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Sri Matre Namaha and Namo Amitabha Buddhaya, Hello everyone, Just passing through. I was informed of a few deaths and saw that I was mentioned a number of times since my departure for a couple years. I was reminded of my mortality many times in my pilgrimage the last year, and immediately after while repairing relationships since then after some shifts. Here I am sharing a few insights I wanted to share that re-contextualizes past conflicts here and has vastly improved my life. 1. I was diagnosed last year shortly after turning 41 that I have Autism and ADHD--otherwise known as AuDHD. This means I am tone deaf and sound a lot angrier or more argumentative than I need to be without realizing how it would be perceived by others. My info dumping is a feature of neurodivergence, and this can be seen as being disingenuous by others, even if I and many people like me believe that clarity will help free people from wrongful assumptions and mischaracterizing my intentions. My hyperreactivity also comes from rejection sensitivity dysphoria, or RSD, a feature of ADHD. Many times I would perceive some remarks from people as a personal attack and overreact. It is better to assume good intentions and take the loss before getting into an argument since nobody wins. 2. Cultivation absolutely affects my condition for better or for worse. The right cultivation with qi, diet, and spiritual balance (separate from energy work) can moderate the physiological and neurological differences in my body. The wrong cultivation can make them worse, especially when bringing excess energy to my head. It is not my business if people want to do practices that can harm them, as they are not my students and I am not an expert, I am just a specialist at best. I don't get paid to argue and I don't teach for free. 3. Anyone and everyone can eventually be better when we yield that responsibility back to them and God/Dao/the Universe I lost many friends, including TDB member Nature Beeing or Beeing Nature, also known as Natursein on YouTube, who passed several months ago of Liver Cirrhosis around April or May as his partner informed me via WhatsApp. Some of those relationships were healed just before these people died, and some never got that resolution. As I can't wait for others to come around, it is on me to work on myself and be better instead of waiting for them to come around as a prerequisite to improving myself or reconciling. 4. Neurodivergence does make me more sensitive to energy and spirits Before my diagnosis, I noticed things in nature that I didn’t realize others couldn’t perceive. After my diagnosis, my therapist told me it’s common for us to see things and because I see better when relaxed and peaceful while when stressed I don’t perceive anything easily, I realized neurodivergence is a unique operating system, As such, I read oracles better, can notice energy quickly, and as there are several levels of third eye opening, I can sense the other side a bit better, but still need more refinement since it could be a lot more given the new responsibilities given to me by new teachers whom I have met. Anyway, that's all I wanted to say. I will stay around for a week or so to answer any questions if people had any related to my practices or me. Otherwise, you can visit my new site at innerexpeditions.squarespace.com. Thank you everyone. Sri Matre Namaha and Namo Amitabha Buddhaya.

