thelerner

amazing..https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/260215-alphazero-new-chess-champion-harbinger-brave-new-world-ai- ..By simply playing against itself for a mere 4 hours, the equivalent of over 22 million training games, AlphaZero learned the relevant associations with the various chess moves and their outcomes. In doing so, it was learning much the way a human does, but because the computer can compress 100,000 hours of human chess play into a few minutes, it builds up a set of associations far more quickly than we ever could, and over a far wider range of move combinations. And now its owned by Google. It's been pointed out that its expertise is in limited areas. Yet, the idea of a 100,000 hours of experimentation in a few minutes is amazing. Seems like there are many scientific problems you could set it to and have it chug along practically randomly until it hits a workable solution. Course, the computers we're using now are probably the super computer equivalents of the early 90's. late 80's. Here's some perspective on the latest tech as far as chips. https://www.popsci.com/intel-teraflop-chip#page-3 "..In fact, if you wind back the clock to 1976, the Cray-1 supercomputer could do just 160 megaflops (that’s a million FLOPS), meaning this singular new Intel chip is about 6,000 times as fast as that machine, says Steve Scott, a senior vice president and chief technology officer at Cray, Inc..." And thats a single Chip! These days a kids Play Station 4 is processing over a teraflop at a time.

It's true and I'm always looking around for one of the other 6 to high five and say Yeah, we did it.

Glad your here. We have a couple members with solid information on China, like Wu Ming Jen. I am not one of them, but once you settle in here. I'd love to hear stories of how your travels and time in China was.

I get the feeling many national healthcare services around the world, pay more attention to preventative care then the U.S. I've never been to China, but walking through Chicago's China town, the many herbal stores with plain and exotic herbs are like nothing that we have natively in the U.S. I can't help thinking to put medicinal (& common) herbs so prominently on sale, points towards a much more holistic and preventative way of thinking.

In the deluge its nice to keep aware of some good things- http://mentalfloss.com/article/519659/25-species-have-made-amazing-comebacks quote- "Conservationists can’t afford to become complacent. When it comes to rescuing endangered species, progress is an ongoing effort. Still, we can take comfort in the knowledge that many life forms which were once on the brink of extinction or endangerment have made tremendous comebacks with our help. Just look at what happened to these 25 plants and animals." As we see fearful trends happening we need to keep in mind that these things can reverse themselves.

I understand the sentiment, but judging by the flow of this thread and general free/flow of conversation on the bums, that wouldn't help. Trying to enforce it would create more spam then it would prevent. On the other hand, if there was a Teachers Corner maybe they could ask for credentials and create special Permissions for such authorized Teachers. But even that would be problematic since it'd keep regular people from asking questions, which is half of the purpose. Maybe the best is for teachers to create there own threads here (Systems and Teachers.), and define on the outset the parameters of the discussion and keep reminding people if the thread goes off subject.

I do a couple at home. Like you, Pushups. Squats are good, they hit the lower half, that pushups don't. I have some kettlebells I'll squat with, then raise them above my head. Using a dumbbell would work just as well.

Good question. These weren't 'just' books, they were rare manuals (or scrolls) containing treasured secrets. In many cultures it was not unusual to have written as well as deeper oral traditions that were not to be written down. Partly to make sure those who got the deeper instructions were worthy. In the case of the Golden Flower a scholar pointed out that it lacked clear descriptions of a some key points, leaving people to fill in the dots. Thus you see discussions here over whose translation is best, and reading them you see big differences. Amongst the few teachers too. To some that points to oral instructions. There's a world of forms and traditions- gi gung, herbal..etc., we'll never know about because they are family forms only passed on parent to child. So secretive they die out when holders no longer have progeny to learn. Thankfully there are cases where the rule is broken.

Most of the time being a mod is interesting.. sometimes it gets sticky and unpleasant. I think there's a fair amount of wisdom in taking a break after a long time. So, another wise decision, Karen.

I'd go further and say with regards to the Golden Flower that the translation is difficult and purposely incomplete *. That's there are blanks a teacher is suppose to fill in, ie written instruction, and protected verbal instruction that was not supposed to be written down. *That its purposely incomplete is not an original idea, it comes from a source that's studied it deeply, one I quoted in another Golden Flower thread. *Was it Shangri La?" No, it was.. Buddha. We didn't have him, the west was generally lacking in meditative practices. There were some mystical/religious but they were rare, watered down or cloistered, rarely main stream. We killed off or disregarded our shamanic heritage, but the East kept it alive and had access to the ideas and concepts of meditation for a millennia.

So much of the initial question has to do with our idea of what chi is, how its stored and used. I protect my Chi, first by staying healthy- Wholesome food, sleep, exercise. Secondly is the mental/spiritual game. Trying to keep a quiet mind. Third, cultivation, sitting meditation, forms... And hybrids, walking in nature, sitting on the ground.. gratitude, listening to dharma talks. needless to say, I'm not poster boy for the above, but I work on it in my own 'two steps forwards, one step back' way.

me too, but the trajectory is strong. Everything starts as a seed (cept for things that don't)

I'm guessing that in the past, in the East meditation was such a wide spread cultural phenomena that the average person was pretty accomplished in it at a young age. So a couple hundred ago, starting with the Golden Flower, the average Easterner already had years or decade + of meditation experience under there belt as part of there life style. I think this trips up many Westerners who try practices that move quickly (I'm thinking Healing Tao here). It's not that the practices don't work, its that most Westerners lack the base, the fundamentals that other cultures picked up from childhood. Just as without memorizing the addition and multiplication tables, advanced math is going to be problematic.

