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.

What kind of meditation are you doing? It can be a side effect, but it doesn't have to be.

Is it so wrong to help a person get these needs met first and then work up the hierarchy to the spiritual needs, instead of waiting for them to get there without help?

When I pay, it seems to me that the teacher should do the work for me. It just seems to fit more into the category of receiving some kind of treatment. The more I have to actually do the work myself, the less willing I tend to be to hand over money for it. There are just too many things I've paid for and left sitting around. They didn't do anything for me. When I consider paying for something new I stop and ask myself if I already have something along the same lines and if the answer is yes then I do not buy. Actually, lack of knowledge rarely seems to be a problem. As far as I can see most people know what is wrong with their lives and what they have to do to make things better - they just don't do it. I don't do it. The thing is, most days my life just doesn't feel like it is worth the effort to fix. If I am going to pay someone, I want results I can see.

I don't know. Pray?

In order to raise Kundalini, both prana (flowing upward) and apana (flowing downward) pranas must meet in the navel chakra. At least, that is what I read. (Personally I chose to receive Shaktipat.) When they meet they generate heat and this heat is what activates Kundalini. Having something to do that seems constructive can get a person to stop doing other things that may be even more disruptive and scheming and plotting. It can often require a technique to make it possible for a person to finally get out of the way. It doesn't even matter if the technique does anything, if it sounds cool and it keeps a student's grubby little paws off of where the real action is going on. If you knew how many times I kept asking my teacher "But what do I do ... ?" you'd be impressed that he didn't resort to hitting me. He kept saying that spiritual growth is like puberty, in that you can't force it to happen before it is time. I told him that everyone goes through puberty at a set time, but I didn't think that everyone's time for spiritual growth came and what was to distinguish between my not doing anything and the not doing anything of a person who had never heard of enlightenment? He said it just happened when the time was ready for him. Seriously, though, how do you distinguish between one person's not doing and another person's not doing? Why does one attain wisdom and another stagnate?

In order to release the feeling - correctly - it is necessary to first fully accept the feeling. It can't be just about making it go away. That often doesn't come through for a lot of people who practice The Sedona Method. Full acceptance and release are one of those sides-of-a-coin sorts of pairs. The basic method starts by listing several emotions and ranking them from low energy emotions to higher energy emotions. It suggests thinking of something to bring up each kind of emotion as practice for fully releasing it. When you release a negative emotion, you become a bit more free of it. When you release something positive, it tends to grow stronger. It can be helpful to know that you can feel free to fully accept / release anything.

Have you considered The Sedona Method? It is a way of working with thoughts and emotions so that you can hold on to them while you want and release them when you choose to. It is possible your local library will have materials on getting started or that they can get something for you through interlibrary loan.

Now isn't a very good time to become a gardener. There aren't a lot of people who can afford to have gardeners and this could decrease at any time with little warning. Then you won't have either job and you may have difficulty explaining to potential employers why you switched. It seems to me that there are things you can do to improve your stress levels, starting with taking a daily multivitamin and some B complex and maybe some 5-HTP and melatonin at night. DHEA in the morning. You may want to try a colloidal trace mineral supplement. It doesn't take much if you find you have a deficiency of one or more of them, and it is cheaper than getting tested. I tried a liquid colloidal trace mineral supplement, but I didn't read the instructions carefully until I had almost finished the bottle - refrigerate after opening. For that matter, probiotics like acidophilus can help you to absorb nutrients more easily. When you are experiencing chronic stress it is actually much harder for your body to absorb nutrients from food. There was a technique I learned a few years ago, for working with the breath. When you breathe in think "accepting" and imagine that your breath is carrying all the qualities and energies you need. When you breathe out think "releasing" and imagine that everything not for your highest good (that you are ready to let go of) is being carried out with the air. It doesn't take a lot of concentration so you can do it at work while you go about doing your job, or even just for a few minutes from time to time during the day between tasks. The more frequently you can take a minute or two during the day to ground and center the better you may feel. Before you make a radical change in the circumstances of your life, first consider that you are where you are as a result of choices you made in the past. Part of you, anyway, chose this. Until you know why you are where you are and what you meant to get from it, you may find that you will keep coming back to it whether you really want to or not.

Was Morgana from Topeka? The name seems almost familiar somehow.

I think Kan and Li have to do with working with inner fire and inner water, with the body as a container to build up steam. They are definitely terms in Taoist alchemy. I think the natural order of things is to have the fire above the water and the practices move the fire under the water, but I always considered this sort of thing a bit too advanced for me because I don't have a solid background in Taoist practices. The MCO, inner smile, and healing sounds are about all I know.