erdweir

It's hard to compete with internet porn

I would day your teacher is trying to get you to see beyond the dualities of the mind and it's usual way of perception. Look for a deeper kind of perception to come out of your practice. don't overthink it. if nothing come out of your practice, even if you are being diligent about it, maybe visit some other teachers and see if you can find someone you like better. eastern philosophy is way different from the western version. It doesn't make sense to try to grasp it without practice in meditation. your teacher is speaking in riddles, but that is because they aren't talking to the one sided rational consciousness. try to let go of your prejudices and relax into it

You say you think the answer lies beyond acupuncture and herbs and you ask for tips on finding a good acupuncturist? Think about this contradiction. You are unsure as to how to proceed. open yourself up to more options. My hair was falling out last year, I was too stuck in my head. Doing chi gung helped, my hair stopped falling out and turning grey as well. But you say your system is too fried? What kind of drugs were you doing? drugs can seriously deplete the body's energy reserves and chi gung can replenish them. And you are also fried from too much meditation? and yet you found some inner calm from meditating. Another contradiction. The wrong kind of meditation can hurt you if you are not ready for it. If you have blockages and damage from drugs you should proceed carefully. I would guess you need something that will build up you energy slowly and gently. I also agree that a rough guess is that you kidneys might be weak. sexual vitality come from the kidneys. fear also resides in unhealthy kidneys. the adrenals sit right on top of the kidneys and are aversely affected by their weakness. hair loss is also a sign of weak kidneys and sexual vitality. what kind of abdominal blockage are we talking about?

I like what he is saying about how people look for confirmation of their own ingrained ideas, all to often the case, even with myself. hard to unlearn. Has anybody ever read Madame Blavatsky's Baboon? It gives a strange history of the Theosophist movent and some disturbing revelations therein. Apparently UG was "found" by Leadbeater, on of the movements early leaders, during a search for a new Messiah. The Theosophists were looking for kids all over India thaet they could raise to be a new savior. After several false starts, they settled on UG. The gross thing is Leadbeater was a notorius pedophile. Aleister Crowley also wrote some dirty limericks about him after they had an affair. So Krishnamurti was taken from his family and raised by the theosophists, must has been weird for him.

Hey awake, I had a similar problem. I got this doing the Microcosmic orbit meditation from Mantak Chia's books. I got a raging stream on energy shooting up my spine than ran into a block in my upper back. I could feel these undulating snakes pressing on the block with their pointed heads, hunting around for some was to get past it. I decided to try and push past it which was a bad idea. it just made it worse. I ended up driving myself crazy and started biting myself on my arms rather fiendishly for an hour or so. I eventually had to call someone to help talk me down from my panic. I tried to find a teacher to help me but didnt have any luck. I ended up just slowly working through the block a little at a time, just a trickle at first, then more and more. My back was sore all the time like yours. eventually all the vertebrae in my upper back cracked and the energy streamed up to my head and i felt relief for the first time in a month. Later i found out about other exercises which loosen up the back, like "spinal cord breathing" and also learned from the experience how important it is to keep your back very straight and upright while doing these kinds of meditations. My advice to you is get a teacher to help you, and do something for your back, like hang from a door or swing set or something, or take some yoga or tai chi if you can. they will both help align you back. a chiropractor will be able to align you back but you will keep having to go back to them. I would go do it now far a quick fix if you are in allot of pain but learn how to do it yourself for the long haul. A regular MD is not likely to understand what you are going through, but you never know. Getting checked up cant hurt. You can put your back against the wall when you meditate if you need help keeping it straight, and do the meditation gently and dont push. I got the energy to pass through my block by trying to concentrate on a spot above the block instead of pushing up against it. I would stop doing it for now though, or just concentrate on reversing the flow back to the source at the base of the spine. remember to keep calm, this kind of thing is dangerous and really uncomfortable but it can be managed. if you can find a chi kung teacher in your area they might be able to help you more than a doctor but not all teachers are that good, it can be hard to find a good one. Sounds like you got more than you bargained for! so did I and many others here. but you can get through it.

