SFJane

I am very disappointed with your reply and your circumlocutions. Believe whatever you want. Allow your mind to dominate your world view with biases you inherited from others. Believe in whatever fantasies you like most. I am also disappointed that you can not see fit to reply to me in more grounded and down to earth language without spewing duality this and duality that and Oceans and whatever.

was a pile of bs. Anyone can stick their finger into a candle and make it pulse. My god, this is real power to you? Give me a break. I am on to debunk the others. here is How pathetic to just assume it must be his incredible psi at work. Confirmation bias and selective thinking at it's finest. If you set up that same experiment yourself (and Ive done similar things in the past) and watch it like a hawk for long periods of time, you will find that metal objects, papers, foil, wires or what have you, will move around a little, even under glass, all by themselves. TK does not even enter the equation. Try it and film it yourself. When I was into this sort of thing there did not exist 100$ digital cameras and youtube to post videos to. There is explanations other than psi for the effects that he is showing. Some people are really easily deceived and judging by how paltry and weak and feeble his demos are, said folks are easily impressed too. That would be you, xakarii, and the fanboys that comment on his videos that I am referring to so no one has to wonder who I am talking about. More bullshit you can tell by his voice in his videos he is just a kid in his 20s. His premise and conclusion is a phenomenal insult to actual science. Folks, xakarii, you need to know what pseudoscience is. All this unified field, quantum energy crap is severe pseudoscience nonsense. The New Age and self empowerment movement is filled to overflowing with incredible abuse of scientific ideas like quantum mechanics to explain away all sorts of bogus 'powers', synchronicities, mental connections, events and the like. Desperate people wanting dearly to rationalize their mental biases or steal unearned credibility for their ideas or demos resort to quantum explanations. I am sick to death of hearing how quantum mechanics relates to psi, magic, spirit and the like. Talk to any scientist who knows something about the unified field theory and quantum mechanics and you will not find a nebulous paradigm with which you can fall on to explain away your confirmation biases and tendency to magical thinking. It's intellectual abuse and dishonesty to actually try to support your magic or psi claims with quantum theory. It really is. I can't even watch for more than a second before spotting the bs. 'Demonstrated here is a 'Ryty' a balanced instrument sensitive to mass cancel' Holy treknobabble batman. Can we invent any more pseudoscientific jargon and fit it into his initial premise? Who named this device? Who was it's inventor? What patent is it filed under? In what science book is 'mass cancel' explained? Under what standards has it been calibrated? How do you know it's sensitive to mass cancel? (whatever that means) How does one tune such a device? How would a person know if such a device was working properly? Each video of his begs the question. What planet does he come from and what science do they use there? This guys channel is a giant rick roll. He abuses science and scientific sounding language to state a premise and then goes on to prove his premise with no thought or lip service for other possible explanations. I can't believe you don't know enough science to loudly protest ShirakOmegaX's incredible abuse of it and his completely ridiculous experiments. I am really disappointed that you recommended this delusional scam artist. You obviously can not differentiate real psi from fake or real science from fake for that matter. I am really looking forward to your explanation on how there is no such thing as ontological honesty. This ought to be good.

Hi. My name is Jane and I started this thread. I also take personal responsibility for that above mentioned comment. I stand by what I said. Do you have anything better, more anecdotal or more detailed with which to disagree with, aside from, "No such monster"?

