Taomeow

74F here today, humidity 27%, chance of snow 0%, of rain, 0%, of clouds... well, they discuss sightings of clouds on the news, their shapes are reported to the public... "oh, oh, check this out -- there was a puffy cloud in the sky today that looked like a fluffy kitten!" So I'd say faith is what you need when something goes wrong. I have plenty of faith, but not where the weather in San Diego is concerned -- no faith in fair weather is required here, because nothing is ever wrong with the weather!

You'll find no opposition from me on this one. I too am much more interested in how and why people have arrived at a particular emotional/spiritual/intellectual etc. destination than in hearing declarations about it. The stories that are most likely to move, inspire, or at least not antagonize me go something like, "I was A, I was doing B because unbeknown to me I needed C but instead they did D to me, so not knowing any better I responded with E, the outcome was F, therefore now I'm G, but since this isn't the outcome I'd settle for for all eternity, I am working toward H using J which I learned from K, and so far the results are L but I do believe that M is possible because I've seen N and read about O and was blown away, and have this gut feeling about P..." and so on. Connected stories of the process whereby one comes to know oneself... ...you look at one of these and, provided it's honest, whether it's "right" or "wrong" truly disappears -- not as per an empty declaration that "there's no right or wrong" or some such backed up by hearsay and nothing else. To err is human; to refuse to consider a possibility of error in one's reasoning, beliefs, education, scope of knowledge, capacity for understanding experiences (whether one's own or someone else's) is assinine.

Homer: I think it's very sad when someone gets underpassionate Me (the Lisa in me) has no problem with disagreement, arguing, OR passion -- I just feel that arguing for the sake of arguing is not arguing, it's bullying. Darebak picked up on that I think, though it's not limited to male-female dynamics. Lisa (the original Lisa Simpson) does argue a lot, but not in order to get the upper hand, she argues in order to establish the truth or common sense or whatever, human rights, animal rights, soul rights? She's into "the right thing." (This can get annoying too, especially considering her intellectual and moral superiority.) Homer, however, argues for the sake of winning the argument, and "truth" and "the right thing" are immaterial to him -- what matters to him is to overpower. Indeed, it's not as frequent here as I've seen elsewhere (thank god), but whenever a discussion takes this particular turn, I start having second thoughts about "the whole thing." Oh, and "why discuss anything at a discussion forum at all" is a separate topic. (I know why I do it. )

I know and highly respect Joseph Yu's system, I was wondering if anyone knows what Chia does to come up with his version of the Hidden Stems and why. It's not trivial, because it reveals whether the master understands qi in any depth or not. I put someone's chart through Chia's calculator and it shows Dry Earth leaking into Water in a hidden stem. This can't be.

Nice intro for beginners by Chia. I checked out his site and he has a Bazi calculator that includes some non-beginner stuff too (the Hidden Stems) but without any explanations (as usual -- if you want to paint a master into a corner ask him/her how exactly they determine which Branches generate Hidden Stems and how exactly. A million-dollar question.) Do you (or anyone) happen to know if he has anything anywhere on the system he uses to calculate these? It's actually pretty advanced FS and I'm having trouble reconciling systems used by different masters.

Great insights, venerable sages! yeah, but that's where I turn into Homer: "God knows I've never been very religious... but if you're out there... please... please save me, Superman!"

It's going to be a Tiger of Metal in its yang phase. Things don't get much more interesting than that... ...until the great Black Dragon of 2012 of course...

It's the White Tiger of the coming Chinese New Year, which begins February 14.

Crane, We might be caught up in linguistic rather than physical distinctions -- what does "reverse" stand for to you? To me it means "the opposite of postnatal." In terms of yin-yang dynamics, postnatally we inhale (yin) and expand the stomach (yang); then exhale (yang) and contract the stomach (yin). Whereas prenatally we inhale (yin) and contract the stomach (yin), then exhale (yang) and expand the stomach (yang). So postnatal is yin/yang turnig into yang/yin; prenatal is yin/yin turning into yang/yang. That's because we are in the domain of "pure" or "old" yin and yang, less intermixed, before we are born. Yes, it's natural, but most people don't breathe like that after they are born. I relived my birth many times when I was working on -- hm, myself -- and it would kick in on autopilot when the somatosensory memory fully activated. It's nothing like everyday breathing. For starters, it's individual and replicates the way you actually did breathe during birth, in a sympathetic or parasympathetic mode depending on what was going on. In my case, it was sympathetic, so the breathing that kicked in was unbelievably fast -- perhaps twenty times the rate of "ordinary" -- so with "ordinary" breathing I would hyperventilate in two minutes going like that, but in the systemic memory context it would go on for up to two hours on autopilot, with no signs of hyperventilation. And it was not only yin-exhale yang-inhale but like a wave up and down the stomach, naturally rising on exhale, falling on inhale. That's because you breathe through the umbilical cord as a fetus. Your stomach follows the pressure of the fluid -- in on inhale, out on exhale. Because that's real prenatal breathing they're trying to emulate. It is indeed, but yoga has its moments too. There's much about yoga that is designed to replicate the conditions of the fetus in the womb and, especially, in the process of being born. Shoulders back is one of the positions you invariably go through while being born. If it is a complicated birth (as most modern birth is, due to the parents' less-than-stellar health), one might get stuck in this position for minutes, hours, or even days. This is horribly traumatic, as well as many other difficult positions the fetus might get stuck in. Yoga is actually a therapeutic modality that works with repressed traumatic memories -- not of the neocortex (which wasn't even there while this was going on) but of the body. Reliving an unconscious memory consciously is therapeutic. Too bad yoga doesn't connect all the dots, only some of them...

Yipee! Cat power! Welcome back, don't be a stray... um, stranger.

