freeform

As another poster said - you can recover most files you've deleted. When you delete something on a hard drive, all that happens is that space is marked as 'deleted' - but the data is still there until something else overwrites it. Have a Google search, in most cases you won't need to pay anyone - just use an app that searches through the 'deleted' space.

Yeah - Ratu is great. His dancing is wonderful too! The 'shaking' is at the root of many good systems. I just don't like calling it shaking, as the movements quickly develop into a whole gamut of movements. You don't have to go as far as Bali to see teachers that work with spontaneous movement either. Many 'closed door' students in daoist schools are introduced to it through transmission. Although these days it's not so 'closed doors' anymore.

There's a difference between just shaking, and shaking as a result of energy movement. Once your shaking is driven by energy instead of mind, the shaking becomes almost effortless - that 6hrs goes quick Have you had the pleasure of meeting Ratu, Hundun?

My own personal investigation into it has been admittedly superficial (as I found it immediately distasteful). However I've met quite a few followers of this work, including two teachers. None of them had much of an idea of how to clear anything beyond 'the beliefs that are holding you back from manifesting what you want'. One of the teachers I mentioned - a lovely lady who I got on with very well - received a transmission from one of my teachers. There is usually a two-fold effect - incredible bliss, heart opening, strong flowing energy etc. followed closely by the surfacing of all the inner emotional gunk, the 're-wiring' of cognitive patterns that keep the false identity together along with physical 'detoxing'. Long story short, she had mini mental breakdown. She told me candidly how she suddenly saw the underlying motivations for all of her desires and manifestations. She saw how she was driven by greed, lust and the desire to hold power over people whilst completely fooling herself by packaging these desires in wonderful sounding 'spiritual' finery. She was particularly distraught that she had taught many hundreds of people to do just that. She wasn't a 'bad person' - she was just like me or you. Everyone has this inside of them, and it drives our motivations - especially when you focus on desires. I am not unfamiliar with the manifestation 'effect'. Just as Yasuja explained in his post. When I started spiritual work I received countless blessings and many serendipitous synchronicities. It's like the universe was conspiring to have me succeed. But I never asked for it. Never asked for anything specific. I was also made to face extremely difficult situations - both out in the world and internally. I would certainly have never asked for these - even though the result of going through these hardships has always been an important lesson for me. If I was to direct this 'manifestation effect' consciously, I would make a terrible job of it. It would be a morbid caricature of a magical life. It would stop any real growth. And would trap me in the world of desires. We may indeed differ in our understanding of spirituality, however 'detachment' is far from what I seek. As I said I'm on the Daoist path - which is a path of deep embodiment. Material success is not the opposite of detachment, and material success has nothing to do with spirituality. I don't judge it as being a good or bad thing in the least. It just is. You can be spiritual and be materially successful or you could be penniless and deeply spiritual. However, contriving spirituality and the effects and 'powers' inherent in it for the acquisition of wealth is a disturbing trend in the americanised new-age movement. LoA as it's actually practiced by most people typifies this trend. I'm not carrying on this discussion because I want to be 'right'. I would not bother taking time out of training and living my life and put effort into this discussion if I didn't see this work as actively damaging for people - rather than just a waste of time.

for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. - Hamlet The emphasis, for me, is on the word 'thinking'.

Hi - thanks, but from what I've seen - there is little more than lip service to this. Certainly the case with all of the people I've met who are into this work. I haven't seen many methods for this clearing process and I haven't met any people who're actively doing anything like that. Most are unaware of the importance of it. I admit I have a rather unfavourable view of this work, and that's born from the fact that I see a lot of people who want the normal things in life - a car, a house, a wife, a child, more money - these are all the things that most people get anyway - whether they pay for conferences or not. And then the heavily supported confirmation bias convinces the people that did pay for conferences to attribute their success to LoA. Not only that, but this work takes the magical aspect of life and attributes it to the least magical aspect of us - the wanting, desiring mind, further leading people away from what would actually free them. Not only profiteering, but further endarkening the very people that are brave enough to seek something greater.

