Taomeow

I've studied both physics and taoist sciences, and the resulting paradigm I gleaned is that of co-creation, not of a creative consciousness breathing animation into its passive recipients (whether human or animal). In other words, no higher consciousness can dream me up unless I am real.

I second Ujai to chill, and am opposed to deliberately induced "buzz" breathing of any kind. Spontaneous -- through assorted recapitulation venues (systemic body-inclusive memory retrieval practices) -- arises as fetal breathing, involves the kind of hyperventilation that is not sustainable outside one's own systemic fetal memory context (you would faint in five minutes) and can last as long as it chooses to -- the longest was four hours in a breakthrough session about ten years ago, since then, never longer than forty minutes, and often only forty seconds. This can't be forced. Anything that can trigger this mustn't be forced. Breathing as some other creature out of the context of "being" that creature breeds monsters. (A monster is a creature comprized of different incompatible ones -- e.g., part human part wolf makes a werewolf; part human part bull, the Minotaurus; bat and cat, a gargoyle; a combo of several humans in one, the Frankenstein's monster; part human part reptilian, our current government; and so on.)

You're living in a dream world, Neo?

Being perceived by the world starts at exactly the same time we start perceiving the world. Did you notice when you came into existence in the world? Do you remember when, do you remember how it felt? What about being perceived by the world? Did you notice when the world noticed you? Did your mother notice you first, or maybe a doctor? Do you remember when, do you remember how it felt? Do you perceive being perceived? Do you notice mirrors? Do you notice your reflection in the mirrors? Do you ever feel that some of them are distorted and can't reflect you correctly? How does it feel to be reflected in a distorted mirror? How does it feel to be reflected in the mirror that mirrors you accurately? If what we perceive, as they like to say today citing authorities in the field of quantum physics, among others, is influenced and modified by the very process of observation -- what does this process do to us when WE are the object of observation, when we are the 'material' of others' perceptions?.. ???

I bet he's fed commercial dog food... or he wouldn't fart. Dogs I used to know who ate what tao has intended for them to eat never farted. His fart is a message from tao. It says, "dogs are made by mommy tao to eat raw meat, and commercial dog food is made of cow dung, corn, and toxic chemicals." Every moment is choke-full of information -- if we ignore it we are more likely than not to hurt ourselves, others, or both.

Wayfarer, yes, sensitivity and responsiveness is it! In fact, that's what consciousness IS if you ask me... not "thinking" or "non-thinking" confined in either case to one's isolated head but sensitive and responsive interactions with the world using one's whole being -- body, mind, soul, integration, "outgoing" and "incoming" perceptions alike. A whole, integral (or integrated through practice) consciousness is able to accurately perceive other beings, entities, phenomena, energies. A fragmented consciousness is numbed out to them and either can't feel others at all (except through the crudest of interactions), or can't help misunderstanding and misinterpreting (distorted mirrors!) their intent. I don't think human consciousness is evolving though... I think it's degrading, and fast. We used to be sensitive and responsive as a species, naturally, and what we think of today as special, extraordinary, magical abilities used to be the natural manifestation of our once-functional sensitivity to the energies of the world and the resulting ability to respond to them and interact with them with competent precision. Restoring this lost state of being and some of these lost abilities (the more the merrier) is what taoist cultivation is really about, by the way...

Do you remember at what age it started? Or were you like that from birth? And if not, when and why did you choose to become separated/divorced from the external? Did the external world somehow fail you? Hurt you?.. Cool exercise! Which party do you mean by "observer" in your last sentence, the students in the circle or the "stalker"? I wonder what would happen if the "stalker" was instructed to stalk the people in the circle with love, admiration, blessings, delight... Would he or she be able to generate enough of these for others to feel?.. And if not, would it mean we are better at projecting and/or perceiving (or both) malicious intent than benevolence?..

I agree. That's one reason so many genuine taoist practices are difficult, and some, outright impossibly so! If it's easy-nice-relaxing-fun-bliss, etc., it might be enough "for now," but a nice relaxed now is never guaranteed fifteen minutes from now... let alone fifteen months, or fifteen years. I believe it's a good idea to at least try to be prepared to as many things as possible with something better up our sleeve than panic, helplessness, and incompetence... I also happen to believe that courage is the greatest virtue of them all -- everything else is hinged on it...

I'm truly, deeply sorry you had to live through this. Children are always right no matter how they deal with adults' insanity. I am always on the child's side, under all circumstances and for all purposes. When we are totally helpless and powerless against the parents' will jammed down our throats (whether harshly or gently) we do what we have to do in order to survive -- and, yes, repress our feelings, free expression of our true feelings, and eventually (or right away) our perceptions -- of everything, including our own feelings. In other words, reality. Our own reality. It's never the child's fault when she has to run away from reality -- wherever, however, inward, outward, into the unconscious, into the dream world, into a book, a TV program, a self-image of wisdom and invincibility... She has no choice. The trick so easy to fail at that most do is to stop being a child once we are no longer children. My "prescription for sanity" -- "know thyself" -- concerns adults, or people willing and able to review and reprogram the coping mechanisms they inherited from their childhood. It's not about embracing suffering, it's about embracing a chance to be real...

Most people dispose of painful moments by splitting their consciousness away from them, and in the process sacrifice long-term health for short-term relief. In order to heal, the body, the mind, the soul need to know they have been wounded. "Healing" by way of ignoring the wound, "forgetting," pretending what is happening isn't happening and what has happened never happened, is never complete, the wound is still there, patched over hastily, and so we proceed to accumulate dysfunction upon patched-over dysfunction from thousands of moments of incomplete healing. As a wise (incidentally taoist) physical therapist who almost dislocated my arm in the process of treating (successfully) a bad case of tennis elbow put it, "the way out of pain is through pain." If you seek a way out of pain through something else, chances are the labirynth of pain will never be left behind, you will just hide in a dead-end "safe" niche INSIDE it... Many, many people live in such niches. I might take an aspirin roughly once or twice in a decade, and tell the dentist I don't mind feeling the pain but do mind numbing it out with a "shot" (messes me up for a week, as opposed to suffering for five minutes). I normally dispose of the flu within hours by focusing my full awareness on how it makes me feel.

This one is easy! I believe the primordial teachings originate exactly where the tradition (something "all" schools and sects of genuine taoism agree on regardless of their differences in other respects) puts them. I.e. they originate with Fu Xi, the "founder" of taoism universally acknowledged as such by all schools and sects, to whom the most profound truth of all existence was revealed in the form of celestially transmitted maps, Hetu and Luoshu. From these, he developed the concepts of wuji, taiji, yin and yang. From these, King Wen and his son the Duke of Zhou developed the I Ching. From the I Ching, the rest of the taoist method of approaching (and, importantly, emulating! not just contemplating!) reality was developed over the centuries. I don't see any of the later developments as an "improvement" though -- Hetu, Luoshu and the original (circular, and with no verbal comments) I Ching are absolutely perfect, divinely and effortlessly perfect, in no need of any improvements, developments, or re-interpretations. But then, the general belief that any of our "progress" has been about a change "from worse to better" is recent (about 150 years old, originating in Germany and incorporated into educational systems worldwide through monied shaping thereof); whereas for the rest of human history prior to that "adjustment" the belief held universally by all cultures and all peoples was that our current state constitutes progressive degradation from once-experienced "golden age," a view shared by, but in no way limited to, traditional taoist teachings. So technological civilization, which did improve something -- namely, our machines -- was never before believed to have improved on anything BUT machines, and in fact was viewed as a sign of degradation in and of itself, of people wasting their spirit on "improving" all the wrong things... but I digress. My own "area of preference" is the original, earliest taoism and its shamanic roots. A lot of proto-taoist shamanic practices (as well as the word "shaman" itself, alghough this is not the word the shamans themselves use there, they use the word "kam") come from the Siberia-Altai region on the border of modern China, Russia and Mongolia, and some of the shamanic proto-taoist roots still survive there, though hidden quite well... That's my place of origin and home to one of my teachers, who is not a "taoist" but a lineage holder of a tradition pre-dating taosim and feeding into some of its practices and expertise. So, far as I'm concerned, the earliest taoism plus shamanic proto-taoism (which is, in its turn, as ancient as human existence itself) is the starting place for it all, and that's the place worth exploring quite thoroughly... just like reading a book or watching a movie is something you want to do "from the beginning," not from any random wherever place. And that's where a teacher comes into the picture... for without one, a modern human is more likely than not to just flip "the book of existence" to any random wherever page and proceed to believe that whatever is written on THAT page is it... is all he or she needs to "get." Alas, it is seldom if ever the case... This is not to say that one doesn't need to do the leg work and meet the teacher halfway... yes, that's the prerequisite, and the learning you (and others) talk about, the learning from trees, animals, "unenlightened mere mortals," everything -- IS the leg work... but it's not the beginning nor the end of "taoist cultivation," a rather specific (as opposed to "just learning to be a decent human being") endeavour... As for Laozi appearing to the founder of the Celestial Masters, I don't know, I wasn't there! However, the venue is quite traditional, some transmissions (few, but quite a few) have reportedly been instantaneous and did come in vision and dreams. There's hundreds of such accounts in history, and not only in taoist history. So it's quite possible. However, even after such revelation, the work, the practical work (e.g., of creating and perpetuating something like the Celestial Masters sect) is still to be done... one doesn't sit back and bask in his or her know-it-all enlightenment, one still does the leg work... This, too, is something a teacher might help with. Most people are naturally prone to homeostasis, to maintaining whatever status quo, and their status quo is not necessarily in accord with tao, in fact the opposite is the case more often than not... Thank you for a good conversation!

