goldisheavy

Solipsism: I am the only shit. New Age: We mixed all the shit together. GIH-ism #1: All the shit is intentional. GIH-ism #2: Beliefs are shit. GIH-ism #3: Different types of shit come in, but only one shit comes out. Qigong: Sink all your shit into the dan-tien. Qigong #2: There are three levels of shit. Zhan Zhuang: We shit standing up. Confucianism #2: Nearest shit is the warmest shit. Don't forget it. Martial Arts: I'll beat the shit out of you if necessary. Tibetan Buddhism: Only chosen few can ever see us take a shit. Chinese Esoteric and Martial Arts: We only shit behind the closed door. TTB Buddhists: all the shit depends on some other shit. TTB "big" shot: all the shit (except my own) is arrogant. Modern Spiritual Teachers: This $hit ain't free.

Well, I've been here longer than you, and in my opinion this forum is the same it has ever been. Nothing has changed here. And especially nothing has changed here radically. If anything, this forum sees a lot less heated debate and a lot less controversy than in the old days. There is a lot of brutal suppression on this forum, and yes, it's uneven. People get insanely huge timeouts for relatively mild behavior, or in some cases completely innocent. One more thing. I always self-moderate. The problem is that my self-moderation is not what some people want it to be. It doesn't mean I don't self-moderate. It just means we disagree about the appropriate level of moderation. Similarly I am willing to bet everyone here self-moderates. Even the loudest mouth here has deleted posts and has edited out things before hitting submit. The problem is that people just don't agree on what is appropriate. Take Sean for example. Is he a good guy? Everyone here tends to think so. And yet he emailed me advertisement for some bullshit straight to my private email address. That's fucking rude, isn't it? I don't remember singing up for this kind of crap. It's one thing if Sean wanted to privately talk to me. He's always welcome to do so. I have plenty of time for Sean's thoughts, but I have no time at all for his advertisements, especially the ones he's just forwarding on someone else's behalf. And yet Sean is very polite. So where does this leave us? Good or bad? Not good. Not bad. Look beyond the superficial. You can tell a lot about a person if you just ignore the swear words and the outward bullshit and look at the deeper meaning of the actions. This assumes that ruckus is inherently bad. What if I tell you the bad apples are the ones avoiding the ruckus and perpetuating status quo? This means these people were never serious to begin with. If you participate only up to the level of your personal comfort, you're nothing. Imagine if you went to a meditation retreat and upon discovering there was no electric stove on the premises, you packed up and left. What would that say about your commitment to the meditation retreat? Serious people always push themselves to go beyond their comfort zones at least to some extent. Finally, I am more than willing to bet that most people who left did so because it was time for them to move on. This has nothing to do with the rambunctiousness of the forum. It had everything to do with the personal cycles of these folks. They got everything they wanted out of this forum and moved on. It's that simple. A minority left this forum by being effectively exiled by the moderation team. Well said. We are all much too touchy. We should try to be more tolerant. Maybe we should start a thread where we all insult each other so that we can work out our extreme over-sensitivity and hangups. Part of the problem is that we assign so much meaning to image. An insult is perceived as damage to the image. We live and die by our image because we are so superficial. I include myself into that number although I think I am much more tolerant than most people here. I've been in many situations where I said "this is OK, let's keep things rolling" and others were saying, "no, no, let's stop the presses and yell for maximum moderator involvement right away." There are so many adult pussies here behind the scenes. The youngsters arguing their hearts out are fine. But the 50 year old idiots sending PMs to the moderators are the real problem. They just can't tolerate the energy of youth and probably secretly resent not being young themselves anymore, not having that same energy, and not able to compete. Plus older people take themselves way too seriously compared to younger ones. (unless we're talking about 90 year olds who know they have only a year left to live, and then they no longer give a shit about image)

You're plenty polite in a superficial way, but I don't like your behavior on this forum. So far I've refrained from complaining to moderators. I'm such a good boy. In fact there are many polite people here I cannot stand. Like perfumed turds or shit wrapped in satin. It's like moderating people based on what suits they wear and how they smell, without any regard to the substance and deeper meaning of behavior and intentions. It's a very corporate approach.

You intend it.

