erdweir

I would say strength comes from self-mastery. Being stronger than another is a side effect of "mastery" but the point isn't to win some spiritual arm wrestling contest, it's to tame the random bullshit that is incessantly churning away inside most people's psyche's, and transform the body into something that can support an evolved consciousness. You need strength to accomplish this, but not the kind of bad ass muscular macho most people associate with strength. becoming sensitive to the forces of nature and learning to ally yourself with them brings great strength, and does becoming aware of how one is manipulated by petty ego desires and fears in order to move beyond them. one can accomplish these kinds of things with great struggle and or by a cessation of struggle, either way, i would say one is "mastering" something by going through this. But to get back to Wang, the book on him has allot of stories about going through these trials and learning to "master" himself. If you do get the mysterious superpowers from it and start talking about it then of course you are going to attract miracle seekers and all kinds of idiots but also people who are somehow woken up by it. Hell, the first time I saw John Chang in Ring of Fire I was astounded, I had no idea what I was watching but it really excited me. It's sensational because most of us are trained to think these kind of abilities are the stuff of fiction. My fascination with what I saw in Ring of Fire fed into my interest in Taoism and Nei Kung, not just because of the so called "supernatural" aspect of it (whatever that is supposed to be) but rather that I felt I was being shown some aspect of life that had been suppressed by the rationalistic western view of things. it showed me the whole story about western science campaigning against superstition and witchcraft was more full of shit that I had perviously imagined. But in any case one doesn't learn how to do stuff like that without gaining higher level of understanding than most will attain in life. It doesn't necessarily mean you are enlightened or immortal, but I am not going to say a priori that being immortal or enlightened, whatever that is, is totally out of the question. Having attained "mastery" just means you have gone through the effort to learn something, something rare, hard to define and difficult to understand. People call it mastery for a lack of a better word.

I know there are Taoist on Mt Hua of course, but I dont know much about them. feel free to share what you know if you have the time, I would be interested to learn more. I would like to visit there next year.

I think the good old microcosmic orbit has been my strongest experience. I did it for two+ hours once and I not only felt strong chi but it increased my awareness dramatically. crazy stuff if done intensely.

Ok, i just thought I would send you a friendly warning. Some people here contacted me privately after talking to me on the open forum and told me that they liked the practices, but some found the atmosphere in the school creepy. Nobody really went into detail with me, so I look forward to hearing your take on it. I have decided to go to China myself and poke around to see what I can find. I am not going to be able to go until november or december. Perhaps we can keep in touch to talk about practices and such. I am mainly interested in Neidan and things like the secret of the golden flower, but i have other interests as well. if you want to respond to messages individually, there is a reply option at the end of each individual post that automatically quotes the message you are responding to. I think you just went to the bottom of the thread and clicked add reply

who are you studying with in rome if you dont mind me asking? David Verdesi perhaps? If so, you might want to look at this thread: http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?showto...l=david+verdesi

This is a total contradiction. You are passing judgement on something you dont understand and saying you want to be free of your personal judgments. You are expressing prejudice, and that will get you nowhere. Good luck with that.

Most of us here are practicing something, there are allot of different things to practice. they fall into different groups which all overlap. Chi Kung and Nei kung are methods of cultivating chi or internal power, and no i dont mean we are all power hungry, i mean we are gathering chi for various reasons. When you do this, you become aware of all of these problems in you body/mind, and start seeing the world a bit differently. It has made me more peaceful, less stuck in my head, less judgmental, etc. One finds stresses in the body and dissolve them, etc. Chi king and Nei kung are also called standing meditation methods. Internal martial arts (ones which are based on cultivating chi) are also popular here. The main chinese ones are Tai Chi, Bagua Zhang, and Xing Yi Quan. They are not just fighting arts, but deeply spiritual and are meditation systems and Chi Kung methods in their own right. Then there are Taoist Yoga methods like Dao Yin, and very advanced things like Nei Dan, or internal alchemy. In Nei Dan, one converts the lower levels of chi into higher ones. Also stillness meditation is very imprtant in Taoism, as mentioned above. There is allot of information here about these things, as well as other systems, like Tantra, Tibetan Buddhism, and Kundalini Yoga. Most of this stuff deals with life energy or chi in some way and body practices are also bigger in taoism than in the west. but maybe you should also look at esoteric western practices, like kabballah or something? there is allot more tot he western tradition than the devotional methods. As far as taoism being diluted, unfortunately there is truth to this, but there are also allot of really serious practitioners and teachers out there and you can find them if you look. Of course, there is allot of bullshitting on this site, it is the internet after all, but some people will point you in the right direction of you ask the right questions. I would recommend searching through some of the vast number of posts on this site to look for what you are interested in. This will take some patience, but it can be worth it if you are serious about taking up some taoist practices.

