erdweir

 

What I don't quite get is how these Taoist practices are going to lead to Enlightenment. I am specifically thinking of Lei Shan Dao, or some other form of serious Taoist cultivation method, not for example Healing Tao which I have little regard for. How does building a Dan Tian change you into an Enlightened one? What is the mechanism to this, how does that mechanism correlate with the Buddhist mechanisms to Enlightenment. Because to me I don't "understand" how they both lead to the same state.

 

Hey 11:33, I think the building up of energy in the dantien is necessary for the transformations that occur in the later stages of internal alchemy. The Healing Tao gives a roadmap for this process, but I agree with you, I dont have much trust in it. You know Michael Winn admitted on his forum that Mantak Chia had never even done the Kan and Li practices, so what is he publishing? Guesses? Someone else's untried instructions? And I would listen to all the people trying to turn you away from the Lei Shan Dao stuff. The whole thing is highly suspect. But anyway, lets get back to the Dantien... once you have enough Jing, you transform it into Chi, and then transform Chi to Shen, etc. In the begging you just have to collect enough energy to start. You have to have something to transform.

There are other taoists out there who teach internal alchemy, some of them are at taoists spots in china like Wudang and Huashan, or just hanging out in their acupuncture shops. It's had to say whether the goal of internal alchemy is enlightenment or immortality or oneness with the tao. I guess there are various uses for it. I know some people who practice Bon Internal Alchemy, but I dont know much about it. suppsedly there are allot of similarities and differences. then there are the western methods, Mayan ones, etc.

and as far as buddhist masters who dont practice Qi Gong, yes, perhaps, but many of the buddhists, especially the tantric ones from tibet and nepal, are doing energy culitvation, they just call it Pranayama and Kundalini and so forth. Prana and Chi are the same thing. The greeks called it Pneuma, there are lots of names and allot of ways to cultivate energy. Look at the dances in the end of the meetings with remarkable men film if you want to see some weird sufi alternatives..

And Creation, If you want to trust Kosta's book about Chang, Chang says in the book that he is not a Taoist, he is a teacher of a type of kung fu called simply nei kung. And yet his practices reek of taoist concepts, like yin and yang, so maybe he is using taoist methods without the doctrines? had to say exactly.

 

Generally you can study in a school, and once you have mastered that school, and reached a supreme level there you can expand in another school. And maybe reach a sinthesis between those two schools. But if you do this before having understood the ins and outs of your school you are in dangerous unexplored land. Here be dragons.

They truly danced together for more than a thousand years. The daoism that mixed with Buddhism to create chan was already a form of daoism that was heavily influenced by buddhism.

 

My thoughts exactly. You have to understand the rules before you can break them.

Ah yes, so maybe good and evil isnt the question. Sorry for reading too much into your words. There is allot of strife in nature. And martial arts can be deadly, and beautiful at the same time. Where is the sense in all of it?

There are allot of ugly things in nature, but none of them are quite as ugly as what mankind has done to it. They say that if you are in tune with the universe, you will experience less strife. If you are not, you experience more. There must be allot of people out there who are not in tune from the look of things. I am one of them, but only partially. I am trying to wake up.

Allot of western philosophers have thought that humans are inherently violent or peaceful, I am not sure we are inherently anything. You can do anything with a person, turn them into a divine or profane being, but a plant or an animal will usually just stay what it is, unless we pervert it.

I too have questioned the world, and the only thing i can think of to justify it is that it must serve some purpose. what greater purpose must it serve and still be justified given all the suffering in it? the only thing I can think of is that it is a challenge for us to overcome. Maybe like the Buddhists, trying to escape the cycles of birth and death, or just in meeting it without struggle. If it doesn't have any greater purpose it must be some cruel cosmic joke huh?