You said before one could not tell what kind of experience someone might get from drugs, and maybe that is true, but as practitioners of taoist meditation or whatever, maybe we want more than just a nice experience? we want permanent expansion of consciousness, or to dissolve consciousness altogether? I myself have wanted to go beyond drugs for quite some time, and have finally done it. I made myself feel like i was on acid, with a heightened state of awareness, just from meditation, and now I an trying to get more control over it so i can do it whenever i need to. but back to the door, allot of adepts have said that drugs can show you that there is something there, but they cant really help you live there. I would agree with this. It fits my own experience. On the other hand I dont know that much about shamanism. I would assume that any shaman worth his peyote is doing more than gobbling buttons. And peyote is pretty new to most native american tribes, its use dates back only about 100 years. so these guys were adopting it into an already established tradition of seeking visions and thus might have more of an idea of how to use it. they are not just getting high in other words.

I agree, drugs can give you a peek in the door, maybe something more, but I am more interested in doing it through my own body/mind. although we should respect serious traditions like the native american church, but i am not lining up for a peyote ritual. to each his own...

I think this article makes a good point, but it also inadvertently admits that lsd can give you an expanded view of sorts in the midst of trying to show you how it cant take you all the way. You need mental discipline for that or you will just be tossed around by random associations vomited up by your disordered unconscious. fair enough. That being said, i think it's being pretty hard on all drug use, and doesn't take into account shamanistic practices, which have their value. I myself had a wonderful experience on mushrooms in which i healed myself of 90% of chronic joint pain on the left side of my body. the shrooms helped me feel all of the tense muscles in my body and i spent hours isolating each one and stretching them out. the next day my chronic pain was gone. it still comes back sometimes if i eat bad food or something, but it isnt as strong and doesen't last long. i healed myself with the aid of the drugs where acupuncture and western medicine has failed, and I wasn't tormented by my demons one bit. I didnt go back and take it over and over again looking for cheap Nirvana. I am not really interested in trying to use drugs as a short cut. In that sense this article is dead on, Drugs are not a short cut or substitute for self mastery. But contrary to the opinion he gives, they are not devoid of benefit, and they can help in certain situations. Most people take them just to get high though, and there's nothing particularly evil or divine about that. I'm talking about psychedelics here. Americans consume an awful lot of drugs, and we should think about why we do it more, and do it for better reasons. this goes way beyond illegal drugs, we are throwing pills at kids instead of paying attention to them and acting like we are doing the right thing. Adults find it easier to take pills than learn to meditate too much of the time too. I think LSD and other drugs can be of psychological help, look at the LSD therapy movement of the 50's before it got hijacked by the CIA and turned into a mind control program called MKULTRA. see Acid Dreams for details. on the other side you have people like Timothy Leary and Terrence McKenna who just tell you it will fix everything, and this is obviously nonsense. Read Mckenna's True Hallucinations if you want to hear an account of abuse of sacred substances. His brother had his mind shattered in the Amazon, and he was trying to decode his psychobabble instead of helping him. Disgusting. Leary also informed on his protectors to get out of prison. Is being a rat enlightened? Hardly. See Acid Dreams for this story as well.

