Lidolon

Coming from a very analytical but open mindset (I’m a mathematician by training, after all, and in maths any set of axioms is game, provided they are coherent), I’m both extremely curious and slightly baffled about the energetic phenomena that define qigong, neigong, neidan, etc. I’m curious to see if I can experience them, and then if they can be useful, as it is said they are, for health, longevity and cultivation of the mind (I’ve no interest whatsoever in martial arts). However, from what I understand, a consistent daily practice of many years is needed, and many many techniques, schools, teachers are out there. I’ve really no problem to commit - as a personal experiment of sorts - to some method, even for a few years (the potential benefits make this some kind of lesser Pascal’s wager); however it would be very disagreeable if I were to devote so much time to some broken, half-authentic, ineffective-because-diluted system. So here my problem and question. Given I know no teacher close at hands (any suggestions for a real, legitimate teacher in Italy?), which serious options for distance learning are there? I’m seriously baffled by the number of options and uncertainty about them. For example, after scanning a bit this forum, I’ve found, to give a few examples: Flying Phoenix. This seems to give quick experiential results according to practitioners, so it could be a good option to experiment, but at the same time it seems conceptually quite different from any other system and potentially limited in its ambitions. So a potentially nice and pleasant dead-end? Damo Mitchell’s Academy. Very professional looking videos, convincing speeches and the various books scratching my need for theory, but let’s be serious: I have no experimental or experiential knowledge of neigong, so how do I know it’s not a pile of pataphysics? … and no, the body’s center of mass is not in the chest. So a potentially well produced MacNeigong? Nathan Brine’s book/course. He is a student of Wang Liping, who should be a Master with a great pedigree; Liping’s system seems ambitious, transformative, painful and almost impossible even to begin without preparation and a teacher’s assistance (maybe the arrival point of the first book by Brine could be done with distance learning. Maybe). So a potentially hard enough method not to be falsifiable, as it is structurally unfeasible (and painful)? I want to say this clearly: I mean no disrespect to Dunn, Mitchell, Brine and Wang. I took them as example because I actually found what little I’ve read about their methods intriguing and to show that for an ignorant noob like me even widely appreciated methods are difficult to classify and potentially suspicious. So, which system would you suggest me, a complete beginner who wants to seriously experience and develop internal cultivation to improve health, longevity and the mind, and, most importantly (since the forum is already full of such recommendations), why would you suggest that specific system? (please, don’t just tell me “find a good teacher in person and just trust him”. As I said I know no good teacher close to me and while I can find time to practice, because of family obligations I’m not able at the moment to travel long distance to get to some Master or partecipate in a retreat)

After reading a number of books on Buddhist meditation, I’ve convinced myself of a simple (and probably wrong) analogy between shamatha meditation and a memory leaking computer program: as a simple concentration task absorbs more and more computational power, all other mind routines shut down, till, progressing along the jhanas, even the operating system itself crashes and only the BIOS remains. As the Buddha pointed out, this is most useful, in that it is possible to witness the reboot of the system, which makes experientially clear how much the five khandhas depend on the software and not the hardware. Given the brain neuroplasticity (here I’m going from bad analogy to pure speculation), the repeated reboot of the brain, which should reasonably follow an hardwired pattern, would strengthen the pathway of this standard reactivation of the various mind routines. Since I think chakras are just bodily projections of brain sectors, this pathway could very well be what the yogic tradition call shushumna; in this case, concentration meditation would obtain the same result of a kundalini awakening through the opposite mean (that is, the chakras are not opened, but silenced, and the path between them strengthened as they are turned on again and not by artificially overstimulating it). The critical point here is that the reboot is automatic, so the practitioner has no choice on which neural path is reinforced, it is determined by the structure of the brain itself. So, to end these ramblings, this toy-model poses one serious question. Taking the neural pathway of mind reboot as the standard (since it emerges automatically from the practice of the jhanas), are the plethora of energetic techniques in existence (Kundalini, Kriya, Vajrayana, Neidan, etc.) really able to stimulate it with enough precision? For sure they act as an active stimulation of certain neural paths, but how can one be certain they are really stimulating the correct ones? Even more radically, is it true that all these techniques aim at replicating, from the other side and hopefully in a quicker fashion, the physical (neural) transformation caused by samadhi, or each of them are reinforcing different brain processes, and which are the differences? I hope someone will humor me, even for saying I got everything wrong, since I’m quite at a loss to find a conceptual way to understand all cultivation phenomena, as they all seem fundamentally similar behind their superficial differences.

I’m not so sure. But of course it depends on the definition of “scientific mindset” we give. If our definition is not to believe in things outside of what current scientific theories imply, it would just be a silly mindset (more “scientism” than “science”); but that’s just a parody. Real science has nothing to do with a priori belief in phenomena and everything to do with prediction of events: a theory gives you a good guess about what to expect given past (collective) experience. In the end it is just a belief in the following statement: “If I have the same causes I will have the same effects; and if that’s not what I observe it’s because there are more causes at work, which I have not yet identified”. Thanks to everybody who answered. I will just arm myself with patience and try a few methods to see if they produce interesting effects. I will report my results in a few months, and in the meantime I will be on the lookout for masters to learn the traditional way, since the consensus seems to be that a true master is more important than the technique.

Hi everybody, new member here. I’ve some experience with Buddhist meditation, but I got interested only recently in Daoist traditions and techniques. I’m here mostly to explore, learn from others and find out where to look for more knowledge (e.g. which cultivation school should I follow)…