doc benway

Gratuitous sex comes to mind...

Using TTB's as a cultivation tool!

In considering this question, I find it instructive to also include the possible answers - both and neither For me, here seems to have been an active dismantling

Some great advice so far. Yes - you will be able to feel and direct the Qi throughout the body. It's very challenging for some and easy for others. This is an integral part of Tai Ji Quan. Waysun Liao's book, The Essence of Tai Chi, gives some good advice to beginners for working with Qi. One caveat - if you have a credible teacher, try to stay focused on what they are asking you to do and be cautious when adding practices recommended by others. While most of the advice offered so far is excellent, it can get confusing and different methods can work against one another. The important things are that you are enjoying your practice and have confidence in the teacher. All that said, I'll offer one more bit of advice - I think one of the best ways to develop the experience of Qi awareness is through standing meditation. It gives you the opportunity to work a bit with the mind and allow it to become more tranquil and sensitive while at the same time offering some physical stimulus and feedback due to the standing posture. I think standing offers the ideal balance between tranquility and engagement for beginners. Sitting in a stable posture is great for working with Qi at a more advanced level (like Daoist meditation methods) but can dissociate the mind from the body and interfere with the smooth flow of Qi and awareness throughout the limbs. Movement based activity, be it the Taiji forms or Qigong, are great but the attention required to attend to everything going on (the body movement, posture, timing, eyes, breath coordination, etc..) will distract you from the more subtle awareness required to work with the Qi in the beginning stages. Once the forms become second nature, it will be much easier to attend to the subtle body - the energetics and beyond. Until that time, standing can allow the internal skills to develop. Hopefully, standing meditation is a part of your teacher's Taijiquan curriculum. If it is, I'd advise you to take it seriously - many folks don't. In my experience as a Taijiquan and Qigong teacher, the students that take the standing meditation work seriously have much more rapid and deeper progress in the internal development than those who don't. Good luck!

Great video, thanks for posting that. It's very important for us to raise awareness about the rapid destruction of this precious natural resource.

A stable meditation practice can greatly reduce the sleep requirement. I've experienced this personally as have others practicing Daost meditation that I train with. One requirement is, however, that significant time be devoted to the meditative practice. It's not too difficult to reduce one's sleep requirement to 4 hours in this way. What is difficult is maintaining the meditative practice...

Once can similarly have the experience of - I know I can't sit on a beautiful sunny ocean shore and have any hope in hell to NOT meditate. Any idea of meditation is not it... Including that which one is distracted from by surrounding beauty, imagery, and trappings.

If that approach works for you, go for it!

Sorry to interfere but the only way for you to come to your own conclusions about the worth of a system is through your experiences with it. Someone else's can never be a meaningful substitute. Just sayin'

I think that anyone with even the remotest interest in spirituality is manifesting curiosity. It's the nature of the path... The questioning is much more important than answers. And in the end, it is all Great Mystery, which is the Yang to the Yin of curiosity.

Thanks - It has absolutely nothing to do with abstraction - that's the point. It's got to be directly experienced or it's someone else's answer and we're back to believing, not knowing.

The question presumes self and other... That's where I found the answer to your question. But my answer and your answer may differ so I'll keep it to myself. You need to do the work for yourself if you really want to figure it out. No disrespect intended.

Nothing better than using TTB's to examine yourself!

Thanks - I think you make a good point about intelligence. It can be used. An intelligent mind can be very wily, very tricky. For me clarity sees through all of that, clarity means to be free from distraction or obfuscation. I don't think clarity can be an obstacle to perception, though I get what you mean about "intelligence" potentially having that affect.