I love this topic! I think about it often. I have been doubting the reality of chi for a while, even as my experiences with it become more powerful and interesting. But I am a pragmatist. If chi is a delusion, it's a beneficial one. But I dont think it is a delusion. I have traded energy with other people so i would have to think it's a collective hallucination. perhaps one brought on by chi kung! Even though I accept it, with reservations, the cross cultural differences between their descriptions of the subtle body are puzzling. I can only think that the subtle body is more flexible than the physical one, or that these different systems emphasize different aspects of it. as far as reality goes, before i even started doing any practices, i have had some weird experiences where the world didnt seem "real" to me. It looked like crystalized energy. for the record i was not on drugs. I was in this park and the trees looked like liquid metal moving in slow motion. the sight of a bee landing on a flower made me laugh. "Oh come on", i said "you cant be serious". I realized i was talking to god. I was walking around in this holographic garden looking at these flowers, which seemed very erotic to me but just made out of holographic light, and saying out loud to god" oh you cant be serious, why are you such a pervert" and laughing to myself. I guess this and other experiences have led me to take the consensus reality with a grain of salt. who gave the western scientists the right to dictate the validity of everyone's experiences? why do we go along with it? I think we accept science so readily in part because we have been trained to. and in this sense how different is science from chi kung? sure science has obvious effects and is very powerful, but can you not say the same thing about esoteric practices? and so what if chi doesn't work like an electromagnet in a lab, it's a different realm of experience that science hasn't caught up with yet. actually there is this book called The Field that has some interesting things to say about photon emissions in the body. apparently cancer causing substances block photon emissions of a certain wavelength. these emissions are thought by certain scientists to manage the body's chemical processes. they say that the normal way of accounting for the precise meeting of the required chemical components for protein synthesis in just the right part of the cell at the right time cant be accounted for by the usual explanation, which is that they happen randomly against astronomical odds billions of times a second. at first none of the other scientist would even believe the body was emitting photons, much less regulating it's processes, but it makes sense to me. sometimes believing in chi is actually more reasonable than believing in the absurdly narrow views science can take.

Santiago, I would also like to hear and answer to Loke's question above. In Morris's Path Notes, he states that Kan and Li is the Chinese or Taoist version of Kundalini awakening. Can you clarify this? Does Kundalini involve some kind of internal copulation between Shiva and Shakti? Is this Similar to the Taoist Kan and Li Practice? Is it also supposed to result in the birth of a spiritual fetus?

My experience is mixed with education. In the sixth grade I was singled out as being "gifted", whatever that means. In Junior High I was in honors classes but by the end of the eighth grade I had lost all interest and barely passed on the high school. I never passed the 9th grade and never made any effort to. When I started my third year in the 9th grade I realized it was never going to happen so i dropped out and got a GED. If I had to say what it was that made me lose interest I would have to ay it was my own disillusionment and the violence, cruelty, lack of understanding of faculty and students. I feel like my creativity was deliberately attacked and repressed. I figured school was mainly for brainwashing and left. 10 years later I decided to go to art school in NY. I ended up minoring in philosophy. I had a much better experience, had a couple of bad teachers but allot of good ones, and my artwork and thinking improved. Now in my early 30's i left college with a BFA. I started wandering and getting more spiritual, reducing my chronic tension, learned to sleep at night, and opened myself to some better ways of being. I tried various forms of holistic therapy and meditation and eventually ended up with taoist practices. most of my friends from my teenage years were drop outs like me, and we were all pretty self destructive punk street kids, but we all made art and music too. I think our creativity saved us from a worse fate. A few of these people were interested in the occult, as was I, but there were too many drugs and f'd up things happening so their quest ended badly. I managed to clean myself up and restart. I am the only one of them to finish college and most of them never went to any college at all. The friends I made after this period in my life were more educated, most have a Bachelor degree, some have graduate degrees, a few pursued doctorates. some of these friends have spiritual practices, they do Reiki, Martial Arts, Yoga, Tantra, Acupuncture, etc. All of these people who have spent time developing themselves spiritually also went to college and got degrees and none of them are as self destructive as the people I grew up with. None of my friends or family members are what you would call religious. My parents and most of my friends have no beliefs. I know a couple of rabid atheists who are what I would call rationalist fundamentalists and are about as bad as any other kind of true believer. I myself am sort of agnostic sometimes but lean toward pantheism.