From my readings meditation should begin and end with attention on the dan tien. That's not to say work shouldn't be done with the 3rd eye, but too much too fast and without enough grounding and one can get into trouble. Get into woo woo territory.. spacey, ungrounded.

Minke DeVos from Silent Grounds has great one, Deep Body Smile. Takes you through the bodies system in a very Daoist way. On her Tao Basics CD. Giles Martin has a good indepth meditation slowly lighting up the bone structure in The Bone Dreaming Meditation on his Sleeping Chi Kung album. Similarly most Yoga Nidras do a good job working and relaxing the outer body. My experiences with these types of meditation is generally deep relaxation and a nice feeling of clearness. For example near the end the Deep Body Smile has you slowly shining on a cleansing light on both sides of the brain, clearing out the mental cobwebs.

One word, Plastics. No, that's not right, the one word is Compartmentalize. Do, what you gotta do to survive. Work the boring job, and train yourself not to complain internally or out. When the clock strikes whatever, do your thing, have your fun, live your free life, preferably on healthy terms. I'll add the more needed marketable skills you have the more options you get. You can be dragged screaming and fighting into this, or you can surrender to the reality of Western life. Think of yourself as two people the worker bee who 'does it for the money' and the hedonist. You can keep your eyes open for a dream job, but ultimately most jobs get pretty tedious. This one goes out to you and all the other dreamers Westenra It's not all bleak, there is a 5 o'clock world where you can do you thing, and have your fun. As we get older we don't have to put away all our childish things, but we do have to postpone them while we make a living.

A simple system would be standing in horse stance and breathing with a 7 count in, 7 count hold (w/ slight belly tension) and 7 count out. That should produce some heat. You can throw in the visualization of in breath adding fuel, the hold concentrating the heat, and the out breath a bellows and you should get even more. Not a practice you want to over do, but not a bad one to have in your repertoire. After most seated meditations you should be able to rub your hands together vigorously and produce substantial heat between them. Infact the better I meditate the hotter my rubbed hands seem to get. Then I'll press my eyes gently and rub them on my face and around my head..etc.,

Good video. Though its cooking the books a little, imo. I'd welcome more investment into newer safer nuclear systems as an ingredient to the whole energy picture. Nuclear is still costly from building to end of life and storage; very expensive and with quite a bit of baggage. True there's been less investment the last 10 years, but go back 20, or 30 years and I bet you'd see for decades it got the bucks and renewables languished. The money spent on re-useables, has worked. Those investments 8,9 10 years ago etc., laid the floor work for massive gains in price/power generation. Modern set ups are producing at competitive prices A catastrophe in solar and wind is negligible compared to worst case nuclear, imo. Conservation seems as key as production of energy these days. I just reduced 450 watts of 'light' in my house to 51, plus the bulbs are supposedly good for 25,000 hours and produce little heat- thank you LED's. A nice savings. Each car we buy tends to have better and better mileage.

True, yet to my perhaps uneducated eyes, such things are legendary.. rare, somewhat mythic. Like virgins births, if Caesar and Socrates were virgin births then its tacked on to any would be messiahs resume. Can't help thinking you've got well known saintly people, who've done miracles etc., who simply die, just like the rest of us. So, if an average monk disappears without a trace, he must have been a saint who hit rainbow body and left without a forwarding address, whereas the heavy hitters running the school will often simply die and be buried. You've told the story of a Westerner who disappeared from a monastery and it was assumed he must have hit ascendance, but seems he could have simply slipped away in the middle of the night. Likewise the saintly people who've died might have been living buddha, they just didn't disappear at death for whatever reasons.

I have no idea of what he's talking about, but I admire that he's framing it from within his schools philosophy, rather then stating the position as an absolute. I was just in a discussion about chi/ki. And I could say from a Japanese angle, ie Ki-Aikido Ki is considered this.. the definition and understand is pretty different then Chinese schools, but that's not to say its wrong or doesn't have its uses. It'd be wrong for me to state it as an absolute. So, Namdak saying from '..the standpoint of Dzogchen', is using his school's viewpoint, which I believe is from a smaller subset, ie Tibetan Buddhism.

Good to have more FP practitioners here. While its one of oldest and longest running threads, it's a practice that's rarely mentioned outside of a single discussion. It'd be nice for that to change. I'd love to see more threads discussing its practice and philosophy.

All of it, Good advice. Yet we can't begin to choose such winter practices as appropriate or not, until we've tried or at least been exposed to the ideas.

Can't say I've heard of it. What kind of methods does it use? Does it use Forms - ala chi gung? Internal energy meditations - ala nei gong? Diets or belief systems?

We often don't notice when things run smoothly, but its been weeks or months since the board gone down or had problems. Thanks everyone working behind the scenes, for keeping the 0's and 1's in there proper place.

bump any questions you'd like to ask teacher members of the forum?