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Poor bird! Hunting for sports is... well, I don't want to judge, maybe cats need to do it in order to not lose the skill should civilization collapse and they are forced to hunt for food for real. The cat who raised me, my grandmother's (who was 5 years older than me), caught birds like that approximately once a week, becoming airborne and snatching the hapless sparrow in midair -- but she actually ate them. She was only very partially a pet, and a fully engaged huntress in between home meals.
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I'll let Stephen Fry speak for me:
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Count me in to the soft lefty camp. Can't people just be nice to each other without taking their stuff
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I try to study the amazing ”yeah thats an unintentional double backflip with a corkscrew, who would have thunk i’d pull that off?” thing kitty is doing but then that spotted belly comes into view and i wonder if it’d be thin or thick fur and when can i pet it, would it mind if i just gently scrunched its ear up a little and i’m totally lost to it... But thats a bengal right? I’ve almost never seen ”regular” cats get so into playing they’ll do an aerial show and i hear some of the more ”wild” groups such as bengals have an extra gear for serious awesomeness. I did observe my old cat Selma catch a low flying and overly cocksure bird at about a meter off the ground in a similar fashion, she was just eyeing it and suddenly went off like a spring, straight up and latched that sucker with all four paws midair before landing (not gracefully but) very satisfied. Then she bit it half to death and suddenly remembered she left the stove on and just fucked off, tail to the stars.
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Bound to be beautiful: The bizarre practice of foot-binding was once a symbol of beauty in China Foot-binding – a widespread custom in China which lasted for over 1,000 years – from the 10th to 20th century, is considered by many to be one of the most dangerous fashion trends in history. For centuries, tiny, curved feet were a symbol of beauty in the Chinese culture, and the bizarre tradition of foot-binding was passed from mother to daughter, generation to generation, The fashion trend was soon adopted by upper-class women in the south of China and eventually, it spread to the north of the country. While at the beginning it was considered a symbol of high social status and wealth, eventually it spread to all women, regardless their social position. Neck rings seem like another fashion trend that seems bizarre we seem to be a lot more tame with modern fashion and we can by boots that look like hoofs
- Today
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Like a continuous experience but not as evident as rain. It’s more as if there is an enjoyable quality to the rain and you’re wearing goretex shoes, had your favourite breakfast which means you’ll feel like lunch around lunchtime, the coffee you didn’t drink wasn’t needed etc... It’s the little things.
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Another way to learn sung is to study a cat (who is in good shape)
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I´m adamantly opposed to "forced property seizure by the working-class" yet happy to support programs and policies to keep people from dying in medical poverty. Does this make me exactly the kind of leftist that earns eye rolls from our beloved leader? Perhaps. Still, it´s not all the time that I´m in tune with the American zeitgeist and I´ll take my conformity where I can get it.
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Jing is a substance in the body whose amount can be measured due to proper diagnostic, especially of the elasticity and tone of the related acupoints. One can divide Jing into multiple subtypes of Jing depending on where it is stored, so you'll have Marrow-and-Brain Jing, Meridian-Yuan, sexual Jing (stored in the Bao), etc. It is indeed like dividing an egg into yolk and egg white... which is useful for the same reasons people DO separate Yolk and Egg Whites "Sexual Jing" can be understood as the Jing related to the Bao and the Gonads. Even though your amount of produced sperm increases with sexual practice and regular sexual life, sperm IS NOT Jing - it is a material substance which serves as a "vessel" through which Jing flows. Increasing the amount of the "vessel" will make it so more of the "water" will be caried along when you come. The amount of produced sperm increasing with promiscuity is indeed a sign of loss of Jing. Now, how can the amount of Jing in someone's body be quantified? As I've said, Diagnosys of key points and phatologyes the person has will give you indications on the amount of Pre-Heaven Jing someone has in their body, the main factor being Aging. Look into people who commit excesses in their lives, like promiscuity, drinking too much, staying in the sun for too long... and you'll see all the signs of premature aging. Then, if you reach a point in which you can feel the amount of Pre-Heaven Jing inside someone's body, be the Kidney Jing which is stored on the region of the left kidney, the Ming Men Jing in the region of