Pietro

Yes, I remember the post. But it was based upon Castaneda describing Don Juan as being trapped in some place beyond the world. Practically it was based upon the assumption that Don Juan was actually there, at least until he wasn't anymore

I read and practiced Sanchez stuff some years ago. But my understanding was that he was deriving it from Castaneda. So he was downstream from him. Now that I think of I remember reading a one page interview to someone who was pretending he was Castaneda, this in the period between his first 3 books and the others. And this guy saying something like: 'yeah, there is this other guy who goes around, saying he is me'. All together I think I would more look to academic material or proper original anthropological material. No other Guru who learned from a 'secret teacher'.

Interesting topic. I know much less on Castaneda life, but I did make up my mind. The story is made up. No doubt about that. But I don't think he did it with ill intentin at the beginning. I do recall reading a site saying how the first book was mostly written as a tongue in cheek joke. But then it had success. And this brings on problems. Because it is not easy in this world to be satisfied with your job. So he might have found himself at different point in his life with no job or dream or guide or whatever. Essentially lost. And if anything like that have happened the memory of the success that his previous books had would have been a grear source pushing him toward continuing the trend. We all need to eat, although not all of us accept to lie to eat. Think about how often have you found someone having success with a book and then writing others, just at a very lower quality. I think the only book worth something is his third book, ... to ixland. And I still suggest it specifying that is the only one worth something and that the facts are actual fiction. If you take that book and you dissect it you have 3 type of experiences. Stories of power his interaction with Don Juan, description of energetic excercises, and pieces of philosophy. The first is probably made up to make the book more interesting and explain his point, the second is not learnable through a book, and it seem that it was mostly taken by his energetic teacher (H. L. Howard Lee?), but the third is really interesting. Where does that come from? Well, do you remember that C.C. was doing a PhD thesis in his first book, right? Well the professor was: Erving Goffman (according to a friend of mine who used Castaneda stuff for some time, before deciding it was pseudoculture and not culture). Now Goffman book titles are: The presentation of self in everyday life; Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience; Strategic Interaction, and others Can you see how they might contain the philosophy that Castaneda was presenting. I have tried to look at those books, but they seem to be REALLY hard to understand. And it is not a matter that it is academic and I am not use to academic, because I work at the uni. It is that 'anthropological academy' is generally written in a very obscure way. Often to obfuscate the fact that some of the things said are quite obvious. And then the whole field followed the trend. So I am sure some (most?) of the meat is there. Just unavailable for most people. Well Castaneda has been able to make some parts of it available so much that other teachers do refer to it. I think this is good, and probably it was part of his ming. But I would love to know more about the origins of his philosophy and where to get that.

Your intuition is correct. Many people believe once the jing has been aroused it is just not possible to bring it back to the unaroused state. And if it is possible I never managed to bring it back. As such the practice with cold unaroused energy is significantly different from any practice with aroused energy. And in my experience the only one which have any hope to attain complete retention. Yet Ron would disagree as he seem to have managed to work with extreemly aroused energy and complete retention. But at what price!

It is not mine. It is the underlying philosopy in the whole water method. You find it again and again in Bruce's books. We... agree... on... retention??? Wow. Must be the first time from when I left the HT! There is a whole world of eating high meat out there. And worse... but let's not enter into that. Eating (your own!) semen is quite ok. It made me understand why my gf was having problems with it. It is so Y*A*N*G that it is really hard to absorb. She was having skin rush. I am totally ignorant regarding chinese herbs and similar. But I do remember Bruce saying something about not taking supplements before age 50 or 60 to make sure that later in life they still work for you. Since I don't take herbs in general I quite happily adopted that philosophy. No action was necessary on my part. Cameron, your aim sound way more reasonable than before. Well done!

Sorry. I Just check the forum once a day. My loss. Once you come you thread upon your principles. In various ways. First of all most of us are not able to have properly sex WITH their body, but would instead have sex to the fantasies. This brings two problems: 1) you are getting your hormonal to fire on some fantasies, thus confusing fantasy and reality 2) often the conjured fantasies would balance some deep internal need. A person who feel powerless in his life might dream to be an all powerfull god. Or viceversa, a manager to whom this society have given more power than what he can safetly handle might dream to be a slave. There is a nice story in chuang tzu about this. And I have personally read blogs of prostitutes describing this as a common partner among their clients Often in thos fantasies a person might do things they wold never do in real life. This creates a fracture between their higher shen (who would not do those actions) and their pulsion (who just need to balance themselves, quite mechanically). Recovering this fracture is a major step that needs to be adressed in order for the crisis to be over. All this does not happen if you just have sex with your body remaining present in reality all the time. If your body REALLY needs to release (i.e. empty the balls) it become quite possible, but if you are using sex compulsively to balance some deeper problems, it will just not work. And if you force your mind to remain in reality, as soon as you come you will have lost part of your power and the compulsion will kick in. Or you simply feel that whatever needed to be balanced by the ejaculation, that every other time got balanced, is not getting balanced this time. And this bring to the positive side of ejaculation with fantasy: your mind expands, and your nervous system releases all the tension gathered. The fact that the nervous system need to be relaxed is maybe the biggest single thing that gets adressed in the water method and totally ignored in the HT. The inner smile is supposed to do that, but for most people it just doesn't. The fact that we need to let our mind expand, especially after hours passed in front of a computer, and release our tension is a big reason why most people in modern time are compulsive about sex with sexual fantasies. Then to complete the topic about how ejaculation shakes the relation between higher self and lower self, there is the whole issue of expectations: most practitioners have irrealistic expectation about their ability to retain. Also because they adopt the indian philosophy of practicing as their (head!) hair were on fire, they would actually do 150% of what their retention ability actually is. Where 100% is how far you can reach _in_a_safe_way_. Now, once you reach 100% something kicks on, and greed start to push you. Now you are really moving your boundaries on. In this sense reaching 100% is bad news. But it feels so much as good news. Then when they invariably fall, not only they ejaculate, but this break their dream of invincibility. And this harms them even more then the loss of jing. Suddenly they feel human again. And mortal. For them they will feel back whole when they recognise the ejaculation as their error, and recover their illusion of invulnerability. But as you can imagine this is just temporarily, and what all this yoyo movement does thrugh the years is to split the mind. It is a road to insanity. Let's clarify, not for all. Some are naturally chaste (Fajin from the other board comes to mind, although I don't really know), and some are just not interested anymore in sex (Harry Pain might be a good example here). But when chastity is taken in the wrong way or at the wrong age or for the wrong reasons, troubles awaits. But this splits between your higher self and your lower pulsion is much harder to really heal. I myself am not over it yet, so I have a hard time in explaining. My guess is that it require to adopt the 70% philosophy here too. Having a strong commitment to not pushing yourself over that limit. So if you can have retention safetly for 2 weeks only do it for 10 days. The chose to come. And since you chose to do it, you might even do it while keeping your mind in reality. And once you can do 10 days with no effort (which means 14+1 in a safe way) strive to do 11 days. And since you have chosen to come after 10 days you have not broken your vow by coming. So the hormonal have kept respect for the shen and only fired after the vow was over, on the other hand the shen have respected the hormonal by not taking a vow that was irrealistic, dangerous, greedy and stupid. And everybody is happy. Does this answer your question Thaddeus? Pietro

drinking raw eggs, raw meat, sleep, but also relaxing the kidneys, and generally the internal organs. Most of the pain comes from having the organs contracted after. And rebablancing the energy inside the body. Most people when they ejaculate tend to subdivide the body in different compartment and just empty one of those. The bad thing about this is that not only you lose energy but you also are then heavily imbalanced. And also allineating your body-hormonal system with your intention makes you feel much better.