This is doable but it's a rather advanced skill, believe it or not. The key is the body, control of the body first, of the mind later. When we read, the body automatically directs an increased blood supply to the eyes and the brain. When we eat, the body automatically directs an increased blood supply to the digestive tract. If someone who doesn't have the skill of the voluntary control of one's blood flow reads and eats at the same time, both the brain and the stomach don't get enough, and both the reading comprehension and the food digestion suffer. In order to multitask like that without impairing your body's natural functions, you would need to have conscious control over increasing, then splitting in two opposite directions, your blood, or at least oxygenation of your blood, and that requires control of qi that moves your blood, and that requires control of yi that moves your qi. So... when you have that, you can eat, read, drive a car, and sleep all at the same time without sacrificing either the efficiency of the task or your own health. (Mantak Chia, e.g., asserts that his brain wave activity as measured by researchers indicates that he can have a brain wave pattern of someone awake and alert and fully equipped to, e.g., drive a car simultaneously combined with another one, that of someone peacefully sleeping. He can get his brain to "multitask" like that.) But unless and until you do, it's far better to focus on one task at a time. If you start training yourself to multitask efficiently, there's different ways to go about it, my favorite is taiji which teaches the body to switch between "heavy" and "light," "full" and "empty," "yin" and "yang" all the time. You may have, e.g., a simultaneous 50% dantien focus, 5% "empty leg" focus, 20% "full leg" focus, 2% left hand focus, 3% right hand focus... and refine it even further as you go -- 0,5% focus on the pericardium meridian (in Chen), 0,25% focus on each little toe, and so on.

Absolutely, Taoist81, you have my respect for formulating your ideas courteously and thoughtfully. You also have my respectful disagreement -- I simply don't believe that all the sages who repeated time and time again that in the human society "tao has been destroyed" were wrong. Laozi, Zhuangzi, Wen-tsu, Yuandao, Ta Chuan -- they all assert this is the case. This is also my personal assessment. This is also why taoist cultivation, the antidote to this state of affairs in the human society, has been around for thousands of years. The local, thousands-of-years-long, case of "tao has been destroyed" obviously has no bearing on the universal principle of tao's eternal and indestructible nature, but we (taoist cultivators) differentiate between Xian Tian (tao-in-stillness) and Hou Tian (tao-in-motion), and our "problem" is with Hou Tian, the world of manifest phenomena, i.e. the actual as-is human world of here-now. Sure, we have no problem with Xian Tian (the unmanifest world) and don't need a teacher in order to become reabsorbed in the universal tao when we die -- this is, more or less, guaranteed. But we do have a problem with how we live, the generic "we," and that's something that I haven't seen anyone being able to align and harmonize with tao without a teacher. Theoretically, it is possible. But the sages didn't see any such cases even two thousand years ago... let alone now. So, basically, the bulk of my respect goes to the traditional teachers and traditional teachings, which means no disrespect towards anyone who isn't into that, for whatever reason...

Taoist transmissions don't "teach tao." They teach how to not fly in her face. Nature is the best teacher -- for those who have natural (non-civilized) mom and dad, are born into a natural life, and proceed to live a natural life in a natural environment which they approach naturally, the way they learned to from their natural parents and their natural tribe that are all an organic part of nature. Everybody else seems to say "nature" when they mean "whatever I, personally, choose to believe, do, or say." And whatever they, personally, choose to believe, do, or say does fly in the face of tao unless they had natural parents and were born into a natural life, etc.. Nature is the most demanding teacher of them all, by the way. I lived in the wilderness for months on end, for years repeatedly, and so I'm talking from experience, not from an armchair philosophy. The very first thing nature teaches a civilized gal when it's for real is how unprepared we are to understand her and to learn from her. Only then, only when you fall on your knees and proclaim, "I'm not worthy!" -- only then will she start taking you seriously as a student. At least that's how she approached teaching ME. What about you -- are you talking from experience? What have you learned from nature, and how exactly? Did you, too, try to live in harmony with her and found out things about yourself you didn't know, and things about nature you didn't know? Or did you take a stroll in the park?