The fastest way is to perform a feat of magic, but that's also a good way to go crazy if you're not prepared for it. So actually there is no "fastest" way. Every way is predicated on the state of your mindset. If your mindset is coarse, then get ready for a long trod. If your mindset is refined, not only can you benefit from fast approaches, but these approaches will be self-evident to you thanks to your innate wisdom, and you'll not be going around on forums asking about them. Meditate and contemplate. During contemplation you must critically investigate the nature of experience and the nature of reality as you know it. During meditation you can do many things, such as relax and rejuvenate, deepen your insights by making them the center of your attention for a long time, experiment, and more.

You should question whether or not the ideas you're playing with make sense. For example, is consciousness an object? If yes, then what is conscious of consciousness? If your practice is based on a deluded idea, you're not going to get far, and you may even go crazy in a way that's not liberating. By questioning your beliefs about consciousness. And do you enjoy this?

Different people channel stress in different ways. Depending on how people channel stress they can get different ailments or even no ailment at all. How well your sister would respond to various kinds of healing approaches depends on her mindset. The best case scenario is when the sick person is the one who seeks out healing. If you seek on her behalf, it may mean she is not interested in healing, or it may mean she is in a hopeless state of mind where she simply doesn't believe in the possibility of healing. Alternatively it could mean she is seeking her healing in a different place, so in this place you have to seek on her behalf, because she herself wouldn't want to look for healing in a place like thetaobums. This is important because the best way to heal is to heal from within where doctors and external circumstances act as co-conspirators in your own healing from within. She should try meditation and healing visualizations, but these will not work if they go against her will. In other words, if she doesn't believe that the mind has domain over the body, it's fairly pointless to visualize and meditate as a method of healing. The only exception to this is if you think there is a possibility of her beliefs changing during meditation or visualization. Dry skin suggests internal fire at work (she probably actually feels heat or dry air inside or around the skin area), so the visualization to neutralize that would be water or even better cool oil. But if she doesn't believe that the mind has the power to do these sorts of things, she will be looking to take pills and ointments from conventional practitioners and will only accept alternative treatment as a last resort. So what I am describing in this paragraph is a counter-symptom visualization, which will help, but is not a full cure on its own. Root causes of stress must be dealt with, or the counter-symptom visualization will be overwhelmed from within by fresh stress and fresh fire channeling (assuming she's channeling stress into fire).

First, I want to ask you if you're sure you want to lose your desires for friends and a girlfriend. Why? Because desires are treasures. You may not realize that now, but when you lose your desires, you may want them back. So think twice before losing your desires. To lose your desire for anything, including friends and a girlfriend, simply consider daily the disadvantages and the downsides of that thing. If you contemplate for 5 minutes every day on the disadvantages and the downsides of the desired objects, your desires for those objects will be reduced in a short time. That short time can be a week or a month or a few years, depending on your individual conditions. To regain your desire for anything, just do the same process in reverse: consider the advantages and benefits of the same things. And again, it may take time to regain the desire just like it takes time to lose it. One more warning: be careful with your desires. I'm telling you how to lose them effectively and quickly, but you may not like the end result. So make sure you know what you're doing in your heart and make sure you're not just following dogma.

I have nothing against Flowing Hands, but the link you posted has practically no information. The warning is fine, but these warnings are common. Many people warned of the same dangers in the past. How is Flowing Hands' warning different other than it reaches dramatically fewer people than similar warnings in the recent the past? He's calling on people to set aside religion. Well, guess what? These kinds of calls are common in the world. Obviously there are reasons preventing people from setting aside their backwards religions. Assuming Flowing Hands still wants to get involved, as a Daoist this guy should comprehend these reasons and address them. And when doing that, he should be addressing the terrorists instead of preaching to the choir.

http://neigong.net/2008/10/27/interview-with-zhao-daoxin/ https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Dachengquan http://neigong.net/2008/05/29/grandmaster-wang-xiang-zhai-1885-1963/ (warning, contrary opinions are contained here) More fuel.