I choose to believe nature, including all of the pain and death, is here for a reason. Some would say i am just wishing and hoping, and perhaps I am, but living in a Nihilist world view seems to dark for me. Why would we want meaning so badly if there is none? and why would we be so sensitive to the dark aspects of reality if there were no lesson in it? It's easy to say you believe in the better possibilties the world offers us a chance to pursue, it's much harder to actually pursue them. maybe the reason you are questioning the cruelty of nature is that your practice, which you say you are losing faith in, is waking you up a little? Just a guess, but awareness can be a cruel dawn, the dark night of the soul the mystic goes through before the bliss is reached.

Perfection, in my opinion, is not a thing of this world. we somehow have an idea of it nonetheless. This can be quite a torture, but you have to place things in their proper world. The abstractions of mathematics and philosophy are amazing, but they live up in the ether. if you want to know them better, you have to go up there where they live.

No official views here, just my own private drivel.

The western mind seems to have been mistrustful of nature since the old testament. The greeks were healthier about it, but our metaphysical myths are still mostly biblical. This problem of evil in nature obsessed the early church, and they argued endlessly about it. I feel that capitalism has inherited this alienated view of nature and we are all paying the price for it now. Islam has some of the same roots unfortunately.

Taoism seems to be more accepting of nature, and doesn't seem to be as obsessed with the ideas of good and evil. Evil is a tricky concept, hard to justify allot of things in the world once you accept it as valid. One thing you might ask yourself is are you really in a position to judge nature? And do we need to judge nature at all? why attach all of these moral divisions to it?

One of the goals I have in life is to reach a state of mind where I can approach every situation, no matter how difficult, with equanimity. So if something really "bad" happens to me, I will be able to react with mental ripples, not mental tidal waves. Another goal I have is to regard life and death as equals, so I am not afraid of either.

 

My problem is that I tend to jump from one spiritual practice to another. I have struggled mightily against this tendency. So far I have stuck with Silent Illumination meditation of the Zen tradition. But is it okay to practice more than one form of meditation? Or is it better to become adept at just one?

God I hear that. I started doing Mantak Chia's practices and am looking for something else now. It was able to get me into a good non-reactive state but I had weird energetic issues from the practice and creepy shit started happening to me so I backed off from it. I didnt have a teacher so who knows how flawed the practices were. for myself, I can say they weren't right. Not grounded enough for me. Now I am trying to work on basic stillness and breathing. Sitting still is hard for me, but I am getting better at it. I guess as long as you keep looking for something and working on it then you are doing the right thing. But some would say the opposite, that searching is the problem... so Zen. And you can end up with bad people out there. I think there are allot of different ways to get to the same place, it is more of a matter of how you want to get there. I think if you find a practice you can work with, you should stick with it for a while and see where it takes you. otherwise you are just flitting around dabbling in this and that.

I also like what Hagar is saying above, about how tricky spiritual goals can be, I find this a strange problem myself. On one hand goals can motivate me, on the other they can trick me into thinking I am trying to fill a spiritual bank account or some such nonsense. Having some emotional stability is not such a crazy spiritual aspiration though, it a just a good foundation you (and also myself) are looking for.

Enlightenment is such a loaded word, it means different things to different people.

Enlightenment can be a loaded word, but I actually like it, and words like illuminati, because they contain the word light or lumina, which to me is the crux of the matter.

I've heard of both, and am familiar with people with powers and "abilities" but are they considered Enlightened?

The powers or energy these people have is just a sign of their achievement, not the goal.

People here talk allot about Master Wang Liping (of the Dragon Gate sect of the Quan Zhen school of Taoism in China) as being a full realized Living Taoist Immortal. I dont know much besides his rep, but he has a seriously high rep. There is a book about his training called Opening the Dragon Gate

Also John Chang of Java is thought to be a very powerful master, another Living Taoist Immortal. The sect he is from is called Mo Pai. His rep comes largely from some crazy videos, like the Ring of Fire documentary, look him up on you tube or read The Magus Of Java

If you search these names on this forum, you will find allot of posts

very interesting

Yes, Unfortunately Daumal died fairly young from tuberculosis he got from doing dangerous drug experiments on himself with carbon tetrachloride. His alternative to surrealism was an interesting one, his group was more dedicated to the occult than Andre Breton's, and they supposedly developed some real psychic abilities. he was also self taught in Sanskrit and translated some texts into french.

