silent thunder

You definitely get a good work out here

Science is amazing and it's helped us out incredibly, but it does not provide a full model or complete understanding. Science has not purged hunger, disease, death, murder, rape, suicide, emotional abuse from our experience. It's definitely allowed us to perform some of the processes on that list faster... but science is not our savior. Science answers some questions and raises many more and I love it. But it is one facet of my experience. My point here is not to fill your cup too full. Living in the answer is to miss the bliss of the question. Life is larger than science and kung fu and qigong and real spirituality and fake spirituality (whatever that might be) and etc. Let's look at Mo Pai. I'd never heard of it before arriving here. I find it very interesting and so have read many of the threads on it and my take is that it is a very deep and intense system comprised of 73 levels, (level 2 being split into a/b ). It seems from the descriptions I've encountered here; like a highly secretive, closed system, with a reputation of being extremely exclusionary and somewhat xenophobic to outsiders. Even if the exclusionary and xenophobic traits are overblown and false in the descriptions on this board and it is wide open, this simple fact hangs in my craw when you attack spontaneous movement as useless entertainment; and that is this: No one aside from the two reported masters who have achieved the 73rd level know what the entire system comprises, so... Can you with any certainty state that between your current level of understanding of Mo Pai and it's highest level there does not exist any spontaneous movement or wuji aspects? I was exposed to wuji and shaking by a qigong master with decades of experience. Living in the answer is a defensive posture and closes me up to life. Living the question refines and tunes me in to the present moment. Assumption is a harsh mistress.

I used to have an incredible memory for certain things. When I was in the acting phase of my life, I would memorize the entire script. It came without effort. By the time the other actors were off book with their parts, I'd have the whole show in my head. This was partly a survival instinct on my part, in case anyone else went up on lines, I wanted to be able to get us back on track and not lose information central to the plot in the process. When working at the bank, I would memorize the account numbers for corporate transfers... (this gave my boss nightmares, but I never slipped up). These days, I can recall some quotes and still memorize my bank account and serious numbers. But my recall for long text is all but gone. Use it or lose it I guess. Perhaps it's time to start working this area out again as part of my cultivation and memorizing some monologues. Or perhaps this is natures' natural path of decreasing what isn't necessary.

I'm at an age now, when I get to play the game... Why did I walk into this room?>

Science is one spoke on the wheel. Qigong is another. Religious thinking another... All spokes meet at the emptiness in the center. Emptiness trumps all. Don't be afraid to settle enough to let the waters of the mind clear.

Thanks for sharing your experience, knowing it would be unpopular. All paths stem from and return to Source.

I built sets and props for seasons 2 and 3. Never watched the show, but loved the crew and my time there.

My wife once followed my doppelganger for a couple of blocks before confronting him, wanting to know why he/I was not at work, but was walking around downtown. As soon as he turned around, she realized he was not me. She was shaken that someone could randomly so look like another. While filming on Community I had several grips call me 'Crash!'. When they got closer and see that I have no tattoos, they realize I am not Crash and then they have this astonished moment of... 'holy hells, you are like his identical twin, you even sound the same.' For me it's representative of dominant patterned genetic variation within large sample groups. With 7+ billion alive now, + all those who've come before, it's not surprising to me that there exists similar repetitive genetic expression.

My practice of wuji happens spontaneously and frequently begins in response to music. Presence in the moment seems different when a natural movement slides unhindered into the next without some knowledge of what move should/must come next and this yields clarity in my case. Clarity and dynamic relaxation pair well. Empty mind, big soft heart.

Real pity the way things turned against the Gnostics and experiential Christianity. I find good resonance in the words of Brother Thomas...

*raises hand* I'll be enjoying it with you... welcome!

I always have a bowel movement shortly after I eat. Usually it's a good sign and is called gastrocolic reflex. Do you have pain?

Welcome to the Bums. Five posts in the lobby and you'll have access to the rest of the forum. Peace.

Nada Himalaya by Deuter is one of two albums I can put on repeat and have cycle for days at a time. The other is here: http://devaproject.com/product/wonderland-gaia-healing/

Sure thing. I loved ghee. I use coconut oil now for cooking instead of ghee, but that is only due to my wife's extreme sensitivity to any dairy.

I like to clean when I'm trying to burn off anger. Just have to be careful not to rub the finish off the furniture...

Eat good food=Awesome medicine in my world.

For me, the only real component of measurement that matters, is direct experience. That was the only thing that overcame my materialist upbringing/conditioning.