Eric Yudelove, Mantak Chia's student, tried to combine Chia's advanced practices (which weren't well tested mind you) with Kaballah and the result is that he lost his mind, pulling samurai swords at strip clubs and babbling about black dragons and losing his family. ouch. I wish E. Yudelove well, and hope his troubles were endured of some greater lesson, but it should be a warning to us all of trying to reach for too much. We may indeed be capable of fusing eastern and western practices, and achieving unheard of lifespans, but i would not get carried away too quickly by fantastic goals. Nei Dan and Kaballah have long histories, took ages of time to refine into what they are today. It may take just as long to merge them if such a thing is even possible or desirable. And even if we can, should we really be trying to cheat death, or should we be trying to see the truth? You need good health and long life to seek the truth, because it isn't easy and can take a life time find some part of the truth, but holding on to our bodies as long as we can might not be the most worthy goal. This is just my personal view, but I ask you what the point of this worldly immortality is? Taoist Neidan is more about creating a immortal spirit body that can survive the death of the physical body, not about holding on to the body as long as possible.

yeah I'm sorry but i cant remember exactly where I read about the obesity thing, it was in some book about bagua and it made mention of a bagua master who had made himself obese through some chi kung practice that was known to have that effect.

Practitioners of Taoist internal arts frequently live into their 90's, and what's more, they have good mobility, strength and clear minds well into their final years. This is common amongst masters of Tai Chi, Bagua, Xing Yi, and other internal martial arts, and also masters of Chi Kung, Nei Kung and Nei Dan. I have read some stories of Chi Kung that has made people obese and given them heart attacks, other weird stuff, but you have to wonder if they were practicing properly. Sometimes you hear these stories of Taoist who are hundreds of years old, but I have never seen it well documented. But living to be close to 100 years old, with strength and vitality unusual for that age, yes, I would say that is well documented.

Fair enough

The problem with statements like this is that they apply to themselves. If all language is a lie, then so is this statement. It's the classic paradox of the cretan who says all cretans lie, and is therefore himself lying, so the statement has no truth value. self referential statements like that are considered nonsense in contemporary logic. I may be sick of reading philosophy, but this is just bad reasoning. maybe he is trying to create a paradox intentionally, I dont know Paul Walter's point of view really, but it sounds too simplistic to me. This is the kind of shit that made me stop reading philosophy, like the post-modernists who say there is no such thing as absolute truth, which is itself a statement which asserts an absolute truth. total nonsense.