DreamBliss - you're obviously a creative, sensitive individual. I can see you're striving for something bigger, grander than the limitations you're stuck with. That's admirable. Many people feel a sense of deep, hungry, emptiness that they need to somehow fill or satisfy. Some (many) people try to fill it with food, some fill it with sex, some with drugs, some with money, some with power, many with just busy-ness. And most people don't even realise what they're doing. They don't realise that the things that they do is an attempt to satisfy a deep longing for something that's not available at that level - it's not outside of them - that's why they're addicted to work, or looking good in front of people, or having power, or even some religious dogma. Being a sensitive individual that you are, you've come closer to this empty void more consciously than most. Which creates a double bind. That 'void' is actually one's 'salvation', if you will. The problem is that you need to not only come close to it, but to dive right in - which is the most frightening dive possible - it means death to who you thought you were. It's really a life or death situation - with all the charge that that involves. If you just dip your toe you'll just have a stronger sense of yearning. You won't discover experientially that that void of dark emptiness is actually full of all possibilities. Dipping your toe and then clambering out into mundane existence is tricky. The experience reveals to your false, self-constructed personality that it's not really real, that it's just a construct. So once the toe comes out, the personality goes into overdrive trying to rebuild itself ever stronger, ever more impenetrable. It does that by becoming certain of things, constantly gripping at anything that looks like 'truth'. It does that by making itself seem real. By creating problems and then solving them, by taking things around you and presenting them as evidence of its realness. There is no truth - it's not real, it's yet again a construct of who you think you are. The false self is just a combination of things - of conditioning from your life - from what you parents are like, to how your teachers treated you, even conditioning brought in from other lives. Have you noticed that there are quite a few 'gurus' that fell from grace into dubious activities such as the hoarding of wealth, seeking of power, sexual deviancy... all of this is a result of taking a dip in the void, then clambering out and having that false sense of self rebuild itself, in ever more morose ways. Nervous dogs don't normally bite - they bark and growl, but not bite unless, that is, they feel trapped in a corner. The false self is like a nervous dog that's trapped in a corner. It either bites or reveals itself as not real (in effect dies). The dog will always try to bite rather than be killed. So what can we do? If we yearn for the void, but jumping in means death, and slowly immersing means a very likely deviation from actual growth, how can we actually progress and become whole again!? Well you're on a Daoist forum... And as it turns out, the daoists have a very clear way of slowly preparing you to enter the void, to capture the essence of it, and through an alchemical formula, use it to grow an 'immortal', pre-conditioned Self. (This is an awful overview, but it's something ) Yes I'm sort of saying that the LoA teachings are like the guru that fell from grace. Of course they have some truth and value. But this work fell into the trap of not having any way to deal with the false self. The self that strives to fill its deep yearning with 'stuff' whatever that stuff is. As a result it simply adds to the false self, adding new layers, whilst at the same time cleverly leading you into a labyrinth of mirrors and illusions (yes I'm picturing Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon!) This fools you into believing that you're doing spiritual work, that you're getting closer to the divine, when in fact exactly the opposite is the truth. LoA is about creating - but it misses the biggest aspect of personal growth which is focused on dis-creating. The spiritual path is, in fact 80% clearing, cleaning, purging - layer after layer after layer before you start any creating. This is because any creating before this would come from the limited, false sense of self, and anything created from this aspect can only ever be perverse (even if (or especially if) it seems pure, and fluffy and spiritual). A small tip for you. Part of what makes the Daoist alchemical path so effective is that it includes the body - in fact starts with the body. I invite you to pay attention to your body more. In small ways as well as large. Pay attention to what it physically feels like to be sitting and reading this, where are your feet? How do they feel? Do you feel any tightness anywhere? You could also move your body whilst staying conscious of it - whether doing exercise or calisthenics or dance or yoga or especially any of the myriad of Daoist arts... When you include your body, that nervous dog of a false self discovers that it has a friend rather than just foes. That it's not trapped in a corner all by itself. So here I am, having typed this up for you. Am I being a vampire? Barking up my own branch? Trying to somehow get one over on you? Or simply inviting you to see possibilities that will hopefully expand your world rather than contract it?