Did you read my OP? I would assume that if you had read the OP and subsequent posts that your question has already been answered. Have you truly never gone into your own mind and rooted out where you first encountered concepts like divine or demonic? Then, having found out those concepts were learned from others, deleted those files from your mind and then take a look at the world without having special glasses with those filters in them. Because that is what divine and demonic are. They are ideas thoroughly invented by the human mind and have no basis in reality or inherent qualities other than what people attach as meaning. From where I sit, nothing is demonic or divine. Those were concepts my catholic parents programmed into me and I deprogrammed myself of those ideas years ago. Hell realms? If you are talking about other dimensions then I don't agree. In my experience, hell is not a place. Hell is the mind. Spiritual hell is the state of having so much mental suffering that you can not enjoy life on any level. That you feel lost, overwhelmed, hollow, powerless. You feel like life isn't worth living. Hell is being your own worst enemy and knowing that this is so and not being able to fix it. The concept of extra planar or dimensional 'hell', much like demons and divinity is intellectual invention that sprang forth from the frontal lobe region of the human brain. To ascribe demonic motive to something like 'total mental domination' is frankly absurd and here is why. I am not a demon. Never have been, at least, not in this life. Nor am I possessed with demons because I went inside and made sure of that fact. I had a very simple and easy to understand motive or desire to possess the ability to completely mentally dominate another person. Control. No demons motivated me to want that power. Simple helplessness was all it took to imagine the power and to have a need for it. Imagine for example, that you were locked down in a mental ward and told you were going to stay there indefinitely. How would you feel about that? This happened to me as a young teen and I felt pretty angry and powerless about that. I chose not to accept my sentence passively. I practiced meditation in part to gain the ability to mentally dominate people so that if successful, I could simply convince people that I was fine and force those people to let me out. I can think of a myriad other reasons for wanting such a power. Especially when I was young. The ability to dominate the guy or gal at the 7-11 so I could buy cigarettes and booze underage without getting carded. The ability to dominate my social worker so she would do what I wanted instead of what she wanted would have been neat. Back then I often imagined forcing every single person who ever threatened to harm me to kill themselves. At that point in my life, had I had that power I would have used it constantly and laughed as I forced people who dared threaten me to slit their own throats or hang themselves. I would have enjoyed turning the tables on the adults that controlled my life. I disagree most vehemently 3bob, that the desire for mental domination over others is demonic in any way shape or form,(seeing how things are only demonic if you put on your special glasses with the demonic filter lenses in them). I have given a very down to earth, pragmatic and easy to empathize with reason for wanting such power over others. It would have made my childhood, teens and early adult years go a lot differently.

Re; “innocent open heartedness to matters in general” Main Entry: in·no·cence Pronunciation: \ˈi-nə-sən(t)s\ Function: noun Date: 14th century 1 a : freedom from guilt or sin through being unacquainted with evil : blamelessness b : chastity c : freedom from legal guilt of a particular crime or offense d (1) : freedom from guile or cunning : simplicity (2) : lack of worldly experience or sophistication e : lack of knowledge : ignorance To start a thread like this is to have an opinion or a conviction based on experience and that involves losing your innocence cherry. 'Open heartedness' is this supposed to be a euphemism for not calling bs when you see bs? In what child psychology book is youthful innocence equated with open heartedness? Why are you concerned with what other people's emotional or spiritual state is in an online thread? Is your inner garden so well tended that you have time and energy to burn on analyzing and worrying about other people's gardens? What do you care about what folks are getting out of threads like this? I for one, could care less how happy or how bitter other people are or how their spirit is doing. It's none of my concern. As for heartfelt, you can be sure that most of my posts in a thread like this are as heartfelt as I can make them. I noticed your initial post in the Lobby about stress and trauma and I respectfully suggest you take a gander at the blog linked in my sig. I've had amazing success in dealing with stress and past traumas and on that blog I talk a little about how I got over those traumas and learned to destress myself.

You know, I have to say that I hadn't visited this thread in awhile but now that I am caught up on most of the last ten pages I am more sure then ever before of one thing. This entire self-no self thing is complete pseudointellecutal bs on the part of alwayson. Over and over you brought up the term academia, academia, academia. It seems to me that is what Buddhism is to you. An interesting intellectual framework to nerdrage and wax pedantic about. You have not seen fit to share any original thinking and instead get all your talking points from giants that lived and died long before you took up this incarnation. The real Buddhism is inner work and none of your posts reflect any hard ontological effort on your part but instead are regurgitations of the thoughts and ideas of people who put in actual practice and came to their own conclusions. You remind me of someone who read a book about how the internal combustion engine works and you fancy yourself a mechanic even though you've never done any actual repairs or rebuilds on actual engines. It's really pathetic and I am surprised more people haven't called you on it.