Yeah that is quite the circle jerk going on over there, I put in my 2 cents, but then I realized I just dont have the patience to really go for it anymore. I studied allot of philosophy in college, and took it very seriously. Doing that really sharpened my mind. I dont fall prey to mushy logic very often anymore, which I appreciate greatly. Mostly though I am glad I got it over with. I think when I was young, a teenager, and someone first turned me on to some Kabbalah or Tarot, I was fascinated by it, I read all about it. Ultimately I gave it up because I realized my approach to it was just intellectual and I couldnt find books with any real exercises in them to do. I also tried to read about all of these other things, Buddhism or Indian metaphysics, or whatever else, and the same thing happened, all of the theory and concepts turned me off. I turned away from all of that stuff because I was sick of my intellect, it bored me. I feel like I was stuck in my head most of my life and doing body focused meditation is much more of what I want now. I wish I had done it earlier. I dont even want to read about the concepts behind Taoism, it seems pointless to me, all I am interested in in practice. There is something important about intellectual inquiry though, just as there is something important about any human talent, it just needs to stay in it's proper sphere. If you look at western society, we have an excess of intellectual disciplines and a lack of spiritual ones. Which is why we have allot of material power and use it recklessly. In the Critical Theory books you have to read in art school, the intellectual masturbation levels are disturbing, hard to believe actually. You get all of these trendy radical statements that do very little to enlighten anybody but sound very sophisticated. It really made me sick trying to read that stuff, especially after reading much more serious thinkers. At this point in my life I feel like the intellect is still important, but it needs to be dealt with as just part of the human landscape. Using science to study Chi is an excellent meeting of different worlds which have too long been kept apart. we need more of that kind of inquiry.

what about Sean Denty? Everybody loves to talk about him....

I would equate this with the Kantian view. Hegel would say that anything which appears as an object of consciousness is actually part of consciousness, which has been split off of it and presented as being something different from itself. So a phenomenon to Hegel is a kind of trick consciousness plays on itself in order to discover what it really is.

Yeah I prefer Hegel on this, but he is an aquired taste I guess, as is Kant. I dont like Kant nearly as well, I hate the whole split between the inside of the mind/outside of the mind, but it's very foundational to the western view of things. Probably why I dont like it very much.

Phenomenon is a word that is best understood in relation to it's contrast, Noumenon. Kant, the german enlightenment giant, divided the things dealt with by the mind into objects inside the mind, Noumenon, and objects outside of it, Phenomenon. People often talk about this split as having been articulated by Descartes, but is actually goes back to the ancient Stoic Philosophers. Classical Hellenic Philosophy doesn't know this distinction, but it often read back into it by later commentators. The Greeks Invented this Idea of the Mind as their classic period was coming apart. They used to think that humans were distinguished from animals by speech until someone pointed out that animals had speech too, so the answer to that was that humans had something else, a pre-uttered speech, which had to exist somewhere, let's call it the mind! See Bruno Snell's Discovery of the Mind for details of this story Of course you can say they had to understand the concept of the mind before that, but actually they had no word for it, any more than the Homeric Greeks had a word for the body! weird, but true.. If you read a good translation of Homer, he always talks about parts of the body, they dont have a word for the whole thing, interesting, huh? Ok back to Phenomenology. Hegel brought this word back into modern philosophy when he decided to consider the mind as a phenomenon instead of taking it for granted at the foundation if inquiry. A total reversal of the Cartesian/Kantian/Stoic mind body foundational split. He ended up in a position where he said the universe actually made of of thought, or mind/spirit (Geist?). No division between perception and perceived anymore, just like the good old days again. The Phenomenology of the Spirit is quite a book, very dense and also very fascinating if you like that sort of thing. It's allot of work to understand, but very rewarding for me to work through. Modern Phenomenology takes after Hegel attempts to study the experience we have apart from our usual assumptions about it, but i dont think it's as profound. It's very much related to existentialism. You could say it's the German counterpart to French existentialism. I never found it that interesting personally, but allot of people in radical left wing circles, and art criticism are really obsessed with it. If you want to punish yourself, pick up some Heidegger or Husserl. Husserl was Heidegger's teacher, but Heidegger ended up being more influential.

Trying to pick up women is, in my experience, a total waste of time. Women actually tell you if they are interested, you just have to be aware of how they do it. Then you decide if the feeling is mutual and there isn't much more to it. I never expend any energy on it, I dont look for women at all. When I am ready to meet someone, they just appear and there isnt any power struggle or mind game involved. It usually happens when I am very consciously not doing anything. I have met guys who pick up a different woman every day of the week. I never asked them how they did it, because I was never interested in learning how to charm and manipulate people into sleeping with me. I could tell they were total liars though and it seemed like a totally hollow pursuit. Having spent some time in bookstores, I have leafed through those pick up books like The Game, and they seem totally stupid to me. It's something like reading a cheesy book like "seven easy steps to spiritual mastery" but also like reading a manual on how to be a slave to your desires. What's the point?

