Creation

Would you please elaborate on this?

The cool thing about Kunlun is that it simultaneously stirs up and dissolves, whereas these are separated more clearly separated in Frantzis' lineage (as I understand it, which is not much). Oh, and the channel from the head to the heart is the katika channel, according to the spelling Max used on his blog. Snowmonki, I think the Max quote is a transcription of a part of an interview, I'm not sure where it occurs in the interview but here is part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onIbdDHwdJA

I know Winn has said how he studied Ba Gua and nei gong with Frantzis and edited Opening the Energy Gates. So it was surprising for me to realize that Winn fighting straw men. Well, that's how it seems to me; I can't rule out the possibility that I have no idea what I'm talking about. But people talking past each other is such a ubiquitous thing. Even with chi masters, I guess.

That article by Winn, man, at first it was like, "Wow this is so profound, how did Frantzis not see this?", but then it changed to "Wow, Winn really doesn't know what he's talking about here." The change occurred when I realized that most of what he acts like he is correcting Frantzis on he is actually just repeating something Frantzis already said in one of his books. Like how what the water method really is is the way of never forcing anything, not the way of never using fire nor the way of emphasizing dissolving. Of course Frantzis' system uses fire, it uses all 5 phases and 8 forces, like any good system must. And Frantzis says explicitly that Fire schools use dissolving, the difference being the philosophy behind how and when different techniques are used. Frantzis also explicitly says that both the Water and Fire schools have a practice called Kan and Li, so why Winn acts like that his system is the "Way of Water and Fire" as opposed to the "Water Only" school can only be that he didn't actually read Frantzis' books or ask Frantzis about it directly. Again, Winn says the process is unnecessarily slow and only leads but never follows, but just because Frantzis has not put the teachings for speeding up the process in books, doesn't mean they aren't there. You do stuff to get everything all stirred up (lead), and then you dissolve it (follow). But he hasn't put the "stir up" techniques in books, and probably never will. Yet again, Frantzis does say some people are more suited to the fire methods, and never says they are bad or wrong. But he does extol the virtues of the water method (of course) and point out the flaws in the fire methods, which definitely can give people the wrong impression. So I think Winn's heart is in the right place, it's just that he is beating down straw men for most of the article.

Snowmoki, Thank you very much for this post. This is precisely the kind of info I was trying to get out of Pietro, plus a whole lot more.

The verse does show that Jesus was not anti-snakes, since he told his followers to be like snakes. Snakes are considered to be shrewd in various cultures, but the other side of shrewdness is deceitful craftiness, which is one possibility as for why the snake is the animal that tempts Eve in the garden. Not because snakes are considered to be intrinsically evil by the authors of the Bible. That is just how superstitious people have twisted it. However, Jesus does in fact compare himself to a snake: "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life." (John 3:14-15). He is referring to an incident in Israel's exodus from Egypt: "From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom. And the people became impatient on the way. 5 And the people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food.” 6 Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died. 7 And the people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord and against you. Pray to the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. 8 And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” 9 So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live. " (Numbers 24:4-9) Now does the image of a snake on a pole remind you of anything? Ramon, I don't understand why you have identified the archetypes of the Goddess Shakti, Mother Earth, and Satan. It seems to me that the first two are related but not the same, and the last is completely different. Satan means Accuser, and is the being who brings charges of wrongdoing against humanity, and who tempts humanity into sin, especially by deception, in order to bring more charges against them. (Revelation 12) This verse shows that Satan and Mother Earth are completely different, and that The Earth and God are on the same side. Just because Hell is referred to as being underground doesn't make Christians anti-Earth. Don't Hindu's and Buddhists also refer to the Hell Realms as being below and the Heavenly Realms as being above? This is universal. Actually, the ancient Jews believed that (almost) all the souls of the dead went to sleep below the Earth, in the Underworld (which they called Sheol, and used the word Hades when translating their Scriptures into Greek), and only rarely would someone go to be with God in Heaven straight from the Earth.

:lol: This thread has made me very wary of attaching layers of meaning to posts here. But your latest riddle seems clear enough. When you have swallowed your food, then hopefully you will help clear up some of this confusion about "What is breathing beyond the obvious pumping of air in and out of the lungs."

Hi cat and Rainbow_Vein. Thank you both for you kind words and intentions. I am very fond of both of you, you know . I want to say something else, but it just won't come out right.

Pietro, I have no idea what you mean by "I don't even need to reply anymore". Actually, I get this impression about this whole thread, like everybody is misinterpreting everybody else, and then responding in a way that is easily misinterpretable. I really would like to hear anything you would be willing to share in response to my question to you: Thanks, Tyler

Right, this is precisely why I requested what I did from Pietro. I know he will not spurn my scholarly desire for precision .