GV4, the Bao Jing, the Brain-and-Marrow Jing or the Meridian's Yuan, you'll be able to notice that it does not increase after being used - and that it decreases greatly with excesses, like fasting for long periods of time. Then, if you find "rejuvenating qi-gong" you'll still will be able to notice that some key acupoints in your body will remain relatively empty compared to when you where younger, and that it is the same with everyone who's older. You'll be able to create a rejuvenating appearance in someone by accurately using acupoints like Kidney 7, which "replenishes the Jing", but you'll then notice that this a feeble effect with many limitations - yes, it will make you look younger and even take away some of the old-age pains you might have, but once you stop using acupuncture or moxabustion on that acupoint, that all crumbles in a few days. The pain will be back, the wrinkles as well... best of cases and you can nourish the region for enough time and with enough technique to be able to accumulate some Post-Heaven Jing in the Kidney meridian's connection to the Extraordinary Vessels to look young for a little bit longer. The Extraordinary Vessel which connects to the Kidney main Meridian, btw, is the Yin Qiao Mai, which connects to K2 all the way to K8, and then follows a path right next to the Kidney meridian as well, even without being part of it. Then it nourishes the Brain. This Meridian, therefore, can be somewhat nourished (to the limit of how much nourishment can come from Heat alone) once one applies Moxabustion on K7. Opening this Vase works wonders for rejuvenating people, especially if they present Kidney Yin Deficiency related problems. Wonder why? Quick note: That's why saying "look at that qigong instructor, he looks so young, his QiGong must work indeed!" is a mistake. There are plenty of means for one to pretend to be younger with TCM. That's the more physical and medical form of understanding the logic of "excesses (including sexual ones) deplete the Pre-Heaven Jing". You're free to think that "it is all sexual taboo by those hiper-conservative idots" and rebel against it, of course.... just make a small money reserve and look for me in 20 years or so, haha. Edit: Memory isn't related to Jing, but to the state of your "Sea of Marrow" (Brain), which is connected to the Kidney's Yin, which THEN is connected to Pre-Heaven Jing. There is some Bone-And-Marrow Jing associated to that, but most of the nourishment to the Sea of Marrow and the Bones themselves comes from Kidney Yin. Only the most profound Marrow has some Jing stored in itself, like some of deepest recesses of your brain (your essential structures, such as the motor cortex, cerebelun, amigdala, etc). Alzheimer patients can be quite easily treated by stimulating the Kidney Yin, and that will solve the memory loss issue (at least for a while). Of course, if it could cure Alzheimer for life then we acupuncturists would all be filth rich by now, but it can slow down the disease's progress quite a lot. In the end, the loss of Kidney Yin with aging is unstoppable without some miraculous means. So things like Dementia will eventually settle in. You either become brainless or die before that, there is no way out except by finding the formula for Pre-Heaven Jing reconstitution.
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Oops! I was reading your second paragraph happily formulating the exact question you say you´d rather not go into in your third. Ah well, as it happens I may have figured it out on my own anyways. Or at least I have some pretty good ideas of what not to do.
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We have a finite amount of "something," it's true, but before applying any practical solutions to this problem, it would be a good idea to first figure out what that "something" is before undertaking to conserve it. Otherwise one might discover that "something" that shortens our lives by running out too fast and "something" we are trying to save are not the same thing at all, so the latter won't help with the former. Jing in its broadest sense is memory -- memory of self, of how to be yourself. The copies of copies our cells create under less-than-optimal conditions can indeed take us farther and farther away from the "original" -- but what exactly is the process whereby we produce "more copies" and lose more and more of the original? Well, the good news is, sex isn't that -- bad sex is. Sex is part of normal functioning like all other processes associated with aliveness, and doesn't take away from our cellular memory of how to be "ourselves," members of our species and individuals of that species. Bad sex does though -- by causing the body and the mind (and more) to "forget" what we are, on all levels -- from scrambled, haywire hormonal cascades affecting all organs and systems that respond by cascades of abnormal functions throwing off system-organ-function memory of "what it's like to be normal," to really stupid ideas in the head, including all in-betweens. Now I'm going to stop before I write a dissertation on the subject of "what constitutes good sex and what constitutes bad sex" -- I'll just say they are not the same and leave it at that. May we all find a way to figure it out and be blessed with partners who have figured it out too.