You know, enouch, I just went and checked your profile and looked at some of the topics you started. Projecting chi from the eyes, vapors at the corners of the eyes, chi gung healing stuff. You really should come spend some time with me and ask me these kinds of questions, pick my brains and learn some of the things I could teach you. You could show me your powers and I could show you mine, wink wink nudge nudge.

I am sorry but this does not impress me. You seem to think it's amazing and that's fine but I don't. Please accept that. What would you have me do? Declare how amazing it is and make haste to India so i can be like him and to pay homage? If I take it at face value, my answer is, so what? If I take the skeptic route than I have to say, if Jani can do it once, he can do it again under the same protocols for another group of researchers which is how theories and hypothesis are borne out. Through testability, reproduction and peer review. Where are your achievements? Do you have anything to post other than other people's achievements?

Well, I don't fully agree with this line of reasoning about science and magic dwai and here is why. I assume you are familiar with the idea that technology sufficiently advanced could, to people who don't understand it, seem like magic and for all intents and purposes, is magic up until the point where the principles are finally understood by those who once feared or revered it. Let's examine fa jin. Bruce told us that Fa jin simply means: 'to throw out power' and there are many ways both subtle and gross to do that. To a person who does not understand the mechanics of an internal arts power push, witnessing someone get thrown back effortlessly like a rag doll could seem magical. But I say that a skill which is sufficiently advanced can seem magical while actually having mundane and easily understood but difficult to actualize principles behind it. The thing with fa jin is, if it works it works, period. You can stand in front of me or anyone else that can do fa jin and say, "I am skeptic, I don't beleive in chi and my skeptic energy will turn off your fa jin." But then I push you and you go flying anyway despite your disbelief. I can say I did it with chi but you can certainly say that is was just a high level of expertise over biomechanical precision and chi doesn't enter the equation. But your disbelief can't prevent you from moving when I want you to move. The energy underlying push, press, rollback etc is something else entirely dwai. At least in my opinion. You can put your hands on someone and project those energies inside them and unless they can feel chi they are going to sit there and look at you waiting for you to do something. And when you say that you just did peng on them they can say they didn't feel a thing. However, a student with sufficient sensitivity to chi will sense their own chi being influenced by your peng or lu or an or whatever you are doing and they can feel and eventually reproduce what you are showing them. Unless you can feel chi and manipulate it yourself similarly then concepts like the hidden energy of push and rollback will be just an intellectual datum. An interesting concept as opposed to an obvious and live force that is somewhat under conscious control through intent. I did something similar to what your master did about four years ago. I serendipitously met a man that was a wu style teacher who had twenty years of experience on him and taught classes in the park. We got along right away and soon we were making dates to practice push hands together before his classes. The concept of chi came up a few times and one time I allowed and encouraged him to push me into an inferior and awkward position, bending backwards. Then I lifted one foot and let him move back even more. Then I showed him how precarious my position was. Then I sent a command throughout my entire body to suddenly relax (to open space inside me to move) and then I sent a pulse into him through a new alignment that I created. This had the effect of overcoming my postural disadvantage in an instant and I started pushing him backwards from my new and more advantageous alignment. So, I didn't send him flying with one finger into a wall but I did put myself in a weak position and then, through yielding and absorbing, I managed to create an internal wave that realigned me and countered his advantage with fa jin. I can say it was done with chi and from my pov, it was, but from a nonbeliever pov it could still be explained as having a natural aptitude for sensing kinetic forces and for using biomechanical efficiency as a force multiplier.

Let me ask you, have you checked your own experiences for filters, biases or wishful thinking? In my opening salvo, that is what I did. In a nutshell I stated I had experiences that I believed where one thing and later I reevaluated for the possibility that they indicated something else. This is ontological honesty we are talking about. Self deception, the ego and the attachments of the mind are some of the most difficult obstacles towards achieving a clear, no bullshit situational report from your inner world. For the moment I've only skimmed the monster copypasta you posted but with regards to Jani, I once went without food and water for five days in an attempt to passively kill myself. The only reason I stopped was because I was threatened with being restrained and fed through a tube in my snout. After the first day or two, I had passed all my stool and my body was reabsorbing urine. I was actually under medical supervision and they are the ones who put a stop to my experiment but I had the will power to keep going. According to the study findings, Jani was losing weight and this is in keeping with what we know about people who are starved. Do some research into how long people lasted in concentration camps with very little food or water. They persisted for weeks and even months and their bodies adapted to the low calorie diet. Jani has been practicing fasting for years and so ten days was probably pretty easily done for him. Fasting for ten days and not pooping because you don't have any poop in your guts is not mind blowing man.

