Meditation is not a good way for practising

[三江源]

WHAT!!! LLOLL omfg dude please stop talking it hurts.

 

 

I think this fits in perfectly here:

 

 

[Lao Tzu]

The meditate I practice does not involve visualization, or thinking of anything. You enter a deep deep deep state of trance where you can easily and tangibly feel currents of energy within your own body, in this state you can pull in more chi and store it at the naval chakra, or dan tein.

OK, It is not the best way to practise Tao. Because you must keep in one certain state in which you are paying attention to your own body. It is opposite to the core spirit of the Taoism or Buddhism.

That can only help you feel the Chi. It can hardly help you make you more healthy.

[joeblast]

Okay. First error. (Taoist) Meditation is NOT! thinking.

*drops deadman's manual on the floor from chest height*

 

nor does Zen imply mental gymnastics

[Protector]

Maybe I should say why Taoism has nothing to do with meditation?

Nah, I want to listen to you guys embarrass yourself some more

[Marblehead]

Sorry about my English or my misunderstanding of the meditation.

Can you please tell me what is meditation?

Chuang Tzu, Section IV, translation by Burton Watson:

 

"Make your will one! Don't listen with your ears, listen with your mind. No, don't listen with your mind, but listen with your spirit. Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but spirit is empty- and waits on all things. The Way gathers in emptiness alone. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind."

[Thunder_Gooch]

Sorry about my English or my misunderstanding of the meditation.

Can you please tell me what is meditation?

 

For me, meditation is an altered state of consciousness, where the body grows cold, the breathing slows to imperceptible levels, the heart beat slows down to the point a pulse cannot be felt, and you can feel currents of energy run inside and outside of your body. In this state you can focus on pulling in energy to the lower dan tein also known as the naval chakra.

 

I think it's a little silly that you have to ask what meditation is (there are millions of types of meditation) but yet you think it has nothing to do with Taoism and is a waste of time.

 

It's like saying cars are a stupid way to get from place to place, walking is faster, wait what is a car?

[joeblast]

OK, It is not the best way to practise Tao. Because you must keep in one certain state in which you are paying attention to your own body. It is opposite to the core spirit of the Taoism or Buddhism.

That can only help you feel the Chi. It can hardly help you make you more healthy.

If you do not do the requisite work, you are unable to separate the signals from the noise and have no basis from which to declare one phenomenon noise and another signal.

 

This, like all other methods, are to be dropped sooner or later.

 

The buddha's years of austerities and meditation provided the platform from which the understanding came forth - without such, one never really fully understands the concept of turning one's hands over.

[Marblehead]

Maybe I should say why Taoism has nothing to do with meditation?

 

You are almost correct with that statement. But only almost. Hehehe.

[Thunder_Gooch]

OK, It is not the best way to practise Tao. