SFJane

Immortal Sister has a book about mushrooms? Now that is cool. The things I miss when I am away... Anyone else a huge BSG fan? Turns out my brother's mind works very similar. He liked it a lot. I wrote it for him more than anyone else, to 'prove' to him that our minds are alike. It was just a crapshoot to wonder if anyone else's brain works in similar way and might 'grok' my words. It was meant to show a stream of balanced right and left hemisphere thinking going on at once. I figured you guys might dig some of the heart-mind references and such. One of the recurring topics on these boards is what does conscious thought or projective thought really mean? In Taoist verses, what is daily accumulating? What is the water that can be muddy or clear? So, the references to energy balancing, heaven and earth, yin yang and sensing inside yourself and without and the like, I figured would go over with this crowd.

Bum Grasshopper: if you mean the BWE phpBB forums (with the blue trim), then yes. That sounds like a great idea. Please attribute the article to me and add a link to the original article at my blog. http://roguetaoist.wordpress.com/2010/08/15/meditation-as-a-cure-for-mental-illness/ That is all I ask. I hope it helps too. Good to be back! Mokona See! Everyone has a chance at being 'schizophrenic' or 'manic' because we all work the same way organically. Mental illness is normal functioning taken to a destabilizing and abnormal or hyper level of functioning. Anyone who meditates long enough will discover 'voices' inside themselves and know, at least for a little while, what it means to be schizophrenic (even though you are not, technically). A real 'schizophrenic' has very little separating their conscious mind from their internal stream in some places, like rubber worn too thin on a tire--and the voices become too distracting to deal with life. And you are very welcome! SongsofDistant: I will try to send it to you when I get a chance to dig for it. Expect it soonish. Thanks again, everyone who read it and commented.

That is great to hear! Another Kumar devotee. And yes, it's not just me saying this, because you are getting results. Never read any of his stuff in detail, but hey, whatever gets you in the door. You are totally hip to two of my favorite other teachers. I've never met Liao, but I have read his books and from what I learned from Bruce, I can see that Liao knows what he is doing, and I've played around with his stuff to experiment. Ralston, I've trained with and he's a hoot. My turn to clap now. It brings a warm feeling to my heart to read this. Yeah! to boring people who give themselves to the training. A life can only slow you down from your passion. Let the empire totter and do another set of forms I say. Its coming and it'll be POD unless some big-time lit agent sweeps me off my feet with an offer I cant refuse in the next few months. Very interesting. Trying to get a wide range of people to understand me has been a goal ive tried to achieve. I could talk about the chi of this and the chi of that until I'm blue in the face, but Id get a smaller audience. And this, WallaMike, is where I have to put my finger over my own lips. Thanks a lot for your sincere and detailed reply. Had to find some spare minutes to read it all carefully and reply thoughtfully to you.

Yes, please do send it if you like. It's always nice to hear about other stories of similar things like Morris or Shanihoff's work. It means its not just me saying this. Other people are getting similar results in not dissimilar settings.. That's a good thing, I think. You are very welcome, Mattimo. Thanks for reading it all.

Would you feel bad if I told you I did a 2k word criticism piece of truehope awhile back? I tore into the ahem, science. I could possibly go find it and send it to you in a pm. I personally, wouldn't recommend it to anyone. But that's just me. I think its a great big talisman and the science is more than a little wonky if you want to get right down to it. The Empower group is highly resistant to getting itself properly tested scientifically and that's a huge turnoff for me. I have nothing against proper nutrition or vitamin supplements, I just don't like how empower does business.

Well said. Showing of powers as evidence of enlightenment is kind of like saying "And now for a demonstration of my healing abilities, I will break this board."

zomg you even picked up that I was talking about the movie, more-so than chaos theory. nice. yeh. the butterfly effect was how I undid bipolar and ptsd. in Taoism there is a whisper of something called change and change is what? alchemy..a series of transformations of heaven and earth so..Taoism -as alchemy-to go in and change shit and do it right this time, now that you've been able to see which flappings got you where last time... if you cant visualize beyond what you think you know you are...imagine something different and doing that until it is you..meh..you suffer.. and do it all over again. ..and again alchemy lets you tamper with the matrix without being visibly jacked in i know what you mean about talking about it...I try...never, ever to talk about...well..you know...because I feel instantly like a moron..so..you know how they detect planets these days? gravity perturbations on the stars they orbit...we know its there by its effects on things..even though we cant see it.. to say anything else is profane really...to me...

