SFJane

No date set, still working on it. The goal is this fall-winter for the holidays. I have never written a book before and was out doing tai chi at the American River when all my peers were taking English Comp and Statistics. Not only do I research but I practice my writing which is what my blog is for. My entire blog is a rough draft of the book and serves as a platform where I get feedback both on my writing and the content. The title is totally top secret, during the last year, 2 books came out with titles I had been kicking around for mine. I don't want to talk too much about it because I haven't read up on Sean's rules for pimping your wares in awhile. There is no newsletter or forum or anything so if you want updates, subscribe to my blog feed or sub up to my youtube channel. If Sean lets me I will post something here when it's ready. Xienkula1 Yes I quite agree

I think AugustLeo has said it succinctly enough that I could pass on further comment That really is the best approach in my experience, it is the attitude which will yield the best results long term. But what the heck, there is a few more things I could add. I think I understand what you are driving at. What you are talking about, in one way is a kind of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Here is a simple example of CBT in action. Patient "I am worthless, I am stupid, I never do anything right" Therapist "Well you are intelligent, you are working on your degree, who told you you were worthless? How do you know?" Patient " Hmm" Therapist "Who told you you were worthless? Did it happen today? When did you first learn you were worthless?" Patient "mmm" Patient "Well, no one recently" Therapist "Then when did you learn you were worthless and how do you know you are worthless?" Patient" You know, now that I trace it back, I remember my mother telling me that over and over again." Therapist " It became part of your identity. You accepted it unconsciously and all your life, deep down, you have thought of yourself as worthless but is it true given all that you have accomplished and all that you are capable of?" Patient "No....." Therapist "You internalized the negative criticisms from your mother, but now that you give it honest examination, you can find plenty of worth so you are not really worthless are you?" Patient "No I guess not" Patient gradually *releases* the label of worthlessness with a cognitive understanding of where that *block* came from and that it does not apply. Patient uses rationalization and introspection to *think* their way out of a habitually self harming, self limiting personality *block* So, along the lines of classical therapy, identifying, understanding and rationalizing some problems help one to move on and create new empowering cognitions about themselves or grant freedom from those mental chains. Sure. I am not going to argue that therapy (figuring out your problems) can be useful in mental health treatment. Far from it, it is the mainstay of psychology and much more effective at long term resolution than being drugged into oblivion forevermore (psychiatry). However it does not work for everything, and if you tried to *psychology* all your issues you could possibly be at it for the rest of your life. The chains of cause and effect and the hierarchy of primacy with psycho emotional issues can be so complex and so deep that you could be contemplating the nature of your problems without a clear answer to some of them forever. The whole time you are futilely tracing causes, you could have been dissolving them out for good. You are right, they are not just there 'cuz'. Of course you find it therapeutic to find a reason for them. That is human nature at it's finest. We demand answers and the sooner we can label, categorize and tag everything to our satisfaction the more we feel we know about the world. To want to know and to feel better with the knowing means you are a homo sapien! I am going to give you two prime examples from my own life and experience that I hope should illuminate the ultimate folly of that approach. My stepfather was mentally ill and a child abuser. He was a rageaholic. Loved the power of the dark side from working himself up into a good angry. He had a pattern of coming home angry every day from work and had a cube delivery van and he would slam the door shut when he got out. Soon after he walked in the beatings and the screaming began anew. In time we became conditioned to the repetitive door slam to imminent beatings like Pavlov's dogs. Eventually, we started to panic before the beatings began due to expectation. We would be doing homework around the table, SLAM, Daddy's home, oh shit, adrenaline dump, can't concentrate, hands are shaking, heart is pounding, getting ready to duck, run and hide in my room. I left the household for good when I was kicked out at age 14. I lived with grandparents for bit, then I became a ward of the State. All through out my later teens I reacted when my grandparents came home and slammed the car door, when the staff arrived at the group home and slammed their doors. Even though I was no longer exposed to the stimulus, I still had the reaction. Later I learned that people exposed to military combat, gang warfare and the like develop a similar reaction It's called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome I knew I had been conditioned. It was like a compulsion a reaction, I could not prevent myself from going into survival mode and the