You really didn't add anything meaningful with this post either Lucky. What is the point of stating cliches like 'all things change'. Snore. I am a ba gua practitioner I work with change directly. This is just pedantic dude. That whole ego this and ego that thing is like an artificial device that some people on this forum start bandying about when they want to take down someone else's position. It's a kind of ad hom actually and a red herring. I don't think you have enough personal meditation practice to have any actual real insight into what ego is or isn't. By your rationale, talking about one's personal experiences and how they led to certain thoughts or convictions is evidence of ego walls crumbling. Give me a break and stop insulting my intelligence. Please. Enough. This is more patronizing garbage based on your own bias and total speculation. You be sure to let me know when my egos walls come crumbling down so I can apologize and act contrite.

You used straw man again Enouch. You made up my position and set fire to your construction. Is it too much to ask to attack the idea and not the person? Let me do my own thinking and present where I stand on an issue. Things are only a big deal if you make them that way. I told you I was grateful for the link to Swami Rama and that I thought it was neat. A skeptic has to ask questions enouch, and investigating experimental protocols and conclusions must be part of that. Notice how no one since Swami Rama has replicated or outperformed his parlor tricks amazing feats of mental power under similar or better lab controls. I have to look at how much energy was invested and how much time and training went into Rama's demo and at the end of the day it's not impressive. Obviously, if Wim can violate medical books, those books are wrong or needed to be amended. At the end of the day, so what? I stand by what I said, Wim is a one trick pony who so far has nothing else but cold endurance to commend him. It's nifty but it just does not impress me. I've mentioned in my OP the things I tried to do with my mind. Lift cars and throw them at people. Teleport anywhere I wished, at will. Total mental domination of another person. If someone demonstrated things like that, I would be impressed. If someone started repeating to me aloud word for word what I was thinking at the moment, that would be a power and I'd be impressed. Really. You want to go down that road and let's together, root out and expose every single instance of ploys of distraction that have been used by just about everyone who has disagreed with me in this thread at this point? Want to see where the score stands on that? Criticism and skepticism is the name of the game enouch. For example, Big Pharma likes to brag about how their latest drug has been proven to ameliorate symptoms X,Y and Z. But what happens when we examine those claims? Big Pharma has been busted time and again concealing studies that disprove the claimed efficacy of their latest drug while promoting studies which show a barely meaningful or statistical increase in efficacy of their drug over placebo controls. What that means in a nutshell is that they reject studies which disprove their claims and accept and endorse only studies which seems to support the results they want to market, even if only barely. Big Pharma is a classic example of an entity that makes use of communal reinforcement, selective thinking, confirmation bias. They have a financially motivated inability to accept contradictory scientific evidence. Only by digging deep, subpoenaing sealed records and making them available to public scrutiny are consumers able to see how corrupted and dishonest Big Pharma studies really are. It would seem by your reasoning that we should not ask hard questions and simply take Big Pharma's research conclusions at face value because doing otherwise is a tactic of distraction or an attack or close minded or whatever. What is the point of comments like that that barely conceal a level of snideness? This is Christian-style passive aggressive patronizing. I can easily turn that around and do the same thing to you. Maybe you are just not advanced enough to understand where I am coming from. See? That's patronizing and assuming and that's what you and others who have disagreed with me have done. You (group you) patronized me while not furthering your claims. In your case, enouch, your only talking points are not anecdotal but taken from others who have actually done and proven certain things. Where are your anecdotes and personal observations from actual practice? You didn't answer my other questions like why is Wim Hoff even now, training for another stunt when he has already proved himself. Why isn't he working on the next stage of Tumo instead of trying to break more records and impress more people? Is that not the definition of being hung up on powers?

