de_paradise

Its good you can do this kind of meditation, but the body and mind has to go deeper, or more subconcious, and that is like going down levels. The lower one gets, the qi flows stronger less inhibited and you are bound to get more results. I found a shortcut to training oneself to go into these deeper meditation states by use of "ultra depth relaxation" hypnosis sold at ultradepth dot com. I did this for about a year. The body can learn the states and eventually will able to find the depths without the hypnosis. Now I dont mean brain entrainment or that kind of hypnosis, I mean simple relaxation, after all master Nan hui-jun says that deep meditation is deep relaxation. I think doing this hypnosis, even though maybe some people will have some kind of objections to its purity, is more time efficient than doing meditation without significant relaxation of the mind. This is perhaps your problem. Alternatively you can try to allow yourself to go into a deeper state when you meditate, and you will know its working because its relatively blissful and people will note how you look really spaced out after you finish. Another thing is I find that its better to do a meditation that is more taxing to the mind at the beginning, like a visualization, or try to imagine yourself as everything, God, if you will. After some time your mind will tire out and you can go to empty awareness at a deeper level.

Are you joking? Jesus fell off a train in Thailand last month and died. Not before stealing the olympic flame and getting arrested by overzealous cops:

The future exists as a possibility or among possibilities. In effect if say Kunlun or Falungong, or some rapid progress spiritual path were to catch on among large populations, then it could transform people's minds to a higher spirtual level than now. We are co-creators, so to say passively that this or that could happen is leaving out what you can possibly make happen. A school tries to create a new reality, but it exists as a possibility, so they are not distorting some truth, they are attempting to create a truth. Of course the forces of doubt and status quo will fight back. Max was accused of everything under the sun in this forum, where he had been previously successful in getting interested students. Falungong people were tortured to death with cattle prods by the CCP. The list goes on. Yet I try to live my life as it were a special time, and that we can make it happen. I suppose I've been looking for reasons for why my body endures such an awakening and evolution. Taoists have been doing this for ceturies, they might not care about a special time or not. But I'm an average schmo, not believing in all this stuff most of my life, I searched for meaning. So if it is a special opportunity, what can I possibly do to make it a special time where humans evolve? Sociologists using the national values system by Clare Graves, or Spiral Dynamics see that we are continually evolving as a society, and we are close to gaining a level which is in more harmony with earth, seeing it as a living whole. Economics: Of course oil and other materials are running out, and this will cause a collapse in the old system, this is just fact, not some 2012 mystery. Its only a matter of years. As far as global enlightenment special timing, its also in our hands because we are spiritual savvy and online with vast reach but we perhaps dont even know our own importance.

After learning many foreign languages, attempting more and quitting, teaching language for several years. Ah, good times. I can distill for you what I have learned. Alot of language learning is actually motivation to do the work, because even with the best plan you still need years of trying. Tony Robbins is good prep for language learning. Colleges for languages and such are magnets for dilletantes, people with only vague ambition and hopes, and have a bit of cash to spare, or their daddy does. These people make little or slow progress, lowering the bar for you. A college degree or certificate in a language is next to worthless. This is universal. You can pay someone to tell you to learn something you can learn by yourself for free, and at a quicker pace. What they supply is the motivation, the master to servant authority, thats all. You pay them to tell you what to do, even though its pretty obvious what needs to be done. Essentially, if you really wanted to learn Japanese, you could go down to the bookstore and just start. The only thing that stands in your way is will and motivation. The best students are ones that learn by themselves, and use the classes as a showcase, and leverage that success to give even more motivation. Hiring a private tutor is the way to go, pay by the hour. If you can shape your own program, and thats easy because you can just buy some books, then you dont need a professional tutor, only someone who will guide you through the drills and games, etc. I never go for professional tutors because they are generally worn out and have little spark to them, think too highly of their direction, and will charge more. A private tutor regular will give you the motivation to prepare and advance. A good looking private tutor of the opposite sex works wonders. Start with Spanish because its much less challenging but still quite challenging. The verbs are the key. If you go to Guatemala, there are many cheap 1 on 1 schools in Antigua or Quetzaltenango where you can get overdose of language, plus food and house for absurdly cheap.