Hi Michael. Has anyone ever told you that you can come across as cynical and disparaging? Maybe I'm just hypersensitive. Anyway, I'm glad that wasn't the case here. It seemed to me that you were suggesting that any idea of breathing into a particular part of the body was a visualization method for bringing in energy. I know this type of visualization is common, and I have never liked it either, but I also feel like there are so many more wonderful things possibilities inherent in the breath. Like this wonderful description, for example: Anyway, I missed seeing you this weekend. Next time maybe?

I was touched by this phrase. I have never thought to phrase it this way, but I feel like my heart is uninhabitable.

I would love to hear what you have to say in reply to this Pietro. Indeed, what exactly do you mean when you speak of breathing with a particular area of the body? When you breathe with your big toe, what are you doing? What things are happening on the physical and energetic level when you do this, and how is it related to intending energy to go to that particular area (which is only one half of the cycle anyway)? How about when you breathe with your dan tien? Michael, It seems cynical to me to suggest that the 3 week intensive on breathing Frantzis is teaching is no more than a contrived and kindergarten way of learning to bring energy into the body. There has to be more to it than that.

What a refreshing and inspiring post. A true breath of fresh air. Thanks for posting this. Thanks also to cat and Darin for provoking it.

How very Taoist of Mr. Perleman. "When wealth and honours lead to arrogancy, this brings its evil on itself. When the work is done, and one's name is becoming distinguished, to withdraw into obscurity is the way of Heaven." Hopefully, now that he has definitively rejected both the Fields Medal and the Clay Institute prize he will be left in peace.

Hi Dwai. I know its a tangent, but I egged you on anyway. So thanks for playing along . The main point of my post was to try to shift you from being the doer to being the watcher with regards to your own views. It seems to have had the opposite effect. Oh well. Yes, I can imagine how infuriating that must be. It's infuriating to me and I am not even Indian, just a lover of Indian culture. I am also a lover of Christian spirituality, which I suspect that your conception of is something of a caricature, like how Americans might think yoga is all about stretching and tantra is about better sex, and Hinduism is probably something like the ancient Greek religion because they heard it was polytheistic. True, Christian spirituality is not as mature as yoga, after all it is much newer. But it is mature enough to make some major spiritual progress with. And I know better than to believe that all Hindus are beyond dogmatism and letting literal interpretation of scripture get in the way of development . You clearly have a very strong Indian identity, which I think makes you a lot of fun to talk to. But along with that comes a strong "us vs. them" / "Superior Indians vs. Western barbarians" mentality. Indeed, how could you not despise Christianity and identiy it with Western consumerism and imperialism after what the British did in India, playing Christian the whole time? But something I have picked up from yoga is being identifying as the watcher rather then the doer, even as you are doing things (having thoughts and opinions and viewpoints being an example of a doing). I can't do it, so perhaps it is presumptuous of me to encourage anyone else to do it. It's because I like you. Otherwise I wouldn't even bother.

It may come as a surprise to you to hear that Christianity and Judaism have highly developed spiritual disciplines, which are plenty "inward focused." They are just not widely practiced in fundamentalist circles. There may be some commercialized "Christian yoga" out there, I don't know, but actually the idea of it makes perfect sense to me: the Christian disciplines (I lack knowledge of the Jewish ones) could benefit from asana and pranyama in the same way that Hindu meditation and devotional practices can. I would much prefer to view this as useful cross pollination rather than an aberration, but I perceive that a necessary step toward that view is having respect for both the Hindu and Christian tradition.

Hi Kate. You are right, it would be a mistake to infer anything about Santi or Tao from the words of someone who just started studying with them. I was just giving some friendly encouragement to "represent" your teachers with more than lip service. He can take it or leave it. But I personally think that that is a good thing to do that people forget about in this age of internet classes and spiritual consumerism. It's a kind of giri, you know? Thanks for the kind words! I don't get too much of that these days, so I really appreciate it.

Hi John. I invite you to consider that promoting your teachers and then calling a guy a dick (who wasn't being a dick at all, but that is irrelevant) might not reflect so well on said teachers. Ordinarily I wouldn't care so much but I like Santi and Tao and don't like to see them represented like that.

I get this feeling that I will someday have that same reaction to seeing my posts here. When you first got here I suspected that YOU were Sean Denty, who got a new name because he didn't want all the baggage that came with that name anymore.

Hi JohnC. Jiang's primary claim to fame around here, like Chang and Peng, is his (alleged) ability to produce an electric current from his body. He is one of David Verdesi's teachers.