Recently the Dalai Lama explained how interested they are in collaborating with Western Science. Spoke praise of it, while clarifying that on psychology, however Buddhism is thousands of years more advanced than western psychology. I was wandering if anybody knew of a good (accessible & complete) introduction to the structure of the mind, according to Buddhism. Many thanks, Pietro BTW, I shall be around today so we might do that famous chat.

As I was on the train to london about 1 month ago I met Richard, a buddhist friend of mine. It came out that he was doing a phd in 'buddhist psychology'. Bingo. So I asked him a few books (what follows are my raw notes): -books by the Dalai Lama -Daniell Goldmann: Working with destructive emotions -An introduction to Buddhist Psychology In Buddhism the speak about the "3 baskets": -sutas (or is it sutras?) -discipline -abhidharma (Buddhist psychology) hope someone finds it useful

Could I bring the attention of this community to this website: http://www.bwgen.com/index.htm

would it make sese to organise a series of mp3 to share with the group?

I don't remember where is it from... but it sounded about:

Trip! so nice to hear from you. You should read those entries from Steve Pavlina. I started drooling when I read the description of how time ended feeling divided into days; and the extra time you had (imagine being able to have a job and practice and have a social life all in the same lifetime); and the mind going naturally quiet. BTW, should we make the MM at TB? I think the chinese medicine of it is that the less original energy you have the less you sleep. So kids sleep a lot and old people hardly any. Mbanu is the person to ask to. P.S. nice pic, better than just the eye. Pietro

How interesting! I was actually aiming for a state in which I would sleep around the clock in a fairly symmetric fashion. The reason why I considered it possible it is because I read reports of people succeeding with it. Also in a way in which the total sum of slept hours is much fewer. Say 3 hours a day. If you have naps of 2-3 hours each day it might work, ... but I am not excited about it anymore. I would still sleep 7 hours a day So, is this napping every day a common practice between people who are working at strange times? Because I know plane pilots that have long east west route have a shorter lifespan on average. If there is a culture of polyphasic sleep in this kind of jobs than Polyphasic sleep would net be such a good tool. (according to the stats). Do many of your collegue nap regularly? How did you learned it? Many thanks, Pietro

The esperiment is probably near its end: failure. The last day was really god in terms of how I felt (remember that I slept yesterday night!), but my body just refused to stay awake during the night. It went perfectly until the 2 am nap (which is a an ok time to go to bed). With all the naps at the right time, and me also getting 10 minutes before in bed to cool down and read myself a bed time story. Then I dutifully woke up at 2.30, tured off the alarm, and woke up again when my flat mates came back at 4am. "oh sorry, we woke you up" "no, no" I lied. The really strange thing is that in the first days it really felt like it was working. Some days it felt I was drifting. The difference was similar to let's say jumping (monophasic) to flying (poly). Moving the wings more often, and always for less energy than pushing with the two legs in jumping. But altogether being carried around by the cumulative effort of the little wings movement. Right now I feel there is no possibility in the world it can work. At least for me, now. It feels like, after flying, falling. And it is better to fall, accept that I fall, and recover, then if I want try again. Instead than keep on flapping my wings while on the floor.

Oh, you just repattern it. So now it is Noel Edmond the problem?

