Nintendao

Therian Quadrobics all the rage 😹

Part of my daily standing exercise includes “standing like a tree trunk" or "holding the beach ball" type of "movement in stillness." I don't usually hold it for very long, five to ten minutes at the end of a larger sequence of huffing and puffing and wiggling about. Rarely staying perfectly still, there is a subtle swaying and settling around, as I like to continuously review and adjust for the Nine Pearls, Four Principles, and Three Harmonies, as in Taijiquan. The Nine Alignments: Feet Pace Earth a.k.a Suction Cup Soles Empty Spirit, Summit Strong a.k.a Suspend From Crown Subtle Shoulders, Weighted Elbows Surround Chest, Expand Back Seated Wrists, Tall Fingers Sink Chi to Dantian Untying Belts, Loosen Corset Tailbone Centered and Upright Rounded Kua, Bent Knees

🧘

This one is sure to be unpopular 😇😈 Medieval alchemists were famous for doing all kinds of weird things, like boiling vats of piss to refine phosphorous, which glows in the dark, so is of course very magical. Internal alchemists, being even more weird, huff and puff and wiggle about in a peculiar way that forces oxygen into the brain, causing them to see various lights floating around, that are of course very spiritual.

https://www.talisman.org/tao/

We can of course get energy by harmonic oscillation with virtual photons from non-commutative phase space (void). Unless you're already experienced with handling sunspot guts (烏肝), best way to start is get some fresh air and a walk.

I like the Cantonese version, "Dough Ducking" 🔊

In this video, the shifu talks about three types of influence over the partners’ movement: fascia, qi, and “spirit body.” The fascia layer, I think this is what internal martial artists develop. Advanced level of sung and ting, can extend sympathetic tensegrity via the slightest contact. Qi manipulation maybe more along the lines of when accomplished practitioners gain the ability to peng the dantian. The spirit body, near the end of the video, he talks about communicating with the students “shadow.” This sounds to me like how hypnotists learn to issue commands directly to the “subconscious.” How could this be, when direct shen perception is considered to require an even more refined cultivation than qi? Perhaps neurolinguistic programming is a technology not unlike acupuncture, but dealing with pure mind. Anyone who can pick up a needle, if shown the precise location, can insert it to affect a meridian. At least to some degree.

One of my all time favorites Seven Taoist Masters translated by Eva Wong, reads like a fairy tale but is based around historical figures that went on to found Dragon Gate Lineage, who to this day includes good teachers for example Damo Mitchell. If you eventually circle back to the Secret of the Golden Flower, that site has a ton of notes in the margins to help on your way. On the other hand if you're into more esoteric side of practice, can't go wrong with Benebell Wen. Oh and welcome to the site!

Aw, you busted me it was a play on words between 发劲 and 法神

When Abraham's grandson Jacob is employed by the shepherd Laban, he is allowed to take and keep for his own family any sheep that have dark or spotted wool. So he invents a peculiar way of getting more and better sheep, described in chapter 30 of Genesis. The placement of striped sticks appears to be a rudimentary form of one of the uses of fu talismans, where strips of paper with specific inscriptions are placed in strategic locations to cause luck or other desired result. Another popular example, the Urim and Thummim, though mentioned several times, are not explicitly described, but understood to be a system of yes/no divination, similar to jiaobei.

Hey i'm just playing with sticks and stones here! didn't expect a fully miraculous materialization. Your use of the word vessels there though.. really got me to thinking about it on a few other levels. If not the qi filling the eight extraordinary vessels in the greater orbit, or even the prized exudate of jade liquid, the tears of a widow could sometimes be even more precious. Now not trying to interpret a precise meaning of such a scripture, as Spirit continues to reveal in different ways to different people at different times, the oil seemed most analogous to the de (as in daodejing) whos translation as simply virtue, hides what sages come to know as an almost tangible substance of its own, that is multiplied and shared amongst the hearts of the humble.

That's pretty cool. I did run into some botanical interpretations for the story, but none taking into account the power of mycelium. That reminds me of the manna loaves that Moses ate while wandering the desert, that are often thought to have actually been some kind of mushroom. Small, white, round things, in the dew around the camp (Exodus 16:14). Maybe they had some moldy canvas tents that were harboring spores.

Amen. Energizing as this thread has been, it does seem to go in a circles at this point, and especially out of respect to brother Rudi, even though others may not share that sentiment, good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow. ☯

I agree. But objectively speaking, a fist hitting a face constitutes violence.

I notice a lot of the debunker bros on youtube tend to be into MMA. How much does a ticket to one of those matches cost? Sure it's not technically a scam, but maybe even worse, to exploit the potentially addictive adrenaline rush associated with witnessing violence. Using magic powers to lure people into learning a healthy breathing exercise, seems benign compared to the fight organizer reaping hundreds of thousands by convincing two guys to smash eachothers face to bits.

