Sloppy Zhang

1) Find people for whom profit holds no sway 2) Find people who currently are not making a profit and wish to profit by introducing better medicine that heals you without making you feel like crap in the process or potentially killing you "Greed can be a powerful ally." - Qui-Gon Jin

I'm not very good with economics, so I can't say overall. But like wtm, I have food and a bed, so I'm good.

So I just finished listening to section six, wood element. So far, things are going great. I am starting to compare stuff he says to stuff that I've experienced in my own life- for the most part it checks out pretty well. Though I don't work in a medical field or take notes on the problems+lifestyle habits of enough people to know about the other conditions he talks about. However, some stuff he talks about has piqued my interest. For example, in part 6-6 he talks about taste, and he says that nutritional science and stuff just assumes that nutrients get dispersed equally throughout the body, but he says that instead taste is connected to various organs, and that's one of the reasons we have taste buds in the first place- to figure out what nutrients we are getting and where they need to go. If that's the case, are there any nutritional research being done on things like that? A lot of material he's presenting is really interesting, but he turns around and says, "well that's not modern medicine works." It's like, if there is a much better method out there, then more should be done to get it accepted in the main stream medical science. And I guess it would go without saying that the people you have to get in on this are researchers or maybe even professors and stuff in the field. A pharmaceutical company obviously has too much invested in their own product to test something that could make them obsolete. But experiments can be set up, results can be gradually shown to more open minded people in the field, and word could seriously get out. As long as the experiments follow basic procedure, are subjected to peer review, and subsequently repeated, then it shouldn't be a problem. Or maybe this is the wood energy talking but I mean, subjectively the stuff that checks out for me checks out for me (duh ) but there are lots of people out there who absolutely REFUSE to believe anything that hasn't been "scientifically proven"... so why not help people along by proving it? If it's true, then it should be true, right? (another duh ) Whether it's in my house, in the house of a traditional medicine healer, or in a lab with people who believe it's all bogus..... right?

So still been doing some of B.K. Frantzis' stuff. One thing that has started to happen to me is that I'm starting to remember old injuries, fights I've been in at my dojo, fights I got in in school. I remember once there was this kid who was like, "I know all these pressure points, they will put you down!" And I was like, "I don't believe in that stuff." So he tried them on me and none of them worked. But now I've gotten into qigong, learning about various meridians, and start to wonder, "did that kid screw me up back then?" So anyone have any opinions on that? Anyone have any other experiences they'd like to share about any of Bruce's methods?

That was good. If anyone is interested in lucid dreaming, ld4all.com is a great place to get started.

In Franz Bardon's method, watching the thoughts, and having the monkey mind jump around, is the first step. The thing to watch out for is attaching to the monkey mind thoughts and following them. Instead you learn to recognize them as just a shifting mass of thoughts, and not attached to them. Eventually you get more and more distant from them, and they more distant from you, until they slow to a trickle. From then, in his method, you hold on type of thought exclusively (a kind of focal meditation), and from that you then let that one thought go: stillness. You take as much time as you need, and you stay in that state for as long as you can. Like Kate said, don't be concerned with time. Don't say "ah, I've only been still for 2 minutes, but I need to try for 30!" Because then you are wasting 28 minutes of your life trying to get to a spot and worrying over it, and that's just counter productive. I found that in the beginning stages of meditation, I actually didn't spend that much time meditating! It's more important, like TzuJanLi said, to get a good understanding of the territory first. What is stillness of mind? Spend a little time trying to find it first, and then after that worry about how to get there consistently, THEN worry about how to stay there for longer and longer. Oh, and don't worry.

Wikipedia is your friend, as this link can be found there: http://zenmontpellier.site.voila.fr/eng/lotus/lotuseng.html All of those stretches helped me. Also, something very important, and that's to bend the legs from the kwa, otherwise known as the Bilateral Inguinal Creases of the groin region But basically, if it is putting stress on your knee, STOP DOING IT. For the longest time I thought it was about knee flexibility and haven't it bend, but it ISN'T. Once I realized I should be focusing on the kwa region, the very next day I got into it quite easily (albeit a little bit poorly....) After that it's about building up your ability to hold it.

