goldisheavy

We don't need crooks to support the existence of the honest people. The fact that crookdom exists as cognitive potential is enough to illuminate honesty. So while honesty is manifest, crookdom is known yet unmanifest. This is better than the other way around. Remember that it's not just high and low that you observe. There is also the manifest and the unmanifest which also support each other when it comes to cognizance. In other words, relativity has a spiritual dimension to it. It doesn't just talk about the obvious.

It's like these masters fear for their lives and comfort, so they are subject to being trivially bullied by the so-called "powerful." Compare this with Zen masters of yore who would refuse to bow to the emperor of China, which is a vastly more powerful figure in political sense than many of today's power people who are economically more powerful than the emperors of old, but politically, not so much. Somehow these modern immortals are just much less impressive if they are more intimidated than someone like say Julian Assange, who continues to bring us transparency regardless of all kinds of threats by all kinds of powerful people, including at the highest levels of multiple governments. Assange is not even an immortal, as far as I can tell. Surely a real immortal should be like Julian times 1000 in terms of fearlessness and skillful means.

There are good methods of two kinds: 1. Ornamental. 2. Healing. Ornamental methods are employed by the healthy people to achieve an effect for effect's sake, basically for fun and for the joy of life and not for any ulterior purpose, such as for health or for enlightenment. Healing methods are employed by the sick people to illuminate the nature of their sickness. Once the sick person understands one's own sickness, one can get better. All sicknesses are caused by ignorance of some sort. Thus a good healing method produces an experience that directly challenges an ignorant presupposition. For example, let's say for the sake of discussion that a person has an ignorant presupposition that says, "Reality is something different from dreams." What's a good method to heal such ignorance? Well, a good method is to teach the person to lucid dream. Then inside the lucid dream the person can see first-hand how the dreams are identical to reality in every conceivable way. Once the ignorant presupposition has been cured, the method is no longer necessary. At least, the method is no longer necessary in its healing capacity. It may still be useful in an ornamental capacity. There is also a third kind of a method, which is a bad kind: 3. Stagnating method. The purpose of the stagnating method is to maintain the status quo without challenging any presupposition while carrying on a pretense of working for a higher purpose. So the pretense of a higher purpose disqualifies the method from category 1. And the fact that the method doesn't challenge any presupposition eliminates it from category 2 as well. Such a method is a waste of time. What say you?

Niiicccee!! :)

This does not bode well for the moderation at TaoBums. If a person of your character feels the need to resign, there most likely has to be something wrong with the other moderators. However, in the absence of real information, that's just a guess. And it might be a bad guess too. I'd love to know what happened exactly. I hate all this secrecy bullshit. We hate when politicians meet behind the closed doors and yet we do it on a small scale everywhere we go. How stupid are we? How can we want our political leaders to be more transparent if we can't even run a simple forum in a transparent manner?

jenn992, I must ask you to stop typing the way you do. Please write in complete sentences with a period at the end of each sentence. Please split your massive walls of text into short and easy to read paragraphs. You complain about suffering inflicted on you by others, and yet you demonstrate total disregard to the comforts of others by your manner of writing. You apparently don't care how hard it is to read what you write. You don't care that writing in short phrases split by intermittent ellipses, without any paragraph breaks, is a sheer mental torture to read. It's almost like subconsciously you don't want anyone to read anything you write. I tried to read your first few posts, but I will not read one more wall of text from you. If you want help, please be nice to those you want help from. Begin being nice by respecting the basic and simple rules of the English grammar. You don't have to be perfect, but surely you can do better.

It's possible. It was never my goal to be harsh in order to enjoy pissing people off. I like to question certain assumptions and I also don't like to beat around the bush. This is sometimes perceived as me being harsh. And it's also possible that I'm just getting tired or older or both and I'm not as good as I used to be. I appreciate your suggestion.

I just discovered this one today and figured you might enjoy these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7yN-0rNMiY&playnext=1&list=PLF22E4D4E228D7910&index=21 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6veAh1-lak

I agree. I've researched some of these guys well before the show appeared, like Dennis Rogers for example. And Dennis always emphasized training. He never said something like, "I'm born with it." In fact he has students who do similar things as he does. I agree the show is stupid when they mention "genes." By this time I just automatically discard such nonsense, but it will affect other people negatively who will actually believe in genes. There are no genes to hold us back. It's all about training.