Err... Surely one would just manifest a female?!

Haha it's not the complexity of the question that's of concern - I would rather keep my teacher's names out of public domain for now. Regarding Michael Winn and his 'friend from Atlantis' - that's not something that puts me off really. Once you start getting into advanced nei dan training and meeting the various people and masters involved, you start to hear some pretty surreal stories! Way more out there than that... Michael is an impressive businessman and seems like a nice enough chap, but watching him stand or move, it's clear to see that his body is still pretty bound up and tight. His 'qi belly' (aka stagnation belly) is also questionable. That doesn't mean he's no good - just that he doesn't exude the qualities of a realised master. This is also evident when you pay close attention to him speaking - (and I don't mean the 'content' or the words he says, but how he talks... 'where' the words are coming from...)

I'm more than happy to discuss that over pm if you'd like.

That's a pretty common 'understanding' of the subconscious. It's also, again, completely counterproductive to any sort of growth. "even the person himself" - like the subconscious is a dark tormented shadow of the real 'person' who's in fact the conscious mind. The subconscious is a facet of who you are. It's in fact the biggest facet. It's more 'who you are' than your conscious mind is. But the conscious mind is a clever little devil, to assert its importance it declares itself as the "I" and the rest as some shadow double interfering with its work. When you say I - what do you mean? How big is the scope of I? I've met teachers that when they say I you feel the energy of the entire universe included... with others you sense a tiny adolescent mind being the "I". The other thing... I take offence at any suggestions that we're in anyway 'sane' Seriously if you've never caught yourself doing something 'insane' - like getting angry at your partner for not taking the rubbish out or for the guy who cut you off at the traffic lights or for getting nervous about a meeting or for feeling awkward in certain situations... Trust me we're all 'insane' - at least from the point of view of the conscious mind, who's bandwidth for observing is about 7 bits of information at any one time.

My introduction to Taoist practices was through Chia's books. It opened a whole new world to me many years ago - so I'm thankful for that. I did look deeper into the system, bought many of the books, met a couple of teachers of the system and grew very uncomfortable with it. Firstly I noticed that many of the books were simply cashing in on Taoist training - that was clearly the aim of them ('multiorgasmic' series being one example, at least one completely plagiarised book being another). I also noticed a tendency with some of the teachers and students to develop sexual deviancy - there was an obvious vibe - and certainly one of the teachers clearly attempted and probably did sleep with a large number of his students. Further to that I noticed that many students simply did not show any of the virtues that accompany spiritual development. After a number of years of practicing only some of the foundational HT practices that I was comfortable with, I serendipitously met a legitemate teacher and within a few seconds I recognised the difference. With one touch he gave me a bigger energetic shift and deep understanding of Taoism than the couple of years of reading, training and meeting people within the HT system. I'm glad to have come across Chia's material, and glad to have moved away from it when I did.

Can't speak to origins as I'm not a particularly keen scholar in these regards. Practically though there are key differences. (The caveat being that this is my point of view and that of a number of my teachers - different schools will have different interpretations and will vary in nomenclature) Dao yin, specifically, is an older form, linked with shamanic practices. It's main aim is the removal of pathogenic 'substances' and 'sick qi' from your body - not creating balance and homeostasis as in qigong or opening up of further energetic 'layers' internally as in neigong. (This doesn't mean that it won't help to achieve these aspects or that neigong and qigong practice won't help to remove pathogens - but it's a different focus) Neigong can be considered as preparation for neidan. If neigong is the practice of opening your energetic body, then neidan is creating a range of 'transformations' within this energetic structure. Neigong practice can actually move into the beginnings of alchemy spontaneously. In terms of spiritual cultivation neigong can go very far indeed, but the highest levels require spiritual transformation - which, broadly speaking is in the realm of neidan. Damo Mitchell has a number of books which I recommend highly. But a good teacher is (in my opinion) vital. Even if you only have contact a couple of times a year.