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Wow! Thanks everybody. This is so much more than I expected to get. Now for watching video, thinking, digestion and then back to daily practice. When I wrote my initial question I neglected to mention that in addition to standing and sinking, my daily routine also includes slow deliberate movement ('cloud hands') with sinking, and a small amount of fast repetitive movement with sinking. I also do a chunk of seated meditation daily. To what extent would you all describe 'sung' as a continuous experience - like falling rain? Or is sometimes a single wave ? of sensation Or is it like dropping a stack a plates - they all fall down
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Taomeow put a very important head on a crucial nail! ”Investing in loss is the quickest way to a win” said dear Sifu to me while we were talking of loosing respect and status or just falling flat on ones face. Do it wrong and do it wrong and do it wrong and the something changes just a tiny bit and so forth. I’d like to venture that standing like a tree without looking at moving and more dynamic exercises directed at developing Sung, aka Sung Gong, is not necessarily going to enhance your sung at all. Standing will benefit sung if you’re on the way, but to simply stand to get sung won’t yield very fast or noticeable results. I agree with Freeform and Steve and Taomeow on this and i think developing Sung is a cumulative practice. You do it, even just a little every day and it starts to happen. That video with exercises is great stuff to learn from, but even with such good guided exercises and clues to the feedback etc etc it’s still not a binary state. You WILL feel it when you start get there but you wont notice it until you notice what it does for your other practices. It’s not like you cross a threshold and you have it. It needs to be developed, maintained and enhanced daily. If you’ve done considerable work to develop it you can go without for some time but too long and your body is going to start blaring pain and stiffness. Standing wont help you dissolve deeper blockagesor stiffness or a certain tendency to favour weight on your left big toe or something else. Just standing and tai chiing without proper sung gong to strenghten the foundation is not going to do the trick. Sung gong isn’t also just one of those things you do and it happens on its own. Sure, a little, but Meows quote there really emphasises the crux: understand what you didn’t know you were doing wrong and correct it. That takes a lot of focused study that can only come from experience in sung practices, which in turn pivots only on surrendering to those exercise and try to experience why they are so fundamental and powerful. Enough blab from me now.
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The I and the me and the we Which will it be? The I influenced by the we, is it I? Is it me? When does the me overtake the I, that was formed by the we? Is it me?
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Sexual Jing: Is It Really Limited (?)
Rocky Lionmouth replied to Lataif's topic in Daoist Discussion
Don’t forget executions, there’s been plenty of those as well with and around kings. Sorry for the crude edit there Shubin but if we look at it as that the whole issue with kings is more like an issue of many humans from all strata and situations. -
Another wonderful thing he said when someone asked him how he stayed in consciousness - he replied that 'he didn't mind anything that happened.' That's serious acceptance of what is.
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What Freeform and Steve said. To this I will add that, in my own experience, you assemble the proprioceptive ways to get your body to understand sung gradually and from multiple sources. From reading Taiji Classics and trying to play, in a somatosensory way, with its metaphors ("a flexible steel needle wrapped in soft cotton" -- that's sung for you) to "investing in loss" (one of the most accomplished MA folks I've interacted with, whose push-hands skill seems to border on supernatural -- when he "stands like a tree" you literally find yourself trying to push a 600-year-old oak tree off its roots, and he's merely a small-framed dude of under average height -- answers all questions about his "secret" with this primary advice -- "for three years, let everybody push you, don't ever try to win, that's the only way to understand how you lose and keep correcting whatever you didn't know you were doing wrong) to getting as many corrections as you can stomach from a good teacher and always asking for more, to just practicing enough (sung is internal MA territory, you can apply it to whatever else you do but the best way to master it is through practicing an internal MA) and more... there's always more. Sung is also twofold -- how you learn it and how you actually apply it in a spontaneous real-life situation are sort of opposite (but that's a later-time skill, to be able to turn it inside out and have that soft, mellow, relaxed "cotton" inside while on the surface the steel needle emerges and strikes -- instantly and spontaneously.)