You know, I have on my hard-drive a manuscript about my life and experiences that is over 120k words. In this memoir the words, me, my, mine and I are used exponentially more than anything that I have written here. By your goalpost every memoir author and autobiographer that ever lived is or was terminally self absorbed. I supposed being perceived as self absorbed in trying to become a published author and writing about about my own life is a risk I am going to have to take. Or is it that it's OK to write about your life and experiences in a book and you're fine. But if you write about your life, your thoughts and experiences in an online forum that is self absorption? Please share with me your judgment and interpretation of this conundrum CowTao.

Thanks for being more precise 3bob. I mean I could see where you are coming from if someone waltzed into a thread about a flat earth and started debunking the OP but how does that pertain to this thread?

On a side note, I am up to ten classic pushups and ten hindu pushups twice a day since I started that thread. I suppose I should go back, dig up that thread and talk about how I became an internal practice elitist after getting hooked on the Kumar bandwagon and stopped doing pushups in order to make sure my chi was flowing through the 'shoulder's nest'.

I don't actually agree with glorifying or romanticizing the virtues of children. Children have no minds, so to speak. That is, depending on their age they possess very little formation of self and very little advanced brain development. Babies and children observe constantly people around them for behavioral or gender cues on how to act through a process called modeling. Adults take advantage of the clean slate that is a child's mind to program their cultural, religious and political beliefs and biases into their children before the child encounters those concepts on their own. Some adults exploit a child's lack of experience to take advantage of them or even to have fun at their child's expense by initiating them into ideas like the tooth fairy, santa claus and the easter bunny. All of which are unreal entities that a child must learn the hard way don't exist to their own disappointment (at least in my case). Children are gullible, easily deceived and their brains contain a mere fraction of the neuron development found in a mature adult's brain. So it's no wonder they are curious and lack preconceived notions and possess innocence until those qualities are taken from them by the exigencies and realities of life. Plus even when children do have momentous realizations or interesting conclusions they are often not taken seriously due to their youth. I'd much rather possess the mind of an informed adult with experiences to draw upon than the vulnerable and easily misdirected, untrained, undisciplined mind of a naive child.

Can you give me a concrete working example of what you mean by this 3bob?

Ah Enouch, I have been meaning to get back to you on several replies. Firstly, thanks for the link to the Swami Rama studies done in the 60s. I read the results of the experiments and I was pleased to see someone confident enough to go into a lab and be tested. With that said, the TK demo was hampered by agreeing to Rama's request to not record it on video. That was a research flaw. Be that as it may, if, for the sake of argument, we agree that Rama did in fact use TK to move a needle ten degrees then I have to say I am very disappointed. He was 45 yo at the time, had great mastery of his circulatory system and yet it took him days of repeating a mantra some 140,000 times to generate enough power to move a small piece of metal an even smaller distance. That was a pretty puny display of TK. If it took that many years and that much work to generate so little of an effect than frankly I am not impressed. So far, the one link in this thread about someone with demonstrable siddhi was a guy tested in the 60s who died in 1996 and not one of his students has stepped up and performed similar or better feats since then. Certainly we have no links to pdfs and videos of TTBers with siddhi that have been documented by science in this thread. It seems to me like these names you keep bringing up are really important to you. If so, why? Do you have even a tiny fraction of their ability? So what if a guy can run seminaked through the arctic. What does that mean to you? Why not get into Tumo and see if you can beat Wim Hoff's records and get that power for yourself? Isn't cold endurance just an artifact of a practice designed to liberate your consciousness? You know what Wim is doing now? He is training for another cold endurance stunt. Whatever happened to moving on from the powers you acquire and getting back to work leveling up your consciousness? Which do you want? Powers or enlightenment? If you start performing cold endurance stunts does that mean you are more spiritually advanced than us or are just utilizing more of your physical capabilities than you thought possible? Do you think siddhi is an honest indicator of where someone is spiritually? Do you think if you yourself could demo siddhi this would be a kind of meaningful certification of your enlightenment? The OP was getting big enough and I could not include every little thing I thought was relevant. So I left out a lot of other stuff that I was into including lucid dreaming and healing. Healing myself of my problems was one of the things I was doing in my early to mid twenties. The very first thing I learned in Bruce's system was a chi/nei kung set called 'The Marriage of Heaven and Earth'. Bruce taught us how to heal ourselves with that chi kung very explicitly. I learned it to help heal a variety of myofascial, structural and energetic problems I was experiencing at the time. Around the same time I eventually went on to become a certified Reiki III teacher. The thing of it was this. I had a plethora of mental, emotional and physical problems that needed to be healed. I was doing a lot of trying to heal other people with both chi gung and Reiki when I realized the hypocrisy of it. There is a saying, "Healer, first heal thyself." How the heck could I take myself seriously as an energy healer if I was so unwell on so many levels? So I stopped practicing Reiki and chi gung healing on people and instead focused on getting my shit together first. In the process of healing myself I realized how energy intensive it is to try to repair substantial problems in my energy system. It seemed even more pointless to splurge my energy on healing others when my own body needed a lot of attention. It followed that if I could heal myself and balance my mind, body and heart then I would have a surplus of energy to heal others and much more experience doing so. I went underground with my healing interests and instead, tried to heal myself. While healing I not only changed the landscape of my mind but also my body. Which previously was twisted, tense and contorted from all the energy blocks that had embedded themselves from various injuries over time. My ribs were migrating towards my clavicle due to internal tension over the years. I saw my distorted skeleton in my Xrays at a chiropractor's office. Daunting though it was, I used Bruce's Bend the Bow and Shoot the Arrow chi gung to reverse my migrating ribs, reverse the pressure on my nerves and remove the distortion in my fascia that caused my posture to be so inefficient and painful. I never really desired healing powers per se, but I did manage to get some amazing self healing effects mentally and physically by practicing Bruce's system diligently.