Homm, last day I tried to get back with some activity and the result was that I nearly slept the whole night. Let's follow the whole thing. morning went well. It was holiday here in Germany, so I was not going to the office at all. I planned to take a walk between the 10 am nap and the 2 pm nap. But it was raining, so I had to potpone it to midday. There is a nice hill just on the back of where I live, so I aimed to that. At 1.50 I was in the middle of it and it was clear that if I wanted to sleep back home I had to run down the hill or similar. Instead I went the other way and headed for the office, to nap there. My 2 pm nap was in the office, and quite ok. Although I might have moved it by some half an hour. But on the next cycle I felt tired. At 6 am again I did not took the nap on the correct time but some half an hour later, and this time I simply overslept of about 1 hour. Not good news. If the body starts to oversleep it might start taking the deeper sleep in this way, instead of adapting itself to fall deeper early. I should have paid more attention. At 10 pm I was still in the office, having been reading there. So much that I decided t take the 10 pm nap in the office and go home after. As I went home I felt very good. it was around 11, I just woke up, the city was nice and peaceful. I went to the pub where my firends where and I had a game of Go. Apart playing very bad, this meant some SERIOUS concentration. I avoided to drink anything, not to fuck up my schedule. I took the next nap just after writing that long message. Again I was not precise on my schedule. It was maybe 2.30. I could not catch sleep. At some point I wondered if I had slept at all, and I was waking up or not. It happens on this kind of schedule. You remember how I said that oversleeping to the last moment of the alarm clock was a cause of some serious drawsiness. So I decided I had had my 2 am nap, although a short one, and I got up, and started working on the computer. I felt quite awake. At 3 am I was hit by a strong drawsiness, and I decided totake an extra nap. I woke up from it at 6.30 having overslept mt 2 alarm clocks. More than that at that point I was physically unable to get up at all, and I slept another hour. Hmmm. At this point I seriously considered pulling the plug to the whole experiment. Feeling that yes it is possible to live in that schedule but there is some deep type of sleep that does not get done. And in the long run that is what hits you. Before doing it I went back to read Steve Pavlina first week as Polyphasic sleeper. Some things came out: 1) he has been way more precise than me about taking his naps on time, up to the point of planning to read something for the last hour before a nap just to get in the mood of going to sleep. I kept an active schedule where I just wuld interrupt it to take a nap. Obviously in this way it was harder for me to fall asleep, and the 20 minutes I sat aside for sleeping were usually thus futher reduced. This might have implied that the deeper sleep was happening more with him than with me. 2) Yesterday I said how I felt I was over the hump and was now trying to stabilize the whole thing. Well going for a long walk up hill and playing a game of Go was more part of putting things back in. And probably my schedule was not sable enough. So for the next days I shall try to be more precise with naps and slow down on activity. Although Tuesday is appraching, and with that the office is opening up again in full force. AT that point my experiment will necessarily have a lower priority. And, Yoda, you might want to read very carefully the posts from Steve first week. Believe me: when you have a core sleep the type of nap that you got is qualitatively different. Not just deeper or less deep. A different type of animal altogether. Doing some naps during the day to sleep less and have less of a jump is ok. But eventually if you want to get fully Poly you have to jump. At some point you need to train your body to take the type of sleep it is used to take only after having been in bed for more than 30 minutes in the first 30 minutes. And this switch will just not happen unless there are reasons for your body to do it.

I have a couple of info on the stories that I wanted to throw in from a long time. first: Second (it will become important later): Third: there is a friend of mine I use to practice with. I started meditation one year after her. But her progress were very fast. Most of my first progress happened because I have had the luck of unfolding while she was unfolding too. We would visit masters around the world and she would be invited in with all the honors, called bodhisatva, and then they would say: "Oh you also brought your little friend," tap tap, toward me. I shall just say that it took her really a long time to understand that because she is able to do something and her students are able to do something in her presence, it does not naturally follow that other people are able to do it, or her students are able to do it when she is gone. And I am always not sure she got that totally. You got the idea. We shall call her F. So I spoke with F. about this issue of manifesting. She said (if I remember well): "...when you manifest (something new) you are cocreating with God. Which is part of the reason why we are here.". "But what about Karma?" "Oh Karma is good, it makes us connected one another, so we make one body. And Karma is so simple, it is just a pattern. If you don't like it you just repattern it". Yeah, right! So putting it all together it seems to suggest that it would be a good thing to learn how to handle karma before starting to manifest an elephant in your living room. Fourth story(I might have told this before, I am not sure): Some people seem to think that to have a good manifestation you need to add a formula like: "As long as this is for the benefit of all manking" or "if it is good for it to be so", and so on. I do have some serious issues with this kind of affirmation because they seem to take ethics and morality which I view as personal (which is why I got interested in Taoism, instead than in any other way to salvation) and situational and link the manifesting with an objective version of it. When you think there is no objective version you have a problem in doing it. Just slightly. Also it seem to me that part of our job as human beings is in discovering what our ethical and moral system is. As this gives us hints on each of us is. And I have difficulty in thinking that a ritual no matter how complex can cut through the simple fact that we need to look inside our heart and decide what is ok or not for us. (who to throw from the boat). I see this as our spiritual job, and the creation of a ritual that does it as impossible as concentrating on one color and becoming wise, or making an engine that produces more enery that the one that was put into (in one form or another). But if you faced the same problem and found something that worked for you let me/us know. Ok, good nap. Pietro

You know after having seen your office where you have forced everybody to balance on balls , I suspect your boss might be pulling your leg... just to get even. I do have a vague memory of a workshop- or a tribe. It was so long ago that I was still in Rome - before ''98. The culture was from the Amazonian forest and would 'divide space-time in a different way'. The news made me really excited, although at the time it was an impossible-to-follow thread. But for hunter gatherers it would surely make more sense, than for people in agricultural or industrial culture. Now that we are moving to the post industrial age (that is if we do not fuck up the world), where everybody is more free to set up their own timeplan it starts to make sense again. So we might be rediscovering it. And yes, of course it makes a lot of sense for hunted gathered. Amazonian forest- New Guinea, another Kon Tiki connection? P.S. I am sitting on my ball right now. It's full.

You are overblowing it out of proportion. People who were succesful said it is easier if you just do it, than if you procrastinate it. Last day went well. Everybody seem to be strugling around the third or fourth day but to me went just fine. I was tired only two times: at 3.00 pm and and at 2 am. At 3 pm I was tired because I over slept: in fact I used all the time the alarm would give me, instead of getting up when my body naturally awakened. This is not overlseeping respect to the schedule but it is oversleeping respect to the body phase. I am ready to bet that my body was already moving to the next phases. From that moment I took a mental note to get up as soon as I wake up after a nap. Without being violent with myself, but not just going back down. At 2 am instead it was very different. My heart/body/mind/soul wanted silence. Anything was too noisy. Even thinking. I sat in silent. And then did some veeery light qi gung. A couple of hours later I was ok. If you consider that from monday I slept maybe 14 yours and had had sex two times it is quite mind blowing. And yes, it does feel like it is a single day. So later today (In the next days, one week for the reader) I intend to stabilise the situation: Get strong again. Start again some qi gung, walking around. I might add meditation, maybe. Breathing, already is in. I might still wait for introducing back Tai Ji. I also want to try to do different thing during the night. At the moment most of the time I am in my room sitting on my bed while reading, or reordering things. (I made a photo folder with 60 pictures of all my good good friend really really nice. It took me 3 hours to chose them, when would I ever have had time for something so supefluouse... and yet so nice!). I also want to bring some work to do at home. Since I sleep in the office it is only fair that I work at home.

Well, at least he has sense of humor. I'll look in that direction. Rapid update of the polyphasic experiment. At 10 am I jerked off. It felt great, as if it was due. Mainly the feeling was that my nervous system had given up unnecessary tension. I also tried to apply a technique from BK to come without damaging the kidneys. Being the second time that I tried it I am not sure still of the results, still the kidneys were not contracted after, as it normally is the case. I also used the orgasm to clean open my channels. Still I was worried that it might have affected my polyphasic experiment. For the rest of the day I felt great, doing all my naps in time, and feeling I was living polyphasic. The night also went fairly well. I avoided using the computer at all, not wanting to use all the extra time in over exposing my retina. At 4.30 I was hit heavily by a very strong tiredness. All at once. And it did not leave me until 5.30. By that time I had made myself a celery/apple juice. And had cleaned the kitchen. In fact I practically passed the night reordering and cleaning things: books, plans, old pictures, clothes, all sort of things. Eventually I want to use the night time to work so that during the day I can stay more under the sun. But for now my concentration is too low to be able to do anything whoe result is important for my life. At 8.30 I woke up. The alarm told me that I went to sleep at 6 (which I remember) for the 6am nap. And I overslept by 2 hours. Is this because of my sexual activity in the last 24 hours? I don't know, but it is a fairly educated guess. Now I feel well, but the feeling of being polyphasic has dissipated. I will have to rebuild it. I see why people suggest that you do this transition during vacations time.