Finally. You can fight the system and win all the while not hoping for anything. The same realization can drive power instead of victimhood. Bear attacks? Fuck the bear up. You might die. That's OK. It's not a problem. Leave your mark on the bear. Leave him with just one eye or no eyes at all. Stab him in the heart. Punch him in the nose. You don't have to take shit lying down and you don't have to worry about yourself or your circumstances either. You don't have to worry about your relatives or humanity. There is a level of surrender that doesn't imply victimization, and a flow that doesn't imply following something else. The system is powerful because you've given it all the power that it has. Take that power back and the system has nothing. Surrendering makes you into a daredevil if you can't believe you surrendered and you strive to prove your own surrender to yourself, or worse, to others. Good. You don't deserve to be depressed. I know people who deserve to be depressed, but they are happy and entitled. The world is somewhat backwards, but it's that way only because we've been sleeping.

This sounds like a plausible explanation and you're getting at the heart of the matter I think. Imagine if Taijiquan practitioners routinely joined MMA bouts and routinely demonstrated all manner of strange abilities. Would this conversation be here? No, of course not. We would then just accept Taijiquan for what it is and none of its abilities would seem strange or controversial after a while. We'd get acclimated to it. The situation now though is that 1) very amazing claims are made by the taiji people and 2) we don't see those claims tested in a real bout, but instead we have youtube videos demonstrating against passive opponents who resist in a very specific manner prescribed to them. So basically the demonstration is a setup and it's not an honest demonstration because these special conditions are not disclosed at the beginning of the video. Imagine a video that starts off like this, "What you are about to see is a taijiquan demonstration. The demonstration is performed against opponents who are taught to resist in a specific way. Namely the opponents are asked to be still and stiff, simultaneously. Because this is the case, what you observe in this demonstration is a very exaggerated effect of taiji training which is not observable in a real bout against a skilled opponent. We do these types of demonstrations for practice to get the hang of the skills explained in our martial art." Imagine??? Would controversies still exist? Would Stig want to travel around the world in that case?

Awareness is not a division because awareness is not an ordinary name. Unawareness is awareness. This doesn't apply to other names. For example light is not also darkness. But you have to be aware of not being aware to have the concept of unawareness. So unawareness is a form of awareness. What you're describing is 1) very powerful and 2) not whatsoever contradicting the view of intent I present. In my view, we as humans, ultimately do not understand the true extent and the true nature of our own intent. Human flavor of intent is only the starting point for us drunkards. You can never forgo your intent (eternal responsibility... it can be a harsh mistress). The best you can do is relax it so deeply that the ensuing experience goes beyond your understanding of what you are. Ultimately you can never really lose yourself. You can only lose your limited idea of yourself. You can lose something that you never were to begin with. You can lose a role but not yourself. My view is precisely the view that allows for the best, most total relaxation. You talk about your own ego as if it was self-powered somehow. In reality there is only you. You are beyond your ego. What you call ego is you egoing. It's an activity that you enjoy performing. When you are egoing you can simultaneously influence things that are seemingly outside of yourself. You can also stop egoing and in that state you can also influence things that are seemingly nowhere (because without egoing in some way you lose the sense of location). The influence can be direct or indirect. Direct influence means simply relaxing and knowing all is a reflection of your undying intent. Indirect influence means exercising intent through a structured awareness, and awareness is structured by beliefs and habits (psychological factors). And yes, it is power. But this power is your birthright and the best any of us can do is to try to talk you away from it or confuse you in some way. Even then, it's all your doing. If I can confuse you, it's only because you can confuse yourself. Once you are no longer willing to be confused, there is shit all I or anyone else can do. Who is "we"? Do you mean yourself and your friends? This isn't surprising since when scientists investigate matter they really investigate their own mind in the most bass ackwards way possible. If the scientists remain disciplined and principled, sticking to reason and experimentation, they will find the same truth eventually, but it will be a very very slow and confusing road. My view doesn't ignore it. My view allows the study of structures as beliefs and habit. Habit is almost like matter with some crucial differences. Habit is not defined to be external to awareness. Habits can be arbitrarily difficult to change, but they can be changed intentionally in every case. For me what the scientists are talking about is useful information because it presents to me the baseline of my subconscious habits. Also, science is mostly honest. Only the metaphysics inherent in science are wrong. But insofar the scientists are disciplined and principled, they are really like deluded spiritual aspirants. They are the good guys who will eventually get the truth because they are searching for it sincerely and engage, even if they do have blind-faith assumptions that get in their way. So I have a rather friendly relationship with science, even if the scientific community fears someone like me. Also, I don't view all habits as bad. This computer here is a mind habit, but it's an enjoyable one. I don't plan to dissolve it soon. That's just one example. I am convinced you understood everything I said in this specific discussion. I also notice you don't really argue against my view per se. You mostly try to promote and defend the view of there being something unaware, call it matter if you like, permanently existing beyond awareness and generating it and then quasi-intelligently interfering with the contents of awareness. It can't be God, because God is the ultimate awareness, if anything. But it's like God in many ways, yea? Like God you have to take it on faith and like God you claim it produces interference that you then claim to be intelligible and discernible. Well, since I am convinced you understand what I said so far, maybe you can start over, forget my view for a second, and try to present your view from start to finish, give reasons for it, explain its benefits, etc. There is hardly any point in talking about my view now, since we both seem to agree to disagree and whatnot, and I am sure you understand my view enough to be able to reject it authentically (which is your right in my books).