strain on my nerves, my kidneys my heart, added up year after year. I knew specifically that I could trace my reactions to my step father's behavior and yet that knowledge did no good whatsoever. Far from being therapeutic I was angry to know my step father could pull my strings through time and distance and that I had been programmed by him. I fumed at the knowledge but it was like a magic spell that I could not escape. It was wired into my threat perception, amygdala and sympathetic nervous system. I could literally not stop myself. Talking about it did not stop it and knowing the origin of it had no effect on resolution. I find myself living by myself in an apartment in the Sacramento area at age 21-22 or so and I'll be damned, 3000 miles away and almost ten years after leaving the stress causing stimulus. I am finding myself leaping out of my bed in the middle of the night ready to fight when someone in the complex comes home from a late shift and slams their car door. So after some Kumar classes I began dissolving my memories of my step dad and his truck. over and over i wash over that pebble wearing it down bit by bit. When I was jerked out of sleep by the reaction I would sit down immediately and dissolve. Then I got an idea. I decided to sit vigil an entire night. I would bring myself to meditation stillness and wait. Sure enough, the hours tick by in relative quiet. The mind wanders and returns several times then BANG, seems waiting for it made it even louder and there it was. Remember the scene at the end of the Matrix where Neo reaches out and stops the bullets and says "No"? metaphorically speaking, that is exactly what I did. Fully present I exerted internal pressure inward the instant I felt the nervous system commands. I literally felt the reaction. The Ear hears, the Amygdala reacts, the CNS sends a signal down the spine into the kidneys, the kidneys fire, the energy goes back up the spine, the legs tremble, vision narrows, I caught it in progress. I stopped it Then I reversed it. In that moment of consciously aborting the reaction the magic spell was broken and then I was finally freed of my reaction to it. Example number 2 I got my finger crushed in a machine showing up stoned for work at the factory. I thought I lost the tips of two fingers inside my glove. But I didn't ( all that Iron Shirt maybe, thanks Chia ) In a split second one of my fingers burst from the pressure. Literally the guts of one finger blew out. The second finger did not burst. The finger that blew out from the pressure eventually healed up pretty good on its own although a long scar from the rupture remains today. The second finger did not. The pressure went into my carpal bones and soft tissue. My finger was literally swollen for months and months. It felt like a jelly bean the size of a small nut was embedded on the top and bottom of that finger. Not long after that actually is when I went to my first Kumar seminar for the Marriage of Heaven and Earth. Kumar took a look at my finger and told me it was "dead". So I began dissolving and I learned to open and close my joints and pressurize my fluids. Bit by bit I gradually unfused the space between two of my carpal bones and got the synovial fluids to start pulsing again. Gradually the hard tissue compressions softened up. Dissolving greatly removed the pain and deadness and made me feel my finger again. It took years to regrow my nerves though. When I went back East for Christmas and stood outside in the snow I could keep my hands warm by pulsing them but that one finger became blue and painfully numb. I had not been exposed to sub 30s temps in years. What finally healed my nerves was the slow regrowing of them cell by cell. The finger stretching of San Ti and the open palms of Ba Gua did much to restore integrity and chi flow into that finger. I had an energy blockage in that finger for years and I completely understood how it got there. Yet my sure knowledge of the energy blocks causation did nothing to remedy it in the slightest. I had to work to get my finger back. Both that PTSD reflex and the damaged finger were energy blockages and *personal issues* the causes of which were well known to me. Knowing about it had no bearing on it's resolution. That is only two issues. When you start therapy or meditation, you may have hundreds, perhaps thousands of *personal issues* that need to be addressed. If you take the time to try to trace them all to root causes in order to streamline the process of being free of them you may end up doing the opposite! You can spend forever trying to understand the crap inside you, the thoughts, feelings, aversions, attractions, compulsions, pains, reflexes, etc. You would ultimately go nowhere. You would be better off taking all the time you had budgeted for tracing causes and effects and just getting to work getting rid of them. You really would. I am not explaining my beliefs and theories about psychology here. I am sharing my knowledge gained from experience with these things. There is some validity to knowing what your problem is can give you a new bearing on it. I won't argue with that. Trying to *psychoenergetically* unravel all your problems intellectually is really a waste of time. You are better served getting to work right away *mechanically* dissolving the energy underneath your issue rather than endlessly cogitating over the origin of these blocks. Understanding does not guarantee resolution. On this, I shall say no more.

