dogson

i have a lot of books on this subject... hitting people isn't nice tho....

skydog, you made a great point here. the natural state you spend your life in has a huge amount to do with cultivation, which is the point of training in the first place, right? when i practice chi gong in the morning, my entire day is magical; same if i read something inspiring, or whatever. i also think a huge amount has to do with what you believe will happen. i made the "mistake" of reading a book by paul dong called empty force, where he actually laid out how much training is necessary to get fa jin - about 3-6 hours a day, every single day for 3-5 years, and it helps if you're a dude if you don't ejaculate. this was helpful because it made me realize there is actually a threshold, vs. a lot of people being like "just train bagua for 70 years" or something, which is the most unhelpful thing to say ever.

Does anyone just straight up practice chi arts 4, 6, 10 hours a day? I love TTB for inspiration but dayummmm the mo pai thread, superpowers just come from working dat chi straight up. Is there a thread for heavy hitters who are really in it like you need to be for that level?

This is awesome. I was got even moreso because I'm a n00b still. "Deleting the Buddhist sections???? WTF" <3

I think this is the crux of the issue, right? Are our desires genuinely coming from our soul, or are they conditioned through society, advertising, etc? I've found that reading tons of spiritual stuff has castrated me slightly in terms of my ability to take decisive action. I used to be such a badass as a kid, speaking my mind clearly and strongly, and just creating wildly without any thought or inhibition. But I was also kind of a dick. I just didn't give a F--- at all what people thought. I found the tao at 13, and that led me into a whole string of compassion / metta stuff, but it also really inhibited my flow and made me repress a lot of emotions / negativity like "Oh I shouldn't be negative, stuff it" . I think so much of desire comes from a profoundly creative place, and I do think we're meant to create what we want with our thoughts, our intent. Dangerous, sure. So is NOT creating. I don't think spirituality means being broke, I don't think humility means being diminished or spare... if it's our karma to want to drive fly whips and enjoy abundance, then go through that. I'm so curious about everyone in this community, and their practice, and the reasons why they practice. I think we are a race of superhumans that temporarily devolved into couch potatoes, but we're finding these in-between superhero mythologies as a bridge to reclaim our potential. I don't mean superpowers in the sense of chi bombs or whatever... but actually feeling joy and happiness and bliss, I regard that as a superpower in this society. That kind of vibe is infectious and I wanna infect the world with profound spiritual inspiration <3 <3 <3

Captain, I feel like I manifested you by mentioning Mutants & Mystics, kinda bizarre... I dig you posts tho What are your thoughts on superhuman potential? Activating it is possible, obviously, but how best to conduct oneself in society? I struggle with this a lot especially in making art. Lowest common denominator usually appeals to the most people, whereas if you try to express noble aspirations or even straight you "you can be a godlike creator in this world", often stimulates hatred. Have you had this experience?

Gooey Mucous?

hey sunchild, if you can get your hands on it, a fascinating book relevant to your inquirity is Mutants And Mystics, by Jeffrey J. Kripal. It's a book of essays on the origins of superhero comics. Basically, as it turns out, most of the originators of our superhero mythos were experiencing intense kundalini awakenings of their own, and created comics as a way of "sublimating" their experiences. There's an entire chapter, called "Authorization" dedicated to these writers who would write something and end up experiencing what they wrote. It's really inspiring and fascinating stuff. I echo a lot of the advice already going in this thread about qigong, and especially just learning how to ground yourself. Being able to access your tan tien, and use it to ground yourself, no matter what you're experiencing, is really, really valuable.

