Maddie

You have a rather artistic way of expressing thoughts.

It's descriptive, as in the needles "puncture" the skin.

Based on what you said it is not possible to determine if you are either right or wrong as you made statements but gave no reasons to support them. Who is to say if you are right or wrong?

The inference of disgust and laughing is your's and your's alone. Inferred judgments say more about the attitudes of the one making them.

My first exploration into the spiritual world was though the lens of fundamentalist Christianity. Needless to say Christianity in general and especially this type of it tends to have the view that they are right and everyone else is wrong, or even evil. It came as a shock to me when I began to question and then doubt that fundamentalist Christianity was the one true religion after all. A few years later when I became interested in Buddhism one thing that I appreciated was that Buddhism was not exclusive and elitist like Christianity, or so I thought. As time went by and I began to read the suttas for myself I kept coming across passages where the Buddha supposedly said this is right view and if someone thinks differently it is wrong view and it will lead them to a bad rebirth or even hell. I had heard that line before and I wasn't amused. I would listen to Buddhist monks on YouTube speak about other spiritual traditions and generally why these other traditions were incorrect and why Buddhism was correct. Again after what I had been through with fundamentalist Christianity I wasn't very enthusiastic about this type of thinking. Even on forums such as these it is often the case that a view differing from one's own view isn't seen as a different perspective, but rather as wrong. Granted I don't think every single thought, view, or utterance that is said is true, in fact sometimes I think things can be quite wrong, but that does not change the fact that very often things are not right or wrong, but merely a different way to explain the same idea. The Buddha may not have spoken about channels or chakras, but that doe not mean that the practices the Buddha taught don't affect them. The Taoists might not have orinally spoken of karam, but they did speak of yin and yang transforming into each other and to me this symmetry of cause and effect sure sounds like karma if not in name, in action. Why is it that differing view are seen so often as wrong rather than simply an alternative perspective about basically the same thing?

I can always tell how kind someone is to themselves by how kind they are to others.

As an acupuncturist I might be biased but I was suggest going to see an acupuncturist there's quite a bit that can be done with acupuncture and herbs in stitutions like this.

I would like to add that there is another well-known poster on here who tends to link an addiction to solo ejaculation to being a pervert and want to be very clear that that's not what I'm doing as that seems very judgmental and I'm making no judgment I'm just sharing observations of what I've noticed through my own meditation and as a practitioner in TCM.

Oh you're absolutely right if speaking from scientific terms there is no way to intrinsically know this objectively. That being said having done excessive organ meditations on my own in the past and as an acupuncturist treating a large amount of patients one begins to see patterns and when I begin to treat somebody accordingly things improve. So again not that it can be scientifically objectively proven but the fact that I do treat people along these patterns with TCM and they do improve would suggest that there's something to it nevertheless.

I think you need to get a therapist if things are that bad, and see a doctor.

I'll take that as you don't know what your statement means then.

Require no, but if you do not it would tend to make it sound like there's a fair amount of eel wiggling occurring. https://obo.genaud.net/dhammatalk/bd_dhammatalk/dhamma_talk/eel_wriggling.htm

I'm not the one that said it. So ask again do you even know what that means?

So aside from sounding like I am The walrus by the Beatles what does that mean? Do you even know what that means?

Well, ok then.

Stripping yourself of a false notion of self takes you beyond the level of winners and losers and causes one to realize that's just a game of the ego.

For being the same person we certainly have very different thoughts.

The problem with the statement is that I have followed the Buddha's methods and I have let go of some degree of desire and with it the amount of suffering I experience has lessened as well. It's pretty hard to argue with personal experience confirming and verifying a teaching.

He didn't say there's anything wrong with desire, not like it's intrinsically evil but he did say it leads to suffering. And this is quite easy to confirm from one's own experience. therefore it's a reasonable conclusion to infer that by letting go of desire one will let go of the cause of suffering.

I think if you just define qi as energy it works well. Energy simply defined is the ability to do work. This applies to qi. Potential energy is the energy stored by a body relative to other objects. This also seems to work as a definition of qi. Kinetic energy is the energy of motion which also applies to qi. Thermal energy is the energy of heat again the seems applicable to qi. Einstein in E=MC squared said that energy and matter are synonymous just in different densities. This would seem to apply to qi also. Qi is energy. Very simple.

I think it depends on the goal. If one is wanting to quiet the mind then yes visualizations are too busy, but if one has other specific goals then visualization can be very effective, having spent a great deal of time with both methods.

Basically yes. Anger is just the inverse of desire. The Buddha said suffering comes from desire. Either the desire for or the desire against. This desire against is called aversion and anger is one derivative of aversion.

Maybe the truthiest truth that has ever been truthed!

Yes for several years I was a by the book Buddhist and found many useful things in it, but didn't find that my personal experience and the suttas always lined up, or that not everything in the suttas made sense. Before that I was a by the book Christian, just repeat what I said about Buddhism for my experience with that one lol.

Then your original post was more of a statement than a question.