To the Immortals Lu and Ch'ang, Immortal Sun Bu-er, lineage taoists Eva Wong and Lu K'uan Yu and Mantak Chia and Stephen T. Chang and Bruce Kumar Frantzis and Deng Ming-Dao and my live in-person teachers (of taijiquan, Xuan Kong, Mandarin, talismanic calligraphy), among others. They all assert, to quote one of the immortals, "even if you have wings, without a teacher you won't learn to fly." What about you -- who do you listen to?

She came to the entrance at night and read the sign that said, Violators will pay a heavy fine. She blinked and read the word higher up that said, The Zoo. She frowned and told the moonlight, "Gee, I didn't have a clue!" She fumbled for a jade key and said, this seems to fit, this key that makes all locks on all cages obsolete. When animals were leaving, the sirens all went off! She blew a silent whistle and made all fake voices stop. She rode a mighty elephant into the land of vines, and all the talking parrots were reading all the signs -- The sign that said, Be brave, the sign that said, Be free, the sign that said, Be saved and the sign that said, Just be. © Bei AiLian

Traditionally, there's no self-taught taoism, it is transmitted (not just "taught"! -- teaching pre-supposes informing the mind and/or training the body while transmission implies educating the spirit). It is transmitted master to student, not priest or writer or professor to audience. Does one need a teacher? Most people prefer to improvise, because a good/real teacher is hard to find, or because a good/real teacher doesn't want them, or because a good/real teacher means discipline and lots of people dislike THAT. And even if they don't dislike it, without a teacher it's rather likely one will spend too much effort on figuring out the fairly obvious and minor and miss out on the not-so-obvious and major. It's like that with taijiquan (e.g.) all over the place. One touch from the teacher at the right time, with the right explanation -- and three years of struggle with a particular move just dissolve, and I "get it" on the spot! I've heard of a teacher who was asked a question about taijiquan: how long will it take me to learn from you, master, before I'm a master myself? -- a student inquired. Thirty years, was the response. Oh... but what if I work very-very hard on it myself? Every day, for hours?.. Then about one hundred and fifty, the master replied.

Craig, yeah, I know, I played this game! A long time ago... The additional kick was provided by the fact that the people I played with were all highly educated recent immigrants with very limited command of English. You could fool them with "cat" or "dog" (almost) but anything Latin-derived rang a bell, so made-up definitions could get arcane -- and hilarious. I like to play a word game with myself where I trace a word to its "elemental forces of origin." I posted once about "remember" being the opposite of "dismember" -- which makes "remember" transpire as meaning "make whole again." Or take "understand" -- it means "stand UNDER," I picture knowledge like an umbrella over the head of someone who under-stands... shielding her from the rest of the perceivable phenomena. Or "deserve" -- SERVE jumps out at me, obviously a servant's attitude, a slave's virtue... And so on.

I thought at first Om- was derived from "omnis," the Latin for "everything," and then -Phalo = related to the phallus, and then -Skepsis = mistrustful or critical attitude... so Om Phallo Skepsis must mean something like "universal mistrust of the male principle."

Been re-reading a book on shamanism and came across a story told by an Evenk shaman circa 1900 to a famous polar explorer. The story was a narrative of the shaman's whole life, beginning since before his birth (which was a stillbirth, reversed by complex magic of the then-shamanka, female shaman, of the tribe). Basically, the efficiency of the magic that was to keep the dead-at-birth boy alive depended on the observation of many intricate and difficult taboos imposed by the shamanka on the boy himself as he grew up, his family, and the whole tribe. There's a detailed account of their strict observance by everyone up until the boy's adulthood, even though many had to do with assorted prohibitions on food intake -- and this, among polar hunters (whose daily "bread," so to speak -- 95% of their food depended on a successful hunt for the most "uncooperative" large polar animals -- was extremely hard to get). Got me thinking... do any of us observe any taboos for any reasons? Taoism has many... does anyone pay attention?