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I suspect that "culture" that entails elimination of normal natural developmental pathways (since before birth, during birth, in early infancy, and onward) is not the right word for what happened to us, that the word is a euphemism for something entirely else: domestication. Epigenetics is a relatively new science and its findings are relatively frightening. We inherit whatever features of our "culture" have been traumatic, persistent or imprinting, that's what it keeps finding. We are not free of what our ancestors did and what has been done to them. When we experience a spontaneous opening, ideally it is an opening into a pristine paradise, but in reality, it's an opening into reinforced walls of developmental trauma of millennia, into whatever hell happened between that paradise and now -- not just ontogenically but phylogenically. I think I can relate more and more to that taoist who, upon returning from the invisible realms, found that our everyday world is not all that rich with nuances and differences -- "everything is mysteriously the same." The indoctrination by CCP you describe, e.g., is something I encountered growing up myself, in the form of the indoctrination by the CPSU, almost verbatim. And I was growing up a dissident, believing that if what this side offers is a crock of shit, there's got to be another side, in some imagined mirror world, where they offer a crock of honey instead. I genuinely believed that whatever side does it differently does it right. What can be worse than the devil you know, intimately, up close and personal? Turns out something can be worse. The devil you don't know, skilled at wrapping the crock of shit in a shiny plastic wrapper that lists "Honey" as the main ingredient on the label. You buy it, you commit to gobbling it up -- and if everybody around is smacking their lips and going "sweet, fresh, fragrant," you have to choose between shutting down your senses and sensibilities and going along -- or finding yourself in that uncomfortable misfit/outsider position once again. Besides, flavors of our various "cultures" might indeed vary. If you're lucky to focus on that instead of on "everything is mysteriously the same," you can choose one over the other -- see everything that's wrong with the ones you didn't choose in clear detail, blurring out everything that's right with them (if there's anything that's right with any of them, that is) -- and consider the problem solved. Historically, no one with any power to change things ever stopped at that though -- they typically proceeded to get whatever culture was different from theirs to conform to what they have chosen for its "development." And that's more distortions piled up on top of the already piled up distortions of the "abnormal and pathological process of domestication of humans" (Konrad Lorenz.)
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Cool how that uses a mirror to simultaneously show the angles. I started a kuji-in photo project with the intent to not only make artful pictures but ones by which a newbie could get into the hand position. That’s a tough shoot! Some of them are complex that you need step by step photos of how to get into it, then the finished mudra from front & back. Yikes, ugh. Not the fun personal art project that I’d signed up for, lol.
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...I think that everything Krishnamurti ever spoke on or cared to exude can be summed up in his most famous quote, that he used to begin his speech when he disbanded the order of the star in front of thousands of people, due to his brother dying and he having lost faith in theosophists... " truth is a pathless land "
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The three things I found most important in realizing and developing sung are standing meditation, practicing the taiji form very slowly, and pushing hands. If you are serious about learning this you need to practice with a good teacher. Everything about taijiquan requires precision to be effective and precision requires expert guidance. In addition to everything mentioned above, I found that paying attention to tension in the face and hands is helpful. Those are two areas where we tend to carry a lot of tension and they're easy to ignore. Good luck!
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Has anyone else read this? The most important Buddhist work I've read in a decade. Cuts to the chase about unconscious conditioning and how to free ourselves from it.
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Whenever you remember to do so, relax your buttocks and abdominal area.
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Don't try to force anything. It will happen on its own. Just be patient. Setting aside the technical aspects of structure, posture, etc etc which are important initially, Sung is from letting go. By letting go, it means not letting your mind get attached to anything in particular. Whatever arises, let go. If a thought arises, let it go. If an emotion arises, let it go. If a sensation arises, let it go. Then next question that usually follows is - "How do I let go?" The answer is - it is as easy as literally dropping something you were holding on it.
