Inedible

The manager at my local GNC said I'd be fine as long as I limit my tofu and tvp consumption to 100 grams / day.

You are already "one with everything". The trick isn't to consciously experience everything and everyone from the inside out, so much as to just soften the certainty that you are separated from everything. You are probably already familiar with the feeling of energy that goes beyond the boundaries of your skin. Even in beginning reiki classes it is common to use hands to feel one's own aura and the aura of other students - and maybe even the teacher's aura. It is a good place to begin to experience yourself as extending beyond the boundaries of your skin. Maybe you might even have started to drift off to sleep (or in meditation) felt that you were expanding and filling more of the room. This isn't to say that you have to know what it is like to be a floor or a wall or a ceiling, but your energy connects you to the floor, the wall, the ceiling, and the people who may or may not be around you. It is common to state things in an extreme as a way of countering another extreme, so we talk about being one with everything to overcome feeling one with nothing.

It seems to me - I could be mistaken - that testosterone levels are more important than sperm production. As long as your hormone levels are within normal, that should be enough for doing energy work. If the level of testosterone is low you can get hormone replacement therapy. If you want. I seem to recall that Mantak Chia described an exercise or two that had the helpful side effect of raising the level of testosterone.

Retention is not just about losing energy. It is the demands placed on the body to replace the sperm. The purpose is to not have to be constantly diverting resources to making new sperm. It still has to be done, because sperm live 90 to 110 days and then they die. If you were to stop producing sperm due to a vasectomy the energy that would go into making sperm would be used for other things instead. The important thing is the hormone levels, and wouldn't a regular chi kung practice maintain the hormone levels?

The thing about Kunlun that I like so much is that I seem to respond to it really quickly, and the level 3 description makes me think of the sort of things that are experienced in practicing Dzogchen. It seems like if I would just do it consistently I could save myself decades and end up in the same place. The problem is that I also have the feeling (from what I've read here) that Kunlun is at best useless and at worst dangerous. I've had several feelings about the practice, too, that just seem to tell me to stay away. Recently, though, I've started having the feeling that maybe it would be good to try playing with it again and maybe even do it seriously for a while. Reading this thread actually, has contributed to increasing that feeling that maybe I should give it a fair run and see what happens.

The Clairvision School guy talks about keeping a bit of focus on the third eye during sexual activity. He says that sometimes a person can feel drained after sex and sometimes energized, and that the third eye focus can help prevent damage so that you more often feel energized. Unless you are in your 50s or 60s you probably don't have to use retention anyway. Go with what feels natural. Unless you are using sex to relieve boredom or to replace food or smoking or something else, don't worry about it. Using sex as a way of covering up something else is a problem. You can use something like the Sedona Method or EFT to make sure that you aren't covering up some other feeling if you want, but it is better to famliarize yourself with genuine lust and see if that's what you are feeling. Much like eating out of boredom isn't good, because it doesn't actually satisfy the genuine urge. I've heard as much as a 3 day wait for training. That didn't seem right to me. I've always been able to meditate better after sex and sometimes the effect would last for a couple days. See for yourself.

Possibly because, like with regular people, the enlightened ones don't all have the same abilities in equal measure?

Threads like these are just asking to be derailed anyway.

Awakening Prologue may have been the hardest level, at least for me, and I went all the way through Flowering Level 4. I would suggest finishing Awakening Prologue and giving it at least two or three months. If you can get a copy of "Thresholds of the Mind" by Bill Harris through your local library, even better. There is a newer version than the one I read. It was almost more helpful than the actual holosync program and you can apply the ideas to holosync, other entrainment, or even "traditional meditation" without entrainment. The advantage to using entrainment for a while is that you will find that your "traditional meditation" will tend to be stronger afterward. The thing is, I was several levels in when I realized that my "traditional meditation" had gotten to the point where it was deeper somehow than I could reach with the holosync. I just kept going with the levels because I kept expecting that to change. It also had the advantage of making sure I got at least an hour in every day. Often two or three or four. Instead of the deeper levels seeming deeper, it increasingly seemed like the entrainment was holding me back. I finished holosync just to be able to say that I did. The information in the book about witnessing / "the watcher" as a way of working through resistance really helped. I had to keep pushing myself harder as a way of keeping the pressure on. The first level of BrainEv was really nice even after I finished holosync. It wasn't really the entrainment; it was the richness of the background sound. Lots of CDs use water based sound, but this was like being in a raft floating down the stream compared to most of them. I might actually take the time to start over and go through the entire six month program some day. I quit after I reached the third level. It turns out that it has entrainment going in two directions and the point is to choose to follow the lower frequency entrainment while ignoring the higher frequency entrainment. It was easy enough that I did it without thinking about it, but it did seem a little grating and I just wasn't sure why I should do it for a full month. I had thought it was level four which did this going in two directions thing and I thought that was what I had to look forward to. It really does feel like it gets more done in half-hour daily sessions than I got from three hours per day of holosync. The entrainment just felt more natural to me than holosync, and it was more interesting.

Personally I prefer to go to teachers who are teaching as a way of enhancing their own ongoing learning. People tend to learn things more thoroughly when they start from the beginning with the expectation that someday they will be doing the teaching. It is hard to find a good student. A good student can be more satisfying than being paid in money.

If I'm going to pay a teacher I prefer to start with little things until I can get a feel for if the teacher is the real deal.

Did your first girlfriend make you pay in cash? If so, did she charge by the hour?

The first thing I want to add is that if we are going to speak english, we should use english. No chakras, no meridians, no tan tien. No prana, no chi, no qi, no lung. Literally, we should put in in our own words even if we must be influenced by other traditions.

It is the ability of the student to see what it is they are going to buy which is my concern. Especially in the beginning it can take a lot of time and effort to learn to be able to respond to what is given. It requires a great deal of faith when their money is a sure thing to them, and energy might just be in their imagination at best. We are talking about in the beginning, aren't we, when the student has no way to distinguish between a real teacher and a crook?

My biggest problem with paying for spiritual things is that, unlike money, they can't be quantified or guaranteed. You can standardize herbs, but you can't bottle chi.