konchog uma

poor guy. Whats wrong with inner light?? I do chakra meditations every day, they are very beneficial!! Do you speak from any experience?

Not all meditations are qigong meditations. Some meditations can be taught by non-immortals, and are natural and beneficial to health. Just watching the breath and keeping good posture is the basis for a lot of buddhist practice. A lot of people find it beneficial in a lot of ways!! isn't something beneficial to health in accord with the dao?

right. And then after death s/he lives on as a spiritual immortal. So some immortals live 256 years, some live 56 and decide to pop out the top of their head and not come back. There's no telling. Immortals who never actually "die" is something I have only heard about in stories. I have heard of people living thousands of years, but eventually when the spirit is strong enough its better to be a spirit without a body because then you can fly and its more comfortable than having flesh and the mind can be freer and there isn't daily maintainance like when you're in a human body. So most people move on eventually form what i have learned. It is not natural to resist change.

it doesn't mean that everything is "right" or "wrong", the mind of dao doesn't make those distinctions. I am not talking about right and wrong. The mind of a sage just accepts everything without creating dualistic distinctions like that around things. So you might think that you can say "something is against Dao" but i guess that means we will just have a fundamental disagreement between us. Which is fine. Just a matter of philosophy, which is ultimately semantic. I got the impression that you thought that there were no qigong masters in the world, that they were all cheaters. Excuse me for misunderstanding you.

haha great point its not usually said in the context of marketing, but rather in the context of practice, whether its private, or monastic, or part of a school, or under a teacher doesnt matter. Its just said that telling other people about the ins and outs of one practices diminishes the effectiveness of that practice. Nobody is really selling anything yknow?

Thank you for the feedback. My natural intuition is to share what I have been doing lately on TTB, but every time I want to write an awesome thread about internalism, I am smacked upside the head by 2 thoughts... 1, that I should keep it to myself and not post about it on the internets for the reasons given in the OP and resounded by you all so far. and 2, that I am just wanting to post about alchemy out of egotistical reasons, saying "look at me" in a way. Its been a seesaw for the last couple weeks, but I am going to keep my practices private (except from my girlfriend, who is quite my energetic/spiritual consort, and my teacher, who can give me feedback and guidance). I feel that my girlfriend has every right to know what I'm doing; it would feel really weird to keep secrets from her. We do some of the same meditations and share energy in many ways, so I am open with her. I think I need to be open with somebody and I think its appropriate that I talk to her about my meditations and my progress. Does that make sense to you guys? I mean, thats healthy right? It seems way different than blabbing on the internet about stuff.

well thats an extrapolation, but i guess it's not a completely off-the-wall one. My point was that i don't really create the idea of "against dao". Whether you meditate or not, or practice qigong or not, or understand or not, that is dao. Dao is dao. Only the human mind, after the fact, creates the illusory distinctions like "against dao" or "contrary to dao". And even that phenomenon is part of dao. So in other words, i agree with the people that say that there is more than one right way to do things. Some ways are right for some people, other ways for other people. There is no single best way for everyone. People are too diverse for that sort of idea to be true. If you had said "i dont really like to meditate and i connect with the way through non-action" it would be one thing, but you said "meditation is not a good way to practice". Or if you had said "i suspect many qigong teachers are frauds" instead of "every teacher in china is a cheater", i think your ideas would be received better. Its hard to deal in absolute statements when talking about nebulous concepts like the way, and cultivating vitality. Those things are such broad topics that it is very difficult to make any statement about them that covers the entire subject.

happy 2012!!

i never claimed that everything i did was right. ???

its a play on a jack kerouac piece called dharma bums about a group of spiritual dabblers

to answer the 1st and 2nd questions together, the function of the technique is the first stages of the process which leads to the creation of the spiritual embryo, or "immortality". There is not really creation of a light body in my practice, we all have one of those, but it can be strengthened by exercise if thats what you mean. unsure. its not the same as the egyptian geometries meditations, although they might have had something similar, i don't think it's merkaba. the geometries of merkaba might be taught in himalayan secrecy but i don't think they're part of mainstream daoism or temple daoism. Although I have received advice from a daoist master (kwan saihung) to meditate on geometries within a chakra, so perhaps at very high levels of daoist knowledge there is merkaba practice. I mean if you're using geometries in spheres to achieve subtle effects, it wouldn't take long to stumble upon the star tetrahedron. pure speculation. welcome btw, and watch out for that ol rascal mantak chia, theres a lot of criticism of his methods from the internalism crowd. If you can generate light in your head you should seek a master to teach you meditations. Theres a book called Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality, which some people say should never have been written because it shouldn't be learned from books at all (safety issues), and it starts with a meditation much like the one you described and progresses from there. But i don't personally recommend doing that stuff without a teacher. Very dangerous... http://www.amazon.com/Taoist-Yoga-Immortality-Charles-Luk/dp/0877280673/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325300609&sr=8-1

that the "the" point, thats YOUR point. If sitting in stillness isn't dao, something's wrong with your stillness. When I sit in stillness, its pefectly natural. Nothing against dao about it. So maybe you're just meditating wrong.

exactly

nothing is "in conflict with dao" everything arises from dao and returns to dao, and in between, is a manifestation of dao. To the sage who can reflect without grasping or rejecting, all is dao. So maybe it is your mind which creates the idea of "dao" and "not dao" and "conflict with dao" and "against dao". My mind doesn't do that, so i can't relate to what you are talking about. To me, everything is dao, even if i can't see that in the moment, that too is dao. I think you are not openminded because you seem stubbornly set in your ideas. You think you are openminded, but you also seem to think you know it all better than the rest of us, without any basis except that you have read many books in your native language. The dao isn't in books. The way that can be spoken is not the true way. So you definitely don't know what the dao is like by reading books. One can look outside and see what the dao is like, or can observe cycles keenly to see what the dao is like, or as a sage said, one can know the way by staying home with the windows and door shut (thats a metaphor for meditation). Finally, a person can do something that is "in conflict with dao" and still be a good teacher. They can have achieved a high level of qigong mastery, and have a lot to impart to a student who hasn't already closed his ears and heart, without achieving the highest levels of spiritual purity. One of my teachers used to kill people for a living, but he's still a master internalist. I am grateful for what he has shown me, and i practice every day. Taking what you can get, opportunism, pragmatism, thats dao. Perfectionism... ummm no. Perfection doesn't exist, so thinking that you are somehow on to a superior method because you maintain an unrealistically high standard of perfection might not get you as far as you think. Or you can wait around casually doing nothing until an immortal decides for no reason at all to take their time and teach you. Or maybe a sage will stumble upon you one day and decide that even though you don't cultivate yourself with meditation that they will teach you anyway.

you can't tell qigong teachers internal level of skill from reading books!! it takes years of experience to size someone up without actually working with them or becoming their student. I'm not saying there aren't frauds out there but saying the all qigong masters in china are so seems a little um... extreme, to put it nicely. you don't seem very openminded to the opinions of others, so im not going to say more.

thanks, Chen Zhiqiang is a joy to watch. His eyes stay so calm in the midst of aggression. I appreciate the link!

got any awesome tattoos?

the mantra as the end of the heart sutra is one of my favorites.. "gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi swaha" which translates roughly to: gone, gone, gone beyond, beyond the beyond, enlightenment, so be it! cultivating ones own compassion and going beyond the senses to awaken the one sense in ones own awareness are two of the best ways to cultivate connection to kuan yin. also, compassion resides in the heart according to several systems of internalism, although i'm not sure the heart sutra has anything to do with that organ or center. I think its meaning the "core" of the issue.

I've never heard anything like that before.

I'm afraid to ask, but why do you think that daoists have always meditated? If hundreds of sages warned against meditation, why is daoism a meditative tradition? Do you suppose that you have gleaned the meaning of the true dao and that millions of chinese throughout history have been wrong? Heiroglyphs and cave paintings of people in lotus posture, and you come along with one idea gleaned from i-haven't-personally-been-able-to-figure-out-where, and think you know better than your ancestors and their ancestors as far back as we have human record?!? And you're not even open to the idea that you might be wrong?@#! hehehe "you can agree with me only after you've read hundreds of books in chinese" ummm the single solitary quote you cited didn't even say not to meditate! it was in a book ABOUT meditation! i am sooo confused. All colors of people have meditative techniques, back to their respective shamanic traditions and beyond, people have sat and let their minds still, let their energies circulate and cultivate, let their spirits thrive. I don't need to read a single text in chinese to figure out what the whole of human history has taught our race by experience, which is that meditation is really really good for you, if you want to dissolve the limited self and experience the greater reality. In china they called it dao, but its universal. whew!! I can't believe I'm still posting on this thread. So all that commentary aside, i am really curious... why do you think that at daoist monasteries they have always practiced so much meditation?

thanks!

the irony kills me. the mind affects energy flow, anyone who actually HAS meditated knows this. i'm not even going to look for articles to cite because i don't care that much about this thread, or convincing you of anything mr tzu.

why

no thoughts and subconscious mental patterns affect the flow of qi they do not affect the bulletproofness of your skin

oh i don't know, i think that the chinese patients could have had success because they were familiar with the idea of qi and acupuncture points and it was part of their culture, while to the westerner it is foreign and the mind can set up subconscious resistance to that sort of thing. Those sorts of barriers can affect the flow of qi, and thus the effectiveness of acupuncture. just an idea