sheng zhen

Im actually on vacation now, but I cant help it. I love studying these things and love discussing them Freeform, you mention the analogy of snow, but why dont you want to talk about all the different qualities of snow and what you have learned about it? Why do you keep telling us to stop using words? Why cant you just share your experience with these things instead of telling us to get our own experience? I understand that experience is the most important, but that is not my issue. Im not interesting learning how to see the chakras or nadis or anything. Im interested in hearing about experienced peoples views on the differences, because textbooks and too many teachers mix them all up believing it is all the same. Now, here is another analogy, just because analogies are so fun: you dont need to know anything about cars other than to drive if you use it only to go to work. But if you want work in a science team and develop new materials for cars to make them better and more comfortable to the normal people, you need to know every detail about cars, you need to know every detail about the molecular makeup of the materials and all their strengths and weaknesses. You need to know a hell of a lot about almost everything! This is where Im asking these questions from. I want to know a hell of a lot on how peoples energetic constitusion is built up. So let me just say where I stand. I know all about chakras and auras and the organ energies, meridians and some other enerysystems aswell. But Im new to taoism and how differents states and energies are labled. Still i recognice a lot of these states from my own practice, that I only have been calling energy. Like shen. Insted of working on not scattering my shen, Ive been working on not scattering my energy. And things like that. As we develop we need new lables to understand where we are and orientate our selves in this new state. Otherwise it all would still be subconscious and impossible to articulate. I would love to get a better vocabulary and not just call EVERYTHING I feel and see: energy. Because I know it is different qualities of energy, but I havent learned the words. Im not, as you say it, trying to reverse the prosess. And I believ that the argument that all this is of the mind is something too many use to hide that they dont really have any knowledge of these things. So come on people! Give us your experiences, not just your general theories. Ill try to articulate what I know about energysystems in a little while, to get this thread back into the technical issues. Then you all can go ahead a trash my illusions as you wish. Maby some of you can help me and fill in my gaps and misunderstandings also

Yes! exactly! That is why Im curious to know if anyone know the "specifics" of what makes these energysystems different. It is a technical question, as Little1 pointed out. But the problem is that we put our individual meanings into these words, based of our own experience of them, and people have been doing that for centuries. Especially in the west where we dont really have as many words for different states of mind and energy as some laguages in the east has. Like saying that qi and prana is one and the same thing, or that nadis is the same as meridians, etc. It is just as true as saying that nerves and blood is the same thing, and things like that. Ive talked to many people about this, and mot of them seem to be extremely hung up on this. The fun thing is that they have no clue what they are talking about, they only repeat what they learned from their teacher and have no personla experince with actually seeing these things. There are thousands of acupuncturists who dont see the meridiands or acupoints, they only do what they have learned. It dosent effect the value of their treatment though, it only effects the value of their statments about what a meridian or qi really is. When we get more specific we see that qi is not just qi. There are several different qualities of qi. Ive heard there are 6 different types of qi. So we can get very very specific the more we study these things. But we need to lable things to be able to share our knowledge. And we need to be able to agree on the meanings of the words to have meaningful a conversation.

Yes, the lungs and the ribcase isnt the same. Its that simple. The energetic physiology is pretty much like the physical physiology, and just as(or more) complex. It dosent matter what we "think" about it, its there anyway.

Yes, I totally agree that it is better to experience it than to study it from a book or anything. So what is your experience? Do you say that the three dan tiens are the same as the chakras? Do they have the same function and the same energetic expression? Or is the meridians paths the same as the nadis paths? Even though the charts show that they are different? And I totally agree that what people observe all depends on the cultures paradigms. But does that nessecary mean that the differnt paradigms actually see the same thing, or do they just focus on different aspects of our energetic constitution? I believe the latter is more correct.

After little over one month practicing Taomeows advice; practicpracticepractice, Im now able to sit in half lotus for as long as I want. And full lotus for about 1 min when Im warmed up. My left knee is still damaged and stiff but the energyflow has begun to get better. Its a very interesting process and I could never imagine the energycirculation in my legs were that bad before I started on this task seriously. I thought I had a pretty good circulation throughout my body, but god damn, Ive got a long way to go before I am where I previously thought I was Does this mean that the index finger represents Individual soul and the thumb Supreme soul? Does anybody know what the other fingers represents in yogic kind of knowledge? Ive learned something we call vibrational anatomy, where each part of the body represents a function of consciousness or part of a process. The index finger as individual soul and thumb as supreme soul corresponds pretty good to what Ive learned.

Luckily for me I live in Norway and can travel to either one of them whenever I want But arent there teachers i Russia, romania, turkey and italy too? The "the" Foundation Training is very interesting so Im looking forward to see what fate has in it for me when time comes.

I dont quite understand the fuzz about this clip. He is no worse than any other religious fanatic. They are around us everywhere, in every religion. We see them on tv and in the newspaper everyday. We even vote on them to run our countries. My grandmother looks like that when she talks about all the foreigners invading our country. These fanatics are everywhere, nothng special about it

Ive also read stories of people releasing some karma and then suddenly was able to sit full lotus effortlessly(ofcourse not without practicing first). I thought this was just some religious mumbo jumbo, but maby there might be something to it. Hahaha, great title! Like Drew says; you cant fake the full lotus! Thanks for all these advice and information Taomeow. I will go now and practicepracticepractice.

Great! Sounds like Ill atleast have to watch part 3...

I totally agree that you can meditate in any position, and I agree with all the above points, but still you cant do a full lotus meditation without being able to sit full lotus! Thats pretty obvious isnt it? I hope this thread can be used to explain the different benefits of full lotus and how to be able to do it. Full lotus is not mandatory, but it is special! It gives something special to the meditation that only full lotus gives. I am shure anybody who has done full lotus meditation without any disturbing pain can confirm this. Those who havent done it, and those who are to lazy to learn it and really try it, will probably just continue saying that it is not nessecary, like I have been doing for 15 years of my meditating career. Ive only realized the gift of full lotus recently and if I dont work with it every day I get stiff and painful again in no time and have to start all over again.

But Drew, when you first started learning full lotus, how did you train yourself? Did you do any special streching exercises or did you just do spiring forest qigong and suddenly you could smack ringht into full lotus bliss? How was your way into full lotus?

hahaha, my god I got a culture trauma! I watched the whole thing waiting for someone to shake, bounce or have eppileptic sesiours, and nothing happened other than this weird music and smiling girls. Didnt understand the connection to kunlun...

I think you will have a problem in feeling the differences if you do other systems, but you certainly will not have any trouble feeling the negative effects of mixing practices I did that for a while and got really dizzy, fucked up digestion, and generally wasnt feeling well at all. It all stopped when I stopped all other practices. And please, dont forget to do kunlun with a "beginners mind", not the analytical mind. Otherwise you wont really get into it. Forget all knowledge and experience you have and just dive into it and see what happens. Im shure you will have great fun and laugh a lot! Or, a second thought, dont take my word for it... try it both ways and report back to us what you've experienced My experience has been that it works a lot better with the beginners mind than the analytical experienced mind. I dont need to have blind faith and trust Mantra when he say these things, I know it is true. But still, I think it is better to do the "wrong" things and get your own experience, than to blindly follow any teachers words(unless ofcourse it is a teacher you have a deep connection to). I dont do kunlun at the moment because I want to check out other things before I decide what I want to dedicate my time to. But for 4 of the 5 months I only did kunlun. As for my background it might be called western spirituality. You know, the kind where you take everythng from taoist, buddhist, gnostic, jewish, egyptian, shamanistic, and so on, and mix it all together in one big soup.

It is an interesting fact that all the people trying to save us taoist newbies from being fooled by the bogus claims of Kunlun, only gives more energy to the method. It will only make even more people interested and make it more accessible. And specially because it is so transparent that none of those who tries to "save us" has tried kunlun themselves. To most people who has an hounest curiosity about the method this fact will only make all the critizism fall lifeless to the ground. Maybe you critics get a lot of confirmations from people agreeing with you, but I guess those people would never try Kunlun anyways. Im really looking forward to hearing WYG's comment after he has tried it for a while! I did kunlun level 1 1-3 times a day for 5 months and the last moth I did level 2. I had so many great experiences that nothing anyone say about lies or bogus claims in Kunlun makes me doubt the method.

I saw the first part of it. I've seen several comparisons like that. If we work enough with it Im shure we can find whatever we want. Im actually a little tired of people trying to debunk chistianity. We all know it is a constructed and not the words of God. So the movie didnt shake my grounds. But I have a friend who keeps telling me to watch the second part aswell. Do you think I should?

Thanks for all the good explenations of nei gong! For us newbie taoists this has been a great thread. But Im still a little unshure what nei gong practically looks like. The cultivation of the belly embryo is classical nei gong, right? Is breathing through your belly nei gong? Or tracing the meridians with your mind? Or working visually with the organ energies, or the chakras, and things like that? Or cleancing visualisations like the kunlun lotus-visualisation? Is all this kind of inner work nei gong? Or is there somthing, a definition or something else we can use to use to recognize the difference between western energywork and visualisations from taoist nei gong?