It might seem strange to bring up Hegel on this forum, but in this case i think it's actually relevant. In the Phenomenology of the Sprit, Hegel discusses the way consciousness assumes different "shapes". each shape is formed by the mind or spirit dividing itself between a subject and object. this division is actually false according to Hegel. He calls it the opposition of consciousness. As the phenomenology unfolds, the mind keeps becoming frustrated by trying to know the objects it creates because it assumes the objects are separate from it. as each shape implodes, the spirit incorporates the ruins of it shattered illusions into itself and tried to create a new, more sophisticated object for it to know, and in the process creates self consciousness and a great deal of other things. Eventually it comes to know itself as a process of creating and destroying objects for itself to know. This is Hegel answer to the Kantian problem of how to know the "thing in itself". The "thing" we see is not actually existing apart from us, we in fact create it. this goes a great deal further that Berkley's idealism (if a tree falls in the forest and no one sees it...) Hegel actually maintains that the universe is made of mind or spirit and is not separate from it. Hegel goes further with this line of thought in the Science of Logic. He shows how western science tries to get to know things though quantity, quality etc, but these methods all fail. Hegel call this stage of mind which tries to know physical things as absolutes the "understanding". eventually this stage yields to the dialectical phase, where the flaws of the understanding are revealed though their own contradiction. in the third stage, contradictions are resolved through the unity of opposites in the "notion". this is infinite thought according to Hegel. finite thought deals with separate individual objects and their position in space and time, but finite thought cannot give a consistent account of changes and transformations in the world. By the infinite, Hegel means not an endless series of numbers, but a unity of all things with their seeming opposites where all boundaries are transcended. of course all this is purely intellectual and Hegel didnt seem to know much about the transcendent states of consciousness where unity is not just described but experienced directly, and and he tended to value the intellect over religion or art as the best way to know the absolute, but I find Hegel's philosophy strangely compatible with esoteric notions of transcending the individual viewpoint and it's divisions of the self and other. Hegel also values the individual, not just the over all unity, and says that the over all unity and individuals need each other to reveal and complement their natures. There is allot more to it of course, Hegel is notoriously dense reading, and i dont agree with all of it, but I am glad I studied it.

i hate to perpetuate a rumour, if indeed that is what i am doing, but has anybody heard this story that mantak chia actually learned all of his taoist techniques from three teachers in new york? i was told this briefly by a martial arts teacher who feel uncomfortable naming on a public forum. they said that although chia learned authentic formulas from these three as of yet unnamed new york teachers, the teachers were very disappointed in him for publishing them. supposedly because they were dangerous and thus unethical to give to people who might damage themselves trying them alone without an instructor. this would make chia's claims about his lineage bogus, of course, but would also preserve the authenticity of his teachings. i dont personally know what to think of the story, and have no way of confirming it on my own. i even feel weird putting this out there, but then i know that there have been numerous controversies surrounding the publications of western kaballah, tantra, etc. and the tendency to claim lineage to immortals, secret chiefs, etc. is also quite common and often found questionable. so anybody heard this one before?

hello, i am a novice in taoist practices and i live in san francisco. i have been working alone with books and info from the internet, and i realize it is limiting me. i have had some rather under-whelming experiences with meditation teachers and martial artists so i feel like the time is right to open the doors to advice. does anybody have any suggestions for teachers of taoist yoga, sexual cultivation, internal martial arts, or nei kung in the bay area? i am not sure what style/school to dabble in but i think the personal connection is important. i have had it with manipulators, fakers and spaced out flakes! throw me a bone! and if you have the time, please tell me what it is about the teacher you find compelling thank you

this is all very interesting, i had never heard of james mcneil. one of the things i am picking up on is that chia seems to have allot of material which closely resembles that of some others. the bone marrow washing is just one example. if you look on the wikipedia article for mantak chia, it mentions he is being taken to court by someone who claims he stole his inner smile technique. but then you have to admit that things like the healing sounds, for example, have a really long tradition behind them and there are allot of different versions of them. so does anybody really own them? it does seem that chia has taken allot of elements from different places. maybe he is slack about giving credit. it seems i am not the only one hearing these stories.