Passing observation or not, it is critical. Can't you do better than this? This is an ad hom. You are attacking me and my alleged personality trait and not the substance of my ideas. The post you are referring to is an anecdote from my personal practice, of course it is about me. How easy it is to accuse someone of being self absorbed when they dare to post a thread or reply about themselves? How do you avoid coming across seemingly unabsorbed with yourself by posting about your own experiences and ideas? That is a risk I had to take in making the OP and subsequent replies based on my own lived experiences. Can you post a cogent argument for or against the actual ideas and concerns that I broached? Note to Trunk. I saw your post and I want to make it clear with this reply that I am not trying to fan flames, only wrest higher quality posts from people who I know can do better than they have.

Assuming it's not just words to you this shows you have some understanding.

I for one, am fully prepared to bow down and welcome our new (ancient) reptilian overlords. Psyche. On a more serious note. For about 70% of my life I was a predominantly right brained person. All the stereotypes applied to me. I was in every kind of art. I drew black and white sketches I played the flute. I like theater and enjoyed role playing games. I've always considered myself sensitive to the energies around me and inside me. I was once very religious and believed in all manner of things from gods, goddesses, faeries, demons, angels to ley lines. In addition to believing in a variety of what are called conspiracy theories, I was a New Age junkie. I've heard all about pleidians and atlantians and was easily sold on concepts like crystal healing and kinesiology. I am guilty of several forms of illogical thinking. I covered some of those things in the powers thread, like selective thinking, confirmation bias, communal reinforcement and many more. Over the last fifteen years I have done chi kung, nei kung, meditation, tai chi and other internal arts. One of the interesting things about these energy practices is how they tend to balance your chi and bring out new capabilities. Practiced long enough they can change your personality considerably. As the years passed I began to grow a left brain from doing energy practices. I became more skeptical of the the things I believed in. Taoist meditation asks us to learn to discern between the real and the false. As part of the internal inquiry we have to examine all the things we hold dear to ourselves and believe in and ask ourselves why do we believe in those things at all? Where did we pick those concepts up originally? How did we come to accept them as truth about reality? As part of the query we think about what reality might be like if we were unburdened with biases we picked from other people before we really had a chance to develop our own thoughts about it. The longer I practiced Taoist meditation the happier I became as a person. While the process of going from a depressive person to a happy person was occurring other inner aspects were changing as well. I began to become a person who was willing to reexamine the new age beliefs, the conspiracy beliefs, and religious beliefs that I had been exposed to. In time I eventually shed all belief in a higher power(s) and I lost all belief in things like 'reptilians' 'angels' 'pleidians' and the like. The internal change, that is, the experience of growing a left brain and using reason to offset my natural inclination to believe distinctly felt like growing up. I look back on all my mind-body experiments, all my acid trips and hours spent in solitude meditating or scanning people with my mind and I can't say I have ever seen one shred of evidence of these creatures. The notion that there exists a race of reptile people who watch us from behind a screen of their mental power and technological advancements seems pretty ridiculous to me now, but it seemed more plausible back when I was ruled from my right brain and less balanced overall as a person. Interestingly, the time of my life when I most believed in those kinds of things I considered myself an open minded and