confused and my feet went sliding from under me because the ground suddenly turned slippery like ice and also I couldn't tell up from down -- so I went flying."

Nothing if not succinct.

Thanks for the videos, Sloppy! Not different dimensions, different timelines. (I've glimpsed different dimensions too, but that's a different story.) Timelines and dimensions are not the same. I use dreamwork to access a 3D process which involves multiple timelines without any of them changing dimensionality except on occasion and for a purpose (e.g., a surgery that can't be done in 3D can be done in 4D -- whether physical or an "exorcism" that actually is necessary every single time when a different-dimensionality entity has trespassed and squatted in a 3D being -- but under normal conditions, no 3D creature is comfortable with 4D intruders or in 4D environments, and higher than that -- or lower than that for that matter -- is absolutely unlivable for a human being, I know this for a fact.) 3D+time=a 3D process, not a 4D space. Time is not a dimension "like the rest." Time is part of all dimensions, because all dimensions are processes, not "objects." Yup, you got the interdimensional travel right, but that's not what I do unless forced to (I was forced to on a couple of occasions... I can't handle it. I get dimensionsick much like one gets seasick. Only worse. I might get used to it with practice, the way someone might get over seasickness with practice, but I don't practice this. Maybe someday... if I have to. I'd rather not.) Switching to different timelines is possible without switching to a different dimensionality. I was basically shown how in a dream I had when I was 4. It is indeed awesome but very scary. I'll give you an example of some ordinary everyday activity to illustrate just how scary it is. Imagine you need to get to the supermarket to buy some groceries. It's a ten minute walk, and you are debating with yourself whether you should take a walk or drive there. In our everyday functioning, we create such bifurcations in space-time every time we make a decision, and once the choice is made and the road is taken -- whichever road -- the other option goes extinct, does not cross over to the domain of the manifest and reverts forever to the unmanifest (in taoist terms, does not enter Houtian and reverts to Xiantian). It never happens. It never manifests simply because you made something else happen and manifest. Say, you decide you'll walk, and walk. The whole sequence of events that would have, could have, should have resulted from your driving immediately goes extinct -- the timeline where you took the car to the supermarket goes extinct. You proceed on the timeline you've chosen, the one where you walk. What happened on that timeline that never happened? Maybe nothing to make it much different from the one that did happen -- you arrived three minutes sooner, nothing changed. Or maybe something happened there to change everything -- e.g., a fatal car accident, or alternatively, in the space of those three minutes you met your future wife who was just leaving the supermarket and dropped something and you picked it up and it resulted in children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren -- a timeline of posterity sprouting from that 3-minute window of opportunity. But since you didn't take the car, these and all other infinite versions of different timelines never happened and you can never know the "what if" of any of them. Now then. In reality, this is not the case. In reality, you are something or somebody who can manifest any such timeline at any time in any place, always and forever for all infinity. You are someone who decides to pull a timeline outta Xiantian. If you know how that is. If you do it even once, this changes everything, this changes how you relate to the world you're in -- in particular, this basically renders its timeline which is supposed to be irreversible quite extinct. And that's very very very scary.

Hi Suninmyeyes, no, different time zones (nice term!) in the past, future, etc. are part of any one timeline, but what I'm talking about is different timelines that exist simultaneously. "Line" is not the best term but it's more or less accepted, so I use it. In actuality, time is like a river that is not only a far cry from a straight "line" but a river with many tributaries, and all the tributaries exist simultaneously. Unlike on a spacial river extrapolated from its temporal aspect, however (which is what a "river" is to a 3D spacial creature), in the river of time you can be present at all of them simultaneously. Picture yourself swimming in one of them on a hot summer day while you're fishing in another one in early spring and skating on yet another one which happens to be frozen solid because it's winter, and drowning in yet another (that's the end of you in this one tributary but it does not faze the total you anymore than a loss of a hair does the 3D you of this one timeline) and so on. All the "you" out there are parts, cells, units, pearls, petals -- of the single multidimentional multispacial multitemporal flower of the whole you. Each petal has a life of its own but not really. Each pearl IS the necklace but also isn't. The whole matters to the part but not really. The parts matter to the whole but not really. Hard to explain but not really... ... ...that's reality as it has revealed itself to me to date. If at some point it hits me with another "not really," I'll simply switch to a timeline where everything is real -- or where nothing is real -- ...that's infinity, there's infinite ways to play with it. But some are much more fun than others. In fact, there's an infinite number of ways to play with it that aren't much fun. I am trying to learn to choose my games wisely...

I have a book recommendation: The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche (Author), Mark Dahlby (Editor) Dreaming is a high and mighty human art in many traditions, but not all of them are written... so if you want to do it in a traditional non-haphazard way, oral transmission is best, but a good book describing a written dreaming tradition is better than trying to invent the wheel. I am working on switching timelines in dreamtime... not really interested in lucid dreaming in this one, I spend enough time here in my waking state. Your access to different timelines is determined by their emotional rather than spacial or temporal proximity. I.e. if you feel you "belong here" and all you want to do is tweak with your position "here," you can learn to lucid-dream in this timeline. But if you feel you "belong elsewhere," you will need to work out the details of this "elsewhere" first. Lucid-dreaming in the current timeline is much easier, because you remember many details (millions) on autopilot. What your clothes look like, and everybody else's. What houses, lampposts, money, toilet bowls looks like. What a "car" is. What a "Ph.D." means. Millions of details are already there, you don't have to change "it all" in your dream -- only something minor like your own position within this timeline. Not so easy with switching timelines. Things you don't remember outnumber things you do by orders of magnitude. Luckily, once you remember something, it's like a bead on a string -- you pull and the whole necklace of related, connected "beads" can be dragged out, and then you notice where it is tied to another one... you can disentangle a whole timeline like this. The "bead" is an emotionally significant or a very vividly remembered (due to repetitive use, e.g.) little detail. One such repetitive detail is the shoes you wear in a particular timeline. I like to start exploring other timelines by looking down at my feet (with my mind's eye, not with my physical eyes) to see what I'm wearing there. The routine is, as you go to sleep in "this" timeline, you visualize waking up in "another" one, and when you wake up, you put your shoes on, or go barefoot as the case may be. (I can't gain access yet to timelines that have no shoes.) When you are putting your shoes on, use your hands (in your mind, that is), and keep looking at your hands and feet and the shoes might materialize. If they materialize, put them on and go... where?.. Keep watching your feet, see where they are going... take it from there.