I haven't read mount analogue, but I have read his other novel. It's a kind of dry satire on ordinary consciousness, which i didnt find very compelling personally, but it has it's insights.

I dont think El Topo holds up as well as Holy Mountain, but to counter the rumor above, Jodorowsky was well versed in LSD when he made it. And it ain't more coherent. The El Topo book is full of drug references. Holy Mountain was made with allot more money, John Lennon saw El Topo and Holy Mountain was better funded and produced by Alan Klein, the manager of the Beatles.

Another movie well worth watching by him is Santa Sangre. It's more about psychopathology than his earlier films, and more autobiographical. He made it in the mid 80's. I found it to be a total MindF@ck, over the top twisted and more emotionally intense than the earlier films.

There are some other movies he made that I haven't seen, like The Rainbow Thief and Trunk, which are not so well regarded. He supposedly made a movie called Son of El Topo In the 90's. He also wrote some comics that were published in Heavy Metal and other places. Before he did films he directed some surrealist theatre productions in Mexico City during the 60's. There is an autobiography as well.

Hey everyone im new to the forum. I actually have been reading here for a while but registered to join this topic. I had a Kundalini rising when i was 17 or 16 cant remember.

How did your Kundalini rising happen? Were you meditating or did it just come about spontaneously? If you were meditating, were you doing Kundalini Yoga or something else?

Where did you hear about Hu Xuezhi? I only know of him because of Dao Zhen. He has studied quite a bit with Hu Xuezhi (so I gather from Revealing the Tao Te Ching) but I don't know what he is up to now.

 

He hasn't posted in a while, even though he seems to check back here occasionally. If you are reading this Dao Zhen: I have very great appreciation for your contributions to this forum and I hope you are well.

 

What in the world happened to eternalspringtours.com? I really would like to go on one, so I hope they are still doing the tours when I can get the money to go. But the site not existing does not bode well.

His name is on a website that I found of the internet just trolling for places to go check out in china. here is a link: http://www.damo-qigong.net/

Laurie Spiegel

Delia Derbyshire

Hello Fire Dragon,

thankyou for your reply,when I have achieved the mco i have felt pulses of heat shooting up my back and my top lip sweats,this I have done through tai chi practice and chi kung,this has then healed up old injuries that never quite whent away and also arthritis.

What does kundalini feel like?.

sabretooth.

I am no expert i this, but I would second the reply above. Georg Feuerstein says in the lost teachings of yoga that the prana(chi) that you experience from doing pranayama or chi kung/tai chi is one type of energy, and the Kundalini is of a higher intensity and intelligence. Kundalini awakenings can be traumatic to the extreme (see Gopi Krishna's book) if they occur spontaneously. Another description of it is in Shadow Strategies of an American Ninja Master by Glen Morris. His didnt sound too pleasant either, but he seemed to have dealt with it better than Gopi Krishna. It basically comes raging up your spine and blows your head off, but I have never experienced it so I cant really tell you much beyond that. The kind of things you are describing from your practice are pretty common Chi experiences I think, I have had much of the same.

I did have an experience with red hot snakes of energy snarling up my spine and some Chi Kung and Taoist Yoga teachers told me it was probably Kundalini but I kind of doubt this myself. If it was it wasnt a full on awakening. I have read that yogi's sometimes refer to sheaths of Kundalini, like there are layers or levels to it. I dont really understand this, maybe someone else would care to explain? Is it possible to have a half assed Kundalini experience?

What drugs were you addicted to if you don't mind me asking?

this isnt a drug thread, but since you asked, the one i think is hardest to quit is sugar, also caffeine is a bitch as well...

Erdwier,

 

It sounds to me like you nearly did the astral projection thing, from the energy sensations and the lights you saw.

 

The dark shape you saw was probably a manifestation of your fears, balancing your mind and emotions will remove that sort of thing, and help with the subconcious manifesting. Otherwise next time you start to get out you can affirm that how safe you actaully are, and use your imagination to blow away that sort of thing easily.