Beliefs are not true or untrue. They're useful or not. Preoccupation with finding 'truth' is a mental trap. I find the idea of the subconscious a helpful distinction for myself, it enables me to make finer distinctions in attending to myself and watching the processes that happen within myself and others. I don't view the subconscious as 'my' subconscious - like it's something "I" possess. Similarly I find the LoA teachings in the way that I've seen most people apply them to be worse than not useful - I think they're detrimental to growth and development. Luckily most people tend to snap out of this fad sooner or later. Apologies if this is not the sort of feedback you wished to attract

Really interesting advice from a dietary tcm perspective! From a different perspective, you may have a frozen diaphragm (probably caused by internal emotional 'weather'). There are many ways to work with this, including massaging deeply under your ribcage (painful) also stretching around your ribs, chest and back. An emotional release may accompany this. Another interesing thing you could try is breathing through a straw - just a few natural breaths while sitting up straight - you may need to experiment, but the result is a reflexive deep abdominal breath that happens spontaneously - kind of like a sigh, but different - (when it happens, do it without the straw!) A few of these will help to loosen your diaphragm.

I always found it pretty simple. Someone else mentioned this too - but what is it that you want to achieve? That's the most important question. A good analogy is sport or athleticism... can you become strong and healthy and agile by learning from DVDs and books? Of course you can - you can do a LOT by yourself if you have strong discipline and good focus as well as the right tools. You could also do yourself some damage if you don't have these things. However could you ever compete at the Olympic level? It's doubtful. I personally don't know of any Olympian who's never had an in-person coach (let alone a whole team of coaches). If your aim is at the very high level attainments in the Taoist arts then you need a teacher - a good one - and usually more than one. And you still need all the other qualities of discipline, commitment, focus and the means to dedicate a lot (most) of your time to your art. If your aim is at the very top of the field, then doing things by yourself would usually just mean having to restart the process once you do get a teacher. But again - not everyone wants to be an Olympic athlete when they work out. Health and happiness are excellent achievements as it is. And it IS possible to get that with the right tools and the right mind-set... although it would still be easier, quicker and more efficient with a good teacher.

Yes - I think the state of flow is a glimpse of wu wei. As I understand it, wu wei is acting from your preconditioned Self. This is a very high attainment indeed.

An interesting perspective from a very talented meditator and teacher: (Long quote coming up...) "Over the years I have come to notice a common trend during the winter retreat I hold each January. Invariably one or two people arrive suffering with winter flu. Sitting together in a close environment, by the end of the second day, up to half of the group may be snivelling and sneezing. And yet by day four there is not a sneeze or sniff to be heard all day long, as everyone settles into their meditation and begins to deepen their concentration and mindfulness. So how is it that such a change can come about in such a short time? Mindfulness is quite simply awareness. Or even more simply it is paying attention. Each of us has a certain amount of mindfulness as part of our everyday consciousness. In some it is naturally well developed in others the mind is scattered and restless, wandering around here there and everywhere but seldom resting within the body in a state of simply being present. The meditation I teach beginners to is to learn to settle their attention within the body. It serves to establish concentration while bringing a degree of coherence back to the otherwise disorganised energies in the body. When I check each persons meditation, one of the things I am checking is the awareness , or mindfulness levels within their own bodies. This mindfulness is one of the key players in determining a persons resistance to sickness or their tendency to ill health. Lets take the virus as an example to illustrate this point. I use a scale which I measure against my own body to assess a persons physical awareness levels. At an energetic level the correlation between this mindfulness level and the integrity of their immune system is considerable. The average persons level of mindfulness (on my arbitrary scale ) is around 90 ( with 300 being the highest level. A virus has more the characteristic of consciousness than matter, unlike a bacteria which is predominantly a material entity with limited awareness levels. Viruses respond directly to consciousness, even mutating and changing characteristics with the conscious environment in which they reside. The average flu virus has an awareness level similar to that of most of us, around 90. The important difference to our own mindfulness is that a virus produces a left handed spin in matter while our own wholesome states of consciousness (ie mindfulness) produce a right handed spin. It is the left-handed spin that has the disorganising effect that opposes the organising effect that our own mindfulness has on your system. Put six people in a room for a few hours and bring in someone with the flu and the next day some of them will begin to display the flu symptoms, while others wont. Yet all of them will have been exposed to the virus in that time. In those whose mindfulness levels are over 90 the flu symptoms will not develop. Those who might be tired or run down, and with mindfulness levels below 90 will invariably develop the flu. To understand this we need to understand that it is not the virus that causes the sickness, but the bodys reaction to it. If there is enough mindfulness in the body there will not be a reaction to contact with the virus and so the body will not produce a supporting environment for it to proliferate. When we meditate, most people are able to raise their mindfulness levels to over 100 within a couple of days of sustained practice. At this level the virus stops producing the reaction in the body that supports it and the flu symptoms will. Even at a physical level we can see the changes in the system. Under dark field microscope we can observe a significant increase in the mobilisation of the white blood cells witch the body uses to combat a virus after only three days of sustained meditation. If we already have a resting level of mindfulness within our body of over 100 we are unlikely to develop flu at all. Lets take the hepatitis virus as another example. This virus has a mindfulness level of around 120. This is higher than most peoples resting state mindfulness and so nearly everyone exposed to the Hep B virus will develop the symptoms. The virus produces a hot energy in the liver, and the lack of sufficient mindfulness causes the liver to react. The liver itself becomes hot and over time dry and stiff producing the cirrhosis. Many of the people coming on meditation retreat have managed to raise their mindfulness levels up high enough to reverse the damage in the liver and allow the cells to correct themselves. Robbed of a supportive environment the virus no longer survives in the body. Some people have successfully achieved such results with a week long meditation retreat. The HIV virus poses an even more challenging threat. It has an awareness level of 220. Now this is extremely high. Many advanced yogis have not reached this level of mindfulness in their own bodies. In fact the only person I have perceived to have a natural mindfulness level as high as this is the famous chess player Kasparov. I am not saying that if exposed to the HIV virus he would not develop symptoms but his chances of resisting the virus would be good. Some years ago I did an experiment with my teacher on a group of meditators who all carried the HIV virus. They were trained extensively and spent many months diligently practicing. Eight of them were able over time to achieve such levels of mindfulness. All of their symptoms disappeared and when tested of the virus it had all but disappeared from the blood, with almost undetectable levels remaining. Every year, millions of us go down within the flu. Until only there is no medicine that can treat the flu virus, we can only take medication or supplements to support the bodys resistance to it. This is because all medicine is nutriment. It is indeed possible to treat bacterial infection with nutriment, but not a virus. This is because the vibrational bandwidth of viruses is more akin to consciousness than nutriment of any kind. Medicine, being nutriment in nature, miss match with the viruss energetic signature. However our consciousness interacts directly with viruses. A mind that is restless, stressed or scattered will react to and support the proliferation of viral infection in the body. But a mind that is well organised, concentrated and mindful will not. This year, why not try for yourself. Learn a basic meditation practice that takes the body as the object of concentration. Practice daily to raise your bodys mindfulness levels and see if you can be one of those who can sail through the winter without falling prey to the dreaded flu. In the next episode I will discuss the role our mind plays in developing allergies and food intollerences, and how they might be over come"

Not sure what went 'wrong' - or if it did indeed go wrong. But you may want to give neigong a break for a couple of days and focus on stretching and opening your joints instead. Then get back to more ji ben qigong. In general it's best not to mix practices- especially before you know exactly what you're doing. PS - it's great that you've started practice!

wonderful. I think that's a perfect example for this conversation. Especially seeing as we're quoting from alchemical texts so much... Note that it was indeed much valued by jazz musicians already at the top of their game. However for someone who's never heard any jazz before, reading those volumes over and over would never substitute the actual experience of hearing jazz with one's own ears.

Thank you - I'm glad my clumsy mumblings made sense. I hope they make some sort of sense to CD too - if I can clarify anything any further, just let me know and I'll try my best.