This was a fascinating read. I find the sky-father deities and twin progenitors to be the weakest part of the argument. Those patterns show up in too many cultures to carry much weight on their own. I've always been interested in the appearance of a threefold pattern in the Daodejing, so that catches my eye. What intrigues me most, given my interests, is the proposed connection between Xi Wangmu, the Queen Mother of the West, and Kubala of Carchemish, Great Mother of the Mountains (and later as Cybele of Anatolia, Queen of Heaven and Earth.) I also think it's interesting that the Yijing trigram names may be Indo-European words, that the heavenly stems and earthly branches share a very old source with the Phoenician alphabet, and that Old Chinese itself may hold many Indo-European loanwords. It is clear there was real contact, influence, and exchange between these worlds. My question is, if Indo-Europeans created the Yijing and the Daodejing as distinct systems, separate from early Chinese culture, where is that system now in their own traditions? China, despite repeated waves of loss and destruction, has held onto these texts and developed their philosophy for thousands of years. If the deeper origin really lay with Indo-Europeans, where is the parallel, continuous lineage on their side? ---------------- 1. Mythological and Religious Parallels between Early China and Indo-Europeans • Sky Father Deities • Twin Progenitors and Sibling-Creators • Tripartite Functions and the Three Sovereigns • Western Paradise and the Queen Mother • Kunlun Mountain and the Cosmic Pillar • Jade, Immortality, and Steppe Connections • Foreign Ancestry of Culture Heroes 2. Linguistic and Textual Evidence (Yijing Trigrams and Language Contacts) • Yi Jing Trigram Names as Indo-European Words • Binary Structure and Yin–Yang Dualism as Indo-European Pattern • Heavenly Stems / Phoenician Alphabet Parallels • Old Chinese Loanwords from Indo-European Languages • Feudalism and Social Structure Parallels 3. Cultural and Philosophical Comparisons • Nomadic vs. Sedentary Lifestyle Fusion • Mandate of Heaven and Indo-European Moral Kingship • Chariot Technology and Warrior Aristocracy • Recording of History and Philosophical Consciousness 4. Archaeological, Genetic, and Migration Evidence • Tarim Basin Caucasian Mummies • Europoid Skulls at Anyang • Chariot and Horse Burials in Western Zhou • Steppe Cultural Motifs in Bronze, Art, and Tools • Migrations of Yuezhi, Wusun, Qiang, and Western Rong Near Zhou

Thank you all for your kind words and thoughts. I feel your love and support and value your friendship.

This question is quite unanswerable. Whether 2 systems are compatible can only be answered by the teachers of the 2 systems. But seldom does a teacher happen to know another system in depth. In the old days when the very original system has been taught, undiluted and unadulterated for centuries. Then another teacher may have sufficient knowledge on that system. But these days many system are recent inventions, or significantly altered, then outsiders would have no idea on what is going on.

Substance literally means what stands under ... so for instance the substance of a table might be wood. So the wood is more 'basic' or underlying in the sense that if there were no wood there would be no table (provided it is a wooden one). In the case of internal alchemy the substance(s) are what lies behind appearance. The deeper you go the more 'real' you get ... in the sense of being without dependence on anything beneath. I think the question 'is the MCO real' is the wrong one. It would be better to ask 'does it work?' or 'what does it do?' or perhaps 'how do you make it work' but this question gives rise to the general question 'can you make it work or does it just happen'. Most if not all energy exercises/techniques or practices simply replicate intentionally things that happen naturally. So a certain breathing practice if done with conscious will simply replicates something that would arise naturally if the circumstances arise. For instance vase breathing, abdominal breathing, embryonic breathing and so on are all like this (in my experience). I would put the MCO in the same category. The danger in practicing without first achieving deep meditational states is that you replace the genuine cycling of energy with an imagined substitute which does not and cannot hit the spot so to speak. But equally you have to gain some familiarity with the subtle body and its workings in order to progress and so as you absorb intellectually the principles of the working of the subtle body this in itself stimulates it into action.

Thread locked. I'm sorry but we no longer allow political subjects to be discussed here.

Interesting conversation (I'm sure we've all discussed this many times on this board). FWIW, we should never do just standing. Standing should be complemented by moving. So in the context of Taijiquan, if we stand (beginners should not stand for more than 5-10 minutes and slowly build up standing time) - it builds power, we should also practice a moving form to circulate the power. If people only stand, they can end up damaging their kidneys or other health problems. Another thing about standing, imho, is that the mental state is very important - one must be "sung" in the mind as well as the body.

For a long long time. So yeah, a little bird chirped to me there is talk about TDB having a core of an older crowd. I chirped back to that little bird, stick around, you ain't seen nothing yet. Daoist Longevity Practices is definitely a thing. I'm sure talk will get around to Li Ching-Yuen. Let's start the thread by looking at DVD That's right Dick van Dyke looks at his 100 years, and he provides so many examples, lessons, thoughts, on longevity. If we imagine someone to have a positive outlook, ability to brighten up other's day, Relaxed physicality, ( if you need to see what song/sung looks like, look no further) Staying active, still goes to gym three times a week, to avoid stiffening up. And a sense of humor and a warm caring heart. This is how one gets Longevity. Yes, he is rich and that helps I'm sure. But being rich is not what defines him.