Yes, dear alchemist, there's a secret recipe, I know it approximately but not precisely and am willing to share what I know with a secret cave dweller. The crucial ingredient is "aromatic water," and you will need a still to make it. Lavender, peppermint, sage, rosemary, dill seed and cinnamon bark must be covered with 87% alcohol (75 ml) and water (300 ml) for 24 hours. Next, you distill this. You get 200 ml aromatic water. This will be 75% of the volume at this stage; 22,5% will be an alcohol extract of (originally) 40+ more herbs, which I doubt anyone uses anymore, and 2,5% alcohol extract of saffron. This composition gives you only a 16% alcohol beverage, whereas the balsam has 45% alcohol. (there's fakes out there too, 50%+ alcohol they are and have plastic stoppers instead of the real thing's oak ones... buyer beware.) How it is brought up to 45% alcohol I'm not exactly sure, I'm told with best quality vodka. Next, the whole thing is kept for an undiscolsed but supposedly rather long period of time in oak barrels, this step can't be omitted. Next, special "healing" clay is used to make the bottles, the kind that has been used since antiquity for the purpose. It preserves the brew's medicinal strength which, supposedly, fizzles out to a great extent out of any other type of container. If you're equipped to experiment, by all means, go for it! I was googling around and came across Russian studies that assert Riga Black Balsam cures depression, among other things. Who knows what else it can do... alchemy is like that -- mystery is an invariable ingredient.

Oh, cool! And you confirm once again that you are blessed with an internal navigation system guiding you toward things of real value! What I know about it is that if you meet a guy who boasts he has a bottle (yes, it had to be brought from Riga to elsewhere in the Soviet Union even when Latvia was one of the republics) and invites you for a cup of coffee laced with the miracle brew, you wind up pregnant with twins... that's the kind of power it has! As for its history, it was, in particular, immortalized in Goethe's Faustus and referred to as "the elixir of youth" -- and its aficionados today include the British royal family. The recipe is indeed ancient, supposedly monastic, but probably much earlier than Christianity itself, since the monks did not invent their famous herbal-alcoholic-medicinal brews, they merely used the local herbal knowledge of way before. The brew went secular in the 17th century and wound up as a secret recipe possessed by a Riga pharmacist, Abraham Kunze. In this capacity it became locally famous as a remedy for many common illnesses, colds and upset stomachs and the like, as well as a general tonic. Catherine the Great happened to suffer from a stomach colic when traveling to Riga and was promptly cured with the balsam, whereupon, in gratitude, she granted Kunze exclusive rights to manufacture it commercially. Which he did or didn't, don't remember exactly, because soon thereafter a Russian merchant bought the rights from him and started making the balsam and supplying it to the empire and exporting it too. The ceramic bottle it comes in, unchanged in centuries, I used to reuse to make all kinds of herbal tinctures that require a dark container after the original contents were gone... Yes, the taste is "love it or hate it," many people would find it too medicinal for an alcoholic beverage to drink straight up... but in coffee it truly shines. Gonna go check out a Russian store in La Jolla, see if they might have it...

Sounds interesting. Here's a few additions to coffee for flavor I've known and liked (with sugar in every case): brew it with a slice of orange peel brew it with a pinch of cardamom cognac or brandy in the cup or Irish Cream or Riga Balsam (my favorite, hard to find) a slice of lemon (and my personal invention) a piece of organic raw cocoa butter

(moved from "Summer is here" thread in OT)

Yup, I've seen the same thing... looks very funny actually. But sensible. A TCM doctor in China told me that he used to think Westerners have very strong bodies because he'd often seen them wear shorts in cold weather, but then he got to work on some Western bodies and discovered it was not the case, it's just that they don't know any better. Someone with a very strong body can tolerate both heat and cold quite well, but if there's a preference (e.g. cold is well tolerated but not heat, or vice versa), it's usually a sign of a problem with internal "climate."

Yup. Thanks, I4L. I'm very familiar with Graham Hancock's work, have read his books and listened to him on various programs, and he's my kind of researcher -- someone who goes wherever he has to go to research (instead of to a library to read what repeaters repeat and then repeat that) -- forbidden Ethiopian temples, deep underwater (he became a pro level scuba diver when stuff he wanted to research -- underwater pyramids -- turned up, well, deep underwater!), he takes ayahuasca before talking or writing about it (rather than talking and writing about it without having researched it the only way it can be researched), and so on, consistently. I think he's a taoist and doesn't even know it. Has anyone read his first novel, Entangled? It's just out I think, I haven't gotten round to checking it out yet.

I think Egyptians did that too. And they didn't use a soft pillow for the head but, rather, a hard neck-rest -- like this: Of course this may explain why they always walked sideways! but, seriously, I think their "sideways" art may reflect their ideas about the importance of postural alignments, which have everything to do with beauty.