My body may be external to you but it's pretty internal to me. Regardless... you said shen-qi-jing is incorrect, I said tomato. So did my teachers. To each their own.

Thank you. It wasn't a choice. If I knew how to be happy without being healthy, I would probably never do any practices to begin with. But a side effect of a really good practice might be that once you're happier and healthier, you might feel you want something else? Happiness is not terribly reliable... what makes you happy today might lose its magic, what makes you unhappy might not ask you if you want it in your life... here's a quote I have handy: "Forget about likes and dislikes. They are of no consequence. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness." ---George Bernard Shaw

Well, "shen" and "qi" processes of your example are both shen, neither of these is qi. Intention is derived from one of the five shens. If you don't go down the rabbit hole, you will not access the qi level, much less the jing level. The rabbit hole is way deep... I once talked to a guy who told me it took him 28 years to dissolve to the level of his tongue. THEN it got easier. The thing is, people come up with many ideas but few practices that affect them on the level of the DNA. A jing-level process does many things, some not so mysterious, some very mysterious, but what it affects on the atomic level is anyone's guess while on the molecular level, to wit on the level of the DNA, there's got to be observable metabolic change for us to talk of a jing-level process. E.g., to give a personal example, I grew almost two inches at the age of 40, my body temperature (which used to be elevated to subfebrile figures for all of my prior life) dropped three degrees Farenheit and stayed there permanently (this means a different metabolic rate, lower oxidation without loss of efficiency, i.e. it didn't cause nor was caused by things like low thyroid, it actually promotes guiltless eating of high-calorie foods I love with no associated weight gain, which is one sign of an efficient thyroid), my eye color changed from hazel to hazel-green to dark brown, and my ability to endure stress with measurable stability of heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, immune functions, etc., improved about ten times compared to what it was before. These are jing processes. The very beginning thereof... What about you -- what did the brain fluid actually do?

If things disappear without having graced one's consciousness with any understanding of what they were, where they came from and what they have to do with you, that's very mystical. The non-mystical way to dissolve obstacles is exactly the way you have acquired them: through living into them. Anyway, I worship water, so if I start talking about water, everybody will be sorry they got me started.

What kind of obstacles can be dissolved by a fluid that has no meaning? Calcium deposits maybe? Certainly not traumatic memories? Shen, qi, jing -- these are the medium and message of meaningful change.

Fun? try it sometime: wear a bearskin, roar, swat bees while stealing honey

That's to establish reverse breathing, which is a fetal breathing pattern with many alchemical benefits. It is neither natural nor unnatural -- it's an earlier developmental stage, something that once was natural for all, recaptured via practice. Doing so is going to recapture some other peculiarities of that earlier stage, the xiantian stage. In one of the systems I've been taught, you actually use your stomach muscles on inhale, in certain specific rhythmic patterns. You do this for a while and you are then taught how to use the muscles of the pores of your skin in a similar manner. You do that for a while and then you learn to open and close them at will. So you open them wider and breathe through your skin when you're somewhere nice and fresh, and you close them shut when you're in a polluted environment. They say you can't contract any illness if you have mastered this.

So then why do you and me have to learn to type, gain access to a computer, and pay for electricity in order to either express or refute this idea?

Shoot the moon, then some gray aliens come visit ass probe inventors

Te is part of inTEgrity

I've checked out Muktananda, who got shaktipat from his guru and then indeed kundalini arose. Didn't look like shaktipat dissolved any obstacles in kundalini's way for him, the way Water would. The guy had to endure it gradually burning through the obstacles, in a culture that understood and supported the process. In ours, he would be locked up.

However, all taoist classics have this to say about tao's relationship to the human world: "In the human world, tao has been destroyed." Sources: Yuan-dao, Tao Te Ching, Wen-tzu.

I'll have to think about it. By the way, have you noticed how a gentleman/lady, etc., interactions get them to assume more basic roles -- parent/child? sometimes they take turns exchanging roles, sometimes one is always the parent and the other one the child in terms of power, and there's no other way to have a relationship with anyone? That's because we all have a mother, and mother/child is our model of a "relationship" -- with anyone or anything we'll ever encounter. Not all have a gentleman/lady or a husband/wife in their lives, this is not where one learns about power transactions... this is where the lessons learned earlier get applied. Laozi has many things to say on the subject (in fact it's the main, if not the only, subject of TTC) but it is impossible to learn from a book. I learned it from a plant teacher who also showed me how difficult it is. It's easy to not abuse power if you have none. Try handling it responsibly when you have some. When you have more than some. When your power has no limits. This is the core of spirituality: if you can't play with a small toy without breaking it, you won't ever get a bigger toy to play with. "Toy"meaning "relationship with a being whose power is less than your own" in this context. Abuse power in such a relationship and spiritually it's all over, baby blue.

The energy is called "water" but not in the wet everyday sense, in the sense of the Water phase of the wuxing, Five Phases, type of qi you're activating. (Kundalini is the wuxing counterpart of "fire." The dance of the whirling dervishes, a spiritual transformation practice of certain sects of mystical Islam, is an "earth" practice. Shamanism, with plant and animal teachers accessed by many methods, is a "wood" practice. Pranayama is a "metal" practice.) The downward-flowing process of transformation is known as shen to qi to jing conversion, or condensation. The systems working with it are some taoist internal-alchemical modalities; yang feng shui that uses the downward flow as needed; knowledge of downward energies is very important in yin feng shui but I don't know much yin feng shui except it's all about avoiding these (downward flow is good for the living, not good for the dead); some methods of TCM and external alchemy; and some shamanic practices (e.g., the "flower bath" of the rainforest).

Lucky you. I tend to think in long foggy sequences with explosive bursts of crystal clarity in between, so no one understands what I'm trying to say to them a lot of the time.