Hey Lomi, I just want to weigh on this too, as it's also an important aspect of my practice. For me personally, I was born with a huge amount of "yin" energy, I'm straight but growing up all the jock kids called me gay, etc. I've just always had more feminine energy, and it's made it really difficult to accomplish things in this society. Eventually I made it an all-out quest to balance this stuff, through herbs like ho shu wu, maca, ant extract (tons of zinc), pumpkin seeds, HARD workouts, retaining my jing, getting sunlight, especially on the genitals, eating oysters (tons of zinc) - ANYTHING that would increase my male energy. It worked, almost too well, I became really aggressive and pushy, felt angry a great deal of the time, and eventually had to scale it back, but it's so helpful to know it works. Now personally, I know I fall on the far end of the scale, in the sense that if I ejaculate, I'm worthless for days. Hitting the gym feels like it's physically damaging me, I feel more anxious and generally not grounded at all, I sleep 10 hours and still wake up exhausted... whereas if I retain for a week or two, I'm invincible. So it's very devastating to me when I ejaculate, and it feels unfair in a sense, but that's just how I'm wired. And I'm in this thing to get fa jin, and to really experience the full energetic potential of a human, so I'll never give up. Having said that - I've never had wet dreams. I think I just don't produce sperm very quickly. My longest streak was 65 days, and still nothing. I'm only 30, so this leads me to believe (especially with all those herbs) that I just don't produce very quickly. Or it's getting re-directed immediately, or something. My longwinded point is that, if you're leaking jing, that's your body saying you're beyond max and you're just rebalancing. If you're 23 I wouldn't sweat it. I think it's really important to understand that men might have impossible standards they're reaching for, just like women who look at pictures of women with fake breasts and photoshopped ribcages. I know that I can be like Musashi, or Morehei Ueshiba someday, but probably not like Goku from Dragonball Z. I probably won't be able to create an energy ball so big it could blow up the planet, but if I can have enough jing to work for 13 hours straight on my music, or a novel, and still feel strong enough to practice my forms, sleep 5 or 6 hours and get up and do it again, that's enough for me. It's really important to know what you want the energy for and always be pushing the envelope in a useful way. If it's not measurable, it's easy to fall into a black hole of impossible expectations. I just try to feel good all day, and to have fun with what I'm doing. I still get pissed at myself if I lose my jing, but I don't let it destroy my mindset for long, because I know the whole point is to enjoy life as much as possible. Hope this is helpful <3

4bsolute, great post. Lots of ways this can be addressed, but I think the core is - have fun. To me, spirituality is about being alive, period. Forget complicated visualizations or meditations, if you're thinking about writing a poem or talking to that cute girl you see every day at the bus stop, THAT'S your spiritual practice. Look at your actual life and what you want to create, and take the smallest next step. And then the next. When you get confidence in doing that, your doubt will begin to be replaced by confidence. The age-old saying that if you want to practice zen, look into your kitchen sink and your toilet first, is very true, but I think zen goes overboard in making it TOO ordinary. Personally I go directly to what will inspire me most. What would make today an 8 out of ten? What would I have to focus on, think about, and work at? Okay, having established that, what would make today a 9 out of 10? Adding in these little extra things, and pushing myself to break through my comfort zone. What would make today a 10 out of 10? I notice what kinds of thoughts and actions this line of questioning brings up, because it shows me my actual life. If you're not feeling great, start with something tactile. Do something you know will make you feel better.

Hi all, We all know about the principle of relaxation in meditative and chi-cultivating disciplines. We've all felt the profound benefits of relaxation. However, although many of us are learning from masters who are advanced in age, a lot of us are young and full of energy, vigor, and speed. So I want to get some opinions on this: how do you resolve the contradictory disciplines of relaxed power and peak performance (demanding as much as you can from yourself, getting high performance in your life overall, not just physically but mentally, working long hours, pushing yourself to achieve goals, etc) ? For example, I love the "ideal" of going to bed early and waking up several hours before dawn to practice my chi kung, forms, and meditation. It seems extremely sensible to sync my sleep schedule with the sun. But often when I wake early and have a great day, I've gotten so much momentum that I'm still amped come sundown, and I realize I could work (or play) for 12 more hours. But this goes against the precepts of just taking it easy, and this is tough for me, because we live in a world where the 70% rule doesn't really cut it. For most of us we have to rolling out the 110% power. Any suggestions? I'd love to hear how other peak performance people synthesize these seemingly opposite ideas.

From what I understand of fa jin and chi power like this, you can do a "long wave" which will bounce you around or throw you and it won't do damage, or you can shorten/compress the wave which can be very dangerous. Xing Yi people for example are taught that the first thing you need to learn is how to relax your shoulders to absorb the force of a punch by "crumpling forward", because if you take a Xing Yi punch full on it can explode your lungs. That's what I was taught on the first day of Xing Yi class, and then my master punched a metal wall with very little physical force and made the entire thing vibrate like crazy. It's true that if you aren't sensitive to chi, then you won't react as dramatically as a teacher's students do. You also won't "ham it up" and exaggerate at all. Go to any aikido class - even the great ones, the top people, you still cooperate when someone tries to throw you. You get used to it. If somebody cultivates immense chi power, they can use it in battle. Look at BK Frantzis. I don't care how sensitive or dense to chi you are, I would never want to fight that guy. If you have more chi you're stronger by default. Anyone who's gone a couple weeks without "leaking jing" can tell you this. Anyone who's stopped hitting the gym and just practiced chi gong standing postures for a couple weeks, then gone back to the gym can tell you - you're stronger. Having said that, if you're fighting a trained MMA guy you better know how to do an arm bar and escape a choke out.

Thanks, Spotless, for the insight and perspective. It is helpful; and certainly while traveling I've felt this - places like Hong Kong, Bangkok, Tokyo, Kathmandu, Delhi are incredibly polluted but still inspired me so much and I did feel like I was experiencing great art. I think the difference is that I was traveling, and the cultural differences were so different that it continually brought me out of myself, or revealed to me habitual things I'm used to having in my own country, so just by virtue of those qualities not existing abroad, I learned about myself. I think anywhere on Earth is a fantastic spot - in truth I feel that reality is holographic, and traveling is a chance to work with some inner quality. I guess it just depends on one's own balance point in relation to where we are. Brooklyn for me is very hard and aggressive. As an artist I'm inspired by natural beauty, so it feels asphyxiating to me, but whenever i've simply visited New York for short amount of times the hum and industry was very refreshing. I'm just craving something that isn't really here. (Nature)

Yondaime, you continue to stir the pot, I love it. More LOA stuff - reading is immensely powerful because reading is sustained thinking on a given subject. In other words it's Think And Grow Rich all over again - just reading the chi kung bible is doing it. You are attracting more like thoughts about chi kung, which will lead you to find more practices, to think about it - your subconscious mind is recording all of this. I think most would agree choosing one practice and practicing the hell out of it is a good way to spend your time. It almost doesn't matter what it is. Tony Robbins just incanted "God's wealth flows to me in AVALANCHES of abundance!" for 45 minutes at a time, he would incant this stuff intensely in his car while driving to seminars, and that was how he manifested and programmed himself. I really like standing postures. You have to go inside yourself. If you say "it's boring" you're just not paying attention...pretend that you're more badass than you actually are, or pretend you're more patient than you are. Focus on the smallest nuance you can notice in your body. That's how you actually get superpowers - what seems magical or supernatural to most is actually just a much higher degree of sensitivity. And you need that to do anything, especially when you talk about sexual kung fu - feeling into a partner, feeling their energy, directing energy through channels - this is all a manifestation of increasingly finer and finer details you begin to notice when your attention span grows.

Tons of great posts and ideas here, I just feel obligated to mention that many practitioners are neglecting the #1 superpower everyone has right now - imagination. I've been living in Brooklyn for the past year, and after being used to training at 8,000 feet in Colorado, it's been pretty grim. The lack of natural energy, the mindset of people here, the whole vibe is just really ugly and aggressive to me. But at a certain point, I just made the decision to enjoy myself. So I employed my imagination. I started visualizing myself with an aura, streaming light and energy, running orbits and circuits I know about but also just playing. PLAYING. Being a child. Being amused. We are very quick in America to shun this as escapism or as foolishness or even dangerous. Really? When I ride the subway I like to project that I'm in an opulent Victorian train car, with brass fittings, leaded glass, everyone in lavish evening clothes. I also appropriated the indiginous practice of sanctifying the landscape by choosing various buildings as power spots and assigning my own meaning and mythology to them. I used my imagination to transform a grim, toxic and depressed landscape into something immensely wonderful. What I found was, engaging my imagination in this way spilled over into everything I did. When I sat down to work on my novel, I didn't have to take forever to get into the groove. I sat down and created wildly. Same thing with music - I felt more free to start experimenting and playing with musical ideas and concepts. Very shortly, everyone I interacted with seemed to really enjoy hanging out with me, and it was obvious why - I was actively resurrecting a huge part of my humanity that most people just totally shun. IMO imagination is the godlike part of us. We can do anything we want with it. Say what you want about chi powers, the siddhis, and things which may or may not come online with a lot of chi and training - our imagination is online right now, always. The more you use it, the deeper it goes.

Dorian, I'm just gunna come out and ask this: are you being compensated financially for promoting Gary Clyman so much?

It's not too much, it's just that I'm able to just take on any energy or state I want at will, but I feel like 12 people sometimes. I'd love to just sit in total peace, but there's a part of me that wants to actually accomplish things and achieve a high level of skill, which takes a much more fire / fierce energy and focus. So it feels a bit bizarre at times. Bruce Frantzis gave me a really good answer to this question when I said it felt like "the opposite of tai chi" to have a fierce ambition. What he said was, it's not the opposite of tai chi to do a lot - it only becomes the opposite of tai chi if it's causing me STRAIN. So he suggested to just go to where my natural limit is - not of my psychological ideas, but the limit of my nervous system and how much input it can take, and from there, give myself a separator state. Go take a walk, switch to a different mode, and then come back to training. Which is great. It's just a bit "through the looking glass" at times, when I feel like I can become anything, and there are so many options - that gets confusing.

Yeah that's helpful! It's very useful to think of them complimenting and amplifying each other, rather than a "should I do this vs. that mode" kind of thing. Thanks

Yondaime, Your post feels trollish but you're bringing top-class people (and information) out of the woodwork, which I've enjoyed reading, so thanks for that. If you want women, and you believe in manifestation, realize that what you're doing right now, in a massive way, is focusing on having a LACK of women. Therefore, you are manifesting "lack of women." I know the secret and the law of attraction is real. I experience it every single day. Problem is, most of us manifest backwards. There are a lot of reasons why - language patterns used in media are designed to flip our thinking around so we focus on lack. But there's a way you can hack this. Specifically with women, and this is interesting, whenever I start reading about celibacy and thinking "I'm not going to have sex with women" I was really thinking, "have sex with women" - I was manifesting that by doing my backwards-celibacy manifestation. And it was crazy. It happened FAST. Within days. Now, whatever, I won't lecture you on just wanting sex for its own sake, or why that's stupid, you're young and if you're suffering because of that, I hope you drown in an ocean of beautiful women. Declare yourself to be celibate from this day forward. No sex with women. No masturbating. Hang out on Reddit's R/NoFap thread and hear from regular dudes about how awesome their lives have become. Get determined to do it. If you do this, you have a win-win situation. Either you'll succeed, and become BY FAR the most powerful person in your community, or you will instantly have a really hot girlfriend from your backwards manifestation. Do it.

What "system" are you talking about? Imagine someone who hangs out at yoga studios, versus someone who hangs out in dive bars. Those people are going to live in VERY different realities, even if they both only spend $20 at a time in each place. One of these people is going to develop liver disease, the other will probably attain some degree of enlightenment if they do this one pattern for their entire life. Imagine someone who thinks of criminal acts all the time, and acts them out all the time, versus someone who thinks of ways to help people and create products people think are cool. One of those people is eventually going to end up in prison, the other, a millionaire. "The system" that you're speaking of - the world we live in - is extremely subjective and relative. The way you overthrow it is not by watching Fox News and griping about how bad everything is, but by making different choices and intentionally deciding what kind of world you want to live in.

I hit fresh squeezed orange juice, and I find that pretty much takes care of it. The #1 thing you can do to implement any habit is get around new people. For me, going 80/10/10 raw vegan for a while was easy because I was living with a raw vegan, who was my personal raw food chef in exchange for free rent. This is an ideal situation, of course, and I indeed felt that I "manifested it" because I had an intense need (not a desire - a need) to evolve my relationship to food dramatically. You can find raw food potlucks in a lot of places, or at least online. Even if you just want to quit sugar or dairy, hanging with these people helps a lot. Certainly, lots of them are crazy, just as people passionate about anything tend to look crazy to people not obsessed with that thing. But when your diet renders 10 times as much energy...what people don't realize is that we eat to take our energy levels DOWN. Because the emotional issues we have, we don't actually want to deal with. We want to suppress it. So we watch TV or eat cake or something, and go unconscious again. When you're eating a clean, high energy diet, your emotional problems have that much more energy. So what you see in raw food communities, and with martial artists as well, is you can see stuff blown way up because the energy is now massive. This is a really important point I think everyone in this community should understand - all the habits we have, they exist for a reason. They are serving some purpose, it isn't just random. We as a society have come up with ways to manage our emotions because the structure of our society is based on this phrase "hard work" which usually means spending the majority of our time doing something we don't particularly enjoy - let alone love. That's hard indeed. Where do we put the suffering and loneliness and frustration? Well, the best of us channel it and use it, and that's where you find movie stars and billionaires and super-athletes. These people also have a reputation for being arrogant and emotional maniacs in one way or another. Why? Because instead of repressing it by eating cakes or whatever, they use it to make themselves burn even more and go higher. tl;dr - diet has an emotional component. I would go so far as to say that we, as chi gong practitioners, don't even need to eat at all. Why are so many chi gong masters fat? Not because they want to "take it easy" and be as relaxed as possible. Chi masters are often fat because chi IS food. It is life force energy itself. If you cultivate pure energy and then keep eating on top of that, you have a lot of excess. The taoists have a tradition called Bi Gu, which says, if your chi is cultivated highly enough, you don't need to eat anymore. Why are spiritual masters always seen fasting? Yes, to renounce food immediately means you will have to face yourself fully - it is very spiritual to fast. But it works the opposite way as well. If you have a high level of spiritual attainment, your emotional reasons to eat go away also. See also: Man's Higher Consciousness by Hilton Hotema, Jasmuheen's work, the "Supreme Master Television" youtube video series on Breatharians, the work of Jericho Sunfire, the sungazing documentary "Eat The Sun," the inedia documentary "In the beginning was light" (which discusses Bi Gu some), and so forth.

