idquest

First, I'd say you could be jumping to conclusions by assigning a lable to the piece of consciousness that contacted you. It could be as simple as your intuition taking specific forms, or your surfacing sub-consciousness. With that, what are your up and down sides? From your words, you were told that discarding some sintetic substances you could improve your health. WHy don't just follow the advice? The upside - your health could improve, the downside - you won't be taking in some sintetic substances and save some money along the way. Unless you have very clear signs that these substances have helped you already. If they do help, it is not very clear, but is still worth it, in my opinion.

There is more of attunement to the body and to the environment. This has direct physiological and psychological benefits. As for the spiritual development - I don't know how to quantify it, and nobody really knows what it is anyway. Repeating walkers with more experience than mine, I'll say that you either have a call or you don't. If you have a call, you just do it. Simple as that.

Just can't understand why hide neidan content from general public/unregistered users. It's not like TDB is flooded with posts on neidan anyway. Also, there already exists a Taoist Texts subforum and the activity there is not huge. Making an elitist club out of neidan? Says something about TDB...

Chia-like practices come from tantra. If you are interested in such practices, you can look either into Kashmir Shiva tantra or Tibetan Buddhism tantra.