freeform

Some of the more ‘magic’ focused lineages that place a heavy emphasis on ‘Ling’ do train in all manner of ‘astral projection’ type methods. These are usually pretty secretive schools… and there are many deluded teachers or outright charlatans in this field - so not easy to get into

There’s two sides to legacy. For the one focused on themselves, legacy is a continuation of one’s name after death. For the one focused on others, legacy is what bears fruit in other’s lives after one’s death. If you’re a cultivator - set selfless seeds that bear selfless fruit for the benefit of all.

Practice when you have time. For the vast majority, the qi body is not sensitive enough to be affected by the environment to any great extent. Better to build qi first. Once you have an appropriate ‘amount’ or density of qi - only then does it make sense to pay attention to the quality you’re attuning to. But I have always found dusk and dawn particularly pleasant

Yeah there’s lots of stuff like this… the thing with science is that you need to repeat it hundreds or thousands of times to reach a certain level of statistical significance to show any kind of ‘proof’ that would be of relevance in the scientific community. Not only does that cost a lot - but try finding thousands of genuine healers who all agree to do this - and are capable of doing it at the time and place selected. But things can certainly be quite objective in a personal sort of way. I can emit qi in a very palpable way for instance. It affects animals… it affected a man in a coma (leg started spasming for the first time). I can make some electric meters move… I can make patterns in magnetic field paper etc. All the senior students of my teacher can do this. There’s lots of schools in Asia that can do it. It seems reasonably ‘objective’ - but for a scientist this would be an anomaly and would not count as scientific ‘proof’. I’m sure someone would be able to (whether credibly or not) introduce enough doubt as to ‘debunk’ it or make it appear inconclusive. Though proving anything to anyone is of no interest to me - it’s just useful form of personal feedback to see if my channels are open or if qi has reached a certain level of density. I’m really against attempting to prove this sort of stuff. I’ll leave that to someone else

😂 probably not

Well your therapist might be ‘dumbing it down’ for you - but I’d expect a more classical diagnosis. I’d expect to hear about the state of the Yin and Yang for each organ, the blood and qi aspect of each organ… the pathogenic qualities in the system (such as ‘empty heat’… cold, damp, phlegm, wind, water etc etc). Its a bit of a balancing act because not every therapist works in the same way. The main red flag for me is that he’s not taking pulses during and after treatment. When he says ‘if treatment A doesn’t work, I’ll do treatment B’ - the way to know if it worked is to check your pulses. But then again, that’s only one red flag amongst many… so it’s not too bad As I say, different therapists work in different ways. For a true master of the art, I wouldn’t question their methods which can appear almost miraculous and not fit into the common understanding of Classical Chinese medicine. For instance I’ve seen my teacher taking pulses and then telling the patient that he needs to go and restore his relationship with his son… But in other situations he would give specific classical diagnosis like what I explained above. Other times I’ve seen him intently pointing his needle in specific locations inside and even outside the body… I’ve seen him massage one lady’s feet and what proceeded was kind of like how exorcisms are portrayed in films…

Thanks for sharing. I’m sorry to hear that you’re having a tough time with your health. It’s particularly difficult when the standard medical approach can’t seem to help. I think that’s a good thing to do. But it’s quite difficult to be your own therapist - particularly as a beginner. Alchemy is not the right thing for achieving perfect health to be honest. With alchemy you really need to have reasonably good physical and mental health to begin. I’m not sure if you’re looking for advice - but if you are then I suggest 3 key things to start with: exercise, sleep and food. Exercise is a big one - and it really depends on your constitution - it can be anything from taking long brisk walks to high intensity bodyweight training. Start slow and build up. Sleep is also a big one - get no more and no less than 8hrs… make your sleep time regular every day… be asleep by 11pm. Food - eat local, fresh, in-season food. Include some red meat if you can. Home cooked meals - not processed ones. Avoid vegetable oils (except olive) and sugar as much as possible. Make simple, uncomplicated meals with not too many ingredients and flavours. Getting these 3 things sorted can be hard… and boring - but they’re by far the most important things. Even advanced qigong practitioners that don’t follow these basics get health issues. Sometimes people read these and think ‘oh I’m reasonably good on all three’… but if you ask them to keep a diary for each aspect, they quickly realise just how faulty their memory and self perception are. Once you have to truthfully evaluate when you go to sleep and wake up, what you eat and how much you exercise - over the period of a month, you’ll have to see the reality of your habits (and usually it doesn’t match up with your initial impressions of this) Once you have these things sorted, I can suggest some other internal training you can do. Stuff that’s not dangerous and that will calm your system, enable you to sink and strengthen kidneys and spleen. Doing this internal stuff before having the 3 key aspects above sorted won’t do much good to be honest.