Woops. Was quoting the russian guy presumably asking the reporter girl what the droprate on her pants was. Trust me, I know about droprates. Use to farm the Eye of Shadow on my warlock and epic mounts on my deathknight. I am on US servers so,.. didnt see that go down. Dreamworld..yes. And yes. And I agree, totally. Morpheous, "Have you ever had a dream you thought was real?" Butterfly Effect inside you.

What is the droprate? I troll everyone even your mom now I can't flame people on my lvl 1 alts anymore! Omg. I almost peed myself. Any guess as to his favorite class? I am guessing gnome mage or ud rogue, doesn't seem the tank or healz type, but you never know Blizz always nerfs the best exploits when they get too many complaints! Nah. Not when stuff can fall on you and prove you wrong in an instant. I've always thought of Taoists as observers of what is, not pedants who tell people what the world should or shouldn't be like. As for robes? Wth is a robe going to do? What does a bowl prove? That you have good knees and can follow directions? Does the robe and bowl give you a set-piece bonus? Did you know Da Mo trolled the emperor of China once and got lol banned for telling people they were doing it wrong? Epic troll.

You are good. My hat is off to you. Elegant troll sage is subtle and elegant. That's a compliment, not an accusation. You can do a lot of good here. /respect

Thank you, everyone that read it and commented. Thanks for the link Dainin! Beoman, I was once, almost. I got into programming as a young teen believe it or not, for artistic reasons. I loved making my own custom screensavers before people even called them screensavers. Remember 'triangles' that would draw and stretch all over the screen and change colors? I used to write my own in BASIC. When I started programming and sat in front of a PC back then, it usually had a black screen and a blinking cursor and that's it. You loaded the program you wanted to run by hand via floppy disk. But I soon noticed that you could command that blinking cursor, either in BASIC or machine code and make it start doing really funky things without ever loading a floppy at all, and I fell in love with coding and editing. I used to haxxor teacher training floppy disks and make subtle changes to alerts and messages, permanently save them, peel off the overwrite tape and put the floppy back on the teachers desk when she was looking the other way. Then I got on psych meds and bam. Lost a half a year of life and forgot I ever cared about computers. The rush and pace of living under the thumb of the state back then allowed few opportunities to get back into it. As an adult, I worked in warehousing and manufacturing and I didn't touch a computer until about '96. Then it was Windows 3.0? And I learned how to use DOS a little bit. It was only thing familiar with the new 'operating system'! I realized programming had changed quite a bit. I got into designing video games and editing in-game environments briefly. Got a haxxored version of Enterprise Visual Studio 6 from someone that worked at Intel. Took a look into C++, which is often tweaked with an in-house code to execute scripts or inform in-game objects of their abilities and dimensions. It was too much stuff to learn. I was so into Bruce's material, doing meditation and chi gung, that I couldn't see giving myself over to being a geek full-time. All my friends were doing it and becoming game coders, Novell network admins, website developers, Unix and Pearl coders and the like. So, I know the lingo because almost all my good friends are IT nerds who run the internets. Programming code still makes a weird kind of sense to me when I look at it, so I know I have still have the haxxor gene in me

HAHAHAHA I am not loling at you, but at me. My story was the opposite for a long time. I was a pretty unhappy kid who delved into philosophical, religious and occult practices for answers, saw how reality really seemed to work, promptly became convinced there was little point to any of it, once you got a good look. I was even more unhappy after I delved into the rabbit hole. More unstable. Didn't get sorted out for a long time. Glad you are taking to it so well!

Done. My apologies. I have been away for awhile and missed you guys too. Troll and counter-troll rules vary widely in some places and I've recently come from sites that have very few rules of engagement. >.>

No, you were talking to me, see here in this screenshot? This is you, quoting me and my posts and replying to me. You haven't added anything all that nifty. Then I added some real world practice anecdotes to the discussion and all you can come up with is NO U! Fail.