 

Good luck.

I like the dark shape, it's my friend. maybe you are confusing me with the guy who took a bong hit and passed out on the couch..

Thanks for the luck. god everybody thinks i am about ready to eject my body. how crazy. see what happens next.

Dao Zhen, are you studying with Hu Xuezhi? I noticed you edited one of his books, and I would like to find out more about him. I was thinking about going to china in the fall and checking some things out and he was one of the people i wanted to look up.

The pratice in question is Xing Shen Zhuang which is a widely practiced moving forms in China. Xing Shen Zhuang was dervied from an earlier form from the Ermei lineage by Dr. Pang Ming in the 1980s. It is a good form and i have no doubt that it is beneficial to the practitioner, so the "it works" i believe it means his health has improved. Two students who leant directlt from Pang Ming began teaching this form in the USA since the 1990s, a dvd can be purchased for about $50 and you can learn directly from them in person for a few hundreds, this is exactly the same form as taught by Verdesi as confirmed by former students of his who has seen the dvd. I don't know where Verdesi learnt it from but what he did is srite some fantastical article on the form to repackage it for resale for thousands of dollars. Of course by looking at the old posts here, his followers claim that their form is the "secret one", the only one you can get from Verdesi. This is of course as false as their claim that Master Wang will only teach you "inner" teaching by going through Verdesi.

Thanks for the info..

 

If you begin to have OBE's just don't cling on them and don't search to achieve them because this is a trap is a sidetrack that eventually will lead you to become a ghost after physical death. The final goal is spiritual immortality and enlightenment and this is a very long journey that will take a lifetime maybe several lifetimes. And we need all the lessons in the real physical life for this purpose, it's a mistake to live only in the world of imagination/visions. Meditation should give you the clarity of seeing the real world. This is just my credo.

I agree with your credo, I am not trying to become a psychic tourist. Never heard of the ghost trap before. Yes we do need this world, why else would we be here?

 

Don't you find it ironic that you are stealing random articles from a private forum in order to make an unprovoked attack on someone else's integrity?

 

Is that a confirmation that these articles are actually Written by David V and you have seen them on the forum?

Erdweir, I cannot thank you enough for sharing your experiences. My similar experiences soon started occurring after taking up Dan Tien breathing meditation. And I do have to agree with your assumption that the herb plays a part in subconscious parts of the brain/spiritual aspects; I'm 19 and have been smoking for two years and have experienced some pretty surreal things while in deep meditation after toking up. This seems like an appropriate thread to ask if anyone else is familiar with what I'm describing: I don't know exactly when I gained this 'ability', but I somehow found that I could manipulate some sort of force located in my head, above ad between the eyes, behind the forehead. I can either contract this 'energy' inward as if compressing, or simply leave it untensed. When doing this in deep meditation, a low buzz soon arises and soon grows much, much louder. For anyone with any personal experience in OBEs, can you explain to me what role this buzzing plays and the subject's apparent ability to control? Along with the buzz, the body itself feels like one completely solid energy mass, feeling every square inch of your body at the same time. If anyone could also tell me how one can achieve the 'pop' that is presumably post-buzz, which leads to OBE (or describe what they have involuntarily experienced pre-OBE), it would be much appreciated. Thanks for the great replies!

It wasn't me that mentioned weed.. but since you brought it up, I havent been using it. It's true that it can intensify things sometimes, but my feeling is that that it is ultimately an obstacle. before i stopped using it i noticed that if i smoked it when it had been awhile since the last time, i got this flood of subconscious imagery in my mind, but if i kept smoking it regularly, it did the opposite, and even my dreams stopped. perhaps you should post this on one of the drug threads.

as far as the rest of it, The buzzing and stuff, I have had all kinds of buzzing from meditating, some of it localized in odd places, like the testicles, other times all over the body. deep breathing is well known to induce this. and the energy in you head, well, it just sounds like chi to me, but who knows, I am no expert. maybe start a new thread about it if you want to ask more questions about it, i dont know what to tell you.