You'll never be able to prove your proposed position either. So what we have here is a contest of two preferences. You seem to agree my preference is grounded in reason. I don't see any reason in your preference though. Your entire argument up to this point seems to be, "Something permanently beyond awareness might be out there." We know that atoms don't really exist as such. Standard Buddhist logic applies here. It's no wonder you think that atoms reflect intelligence because the world presented to you by the fluctuating states of your own awareness is indeed shaped by your own intelligence. It's your own intelligence you're ascribing to atoms, as if atoms were anything more than the shifting states of your conscious awareness. Give it a try. I can't even imagine how you'd begin. I've never had this experience and I've been around small kids and never seen them do this. Ever. I've had amazing experiences in my childhood but nothing even close to this. It sounds to me like you're either making it all up or you're describing your personal experience forgetting that you don't necessarily represent the common case. The slight difference being that I am aware of being aware, so I don't have to take the fact of awareness on faith. Whereas I've never seen or experienced God. I've had experiences I might refer to as God-like, but that's as close as it gets. So neither experiences nor reason support the idea of God. Whereas both reason and experience support the idea of awareness. Other than that small difference I am exactly like someone with unbending faith in God, yes. What reasons do you have to believe that something fundamentally unaware exists permanently beyond awareness, generating it and then influencing its contents? Wouldn't this position be a lot more akin to faith in God than mine? You've experienced the creation of your own awareness? Do tell! What you also notice if you pay attention is that kids miraculously are able to understand the world around them. If kids were born with blank minds, they'd have no context with which to make sense of the world. It's not new, that's for sure. It relies on much the same pre-existing context of meanings that all beings in our realm share.

It's not the mainstream view in my experience. I used to think objective reality existed, so I do get how it could happen. Obviously it's impossible to count that which is not on display.

InfinityTruth, that's brilliant mate. Really perfect. There is nothing else to say. You know exactly what's up.

The Daoist ideal is to rule without overtly ruling. The sage rules his own body and thus the sage rules everything between heaven and earth. Ruling from this point of view is no different from ordinary life. In an ordinary life you have to respond wisely to situations which develop. If you're a ruler, the same thing is true. You don't have to try to lord it over others or to be a pestering nanny. For the most part people rule themselves just fine and don't need a whole lot of external ruling. As various situations develop the sage reacts appropriately. Sometimes an appropriate reaction is to go talk to one of your subjects and find out what is bothering him/her. It's just a natural reaction and going with the flow. It's not an iron-fist ruling or nanny ruling. But I agree that ruling is always less than ideal. In an ideal society no one rules and no one is ruled, and the sage knows this and always aims for that ideal.

It all depends on what school of thought you come from. If you come from a school of thought that proclaims objective reality to exist and to be what is ultimately real, then subjectivity is what gets in the way of perceiving what is real. So for these sorts of people subjectivity is something everyone must work hard to set aside or to sweep away in order to get closer to the objective truth. If you don't believe in an objective reality, then subjectivity ranges from neutral to positive. In the neutral sense it neither helps nor hinders anything. In the positive sense subjectivity is the story-weaving power, which is a positive and good power when used wisely and tastefully for everyone's benefit.