You must have had this "feeling" and know what you talk about. But I guess you havent gone any further with it. As human beings we can never go further than our own limits, we can never see more of reality than our own denial admits. And we can never experience anything outside of these borders. Every impulse we recieve from the great tao, we distort to make it fit inside our own small universe. Most people are not able to imagine what is possible with a highly dedicated practice. We cannot even begin to see the human potential if we live the western way, watching tv everyday, listening to music every single minute we are not doing anything else, eating burgers and drinking coca cola, listening to the constant noise from cars and electricity in the background. Even though we meditate 1 hour a day and take a walk in the forest every week, we are ridiculously far from the higher potentals. But we can feel very balanced and experience a lot of wonderful feelings. Those master being able to levitate, or have other abilities, are extremely rare because it demans so much work, disipline and practice. But Im shure millions of people everyday experience the "feeling" of levitation in meditation. That is possible in just 10minutes of meditation. Most people, like the ones that according to you, supposedly would do levitation competitions if it was possivle, would consider a little as 20min meditation every day a waste of valuble time. It will make them miss their favorite realityshow on tv or something like that... so no, levitation would never be in the olympics

Wonderful! Love of smallness and seperateness! If we really do that I guess we dive right into unconditionality

No vids We did it only once. It demanded a lot of dedicated work and focus. We went on to do other things afterwards and I havent done anything with it since. I used to work with something called Melchizedecs Method. It is a channeled method working with the merkabha as an energetid tool. The levitating method consisted of manipulating the elements in the object, calling in the angel of air and some elemental beings to assist us. Dont remember their names. We faded the other elements and enchanced the air element aswell as using the merkabha to rise its frequency. We were 6 or 7 people highly dedicated people doing the same thing putting all our focus and energy into it and we only levitated it a little bit. I agree with your teacher that it wastes a lot of energy. We went on to do other things because it demanded so much work for too little in return. I dont think levitation by itself gives anything of spiritual value. But it made me confident that true levitation is possible, and that it probably is easy for people at a high level of realization. And I believe it also made me able to recognize fake from the real stuff. But as I never have seen anyone levitate their own body I cant be shure. Do anybody have a clip of true levitation???

The wings design is pushing the air down and thus lifts the plane up. Aerodynamics is a well established part of science without any magical or mystical beliefs. Where have you heard there is a scientific debate about what makes the planes fly? Who here has actually done levitation? Does anybody here have personal experience with true levitation? as opposed to the levitatino done with ropes... Or maby the levitation(full-lotus bouncing) done in Transcendental Meditation? I would love to hear about how it feels or is done. I used to work a lot on this some years ago. In my meditation group we managed to levitate a small piece of wool 3 cm in the air. It was not woobly or unsteady at all. It was lifted as if it was a part of the air around it, supported in every angle. The way this shaman is insecure about his balance is just screaming "I have a rope around my waist".

I have a friend whos been working with the mayan calendar professionally for about 15 years as a therapist. She say it dosent end, it starts over again in a new cycle. My personal belief is that there will be some changes, but it dosent happen over night. Its like when seasons change. Its not like suddenly we have 30 degrees and all the snow is gone. It takes months and is a gradual change. The changes related to the new cycle has allready begun, and has been going on for many years and will continue for many years after 2012. The belief that we will ascend into heaven, and that only the lightworkers will ascend is just stupid and used in fear controlling. I agree with Max that 2012 will be just another year. Maby with just a little more freeking out by people stuck in their own doomsday beliefsystems. And I totally agree with Cameron: chop wood and carry water

I dont think it is easy to see the difference within the brain. Its probably the same chamicals involved. But there is a difference in how it happened. I think that is pretty obvious. Thats one of the reasons the feeling of bliss itself dosent really say anything about enlightenment. But it is still an inevitable part of enlightenment. Another thing I think about when reading the "fuck bliss" statement, is that people get attached to the feeling of bliss. That will make them unable to face reality. There are enough examples of hippies "feeling unconditional love and blissful unity with the universe" with no ability to deal with aggression, conflicts, their own subconscious issues, and things like that. Feelings of bliss are too often used as narcotics by spiritual people, to suppress their real issues and run away from reality and the karma one has to face. Adyashanti said something in the clip Sean posted: "enlightenment has nothing to do with the enlightenment experience". If we see that statement as true, then "fuck bliss" makes sense

Bliss is great, but it CAN be mistaken for the chemical bliss that happens in the brain. And this chemical bliss can be induced by drugs aswell as meditation and a lot of other methods. I believe that if we mistake the bliss that comes from release of illusions and energy blockages with the chemical bliss, then it is legitimate to say "fuck bliss" in relation to enlightenment. I dont think feeling bliss continuously is any confirmation you have reached any level of enlightenment. I dont think it is a two-way connection between the two. It can be just a chemical condition in the brain. But if you have reached enlightenment you probably naturally feel blissful all the time.

I would say it a little bit different; you are awake, yet your body and brain behaves as it does in deep sleep. The brain goes into alpha and delta levels, just like it does during sleep. It makes you more awake than before. I dont think it is like lucid dreaming because then your consciousness is in a totally different state. At least to me it feels nothing like lucid dreaming. But you can sit down and meditate if you go lucid in dreams. It is actually a very nice experience to do that.