mbanu

A byproduct of emptiness meditation is that against its backdrop very few sins seem grievous anymore, and only the things clinging tightest to the heart still have any influence over one's life. Many things simply become non-issues. I suppose one could consider that a form of surrender. It's not really a form of forgiveness, I suppose, simply because forgiveness becomes something of a non-issue itself.

A quiet mind is the last step in any meditative regime, not the first. You can't collapse of exhaustion if you haven't been running all day. Pure emptiness meditation is something of an advanced technique, as it can fuck up your life if you're doing it right but haven't taken the proper external precautions. Things like going to work, leaving the house, paying the rent, will seem profoundly unimportant against the backdrop one encounters, once you've become in tune with it. (This can be a bad thing, if your life isn't stable.) True emptiness meditation isn't one of those things where you're going to yourself "alright, and for today, my 20 minutes of emptiness meditation!" Emptiness meditation fucks with your sense of time. Sometimes hours pass like minutes and minutes pass like hours. It can be hard to escape. When you finally snap out of it, everything seems superfluous and strange in a way I'm not good at describing. It has very real benefits, but they might not outweigh the disadvantages. It depends on your situation. I'd go with peter falk in this one, almost. If emptiness meditation comes to you, don't fight it, but don't necessarily go seeking it unless you're positive it's what you need to do.

The problem is that the original purpose of retaining aroused energy is often forgotten. For the most part it's practice for when you're going the whole way. You practice heating the cauldron but once you're done you cool it back down, because at the moment nothing is ready to cook. Leaving the stove on high when there's nothing to cook leads to fires and wastes energy. In the early stages turing jing into qi through alchemical practices are more about learning how to "work the stove" more than anything else. People see the practices in a moderate amount causing benefits, so they keep doing them more and more until it turns on them, then they decide any retention or sexual alchemy at all is unhealthy. In small amounts in the short term, aroused jing can strengthen your wei qi, make you more alert, smarter, faster... basically the same payoffs and disadvantages as using jing burners like coffee or alcohol to boost you past a rough spot. But when you do it too much and too hot, it starts cooking your brain, people get kundalini syndrome, weird shakes, paranoia, a whole host of problems. When you do it for too long, it depletes jing wastefully, which may make you suddenly find that when it does come time for the real deal, you don't have enough jing available to fire the burners hot enough for the appropriate alchemical transformations. And even if that's not your long-term goal, most people nowadays don't live hard lives physically. They have a safe place to sleep out of the wind and rain, good food is available if they choose to eat it, and most people don't have to worry about being killed or eaten if they let their guard down. That's why burning jing to have enough qi to survive such things is such a waste. It's like the person who see's the veteran of foreign wars with the lightning fast reflexes who never seems to need to sleep, and always knows where you are in the room even when he's not looking at you... people become envious of these talents, but they don't realize they come at a price. It was a price he needed to pay to stay alive during the short term, but it will end his life prematurely in the long term.

You mean like a primer that tells you what they mean when they talk in flowery euphemisms about jade palaces and white tigers?

It's possible to stop menstruation safely, the biggest problem is that there aren't too many people around who know the techniques. It's sort of like a guy trying to go celibate through sheer force of will without any pointers like a lot of monks used to do and ending up with prostatitis or weird fetishes that involve having young girls pee on his face; it's not because celibacy is inherently unhealthy, it's because they're not going about it the right way, sorta like trying to keep water from coming out a garden hose by sticking your finger in the nozzle. If you can find someone who knows how to stop menstruation in a safe manner, it can add years to your life.

I'd say it's option #2. Kinda like my friend who would never bring an umbrella with her when it got cloudy because she thought that if she did it would rain.

A good idea, assuming they're giving him stew or something easy on the digestion. Throw some whiskey in there and he'll be better in no time. Vegans don't take physical trauma well. :/ That's the tradeoff. Caloric restriction and a sedentary lifestyle can lead to a longer life (assuming they're taking care of the qi stagnation risks) but it tends to reduce their ability to cope with trauma significantly. Given the life of the average American, this isn't too big a risk unless something happens like a car accident or a mugging. But when it does happen, well...

Who's having trouble with excess earth, and what are their circumstances?

That's how almost all quick stimulants work, including system shocks, tea, sexual alchemy and kidney massage. No false energy, it's genuine qi. Technically it's actually jingqi, which some alchemists think is purer than food qi, sorta like clarified butter vs. regular butter. It's just a bad idea to squander your jing supply willy nilly.

