Ninjafro

(Although counters to your statements are appearing still readily within my mind, I'll hold off for the sake of non-stagnated discussion.) I'm also attending school to be an engineer. I'm almost sad, though, because I almost just cited the fact that I attend an Ivy League school as merit to my statements. The elitism is beginning to bleed through. D: On a less contentious note, I wouldn't try to put matters of qi and shen into the box formed by the current state of science. There are things known of among the scientific community right now that can't properly be explained (yet), and the more I come to know about matters of (at least Jin Dan) alchemy, the less it falls into anything I've ever seen, read, practiced, or heard at a lecture regarding physics.

I'm just going to poop your party a little bit. No. Energy (in Newtonian terms) is either an amount of work converted into some acting phenomena (kinetic, electric, elastic), or the potential for work to be done through a medium. In any case, energy (assuming an initial-zero state) is defined as a scalar with the same units as work, N*m, which is not at ALL a measure of the "rate of change" of work. The rate of change of work is power. No again. Heat itself is a form of energy. There is no such thing as a "degree of heat." The speed of wind isn't a unit of energy; an energetic magnitude can be derived from the kinetic energy of the motion of the air (see: fluid mechanics). The same applies to the speed of any object. Speed =/= energy. Speed indicates the presence of energy, but the magnitude of speed is not even linearly associated with the magnitude of energy present within a system. Wrong again. Power is the rate of change in work (what you associated with "energy.") Additionally, in schools of Taoist internal alchemy (I'm speaking mostly from the Jin Dan method), jing and qi are connected, but neither are conventionally "energy" or "power" in that the magnitude of one determines the rate of change in the other. Nope. Work does not "generate" heat. Work can be done AS heat, but heat can never be "generated." Again, energy does not have a "particular power." An isolated system can have kinetic energy (a specific form of energy) without having any associated power, but an external source exerts a power of a negative magnitude, decreasing the kinetic energy. Your statement does not hold. Faulty. Electricity is not a "stream of electrons." Electricity is the bumping of electrons against one another (electrons do not actually move) in a manner defined by the EM field. If you knew anything about calculus, you'd see the flaw in this statement. If jing is the power that affects qi, it cannot be "expanding and contracting." If jing is the defining characteristic of "power," the derivative of qi cannot be both negative and positive periodically, as this implies a wavering (and therefore inconsistency in the notion of qi-informing jing). Sunlight and gravity are not even "forms of energy." Sunlight itself is a source of energy (see: Planck's input in quantum mechanics); gravity can provide potential energy, but it cannot do so without energy being provided by another source. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. I thought you said "jing" was the "power" of the "particular energy" of qi? Power =/= energy, so you're contradicting yourself by stating that jing is a "lower vibration" of qi. Overall, it's rather shoddy, and I wouldn't depend on it. How can you state (however inaccurately) that qi, jing, and shen correspond to Newtonian physics, and then go on to depend on the precepts of quantum physics (two completely different views) to support it? Where is your source of information on all of this? Not to be overly critical, but what's the point of feigning understanding of things to strengthen an argument?

I highly doubt that the world is a giant computer program. Not to mention atomic interactions on the scale of 6.02x20^23 between molar masses of matter and the even greater number of subatomic interactions on a microscopic scale, a computer simply could handle almost 7 billion autonomic instances of artificial intelligence. People seem to think that computers are these magic things that can do anything, but they're limited. Any algorithm a computer executes is limited by its hardware (and no computer in the world currently would be able to handle the amount of simultaneous loops and processes needed to run a "universe," filled with dynamically acting individuals) and the algorithms used on the software end of things. No algorithm is without computational complexity; each is assigned O(N) form which, even in "efficient" algorithms with have a value of O(N) = N * lg(N). Regardless of the efficiency, accounting for one mole of water (18g) would bring the minimum number of comparisons to O(6.02x10^23) = 6.02x10^23 * lg(6.02x10^23). Even if only 18g of water (and no people or events) existed on Earth, this is a lot to ask of a computer. tl;dr, without some magic computer with a powerlevel of over 9000, the "matrix" couldn't happen.

The Longmen Pai do not rank people on the basis of "level," and the progression is quite different from that of the Mo Pai. The first exercise, interestingly enough, is remarkably similar.

Why do people throw around terms such as "level [x]" as though it's some objective ranking? I know it comes from Kostas' book, but the whole "level" bit, according even to Kostas' book, is local to the Mo Pai system. I know of at least one system (that is not Mo Pai) in which the levels/progression is not the same as the Mo Pai. I mean...the whole "he's level [x]" and "he's level [y]" bit makes this sound like an RPG or something. q.q

Student; studying computer science and applied mathematics at Columbia.

In the Longmen Pai tradition, the true water of yin forms from the yang fire of the heart; the true yang flame forms from the yin (and yuan) water of the kidneys. Just something to consider.

If there isn't a way to get around this, I will devote my life and career as a computer scientist to establishing one.

I'm not quite sure about what theory you're speaking from. In every Taoist alchemical text I've ever read, Jing refers to semen and other "bodily hormones," which do not require the meeting of the Tiger and Dragon (excuse my reference to LMP terms) to produce. If this were the case, every person with a child would already be 1/3 of the way to immortality. :|

You can find bottles of jing at sperm banks, can't you?

I don't know, but this Clyman cat is giving me some bad vibes.

The pasture's perimeter Jive sucka' trying to flee Fear Black Dynamite

This is definitely an interesting topic. Is this skill exclusive only to this system?