that's not particularly helpful

hello apparently i have to post here to enable my access to certain forums. i found this site after searching for eric yudelove's name and read some discussion of him here. i have been looking at the written material for taoist yoga/internal alchemy for a while, and it was making a bit more sense to me than western or south asian stuff. so i started doing the microcosmic orbit exercise from chia's books recently and got the typical result. or one typical result maybe. i was working my way up the spine after a couple of weeks spine when i hit a roadblock. i got stuck there for some reason, and could not return the chi to my navel. i could feel these warm streams of energy undulating around in my spine and trying to push past some bubble. after a while i got really uncomfortable and started tossing and turning and gnawing enthusiastically on my arms. they were so fun to bite i cant tell you. i got a bit spooked and called up this weird dude i met who had studied extensively with chia and he talked me down. like i was having a bad trip or something. things are a bit better now, but last night i got all the way up into my brain and after i had put the chi to bed it kept coming back and spontaneously heating up the third eye area, it must be really happy there or something. it took me a few tries to really put it back to rest. anyway i am interested in working with all of this bio-electricity, chi, orgone, or whatever you want to call it. it's fascinating stuff. i sort of have a teacher if i want one but i am a bit alienated by how far off the map he is. and i thought i was weird. maybe some day i will become part of an inter-dimensional spirit army too and have these words force fed to my immortal astral body at the gates of taoist paradise. it is hard to know how to take these kind of perspectives sometimes, but then again i am just starting off so why worry about it? in all fairness, sometimes this world seems like it is made out of wax to me anyway, i get alice in wonderland syndrome often enough, so who am i to question his perceprions? it is mainly a compatibility issue. or i dont know how to interpret them yet. i have friends who have done kundalini, ch kung, tantra, internal martial arts, voodoo, etc., but none of then seem to be close at hand these days. so i am going it alone here in san francisco. ciao

to drew, what do you mean by cycles? and just to clarify, i was thinking that chia does have you focus on one center at a time in the beginning, but the goal is to circulate it around, not leave it in one place. it that what you mean by a cycle? a lap around the orbit? to scotty, i actually went to a teacher and didnt get much more info than i already knew. you are describing the tongue thing that is in chia's books, right? sounds the same, as well as your warnings about heat in the head, he never leaves that out. and kunlun, people here are all on about that it seems, what is it? thank you both for the suggestions, i think i have it more under control now. i just got a bit overwhelmed once but i am interested in hearing more of course.... and yoda, i made erdweir up. my birth name is birch hayes http://www.birchhayes.com/index.html

oh yes that was part of it. when i started doing the orbit i wasnt practicing any of the other introductory level exercises that are presented along side it in the written material(inner smile/healing sounds). after i realized my omission, i found that using the inner smile helped melt the blockage in my back. but i think part of my issue was just inexperience and panic. i just got a rather strong reaction fairly quickly and got enthralled by the experience of it squirming around in my back and then lost focus. things are going better now, but like i said sometimes i have to put a little extra effort in to reel in some random chi phenomena. yes everybody has some special method it seems, some say theirs is better, and i dont really know now do i? I havent heard of the things you are referencing. i will take a look. most esoteric practices confuse the hell out of me because they use so many symbols and archetypes. when i was younger i looked at western kaballah and couldn't crack it. i met some crowley types and they gave me the sleaze vibe so i didnt pursue it. there is this dark aspect to people like crowley, artaud, or william burroughs i am attracted to, but it ends up being too much for me. then again i am usually too dark for the taoist/tantra folks i have met. havent found my niche yet. tantra and indian metaphysics also boggle me. i like some of the twisted stories about the siddhas, but the whole cosmology is a bit beyond me at this point. the taoist material has been broken down by chia and some of his followers so it is somehow comprehensible to me. i figure there are allot of ways to go. it makes sense that i would have a little trouble at first just starting by myself with no teacher or experience.