Cold merangue in a mixing bowl with taffy stretching, relentless in personality likes to grind away like your pissed off older brother rubbing your face in carpet for years to rub your head off except its your inner flesh and brain, skull. Thats friction, to deal with that is deep relaxation so it speeds up and not so friction, like speeding your motorcycle down a bumpy road to fly the bumps. People seem to have spots on their body where they can notice qi better, usually around head or hands. Then you have those people who notice it some local spot where it can seem like an itch.

I'll certainly pass the word on to my family and friends with children about this choking game, it has to stop. Again, condolences.

This documentary is pretty depressing, mostly because it presents a very logical compelling framework to world events, and shows how humanity is destined to face a rapid decline very very soon. Dont watch it if you would prefer to live without the burdens of the critical. Part one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuBgzwSBcuw

Yes most of the effect is at the first moment. Also the moments of flirtation, where she is holding the sexual arousal in her mind at the same time you are, you will get a nice spike. It spikes at those moments, tapers off.

This topic hits home to me, since I have been noting for months and months trying to find the keys. This year I developed a sensitivity to energy, and it is very apparent. Eye contact is energy exchange. When you are focused and thinking of that person as they are within your sight, or they are doing the same to you, the energy exchange is much higher. Naturally this follows along male/female, since we are naturally going to look at people of opposite sex at a more intense way. I notice if I say something in my mind like "thats a nice dress", while looking at the girl who happens to be walking by, she will somehow hear this, turn her head, or even stop or move in my direction for a bit. Mark, young/old does play a part, but your own level of sexual attraction really affects how much you think you feel. So you might think a young hottie is sending mega-vibes, but it sometimes is mostly you, and her energy is responding but only in an average way. I have tested children and old ladies. Childred hold eye contact a long long time, so its easy to get a good reading, they are not necessarily giving me a large effect, but often they are, and if you are looking at someone in a kind of naive relaxed way, of course more energy can flow. Obviously if they are getting a special vibe from you, a child will not want to look away, even though they have to rubberneck from their stroller, and the parents are already 20 ft away. Sometimes my feeling of energy connction goes really high. One time it was this "crazy" woman talking to herself, saying something like "I am not here." as she passed by. She talked to her self down the street. I have found that people talking to themselves, crazies, are sending out strong energy. To me it didnt feel negative, just strong. I wish I had stopped her to ask what she meant, but I was busy at the time. And this brings me to a big question I have seen here, and I am trying to figure: When is it them sending energy, when is it that my energy just arcs over to them. My guess is that in almost all cases my energy is flowing to people, and I feel at what rate it is flowing, and it flows at a rate at which they can receive it. Case in point: I was having a coffee, and a guy who obviously had just come from a mosque, as he looked very religious and dressed in clean white djelaba. We made eye contact and I had a high level energy feeling and my heart chakra expanded. Another case: A couple of lesbians, who were kind of being tender to each other, walked near me, close enough through an outer aura and I had a similar heart chakra expansion. Was it one of them was spiritually evolved, or was it their love energy that amplified the effect? Or both? I understood that I could gain a reading on a persons spiritual level if I was sitting comfortably and they walked into my vision. But if its someone, hopefully a girl, thinking sexual thoughts my way, this will affect the equation. Even a mutual smile will affect the equation quite alot. I guess this shouldnt suprise anyone. Sometimes I get paranoid, and like Scotty decide its better not to interact at all with people because they are "bags of filth", but if its something like a spiritual energy juicing into them like Shakti Mama style, then this is a good thing.