AT the moment I am in Germany doing my PhD. Who is Jeffrey Yuen? I never heard of him. Should I bother contacting my friends in Italy telling them about him, in case anyone is interested?

Yesterday was tough. Was really tough. Sometimes starting through some hardness makes you hard enough to go through everything else. My professor in Analysis at the Uni 15 years ago would make us suffer through some difficult theorems, (instead of going the easy way) and then we would get all the others as corollaries. Respect to yesterday the night was a piece of cake. I even got some work done and only felt the need to sleep every 4 hours. One of the first things that seem to reach me is that although the body can easily handle not to sleep at all, it is still necessary to use the time awake in a diverse range of activities. Staying in front of the computer in the night makes it very easy not to even desire to fall asleep, so much are my eyes and brain stimulated. But of course I can't do this all the time. This morning my eyes were so tired that if I moved my head the light bulb seemed to be farther from the ceiling. I suspect as layers inside my brain/eyes would not update fast enough. The irony is that I passed the night implementing a system to organise my todo lists from the computer, just to discover in the morning that I really would prefer to have it all on paper not to be forced to look at a screen more than I really have to. Note: My inner chat is less than usual. I should mention that in the night I was also going through some erotic cartoon sites. This might also have kept me awake, we will see how things evolve. For now polyphasic sleep helped me in this too as after I napped I felt no immediate desire to go back to them. If you are aware of the kind of pull that pornography seem to generate I attribute this freedom to the lack of inner chat. As it is the inner chat which mainly feeds the constant en-chant-ment. Funny enough no one have yet made any reference between polyphasic sleep and sexual chastity. I understand the need for privacy on some topics (especially since many polyphasers are married, and their wife might not appreciate the disclosure) but it is an important topic, and one that should not be overlooked if we want to provide guidelines for other people to follow this path. If I notice anything unusual on the subject I should try to keep you informed.

Reinould speaks fluent english. The guy I was speaking about had not kidneys anymore. I don't think MCO was enough. Good to know that you had good results, still. Anything else from my part would be guess work. Pietro

Funny, with all those masters making their website new and shining it is becoming increasingly complex to find some information. In any case, here is his web site: http://www.taotraining.nl/portal/ How's your dutch? Greet Rainold from me, please. I don't know if it was a full regrowth. But I remember it was enough of a regrowth that he started peing again a bit. Then they made some x-rays and of course the doctors where surprised, and so on. The only thing I remember was that the process involved some heavy use of sexual energy, way beyond what anybody would consider safe, which was balanced by MASSIVE practice of the six healing sounds. Bruce, just last week said something about organ regrowth, while speaking during the kidney day (we had 1 organ a day workshop, spread in five years). But it was more on how there are techniques to connect the kidney with the brain to regrow bones. I know it's cool to have scales, but DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME KIDS. On those things you really need trasmission and precise information. We were just given a hint of where the path was leading. But one thing he did say later was that to regrow an organ (or was it more generally tissue) you need to contact the soft core central energy of the organ. Bruce gives no treatment, but decades ago he use to work in a chinese hospital where they would use qi gong to regrow bits and pieces among other things. Last year we had a person who regrew an intervertebra disk. He said that's quite standard. When one of his students goes to him with one of those serious problems sometimes (but not always) he gives him some instructions about what to do, plus some extra instructions to his instructor on how to follow him. As I said it is not a rule. There are some topics where he does not enter (cancer and schizophrenia, if I remember well), because you need facilities that he simply lacks. And, no thanks, no money: what I am after cannot be bought - unfortunately. Ok, time for my 6pm nap. Good luck, Pietro