Seriously, right? Hehehe... I think the mind and the brain are like nothing else. All our models are wrong, imo.

This makes sense when fighting empty-handed. Does this principle still apply when both opponents use swords? Or is taiji weapon form something completely different and separate from the fist form? Some people like to fantasize about magical powers. Others prefer to fantasize about physical reality. Which one is more lazy depends on many factors.

You might be right, but I imagine most daoist hermits really don't worry about kicking ass. I wouldn't be surprised if many of them didn't even know any martial arts in the formal sense. These people often live alone in small huts and they visit each other to talk as opposed to spar or fight. Becoming a hermit just to study martial arts is really an overkill in my opinion. It's like killing ants with nuclear bombs. The grandpas I talked about live comfortably in USA. They have friends and family and they more or less have whatever they want, although their wants are modest from what I hear. They meet up with a bunch of their friends and practice. If you become a friend, they can call you on the phone at any hour of the day and ask that you show up some (random/strange) place to hang out or to practice. Sometimes they call because they want to get a ride to someplace. I think you can imagine what kind of grandpas they are. They're just like a good friend. They hang out and have fun with you and they can also teach you things and heal you up. And like in any friendship, sometimes they want you to do things for them. They live with people and they are happy that way. When I heard my friend describe these people I realized they are true masters because they act as friends instead of as masters. They are very down to earth. It seems that all they want is friendship and not money. They are absolutely nothing like people who sell expensive courses on this forum. Not only do they not sell anything, but they are almost impossible to find. You'd have to be introduced to them through some Chinese people who live in the community. They don't hang up shingles. They don't advertise. They don't have websites. I agree with you. The graph is not meant to be taken literally.

I agree completely. But for many people kicking ass is an important part of martial arts. Many Chinese people practice taiji in the park for health benefits without even thinking about kicking ass. And these park people are not the reason for controversy. What is taiji? Is it a health practice? Is it an enlightenment practice? Is it a way of fighting, i.e. martial art? All of the above? None of the above? Some of the above? I think a big part of the reason why threads like this popup and will continue to popup in the future is because there is no clear answer. If taiji was clearly positioned as a health practice, it would generate only a fraction of the current level of controversy.

I don't know. If these methods are compatible and don't each require your full attention, I think the results would be good. Also, many of these so-called internal people are deceptively strong with big muscles. What is that all about? So if my intuition is correct, some flavors of internal martial arts already include external aspects anyway.

Hard martial arts tend to ruin the body. This was one of the main reasons why my friend got interested in internal arts to begin with. He practiced external arts and injured himself. Then he wanted to study internal arts and luckily for him, almost all his teachers also were healers. They knew not just how to massage and use qi for healing, but they even knew how to make salves/ointments and herbal remedies that could be put on the skin or taken internally and so on. So as he was talking to these Chinese grandpas they healed him up quite a bit from his old injuries. But at the same time my friend said that unless I am absolutely ready to spend 20 years or even the rest of my life on it, and unless I learn Chinese and find those grandpas that will allow me to try to attack them, I shouldn't waste my time. So that's a whole lot of conditions. Learning Chinese seems to be an essential step. Without Chinese you don't get access to the community. Even with Chinese some of the teachers are racists who won't teach non-Chinese. Is it all worth the hassle? If any of you are lucky to have a real teacher, then good for you. I'd say count your blessings and be happy. As for me, I have very little interest in competing and beating people up. There is a ton of stuff I've been learning and from my point of view, there is no time to lose. I might still learn Chinese later on, but if I do, I will try to read ancient Daoist writings about immortality and cultivation and not use knowledge of Chinese to seek out ass-kicking grandpas. But that's just me. I'd rather spend time with a mountain hermit learning meditation than learn how to project deadly energy into the bodies of others. But then many of these people also teach how to heal, so that's cool. To each his or her own. And as I said before, I am with Stig on this and I appreciate all the clarity we can get.

Here's how my friend explained the skill progression in internal arts vs external and why he said for most pragmatic people internal arts are not worth the gamble if combat effectiveness is your goal: