dwai

Let me say...the immortality of Daoism doesn’t work the way it is conceptualized. it means something very different from what most modern day daoists understand it to be. I know folks who interact with these immortals and have interacted with a few myself. If have to know him, you need to meet him and see for yourself On the other hand If you’d like a little experiment on how Heart field cultivation works, let me know...

I've been a temple style practitioner since 2002.

After a point physiological changes don’t register. Too bad. To each their own... as much as I care about the traditions, i care about the end more than the means. There are plenty of standard bearers of traditions. I never claimed to be one. My goal is to point the seeker (who comes to me) in the right direction. Someone I might point with yoga, someone else with taiji, someone else with jnana yoga.

Yes loving and kind! I wrote about it here — https://www.medhajournal.com/sometimes-we-need-the-spiritual-milestones-and-the-signposts/

I understand my friend i too have been moving beyond the “doing” system. Even within the lineage I practice there is the doing way. One where mind and energy are exercised together. That’s how we start. More and more so, doing is harder. Not saying it’s gone completely. Not doing happens. In order to experiment, the past few days I’ve been actively following the “doing” way. It is hard. I attended an interview for a job yesterday. 7 hours of back to back sessions. “Tell about a time you did this...that...” That’s a lot of doing for me. I woke up at 3:30 am, mind agitated, racing. So I decided to “workout” the non-doing way. An hour later I finally lay back down, recharged, refreshed and mind still.

Haha if love can do this, what can the word “God” do? 😂 😁 It depends on what is being mixed though some actually know what they’re mixing and and serve it in a prescriptive manner. Perhaps that nuance gets lost on discussion forums Love is a word that does mean many things to many people. I find that if I want to understand someone, i have to put myself in their proverbial shoes, so to speak. The context where my master uses this word is actually as follows — He is someone who can manifest taijiquan’s mysterious powers...one of the few I know who can actually deliver the goods. When asked how he does it, he says “I just pour my love into the other person. If they don’t know how to how to handle it, they will fly away....” In this context he said “to issue power, there are many ways. You can put a strong emotion and it will work. But what you put in will also solidify what you cultivate in your nature. If you choose anger, it will work, but it will make you angrier each time you use it. If you use hatred, it’ll work too but it will poison little by little”. The most effective thing he found is to pour love. “Keep practicing with a loving atttitude and that’ll become your nature”... unconditioned, unattached feeling of love, compassion is what works best according to him. Having trained in the cold (empty) way of manifesting taiji power and also the loving-kindness way, I found the love way to the more powerful. Then he talks about love being the most powerful force in the universe. He said it is the power of love (of God if you may) that results in manifestation.The skeptical person will be rolling his/her eyes at this point. But I’ll say it nonetheless. I am open to the possibility of the power of love being the necessary and sufficient cause for manifest reality. It works to explain things at the causal level (as in causal body per Vedantic understanding). Haha 😆 I didn’t read the last part of this paragraph...so wrote about it at the beginning. There’ll always be immature reactions by otherwise mature individuals. To find common ground and understanding should be our objective when possible (imho).

Every single one Yes. Typically words are reserved for those who can’t “get it” non-verbally. Some teachers know both ways. Heck some of them even employ thousands of pages of words (aka books) to disseminate the knowledge... 🙄

Thats excellent! And there are also absolutely genuine masters too...individuals of great attainment Yes the problem is in getting too caught up in said physicality. Goes back to my question about you knowing every single one of them? Or is it possible that you made an inference that tied the syncretic approach to these delusional individuals due to false associative logic? It is important for teaching, not for practice after a point, imho. That’s very hard for someone on the internet to decide I’d recommend you err on the side of caution and pay no heed to what I wrote. If you one day find that you were mistaken, that’d be a wonderful discovery. But after it happens (awakening) , it won’t matter one iota

If you’ve not reached that yet, how would you know? Your posts suggest something to that end... Behind the traditions lies a simple and basic unity - pure awareness, which people call Dao, Brahman, Buddha nature etc. my background as a born and raised Hindu, helps me get better insight into Dao. My Daoist practices helped me get mental clarity which led me to grasp the higher disciplines of Vedanta. My yoga background helped open up and activate the central channel and my Master’s initiation (call it lineage transmission) resulted in a profound awakening. Where all these processes (I’ve not even gone into the past life stuff...) begun are so tightly interwoven that I no longer have the luxury of maintaining simplistic and naive distinctions between traditions. I love and respect each one for what it showed me. What I am authorized to teach by my master i transmit faithfully to my students. I add my insights where I think they might help them, just the way my master does for me.

Are you aware of every inner door system? I draw the line based on the master and his personal attainments. And what he tells me (my master predominantly does direct transmissions - I’ve written about that in my PPF). At one point you have to stop worrying about qi and focus on awareness (if spiritual enlightenment/Self realization is the goal). The qi takes care of itself after a certain stage. the heart field is really a development of the macro cosmic circuit being fulfilled imho and very crucial.