Your cup already overfloweth a little bit. You have a number of choices on how to approach Taoism. None of them inherently 'right' or 'wrong.' You can be a religious Taoist and keep a shrine and do devotionals to the Immortals. You can try your hand at understanding the 'philosophical' aspects of what you read in the TTC. There is nothing wrong with that at all. A lot of people here seem to have a lot of fun with that doing a Marcus Aurelius -like 'meditation' on the meanings of the chapters and verses. There is another way to explore Taoism and that is experientially. You go and live Taoism and try to reproduce for yourself the little accidents and observations the ancients experienced by immersing yourself into a more esoteric more 'occult'-like method of inquiry and that amounts to, stop thinking about it and start meditating. Meditation is both the process and achievement of stillness of the mind. If you are not doing something that is gradually creating that 'bacteria-like' growth of stillness inside you, something that transforms your inner worries, stress, wonderings, fixations, personal demons and spiritual suffering then I don't know what you are doing, but it sure isn't meditation. Pick one technique. Not astral projection or angel meditation or contemplation of a lotus. Choose a technique that involves turning your awareness inward and letting go of the 'stuff' that is churning round and round in your heart-mind and let go and relax. Go practice. Forget you ever heard of a place called Tao Bums for a year. Trial and error just like the ancients did it. One day you will realize you have 'experienced' or solved in a very real way, the answers to many of your questions. If you intend on an ontological inquiry into what living Taoism can really mean, if you want to find out in your soul what the teaching in the TTC are talking about, than this is the verse that should concern you the most: "Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?" You can either waste budget some time intellectually analyzing to death the semantics of some ancient Chinese philosopher with people, some of whom would rather read about it, than actually practice. Or you can find a teacher, learn a technique, get a sense of what right and wrong practice is, get a critique on your progress, then go practice the heck out of it. Then you will come back and read Tao Te Ching for the lulz, and suddenly everything that seemed all weird and mystical and arcane will appear to be totally obvious, common sense. That is all there is to it. In the process of cultivating that patience and that settling you will naturally stop daily accumulating and interfering with your own development through expectation and projection. You will slowly gain the much vaunted 'mastery' sooner or later. Mastery really just means, being centered, being happy, being content, not being destroyed when your life changes. It means understanding the process underlying every single thought and emotion that moves across your inner landscape. It not anything more exotic or complex than that. But you have to be willing to A: accumulate a little more. Just enough to get an 'ontological device' ie meditation practice technique, then, B: STOP accumulating anything else and go sit until the mud settles. The TTC reads like muddy water just as a much as your own mind can be. But that water will become clearer if you go sit and do it.

Not at all. I arrived at the existential realization of the entirety of verse 48 accidentally. I found that it had been foretold in the book and that according to the chapter itself, is hinted at as a matter of course. Your statement is dishonest and a red herring. It implies that had I been concerned with wanting to 'not appear to contradict myself' I should have stfu and not bothered to answer a simple enough question with my own anecdotes gleaned from practice. When the OP directly requested bums to comment on it from their perspective. I have done the sit-and-do-it approach and I found that the practice leads to a sort of, hindsight understanding or apprehension of, something that seemed abstract in the beginning. Then with my bolded print I basically said he should not obsess over what I just told him, but go and find out the truth or falseness for himself. There is information about Taoism that you can not get from contemplating it or batting around cute or elegant seeming prose. Which is what daily accumulating is. You have to, as Morpheous said to Neo, stop wondering what is and isn't real and "See it for yourself." You have yet to contribute something I haven't heard before so what is your excuse for your post just now?

There is that and perhaps even more simply, the entirety of chapter 48 can be summed up like this: While you were wasting time reading this verse and wondering what it really means you could have been sitting, meditating in the woods, letting go and finding True (self) Mastery, ontologically, for yourself. Tao Te Ching is weird like that. It sounds all mysterious and hinting of paradox and multiple-entendres, but the teachings become 'like duh, obvious' if you go practice.