I'm confused (not unusual), what does this discussion have to do with clarity?

between the unseen the mind frolics and dances a display of light

I have a love-hate relationship with belief. A belief is the acceptance of an statement or concept in the absence of direct personal experience or knowledge. While it can be practically useful it can also be limiting and misleading. You may be correct that "There is no such thing as not having a belief system" but that itself is a belief. A big part of my own practice has been to identify my beliefs and systematically dismantle them. It's challenging and possibly a never-ending process, but when I'm able to let go of belief, I feel like I am making room for knowing. I'm also OK with simply not knowing, rather than replacing that not knowing with belief. J Krishnamurti was a big influence on me in this way. He helped show me the importance of looking for answers directly, rather than accepting an answer (belief) in the absence of personal experience. On the one hand, beliefs can be a very practical aid in our daily, relative reality (I don't need the personal experience of a rattlesnake bite if I accept the belief that it's not desirable, it's helpful to believe the bus will show up where and when it is scheduled) . On the other hand, I think it is less helpful in the process of spiritual investigation where direct experience and direct knowledge are really what I'm after.

I just read The Art of Racing in the Rain - a novel about a semi-pro race car driver told through the mind of his dog. Highly recommended!

Beautiful post liminal_luke. Suicide is a very complex issue for me and I don't claim to have it figured out. My current feeling is that it's not my role or privilege to end life intentionally, even my own. Life has so much potential and is such a rare and precious opportunity, I feel it is a terrible waste to end it. Life is so far beyond my ability to understand or predict, I feel that I have no right to end it. That said, there are situations in which I would not object to assisted suicide, and there may come a time when my feelings are different but that's what occurs to me at this moment.

I was addressing the how... I think you know that. No one can give you a taste, not even the greatest master. It's something you either choose to do, usually because of some dissatisfaction with the way you currently view things, or something very traumatic; or you just go along with your current view which is fine as long as it works for you. Your distraction is irrelevant, you experienced the pole through a different sense, that is all. Separating out sight was an artificial illustration. So either you accept the scientific method or you don't. Which is it? How do you know how long the universe has been around? What did it look like before you were born? All of that is assumption and an acceptance of something beyond direct knowledge. If you took away all sensory input, you would still be alive and there would still be awareness. Your answer is incorrect.

There are potentially as many methods as there are human perspectives... One reason is that we are all unique and so no two paths will ever be the same.

So what I'm getting at is looking at our perspective that awareness exists within us, is generated by us, is somehow linked to our sensory experience. An alternative perspective is that we exist within awareness, our sensory experience exists within awareness. So one illustration is to look at what happens if we remove all sensory stimulation. Imagine a theoretical sensory isolation chamber that is 100% effective and removes ALL external and even internal stimuli (eg heartbeat, sound of breathing, feeling of breathing, etc...). What would be left? How would we know we are still us, still alive, still aware? Certainly we are blessed with specific sensory organs as biological organisms that a rock doesn't have, and this is what creates this illusory perspective of separation, isolation, and being the source of our awareness. Clearly there is perception, the question regresses to - what is it that is doing the perceiving? What is the source of awareness? This is not a trivial matter to investigate and the knee jerk responses we tend to rely on don't hold water when you look closely enough. And unless we each do the work for ourselves and are blessed with a peek behind the curtain, we're unlikely to accept any suggestion to our usual explanation. And even if we do accept an alternative explanation, it's hollow unless we actually have a direct experience of this.

Quite the contrary, I'm trying to simplify. A rock is a rock because you give it a name. Have you ever seen anything exist in isolation of the entire wholeness of your perception? Sight is the easiest example - every time you open your eyes you see all of it, everything within the field of vision, nothing is ever seen in isolation of the entirety of its surroundings. You are dividing things up gratuitously and labeling them and then assigning them specific qualities - quite a complex, arbitrary, and inaccurate mess....

There is a problem with the way we are asking the question. It presumes individual objects which 'have' perception as opposed to the appearance of objects within perception.

I'd simply reinforce something already pointed out with perhaps a slight twist. Avoid the tendency to label and categorize this wonderful person. It's very subtle but we are doing it constantly. Over time, we tend to reduce the people in our lives into a conglomerate of our memories, assumptions, expectation, projections.... all rolled up to form an image. And we relate to our image of the person rather than the person. Since this relationship is very fresh, you probably haven't gone too far down that path yet. Be aware of this tendency and, instead, look at her with fresh eyes and ears and an open mind and heart always.