I've gone through intense food revolutions in my life, but sugar and dairy were the hardest. When I learned that dairy, especially cheese literally has opiate effects in the brain - exactly like heroin - and the body goes through physical withdrawals, that's when I really became determined to get off it. Though I've experimented with many substances, for the purpose of exploring consciousness, I swore to myself I'd never do any physically addictive drugs. When I found out there are plenty of those in our food supply, that changed my world quite a bit. Ditto with refined sugar, known to calcify the pineal gland. I literally had to start asking myself the question, "I do I want to do cocaine today? Do I want to blind my third eye?" Using very strong language with myself shocked me into being willing to go through the discomfort of the withdrawal. On the few times that I relapsed, I intentionally made myself ill so I'd associate extremely negative effects to eating sugary stuff. I'd eat an entire box of cookies in one sitting. I'd let myself feel in my body what that does. I realized that just having a few here and there would only draw out addictive patterns in my physiology - I wanted to burn out the neural circuit that craves it by just blasting it. It's worked extremely well. When I think of sugary stuff now, I think of that sick feeling in my stomach, and I have absolutely no desire to go there.

Hi all, I just had a private lesson with the son of a very famous tai chi master in NYC. He seemed completely bored as he did the movements; the whole thing was conducted like he was teaching me how to wash windows. This seems to be a recurring theme - I understand the taoist ideal of humility, simplicity, and a total lack of ostentatious or excessive movement. Still, this is throwing me. Chi training to me is the most amazing thing in the world. It's literally cultivating energy from the cosmos - I can feel it deeply, and it changes my consciousness in an immense way to practice for even a few minutes. So what's the deal? Watching videos of Cheng Man Ching, it's the same thing. I know that great tai chi masters don't need to "do the form" because they already have immense chi, but it just seems so dull, like they don't have any passion or interest at all in what they're doing at all. I want to keep taking lessons, and practicing, but the vibe I keep encountering with so many of these people really throws me off. I'd love to hear some comments and perspective on this.

Also I just want to defend Paul Dong's book. It's not "garbage." If it inspires one person to practice chi gong for even five minutes, or opens anyone's eyes to the reality that this energy exists, that's worthwhile.

This thread is hilarious. Despite all the fear of misuse, killing, health problems, this energy is WHAT WE ARE. Chi is literally life force, the animating energy of all life. We are all going to have these powers one day. The desire to cultivate energy and reach a high level is our evolutionary imperative. Empty Force is real, and we experience it every day. When someone looks at you, and you involuntarily turn your head to look at them - that's empty force that got projected at you. When you think of someone and then they call you, that's empty force that got projected at you. Everyone has experienced some form of it - being able to physically throw someone without touching them is just an extreme version. It's the same as driving a honda civic versus a Bugatti Veyron. Once, I saw an old woman limping across the street when I was stopped at an intersection, and I just impulsively tried to send her some energy because I felt compassion for her. She immediately started RUNNING across the street! That's when I realized that empty force, and the ability to emit qi is very plastic. We use it all the time for all kinds of things. Everyone will see a unique expression of the power, but it animates EVERYTHING we do, not just Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon stuff or Neo in the Matrix, although if you really want that, you can get that.