There is an approach to the quantum measurement problem where a particle does in fact have a definite position at all times. It is called the Pilot Wave theory. It's champion among the second generation of quantum physicists was David Bohm, who in addition to being a brilliant physicist, was quite philosophically astute, and interested in the relationship between the quantum, the mind, and the spirit (he was friends with Krishnamurti). His writings might be of interest to participants in this thread. "The Undivided Universe" was the last and most complete expression of his views on quantum physics, while "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" is a classic, and a bit less technical if memory serves. When you look at the history of quantum physics, you can't help but notice the immense influence of Bohr over all the founders of quantum mechanics (Pauli, Dirac, etc.). He was the one who was dictating what everything "meant" for a long time. Actually, when Heisenberg discovered the uncertainty relations, he went to Bohr to discuss their meaning, and Bohr so intensely argued against Heisenberg's ideas that he made Heisenberg cry. One of the chief aspects of his philosophy was positivism: don't ever make statements about what "is", just what you have measured. Therefore, there simply is no conceptualization of the 2 slit experiment in Bohr's philosophy because to get one you have to measure things, which messes up the whole experiment. That was one of his slipperiest maneuvers in his debates with Einstein. Now, Heisenberg's ideas about the "gamma ray microscope" and how measuring the position disturbs the momentum give a sort of "picture" to the uncertainty principle, and this is what Bohr didn't like. Later, when Feynman came up with the path integral, Bohr said "No, this is totally wrong" because it conceptualized electrons as having paths, i.e. it gave a picture. So in this type of environment, of course the pilot wave theory never caught on. The only reason Feynman's ideas caught on is because he used path integrals so successfully to do calculations in quantum field theory. But now there are chemists using Bohm's ideas about electron trajectories, who knows, maybe it will become more mainstream. But truth be told, Bohr did have a point in that in the formalism of quantum mechanics, there is absolutely no indication that observing the particle "disturbs" it in any way. There is just a rule to compute probabilities of outcomes of measurements, from which one can derive that the product of the standard deviations for position and momentum must be greater than some constant, which is the mathematical statement of the uncertainty principle. Heisenberg's heuristic picture of the situation is actually not derivable from the quantum formalism, and so IMO should not be taken as seriously as it often is. And yet, I don't think physics has really come to grips with the fact that everything is interacting with everything else all the time. How could it? Prediction would become completely impossible. That is why I think all the stuff about a "Final Theory" is ridiculous. I personally romanticize the idea that quantum mechanics is what you get when you make the best predictions you can by approximating the ALL THAT IS by, say, electron + measuring apparatus (which will necessarily be statistical in nature). But demonstrating that (indeed even precisely formulating the idea) would require quite a bit of cleverness and hard work in philosophy, physics, and mathematics. This is not quite correct. I think you are thinking of entanglement, whereas in the 2 slit experiment the issue is superposition (which is related, but not the same). As far as the formalism of quantum mechanics is concerned, the location where any individual photon will register on the screen is only probabilistically determined. The pattern that appears on the screen after shooting many photons is indeed what you would expect from shooting many photons at the screen that are completely independent of each other, namely, the same pattern as the probability distribution (Think of flipping a coin. Each flip is independent of the rest, so after a while you tend to get the same number of heads as tails, because the probability of getting heads is the same as getting tails). So what the mystery of the 2 slit experiment is is that probabilities don't combine normally! If you are dealing with classical particles, you get the probability distribution for the 2 slit experiment, and therefore the pattern that emerges on the screen, by adding the probability distributions for the individual slits, which gives you the expected two peaks. But quantum probabilities can interfere with each other. Note that it is the probabilities that are interfering with each other, not actual photons. This is the real reason for all the controversies about the 2 slit experiment, because after all, what the hell does that mean? Actually, there is a theory of "path integrals" developed by the mathematician Norbert Wiener 20 years before Feynman had the idea, in order to model diffusion, where an atom is constantly being jarred around by its neighbors in a random way. The only difference between this path integral formula and Feynman's is that in Wiener's formula probabilities combine by adding them like normal probabilities, but in Feynman's formula probabilities for different paths can interfere with each other, that is, cancel each other out. To put it mystically, what might have been is interfering with what is! .

I clicked on this thread while listening to this song. It's been stuck in my head all day because that Santana song I posted has a similar riff in it. Said I've been crying, all my tears they fell like rain. Don't you hear them fallin'?

Hi secularfuture. I also have trouble with negativity, misery, depression, etc. One thing I am beginning to realize is that the attitude "if I could just learn how to do neidan (or any other "technique"), I could fix myself" is fundamentally flawed. Ones's ego perceives these emotions and reacts with rejection. This rejection and the consequenst need to change or fix one's self actually prevents true healing from occuring. The only advice I can offer right now, still discovering these things for myself, is to expand your awareness of what you are feeling, thinking, seeing, and hearing all at the same time, and to fully accept and yet not identify with the way you are feeling, that is, realize that what you are feeling is just another sensation like what you are seeing in front of you. You can do this while following the suggestions of others here, like walking and shaking. For me, those things don't do much unless I add in the awareness component.

Hi mewtwo. If you hadn't already come across this, lessons 312-316 of AYP deal with cleansing techniques. Perhaps you will see some things there that you will feel more comfortable with. http://aypsite.org/MainDirectory.html