ChunMaya

You raise a really important point. My impression of Damo from his online interviews is the same — he seems like a genuinely kind person with his heart in the right place. The stories about him banning students from forums over minor things strike me more as leftover behavior from past wounds or insecurities — which is fine. No one is perfect, and I don’t hold that against him. What matters more to me is whether the actual techniques work. That said, increasing Qi and its circulation almost always stirs up unresolved issues and buried behavioral patterns. When blockages begin to clear, the symptoms that surface rarely look flattering — because they’re symptoms of dysfunction leaving the system. It’s easy to judge someone’s behavior at that stage and label them as flawed, but often it’s just Qi doing its work. Internal cultivation takes years — sometimes decades — and the process rarely finishes completely. Maybe a handful of people clear everything in a single lifetime, but that’s likely the exception, not the rule.

You’re reacting like being wrong somehow makes you unworthy. It doesn't. Being wrong does not make you a bad person. No one cares — we’ve all been wrong before. It’s not a big deal. Just let it go. It really doesn't matter.

Geez. Throwing around random, unrelated topics and bizarre assumptions about someone you’ve never even met — all because I called out your religious derail. This thread was about verifying Damo’s skill and Neidan practice, not your need to shoehorn in theology and take cheap shots. Stay on topic.

Ah, and here it is — the inevitable derail into religious fluff. We were talking about a YouTube channel. A guy stopped uploading. Somehow that turned into Bible verses, Satan, and vague doomsday prophecies about “truth” and “science” — as if quoting scripture automatically elevates your opinion into objective reality. Let’s be real: conflating Jesus with “science and truth” is laughable. Science doesn’t require belief. It’s falsifiable, testable, and self-correcting. Religion is none of those things. So trying to frame it as if turning away from your particular belief system is turning away from “truth” is intellectually dishonest. This kind of post always reeks of projection. It’s never about truth. It’s about feeling superior — wrapping emotional bias in spiritual language and hoping no one calls it out. Newsflash: people can disagree with your worldview and not be “of Satan.” Not everyone who's tired of fairy tales is “running from truth.” Some of us just grew up. Let’s stay on topic. Damo didn’t get silenced. He just stopped uploading. No grand conspiracy. No cosmic battle between light and dark. Just a dude not posting videos.

Yeah his channel is still available on YT. Last video was uploaded 9 months ago. Looks like he just stopped uploading.

Why'd it get shut down?

Honestly, this resonates with me. Enlightenment to me isn't some distant goal to pursue—it's simply the natural result of purification. Like burning the haystack to reveal the needle. At the core of it all, there seems to be one root canker that gives rise to the others: the sense of separation. In Sanskrit, it's called Avidya—the primordial forgetting of the true Self. I see this as the true origin of evil. Separation hurts. And most human behavior is a compensatory attempt to soothe that pain—chasing status to feel significant, pleasure to mask the absence of real joy, becoming someone as a substitute for simply being.

Thanks for the honest reply—what you're describing is textbook energetic and psychological suppression. Apathy isn't emptiness. It's blockage. When you're not moved by beauty or suffering, it's because something is binding your internal responsiveness—your capacity to feel. That image you gave—“wires of energy that tie my thoughts down”—is your nervous system trying to describe an internal restraint. Whether it's emotional trauma, cognitive overregulation, or energetic congestion, the result is the same: a kind of mental suffocation. Here’s something worth sitting with: If your thoughts are tied down, then who—or what—is doing the tying? And equally: Who is noticing it? Don’t chase answers. Just let those questions simmer and see what rises. Often, the thing doing the tying is a layer of the self that’s outside of your current awareness and afraid of vulnerability—afraid of desire, afraid of being moved. And remember—not wanting is still a form of desire. Apathy is often the surface mask for something deeper that wants to stay hidden.

It sounds like what you're experiencing is apathy. This flattened emotional state often arises from a few core issues: The suppression or removal of desire. A contracted sense of self. You may still feel like a separate, isolated identity—cut off from the flow of existence. When experience is filtered through that separation, everything feels distant and sterile. If there’s no joy, it simply means something is still blocking it. Joy is your natural state. Its absence signals that something unconscious is in the way—but you’re not yet aware of what that is. It’s not about forcing or chasing joy. It’s about clearing the internal clutter that veils it. Joy surfaces on its own when the interference is gone. Think of it like this: if you’re searching for a needle in a haystack, you don’t need to force anything—you just need to burn away the hay. That “hay” is your accumulated tension, narratives, resistance, and noise. The more you rest in pure being—without trying to fix, analyze, or achieve—the more the unconscious begins to dissolve. Most people get stuck in this flat state because their awareness hasn’t yet penetrated the deeper layers of the unconscious—desires, motives, fears. You have to become aware of what lies outside your current awareness to uncover the blocks and burn through them. Don’t try to observe the unconscious. Just be. Let awareness do the work. The reason I say “just be” is because any instruction that uses a verb tends to make people do something—when the real point is to stop doing entirely. Even a phrase like “pay attention” subtly encourages effort. Do nothing. Just be. And let awareness simmer. Joy will resurface at some point.