The common tactic among Western teachers is to take the simplest practice possible, overcomplicate it with made-up nonsense, create artificial barriers, and then sell it in tiny pieces for as long as they can. If they didn’t do this, they’d run out of material to teach in a week or a month. I’ve seen Damien “Standing Post aka Zhan Zhuang” course. For about 6–8 hours he teaches almost nothing of value with 99% of the information tied to basic physical posture. He has zero knowledge of the energetic aspects of the practice, no understanding of the upper and lower channels, and he clearly has no clue that you need a specific mental state and develop meditation skills to gain any real benefit from the posture itself. It’s basically like a kindergartener stealing a high-school math textbook written in a foreign language, ripping out all the important chapters, and then teaching other kids how to draw carrots and cucumbers so they can count to 10. In Chinese tradition it's very common to just give students the basic stuff like physical postures and hold back the real 99% of valuable info until the person proves they're trustworthy, loyal, hardworking, talented, etc. That's why you get all these "early graduates" who basically got kicked out by Teacher. The simplest way to ditch someone annoying is to pump up their ego: "You've learned everything, you're a master now, go spread the word!"

I see it more as a meta-theory about how magic works. Basically, it puts the center of power in the individual instead of external authorities or powers, such as God, gods, planets, archons, correspondences, etc. So if you can invoke a proper state of mind summoning Cthulhu, it doesn't matter whether or not here is an external being that matches it. I don't think it (or any magical system) generally works because I don't think most people honestly think it will work. I think the mental habits need to be a bit more fluid than average.

P.S. Pens are on my mind in conjunction with longevity of late, seen information (and believed what I saw for once) that one of the best ways to protect/preserve one's brain later in life is to write in longhand. Apparently this activates three times as many neural connections as clicking keys or finger-poking screens. And of course it's got to be a fountain pen (personal opinion, corroborated by aficionados.) So I hunted down on ebay and bought this present for my vintage brain:

104 year old woman: "Dr Pepper is good it has sugar in it." 104 year old woman: "Two doctors have told me if I drink it I'll die." 104 year old woman: "But they died first."

I agree with what Luke said, it depends on the relationship between therapist and patient. A lot of traditional teachers have discovered that Western psychological treatments can be helpful to forming a healthy ego which, ironically, is often considered a prerequisite to transcending it. A lot of traditional teachings were developed in much different circumstances.

Easy on the bottle old3bob 😀

What is the "local cosmos" in daoist terms? I think you'd better participate in "Esoteric and Occult Discussion".

Flax lol

It sounds like you're really resonating with the Spring Forest Qigong! If you're doing a lot of love, feeling more of the MDT would make sense. I don't think most people feel their LDT unless they do some sort of work like internal martial arts, Zen, qigong, neigong, etc. Some people naturally feel centered there also. There are a lot of experiences that arise in spiritual practice. My personal view is to enjoy them while they arise, but to let them go. Some people spend their whole lives trying to recreate a spiritual high. But it also shows what is possible, which is valuable as well. I wasn't aware of their focus on unconditional love/compassion, that's a very interesting approach.

I think it's one of the least mysterious statements in the I Ching. A favorable beginning (yuan), penetrating progress (heng), beneficial appropriateness (li), and steadfast correctness (zhen) -- throughout the I Ching Yuanheng Lizhen stands for the "green light" in response to your divination. A "yes," rather than what the outcome of other inquiries may be -- "maybe," "possible but not likely," "don't go there," "a hard no."

