Ken

I have no idea what you are talking about. First of all i have never said spring forest qigong is a dead end. You can learn from the spring forest qigong tapes/videos/books and they will give you results if the following hold: (1) Chunyi Lin's lineage is authentic. (2) Chunyi Lin said you can learn from the tapes/videos/books. The lineage's power is the lineage's power, i don't know how else to describe it, it can't be fathomed by mortals. However your mentions of spirtis/jinns is a interesting one. First any authentic lineage do not use spirits/jinns to give empowerment, secondly, a lot of practices I have seen that are popular in the west are nothing more than posession by spirits/jinns. These kind of practices have the common theme of emphasising "letting go" and going into "emptiness" from the very beginning since these are the states of the psych when outside influences can get into people. All authentic Daoist practices progress from youwei to wuwei and then to wubuwei. There is no such thing as going into wuwei in the beginning.

What Master Wang has taught to the public is very safe if you follow the instructions since it's primarily for your overall well being. However if you don't, it can cause serious health issue, the Master himself have stated this before. Another thing I want to say is mechanical methods themselves are not enough for you to progress in any authentic lineage. You need the Master's approval and blessing for the methods to work. That's why our practice can only be taught in person with approved teachers. Oral transmissions are needed not only to teach you the method, but there are other things that are transmitted to you. That's why even though mechanical methods from different lineage (Longmen, Mo Pai or Spring Forrest etc) might be similar, they are not going to give the same result. There are lineage power in works and that's why it's a BAD idea to mix practices. Let me repeat myself: Don't be naive, mechanical methods/technique are NOT enough. So don't be so arrogant to say that Longmen Pai and Mo Pai have the same practice, they are fundamentally different, especially you have only went to a weekend seminar!! p.s. I know that Jim and another person is selling Mopai practices on the internet, the people who learnt from them are fools, I don't think Jim et al have the Master's approval to teach, whatever techniques poeople learnt from them just won't work.

Seems like you are the real ass here and not Mike. I think you should listen to his advice of not mixing different practices together, those are wise words.

Thanks. Good luck with learning true alchemy from "Taoist Yoga". That book suits you a lot, you should practice the method in there deligently.

arr..Taoist yoga, in Chinese is called 性命法诀明指, hehe, if i get hold of a print copy I can use it as a door stopper.

What Master Wang teaches certainly qualified as what one would call Daoist alchemy. It doesn't mean alchmey cannot be practised for a health and wellness reason.

Sorry I wasn't trying to be argumntative but Master Wang has never, as far as i know, claimed to be an immortal so I have no idea why people are throwing around that term at him. Master Wang teaches high quality traditional Doaist Cultivation for Health and Wellness. He has never claimed to teach anyone how to become an "immortal". p.s. incidentally the only person i know who claimed publicly to teach you how to become an immortal is David Verdesi, since he claimed he is one already , so anyone who wants to become an "immortal" should contact and learn from Verdesi.

really? A master is quite different from an immortal...you know what is an immortal ? you have met one?

I also want to know who said Master Wang is an "immortal", whatever that means. I certainly have never used that term in the forum, i don't think Kathy Li has used that term neither. It seems the term "immortal" have been used to the point where it has lost it meaning. To the original poster, no, Master Wang is no big deal, so don't obsess over him.

Survivor Bias is more prevalent than one might think, that's why i don't trust any of those "motivational book". But that's just me. There is a simple way to meaure how "successful" one apply the principle. Let's call it the Purchase Power Per Hours Week Ratio (PPPHWR) : PPHWR= (Annual Income in thousand dollars unit)/(Actual Work hours per Week) So I don't know how much that dude that make, but let say 160k/year (maybe underestimation, but more power to him if he makes mor), so his PPHWR=160/4=40. So i would define a sucess as say 10 or above ( quite generous i think). Median GDP/capita is ~47k/year for a US citizen, and let's say one work 40 hours/week. So on average one will have a PPHWR of ~1.18. So this should give a whole spectrum of results for people who applying things learnt from that book. So just tell me your PPHWR and we can say how sucessful you are. I believe you will probably be rated a failure in this scheme. (just put in the "boring" hours you worked and not the time you think you were enjoyin it)