The pulse tells the acupuncturist what’s going on… so they check many times - before, during and certainly after treatment - to get feedback on what’s happened as a result of their work… Generally a TCM doctor should be asking about your lifestyle to understand the various influences upon your inner health. The diagnosis from a western medical perspective should only be of minor interest. I’d suggest seeing if you can find another practitioner.

It presents differently depending on what you've been doing and on your constitution. Generally issues tend to be around pathogenic heat and depletion… Stuff like palpitations, night sweats, tremors, pressure in the head, manic/delusional thinking, feeling high, spacey or ungrounded, emotionally reactive. Theres other stuff to do with heat such as rashes, red eyes, mouth ulcers, hot palms, fragile tendons, stuck diaphragm etc etc. Weak legs, lower back pain, knee pain, anxiety, restlessness - signs of depletion. Or it could reveal some clues about what you could be doing that’s causing you issues.

That is indeed the case. In fact all biological processes slow down to a near stop. This state can continue for months or years. No eating/drinking/peeing/pooing no discernible breath or pulse. Though the likelihood of getting there without a teacher and full time cultivation is so close to zero that it’s worth considering it impossible. A useful yardstick to measure whether you’re capable of entering the 2nd Jhanna is whether you can sit in perfect stillness (of mind and body) for a minimum of 72hrs straight. For the 3rd Jhanna it’s longer (though I’ve not been told what the exact test for that is yet) Your intuition that this is dangerous is right. What you’re describing sounds like a qi deviation. First it’s always useful to get a checkup with a Dr. Just to rule out anything physical. when you say “I realised again the true breathing and stopped breathing” What do you mean. Can you walk us through it? The palpitations, curling up in the fetal position and vomiting all suggest that you’re suffering with qi reversal. It concerns me that you say you don’t have any proper meditation method - which suggests that you’re experimenting… this can be very problematic.

I’m no expert, but my teacher is - and I’ve never seen more than 5 needles used… usually 3 or less. Maybe you could ask for him to write the diagnosis down for you. It should not be vague (though Chinese medicine diagnosis sounds weird from a western perspective). What about before and after? Did he look at your tongue?