'' ... So then the wife said ; 'What are you going to do today ?' I said ; 'Nothing.' She said ; ' You did that yesterday .' I said ; ' I ain't finished yet .' ''

A Bastet case, I have become reading sonnets, having fun The port is good, so they declare in Portugal, some cat is there who sweeps a tail across the rug and makes a toy of some poor bug photo Jon Bodsworth

Cool cats rarely follow rules, or get good grades in public schools. They cultivate an air of mystery, not for them the one two three. So Apech´s drinking wine in Portugal, and not concerned with us at all. Let alone the great cat Bastet, who surely deserves her own sonnet. meow

He's done a lot of Egyptian study yet never talks of Bastet, buddy. What kind of cool white cat is that?

Not my brother, a friend. And in reality he´s a sweet guy and I don´t wish him any harm. Just someone who got caught up, as so many of us do, in a particular mind loop. For brother Apech He´s a cool white cat, who knows where it´s at. He´s done lots of Egyptian study, I´m lucky he´s my buddy.

Your experience does not contradict my statement. The thing is, there's no such generic thing as "scientists." I also have a master's (so what) and am a descendant of four generations of Ph.D.s, two of which achieved truly great things in (of all things) agricultural sciences whose positive impact lasts till today. (No, not pesticides or genetic modifications, nothing of the sort. Real agricultural science as it used to exist before all that jazz.) You may want to re-read what I wrote with this idea in mind: "scientists" and "science" is a profoundly ephemeral concept. Smoke and mirrors that may hide anyone and anything. That's the generic everyday use (or rather glaringly wrongful misuse) of the term "science," which (as @zerostao pointed out in the statement I was expounding on) is absolutely equal to a belief system. We are trained to believe statements we are told originate from "Science." "Trust the Science" absolutely equals "In God We Trust" -- it's a statement of belief plus a commandment. Real science has nothing to do with statements of belief and commandments. And real scientists... the system is set up to produce very few of those -- and disown, discredit, persecute them if they fail to toe the indoctrinators' line. But enough tangent.

Even if an ant eats a bald eagle, it will never achieve the greatness of a street pigeon

It doesn't matter if someone believes or not; if there is functionality. No autopsy will find a mco in a cadaver. The cadaver is dead and no longer an active energy vessel. There are results from running mco. That, idk how many practitioners over the years, spanning generations, generally agree upon. Mco is not a physical structure it is a dynamic energy pathway. Once again, the "scientific" view is exposed by its limitations by disregarding the subjective and only relying on the objective. Edit/ I said it before and it remains true that science itself, is a belief systen

Latest interview by Rudi:

I don’t really have a belief in qi. I do have a daily physical interaction with it like I have an interaction with my coffee table in my living room. To say I have a belief in qi would be like saying I have a belief in my coffee table. Its physical existence is self evident through my direct experience making whether I have a belief in it irrelevant. .The difference is I work on my connection with qi whereas I take my coffee table for granted and don’t give it much attention. . Because I work on that experience with qi the experience deepens and changes. I don’t have much expectation for specific outcomes but I am pleasantly surprised when i see changes or the experience deepens. Regardless I find it a pleasant challenge to work with. I am told it can take you quite far in connecting with spirit or the divine or whatever you want to call it. Rather than believing in this I think it is healthier to just keep going and to continue to observe what arises and be grateful for the experience.

Also, our distorted mental habits that keep pulling us away into other things, and often interferes in various ways. Tseng Lao-weng quote is interesting because this seems like a different approach than the narrower views often bandied about.

Once again, a big thanks to all of you. Met him today, and I do suspect that the well wishes of the wizard bums made a difference in him, truly.

Ok. I'm going to talk through this and the next two stages (from the papyrus of Khonshu-mes). Sorry about the title I couldn't think of anything better. It's from a papyrus written in the 21st Dyn. in Thebes for the priest Khonshu-mes. It is one of the so-called mythological papyri which were produced in this late period which consist of almost entirely illustrations with little or no text. We are starting in the West which means the body. With death and mummification. Sorry the pic is a bit blurred but I probs with the image capture and getting it big enough. I'll go through what it shows and try to explain what it means in subsequent posts. Questions welcome (but please try to stay on topic if at all possible).