spiritual person. But I was not happy. I had a lot of thought disorders going on at that time. I was insecure as a person and trying to figure out ways to protect myself from demons and reptilians and aliens and all that sort of thing. It was a stress to me, to belief those things were real and to respond accordingly. It was part of this whole grandiosity spell that was woven into my psyche back then. I still consider myself to be a spiritual person and I am fairly ruled by my right brained thinking. But tai chi and meditation seem to have come through with their promise to balance the energies of my mind and body and have granted me the ability to critically evaluate with my left brain the things my right brain tend to believe as truth or fact. I used to have nightmares and sleep disturbances because I lived in fear of things like conspiracy theories and reptile people and now I am completely unburdened by those things.

Most of your posts in this thread have been completely useless. But I'll say this, you figured out what the title of this thread was about. My justifying why I am harsh about so called powers display and all the talk about siddhi. You and Spirit Ape both share this position that in light of my OP I was just supposed to lay on my back and spread my legs and take whatever bs and abuse and condescension that some of you, including you, responded with. You and SA need to pay attention to something. I don't give a rat's bottom about ego supremacy. I said before that I am not Buddhist. I have never claimed to be enlightened or to have mastered ego. I claimed to have found sanity and become happy as a person. That's all. If you want to attack the person of Jane rather than the ideas of Jane then Jane will attack back and point out your flaws. According to your standards, my actually responding passionately to your patronizing criticisms is proof of ego. So by your standard, passing on replying to your posts and taking what was coming to me by posting this thread in the first place was the only thing I could have done to prove I was above ego or whatever. Like I have no right to disagree back to those who have disagreed with me. Shut up and turn the other cheek am I right? Not on your life. I am a martial artist and if you strike me I will cut you down in return. If you can't handle having a debate get out of here and go find some safe thread that won't challenge you and your ideas about yourself and the world.

I just wanted to comment on this and thank you MJJ for posting it. I had never heard of the 5 Whys before but the idea of it shares a similar characteristic with cognitive behavioral therapy. You don't need a CBT facilitator if you can understand and use the 5 Whys on yourself. That is something I learned how to do during the course of healing myself of my mental health issues. When I learned how to ask myself 'why' I thought and did certain things I found that my own mind could give me wrong or misleading answers. That is part of the evasive nature of the unknown or untamed mind. The ego tells you, "We are too smart to have fallen for something like that or for getting into trouble ergo it must be the fault of some other agent for our predicament." The mind throws up false causes and solutions as a defense mechanism to avoid the crushing blow of accepting one's own culpability or failure. You start off thinking this is going to take only a handful of 'why' and instead you get ten or twenty whys to sort through. But, if you are willing to cause yourself ego-pain then you keep insisting on the 'why' and you improve at the query aspect and with giving yourself honest answers. In time you start getting intuitive answers to the 'why'. I continued to perform a structured query to see if the intuitive answer was in fact correct on the first shot. It turned out that eventually my intuition was clearly and reliably giving me the 'bottom-line' answer to only one instance of asking myself 'why'. That is guidepost that indicated to me that I was making good progress not only with being honest with myself but in being able to dispel my own mental enchantments that I threw over myself to avoid dealing with the truth.