RobB

I'm in a porridge phase at the moment. Andrew Sterman has a good article on the subject. Ive also had chicken and broccolli (pre cooked) with a scatter of beansprouts and soy sauce if I'm off carbs for a bit.

It's the Bujinkan Godan test. You can find videos on YT.

Thanks @liminal_luke. Equinoxal best wishes to you also. Its at this time of year that I stop shaving, growing a beard (with management to prevent wizard-like excess) until the spring equinox when I shave it all off to reveal my, slightly older, but essentially unchanged potato-face.

Perhaps it is 'perfect' as in 'as it should be'. Everything is as it should be. Things might not be pleasant or enjoyable but they might be precisely in line with how the Universe (or your Universe) should be.

Perhaps it's because scientists are human and like to do cool, fun, stuff from time to time? There might be a publicity element to it as well. In the UK at least, researchers will get partially judged on whether their work gets media/public engagement. I'm not sure this is necessarily a healthy thing but it is what it is. Cool images increase the likelihood that your normally obscure and incomprehensible work will get a moment in the limelight.

The phys.org article links to the original paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-023-01272-3. Which contains this figure: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-023-01272-3/figures/6. The accompanying text reads: Coincidence image of interference between a reference SPDC state and a state obtained by a pump beam with the shape of a Ying and Yang symbol (shown in the inset).

Before anyone gets too excited, the tai chi(yin yang) pattern was chosen by the experimenters to help demonstrate the phenomenon they were looking at. It didn't arise unexpectedly/naturally.

Pitchford seems to be going for a synthesised view of 'eastern' rather than CM specifically. I prefer Daverick Legget's books which focus on CM food energetics. Beinfield's book is heavy on the Wu Xing - in a good way. The descriptions of how these might manifest in an individual are interesting. She has this slightly odd questionnaire in the book to determine your element 'type'. I'm not sure how good it is but the way she talks about the Wu Xing fits quite well with BaZi Day Masters (at least in me and some people I know).

Might be interesting to some: “Meditation Sickness” in Medieval Chinese Buddhism and the Contemporary West C. Pierce Salguero A certain percentage of people report experiencing adverse mental and physical side effects from practicing meditation. Contemporary scientific literature and personal reports from meditators are beginning to document the phenomenon, but centuries-old Buddhist texts also warned about the dangers of “meditation sickness.” Writings from medieval China not only identify the adverse mental and physical symptoms that can arise in the course of meditation practice, but also explain why these occur and how they can be effectively treated. Might these materials contain important therapeutic information that is relevant for meditators today? What would be required to make this historical knowledge accessible for contemporary practitioners and clinicians? And do our disciplinary norms as religious studies scholars even allow us to ask such questions? https://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/files/2023/08/Salguero-Finalized-ms-for-publication47.pdf

Hi @amosharari - where are you headed in Wudang?

Hi All, Ashe Higgs, the interviewer, is also an accomplished martial artist and student of Master Sam Chin of I Liq Chuan. https://www.fallingleaveskungfu.com/2023/06/exploring-daxuan-with-serge-augier/ Cheers Rob

Finally made it to the Hilma Af Klimt & Piet Mondrian show at Tate Modern. Very cool. Nicely curated showing parallels and divergence of development for both artists. All happening with Theosophy in the background - both artists were members of Theosophical Lodges and had contact with Rudolph Steiner and others. Mondrian. Note theosophically-significant belly buttons. Hilma Af Klimt went through an iridology phase... Blackboard illustration from a talk by Rudolph Steiner Mondrian drawing trees again Mondrian self-portrait. There was a photo of him at about the same age with similar young Rasputin vibes

Hi All, https://www.fallingleaveskungfu.com/2023/06/xingyiquan-alex-kozma/ Some of you will have read Alex's books or seen his videos. He rarely lets the spotlight fall on him - generally preferring to highlight the work of teachers and exponents that he has met. Cheers Rob

Hi all, I was speaking to someone yesterday who referred to the Dao as 'her'. Is this commonplace? Seemed a bit odd to me.

Thanks. But it looks like the translation also uses 'it' rather than 'her' so mothering sounds like a function/description here rather than a gender indication?

I think what I was trying to get at was that, in my current practice, by paying attention to the sense of space in/around the body and paying attention to the space in which thoughts arise, I start to experience those two things as the same thing. For me this is new. I could probably substitute 'environment' for 'space' as I try and describe 'where I am at' but space is a better word for all of the reasons that @steve mentions. Writing about my practice is something I generally shy away from so it has been useful trying to communicate some of my experience.

That resonates. There is a parallel between the mental and physical experience. The attention on physical stillness is a process almost of pattern recognition. I think I am still; balanced, relaxed, and then I realise that the stillness is actually a localised tension pattern. But that pattern will not resolve unless I can refocus my attention to the larger physical system within which the tense area resides. Similarly, when my mind wanders into thought, I have to broaden my attention to the space in which that thought arose. Both are about increasing some sense of spaciousness and it feels like that space is, at some level, the same space.

What does everyone think about the relationship between silence and physical stillness? My teacher has said that stilling the body can lead to stilling the mind. In my practice I find that I follow one to the other and back again.

Hi @Jannski, welcome to the Bums. I'm a distance student of Da Xuan and would be interested to hear how you get on with your first encounter! Good luck to you whichever way the journey goes. cheers Rob

The Tate programmers are watching!! Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: UK 2023

I use Insight Timer. It can be programmed easily for various durations and I ignore the rest of the features. It also has the best selection of 'bongs' and 'bings' that I've found. Super spiritual! When I started sitting regularly, I also found myself waiting for the timer to go off but that was about me - not about the timer. Still happens...

So, my first thought was 'those feet look weirdly small'. Yes, Rob, that's right - because everything else in that picture is COMPLETELY NORMAL.

Found on FB today: Apologies for the weird formatting - bit of a lazy C&P but worth it I hope! THE WOMAN WHO PAINTED THE FUTURE In the summer of 1986 a Swedish farmer recovered his abandoned country house by his last tenant. In the basement next to the house he found, covered in dust from years, huge wooden boxes. When he opened them he was baffled. There were 1200 paintings, some very large, with geometric figures of intense colors. He called in a neighbor who supposedly was more educated or informed, but didn’t even understand what they had just discovered. They assumed that the paintings formed an enormous scenography or were illegal, maybe stolen. The neighbor thought he would call a friend who worked in a museum and asked if the paintings had a signature. "Yes," said the neighbor - on the corner says Hilma Klint." Some officials and art connoisseurs arrived and took away the boxes. A few weeks later the Stockholm Art Museum made public an unusual discovery. It was more than a thousand paintings, drawings and theoretical essays, a totally abstract work, with pure color geometric shapes and precise texture, signed and dated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What was unusual was the dates: they were painted before Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian "invented" abstract painting. Hilma was a clear forerunner. Why did nobody know about her? Why were the paintings hidden? Hilma af Klint was born in Stockholm in 1862. Her father was a mathematician and had a large library in which little Hilma prescribed everything about geometry and art. At twenty she entered the Swedish Academy of Arts, one of the few schools that admitted women and was part of the first generation of European painters who set up exhibitions and lived off their work. She painted portraits and realistic landscapes that were well appreciated by her clients. In those years X-rays were invented and electromagnetic waves were discovered, which could send information through air and vacuum. These events blew Hilma’s mind where apparently she came to the conclusion that invisible parallel worlds exist. She was interested in these alternative realities and different levels of perception. Because in that time the sciences were connected with spiritualism and Hilma went to spiritual sessions. The possibility of communicating with the most beloved of her sisters, who had already died, was also encouraged. She would attempt to communicate with her sister, but formed a club with five other women; they met every Friday, summoned spirits and had automatic painting and poetry sessions (which the surrealists did years later). Hilma started creating rare paintings with random spots, pretending to let herself go to other energies, then she went to paint that chaos based on the geometric structures of nature, which she knew well since she was a child. She spent some days painting her commissions and others locking herself in a country house to unleash a creative passion she kept top secret. Two painters in one person. So hid away for several years and on the day she wrote her will, she put her grandson Erick as the sole heir, on condition that he kept his paintings in wooden boxes, which could only be opened twenty years after her death Why did she decide this? Perhaps she considered her paintings a very intimate and sincere view, only of herself; perhaps she thought her work was completely out of academic rules and making it public would end her successful career. But here you are, life decided something else: the grandson left this world before the date of the revelation and the paintings remained hidden for many years more than Hilma wanted, until 1986, when the Swedish farmer found it in his basement. In the eighties, the avant-garde of the beginning of the century were already totally assimilated; art followed its paths, more different than ever. Amidst this worldly noise, Hilma af Klint returned from the afterlife to take her place as the true mother of surrealism… www.wildrevolution.com

I've read 2023. It's OK. If you've read Illuminatus it might seem a bit derivative.