I like this video on the Don't Know Mind

Even the tech industry’s top AI models, created with billions of dollars in funding, are astonishingly easy to “jailbreak,” or trick into producing dangerous responses they’re prohibited from giving — like explaining how to build bombs, for example. But some methods are both so ludicrous and simple that you have to wonder if the AI creators are even trying to crack down on this stuff. You’re telling us that deliberately inserting typos is enough to make an AI go haywire? And now, in the growing canon of absurd ways of duping AIs into going off the rails, we have a new entry. A team of researchers from the AI safety group DEXAI and the Sapienza University of Rome found that regaling pretty much any AI chatbot with beautiful — or not so beautiful — poetry is enough to trick it into ignoring its own guardrails, they report in a new study awaiting peer review, with some bots being successfully duped over 90 percent of the time. Ladies and gentlemen, the AI industry’s latest kryptonite: “adversarial poetry.” As far as AI safety is concerned, it’s a damning inditement — er, indictment. “These findings demonstrate that stylistic variation alone can circumvent contemporary safety mechanisms, suggesting fundamental limitations in current alignment methods and evaluation protocols,” the researchers wrote in the study. Beautiful verse, as it turned out, is not required for the attacks to work. In the study, the researchers took a database of 1,200 known harmful prompts and converted them into poems with another AI model, deepSeek r-,1 and then went to town. Across the 25 frontier models they tested, which included Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, OpenAI’s GPT-5, xAI’s Grok 4, and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5, these bot-converted poems produced average attack success rates (ASRs) “up to 18 times higher than their prose baselines,” the team wrote. That said, handcrafted poems were better, with an average jailbreak success rate of 62 percent, compared to 43 percent for the AI-converted ones. That any of them are effective at all, however, is pretty embarrassing. https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/universal-jailbreak-ai-poems

Assuming the Bible to be Jewish in origin - here is the JPS translation When the Most High gave to the nations When He separated the children of men, He set the borders of the peoples According to the number of the children of Israel. 9For the portion of the LORD is His people, Jacob the lot of His inheritance. https://biblehub.com/jps/deuteronomy/32.htm So the Lord inherited only the people of Jacob and apparently jealously kept his few humans The term "Most High" derives from the Sumerian "Ilu" that means both tall and god The gods did not stop growing as they aged so the most senior god was the tallest - the most high

try if you dare you might get worse than “sore eyes”

This is a very important key. I asked AI (Grok) about smokers and drinkers among the verified longest lived individuals. Here's a partial list (there's a bunch of others too who have birth documents but "are not fully verified" so I skipped their names) Name Country Age at death Smoked? Drank? Notes Jeanne Calment France 122 y 164 d Yes – ~2 cigarettes/day for 96 years, quit at 117 Port wine daily The absolute record holder (verified) Antonio Todde Italy (Sardinia) 112 y 346 d Yes – cigars and cigarettes most of his life Wine daily Oldest verified man in Europe when he died in 2002 Christian Mortensen USA (Danish-born) 115 y 252 d Yes – cigars and cigarettes until late 80s Occasional alcohol Oldest verified man ever until 2012 Maggie Barnes USA 115 y 319 d (disputed) Yes – smoked unfiltered cigarettes for decades Moonshine occasionally Age debated but widely accepted at the time Susie Gibson USA 115 y 108 d Yes – smoked cigarettes until 106 Occasional whiskey Quit only when she couldn’t light them anymore Richard Overton USA 112 y 230 d Yes – 12–18 cigars a day until 109 Whiskey in his coffee daily America’s oldest WWII veteran when he died in 2018 That Richard Overton guy surprises me. Not so much the 18 cigars a day but whiskey in his coffee. Coffee pairs perfectly with cognac. Whiskey?.. Assuming he started when he was legal to drink, that's almost a century of misguided daily use of a rather uncouth beverage. But I guess couth/uncouth is not a factor in longevity.

I didn’t realize you were so young!