Very interesting tech. If that’s the case, then proper via negativa practice becomes non-negotiable. It’s the only way to discern your true self from whatever distortions or overlays are running in your bodymind. Without discernment, you’re just a puppet to whatever’s influencing you—whether thats your minds own script or an external script from outside yourself.

I hadn’t come across the concept of the cankers before — but that’s an incredibly precise model. It explains why someone can have knowledge, training, even wisdom, and still be unconsciously driven by subtle egoic forces. It nails the underlying mechanics of craving, identity, and distortion far better than most frameworks out there. This kind of clarity should be taught from childhood — it’s foundational.

Thanks for your detailed post. That's super interesting about Gautama's description of abiding in the third concentration. I'm not familiar with his instructions but I feel like it lines up perfectly with something I stumbled upon in cultivation. Which is when sitting for cultivation in half or full lotus, before working on LDT, I will bring awareness/presence/beingness to MDT and still/release it. I read in Awakening to Reality that the root of mentation (thinking or endless thoughts) comes from the Huangting (Yellow Court) or MDT or whatever you want to call it. When that null point is disturbed, it creates a restless mind. And so stilling the MDT naturally stilled the mind, released internal tension in the breath (all the interconnected musculature and fascia related to breathing), and allowed natural concentration to take hold. I always do this step first before moving to LDT until stillness is reached, otherwise the session is useless. This seems to line up with what you posted with regards to Gautama, so thanks for that.

This is true. In CST Wing Chun, we dont use LDT at all. Some students would come in from Tai Chi schools or Bagua with preconceived ideas that because we were an internal school, then we must be using LDT. Not the case. We use a completely different engine - our spine. And we do not include the shins when finding our center of mass, which would naturally mean it would sit around MDT. I call it center of leverage to be more accurate as it is not actually the MDT being used either. Most people don't realise that you can move the bodys' center of weight, as it is a barycenter and not a fixed thing. There is a Qi component at advanced levels but that Qi can not extend beyond the body. Whilst there is some overlap between systems, Neigong in my view is about building Yang Shen and ultimately retaining consciousness when the body dies. So to that end LDT development is important, but not necessary for martial arts power.

Pragmatically speaking, the level of evil in the world today (and since time immemorial) is closely tied to the amount of unconscious fear and unchecked desire people are carrying. At its root, it’s fear of suffering—not death, but suffering in all its forms. The more unconsciously someone fears suffering, the more likely they are to engage in evil actions: exploitation, theft, abuse, manipulation, etc. And the flip side is also true—the more someone is consumed by desire, the more likely they are to harm others in pursuit of relief, control, or gratification. But underneath both fear and desire lies something even deeper: the illusion of separation. The belief that we are isolated, disconnected beings trying to survive alone in a hostile world. Once that illusion takes hold, self-preservation becomes the highest priority—regardless of who gets hurt. Layer on top of that a lack of self-awareness (ignorance), and you've got the perfect conditions for evil to flourish: people blindly reacting to internal chaos, with no understanding of the root causes driving them. Even in extreme cases—rape, torture, senseless violence—the perpetrator is often trying to escape some kind of internal torment. They’re not acting from pure malice but from a twisted attempt to feel power, pleasure, or release from their own existential pain. That doesn’t excuse it—but it helps explain it. As for whether evil has increased, who knows. The world population is at a record high, so the raw number of evil acts may have gone up, but proportionally, it may have actually dropped. Either way, the level of evil we experience is a direct reflection of how much fear, desire, and unconscious separation is driving human behavior. The less those forces control us, the more harmony naturally emerges.

Thank you for sharing your experience. That’s fascinating — especially the part about Damo stopping public transmissions after that incident. I can see how something that intense could shift his teaching style and priorities. Your story also reinforces for me that Damo has genuine LDT development. What really interests me is how different systems or teachers articulate what the LDT is and how it forms. Most explanations tend to stay within traditional or symbolic language, but it's rare to hear it described using more functional models — especially ones grounded in field theory. Damo calling it a “magnetic container” stood out to me. That’s the closest I've heard someone get to an accurate mechanical description. It aligns well with how I understand the LDT from my own training and research.