Bear in mind that I’m not arguing, I’m discussing. If you didn’t understand what I meant, then try this. A student only needs to learn to light a fire using the tools provided. A teacher needs to fully understand every nuance of the process under all conditions. How do you light a fire in the cold… how do you do it in the wind… what about if it’s damp… what if your hands are numb? What changes the process when at a higher elevation? What precautions do you need to take if you’re in an arid, dry environment? Secondly the teacher needs to know why you’re lighting the fire. A fire is never for the sake of fire… it may be to heat, to light, to cook or to scare away animals, for creating smoke to pacify bees… the way you build the fire changes according to each context. This is to illustrate firstly Cause, Effect and Conditions. Secondly it’s to illustrate Causal Chains. A teacher needs to have in-depth experience and understanding of all of these aspects to help a student progress efficiently and safely. Anything else will slowly erode the art and potentially hurt students (and the teacher too). Firstly, just so we’re talking about the same thing - what does ‘spiritual as commonly used nowadays’ mean to you? I agree it’s all over the place - everything from how you dress and whether you have crystals to what books you read… But for cultivators it’s worth having a very specific unambiguous definition. For me it’s quite simple - it means working with the Yuan Shen - Original Spirit. So I’d agree that much of the work involved is not ‘spiritual’ - it’s simply the setting up of Causal Chains and Conditions to allow access to the spiritual. While much of the work is mechanistic and very simple - in that there’s a precise Cause and Effect - but as you progress, it is the Conditions that become more and more important. Eventually the Cause becomes super simple… but whether the desired Effect appears becomes based on Conditions. For example the method (Cause) for entering Samadhi or Jhanna or Chan is extremely simple: sit still. Yet the vast majority of people never manage to access the effect - because they don’t have the Conditions for meditation to arise. When Cause and Effect have few Conditions between them, then they are, indeed simple… but as you continue onto ever more subtle processes that produce the rather large transformative change, you’ll find that things aren’t so simple - and there’s a real art to the science. A true teacher - at least one who is leading a student into spiritual cultivation needs to be a true master of both the art and science of the method or process they’re teaching. They have to be waaaaaaay ahead of the student. Though of course the mechanistic stuff early on is teachable by someone who’s really proficient but not necessarily a master… but it takes a master to decide whether they’re proficient enough to teach (in my opinion). Yeahhh wasn’t there a member recently kicked off the forum whose teachings didn’t come from a human? I mean you’re right - but this is only true once you’ve learned and mastered everything a human master can teach you… jumping into this realm before that’s the case almost always results in delusion. I agree with that. The issue I have is that the ones who don’t know (and most don’t) get ensnared in very destructive and abusive cults at worst - or just waste their time and money at best.

The issue is that you may think that the method is about lighting a fire, while there’s a deeper reason that you haven’t received yet - and so have yet to master the art to a proficient enough level to teach. You don’t know what you don’t know. If you haven’t been allowed to teach something you should not be teaching it. Either it’s for the sake of your own development, the development of your students, or the preservation of the art itself. Some teachers of course don’t allow it for the sake of their own authority - in which case they’re probably not the right person to be teaching a spiritual art in the first place.

More than anything it requires the teacher's explicit permission and blessing to teach each level of practice or body of work within the tradition.

Yeah totally agree - that was the point I was making - (less succinctly ) In fact I generally recommend people that ask to stay away from China if spiritual cultivation is one’s primary aim.

While I agree that there’s no magic trick - logic and reason are no better - as alone, they will only ever lead you to a deluded sense of enlightenment.

Thats a good point - because it’s true. The benefits of established traditions is that they offer collected wisdom from hundreds of achieved masters. But on the flip side, they can easily get embroiled in superstitions and cultural ephemera that are completely irrelevant to genuine cultivation. The key is to find what I call a living tradition. To me this simply means that there’s a live connection to source. The tradition is essentially an access-point to this unbroken line that leads to source. Actual methods and specific practices must all fall in line with that connection - otherwise the connection breaks and all you have is a bunch of dogmatic theories instead of direct, live insight into the reality of spiritual cultivation. In my experience a living tradition is often a little rough around the edges in terms of the ‘cultural’ trimmings… no one wears robes and hats and carries around horse hair whips… there’s little in terms of topknots and tea ceremonies in ornate tea houses. It’s usually in amongst normal life - dogs chasing chickens… laundry flapping in the wind… tracksuits rather than silk pyjamas, steaming stock pots and deep grooves worn into stone floors where practice takes place. Its true that some teachers are fond of the old cultural stuff - but it’s generally done in an irreverent way… not placing any undue importance on objects and aesthetics. One very advanced teacher I trained briefly with was a big fan of cowboys - and all the outfits and stuff that went with it. But there was never any delusions that wearing a hat will make him a real cowboy. Superstitious thinking is strongly discouraged in genuine schools. It’s direct experience and creating the conditions for direct insight to arise that is valued more than anything else. Scriptures and canonical texts are used as supplements to direct experience - never as the source for understanding. Reading a text should always be a case of getting a string of ‘AHA!’ moments that help to give context to one’s own inner experience - NOT something that you must intellectually decode the meaning of to discover some secret method (these texts do not contain methods, even when it sounds like it). Anyway - this ramble is all about how superstition is also very much the enemy of any genuine tradition Just because these arts are mysterious and defy commonly accepted principles of reality does not mean that superstitious thinking goes!