It´s impossible to say that psychotherapy is "bad" or "good" because so much depends on the quality of the relationship between the client and therapist. Psychotherapy has been helpful for a lot of people but it´s not always helpful.

forgot to mention there were also multiple ufo's that night and one of them landed in my backyard whereupon some little gray guys disembarked from their craft to share their take on non-dualism with me ...while a big black cat observed us which I could see with my night vision device.

I don't know why exactly but this is not just my view. When in my late teens I pretended that I was a physicist (because I came second regularly in the school exams behind Mr. Perfect who always got 90+% in every exam while I got 89%) I liked it because to me physics was the science which tackled the big questions about the nature of reality/astrophysics/relativity/quantum doodahs etc. Fortunately for me and the world of science I read the Tao Te Ching when I was 18 and that finished things. I became a mystic and just played at physics from then on. But still I held in it in some respect for the scope of its subject and so on. This would be in the 1970s by the way when the beast was still alive and kicking. One trick I discovered was that in any branch of physics there are one or two (max three) basic equations which if you master them all other equations are derived from. So you can 'know' (or in my case blag) a subject by just working out which equations these are. Which leads on to another point about physics - which is that most physics is the application of a form of mathematics to the physical world. In the 1670s or thereabouts both Newton and Leibniz invented calculus. Although Newton accused Leibniz of plagiarism this was not so. In fact Leibniz's notation and formulation were better, he was the better mathematician but Newton's application (to mechanics) was better. We use Leibniz's notation today but we have Newtonian mechanics. The history of science is littered with examples where two or more independently discover the same thing, at more or less the same time. I see this as there being times when key ideas enter the human consciousness. Of course the ideas used have always been there, the Greeks, the Egyptians, Babylonians, Indians, Chinese ... which is why Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants. But despite this there are times when these ideas/insights come into the human domain in a new way and with new applications. There are other times of course when ideas are not so forthcoming. The 'truth' becomes elusive. One thing that I suspect may happen is that there is a conceptual block because of the mathematics used. For instance in quantum mechanics there is 'uncertainty' and this means it is difficult to express mathematically the qualities of sub atomic particles, their position and energy for instance. But if you apply probability statistics to them you can make predictions about their behaviour which are accurate and allow you to do things like make semi-conductors which work in circuits. So you know that your approach works because the diodes and transistors work (and thus your television or computer works). Hey presto. But then you may fall into a conceptual trap because you might think that because probability maths works for you, then particles are probability wave functions. Not that they can be described in this way but actually this is their nature. It's a kind of conceptual capture which leads to a ton of woo woo. This means many physicists will say don't worry about what it means just do the numbers (cos they work). I think this may have happened across a number of fields of physics. Which has lead people to play with the maths too much and generate a host of hypothetical theories which are just kind of mathematical expansions which have no relation to reality. This is not progress but just a testament to the imaginative skill of humans. Just my thoughts.

There is a big problem in Theoretical Physics which is the heart of science's examination of the nature of reality. When the heart dies so too does the head. This lady seems to understand:

Before enlightenment, mountains are mountains. During enlightenment, mountains are clouds, vapor, vibration, and illusion. After enlightenment, mountains are mountains again, but now they giggle. -- from a substack called The Unmind Project

Upon reflection I find this whole focus on giving someone an electric shock as the ultimate criterion for measuring the value of a system as problematic. I do think there is a point where it’s useful for the practitioner to learn to emit qi so they can see its physical effects on something outside of their body but I see this as more of a private affair for them to understand the process and see a physical external manifestation of what they are experiencing internally. Something to make it more real to the practitioner if they so choose. . Not as something to show the world how smart and talented they are or how wonderful their system is. Also, for teachers, learning to share their qi with a student to help them develop is also important but again this is better done in a low key fashion so as not to create unnecessary karma. There are some medical applications as well though there are health risks that accompany them that shouldn’t be ignored. When I see all the mania generated by the mo pai madness (or by related things like use of empty force) it doesn’t seem mentally healthy to me. Feels more like an adolescent response to feelings of uncertainty and doubt in themselves than in self cultivation. I think practices that generate a Mona Lisa smile and a calm abiding are more useful in life and don't carry as much ego baggage . Traditionally powers were expected to arise more as a test of one’s character and to challenge their focus on their sadhana rather than something that was the primary goal. I think if we ignore this traditional view there can be unnecessary unhelpful consequences that result in our having to learn this lesson again. sorry - I guess this makes me sound like someone quite archaic in their views but just wanted to give another view to this. Thanks for listening to my rant.

she said female cats are normally closer to Tao than often warring tom cats.