I've not met or studied with Serge Augier - but I've heard very mixed things. Damo is an excellent teacher in both neigong and the internal martial arts. He often teaches in Sweden - and his workshops are reasonably priced. You're in for a treat

I think people's frustration, CD, is with the fact that if you opened yourself up for experiencing what people are talking about, then you'd 'get it' - and everyone really wants you to get it! It's frustrating for you because it makes no intellectual sense what everyone in this (and similar systems) are talking about. And unfortunately the intellectual part of you is not so well equipped to get it. Just like the post about trying to intellectualise Jazz - whatever comes out will be a pale, lifeless collection of words - which is just selling you short. It does seem you're willing to be sold short. So with that caveat, I'll try to explain in a (semi) scientific way what everyone is trying to tell you. Since its a western scientific explanation, then think of qi as the flow of information nothing more... Now - when you make a conscious, directed effort at anything (including breathing, or even just reaching out for a cup) you're engaging a certain part of your information processing capacity (let's call it 'mind'). This 'mind' is, in fact, the least powerful part of your information processing circuitry - although it is the most visible and obvious, so it does tend to get the most attention. It's the part of you that is capable of processing around 7 + or - 2 bits of information at a time. It's significantly limited, but again - because it's the most obvious, visible part of you, it seems like it's the most important, most powerful part. When you engage this circuitry to make decisions on everything from how you move your body, to how you regulate your breathing your results will be severely limited - because as I said it's only capable of processing around 7 bits of information at a time. There is another circuit - it's a lot less visible, mainly because it processes so much information, so quickly, that the part of you that is aware cannot keep up with it. It's just too much stuff too fast - so it becomes impossible to track. This part of you is like a vast supercomputer compared to the digital watch power of your mind. It's not only a supercomputer in itself, it's also connected to a limitless number of other supercomputers - and it's constantly processes information instantaneously! What practices like Stillness Movement do is they plug into that second level of circuitry. They connect with it, and they let that part of them lead their cultivation practice. This means the decisions made - in how you move your arm, in how you breathe or in how you stand come from a source infinitely more powerful than the mind circuitry. The result is that the mind watches you doing all these unusual 'spontaneous' actions in complete bewilderment. It can't make sense of them (it's not equipped for that) but it really wants to! The key in these sort of practices is to let the mind circuitry just watch, but not control or interfere in any way. If it starts to - for example - want to breathe a certain way, because it's only capable of processing a small amount of information, it would not be doing the exact right thing at the exact right time, which in turn means pretty substandard results. Any action that is contrived by the mind will be extremely limited as it simply can't match the processing power of a limitless number of supercomputers connected in a network. However it will always think that it's more powerful, more important and more capable than it really is (since its the most visible, loud and obvious part of you) So the trap is that it can easily contrive your thoughts and your actions to support its claim as the most powerful, most important part of you. Don't fall into that trap

Ahh - yes well I complete agree. It's probably my poor choice of words in an attempt to be brief. He certainly doesn't claim to do it for you. In fact far less so than a shaktipat guru for example. It's hard to describe his work as it's rather uncommon. It's mostly a practice of increasing awareness of the tiniest internal patterns that we go through - I mean the ones that happen in milliseconds. He's aware of them by virtue of decades of practice, but he brings your attention to them by presence, by precise and well timed interruptions and other more subtle work. Awareness of your patterns then brings about the space and opening for them to shift. Not shift in a particular ("better") direction (as "better" is very much a construct from a limited perspective) - but just to shift. And shift again and again, deeper and deeper. Like sung for the heart-mind. It's less like a chiropractic adjustment and more like being with a teacher that corrects your form at just the right time in just the right way (even if that way seems illogical) to bring about a shift. The shift is where you do your part. And there I was trying to be brief...

Funny indeed! Let's assume we're past the stage of debating whether you can be attracted or not to a person you've only read a couple of (admittedly opaque) sentences about... What's the source of your distaste for your perception of this approach?