Poor Barry, For Barry's reading list. Lucy's Legacy, Sex and intelligence in human evolution by Alison Jolly The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Michael Diamond The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

time is always an issue but I love reading, I love Japanese culture and I love dramas, romance, epics, etc It seems my grandparents had all Clavell's books on their shelves when I was a kid. I was too much into my Anne McCaffrey, Jennifer Robertson, Orson Scott Card and Frank Herbert back then. I did look up King Rat and it's premise and I remember vaguely what Shogun was about. I'd probably enjoy both now that I am older. Thanks! Yes, the entire Dune series is chock full of wisdom packaged as fantasy and futuristic fiction. The Sardaukar, hardened by Selusa Secundus, only matched by the Fremen hardened by life on Dune. Adversity forges strength in the survivors. I remember as a young teen on my own without access to big money or big name teachers I was trying to teach myself all the mind body spiritual stuff. I tried to reverse engineer the Bene Gesserit Training Manual and I tried to teach myself, one muscle twitch at a time, Prana Bindu discipline. I spent a lot of time in forced isolation as a kid, I had all the time in the world to live in fantasy one. My secret wish back then was to grow up to become a Reverend Mother "Without change, something sleeps deep inside us and seldom awakens." Duke Leto Atreides addressing his son

ah good, I was hoping someone would recommend this one. Truly a wonderful book on beginning wicca. I loved that book and I can not recommend it highly enough

Haha in some ways. It was a contest between animal and human, between limbic system and the frontal lobe Alternately it had some elements akin to The Agony with the pervasive sense of doom the urge to die the internal psychological pain, grappling with toxic substances inside my mind and body, the feeling that you are not going to make it and there is no coming back, becoming motedom, dismantling poisonous commands and rendering them harmless, building a new control cell by cell Aint sci fi great? Frank Herbert made a better guide than some of the crap in the self help section today. Some folks gain inspiration from Neale Donald Walsh or Castaneda, I prefer The Sisterhood Nah, I'll tell you what Michael. You can pay me in the next life if and onlyyou attain liberation in this one. otherwise keep your money. just buy my book when it comes out It did contrast weirdly with the subject matter but I am not shooting sparks off over it I like pussy as much as the next girl.....it's an acquired taste. Don't sweat it, you are welcome. I can't participate as much as some of you folks so,.. I try to make it worth reading

Fixed

You are very welcome good sir. That will be $2000 U.S payable in cash to my PO box For another $1000 I throw in the real secrets

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Pschiatry Also, it sounds like you hadn't really done any psycho-energetic issue-clearing beforehand? Which I define as identifying and resolving the actual issues causing the blockages, rather than just mechanically clearing the energetic blockages themselves. Like a combo of psychology and energetics. Umm, hmm. If you mean therapy, well, I had been in therapy since I was 8 until I was 18. I really was not ready to talk about it all so I did not get any work done during that time. If you mean identifying the cause of a block? How does identifying it make it go away? Let's pretend you are walking around and suddenly you get slammed to the ground. Shocked you try to come to your senses only to feel an explosion of pain in your back. Something somewhere between your floating ribs and your pelvis has impaled you. Now along comes a good Samaritan with a first aid kit. Are you are busy screaming, "pull it out, pull it out!" or Are you busy screaming "dude what's that thing in my back?!" Do you want him to stop and gawk and figure out exactly what is stuck in you while you continue to suffer from it? Do want you want him to pull it out and then maybe after it's out and the pain is gone and you can turn over again perhaps you can look at it and identify what your problem was. Chances are, you will be so relived that you may not spare the object more than a passing glance. Perhaps you will never know exactly what that was. Will it matter? As soon as it is no longer troubling you, you will move on and it will pass from your mind soon enough. My point is, it is all well and good to know that some energy blocks inside you might be poor posture, old wounds, toxins, bad memories, traumas. But so what? It is not necessary that every blockage inside you be cataloged, categorized and shelved with a label. You can sit around pondering forever what your problem may or may not be or how it got there but that is not going to help you get rid of it. Dissolving is not *mechanical*. It is the very definition of mindful. You work with the energies you can feel. Classically whether you are into Buddhism or Taoism there is a paradigm and functional theory of personal dimension that you can perceive and work with. Body>Chi>Emotion>Thought>Mind>Causation>Time/Space>Tao/Universe/Brahman/The Force/whatever If you are trying to heal yourself, we really don't need to concern ourselves with karma, space time, psychic powers, Wu Wei, any of that stuff. There is time for that. What you do is work with what you readily sense. Your physical body, your feelings/sensations/nerves, your emotions and your thoughts. Work on stabilizing just those first four Bodies. Leave the Tao and aura reading,the kan and li formulas and karma cleansing for when your heart-mind and your nerves are finally stable. To actualize a higher level you have to realize the one truth. All that stuff is inside and outside you and exists all in the same space like a trans dimensional hologram. At first, it's not that hard to feel between your body and chi or emotions but the other stuff requires you to be able to focus and remain aware for a long enough time to perceive the event horizon where one Body grants access to the next.

Not to seriously hijack the thread or to focus fire on you seadog but no one else saw that as problematic? "Nobody is as victim unless they chose to be victim" Wellll...how about you tell that a newborn who is in a coma after being slammed on the ground in a fit of rage by mommy or daddy? How about the empathic twins sisters that get torn apart by social workers and sent to different foster homes because of a pissing match between CPS, family court and the parents? What about the wheel chair bound senior citizen being financially destroyed by her live in home nurse and care taker who is using up her credit cards? What about the young Iraqi boy that loses his hand because daddy was screwing around with IEDs in the garage and then the boy loses his whole family and house to two 500 lb bombs dropped by an f-16? What about old gramps going into McDonalds only to be sucker punched and robbed by one of the locals pretending to be a customer? What about the young teenaged women in Mormon communites being given to their father's brother and impregnated at age 15? What about the kids Andrea Yates drowned? What about all the kids being abused by their parents, by their extended family, their caregivers and so on? Are you really quite sure about your statement seadog? Do people really choose to be victims or does sometimes shit happen and you become a victim whether you wanted to or not? Is there such a thing as being helpless, vulnerable and being harmed by the deliberate actions of another or does that just never happen? Is it ego that makes one think one becomes a victim only voluntarily? Sure, makes total sense.

Haha yeap I lived right down the road from him actually. We both had an article in some local new age publication for a public class. Mine was chi gung and his was for some ninja power thing I actually visited him unannounced at his leet ninja studio. He was my age and I wanted to check out my competition. He did his ninja cosplay thing for me and was telling me about all his juice. It was pretty entertaining. Anyhoo. Yes glad to hear of your affinity for that place. I lived there man. That was my yard. In fact I will show you something. I just scanned some old disposable camera photos of one of the places I used to frequent. If you follow Coloma Road south from Sunrise Blvd or north from Folsom Blvd you will come to a street called El Manto. It will be on the right if Sunrise is behind you. El Manto leads straight into the American River Park. The last perpendicular street as you pass through the Burbs is Ambassador Drive. Follow El Manto as it passes the park gate and there will be a beaten down path on the right that cuts across tons of Spanish Thistle the bane of bicycles. When get through the thistle field you will be on the paved bike trail overlooking the American River. From there keep an eye on the river and look for rock formations that stick out from the land into the river. I built this one with my bare hands back in 1998 and spent hundreds perhaps even thousands of hours on or near this area. Perhaps if you have a cam you can take a picture of what it looks like today. The first time I built it, the first phase, it got punished by the flood water during the rainy season. But I made it stronger and it began to reappear after spending a few weeks submerged from the Sierra run off. I built it so I could literally sit in the middle of the river and dissolve.

You are right mikaelz and witch brought up good detail. What you put in your body, you put inside you. You experience chemical states brought on by food. Those states can and will have an effect on your mental health and your meditation practice. People have different biochemistry so ultimately it's up the individual to find out what diet is going to serve them best for their goals. Of course sometimes, you get high off the energy you store if you are cultivating. I don't mean *high* as in stoned or tripping. I mean you don't need to eat. You are simply not hungry. Your energy consumption gets real low and you run off your own chi so to speak. Everything is fine with me. I continue to work on my writings and my book and this article is part of it. It is part of the story. I am glad to hear of your progress mikaelz! good luck with your continued progress. You are very welcome. And you too Yoda

Sure! As far as what I was eating. Good grief, that would depend on when you took a snapshot of my diet. When I started I had just become hip to dieting for health and wellbeing. So initially, I was detoxing off crap. I microwaved my dinner or bought it somewhere. I had to teach myself how to cook and the only way I would find the best diet would be to experiment. So I quit the McDonalds and quit addictions to sugar, caffeine, nicotine all around the same time. I started by quitting only red meat. Then I went vegetarian, then I went Vegan, then Macrobiotic, back to vegetarian, then semi vegetarian with the inclusion of seafood and on and on. I did short fasts and punishing fasts. I tried juicing, broths, herbs, all that stuff. I had to find out who I was underneath all of it and that included the effects of the foods we eat, or don't eat. During that particular time, during the Dark Nights (and it is not limited to just one ) I may have been fasting. I may have eaten hearty knowing I was going to need the energy. I just don't remember exactly. How was I sleeping? Again it is a similar thing to the diet and that my sleep needs were all over the place depending on my state of Being. When I worked blue collar at factories I had to sleep at least 6 hours to be able to stand on my feet all day. However when I was taking days or weeks off for personal retreat that changed. In the after effect of a very strong energy release I might actually sleep like a baby unintentionally soaking up 8 hours or more. What normally happened was that because I was not using a lot physical caloric energy, and due to mental vigilance and concentration, I kept a charge going and it was not unusual to sleep from midnight to 4 am and wake up alert, aware and fully rested and ready to meditate some more. During the Dark Nights, It was more like the intrusive mania and the flashbacks and the releasing energies kept me awake and prevented me from sleeping much at all. I would be fatigued from my spiritual battle and pass out at 10 pm only to be jolted awake at 1 am forced to do another round with my internal demons. Was I outside in the sunshine? Yes almost always. At that time I lived in the Sacramento area. Sacramento is known for going 100 or more days during the summer without sighting a single wisp of cloud. I was up before dawn every single day. I usually greeted the sunrise with standing or moving chi gung. Of course I was not limited to meditating during the daylight. Sometimes, especially during those times, I was meditating at night. It is easier to meditate at night for the purpose of going within. Going within, surrendering inwards, is a Yin action and the environment is most Yin at night and early am. The flower buds close up. Some critters curl up in a ball. The air becomes cooler. The psychic pressure of the urban life is diminished because all the people are asleep and dreaming. It is the perfect time to go far into yourself where you are most likely going to find the really stuck stuff. As far as it being more painful than it needed to be. Who can tell. I did it the hard way and I am glad I did. Whatever pain was there most of it had been there for some time. Some of the pain was the agony of change and letting go. I think it's going to be different for everyone. There is no chart that graphs the appropriate amount of psychological agony one is supposed to endure during a Dark Night. The amount of pain you experience, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, is going to be dependent on what is inside you.

I met him on youtube last year. I shall resist the urge to pick on him, I think his vids speak for themselves. When I encountered him it was because I was going through his stuff and I found a vid about healing abuse. Well, being curious about what he had to say. He came across like a guy that had no idea what it was like to have had major issues in life. It was very disappointing. He had no original or anecdotal solutions he made a few statements and judgments and then he said that if you wanted to learn his tips for dealing with abuse, that you should check his blog and he had a link to a page. I followed the link and there was a tiny paragraph about trauma at the bottom of an ocean of Adsense and after his spiel was a like Mantra Generator script thing, and you donate to paypal, crank out a canned mantra, repeat and free yourself from your trauma. Needless to say, we a had a few words about that.

You are all most welcome. Thanks for taking the time read it. Made a few edits and added a section titled 'It gets worse before it gets better' I exist only to serve.

yes I have experience with this From 1996-2005 I lived like that intermittently. I was of the Urban hermit variety. At various times I was laid off from my blue collar job for a few months. I had to live extremely frugally but I was able to live more or less like an urban recluse. I had an apartment to myself in an apartment complex in Rancho Cordova California. Every day I got up at 4 am and rode my mountain bike down to the American River Park. From 4 am to noon ish, all I did was sitting, standing and moving meditation practices. Then I took a break, lunch, read some books etc. Around 3-4 pm, I went back into the park to begin again from late afternoon to late night. I would stay past sunset and sit until I was ready to leave. Sometimes I found myself leaving the park long after it was officially closed at 10 pm. Sometimes I was there past midnight or even later. Sometimes, when I got really into sitting, I found myself at the river's edge at dawn. I started living like that at the age of 22 and I maintained that lifestyle, off an on until I was 29. I had to take breaks from living that lifestyle in order to do temp work to get a few pay checks to pay for rent or food for a few more months before I could go back to full time practice again. I made two moves. One to Rochester NY for a bit and then to San Francisco. Once in SF i had to find a place to live, something to do for money but once I had that, I was back to the same lifestyle only now in the Golden Gate Park or even on Ocean Beach. There were times when I had: no car, no bike no phone no internet no playstation no tv no sex no parties no job no social time no recreation cash or shopping no recreational substances not even a surplus of healthy food I literally wore the same two outfits, all black and grey and blue, for years without variation. I could not afford a closet full of clothes. I had no pretty things, no cute shoes, just hiking boots and a flannel. Whenever I worked it was to save up for more Energy Arts classes. Once I obtained a *critical level* of knowledge about nei gung and chi gung, there was only so much more I would get from more and more classes at some point you have to take the skill sets from your teacher and go train, train, train on your own for long sustained periods of time so you can actualize those trainings and own them for yourself I became quite happy being poor and alone. I loved it.

Just a few thoughts about the service. First I have never been in the service. Between being hard of hearing, bad vision and a host of mental problems I would never have made it out of Basic without being discharged on mental health paperwork. That said I almost joined at a low point in my life around age 18 because I came from State run institutions as a teen and was sorely unprepared for the world and taking care of myself. As far as killing people as a guarantee upon being shipped to Iraq, I can't say anything for sure not being in the army and all but I have this tale to tell. Some years ago I met a guy who was a Viet Vet. We were talking about it and he seemed to have no problems at all talking about life in Vietnam in the war. I was surprised because almost all the vets I had met growing up never wanted to talk about it all. I assumed everyone that went to Vietnam came back disturbed. Not true. It turned out this guy was a carpool driver. He spent the war driving generals and other high ranking officers around bases. That was it. He never killed anyone. He said it Vietnam was not so bad, war, was not so bad, if you got a job like that. What you can do is like take lino's point a step further, watch the numerous youtube vids of hummers getting blasted to pieces just driving around towns or out side them from running over IED. If you do see some action, you may come down with PTSD. PTSD is no joke. You don't need to be in a war zone to get it, but being in combat there is a good chance you will get it but good. When that happens you will bring home more than a souvenir or a feeling of having served your country. If you talk to people with severe PTSD it is not pleasant, and these people are not pleasant to be around. In fact sometimes they are downright scary. If you think unasked for flashbacks or involuntarily hitting the deck when someone yells or bangs something loud is fun well maybe ptsd is for you. Guys I have met with ptsd from vietnam keep well functioning and well used weapons in their gun racks to this day. Obsessed with safety, security, peace and quiet. If you go the VA for treatment, you probably get crappy meds and those meds might cause you to be even more suicidal. If you get disabled from ptsd prepare for the gov to try to screw you out of your military benes if they can get away with it they will. yea, maybe the army will make a man out of you and teach you useful stuff and make you into a doer and not a watcher. You might also come back with a mental disorder and scare the shit out of your GF, your parents, your family. You might relive your time in Iraq for the rest of your natural life. Then you are going to need some serious meditation training because you finally have good reason to do it.

Ha! That is exactly how I use it. Years ago I even picked my cat by his aura and I pick my training places by 'feel' as well. You are right, IR, background heat, all that stuff effects a reading. If you get hardcore about testing it, as a control, you should minimize all that when testing it out by using same color walls, even lighting, even temp, etc.

How do you know? Besides, if you put up a youtube video of you standing in a junkyard crushing or flinging cars around with your mind from 100 feet away, you would get attention. Sooner or later his assistants would probably get wind of it and he would want to test you personally. If you just going blow on the pages of a phonebook and call it telekinesis, then Zzzzz If you can light a fire with your hand on paper from a few inches away, then you should test to see how many inches away you can do it. If you can do it from 4 inches away, then it's just a few more chi pushups until you can do it from 8 inches away, then 12, then 24, then 48, then 96. While you are at it, add more challenges, Use thicker paper. Use cardboard, use wood. How many clumps of paper can you ignite? Just one? Why not two or three all at once? How many can you ignite back to back? Just one? How about a dozen? How about lighting a cigarette with your chi? If you can do paper why not a cigarette? Why not a BBQ? Why not wood? Don't tell me one of the spectators is using 'unbelief' and skepticism to cancel your power, you either you have it or you don't. If one person's skepticism can overpower your power, you don't have a power, you have a delusion If you can ignite paper from a distance, add more controls, Ignite something with a pane of glass in front of it. then a pane of steel, then two layers of steel see. nobody really wants real power or they would take their meager and feeble powers and make them stronger and better and more obvious and more useful. They come up with a parlor trick and that is supposed to make people ohh and ahh and shell out the dough. two words weak sauce

That is an awesome attitude to take sheng I still see them, I can see them, feel them intensely and occasionally hear them, which makes, subjectively speaking, for an assault of sensory perceptions which combined makes me think, gee, I really got this aura thing handled. Except. I failed the test, taking it as honestly as possible, imposing controls. No need to for me to apply for the challenge, knowing I would fail. Yet... I try anyway. To evolve the ability. If I am able to take the test, you folks will know about it. I believe in mental evolution and various siddhi but I also know that the real deal is exceptionally difficult to prove. If you have powers, you should test them rigourously. Strive to make them better. If you can move a key on a string without touching it. Take the key and put it in a sealed jar on the ground and move it. It is not enough, for me anyway, to say, gee I have or know someone that has super power x,y,z, and then not be able to reproduce even a feeble power at all. The cameras do not take suggestion readily and cameras do not have *unbelief* so they are not spilling an anti psychic aura around them to interfere with you. With regards to auras. What's the point of even speaking about it, if you can't prove it? TTB aside. You tell your friends you have powers hoping they will be thralled or impressed? I believe I see auras, with or without third eye meditation and after my last near death experience, I never needed to 'try' to see them. They were always on. However, the tiny tiny left brain part says, well, can you diagnose someone's diseases accurately by seeing only the aura above a dividing partition or a screen? With aura reading, you have a kind of cold reading going on. Namely that your visual impressions of them, conscious and unconscious, clue you and so you seem to get more 'hits' than 'misses' with regards to Dxing people by aura. You cue on on eyes, skin tone, voice, hair, posture and that is what actually adds the 'colors' to the aura, you add them yourself based roughly on your personal ROYGBIV classification. If you can accurately read an aura without seeing the person, relying only on the aura, then you can start a clinic. Would you bet on the health of your sick child, spouse or parent to have them aura DXd with scientific controls placed? I doubt it. Have the assistant bring the patient behind the divider. Then, without having visually seen your patient, walk in and scan only their aura peeking up past the partition. Then DX them. Simple as that. Then have real testing done and see if the labs show what you see in the aura. Too often people think of these things as powers, talents, gifts or abilities. If you can not actually do anything with them...useful or functional..then what good are they? If they are neither 'super' or 'powerful' then why even tell people you have them unless you want a reaction from them? which assistants? do you have copies of the correspondence? I have heard much of what you said before. It is what everyone says when Randi tells them they are not allowed to cheat and make up the rules to favor whatever shennanigans they are using to pretend to having powers. Since you can't defraud Randi by making up unscientific testing protocols, it's his fault. yea right, please, I am 33, not 13. try to respect my intelligence just a little I've done my own reading and researching too James Randi is a good thing for the siddhi crowd. He separates the cons and the wanna be attention whores from the real deal Only someone with real power is going to get that check. That ain't you, or anyone you know. If you spent all those hours practicing to get the juice, why not prove it to world? I use to tell my Dad that I could move small objects if I tried really hard, back when I was a teen. 15 years before I ever heard of James Randi You know what my dad said? If you got powers, prove them. You will be famous. The least you can do, with precognition or micro psychokinesis is influence some numbers or channel them or ask the spirits and make yourself a millionaire via lotto, Vegas, whatever. Along comes james randi and there you go, win a mil for proof. Besides, the powers people want to test are not powerful at all. Oh look, I can move a pencil on desk or a key on a string or a marble. Yea, that's a real 'super power' you got there. Tell you what, when you can rip a bridge apart and move it wherever you want, then you have powers. If you can't I am not impressed.

you two are adorable good luck in Costa Rica!

I think Buddy represents a healthy skepticism that I wish more people would levy against the things they espouse and believe in it is kind of telling some of the reactions to his opinions on the matter skepticism is part and parcel to critical thinking and analysis critical thinking and analysis of one's self and reality is I feel necessary to make serious headway in apprehending that whimsical notion of Truth as for the questions what value is there is knowing *who first started it* ? does it matter what tradition is asking those questions and when they supposedly went down on record as being Askers of Those Questions? what matters is the questions themselves for they are timeless formulas for self realization there are several inquiries into self and nature of self that can be deeply penetrating and enlightening the questions I posed myself that mattered most was who am I? what am I? what do I want? why am I here? do I have a real reason to live or anything worth living for? in the process of answering those questions I found myself in the process of finding myself I gained a new question one that I privately ask the soul of most people I meet without words. I look for ways through body mind and heart that people answer that question the question that I found, after the fact to matter a great deal is do you love yourself unconditionally and unambiguously? for I found that some people can not answer that question some people truthfully answer No some people say yes, and when I dig deeper, I find that it is a conditional love, like a computer programming statement I love myself IF Then If this and that is lined up Then I love myself I love myself, but. After I understood myself, unwittingly I began asking that question with dead seriousness while looking people straight in the eye and found that that question disturbs people sometimes deeply I have made grown men and women cry asking them that one question After I ask people that question, anyone that can not truthfully answer yes has difficulty looking me in the eye these questions , the inquiries into self and spirit are far more important than displays of or allegations or claims of various siddhi why siddhi should indicate spiritual mastery or level of enlightenment or what it is supposed to indicate eludes me when I was younger, I was addicted to the traps of psychic ability and power and it never helped me in the slightest the question to me came down to, which is more important, developing shock and awe power to....shock and awe people or finding myself and a reason to exist I chose the latter and in the final analysis, it made all the difference

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