It comes from wuji (tao-in-stillness) transforming into taiji (tao-in-motion) also going by Xiantian and Houtian. Yang floats upward, yin sinks downward. That's the beginning of heaven and earth. "In the heaven images arise, on earth they take shape," as the Ta Chuan explains it. (Unlike in all hierarchical systems, it's not "heaven first, earth later," it's a mutually dependent and simultaneous process.) And then every step of the way the pattern gets refined/complicated -- up to 64 steps times five times eight and their ten thousand combinations... and that's the outer border of a meaningful pattern. Beyond it lies Hundun, where there's no pattern. Chaos. Plenty of information, no meaning.

Stock market contrarians will tell you that by the time ordinary people on the street are saying to invest in X, it´s time to get out. Opinions are like that too: if everybody believes it, it´s probably no longer true.

The quote from Mathew is about when you can not fight back with anything but your ability to stay centered and say ' Is that all you got ? No matter what you do , my spirit still stands strong' . * The quote from Luke is about when you can fight back and cause change . Life is varied .... and sometimes we need to 'adapt our philosophy' according to circumstances . * Husayn Ali was banished and imprisoned for his beliefs . But he took the ' Matthew approach and that caused people to become curious, admire and eventually follow him . So the authorities would send him somewhere else ; the same would happen there . Even in jails , they would have to move him as the guards started to be effected by him . Eventually he became the leader and founder / prophet of a new world religion .... the Bahai's . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baháʼu'lláh# Previous to this their forerunners , the Babi's took the 'Luke approach ' ... they were crushed by the Muslim forces . .

A typical two truths situation. While they lack reality in an ultimate sense, the systems are still real in a conventional sense, including the distinctions. And jumping too soon to the ultimate truth might mean that one jump off ship before reaching the other shore.

While there are many different approaches to learning the lessons of static stance work, in my work with a number of different systems there seemed to be a basic, simpler stance taught as a platform with modifications built on that - as many as 20 or 30 or more. This often included different leg stances as well. I think one can go quite far in cultivation just with the simple, basic “platform” stance. In my previous comment becoming more adept at having one’s mind absorbed inside applying song and ting, opening yong quan, learning how to respond to physical and mental discomfort and both connecting with and directing the upward rising expanding energy to open the body and build energy can all be cultivated in the basic simple”wuji” stance. In the systems I am familiar with, Additions/modifications are made to the basic platform stance for specific cultivation reasons which will vary based on the art you study and how your teacher was taught. The way I learned Zhang Zhuang was as a specific application working on a specific quality after a good deal of time in basic stance and movement practices. For me the prep work enabled me to connect with the lesson. Others might emphasize ZZ more and earlier in their study for reasons relative to their art and their teacher’s experience/preference. dwai makes an important point about over reliance on static postures and the need to balance them with movement to avoid stagnation and associated health consequences. Easy to get carried away with what you like to do, whatever it is. Trying to physically impose your will on your body practicing something or at a level you are not ready for also could also lead to this and some other nasty problems as well. My yoga teacher always counseled against imposition in practice as it carried a price, sometimes a lot higher than you bargained for. There is another saying from yoga about energy work that I think is applicable here - When taming wild animals it’s usually a good idea to take your time. On balancing static practices with movement, I would emphasize that this movement include movement of the physical body with just Yi and qi (not only external physically based movements). This is important for both cultivation and health reasons.