I think qigong is as effective as people say it is. I don't think anyone is arguing against effectiveness. The idea of bullshit comes in two forms: 1. Some people think that the mind is bullshit. So for example, until recently, most scientists thought of placebo as something negative and unwanted because the mind is unreal and the physical is real in the traditional scientific materialistic mindset. So if something happens due to mind, it's instantly labeled as bullshit. 2. Some people think that the mind is not exactly bullshit, but they still think that there exist various subtle structures. So in a way these people create a reality that's like physical but subtler, but insofar it obeys various laws of manifestation, it is physical-like. That's the reality of the meridians, chi, and so forth. Then there are other people who believe the mind is all there is. Thus every structure is ultimately mind-made. This is especially true of the subtle structures that qigong introduces. So from that POV the idea of firm and inherently existing physical-like structures is bullshit. But in both cases 1 and 2 we admit to effects. So for example, a placebo effect is a real effect and I don't know any scientist who denies that, even those who think of placebo in dismissive terms. When a qigong practitioner uses qi to warm up the body, there is also a real effect that can be measured. So there are real effects which no one that I know of doubts. The question is mostly, "is this the only way?" or "are there an infinity of ways to achieve this and does tradition lock us into a box of sorts?" If you understand that everything is mind, then yes, tradition is a box or a recipe. It has value, but it does limit, and furthermore, what you learn on your own can be better than the boxes or recipes others will teach you. That's the whole point of discussion to my mind. If you understand the principles of manifestation, then all you need to do to produce these effects is practice. You don't need to go around the world looking for a teacher who will then sell you a very expensive limitation. Of course people have no faith in their own abilities and they are deathly afraid of making mistakes, so most everyone wants to outsource personal learning, and basically be spoon-fed by someone else, to avoid mistakes, etc. Mistakes are worth it.

You mean the magnetic guy? That was pretty weird, eh? And his story sounds similar to Magneto's story from X-Men. I also liked Dennis Rogers and Bob Munden (fastest gun slinger) from other episodes. Bob is not that young anymore too, and he's incredible. Also the guy who dived from 30 feet into 12 inches of water. Lots of weird stuff. I've seen a lot of this stuff before outside the show, but some of it is new to me. Who would think to dive into 12 inches of water? That seems crazy.

I like this guy too. He seems sincere.

Talk about synchronicity. As soon as replied I found this article without actually looking for it: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/upper-class-people-have-trouble-recognizing-others-emotions.html It might be relevant to your situation.

Many factors are involved. In general perception depends on the mindset. The mindset is a complicated set of beliefs and relationships that's stored in the mind of a person. So, some examples: 1. If I am a man who has been taught directly or indirectly that women are not as important as men, it will reduce the empathy I have for women because I will think less of them, so if they suffer, their suffering is worth less than mine, since I am a man. 2. If I believe I am separate from other beings, I will feel their suffering much less vividly compared to what I'd feel if I believed I was one with others. 3. If I believe that a person who is suffering is evil, the suffering of that person will affect me less, because I will believe they deserve it and it is right that they suffer. This belief doesn't have to be based on some kind of logic or truth. For example, I might believe that all women are loose whores who try to keep the man from the straight path, and thus are inherently evil. You can guess how that would affect my perception of a woman's suffering. 4. I might believe you're in your situation due to your own stupidity or laziness, and thus you deserve everything that's coming to you. Again this belief doesn't have to be based on logic or reality to be effective at reducing empathy. Many conservative people feel like this about others, they feel if the person suffers, it's that person's fault every single time. So I find lots of callous conservative people. I think empathy generally depends on self-identity and on the perceived deservedness of suffering. So if a person has a wide and all-embracing self-identity, there is more empathy. If the person thinks the suffering person is righteous, there is again more empathy. The worst case scenario is someone who believes oneself to be completely separate from others and who believes the suffering person deserves the suffering in some way. If you find the problem to be consistent, the problem is likely not related to unique individuals, but either cultural or something to do with you. Does your culture view women as pets? I have empathy for my dog, but it's not the same as my empathy for say my wife. A pet is only a pet. So that could be part of the problem. Or it might be something else. Maybe you're going around stabbing people or maybe you gossip too much behind people's backs. Who knows? Personally I doubt that you're a nasty person so my hunch tells me you're experiencing a cultural problem. It would help if you gave some examples of what actually happened (use fake names). In general, and this applies to the entire planet, most people view themselves as entirely separate from others, and that contributes to callousness a great deal. Also, business relations are often considered impersonal, so there is a lot of suffering that comes through with that. There is also a possibility that you see the worst in everything. Maybe your life is not so bad but you fail to notice those times when people helped you and only focus on those times when they didn't help you. Without some examples, it's very very hard to say.

