Encephalon

http://www.amazon.com/Way-Energy-Mastering-Internal-Strength/dp/0671736450/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1284326510&sr=1-1 How has this book remained under the radar, or has it? As one reviewer put it, it is "absolutely the ultimate beginner's guide to zhan zhuang," which is THE practice to focus on for beginners and advanced students alike, of whatever specific practice. (At least that is the consensus I got from our ongoing conversation of a few weeks ago, yes?) Is anyone in here familiar enough with the work to discuss it thoughtfully? Thanks in advance.

I've been restricting my energy circulation to the Little Orbit since my Overheating episode back in September. It unmistakably favors a reverse direction, which seems perfectly okay with me as I have been studying the psychological states associated with the chakras, and find it pleasant to work the energy from the lower dan tien and up through the chakras. Like millions of American schmucks, my chakras are as blocked and/or deficient as any. Like a lot of folks in here, I have mixed feelings about Chia's writing style; I am not familiar enough with his work to register a knowledgeable aversion, other than his fluffy writing style, but his idea of using the visualization of spirals at each chakra/meridian points seems awfully helpful, if not downright pleasant. this technique up the front channel enabled me to feel a very distinct and specific tingling on my crown, whereas before, when doing the MCO in the conventional pathway, the energy would shoot up from the base of the skull, do a bank shot off the inside of my cranium and head straight for the nose, when I would feel the faintest sensation of an incoming sneeze, before descending into my tongue. Is there anything definitive that can be said about an MCO path that favors a reverse current? I definitely feel the gates opening, throbbing, softening, especially with the spiralling effect. Are we ultimately expected to have a facility with both directions at some point? Also, are there any precautions regarding spiralling on energy gates for extended durations? I was spiralling my right foot last night while watching Margaret Cho. I must've spent 45 minutes alone on my individual toes. Thanks in advance.

It's summer in Los Angeles again. I overheated badly last year at this time and have recently allowed my MCO to travel in reverse. The literature on this is limited; "The Root of Chinese Chi Kung" by Dr. Yang Jwing-Ming is the only reference I've found it in. He says it's indicated for ameliorating too much yang. All I know is that it's very natural for me and the current is strong. Any enlightened observations/precautions? Thanks in advance.

Has anyone tried the herbal preparations by Ron Teeguarden at http://dragonherbs.com/ ? I took the gecko rockclimber while I was working out - holy geez - felt like I was on steroids. My girlfriend took Dew Drops for dry skin/scalp and resolved the issue in less than two weeks. Eternal Jing sure seems to be rectifying her chronic low energy/non-stamina syndrome. In a perfect world I'd be sucking down $150/month worth of deer antler. Having this store in Santa Monica makes life in LA a little more manageable.

void

Ever since reading Frantzis' account of a Chinese internal martial arts master asking him point blank "Can you feel your liver?" I've been slowly working toward the day when I could isolate specific organs too. I've been following Frantzis' dissolving map for over two years and once I felt competent with the vetebral column I went for the kidneys, and I'm pretty confident that I can buzz both of them well, barring a kidney chi - induced delusional episode. Any luck with targeting organs?

I guess I won't be able to complain about people posting subjects that are unrelated to Taoism, but I'd really like assistance with a project I'm working on. I'd like to ask you all to submit your votes for the most emotionally intense movies you've seen. Tearjerkers, psychological thrillers and especially love stories are my current fare because they depict character arcs so well. But any emotion, be it anguish, sadness, desire for revenge, anger, or intense happiness is welcome. It might help if you imagined submitting a list for a film analysis class. Thanks in advance. Sincerely, Blasto, film freak