I was listening to this on a daily basis, but then moved in to a new apartment and only just got the internet yesterday so I'm a bit behind and now catching up on lost time!

Thanks for posting this!

I have a friend who has noticed that for some days at a time he'll have very few, sporadic dreams, then for a couple of days he'll have an explosion of very intense, very vivid dreams. He's been trying to figure out what causes this stuff, if there is a cause, or if it's just a natural phase, and everyone has a different dream cycle. For me, I don't pay much attention to it.

How much more proof to people need before they start trusting in human capabilities? we could probably do a lot more if we just let it.

Do you mind elaborating on the situation a little bit? Can you give any specifics as to your situation? The main problem a lot of people face is a lack of specificity. They know that something is wrong, but they don't know what SPECIFICALLY is wrong. They know they want to change, but they don't know SPECIFICALLY how they want to change their lives. Take some time and think about your life. Get a pen/pencil and paper, or work on the computer, listen to music, do whatever it takes for you to get into a the right mood, and start sorting out where you are in life, where you though you would be 5 years ago, where you want to be in 5 years, what you have been doing wrong, and what you have been doing right. What things in your life need to stay, what things need to go, what things do you need to be doing better? Once you find out what's wrong and what you want to change, well then you get to the easy part (well it's not easy, let's just say, you reach the "less hard" part), and those are taking the steps necessary to make the change you want. I think that "going with the flow" is something a lot of people get hung up on, and that's really hard because, well, what is the flow? How do you know when you are going with it or against it? There are a lot of different opinions on that. In those instances, the best thing to do is just do what you can and do what feels comfortable for you to do. What is going to fix the problem?

Even if a conspiracy is just child playground antics on a larger scale, well, most people are living out problems and issues they've had developing since they were children anyway.

Masturbation?

So today my mom was talking about this "awesome" book she heard about on Oprah, but she didn't remember many details. Today I saw the article on it here: Oprah's Epiphany It's about dieting, but to me seems there's some alternate spiritual views and some feel good concepts applied to food, for example: I smile at it because some parts seem kind of cheesy, and messages like these have been around for a long time, and only just now hitting the mainstream, and everyone thinks it's some "groundbreaking discovery" or revelation on a Biblical scale. But then I remember that, well, not a lot of people are exposed to beliefs like this. Not a lot of people take an integrative view between the psychology of self esteem, physical aspects of addiction and food habits, societal messages, and spirituality. So even though I'm rolling my eyes at the over-the-top-ness of the mainstream media, I am glad that more and more people are getting the message, and my mom has been telling my whole family about this, even though I've been trying to introduce her to some of these ideas for the past year. Oh well, long as she gets the message from somewhere, right?

Hmm, no offense to anyone, but I don't think that shying away from a particularly good discussion that can shed light on our own beliefs, the beliefs of others, and the things that we claim to believe in because it is "unseemly" to "roll around in the mud" is a very good way of going about doing anything. Wrestling in the mud helps you bounce ideas off each other, and since true self inspection is so hard, after all, no one wants to be critical of themselves, it's much easier to be critical to others and allow them to reflect to us the things that we do not like. Of course, we should also keep in mind that when people are critical of us we are acting as mirrors to them, so we shouldn't take it personally. As long as you keep what you are doing in mind, wrestling in the mud, there's no need to take things personally. For some reason, this is one of the few message boards in which I very rarely take stuff personally, and I can't count the number of super long and intricate posts I've typed up before erasing it saying, "eh, not worth it." If it doesn't help myself or others, I don't say it. If it's just some personal thing, I let it go. Now other forums is a different story And if non-duality is not the point, then one should be able to find that non-dual area whether they are in solitude or in a big crowd, right? Since it's not really identified with any one thing.

I haven't tried the "finger locking" method, but I have tried a few other "locking" techniques, mostly done using just the muscles in the area with no hands. Without going too much into it (I've done so in the past, but really the only thing to take away from it is what I posted above in this thread) basically if you relax and don't mess around with it for a while, you should be okay. I'd give it about a week, maybe two, then try to ejaculate normally a few times. For me, this helps kind of "clear out the system", gets the muscles and everything working out naturally, and also helps to flush out stuff that might have gotten stuck somewhere on previous attempt. Also, exercise. Get the blood moving away from your genitals and into your limbs. Go for a jog, do some pushups, jumping jacks, whatever works for you. Rebalance your body. If you only tried the method once (or even just a few times minimally) and you are still pretty young, your body should be able to bounce back fairly easily.

My opinion is a blend of everything that has been said in this thread so far.

James Legge's translation is here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/ich/index.htm When I was searching for Aleister Crowley's version of the I Ching, I came across a review of it here: http://www.biroco.com/yijing/redflame.htm where it says Crowley had Legge's translation and wrote at the beginning 'Wood N' Legge which made me (there is a link to Crowley's actual copy of the text is in the "links" section of that website... in fact, here it is: http://www.biroco.com/yijing/links.htm and then the actual work it sent me to: http://hermetic.com/crowley/libers/lib216.html) that was another one of the links the website I mentioned earlier links too. Fun stuff.

I was lucky enough to find a very good copy of one at a used bookstore. Trying to find it on the net, it's pretty impossible, I can't find it anywhere Anyway, it's by Stephen Karcher, there is a new one on Amazon but I honestly don't know how it will compare to this. The thing with the edition I have is that in addition to just the meanings, it actually gives all possible translations for certain keywords. So while you might miss out on the full meaning and all the possible nuances by not reading it in the original language, it pretty much gives you all the possible meanings in English. The only downside is that in some cases it makes the text look very intimidating and hard to digest. But a good thing about it is that in the beginning it goes over divination methods, various different histories on how the I Ching came about, as well as it gives introduction to different theories, such as the five element theory, how the hexagrams and trigrams change, and things like that, before it gets into the hexagrams. The 1950 Willhelm translations is available here: http://deoxy.org/iching it's just a translation of the hexagrams, and just one straightforward translation, so I'm sure there's lots of meaning and context that is left out which people might take an objection to, but for the straight beginner, it's not bad.

In a philosophy class we read "Existentialism is a Humanism" by Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism says a lot of the same things, but the way Sartre described it was really optimistic and beautiful: There is no inherent direction, no real definition, no intrinsic quality that separates someone like, say, the Buddha, from someone like Hitler, or a mad dog on the side of the road. The thing that makes them different is US. If we don't like something, we can change if. If we don't, we don't. I suggest everyone give it a read. I was not really for existentialism until I read it, and it helped me see lucky7's post from a different angle- as in, just because it could initially sound depressing and locked in pure thought, it doesn't have to be. Then again, maybe I missed the point, sorry lucky if that was the case!

Some people only want to learn how to relax and move.

Sometimes doing exercises you don't have much experience with or stuff you haven't done too often makes your body feel uncomfortable, and when your body feels uncomfortable, you feel uncomfortable. So yeah, take a walk, eat cool foods, drink some cool water, and relax.

The water method is more of an outlook on doing things. In many cases, the practices and states reached are the same, but it's the view of what those states are and how to get there that are different. I'm not up to speed on the Buddhist terms, but there are two main types of meditations, ones in which you relax and are open to stuff, and ones in which you have a single pointed concentration on one thing. Both of them are useful for doing certain things. B.K. Frantzis' water method that he teaches stresses on the first one in the initial stages. Once you reach a state where you can easily let go of stuff, focusing is easy, because rather than tensing up around focusing on one thing, you relax and let go of everything else until the one thing left is the only thing you have focus on. Also, in the introduction horse stance isn't really what's used, it's sort of a wuji stance, palms facing backwards. B.K. Frantzis has been discussed in a lot of threads, like this one: http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?/topic/14444-zhan-zhuang/ And this one: http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?/topic/14359-outer-dissolving/ And in those people discuss the difference between inner and outer dissolving, and some points on standing.

Thanks for the link!