This happened early on when I started meditating seriously. I felt and heard a crack crack crack of my upper palate some kind of juice flowed as if through the cracks, and then my tongue went on its own trying to get into a kecari mudra, it wasnt flexible enough so it would move forward and back, doing stretching exercises, over a period of about 30 min. I just let it go, and held my mouth to accomodate it. The juice tasted somewhat like Vichy water here in france, kind of sweet but also kind of mineralized. I agree with your really strong spiritual aspirations causation Seth, because people always want to know the method thinking its all such a pat formula but perhaps the method is just a minor catalyst, as I was doing no special type meditations. Well after that, I could somewhat feel the energy flows in my mouth, and I meditated in a recliner, as if in a dentists chair. And I held my mouth open, and felt the subtle energies drilling holes in my teeth, one by one. IT was like an invisible team of dentists, I felt the spinning energy above the tooth and the pain as it drilled. The energy would even put energetic clamps to keep my tongue away, because if my tongue got in the way, it would dissipate the energy, also if I had to close my mouth it would have to painstakingly start again, setting the the process. Sometimes the setup would take 30 minutes, and the energy was so weak back then any movement could knock it out. Nowadays the qi is so strong in comparison, and not have to take such strange morphs. Also sometimes when the energy-dentist-whatever wanted my tongue to move out of my mouth, it would just kriya itself out, or sometimes I would feel a little electric shock on my tongue as if to prod it to move somewhere, and it would keep gently getting shocked till I figured out where it wanted me to move it. I felt I needed to accomodated the energy as much as possible, which is why I would just go to the recliner chair and open my mouth, and that was the way I meditated. I had just finished reading Bodri and Nans book so I was not all that shocked about the juice or kriyas, I actually thought everyone went through this stuff on the way to kundalini awakening. My parents must have thought I was really nuts as I would report to them what the "teeth qi" was doing, when I meditated in the basement, and that stage lasted about a month, then went into a "cycling slime" stage, where this slimy mucous like water would just zoom, going past my mouth, but the problem was my mouth would sometimes fill up with this stuff and I didnt know if to swallow it or spit it out, many times I would just drool all over my shirt because I didnt want to break the "set up" of the little nadi tubes, drills, such and such. In hindsite I think this was some pretty yucky jing, dunno why it passed through my mouth though. I remember my dantien area turning soft as if nothing, and also the slime built a kind of membrane thing over my throat and also over my mouth, like bubbles like as if to block the air. I was thinking this was the run-up to the stage of embyronic breathing, but to this day, I cant really say. I tried to breath just with that very very soft stomach and kind of pumping action, I dont know if I succeed in going very long. Because it was so hard, if I closed my mouth because I needed to swallow or throat tickled, all the precise set up tubes, bubble films, would all turn back into slime, I would swallow it down, then it would float back up my throat and start the whole process again.

Yes indeed Pimsleur or Assimil are good. First start with a course that uses Romanji, that leaves the characters and script for much later (6 months-1 year.) This way you can make progress in coversation fast and your focus is not so broad and boggy. Plus you may never need to write or read, but speaking opportunities will always come up. To answer your question directly: MEMORIZATION IS LOCKING YOUR MIND ON ONE THING, IT IS A FORM OF MEDITATION. I memorize things in my spare time, but only recently did I realize it had this spiritual effect, it is similar in qi effects as doing a mantra. Plus you get the bonus of having some information at ready. The path of learning a language is akin to spiritual cultivation, the process is spiritual. Here is how to make the most time efficient progress while also gaining spiritual benefits: Take around 12 words per day to memorize, and run through them as much as possible in free time. Also at night before and after sleep, as the near hypnogogic and hypnopompic states favour subconscious impressioning.

I enjoyed that too.

I like this dude, he has some really good insights. Thanks for the link. As far as the downward flow, I interpret that as allowing the qi to cycle as it naturally does, and easier through his technique of a slow conscious relaxation of the body.

Expectations are just thoughts among many others, do a few thousand hours of mediation and see what I mean. Motivations however, are good, and this is where I would disagree with Hagen because he wants to present and idealized version to an audience of people who can do well with just any meditation. He's chopping away at motivations, because he is trying to sound like old Zen masters, but demotivating his audience in the process.

These Zen sayings were meant for monks who tried and tried all day years meditating and are blocked by their own devotion, not for lazy Western spiritual wannabes who want to console themselves for doing nothing. Yet these sayings are always taken out of context, especially by Western teachers who want to sound wise and paradoxical, like this Hagen fellow, who should know better.

Anthony Robbins warns of economic collapse!!! Who wouldve guessed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_rShZA_IjE

Well, if USA is a country of mass consumption, then consumer sentiment could be taken as a measure of general sentiment. When the stock market falls, people get bummed out because they feel poor, and with the Dow flirting with 10k, thats very low, and that corelates highly with consumer sentiment. Simply put, the market falls, people feel like crap. The market falls for one month like in August and is threatening to plummet in September, people get nervous and depressed, fight with their spouses, delay vacations, blame the president, etc. Its a good time to be a muscian or juggler on the street.

What happens is that qi jumps, its so instantaneous that I often wondered whether my qi reacted before the noise was registered in my mind. So if you can imagine a flowing and normal qi jumping up then settling back. I suppose its a good thing because its part of the human self protection mechanism. Another thing that I can sometimes notice happening is somthing like chakra or nadi collapsing back towards the body when theres a sudden disturbance.

