Mandrake

Prince, long time no see! Are you done with your seminar/training? How have you integrated it with your energy work? Maybe a huge topic. Shall I PM you instead? Mandrake

DrT: Depends, why do you want to know / what is it that you really want to know? ;-) Mandrake

Hundun, nice to see you around again! M

You can always find one person claiming something. What I'm particularly reserved against is spiritualizing externals. People want to do that since it is so much easier to confess to a diet, a way of dressing, having sex, washing - whatever - than to get rid of your internal demon and to become a caring and genuinely generous person. People want to appear holy and spiritual (non-materialist) and want to wear it as a badge. For me Daoism has two important take-aways regarding eating: i) Diets are individual, specific for a time, season, state of your body, state of your cultivation etc. There are diets that are good for awhile, when you have a certain illness, a deficiency in one of your phases etc., but these very diets may be detrimental in the long run. ii) Cycles: Nature is cycles, not a top-down pyramid. We die, become soil, the plants grow on that, then herbivores, carnivores, etc. Life and death is natural. Without the carnivores, populations become genetically weak, get inbred, suffer food scarcity, grow weak, get diseases, and all suffer - no one is fit. Morality is not as easy as to die or not to die. Plants may very well have sentience and intelligence in forms and with biological correlates that are very alien to us, but it is handy to turn the blind eye to this. Anyway, since this was about WL and meat, check the search function. I remember conversations about this in the past. Perhaps Taomeow remembers something? All the best, Mandrake

Yes, all kinds of stuff: jobs, people etc.; personally, and some friends. And this vibe is probably why people won't step up and answer. Mandrake

1) Limit the ability to edit/delete messages to for perhaps 30 minutes, one hour after the message is posted. People should think before they post, and not try to polish their appearance in hindsight. 2) Remove the possibility to change one's nick. If I have a break for one year, come back and want to find some posts made by some member... In real life you have a face that doesn't change, a name etc. which is how you follow a person and how you establish a continuity with that guy. Here, the name is in practice the only thing close to a clear red thread we have.

How you find my comment / what you subjectively add to my words is your issue. No. Let me quote again what I said: "A big component of adulthood is loosing ignorance and getting life experience. One can thus be an adult when it comes to relationships, handling finances, work-ethics, health etc. BUT one can be a "child" when it comes to energy work, spirits, cultivation and so on." The emphasis is on CAN. Needless to say, public school and our culture hardly raise us to adulthood regarding energetic work. And it is precisely here that our opinions on the matter diverge. Don't be silly. Plenty of masters out there have as a principle to only share publicly and openly practices that are safe to practice; if there is any risk, then all instructions are reserved for one on one teaching; me agreeing to this principle is just that, not "jealousy." Secondly. Two things have been discussed: the prevalence of damages from MC's practices, and, our opinions on responsibility. The former is a fact, the latter is a personal opinion, not an "accusation." There is hardly any senior member on this forum who raises an eyebrow anymore when people come and have hurt themselves through MC's books - commonly Iron shirt, the sexual practices. It's been discussed many times before here and on the healingdao forum. 9+ years ago Michael Winn even had a discussion on his board where it emerged that MC regretted publishing some of the books. So when I, or other senior members of the community, enter discussions about this, it is not "random" (without "backing") nor "attacking" (as if this was a fight). And thanks but no thanks for your personal recommendation. You just joined last month! All the best, Mandrake

RepublicOfZen: A big component of adulthood is loosing ignorance and getting life experience. One can thus be an adult when it comes to relationships, handling finances, work-ethics, health etc. BUT one can be a "child" when it comes to energy work, spirits, cultivation and so on. Physical age does not guarantee anything, especially naive dangerous curiousity of fields that one is interested in. If you are a spiritual master, then the "care for yourself, give no sh** about others" and "I've washed my hands clean; what happens them is not my responsibility" are attitudes that are unfitting. A spiritual master should have mastered primitive egotic impulses as these, should transcend the subject limitation, and have some increased wish for the betterment of people; taking responsibility for the consequences for her actions would be a natural expression of this. All the best, Mandrake

BaguaKicksAss: I'll happily reply. At that time, I had mainly been doing martial arts, and of course been exposed to documentaries about shaolin monks and the ability of advanced martial arts adepts to take hits. After some dabbling in different western systems, I got hold of Mantak Chia's books, and delightfully, of his Iron Shirt practices. The thing is, I didn't have a map out of the experiences that could be considered a well-rounded foundation. I would put these to be: easily access energy anywhere in the body, being able to get your energies to flow throughout the body, being able to sink your energy and having developed arms and legs, accessing stillness in order to integrate any changes in jing-qi-shen, feeling your physical body and having familiarity with your internal organs and sensations. There are a couple of more things one could add to the foundation, but these would have helped. Why? Just to have the sensitivity and wisdom to understand what would happen with every action, i.e.: If I slightly change pressure this way, this will happen; If X is happening, it means stagnation is building up, and I should stop; etc. It's basically familiarity with structures that feel "novel" to the novice. In the same way as when you have stretched and trained for awhile, you know not to bend more than a certain amount or you will hurt yourself, or lift over a threshhold weight, or you'll damage some ligaments. So to succinctly answer your question: Yes, due inproper packing/breathing, and due to lacking the required understanding of the material - your body and energy - that you are working with. Even, had I not committed these mistakes out of ignorance, the risk of a long term build-up of background damage could have been real, and hence an experienced teacher who could spot if this was happening, would still be required. As much as I am for information being available to people, I don't longer adhere to that principle 100%. I consider publishing these books irresponsible, in the same way that you don't put knives and explosives close to a baby. One could still discuss the general outlines and requirements of these practices, without giving out practice instructions, and geared toward the fact that ignorant well-meaning people will attempt to do these since they are confused about basically every proper experience that would constitute a foundation, and will not recognize energetic abnormality when it occurs. I myself wish I never had laid hands on these books, and that they were not published at all. And yes, in the end my damage healed by itself. It could have been worse, so I was lucky! Love, Mandrake

I also need to express the very sound advice in this post. I actually damaged one of my lungs through Mantak C's IS practice many years ago. Took a long time before it healed. I wish I had read your quote when I was a beginner, and I wish that nobody attempts to engage in these practices without knowing what you pointed out, and without a skilled teacher. Thanks Trunk! Mandrake

It's actually the opposite: this mantra (and other great and tested ones) pushes away lesser spirits. Dmwatts: Valid mantras, when you practice correctly and hard enough, help you transform your mind and behaviour. Of course, this is interlinked with your qi AND your body. Nevertheless, this always surprises people when they actually get the practice going. Your unpurified qi, nastiness, and gunk oozes out, and you experience this in feelings and sensations. Your body can react with skin rashes, fever etc. Stuff happens. You detoxify your mind, you detoxify your body. Of course it can be uncomfortable, but congrats! Mandrake

Malik: Sure, but bear in mind that I don't fully comprehend it myself. Five years ago I got some understanding, now, I see it differently, ten years from now I will understand with new and much more depth; it has to do with my own practice and merits. So don't be locked by what I say, and consider always seeking for new depths and not letting any truths become stale and intellectual. The relevant passage is from the book "Working Toward Enlightenment", p. 204. Indeed you are correct: The Shurangama sutra definitely has bearing here, and is discussed in the two books. You have to string together all the wisdom and teachings in both volumes to understand what he points at; stupid people are unable to do this. Health, illness, forms, shapes, qi, all expressions of the six senses belong to the form skandha. Emptying this out, in the context that he speaks about, is a wisdom attainment, not just non-focus on these phenomena when you are sitting on your cushion. When you completely empty out the form skandha, consider it like a mirror which reflects forms - whatever they are - but they do not stick to it. Your mind after this achievement is not attaching, fusing, identifying to any form. You don't push your sixth consciousness habitually into a body of any sort, into form, you don't clutch your qi to your body, or hold on to it out of habit. You've firmly established that the real Source of "you", is beyond any form, and hence in one way it does not matter if your body ages, if it gets ill, if it is muscular, beautiful, is filled with qi etc. Whatever you do - sit, walk, eat, speak, run, dream - this revolution of your mind continues, and is not a fleeting glimpse of insight. At the moment of death, if you empty out the five skandhas, and you are not bound by feelings or sensations, then of course you don't just get sucked into oblivion. To get some better understanding, buy the book(s) and read the whole chapter so that you get the context and the exact quote (he does NOT say that " if the body is sick then you can't empty out the mind at your last breath and so your spirit just goes into the void"). Wish you the best, Mandrake

He already prolonged his life twice. And yes, the letter is definitely for people to be grounded about cultivation; many just loose contact with the world, getting into fantasies; many others want to find another set of parents to lean against. M

You totally misunderstand his quote about emptying the mind; I could tell you about the encounters many of my friends have had with him, but I would be wasting my time. An ant trying to judge a lion. Get back to your mother's basement.

Thanks for bringing this up. This confirms something I've encountered from other sources, although it is quite controversial for many. M

"Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen." Conan O'Brien (from his farewell speech)

Hahaha, love the double meenings of that one!

They do have a homepage, kundaliniawakeningprocess.com. Click on online interactive classes (KAP1) and register. Second q: Yes. M

Of course: Since you will choose and develop an ethical system that makes yourself and your actions look good.

Spotless: I have to mention that things are not as simple as this (unfortunately, or debating would never have to take place!). There are tribes that almost exclusively lived out of raw meat and milk; their health and longevity was optimal. In fact, there are lots of people nowadays that claim that they restored their health from grave diseases (such as cancer) by eating a raw meat-diet and raw milk diet. A big reason for these debates is a moral one. Meat isn't inherently bad, otherwise carnivorous and omnivorous animals would get cancer and the whole gamut of diseases as well; but the whole issue is spiritualized, and people push forward ideas in large part out of personal ideology, more than adhering strictly to the results of research. M

His ideas has to go through the scientific process; until that they are speculation, however well-founded.

If plants are eating and consuming minerals to get their nutrition then you are getting nutrition rom the foods that the plants had ingested before getting slaughtered. If your going to eat a plant for nutrition why not just go straight to the source of the nutrition aka minerals? It's simple logic.

Wonderful. I respect movies that challenge the audience. Enjoyable to see scripts that don't conform to the all too well trampled paths. M

It's quite intriguing, isn't it? Simultaneously, I'm more and more surprised that people are so fixed in their identity, and cling rock-hard to even the most trivial things as being "who they are"; they refuse to budge, and are averse to change. The discovery of "I don't need to be like this" is refreshing! Mandrake

bump "Death & rebirth"