I would say it’s all about the right practice at the right time. There is no holy grail method. It can be tempting to see things this way when a practice is doing so much for you - but the reality is that at some point you’ll outgrow it too…

In the 70’s and 80’s when lots of qigong ‘masters’ came to the west many people that were interested in this stuff felt like it was a golden opportunity… The reality is that qigong and the internal arts are like any field of human endeavour - the vast majority are not good at all… a minority are mediocre and a tiny sliver are true masters of their art. The people that came to the west were certainly not the best. The best had very good reputations, had their disciples and their schools to worry about… if the political situation made it difficult they would just move to the many other Chinese communities in other Asian countries next door. The ones that came to the west were mediocre at best and complete charlatans at worst. Often they were outcasts from genuine traditions with a bad reputation in Asia. But when they escaped that reputation by coming to the west, they found a thirst for knowledge and a lack of insight and distinctions - so they could simply teach whatever they wanted and it would sell. As a clue - if a teacher can’t name their teachers… or they’re reportedly some hermit with a cloud based name… or there’s some other mystical backstory - then it’s a big red flag suggesting that there’s something suspect in their history. Either they were kicked out, were never allowed to teach or just used books and imagination to create their systems. This is what I’ve been told many times by some of the teachers that stayed… Now we have a generation of people that learned from these ‘masters’ teaching others - and the results are horrific. Theres also a trend of going to China to get all the ‘authentic’ pictures taken - and study at one of the ‘centres of cultural heritage’ (like Wudang) that CCP uses as a means of soft power… The photos, outfits and time spent in China legitimises their teachings… which are basically just choreography and callisthenics. Honestly the situation is quite disheartening. On the other hand, we are starting to get genuine teachers with genuine accomplishments teaching in the West too. Even people living in Asia are starting to turn in this direction for genuine teachings. Like the ‘Shaolin “Master”’ Shi Heng Yi - who can often be seen in the videos of the basic Martial Man camps. Where it’s clear that he has absolutely no internal skill - yet he’s teaching “authentic” Xi Sui Jing (the very secret, and the most advanced ‘marrow washing’ method within the Shaolin internal arts). He does look the part though, doesn’t he! Whats happening in Asia nowadays is interesting too. There are quite a few well known teachers with genuine Qi ability, and genuine internal skill… but zero spiritual development and no ethics. They charge ridiculous prices, do fake demonstrations, teach completely fake methods - all the while collecting the money which they spend on booze and prostitutes… (seems to be a bit of a trend in the power-focused Neigong masters in Asia). A prime example where some attainment can be worse than no attainment at all. Though I guess that’s the case if spiritual growth is of prime importance or not. A very weird world Looking forward to see how things develop over the years.

You. You are everyone. At a certain ‘depth’ of You. Ming. You will act in accordance with your Ming and you will create more Ming with your actions… or you won’t. ‘Know’ may not be the right word for this. And neither is ‘You’ to be fair… because we’re talking about these things at a much more expanded state.

Yup - it’s usually produced through correct practice of various alchemical methods. Yup What I’m talking about isn’t a result of that sort of cause. It happens at an earlier level of attainment than the stage of mastery over form… (earlier stage - though still exceptionally rare).

These are generally inner door secrets. Not sure why - but they are… I can skirt around it though 😅 For instance some of the biblical miracles line up with these signs. Sometimes allegorically. For instance manna coming down from heaven to feed the Israelites on their journey from Egypt to the ‘promised land’. The manna coming down from heaven is what’s known as ‘jade fluid’ in Daoism or ‘Amrita’ in Hindu traditions. Coming down from heaven - means it descends as a fluid into the mouth from the internal heaven (‘located’ in the centre of the head… but also accessed in a certain state of awareness)… it feeds because this is a very nourishing substance that can regenerate you physiologically and energetically and usually means you no longer need to eat for a period. When a master can cause this in his disciples, this is one sign among many…

https://youtu.be/FRvVFW85IcU Not sure why I can’t paste a YouTube video properly… it’s about the experiments of morality with babies.

So I thought I’d weigh in with my own views on morality - as it’s an interesting topic for me. 1 - I think we absolutely do have a basic moral compass that’s prior to any societal conditioning. We know right and wrong from a very young age. It’s based on very basic animal drives and preferences. The preference for nutrition over poison… pleasure over pain… love over hate… attention over being ignored… survival over death. 2 - We also have a strong urge to belong to a group - which means we are primed to take on beliefs, preferences and attitudes of those around us. In this way our moral attitudes are adjusted by our society. This adjusting can override our basic moral values. Theres lots of experimental data to show that this is the case. What’s funny is that our own biases towards our group adjusts our view of morality. We’re far more likely to assume that those outside our group are immoral or are at least capable of immoral acts. The ‘other’ is usually seen as capable of killing while you and your group are not. But the truth is that the vast majority of all people - even despite their cultural conditioning are averse to killing. I can’t remember the exact statistic - but something like 80% of soldiers never even fired their rifle in WW2. These are people who have been trained to kill… being met by an aggressive enemy - and still the vast majority won’t even shoot their rifle - let alone aim it at a person with the goal to kill them. The ones who do shoot to kill are often actively protecting their group (like when their squad is ambushed)… it’s this protection of the group (no. 2 above) that overrides our basic moral value of not killing another. Soldiers that do kill, in many cases are incredibly traumatised by their act. It’s something that never leaves them. ——— Is there some mechanism the decides morality? From a Daoist Alchemical perspective (at least the tradition I’m part of) - yes. But it’s not external to you. It’s you. But not the ‘you’ that you’re aware of… At the moment of death, as your soul gets ready for the process of transmigration, it evaluates your lifetime - and actions that made strong impressions on you will take significance at that time… The soul does not look upon these actions from our normal perspective - our personality with all its biases and acquired conditioning… it’s perspective is closer to that of our true, divine self. So even the dude that took great pleasure in creating pain for others, sees his actions without the filter of whatever acquired mental and emotional deviations that gave birth to these actions… and at that moment they recognise what they have done - and it’s this self recognition that ‘scars’ the conditionable aspect of our individuated soul (bhavanga in the Buddhist tradition) and creates the karma for the next life. The ‘morality’ of our ‘true, divine self’ - is similar to, but a little different from the more basic ‘animal’ morality we express as small children… more likely it’s this divine morality that is adjusted (through the process of ‘refraction’ from pre heaven to post heaven) intto animal morality that is suitable for survival on the earthly plane. ——— So I said that this process happens at the moment of death - that’s true for most people. But it also happens at the moment of entering various meditative states. As one crosses over from the manifest into the unmanifest and touches the centre of one’s divine aspect - suddenly all the impact of our actions come into view… As this happens, there’s a very vulnerable period where one either begins to identify with these karmic ‘scars’ (and therefore fertilises them into fruiting in various ways) or one begins the spiritual journey of transformation. This is why often you see people that have clearly had some divine insight, or some spiritual achievement begin to act immoraly - their karma takes over and they slowly become a kind of monster as their fears, pain and inadequacy begin to fruit into abusive behaviour. Sometimes it’s subtle - sometimes it’s quite shocking. THIS is the reason for spiritual traditions to have strict moral precepts. They are the guiderails for this vulnerable period where we’ve touched the divine at one end, but still mired deeply in all our karmic issues on the other end - and this discrepancy makes for fertile ground for the seeds to sprout. Once these karmic seeds have been cleared, there is no longer any need for the guide-rails of moral precepts… one cannot help but emit divine morality unconditionally. There are various physical and physiological signs of this having taken place. It’s very rare indeed. Jesus-level rare The big issue is that when one is in the vulnerable period, it’s easy for them to think they’ve become enlightened and that they’re at the stage that moral precepts no longer apply… it’s a very tricky period for cultivators - particularly if they are not part of a tradition and don’t have a teacher guiding them.