Sounds like he's just jumpstarting his kidneys to get them to turn some jing into qi. Could get the same effect from drinking coffee.

Why do you do things like that???

Sounds fun. Too bad I don't have any more recent ones.

Why can't you sleep?

Lotta Daoists of old were crazy rich. Or if not crazy rich, big mooches. Lao tzu mooched off the inert mass of bleeding money that was the Confucian government at the time. They didn't just have superfluous government jobs in the US. A lot of alchemists made their entire living off of flim flam and bullshit, especially the ones who got into exorcism but didn't have the slightest fucking clue what they were doing. (Lotta those in Asia today) A lot of immortals learned how to counterfeit gold somewhere along the way to their immortality. There are two parts to living a life of wu wei, but the one that gets the most focus is "no dread of death", with the down and out daoists who actively confront the people inside themselves they always hoped they'd never be, living in pits in the ground full of burning garbage. But there's also "no love of life". Shit, the one tenuous link to daoism that alchemy has is that if you make yourself immortal, it gives you more potential to realize how worthless life is ultimately, kinda like how if you become so rich you stay rich in spite of yourself, money ceases having any sort of meaning. This isn't a 100% guarantee, as can be seen by the fact that many immortals of old, even "Daoist" immortals, weren't enlightened, they went off and became gods, playing on a larger scale the same sorta political shit they played on a smaller scale in their mortal lives. And there are some rich people who never lose the value of a dollar. That's why they're always spending it so extravagantly. But poor and homeless doesn't necessarily mean holy sage. Sometimes it just means poor and homeless. Hardship gives one the potential to confront certain life truths, but nothing is guaranteed. Kinda like that old Zen anecdote about the hermit who gave up riches and glory but was always paranoid about losing his begging bowl. Just like turning into an immortal sometimes just means doing the same things on a bigger scale, sometimes becoming a poverty stricken leper just means doing the same things on a smaller scale.

There are many bears that are Yogis, but there's only one Yogi Bear.

Anything by this man is pure gold. I've been practicing his "sneaking bear" form a lot lately. It's been doing wonders for my qi.

Water and Earth type mentalities vs. Wood type. Water and Earth types dislike conflict, sadly sometimes to the point of being oblivious or avoidant. Wood types tend to have the opposite problem, taking the direct approach when tact would have worked better, having trouble "waiting quietly while the mud settles" so to speak. Not sure if it applies, but the "poser hippie" type practicioner you find in the US is invariably a natural Earth type or a drug-induced Water type. Not to disrespect those types, the "poser hippie" is one of the pitfalls one can become trapped in while practicing. For instance most of the "I'm into Taoism to punch nails into boards with my penis and have anal sex with hippie chicks" types are maladapted Wood mentalities. They're examples of the sort of pitfalls each type has most trouble with, not necessarily an example of that type being successful in their practice. In this case though, I'd agree with you. If they're making up avoidant euphemisms, they're letting their own desires prevent them from confronting reality.

lack of hair increases qi loss but reduces qi stagnation, as the point of hair in general is to "trap" radiating qi in areas of large concentration.

Not sure if it applies in your situation, but sometimes that can be a problem from qi stagnation in the head leading to toxic heat. Normally this is seen in people who do a lot of heavy intellectual work, but a bit of long term kundalini would have the same effect, I'd imagine.

That's what the Peng bird story in Chaung tzu is about.

Never smoked weed. I got most of my weed inspired skills through osmosis by hanging out with potheads all the time, kinda like I got my ecstasy-inspired skills through hanging out with ravers.

Temporary celibacy for the enhancement of sexual alchemy is easy (well, relatively, barring complications). Then you just hold it in and let it build up for a few months until you have the level of qi stagnation you need. Permanent celibacy is a little trickier, because you don't just plug up the hose and let the pressure build, you gotta turn off the faucet. This involves adjusting one's mentality, which can be tricky. It involves being able to focus on the people who live inside the bodies instead of the bodies themselves. This is difficult to do without the appropriate mental/emotional changes. Sometimes the process is completed imperfectly, and their are negative side effects, such as developing a sex phobia, or feeling like you are repressing part of yourself or that you are hiding part of yourself from others because you have no other outlets in your life besides sex for focusing yang energy (being assertive, being fearless, being intimidating) and it hasn't been integrated yet, or just straight subliminating the sexual energy into bizzare hobbies because you didn't actually get rid of it, you just re-directed it.

As far as females go, sexual alchemy (ie ass-fucking) seems to be plato's specialty. As far as the day to day issues of dealing with women, that's been a weak spot of his, from what I've read.