As far as the subject of this thread, or what it has turned into, I dont know how to induce and OBE, but I looked it up and there are methods out there for that, just do an internet search. some of the other posters on this thread seem to know way more about it than me, but the impression i am getting based on what they are saying is that what i experienced last night was just a side effect of meditation and building up energy in the dantien. that is just a guess...

Hi Erdweir,

 

Thanks for sharing your experience. My sister experienced something like this before. She said that she was scared at the time, but upon later reflection said that she wished that she hadn't been scared. She's been hoping for another experience like that but to date it has never happened again to her.

 

At the risk of stating the obvious, it is possible that the exploding spiders/insects were imperfections or impurities of some type, leaving your body? I would guess that if one is going to meet one's higher self, one would need to a higher level of refinement and purity--and the exploding insects could be a representation of your achieving that. Here's another thought: do you think there was any chance that the bars of searing light you referenced could actually be your higher self? Or perhaps a mental representation of your higher self?

 

I humbly throw these ideas out there as something to consider, and I hope they are helpful in some way. Best wishes on your personal journey!

 

Sincerely,

Birch Tree

That was all what i was thinking, implying, and hoping. there is a chance that I am just delusional, engaging in wishful thinking or whatever. I am no stranger to doubting myself. some say you just fool yourself with this kind of stuff, I used to think this way all the time. Now i try to just make it up as I go along and see where it leads me. Being skeptical is ok, but if it means you don't try anything or take any risks than it's just an excuse not to grow.

That is how i just feel about my visualizations during these meditations and dreams. As for last last night, and the energy visitations, I dont know, it was different. I didnt see it coming and had no idea what it was. It definitely didn't have much in common with my vague ideas of trying to contact my "higher self" or whatever.. there was no imagery like during my meditations, but perhaps it was born of them nonetheless. my unconscious just vomits this stuff up and i follow it along. I will just have to wait and see.

I'm glad for you guys cause talking about this not only reminds of who I am and what I've been through but it renews my vigor and determination in many facets which I feel may have become somehwat covered over the years. For that I say Thank You.

Your'e welcome. Thanks for putting in the effort to help me too. That's what this place is for. All of this stuff reminds me of who I am too, it puts me in touch with my better nature. I didnt have the connection you found with martial arts teachers and exorcists, if I had then maybe when I could't sleep at night as a teenager, just like you, i could have gotten some help. Instead I got thown out of the house for being a drug addict when i was anything but.

You know, I have only been doing this Taoist stuff for a year, but it has made me think back over my life in different ways. I realized I had been feeling Chi in my body for a long time. As a teenager, I would lie in bed sleepless and the room would grow very small, and my body would grow very large. I could feel the gravity field of my own body and other weird stuff. sometime this is called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome or Lewis Carroll Syndrome. These feelings were connected with great heat in my body and redness and itching in my skin. sometimes I would also perceive a liquid chrome sphere that was simultaneously larger than the universe and smaller than a quark. I would lie there with the distorted room buzzing with this strange apparition in my minds eye, very lifelike. when I would go to school exhausted the next day I would get taken to the nurses office and accused of doing drugs. thank you nancy reagan.

I mentioned that I have been trying to contact my higher self, But maybe I should give more detail. After I do the fusion of the five elements, sometimes my head is filled with light. I open up my head like a flower, and this white plant with red flower buds snakes out like a vine, and starts searching around the room. I extend it up through the layers of mist and connect with a dark colored marbled rainbow sphere which feeds me energy down through the flower into my body. After doing this for a couple of months, I had a dream where this thing appeared, a large square sectioned bar, also rainbow colored but is searing electric hues. It was one of those dreams where the vision is of an intensity that makes what we call waking reality pale in comparison. It beamed this energy into me and all of these brown insects and spiders started exploding out of me and being blown to pieces. Last night before I went to bed I called this bar down into my body to try and invoke my higher self. Perhaps it worked? dont know.