If you really want you qi to circulate nicely, just think in your mind how everything you see around you is in fact the same as you, it is no different. If you think of your arm for example, as being part of yourself. Theres a certain feeling/state you have when you think about some part of your own body. If you can enlarge that particular feeling/state while you think of the rest of your surroundings just as if you were noticing your own arm, then the subtle energies in your body will become excited.

I love the study of ethics and all its interpretations through history and through the various schools. I discovered energetically on my own exactly why ethics and goodness seem linked with spirituality. The way I explain is that the Tao or God or the Unified whole has the characteristic of cooperation, and that translates to our bodies as a feeling of goodness. When you do something good with good intentions, generally you get some kind of feeling, and its a warm fuzzy feeling. Something like David Hume described. But you must question WHY that feeling arises. Some psychologists like to make up stories such as its merely a function of ego projection or some nonsense like that. In fact, it is the universe kind of noticing or reacting to you acting like the universe acts. In the Kaballistic parlance, the vessel (you) become like our creator in its "will to bestow", rather than human "will to receive" So that is why Rabbi Hillel when asked how to attain enlightenment with both hands tied behind ones back and hopping on one foot, he answered something like "love thy neighbour as you love thyself" The reason I can be so certain, is that after my few years of cultivation, these kinds of feelings: compassion, love, charity, become really kind of amplified and appear more as energy fields arising in the body. No more just warm fuzzies, but misty energy fields expanding out from ones body. A person who has not cultivated to a level where they can feel the immediate reactions coming from certain thoughts and behaviors will not have access to this sample set of data. Therefore its certain that non-cultivator philosophers or psychologists are merely groping around blind, because they are limited.

A half a billion eggs!? So these mother hens, individually laying these eggs, even though they live in cages and dont see the sun, have their beaks chopped off so they dont peck others to death when they go crazy, even though they lived through that misery, somewhere they must expect that their eggs will turn into babies. Not just stolen. And for sure not just pushed into the landfill with 500 million others. Doesnt this seem sick or perverse to you? At all? Is eggs simply whats on the plate?

To Shakti Mama: How does one know when one has succeeded in reabsorbing the jing? OP: If your gf is a typical woman, she gets her attitudes about love and sex from contemporary books, films and magazines, and then cements them with gossiping with her friends. My guess is she probably tolerates your spiritual goals even though they are kooky, having a spiritual boyfriend does rank somewhere as ok in typical female rating system when they gossip with their friends. However Taoism does cross the line from what is normal acceptable behavior, as it is probably written in many books how the moment of greatest surrender to the other is the moment of orgasm, thus the moment of greatest erotic love. So I can see her point, following the typical value system, that doesnt actually really believe in Taoist kookiness to the point of jing and transformation to become an imortal. Mal suggests you can come together and explain it all, but Im sure thats a nearly impossible sell. In my experience, you can draw the line at this no ejaculation, she will neverless have to accept it.

I feel non-vegetarians are more primitive. That doesnt make them wrong, just ignorant and primitive in this aspect. Both my spiritual teachers eat meat, and both highly attained. But my values are based on my own evaluation, not simply the evaluations of my teachers. The way forward for an evolved human society is vegetarian. Its pretty obvious. Have you checked the seas lately? Most of the fish are gone. Have you checked livestock farming lately, like the Tyson monopolists? Its vulgar and dowright horrific. So you need to do your own evaluating. What can you accept to be blind to, what can you ouright reject.

So you wanted to use spirituality and meditation to get what you want, and found that it uses you for what it wants. You got pwn'd dude. .

A small group of 10% of Americans own a whopping 93% of its financial assets, and thats only growing disparity as the economic crisis obliterates the middle class in real time. Its only natural that such a potent minority would control both the government and that means military as well. Thats an absolutely scary statistic not worth fighting FOR, but against. Can I ask the OP why she doesnt just go to a university and learn Engineering or go to a technical school, why take the military route at all? In egalitarian socities, and every country Ive ever lived in only one guy I knew would even consider this military route--perhaps because higher education is cheaper than in the USA, or even free. "her head full of lifelong propaganda, she went headfirst into serving the elites of a decaying empire, only to find herself a cog in an evil machine."