I am wondering how much "Survivor Bias" is there in what is said in the book. Say you have 10,000 people all wanted to work as little as possible to earn as much as possible, e.g. start a web business (right?) like this guy, now there bounds to be a few who succeeded while the majority failed. So IMO the author was just one of the "lucky" one who made it because he did the right thing at the right time in the right direction and he got to write a book about it. But how many other who tried the same thing and failed ? Too many count i believe. This is not to say that it's all luck and i am sure he is a very intelligent and hard working person but one has to realise that two person endowed with the same intelligence and dedication do not get the same reward. Ripped from Wikipedia for reference: Survivorship bias (or "Survivor bias") is a statistical artifact in applications outside of finance, where studies on the remaining population are fallaciously compared with the historic average despite the survivors having unusual properties. Mostly, the unusual property in question is a track record of success (like the successful funds). For example, the parapsychology researcher Joseph Banks Rhine believed he had identified the few individuals from hundreds of potential subjects who had powers of ESP. His calculations were based on the improbability of these few subjects guessing the Zener cards shown to a partner by chance. A major criticism which surfaced against his calculations was the possibility of unconscious survivor bias in subject selections. He was accused of failing to take into account the large effective size of his sample (all the people he didn't choose as 'strong telepaths' because they failed at an earlier testing stage). Had he done this he may have seen that from the large sample, one or two individuals will probably achieve the track record of success he had found purely by chance. (Similarly, many investors believe that chance is the main reason that most successful fund managers have the track records they do.) Writing about the Rhine case, Martin Gardner explained that he didn't think the experimenters had made such obvious mistakes in a statistically naive way, but as a result of subtly disregarding some poor subjects. He said that without trickery of any kind, there would always be some people who had improbable success, if a large enough sample was taken. To illustrate this, he speculates about what would happen if one hundred professors of psychology read Rhine's work and decided to make their own test; he said that survivor bias would winnow out the typical failed experiments, but encourage the lucky successes to continue testing. He thought that the common null hypothesis (of no result) wouldn't be reported, but: "Eventually, one experimenter remains whose subject has made high scores for six or seven successive sessions. Neither experimenter nor subject is aware of the other ninety-nine projects, and so both have a strong delusion that ESP is operating." He concludes: "The experimenter writes an enthusiastic paper, sends it to Rhine who publishes it in his magazine, and the readers are greatly impressed." Recently, this result of survivor bias has led to cases of "publication bias", and has begun to concern scientific journals. If enough scientists study a phenomenon, some will find statistically significant results by chance, and these are the experiments submitted for publication. To combat this, some editors now call for the submission of 'negative' scientific findings, where "nothing happened."

I got to the point where it said Laozi was an imaginary person then i stopped...*shake head*. Scholastic taosim is only good for publishing in academic journals, complete waste of time to read for any practitioner.

I got the impression from the original post that people were seriously pissed and they didn't buy Master Wang's explanation that they are not ready for the practice. But from the two persons who went onto the seminar, the sentiment seems to be quite different....

I agree with Kathy, if you have any grievance towards the seminar with her. Address it directly with her, she has graciously offered refund for anyone not happy with the seminar. But i believe this is a typical westerner's attitude of demanding to know eveything from the teacher when clearly one is not ready yet, in any case, such attitude will be noted and usually such person will never get any real teaching.

I was surprised it was only 3 days. Usually a seminar last 10 days.

well, another side of the story that i heard was that back in the day, a group of influential people was bent on discrediting Dr. Yan Xin. Now since Master Hai Deng was publicly acknowledged by Dr. Yan Xin as one of his teachers and so naturally Hai Deng was dragged into the conspiracy too. If the teacher can be proven to be a fraund, it will be much easier to discredit the student. So which side of story is true ?

huh? You can PM me if you want. Not promising any help though.

I think things will take care of themselves. I know quite a few of his ex-students have already discontinued their assoication with Verdesi and want nothing to do with him. Verdesi will reap what he sows one day, most of his students are John Chnag wannabe and Verdesi neatly filled their desire for power, no one can help these people. I have seen John Chang video and recently read the book by Kostas, one thing that puzzles me is why are people calling him a "Taoist Immortal", John Chang is not a Daoist/Taoist, he is a Mohist. Mohists are as different to Daoists are as Confuciusists are to Buddhists. Moism was loosely a military sect, the mohists are trained to defend cities and fight in wars. One of my friend is a Mohist, but he is not trained in the art as Johng Chang did, my friend is from the "Swordman" lineage, he had learnt the Mohist sword technique, war formations and other Mohist magics. I showed him John Chang video and told him Mr. Chang said he is a mohist, my friend instantly recognise that Mr. Chang belongs to what he would say the equivalent of a "Special Force unit" within Mohist organisation. Most Mohist can't be trained in the neigong special unit since in my friend's words "most mohists can't spend dozen of years to train in that art, most of them need to be trained in effective sword fighting techniques quickly to fight in war so they can kill the enemy in a few moves". Anyway, that's just some interesting side notes i know about Moism. With regard to the techniques of Mr. Chang, I have talked to and showed the video to another friend of mine whose Master can do similar things as Mr. Chang, e.g. can actually produce electric sparks if he hold a metal bars quite an impressive feat, we both agree that the Mohists and Mr. Chang's lineage ancestors have gotten hold of a sub-branch of a Doaist Magic called "Lei Fa" (translated as Thunder method, perhaps that's where DV got his idea for the name) since Mr Chang has said the he practiced "Ba Lei Quan" (right?), and this sounds very similar to what a Lei Fa method will be called and his techniques shown are similar to what Lei Fa can do. For example, there are "Wu Lei Zhang" (Five thunder palm) and "Wu Lei Huo" (five thunder fire) which can do similars things to what was described in Kosta's book. In any case Lei Fa is not the path to Dao, it's application of qi by Daoist to help ordinary folks or in the Mohist's case, it's an application to fight in war.

Master Wang had given out certificates to quite a few people that i know of so that they can spread the Longmen Teahings to the west. Not sure if DV has one. In any case I don't think he is teaching any of Master Wang's practice so it's not even a relevant question. I think it's really doesn't matter how much he charge or what he teaches to his followers, it's their choice and everyone deserve the teacher they have.

Well said... It seems everyone is babbling about "enlightenment" or whatever without themselves knowing what it is or what it really means. What do youn need help for? I don't think anyone can help you if you go to them ask for way to be "enlightened", they will think you are crazy.

I think Mike has it right there, you need to "earn" the way to escape from the cycle of death and rebirth. There is no energetic practices that can leads you to "englihtenment", whatever that mean. Also "Lei Shan Dao" is a marketing term in the west that surfaced in the last few years, no such terminology is used or seen in any Chinese book or document.

Thanks ymwong but i wouldn't say Bian Que is "semi-mythical", he was and is still very real.

The way I translate it, Jing Luo=Meridian, and Mai=Channel. It might not be standard translation. They are different concepts that why they need to be distinguished. Jing Luo is like river where it's constantly flowing carrying qi in your body around everyday. Mai is like Lake, it's stagnant and does not flow on its own, you need to cultivate (or open) it in order to make qi moves in there. Yijing is the principle behind ancient Chinese civilization. It underpins the entire spectrum of all Chinese Traditions. In a way, Chinese Medicine, Feng Shui, Internal Alchemy and Daoist Magics are all derivatives or applications of Yi. This is not to say that you will know all this just from the book of Yijing, it will be like you are trying to prove the Prime Number Theorem but the only thing you know are natural numbers and nothing in between. So it's no surprise that all Daoists are interested in it. Master Wang doesn't teach yijing in most of his seminars simply because this is a subject as big as the neigong practice he teaches, he might touch on it here and there, but there is simply no time, this is a subject that one can dedicate his entire life to. When people talk about Yijing today, it's more related to using it for prediction, which is one of the more direct and important applciation of Yijing. The reason you can use it to predict things is because, from my own understanding, Yijing is the way to understand the evolving configurations of spacetime and the ten thousands things, for example, when one walks on the street and see a blue car coming from the North and a dog is barking in the East, if the person is skilled in Yi, he can extract from this micoscopic observation to deduce the macroscopic configuration he is in at that moment using Yi and from that he can calculate the next configuration he will be in (Book of Change remember?). To a casual observer, it will be like he is predicting the future. Anyhow, like all Ancient Chinese Technologies, you can't learn from a book and no such book exists anyway. True knownledge is learnt through oral transmission, which include more than the mechanical methods themselves, from skilled Masters. This is not to say that one should not study or read the Yijing, the classic text itself contains invaluable literacy and philosophical values which is again an entire subject on its own.

Yes, i think that's the other name for it. On top of my head, longmen pai practices that have been taught over years are: Moving : Peng Heng Gong (Practice with trees), Method to exchange qi naturally (walking practice) etc Standing : different Zhan Zhuangs, External 5 elements to open the channels, Bagua Yi Sphere. Sleeping : 13 different sleeping forms Sitting : Yin Xian Fa, Method of Intelligence I think there are others but i don't remember, the ones above are important ones anyway. Longmen Pai has a comprensive internal alchemy system which comprises different aspects of the practice. I haven't seen another system that is as complete as what Master Wang has taught over the years. True Internal Alchemy is time consuming and require dedication and (very) hard work. I can tell you that you should stay away from any practice that is easy and give quick result, they have many uhhh side effects. But then I have said it before that everyone deserves the teacher they have, it's a karma thing.

The first question is more complicated, there are certainly many stages of qi, no one can really understand it if they haven't reach those stages themselves. But some kind of simple description is possble, so without any elaborations, let me say that : 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 are all "flavours" of qi. The second question is easy, according to Longmen Pai's tradition, the following 14 characters summarized all possible qigong practice (proper qiong) in existence : 動修經絡立修脈，坐修神意臥修靈。 Translation: Moving practice cultivate the Meridians, Standing practice cultivate the Channels, Sitting Practice cultivate the Shen (spirit) and Yi (intention), sleeping practice cultivate the Ling (soul).