Dear Everything, Welcome to TBB. May I make a suggestion? Do not look at chapter 48 as an exercise in mental gymnastics or philosophy. I am sorry if that basically means ignore or tunnel vision past what everyone else is telling you about what it means. But consider chapter 48 as a kind of codified set of instructions and observations, which I will now comment on. Learning consist of daily accumulating. Every day we go through life sensing, seeing, hearing, smelling and learning trivia. We read books and articles. We gain experiences. We socialize and learn new things and think about them. These thoughts on these transient things adds to the volume of 'stuff' and 'noise' in your mind that is essentially pure thought and contemplation. It is the firing of your frontal lobe neurons as you cogitate the meaning of life and what you absorb. In this way, you are always, always accumulating unless you do something very very deliberate about it. The practice of the Tao consist of daily diminishing; If we do not allow ourselves to be distracted by the dialogue and data-stream in our minds,, if we do not allow the mind to jump incessantly from one chain of associations to another, we can begin to simply stop the additive process of constant 'thinking' and 'knowing' about more and more things. In terms of practice, it can simply mean doing some meditation instead of watching the news. Going for a Zen walk instead of blogging or reading Fark or zoning out on your Wii. Decreasing and decreasing, until doing nothing. This simply is the next logical step. You literally put the brakes on your life, suspend 'trying to have a life' and replacing it with simply 'Being'. It directly means doing prolonged sitting meditation and reaching the event horizon in your mind where, you've stopped adding to what you 'know' and are simply seeing what 'is' floating around inside you. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone. This simply means that when the mind is still, it has no desire to jump around. It simply is. It also can refer to being on vacation, literally from life. Being a bum. Having no responsibilities, no commitments, no politics, no socializing, just being content being by yourself in the woods communing with the chi of the sky and earth and trees. In means sidestepping the rat race of consumerism and seeing that it IS a rat race that keeps people from self-actualization. True mastery can be gained True mastery is what obviously? Self mastery. It's repeated again and again in TTC. Know thyself and know the ways of the world. It means mastery of our inner world. A respite from unrelenting mental dialogue, personal demons, and inner emotional, moral, or existential conflicts by letting things go their own way. It means stop being a control freak, relax, let go, and be. It is a direct reference to doing some sitting time in the woods or on a mountaintop and letting the Emperors and Masters of the Universe do their thing, while you remain unattached. In the Water Method branch that also means dissolving through the first four Bodies of Being. It cannot be gained by interfering. Stop trying to make sense of life. Stop relying on selective thinking. Stop trying to control life. Stop trying to find meaning in life. Stop endlessly analyzing everything that happens around you. Relax, surrender, allow and it will unfold on its own, whether its inner peace or spiritual realizations or the events of life itself. Interference means also, that if you are projecting thoughts and cogitating, you are getting in your own way and you are not meditating or on the path to stillness, because stillness is what happens when you stop making and start allowing. It blossoms. It grows like a bacterial culture and reaches a flash point and starts transforming your inner landscape. Stop asking other people about how the mind works or relying on their books or or philosophies to jade you. Go in and find out conclusively for yourself I do not consider myself a Tao scholar. I am way behind on the Canon. I wouldn't begin to comment on I Ching and do not have Pietro's familiarity with it. I don't pretend to be able to comment on the entirety of the Tao Te Ching. I don't study it. I really don't. I just browse it periodically and realize the chapters are talking about the stuff I find comes up in practice. My thoughts are from a sit and mediate point of view, not philosophy or idealogical. All the best in your practice.

I believe you two are Taobums' resident pro-meds bums. I would really love your comments on my review of 'Anatomy of an Epidemic' by Robert Whitaker. Tell me how brain rewiring is good for cultivation or apprehension of qualities of stillness?

Hello Dainin, Thanks for taking the time to read the post and for coming in to clarify your position. I think I got the impression from some of your posts in the past that you were a psych nurse once and that you also had experience on antidepressants. I may be wrong on that point. Either that or you were recommending another Bum try meds. The brother or friend of a self-taught Chia retention guy that was having psychosis, depression and other weirdness. Some people, a lot of people really, report some benefit from psych med use. There is no doubt these things can and do work for some people. But exactly how they are working is of great interest. Does an SSRI work as a placebo talisman? Is handing a person an antidepressant the modern-day equivalent to giving someone a bitter herb to rub three times over their third-eye and then eat before bed to receive a healing balance in a few weeks time? Because the studies show that SSRIs work for people for awhile, and then stop. What happened to the voodoo in the pill? Your brain adjusted to work around it and you are left back where you started, looking for another med. We are told they are correcting an imbalance when the evidence points to the opposite; they cause an imbalance. Is that artificially created imbalance worth the risk-reward ratio in ameliorating symptoms? What is the point of handing them out to people with transient depression? Telling them to tough out the side effects for a few weeks so the med has a chance to 'work'? Which we now know means 'scramble' a very carefully modulated system in the brain developed by natural evolution. A lot of depression incidents can clear up by themselves in less time than it takes an SSRI to 'kick in'. The point apparently is, some people just reach a place where they say, "Help me! Make it stop!" when it comes to mental or emotional suffering and it's so easy and obvious even, to hand them a pill, a quick fix. But a quick fix shortcut often becomes the longest cut, as a person enters deeper and deeper into a world of drug induced damage. Had they stuck with the depression and worked with it, and in it, and through it, they might have been over it by now. And without a serotonin damaged brain that now prevents a woman from achieving her orgasm threshold or makes it so a guy needs a forklift to get his Johnson up. All for what? A fake happiness? An illusion? A chemical induced Maya that obscures the true nature of self? What does Chuang Tze have to say about real happiness? I think Old Chuang had a better understanding of the human condition than Freud, Maslow and Kiekergaard put together. Anyhoo, I respect your criticism of biomedicine as a whole as well. 'Anatomy of an Epidemic' repeats itself in every aspect of our lives. Statins created to prevent heart disease that don't really. Weight-loss pills that hurt women's hearts. Erectile dysfunction meds that cause men to have sudden unpredictable drops in blood pressure that can cause a full-grown proud, tough man to tip over like a fainting goat. First comes the pill. Then comes the epidemic. Then comes malfunction and death. Over and over again. Thanks again for reading and replying. I hope the All-Seeing Unblinking Eye of Adam West catches this thread and weighs in, as you have. All the best.

Push ups. Does anyone include them in their training regimen and if so, why? I got the idea of this thread from Mantis's running thread. I was checking out his link to the Navy Seal work out routine. As I was reading I saw a section on pushups, situps, dips and pullups. I've done all different kinds of pushups over the years. I once trained to win a pushup and situp contest at a town rec center when I was like 10. We learn pushups in school during gym. We do them at summer camp. They do them in the military. Even Navy SEALS do them. I've cross trained in a variety of martial arts in the past like karate and taekwando and we did pushups in training as well. Has anyone ever wondered....why? I stopped doing pushups a long time ago but I tried to do one after reading the Navy Seal workout. I felt silly. It made no sense. At some point in my 20s I learned of an idea called, 'train the way you live'. Most of my life I have done manual labor to make a living. I've been an ironworker, steelworker. I've worked in mass production and fabrication. I've done landscaping and demolition as well as construction. I've been in many fights. Not making any skill claims here, just stating a fact. I've been assaulted a ridiculous amount of times in my life especially as a child and teen. In all the assault and battery situations I've defended myself in and in all the blue collar jobs I've ever done, there has never been a need for the strength training that pushups give you. Your pecs, deltoids, lats and triceps all perform a load bearing exercise in a certain range of motion along a horizontal plane in a prone position. You try to fire off some fast punches after pushups and your arms feel slow, sluggish, like the tension that you've just built up is slowing down how fast your tissues can release power and speed in a punch. Maybe, from an fighting POV, the ability to deliver a bursty push from the upper body would be useful in defense or offense. I'd just assume push on someone with a relaxed force that connected the ground to my feet to my waist and back into my hands and get power by rapid open and closing of the Three Bends. If you are going to hit someone, you practice hitting things. If you need power like in wrestling, to pick someone up and slam them, then you train a certain way. If you are training with weapons, the best training you can do is practice with that weapon. Your body grows weapon wielding muscles. There does not seem to me to be pragmatic and useful intelligence behind the pushup as a conditioning exercise. If you are going to push a broom, shovel dirt, grind metal or otherwise work with earth moving, landscaping or metalworking there is no logic behind the pushup because the muscles and muscular power that pushups develop is not what is needed to do those kinds of jobs. There is no fighting or labor activity that mimics what pushups build in you (that I can think of). Maybe breakdancing and sexual gymnastics or parkour or something might require the ability to forcefully heave your upper body from a prone horizontal position but other than that, I am at loss to understand the purpose of what pushups are good for. We all mindless obeyed the gym teacher at school when he or she said 'pushups now!' and blew her whistle but why were we doing them in the first place?

When you dissolve your mind and intent converge into an area. From ice to water is more or less the same. Your attention slowly wears away on a trouble spot and your mind goes inward. When you feel the sense of the block changing and the block's dimensions become more apparent to your inner eye you have a choice. You can either release outward or inward. How you do you one or the other depends on your intent. Based on the information here you may conclude that outer dissolving is for physical stuff and inner is for mental and emotional stuff. For a beginner, I suppose it helps to think of it that way. Let me just say that in the laboratory of the mind and body you will find that outer dissolving works on emotional stuff and inner dissolving works on physical stuff. Inner and outer is not fundamentally different. Outer is an explosion and inner is an implosion. Both are a release. Outer dissolving is more suited to primarily physical stuff but if you have emotional stuff bound up in physical stuff you will find that you start releasing emotions when you do outer dissolving. Here's an example. In my untempered youth I had a lot of anger issues and hit things all the time. It may sound childish and it is. But I hit a lot of stuff from walls to doors to people when I was angry. Consequently, anger become bound up in the injuries in my hands. Right away when I started doing outer dissolving on my hands furious anger come up out of nowhere. At the time outer dissolving was all I had at my disposal and I did the best I could to release those emotions and physical pain out of my hands and I succeeded. When I was trying to make my ribs come down with nei gung I was working directly with my body but I found inner dissolving worked better for purposes of getting my consciousness deep inside my bones to ascertain what was going on. You may also stumble upon simultaneous inner and outer dissolving. Some years ago I kept dissolving inner and outer in the same spot over and over and suddenly just starting doing both at once and that's how I dissolve now. I probably shouldn't mention this because I don't want to complicate things but in time you will find that you can inner or outer dissolve, anywhere, anytime, in practically any position you want. You can stand, sit, kneel, lotus, walk around in a circle, do cloud hands or lay in a bathtub and dissolve. You can dissolve in any direction you want including (!!!) upward and sideways. In the beginning, you always dissolve down while sitting or standing to instill a pattern and to establish the downward current. It helps because you may not know the hierarchy of your blocks or how they are interconnected and going down ensures you dissolve everything that might be responsible on your way towards the blocks that you want gone. What I would have liked to known at the beginning is not to try to make the water to gas transition happen but to allow it to happen when it's ready. I practiced with books to start off with like some of you and I practiced by myself a lot so over time I gained enough experience to realize I wasn't really dissolving until I let go of all effort and allowed the dissolving process to take it's own course.

My suggestion would be to start by standing and going head to toe. It might help if you imagine the feeling of someone pouring water on your head slowly. How would it soak you? It would drain down your face, nape of the neck, nose, chin, shoulders, armpits, torso and soak ever more inward to the skin. That is part of what you are doing except you pour the water and you pour it very slowly. If you imagine your body as a tall building consider the space just about your head to be the penthouse. Start an inch or so above your head and dissolve downward. You enter your scalp and dissolve. You can dissolve by going room to room or cross sectioning your head, torso and pelvis. You can focus just on your knees and get some benefit. To that effect, you can dissolve inner or outer, standing or sitting or however you like. It's worth bearing in mind that, (assuming you don't know why your knees hurt) dissolving above your knee has the benefit of releasing anything above your knee that might cause knee pain. For example, if you have a bad lower back, bad hip or tight hamstrings you may feel pain in your knee and it's not your knee's fault and dissolving your knee would be of limited value. If you dissolve your leg muscles or kwa you may find your knee pain gone. So, unless you specifically have knee damage in the joint itself, and even so, it's probably best to start at least from the hips and dissolve down to your knee and lower. For your knee I would recommend learning just about any of Bruce's chi gung sets. Dragon and Tiger, the Three Swings, Marriage of Heaven and Earth, all cause significant opening and closing to occur in your knees. Just doing tai chi, like the commencement or brush knee, cause significant opening and closing in your hips, knees and ankles. You just need to learn how to do it. When you get full back and pelvis breathing going on, you will find that you can pretty easily open and close your knees while standing. Deliberately opening and closing your knees causes blood, lymph and energy to pump in and out of your joint which facilitates healing. You can also just lay hands on your knees to get energy into them. If you can feel chi in your hands, you can dry to move chi in and out of your knee through the etheric layer. With all due respect to Pietro's comment on the matter, I feel that dissolving the aura is really not that advanced. Dissolving is something you are doing with your intent and chi. As such, wherever you direct your attention, you can dissolve. So, it's really a small step from dissolving points in your shoulder to dissolving the space a few inches away from your shoulder. You will find yourself dissolving your aura if you practice dissolving your body long enough. It's a natural consequence of gaining facility with the technique. Sloppy, dwai, Pietro and Jesse all had good pointers for you Ramon.

Thanks Scotty, I am aware of this. It's my energy and my time to waste as I see fit. Please respect my discretion of what battles I choose to fight and what posts I am going to respond to and that includes your post just now too.

Spare me your patronizing and platitudes. You have not contributed anything meaningful in this thread. Look at your first post on page 1. This is pedantic. You didn't even have the wherewithal to respond directly to my OP confession. You just tried to drop in and sound like you have some fortune cookie wisdom. Who do you think you are to tell me when it is time to let go. I'm the one who created this thread. I decide what posts in this thread I will respond to. I decide when I've had enough of it. You need to mind your own business and that's the truth. Nobody appointed you the thread psychologist or moderator. Take your own advice, log out and go practice.