People freely mistake superstitions based on nothing in particular for genuine taboos and vice versa, because to be confused is human. But genuine taboos are not based on superstitions at all, and neither are they rooted in common sense. They are rooted in magical and mystical/spiritual competence, and are actually axioms of science-by-other-means, the kind done the traditional sympathetic-magical/alchemical way. Here's a few examples: the taoist prohibition on self-mutilation (this would include tattoos and Botox and Lasik and plastic surgeries, by the way). The reason for the taboo can be found in the taoist anatomy and physiology which includes the human body into the realm of spirit -- some of its shens dissipate after death but others don't, and the problem with these is that they carry the acquired (or lost) parts to other realms and other lifetimes, to any and all existences and non-existences that lie ahead. So interfering with the body in this manner is understood as interfering, quite tangibly, with the soul, and not just in this life but in the afterlife to come as well. So what might be mistaken for "moral judgement" or "common sense" regarding the reasons for this particular taboo is in reality the continuation of magical expertise, of the taboo's creators proficiency in the realm of the spirits. The taboo on disturbing ancestral graves (a common one for all "uncivilized" peoples on earth) is of a similar origin -- to interfere with the resting-in-peace state and/or wholeness of the body's remains is understood as a blatant interference into the life of the soul that used to be attached to this body and, partially but inevitably, still IS! -- and is still connected to this dead person's living-today descendants -- in ways more mysterious but no less real than the way you are connected to your ancestors through your genes inherited from them. Yin feng shui, e.g. (that has been practiced in China for at least a couple thousand years), i.e. feng shui for the graves (as opposed to yang feng shui for homes and businesses), has multiple taboos all of which effectively prohibit making the remains uncomfortable in any manner whatsoever. I've seen an opinion that the Han people who constitute the overwhelming majority in China, which makes them by far the most populous people on Earth today, used to be a tribe no different from numerous other tribes on the territory of ancient China in anything except their burial rituals, and that that's what has made the historic difference in their long-term fate. Their closest historic competitors used to hang their coffins in the hope of assuring the dead relative's ascending to heaven or something. The coffins were thus frequently disturbed by, e.g., adverse weather events and what-not. That people, once Han's powerful rival, is long gone and forgotten. A single taboo that was meticulously observed by a single tribe for a long enough time seems to have shaped the world as we know it...

For a dart board, the Circular I Ching is ideal! You can simply throw six darts instead of tossing three coins six times. (A pic of the Circular I Ching adorns the upper left corner of the forum whose link is attached to my signature. You can make a dart board like this yourself if you like... I occasionally paint the Circular I Ching as part of my calligraphy practice, with brush and ink.)

Seadog, Ryan, Sunshine, Xeno, thanks for your generous words and your thoughts! Trunk, I'll have to dedicate a separate post to answering your question... maybe more than one, memory is looooong and vita brevis Spyrelx, jing is not "gas," if you follow the "taoist canon" (which is what exactly in you opinion, by the way? All major sects have their own, which other sects may or may not accept. The things they ALL accept, the common basics which I like to refer to every chance I get, are Hetu, Luoshu, I Ching, yin-yang, qi, ganying... and that's that. The rest is... one sect's canon and another sect's herecy. Go figure. There's taoists who believe Laozi was his own mother, I can give you the references. Is this canonical? Yes, believe it or not. There's others who accept him as a deity. Is this kosher? Absolutely. And still others don't think he ever lived to begin with. Is this the traditional view? Yes, every bit of it. Anyone who's after taoist wisdom better get ready to process more than one paradox! ) As I was saying, "gas" is not built into the very structure of the car, "gas" you can, and have to, keep replenishing. That's your metaphor for "postnatal qi," or just qi for short. The ignition, however, and the key that gets it to "come alive" (provided there's gas in the tank of course), IS the built-in structure... and that's your jing, or just "prenatal qi" for long. Now you want to replenish it instead of losing it -- sheesh, I wish it was as easy as replenishing "gas" in your car! but no... you have to know the overall maintenance of the overall car in order to begin to control your jing, there's no magic fluid you can put in (unlike the situation with gas) to "replenish" a busted ignition, a fried transmission... OK, I'm about to run out of car metaphors, I am fairly technophobic and utterly car-clueless, to tell you the truth... my son had to explain to me why I need a "tune up" for my car by resorting to the TCM metaphors I could understand ("it's like prevention, you know, it's like what you do for your body..." ) As for "withering away," that's the farthest thing from my personal intentions. I humbly but rather stubbornly follow the classic pursuit of the Three Treasures -- perfection, nondecay, immortality. To venture once again into the car metaphor, I make sure there's gas, I make sure I change the oil, I make sure I rotate the tires... and I make sure I remember where I put my car keys... ...without which all of the other steps would be useless hassle, don't you think?..

Just a quickie for now, perhaps more later: jing IS memory; memory IS energy -- ordered energy as opposed to chaotic energy; Jung and his concepts have nothing whatsoever to do with anything I was talking about. (I don't think much of him anyway, and if anyone says "Freud" on top of that, so help me, I'm gonna scream!) I am a traditionalist by design, I don't care much for anything "new and improved," anything at all. I have two taoist teachers of unbroken lineage going nineteen generations back in the case of one and more than that in the case of the other. While I read enough to assert I'm familiar with most "taoist literature that has been translated into English and Russian" (and am learning Chinese in order to be eventually able to do better than that), much of what I know (not much, really, but more than enough for most taoist discussions that might ever take place in the 21st century...) is not from books. Of course when I say something that seems to contradict what you know you are welcome to take it or leave it depending on whether what I say resonates with what you perceive. However, in case it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm "very very very wrong" -- it might simply mean I'm "very very very differently cultivated." By the way, I do practice female sexual alchemy, but I don't see how I could benefit from it if I didn't know that jing is memory and memory is ordered energy. What would be the use of cultivating something I don't understand (and I don't if I don't remember what it is -- I mean, in my every cell, not in my head!) that comes from I don't know where (and I don't if I don't remember -- I don't mean as a "concept," I mean just as pragmatically, doably, bodily, as you remember what moves to make in order to get your car keys -- and exactly your car keys, not someone else's car keys or some random piece of metal or wood or sh..t or 'pure energy' -- when you intend to take a ride...)?.. "The pattern of tao is motion, and the pattern of this motion is return." If you don't remember where your car keys are, moreover, if you don't remember you NEED a key to start a car, moreover, if you don't remember what a key IS, moreover, if you don't remember how to hold objects in your hand, moreover, if you don't remember you have a hand... and so on... then of course you can fully believe in your head that you're going on a journey when you sit behind the wheel and imagine stuff going by... only problem is, the car won't really start. Jing is your ability to start it... fully dependent on your ability to remember how. (Again, not in the head, and not as a "concept," whether Jungian or anyone else's, but as your own cellular memory attached to that of all life that went before -- in your body, and beyond and before your body... Jing ain't no chopped liver, you can't slap a label on it -- "energy, pure and simple" -- and have it pinned down. Nooooo waaaaay... Pure and simple energy is... what? What IS pure and simple energy?.. )

One of my favorite subjects, jing is, so I'll jump right in... The opinion that jing is lost through sexual orgasm is one of those generalizations that are somewhat true some of the time for some of the people. Jing is not limited in any way to "sexual energy," contrary to popular belief. Jing is our cosmic memory. As opposed to our personal memory, which is more accessible to some of us some of the time. The healthier the shens, the more complete the personal memory. The healthier the jing, the more complete the cosmic memory. Far as human jing is concerned, its main function is to remember how to be fully human. As one of the holy sages put it, "To be fully human is this: to stand like a human, to sit like a human, to walk like a human, and to lie down like a human." Anyone whose bodymind "remembers" how to do these things as a human being will suffer no abnormal loss of jing through any human activities. Anyone who doesn't will keep losing it through ANY activities, not just sexual intercourse. Human sex, like all other human activities, has parameters of "normality" and "balance" that are determined correctly by an overall-balanced system, and incorrectly by an imbalanced one. Modern people are conceived, born, and raised in all manner of unnatural/unbalanced/abnormal ways, so they lose rather than gain some jing right at conception, and more while they are growing, and more as they proceed to live a subsequent life already predicated on distorted development and growth processes. Addressing this problem via sexual or asexual practices is about as useful as addressing the ocean with a teaspoon. So... basically, I wouldn't bother. If one is engaged in too much sex, the problem is not sex, the problem is the distorted pathways (lost memory!) that cause one to mistakenly process needs, feelings and drives not sexual in their origin via sexual release. (E.g., anger. Forbid the physical expression of anger to a small child and the release will be sought later by other means. Or love. Deprive a small child of normal everyday physical contact expressing closeness, acceptance, love, and safety -- and the fulfillment of an unfulfilled need will be sought via sexual touch later, and misunderstood for sexual needs and feelings.) If one is engaged in too little, chances are it's a symptom of a weak jing to begin with, not of a particularly enlightened state... but how much is too much and how little is too little is quite individual.