The brain on a stick is very patient and will beat a monkey any day.

There is nothing you can single out as "THE Experience." Unless you're prejudiced.

That's circular reasoning. Intellectualizing is an experience. Is it not? If you've never experienced intellectualizing, then what the heck are you talking about? So that's your judgment about judgment then. The moment you notice that your judgment has become suspended you just made a judgment. Judgment is perception. It is very subtle.

Haven't heard of him. Thanks for sharing. I liked the sparring videos, although I do wish the person who made some of the clips would lay off the video effects a bit.

What is "experience itself" and how is it different from "experience not-itself"? How can judgment be suspended?

I think I see what you're saying here. It's like you go to a restaurant and it serves olives, eggs, potatoes and cabbage. You love potatoes, you're indifferent to eggs and you can't stand olives and cabbage. You wish the restaurant would only serve potatoes and nothing else, right? The answer to this is to broaden your taste. Learn to enjoy olives! Then when it's time to eat olives, you won't be wishing for potatoes. Look here. Suppose there is a painting that's made of different color paints, but you only like yellow and hate every other color. If the painting was made only from your favorite color, it would be monochrome. So insisting on always getting your favorite thing is like insisting on blindness, do you see? All the colors belong to your visual field. All sense objects belong to your field of cognition. All meat is the best. I think if you consider this issue from time to time, you'll feel better. Everything is porn. Look outside the window for nature porn. Human are the only animals who hide their true shapes. The disease is the hiding. Seeing true form is not sickness. Don't fall prey to conventional modes of thinking on this issue. But you live in convention. So exercise moderation. Everything is OK in moderation. Just don't overdo it. Do not worry too much. The body and mind are one. If you think your mind wants desire but your body doesn't react, your mind is simply confused. Somewhere you're lying to yourself. Perhaps you actually don't desire anything, but society has taught you that you should desire something. Or vice versa. Either way there is a conflict between your real desires and what you think you should be desiring. Return to your true nature without completely breaking from convention. This is what moderation is about. It's a natural fear. But you should take heart. Why is that? Because at the ultimate level everything happens as you intend. Just relax and don't get confused between what you actually want and what people say you should want. You should trust yourself! If you feel like you need rest from sexual excitation, it's OK! You don't always have to be running around horny. At the same time, if you fear your sexual function is gone just because you are at rest, that's an idle fear. Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed. Your abilities can at best be put to sleep, but they can't be annihilated. So don't worry too much. You won't lose anything you actually care about if you don't panic.

I qualified it with "to such people." We're pretty far apart, but I think you overestimate the distance. Stig is no dummy, but he's defending his home turf. It's only natural. I am no different. forest asked a good question and it would be a shame if his implication was simply brushed aside. Well, not exactly. I was similar yet different when I was born. I am sure I still don't know many things, but I am also sure that most of you here don't know way way more than what I don't know. In a way my aspiration has been the same ever since I was born. So in that sense you could say I was born with it. However aspiration alone doesn't describe me as a person. So obviously I've changed. I've also gone through periods in life where I was distracted from my aspiration, or afraid to follow it at a different point, and so on. So for me it's been a wobbly path which is still consistent over time.

You'll be the judge. Direct knowing is what I call direct delusion. It presupposes the idea that some types of knowing are indirect, hence some others are direct. This is a delusion at the ultimate level of insight. Of course since you are a qigong busybody this doesn't occur to you. That's true. I do know something. Admitting to knowing something is not exactly admitting to much though. Well, how do I know I haven't done qigong if I don't know what qigong is all about? Progressive development is a very valuable idea. If you combine progressive development with sudden non-development, you can get interesting results too. Sudden non-development also has value. And besides, it's not like contemplation is necessarily easy. I would say depending on what you enjoy it can be as hard or as easy as any other activity. If you don't enjoy considering things deeply and holistically with a questioning frame of mind, contemplation can be a nasty chore. How long do you think life-transforming contemplation takes? xabir says 3 years. I say it can be a longer time, like 20 years or more. It could be shorter than that. But it's not one day and it doesn't fall down on you on silver platter either. Ignorance is caused by ignoring and becoming aware of that which you were heretofore ignoring is not a trivial endeavor because things we are ignoring are naturally hard to notice. Contemplation is no idle navel-gazing. That's true because music is structured in your definition music. There are some musicians who have transcended this kind of music though. For example, I know one musician who can spin the dial of a radio and hear music in the noises the radio makes while the dial is being spun back and forth randomly. Oh, by the way, he has a very instructive nickname: "square pusher." Do you know what it means? A square is a person like you. You might want to look it up. And a square pusher is someone who pushes the prison-like boundaries of the squares. The bit about the radio I read in one of the interviews of him.

There is one method that is scary effective. But you must be careful because it's hard to reverse. You think like you want to get rid of lust now, but when you get rid of it, you might want lust back. So first, you have to be clear about why you want less lust. Is it just an arbitrary control-freak thing? Are you a controlling person in general? Is it because you've heard that "all the real Taoists are free from lust" and you decided you want to be a real Taoist? All these things are delusions and you have to be careful if any of these are your motivations. For the vast majority of people it's best to have a normal sex life and not to mess around with it. Now, with all the warnings out of the way, here's how to reduce lust in a very scarily effective manner. Look at porn. When you look at it, focus on the undesirable aspects of the sex objects. For example, notice the pimples, imperfections, the slimy nature of them, imagine that they don't necessarily smell good, and so on. Dwell on the imperfections and negative aspects. Consider all the negative aspects of sex, such as unwanted children, tiredness, having some moral obligations toward your sex partner which can be a burden (kind of like, when you take out a loan, you're obliged to pay it back). Look at all the porn you find attractive and contemplate the negative aspects of everything you see. Contemplate the negative aspects that you can directly observe and also contemplate the negative consequences of sex in general that you know of, which you may not be able to observe directly while watching porn. If you do even a little bit of this practice, your lust will go down. But like I said, be careful. You may not like the result. You may want things back the way they were. If you do, you can reverse the process by doing the same thing except this time contemplate the beautiful and pleasant aspects of sex objects. My personal recommendation: don't tinker with it. Leave it be.

ralis, "I agree with you" doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about this issue. If you ever leave to a different forum, send me a PM, and I'll follow. I'd rather have one other intelligent person to freely talk with, than have a thousand people talking to me through a discussion shaper who presumes to know what's best for my own good.