Osho, or Rajneesh, as he used to call himself, was quite a character. All the Rolls Royces(I dont remember how many, maybe 20?) the weird paranoia and excessive violence of some of his followers, the rape stories where people in his retreats would get taken advantage of by his other followers. Then there was the salmonella attack on the residents of a local oregon town near his commune, the bugging of his followers quarters and even his own private chambers, etc.. I think Osho may have meant well, but he presided over allot of messed up stuff, I wouldnt follow his words too closely

I dont think there is any real problem with trying to open up these channels, but that is just my experience. I had much more trouble opening up my spine. working on the limbs didnt weaken me at all, it made me feel more balanced. Now as I am getting deeper into it I find that I am starting to encounter allot of tension in my legs, which didnt happen at first. Some people say you need to open up the channels in the arms and legs so you can sit in the lotus of extended periods without going numb. This goes along with the old story about Damo at the Shaolin temple being concerned with the monks getting weak from constant meditation. There is a brief description of it here but i find it a bit confusing, you have to read it several times over: link Mantak Chia's system has allot of problems with it but many of the basics are common to allot of Taoist practices. The stuff in Healing Light is pretty safe compared to allot of it. Opening up the channels in the legs helps you absorb earth energy, and I would suggest doing grounding exercises which those channels are helpful for too. One thing I am struggling with now and Mantak Chia doesnt stress very much is stillness. The Iron Shirt stuff and bone marrow washing are supposedly more dangerous. and the Kan and Li as well. I would say wait until you have the basics covered and can afford a teacher. I was doing some five element stuff and all kinds of weird things started happening to me that I couldnt explain. It kind of spooked me. Michael Winn also admitted on his forum a few years ago that Chia had never done the Kan and Li. I would ignore what he has published about it.

Razors pain you Rivers are damp Acids stain you And drugs cause cramp Gas smells awful Nooses give Guns aren't lawful You might as well live Resume- by Dorothy Parker

That's more like it. So energetic practices and enlightenment dont have to go together, but in Taoism and Tantra/Tibetan Buddhism/Bonpo they mostly do. In Taoism, the usual thing is to turn jing to chi, chi to shen, etc. In each step you gain more awareness and use the energy to create a soul or spirit body/rainbow body/immortal fetus, etc. You join together the various pieces of your soul, the five elements, Yin and Yang, etc. in order to recreate yourself as a more unified being. You work with the energies of you body to turn them into higher forms of energy and awareness increases along with it. My experience with this is limited, but I have had some crazy increases of awareness from doing this. they were more powerful than i was ready for. I am trying to get myself a better foundation for this work now, and am looking for a better method/teacher. It's hard work. Good luck.

Does one ever finish Bagua training?

I would venture so far to say that nobody is posing as your guru here. Maybe some people are impatient with you, but maybe you are a bit impatient yourself. and so what if they are? don't let it get to you. lets talk about opinion for a minute. Plato talks about the difference between opinion and knowledge in the Republic. Knowledge is distinguished from opinion by the understanding of the principles of a thing. if you understand principles, then you have knowledge and can teach what you know. If you dont, all you have is opinion, which does not have to be wrong, you can have the right opinion too, you just dont know why you are right. some people here offer their opinions, but some actually know what they are talking about. I personally would not assume people trying to clue you in on things are just talking out their ass. And say you are right, and we are all doing just that, so whay talk to us then? You seem very sure of your own view of this community, but keep in mind if its all just bullshitting, than that applies to you as well. Just take what you want from it and listen to yourself above all. Even a great teacher cant make decisions for you, or see everything about you. this is a place to share, and I would value it as such. I just try to focus on finding out things here myself, it's good for that.

Ok maybe you are right, but he wrote down the most of what G said out of any of his disciples. G disowned him for it, but later in life admitted that O had pretty much published his exact words.