This is akin to Christian yoga, Muslim Yoga etc. 😂

I can grok that There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what De is. My teacher’s teacher suggests that De is essentially a reflection/copy of Dao within us, via which one gets back to Dao. It also helps to understanding "what nature of being" implies. It doesn't necessarily mean a "fundamental principle" so much as "a fundamental aspect of being" . You have to understand that for a tradition that says the Dao can't be talked about, a lot is actually said about it. Eugenics and love are not even close to be compared Nothing wrong in syncretism. Very cool. I find what he writes more or less in line with what I’ve learnt in temple style (Tai chi, Dao gong) No problem with that either. However, since Damo mentioned the heart field cultivation as a practice some Daoist schools do, I’m assuming he’s saying he prefers central channel based work, and not really a critique of people chopping and changing things. I have practices that are both heart based (distinct from) and central channel based. My OP was asking for people who have experience with Daoist Heart field cultivation to share their thoughts. Do you know about Daoist Heart channel cultivation practices? Have you done any?

That is abjectly incorrect. Many ancient Eastern traditions deal specifically with "divine love". Bhakti Yoga is a practice dedicated for that and is referenced in texts as old as the Bhagavad Gita. But maybe by "Eastern" you meant Chinese? What is the result of a still heart? Does stilling of the heart eliminate love, or does it clarify/purify it?

The issue is really not with Love but with the misidentification of the conditions that surround it. The first time I fell in love (with a girl), there was essentially a change in the way I experienced the world. It wasn't just about or towards one person. It was all pervasive...a major heart opening. Being the logical person I was, I had assumed that it would only be limited to my interaction with my subject of interest, but it surprisingly spilt into everything in my life. Almost like I lost the ability to dislike or distrust anything or anyone. So even though at that point it wasn't clear to me what was happening, and I tried to keep that feeling focused on the inter-personal dynamic between myself and the girl, it changed me in a dramatic way. It took several years of living to undo (partially however) that which was done in a flash, as I saw the girl walking down the street! Anything we experience, is only within us already. No external object can evoke anything in us. If we focus on the "positive" feelings, like love, joy, etc...these are also within us. If we consider negative feelings like "fear, hatred, etc", are they not just a result of masking of the natural feeling of love, joy, etc? How does this masking process work? With the help of the mind and mental constructs (like us vs them, good vs bad, etc etc). Very profound! By Gut you mean the Lower Dan Tien or actually the gut? My teacher always tells us to balance out the energies by sinking to the lower dan tien.

That is exactly the kind of Love that I meant (and that my Master means). An unattached, radiating love We have a meditation where we work on suffusing this love into the entire body and radiating it by just being.

I like the quote attributed to Nisargadatta Maharaj -- "When I know I'm nothing, that is wisdom. When I know I'm everything, that is Love. Between these two, my life rotates"...

Don't we find that "just being" is also "simply love"? Or is Love something that has to be contrived out of "just being"?

That's fine. It is your prerogative. That was not the point. Did you read any Daoist master say that love is not the basic nature of our being? I know of many Yogic and Vedantic masters who say exactly that. I know of many buddhist masters who say that too. What part of my position did you find contradicting both the book as well as the Daoist classics? Did you find any Daoist classics explicitly say "don't develop the heart field?" or "Love is bad"? Did you actually read the book I referenced in the OP? its entirely up to you. Neither did I invite you, nor will I ask you to leave.

I wasn't offended so much as amused (would be more appropriate if you added the context). And you've heard these enlightened beings tell you that "love is not the most powerful force in the universe"? You're making a logical inference based on incomplete information it seems... It'd help if you can define what spiritual cultivation is, in your understanding. What is it that you are cultivating? The bliss "state" is not a state at all, in my experience. That is a basic nature of our being. It just gets masked by the extroversion of the mind/consciousness. This infinite love is not something to connect to. It is also a basic nature of our being. It only gets masked by the extroversion of the mind/consciousness. Seems like he gave up too soon. The problem is not with bliss. The problem is in misidentification of who we are, and attaching to the bliss. If you think the bliss is something outside of you, you will try to latch onto some practice, or some object, etc from which you seem to derive your bliss. If bliss is your own nature, what is there to attach to? Wherever you go, there you are...and there is the bliss

Very true. My student is embarking down the path of Medical Qigong (haha he's also a Mantak Chia aficionado). The big gap in found in Daoist practice without the heart field cultivation is that practitioners tend to become cold. I was like that before I went to my master. After being with him, I found myself being able to stay detached and yet be more "warm" in terms of general loving-kindness. Of course, that took on a different dimension after working you, jeff, et al. It's not in the book. It is my experiential observation.

I don't know you, but I know my teacher. I didn't find anything shameful in what he taught me yet How do you know one way or another? Perhaps you could share your personal experiences in this matter?

We use an energetic “tail” in Temple style tai chi for stability and as a counterbalance when applying power (during certain types of power transfer).

The Central channel is the Chong Mai iinm...the main channel of the 8 extraordinary meridians. It seems to be the conduit for both Qi as well as Shen (which is concentrated towards the center). This is very insightful. I think the Heart Field is not the MDT but more an integrated field that includes the UDT and the MDT (as you described). Any thoughts on that? Overall the entire field of the individual is the sphere that is formed by the centers above the crown and the ones below the bubbling wells (there are three above the crown and three below, in the ground, iinm)...interconnected by the central beam of energy that flows through and beyond the central channel...or that's how I see it.

Yuan Shen is Buddha nature.