I agree. Qi gong has *some* value in wisdom development. I should have said it's not focused on wisdom. It's focused on results. Qi gong practitioner wants practical results, like for example, being warm in the winter, or being able to stop the bleeding from a wound and so on. Let's take carpentry for example. Generally speaking carpentry is very useful. I think that's pretty obvious. Who wouldn't appreciate a nice house or a small wooden bridge over a river and so on? Of course carpentry gives practical results. Moreover, if you practice carpentry with attention and dedication, there is also a chance you'll wise up just like that butcher in Chuang Tzu. Still, how many carpenters are wise? I'd say an overwhelming majority are just ordinary people without any interesting or noteworthy qualities. I view qigong as somewhere between carpentry and serious contemplation. It's more spiritual than carpentry but less spiritual than contemplation. The experiences qigong produces are quickly boxed in by the qigong mindset that is attached to pretty much every system of qigong. So yes, qigong experience can help with wisdom, as can any spiritual or non-normal experience. Nonetheless, experience by itself is not enough to remove preconceptions. Preconceptions have to be challenged in contemplation, and the only way to do so is to have a very specific and sincere aspiration. The aspiration has to be aimed at the highest wisdom and the ultimate truth of experience and nothing less will do the trick. I don't buy this. The phrase "we give" implies a conscious and aware choice. It implies you know everything is a play of the ultimate mind, and yet you knowingly choose to accept certain limitations in a playful and tentative manner for the purpose of learning and for the purpose of achieving a well defined result which is very close to being something concrete (as opposed to being abstract). Is this what goes on in qigong? This doesn't sound right to me. It almost sounds like some kind of effort or struggle is involved the way you describe it. You're comparing it to a bike, which is telling. A bike is a conceptualized and therefore structured experience. Controlling it means playing by the rules of the structures. This is also what we call a mundane experience. Any experience that doesn't know about de-structuring is a mundane experience. It is especially true if you believe the structure to be self-existent and independent of the state of your own mind. As for the poor sod question, I'll say this. No one is really a poor sod, and especially in spirituality. Chemistry labs cost money. Physics labs cost money. Spiritual practice is one of the very few realms of study that doesn't require anything you don't already have with you at all times other than attention and intent (aspiration). So what is poor sod to do? It depends on what the poor sod wants. If the poor sod wants specific well defined results, by all means the poor sod should engage in the appropriate practice that has the best chance to give those results. If the poor sod wants to go beyond results, in other words, if you want to go from being a Mickey Mouse to being a cartoonist, you need a different approach. Specifically you need to have the proper aspiration and you need to have a fearlessly and relentlessly questioning and investigating mind. Intent is very important. To use an example from history, Mogallana made a vow in one of his previous lives to develop supernormal abilities after an encounter with a powerful mystic. As a result, in Buddha's time he was foremost in supernormal abilities. On the other hand Sariputta didn't care about supernormal abilities. So as a result, even though Sariputta was every bit as enlightened as Mogallana, and in fact he was considered wiser than Mogallana, he had either no or very little supernormal power. So it's kind of simple and fair: you get what you intend to get. If you want results you get results. If you want wisdom you get wisdom. Wisdom is vastly superior to any and all results. In fact, it is precisely bondage to results that keeps us enslaved to this and other similar planes of existence. It's not that results are bad. It's the thinking that there is nothing of higher worth than results that's the problem. In any case, it's not really a problem for everyone. Many people are happy to be bound. They like the results they get and don't want anything else. I have nothing to say to such people. So it seems you need a lot of years of hard labor to get to my starting point. I mean, I start there! It's like in Zen: you start with enlightenment. You don't start at the bottom and work your way up like a dutiful grunt. Playing music is a structured activity. Besides, one school of thought says you should learn scales first and improvisation is the final step. Another school of thought says that improvisation is the first step, then playing patterned songs is next, and finally to get that boost in speed you learn scales last. If you think about it, learning scales as the first thing is dumb actually. It's a very boring, mechanical drill that's aimed to teach speed. Speed is only useful when you want to play something advanced. Why would a beginner need to worry about speed? They're also known as idiots. Masters are not flawless. They are subject to stupidity and error. Remember that story in Chuang Tzu about the shaman who could divine things accurately, who had flashy abilities, and his encounter with an unassuming Taoist master who didn't demonstrate any abilities? One never knows who is a master. To know truly who is a master you yourself must be a master. You can only know up to your own level of ignorance. No. What I am saying is that even if you know 10,000 recipes you're not a chef. A chef is someone who understands the principles of cooking. A person can learn 10,000 recipes without ever learning any principles of cooking. With that many recipes you can fool anyone except a real chef. And in any case, recipes are valuable. Just because being a chef is vastly better doesn't mean recipes have no worth at all. No, it would be like saying someone who plays sheet music is not a world-class musician even if you can play 10,000 different songs from the sheet. A jazz player who can't even play one song from a sheet can be a master musician though. Mastering conformity is not true mastery. When you follow the pattern on a sheet, that's an exercise in conformity. No one ever became very wise by conforming to patterns. Sure, you can learn something, so it's not a waste of time, but there are other ways. Funny you ask: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wankel_engine You know, I respect a lot of things you say too, but sometimes you can be as dumb as a box of rocks.