Iliketurtles

As I explained previously, I have not mentioned my school in hopes of not having to deal with trolling. Teachers die. It is a thing that happens. Teachers take students and pass the torch to them. We can trace the lineage back directly. We also have video recordings. In regards to a living teacher, we do have a living teacher. Your words sound like just because Pai Mei is dead, his teachings become invalid, and the next generation isn't qualified to understand what he taught. Go tell that to Beatrix Kiddo, when she slaps you with the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique. I am not sure what more to tell you here, but it sure sounds like one of the worst cases of sour grapes I've ever heard of. Anyway I would sincerely appreciate it if you would wrap this up, so the original topic can get back on track. Thanks!

"Can you honestly argue the point that you have an art per se." Yes. "as I understand it, all that is available of X" "X is far more spiritual than you realize.." I haven't mentioned my school here to prevent trolling. "X is dead, as is Y...Z is dissociated and so you are working with something entirely out of context...." That's a thing that happens. Teachers die. They take students, and they pass the torch. That is how all this works for all arts. We have video of our teacher giving instruction, and we have students that studied directly under him, and taught many of us directly. You can keep on with your mental gymnastics though, if it makes you feel better about all of it. "Unless you have a teacher who you can really interact with, ask questions as you are going on your journey and they can demonstrate a level of skill sufficient to show mastery over a certain set of skills..." We do. "you are moreso a dabbler than a student" I do not appreciate the hostility here. "X is far more spiritual than you realize.." I will have to disagree with you here. In the common sense of the word spiritual the art I study is not. It is purely a technology and absolutely nothing more. "thinking that spirituality = woo shows quite a lack of understanding regards the matter" Most things which can be regarded as spiritual are nothing more than woo, but you are certainly free to disagree here. "Learning anything from a lineage does require blessing to some extent..." You can learn to light a fire with a bow tool, and no blessing is required. "rituals gather power over time...initiation is key here..." "things are done to the energetic/spiritual bodies...connections are formed.. "stamps" if you would are imprinted...its all quite complex" This is the sort of woo I was talking about. If magical thinking is your thing more power to you. I prefer what I consider to be good evidence and results any day. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" Certainly this is a good observation. I try to be as fluid as is possible about what I believe, and I constantly re-evaluate based on available evidence. When I find what I consider to be good evidence I try to question current paradigms that I hold and re-evaluate them in light of the new evidence. As of last year some new evidence surfaced which forced me to re-evaluate something which I had previously disregarded. I don't get it right all the time, no one does but it is important to me to be able to justify and defend beliefs I do hold as true with what I consider the best evidence available to me. I personally need what I consider to be good evidence to feel grounded in reality, and I am very uncomfortable believing anything at all without it. Certainly it's not perfect, but it seems the least bad strategy for getting closer to the truth than any other method I am aware of. We all make maps of reality, some people choose to believe a lot of silly things that aren't true. I prefer to make my map of reality using what I consider the best evidence available to me, that seems reasonable, down to earth and grounded.

Perhaps if you need a Level 4 Usui Reiki Attunement Certificate (TM) to hang on your wall, then something like that might require blessings, permission, and perhaps a lot of money. Learning to make a fire with a bow tool, not so much. With a pure technology it either works as described or it doesn't. Learning a pure technology does not require a teacher's blessing or permission. I personally try to focus on what I consider to be good evidence and results, and so the practices I am interested in gravitate towards those. I find spiritual woo, and similar trappings repulsive. I see the results people who pursue those practices get and it isn't something that interests me.

I am sure there are a lot of spiritual systems that require transmission. The system I study however is purely a technology, and perhaps even anti-spiritual at least as far as the word spiritual is commonly used nowadays. For such systems either it works as described, produces results, or it doesn't. For example the bow tool example earlier, anyone can learn to make a fire via friction, it just takes dedication, and a lot of elbow grease. You don't need a spiritual transmission because this is just a technology and it isn't spiritual. I personally prefer systems that have decoupled the "woo" factor, and focus purely on technology. No need to philosophize and study hexagrams, bones, visualize and chant mantras. Just do the work, and realize the results. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

If my teacher taught me to make fire with a bow tool, tinder and kindling and he specifically told me I was not to teach other people this skill without his permission, even if I did so it wouldn't make the technology of the practice any less effective. For practices like this that are more of a technology, and less of a spiritual practice it either works as described or it doesn't.

“Those who know don’t talk. Those who talk don’t know." There are several books written about the art I study available on amazon. They were written by charlatans which contain nothing but disinformation. There are tons of people on Facebook who put together fake practice guide PDFs and label it as instruction for our school. One of the challenges I find is that new students eagerly absorb this disinformation and accept it as true, but later are unwilling to admit that they got duped. It seems to be a weird quirk of the human psyche, we must defend at all costs what we learned as true, even the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Learning things is easy, but admitting you learned false information and accepted it as true is so difficult it might as well be impossible for most people. For every person that knows what they are talking about, there are a million who do not. These million voices are all screaming much louder than the one that has a clue. It is impossible to transmit accurate information in such an environment, it is like trying to speak softly in front of a waterfall. Another problem is that for whatever reason the majority of people attracted to things of this nature are not really firing on all cylinders, they lack the faculties to discern reality from fantasy and as such love to collect everything with no regard to it's legitimacy, and they also love to play the role of a teacher and re-transmit all the garbage they have collected with their own unique "eclectic" spin on it. You wind up with something like a game of telephone or Chinese whispers like this:

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Get a teacher.

I am not sure where your lost item is, but I had a bunch of papers near my nightstand at home, and mine was in a stack of papers.

Also I like your username!

Empty space is anything but empty our common sense is that the void of outer space lacks substance there's nothing there but common sense is wrong. Empty space is actually not empty at all it's the exact opposite of empty it's as full as anything can possibly be. Hawking radiation theorized by Stephen Hawking occurs at the event horizon of a black hole. Empty space is filled to the brim with pairs of electrons and positrons that have fused as one what hawking has theorized is that the event horizon the gravitational field is so strong that these pairs of electron and positrons are ripped apart, preferentially the black hole absorbs the positrons and in so doing decreases the mass of the black hole over time the black hole will evaporate as a result of this and it will seed the universe with electrons. To give an analogy imagine that space is like a perfectly flat and level patch of ground now if you pull out your shovel you dig a hole as a result of digging the hole you'll have a mound of dirt if you return the mound of dirt to the hole you're back to where you started it's a zero sum situation. Physicist Lawrence Krauss in his book a universe from nothing explains how given infinite time that a random quantum vacuum fluctuation would happen with such intensity that it could generate an entire universe worth of matter and antimatter. The Mahayana Buddhists believed that the void or Shunyata was the origin of all matter and phenomenon. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-2650-5_13 For nearly two decades before 1972, Professor John Wheeler pursued a research program in physics that was predicated on a monistic ontology which W. K. Clifford had envisioned in 1870 and which Wheeler (1962b, p. 225) epitomized in the following words: “There is nothing in the world except empty curved space. Matter, charge, electromagnetism, and other fields are only manifestations of the bending of space. Physics is geometry.”

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