The inertia of anger. In pride, as a young man, I strove for solitude and isolation as I began to realize the injustice of the world. Seeking anything that would prove I was apart, special, different, unique... let's face it, better than this fucked up world and all its hate and waste. A rejection of the world. A retreat. I found it. And as my isolation grew, so did my anger at the insidious injustice of the world. Everything that was so wrong with all of the rest of these poor deluded fools. These conditions fueled each other. Anger. Isolation. Judgement. Punishment. Fun... Spent years in the justified pursuit of punishing the deserving. What a sad process! Getting off on identifying the guilty and attacking them with vile anger, leading to feelings of further isolation, more judgement. Hurtful. Vicious. Cycle. Woke up some years later as I lay with my head hanging off of a cliff, psylocyben mushrooms flowing through my veins. After sprinting up the last mile to the top of the cliff, my friend and I lay down on the edge of the cliff. Just laying there perfectly relaxed watching the hawks soar effortlessly on the thermals, this thought occurred to me. I realized that I had been angry nearly every day of my life, for the past untold number of years and that if I wanted to... for as long as I had breath... I could continue to be angry. That in this world, there would always be something justifiably worthy of my anger nearby in almost any circumstance. The magnitude of how much effort it took to maintain that kind of anger sat on me then, pressing on my sense of self as if I were under the cliff, not upon it. Then I let it go. I just let it go. The need to always identify what's right and get angry at what's wrong. The psychotic need to defend what I think of as right and punish what I think is wrong. The audacity that I thought I understood the right way for the world, for everyone and that in my head somehow I'd convinced myself I should and could enforce my will. Like if I didn't impose my idea of right, that I was failing to save the world. Just the shear exhaustion involved in the realization of how much energy it takes to maintain the inertia of that anger hit me and in that moment, I dropped it. just dropped it. gone... and I realized that from that moment on, if anger were to gain momentum in my life, I would have to feed it. Like a repeating cycle, exponential growth. I cannot ignore the negative things in life. I do not hide. I cannot. I see them. I acknowledge them, but I don't wallow in them. I no longer gorge myself on them. I no longer feed on them with savage glee. I no longer get off on it. I take action on what I can, when I can. When I take action. I strive to share four things. Humor, Love, Curiosity, Communion. I do still have anger. It's natural, even necessary at times. But the way a gardener prunes though, with love. Or if called to the path of the warrior, then with remorse. Never in glee. Never malice. So if I pick anger up occasionally, still to this day some decades later, it is tempered with understanding and compassion. My desire to punish is gone. I have no interest in punishment. I strive to heal. You. Me. All. Any. My life now is fueled by curiosity, love, communion, humor, silence. I still seek retreat in solitude, but it is no longer a rejection of the world. It is no longer isolation. More like, deep consideration. A settling of the waters. A recalibration. And when I return, it is a celebration. Reunion!

One simple way I've seen is to measure the heat emitted from the hands using thermal imagery.

I would love to have the sun filter as well... just not an option with that price. The six inch I picked up came with a great tripod and is motor driven so I can track objects with small adjustments. It's amazing when you start watching, how quickly everything slides around up there isn't it?

I have a tripod for it. It's just a six inch, but I can get the rings of Saturn and Jupiter is a trip with various filters.

grabbed these with my telescope last year

Balance in all things.... hehehe

Learned something good about support and balance in my stance yesterday while practicing at the beach. I was standing just inside the surf line. So eventually my feet had been buried in the sand. Blissful feeling by the way. In my form we hold open the yong chuan by lightly gripping the ground with the toes and the outside edge of the foot. I'd been feeling my stance is a bit wide recently, but was doggedly saying to myself 'no do the work/don't wimp out' etc. At the beach I could really feel the tension in the outside of my knees, so I narrowed my stance and having the sand there to fully contact every portion of the foot, provided some great play in awareness of foot position and in opening the yong chuan and remaining supported/relaxed. Very good point, with the mental aspect. After yesterday's realization at the beach, I reminded myself in this morning's practice to narrow my stance a bit and when I did, I noticed I had inadvertently been holding the perineum locked. My mind had been very unsettled up to that point; reacting to noises outside that normally don't affect my concentration, even becoming little emotional scenarios in my mind-theater. Seriously ungrounded. The moment I narrowed my stance, released the tension in the perineum and then relaxed the tension I didn't know my feet were holding, resulted in very pleasant, full body buzzing/awareness that was relaxed and intense. The tiniest adjustments in the feet or hands, a knee, anything, could shift the energetic buzz out of an area, or settle it again over the entire body. What this told me was that good position promotes strong flow. As for the footwear and the other aspects, it can't hurt to have cotton or barefoot, but in the end, I sense the Qi finds a way no matter what.