Omigosh.. one summer when I was a teenager, I became obsessed with watching a pirated VHS of Jackie Chan's "Spiritual Kung Fu," where he gets haunted by animal spirits who teach him the lost art of five fists. In classic Nintendao fashion, i treated this like a dang instructional video, and went leaping around the neighborhood looking for spirits, using random tree trunks as makeshift muk jongs. Looking back i was in legit qi deviation for a good couple weeks. Granted i'd also been consuming an amateur concoction of gotu kola, ginko biloba, ginseng and eleuthero, which i stopped doing when i realized things might be getting out of hand. Thankfully managed to not get arrested or too badly injured, and it eventually ran its course. To give you and idea of where i was at, one of the many "insights" i remember receiving at the time was discovering the earth really was flat, and the related cover-ups being perpetrated 💀💀💀 😳

Haha yes I was almost surprised to see in the video “The Martial Camp” banner in the background. The physical cultivation developed beyond just hitting each other, but especially as Mark was saying earlier, it now becomes more about the “arts” side of it. Like if someone exquisite at the sport of fencing, probably still gets sliced to ribbons pretty quick by an assassin with so much as a pocket knife. Some people may respect the sheer power more, but myself I’d rather be friends with the fencer. The more I learn experientially about the subject, looking at these kinds of videos I see a lot of details differently than say ten years ago and just thinking “wow cool jedi powers.” As for hypnotism side of it, It was something I wondered about based on ideas from another thread about “mesmerism” looking at similar results. So there again, for me being someone who has seen mentalists at a talent show, but never trained in it, might as well look like voodoo.

Yeh, if it was made of that kind of stuff, it most likely would have already been detected and understood, at least to the extent we can understand what any energy really is. There are still some big questions around gravity and dark matter. For as many ramblings as I go on about chemicals and electricity and magnets, I haven’t even touched much on quantum effects. Basically other dimensions. I like that. The sun heats the air (Spirit influences the mind) Coreolis effect causes wind (Mind shapes the qi) Wind presses on water to make waves (Qi supports the body) 🌞🌬️🌊🏄‍♀️

Yes, it's turned into quite the spectacle So Rudi, how often do you get asked to do a "James Randi challenge" type of demonstration? Like with credentialed experts observing and yadda yadda.

Of course! Knowing how the trick is done might spoil the fun, but I do get a kick out of Penn and Teller. On stage performance is deliberately deceptive, and takes skill to conceal. Absolutely I have also been completely screwed over by sneaky bastards at certain times in life, that had I been less naïve, might have been able to avoid. At this point I might not call it expertise, so much as having been just dumb enough to have gained explicit knowledge of the difference between watching a fireworks display, and having explosives go off in my hand. Take that both literally and figuratively 😅 I don't deny that objectivity and repeatability are extremely important. I have also noticed that over-reliance on analysis vs experience can become dogmatic. Most people can agree on the direct similarity between a synapse firing and a lightning strike, albeit at extremes of scale. Why is it so hard to accept that the natural energy processes we are built from can be trained up? There's a reason this work takes years upon years of gradually beefing up the handling capacity.

The thing is, nobody needs a thermometer to know that fire is hot. In the time before human ability to control fire, meeting it naturally would be rare if at all, depending on where one lived. People who saw or felt fire and tried to explain it to other people, might well have been thought to be making stuff up, or to have been involved in something super mystical. Then on the other hand some people that lived next to a volcano might have gotten accustomed to working with it directly. What I'm saying is, here's a guy who went and trained with volcano people, and is offering to show others exactly how to do something that they might not yet be convinced even exists. Sure some people might have heard about fire before, or maybe water, and studied it in great depth theoretically, and hallucinated through various levels of what it actually feels like to have a candle up their nose, or a bucket of ice dumped on their head, but if you then take that person and expose it to the real thing, things might change for them very quickly.

Again i’m not saying that qi is strictly equivalent to electromagnetism, any more than oil is to water, but both are technically liquids. Alchemy maybe more akin to a campfire, where chemicals stored in the wood are oxidized, yielding radiation in the form of heat and light. By using different materials and physical arrangements, such as to promote better air flow, a fire can be made to work more efficiently, or in novel ways. This is legit physical process and imagination need not have anything to do with it, other than to help in “leading the ox”

Daoism does also include a whole other side, of altar magic and spirit communication. Usually disregarded as woowoo delulu in more westernized approaches. Nevertheless is still practiced in much the same way as thousands of years ago. Practitioners learned to transfer qi into the altar or other tools, and even into other realms of existence. How can that energy exist outside the body? It's easy for us to accept electricity leaving its circuit in extreme examples like a tesla coil. Electromagnetic radiation is well understood and gives us wireless communication that even works in vacuum. There's no reason qi can't do the same types of movement. Needless to say the wattage level is so low that current technology can barely detect the external magnetic field of biological sources, let alone decode the infinitesimally intricate signal patterns that may be encoded therein. But it is there.