Reading Kunstler's weekly essay is the best part of my Monday morning. Enjoy! Bold italics mine and idquest's. The Choices We Make By James Howard Kunstler on February 20, 2012 9:41 AM The misalignment of politics and reality threatens to scuttle both major parties, but it's especially gratifying to see the Republicans sail off the edge of their own flat earth on the winds of religious idiocy. For forty years it has not been enough for them to just be a conservative party. They had to enlist the worst elements of ignorance and reaction, and they found an endless supply of it in the boom regions of the Sunbelt with its brotherhood of TV evangelist con-artists and a population fretful with suburban angst. Now, in the last hours of the cheap oil economy, the forty year miracle of the Sunbelt boom dwindles and a fear of approaching darkness grips the people there like a rumor of Satan. The long boom that took them from an agricultural backwater of barefoot peasantry to a miracle world of Sonic Drive-ins, perpetual air-conditioning, WalMarts, and creation museums is turning back in the other direction and they fear losing all that comfort, convenience, and spectacle. Since they don't understand where it came from, they conclude that it was all a God-given endowment conferred upon them for their exceptional specialness as Americans, and so only the forces of evil could conspire to take it all away. Hence, the rise of a sanctimonious, hyper-patriotic putz such as Rick Santorum and his take-back-the-night appeal to those who sense the gathering twilight. And the awful ordeal of convictionless pander and former front-runner Mitt Romney drowning in his own bullshit as he struggles to extrude one whopper after another just to keep up with the others in this race to the bottom of the political mud-flow. There is an obvious dither backstage now among those who cynically thought they could manipulate and control these dark impulses of the frightened masses as the candidates all pile into a train wreck of super-PAC obloquy. Won't some level-headed adult like the governors of New Jersey and Indiana step up and volunteer? Is this finally its Whig Moment - the point where the Republican Party has offended history so gravely that it goes up in a vapor of its own absurdity? I hope so. The conservative impulse is hardly all bad. We need it in civilization. But it can't be vested in the sheer and constant repudiation of reality. The opposing Democrats have their own problem with reality, which is that they don't tell the truth about so many things despite knowing better, and, under Obama, they act contrary to their stated intentions often enough, and in matters of extreme importance, that they deserve to go down in flames, too. Just as there is a place for conservatism in civilized life, there is also a place for the progressive impulse, let's call it - for making bold advance in step with the mandates of reality and an interest in justice for all those along on the journey. The Democrats under Obama don't want to go to that place. They want to really go to the same place as the fretful Sunbelt fundamentalists, but by a different route - and that place is yesterday, by means of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. Mr. Obama is pretending that an economic "recovery" is underway when he knows damn well that the banking system is just blowing smoke up the shredded ass of what's left of that economy. He pretends to an interest in the rule of law in money matters but he's done everything possible to prevent the Department of Justice, the SEC, and a dozen other regulatory authorities from functioning the way they were designed. He has never suggested resurrecting the Glass-Steagall act, which kept banking close to being honest for forty years. He never issued a peep of objection about the Citizens United case where the Supreme Court tossed the election process into a crocodile pit of corporate turpitude (he could have proposed a constitutional amendment redefining corporate "personhood."). He declared he'd never permit a super-PAC to be created in his name, and now he's got one. Mr. Obama represents a lot of things to a lot of people. He is mainly Progressivism's bowling trophy, its symbol of its own triumphant wonderfulness in overcoming the age old phantoms of race prejudice. Alas, that's not enough. Where exactly is the boundary between telling "folks" what they want to hear and just flat-out lying? Neither party can articulate the current reality, which is that we have to reorganize civilization pretty drastically. I've reviewed that agenda many times in this space and it largely amounts to rebuilding local economies at a smaller and finer scale. That is just not on the table for all current leadership, or even in the room. If neither party can frame an agenda consistent with that reality, then we'll have to get there without them, probably after a very rough period when the pretending still lingers in the air like a bad odor and no reality-based consensus is able to form, no agreement about what we should do. That's the period when a lot of things fall apart and people get hurt. These are the choices we're making right now.

I realize this is getting way ahead of my original intention to start up a Buddhist 12-Step (B-12) thread at one step per month starting in January 2012, but this is weighing on me, and perhaps it could serve as a taste of what we might be able to explore in TTB. The other night a speaker was telling us about another woman who threw 25 years of sobriety away and "went out." Out here in California Buddhsit 12 step groups are often referred to as 11th step meetings because many meetings begin with a 20-min. meditation session followed by discussion. Also, B-12 groups really do take seriously the wording of the 11th step - "sought through prayer and MEDITATION to improve our conscious contact with reality and live a life with more wisdom and compassion." After thinking about it for several days, it seems to me that people "go out" because their cosncious contact with reality, or, what we could refer to as Mindfulness, simply stops improving, and in the absence of spiritual progress, a stagnancy kicks in that makes us vulnerable to a return to addictive behavior and substances. I've certainly learned from my interrupted meditation regimen since my child was born that my mind starts meandering in the direction of "let's smoke a joint and liven things up a bit!" Chime in at will.

I'm currently in the middle of "Buddhism with an Attitude: The Tibetan Seven-Point Mind Training" by B. Alan Wallace. I've been wary of the Tibetan schools for several years, insofar as they represent the metaphysical arm of Buddhism, and I've been firmly in the camp of the Buddhist agnostics for most of my life, settling for the lessons of Buddhist psychology as they have been teased out in the dialogue between Buddhists from Asia and western Buddhist psychotherapists like Jack Kornfield, Mark Epstein and Howard Cutler. "Buddhism without Beliefs" by Stephen Batchelor sustained and oriented my practice for a decade. But I've been compelled to shift gears of late thanks to Alan Wallace and am captivated by the further formal study of interdependency. I know this must sound rash but this orientation has been my main frame of reference - that all phenomena are interrelated and "empty" in the sense of having no permanent, independent existence - since I was a young teenager, before I even recognized its significance. It is no surprise to me that I studied geography and human ecology in college because, as Fritjof Capra famously said "The Western version of mystical awareness, our version of Buddhism or Taoism, will be ecological awareness." As I count myself amongst the crowd who look for harmony between divergent patterns of ideas, I am obliged and excited to commence this part of my path, to more fully realize on a deeply spiritual level what I have long since intuited and studied formally in academia. I don't yet count myself among the enlightened, but I think I'm on to something, and as long as I can be less of a schmuck than the day before, I might just become an authentic human being before I lose the rest of my teeth. I'm very lucky to have a wide selection of Tibetan representation here in Los Angeles. I'd be eager to hear any sincere suggestions about how to proceed from those of you farther along the Tibetan path. Thanks.

I think this is a good point and I think you've made it repeatedly over the years, but at the risk of sounding like I'm hairsplitting and over-intellectualizing, there is a nuanced difference between monastic training and "what Buddhism is really about," and I don't claim to have ultimate knowledge of either. What I do know is that the reality of interdependence and emptiness is extremely difficult to conceptualize, let alone experience as a daily waking reality, because our separateness as individuals exerts such a powerful hold on our imagination, and we end up creating reified "souls" that are eternal and "selves" that are separate. I guess I'm somewhere in the middle in here when it comes to intellectualism. It's critical that people get at least a conceptual model of interdependency and emptiness in order to develop the experiential side, and what I've seen in here doesn't often serve that goal; the conversation appears overly intellectual but is often full of obfuscation and misleading conjecture. Along side this hyperintellectualism is a form of anti-intellectualism that to me appears more like the posturing of pure laziness and an unwillingness to ferret out understanding from the texts. At some point on the path to enlightenment, scholarship and practice must intersect and I believe those who deny this are not getting the whole picture. I should point out that I never fully immersed myself in the threads of interdependence or emptiness because I found them unnecessarily impenetrable. I ask those of you who nailed the subject down to forgive me for not recognizing it; there was too much background interference. Thanks Jetsun for recommending "How to see yourself as you really are."

This isn't your typical anti-Obama rant from the right, where he is regularly excoriated for being a foreign-born Muslim who hates Christians like Sarah Palin. This is a rant on the man who sold himself to the Establishment, which is what most presidents do anyway because it's not a real job. Pass the Little Debbie Cocoa Cremes. ************************************************************************************************************************************************* Jive Talkin By James Howard Kunstler on January 30, 2012 8:52 AM Well, he had to get up there and say something. In this particular winter of our discontent, the wispiest nostrums and baldest lies will do. America is not interested in reality. America is a nine-hundred pound man imprisoned in a fetid trailer bedroom begging for one more case of Little Debbie Cocoa Cremes before the front-end-loader bashes through the wall to haul him to intensive care. America just wants to hear another story about its own wonderfulness before that happens. America's soul is so lost that it has disappeared into the same cosmic wilderness that MF Global's client accounts were last seen entering. Mr. Obama keeps telling nationwide audiences that "we have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years." That is just not true. If he believes it then he is either 1) getting treasonously bad advice from dishonest advisors or 2) not reading reports issued by his own agencies or 3) just making shit up. This was the same week, by the way, when the US Department of Energy dropped its estimate for the Marcellus shale gas play by 66 percent, while the estimate for all US shale basins went down 42 percent. The shale gas industry is another Ponzi bubble that is about to founder on a scarcity of investment capital. Just watch. The "energy independence" trope is a lie, too. At least in the sense that Mr. Obama means - that we can run the suburban clusterfuck and all its accessories by other means than fossil fuels. He just says it because it makes voters feel better. By the time they find out it was just a story, he won't need their votes anymore. Meanwhile, we'll do nothing to prepare for a different way of life, and so, necessarily, the result will be an obscene scramble for power and resources that will leave a lot of people dead. The topper for me, though, was the President's cheeky announcement that he'd ordered the Department of Justice to form a "special unit" to investigate mortgage fraud and other lethal irregularities in the banking sector. The fact that his congressional audience did not bust out laughing shows what a convocation of craven and perfidious cat's paws they are. Note to readers: the DOJ has a long-established criminal division fully empowered to prosecute all the familiar scams of our time from NINJA lending to the robo-signing of titles to MERS mortgage mischief, to the bundling and sales of booby-trapped CDOs - up to and including whatever Jon Corzine thought he was doing at MF Global. Notice how lame the major newspapers and cable news networks were in responding to Mr. Obama's impudent japery. None of them, including The New York Times, bothered to ask Attorney General Eric Holder what he's been up to along these lines for the past three years. It is really hard to account for the stupendous incompetence of the news media in recent years. Of course, I'm allergic to conspiracy theories and the only explanation that adds up for me is the diminishing returns of technology. Among other untruths we've embraced collectively is the idea that computer-distributed information amounts to knowledge and understanding, tending toward judgment. Apparently, it's only made our society much dumber and more irresponsible. After all, none of the supposed media watchdogs even asked The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, or CNN and a hundred other outlets why they didn't interview the Attorney General of the United States and ask him why he has not been taking care of the business now assigned to this special unit. Not included in the State of the Union message was any reference to the provision in the recently signed National Defense Authorization Act that allows the US government to suspend due process of law and use the military to arrest and indefinitely detain US citizens on vague and opportunistic charges of "suspicion" You will remember a month ago when Mr. Obama signed the law and issued a "signing statement" that said his administration would not carry out these specific provisions. Did anyone notice that it is an impeachable offense for the president to state his opposition to enforcing the law? In which case, why isn't there a bill of impeachment making its way through Congress right now? I've had enough of Obama, though I voted for him in 2008. I won't vote for him again. But I'm not altogether confident that any of us will be voting for anyone in the fall of 2012. Too many systems we depend on are spinning out of control. I suppose we will continue feeding ourselves a diet of lies and evasions until circumstances become so extreme that language itself loses all relevance and only real action will answer. I believe that moment is approaching in the yet-to-be-acted-out political uproars of the spring and summer. In the meantime, American leadership is bankrupt. Just accept the fact that America has no legitimate leadership. The vacuum is total and we know how nature feels about a vacuum.

I'm working on it. Thanks for mentioning this important fact. Here's the list of Tibetan schools in Los Angeles. One of the few advantages of living in this city.

Probably a good idea not to read his stuff, unless you're goin to stick with his older stuff like "The Geography of Nowhere." I like his sense of humor but for less caustic expression you might consider his colleague Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute. I obviously disagree with the reviewers since I enjoy his works and have sound reason to support his basic themes. He's clearly angry about the mess we've got ourselves into since it was not only avoidable but a predictable consequence of creating a nation that can't live without sucking the global tit dry, but I reject the notion that he relishes the prospect of our country being reduced to cannabilistic hordes.

There's no genre I enjoy more than good 'ol post-apocalyptic dystopias, so I was a little disappointed with "World Made by Hand." Kunstler has had a prolific career as a writer, and I think he got cocky and wrote this thing too fast. His "Geography of Nowhere" is required reading in geography, urban planning, ecology, and sustainability studies across the country. It would seem that several Bums suffer from a fairly significant dearth of ecological literacy, something I would have never suspected in a website inhabitated by self-identified Taoists, but oh well. GoN tells the tale of how and why America chose to construct its cities and transportation grids as if humans, nature, and energy didn't matter. Read this and discover why imbuing the planet with permanence is as illusory error as reifing the "self." You're in for a treat, Serene, with The Long Emergency. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyEGnMa9MyM&feature=related

Kunstler's "The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century" goes in that direction. It's a detailed forecast of what would happen to the different sections of North America in the event of catastrophic disruptions in resource flows, i.e., no more cheap oil. Kunstler has been intimately involved with the work of the New Urbanism, the Post-Carbon Institute, and a constant presence in the field of academic geography and urban planning for decades. His strength is in detailing how we managed to get into the clusterfuck we're in, not necessarily designing detailed descriptions of how to get out of it, because let's face it, the vast majority still don't know where we came from, how we got here, or what the problem truly is, much less how to rectify it. For the few who "get it," those who understand the implications of a very plausible disruption of energy flows into our highly energy-dependent consumer culture, Kunstler has been addressing the same prescription that's being articulated by dozens of activist/theorists – prepare to organize culture on smaller scales; smaller farms, smaller homes, smaller financial networks, smaller communities, small enough to facilitate real cooperation. If such a blue print really existed, about 50 million Americans would jump at the opportunity and ask, Where do I sign? The great unwashed masses would remain utterly indifferent or clueless, while the paleoconservatives like JoeBlast and the rest of the crowd profiled in Kunstler's last essay, will continue to believe that suburban consumerism and "pro-growth" jingoism is the natural order of things and will return to America once the liberals are kicked out of office and we bomb the Middle East into submission and take Our Oil. You're not going to see people from the Right offering any viable solutions to the problems of perpetual consumer capitalism because they don't perceive that as a problem in need of a solution. Let's be clear; the only thing that separates modern American liberals from modern conservatives is a magic spigot of unexhaustible oil, undepletable topsoil, carbon-free emissions, and an extra continent or two.

My wildly and optimistically speculative guess would be that once word got out that a bunch of dharma bums or Tao bums had successfully organized along the lines of the Amish and Hutterites and Mennonites there would be less psychotic fundy madness and a little more down-to-earth practicality on behalf of all parties. The pages of the DSM-III will be used to light fires while we read the classics to each other collect books on folk medicine. Something tells me the Fundies will continue a prayerful vigil until the last kernel of wheat is chewed up, followed by loud and lurid lamentations on why God had forsaken them.

I still have a vivid memory of something Chomsky said years ago; what we really need is a persuasive, living, breathing vision of a viable alternative to the consumer model. It cannot simply be a few economic equations written down and theorized about. We've got to construct living models of how people can live outside of the consumer delusion. They already exist in small numbers across the globe but they get very little attention - no surprise there. The moment news catches on that people have voluntarily associated in sustainable democratic groups that don't prescribe the Rat Race and Fox News as a staple of modern life, more and more people take a look and say Fuck This Shit! I'm trading in my coat and tie for overalls and a wheelbarrel. We're talking about post-industrial skill sets, mass graves filled with televisions, manual labor, zendos, dojos, and organic farms. Okay, that's quite enough romanticism for one night! www.ic.org www.opensourceecology.org www.transitionnetwork.org www.postcarbon.org I still think it's necessary to post these messages because the noise machine designed to drown out any alternative message is kept loud 24/7.

Well, I have to agree with you on just about all counts and I commend you on your passion, but I invite you to consider a couple of points - Try to ease up on the rhetoric. You're not the first person to realize the threat posed to this planet's ability to support life by human profligacy. There are millions of others who are ecologically literate and engaged in the process of trying to create an alternative to global consumerism. Sober mindedness is what is needed; alarmism has run its course. The era of fossil fuel-based industrial consumerism has come with its own expiration clause; as soon as these fuels are depleted, consumer capitalism will wind down and the earth will begin to rebalance. That's the good news. The not so good news is that the rebalancing will not accomodate all 7 billion of us, so find a community, practice the cultivation regimens of your choice, learn some post-industrial skills that will make you a handy person to be around, and join us in the task of creating a viable alternative to the industrial mess you've aptly described. You're not alone!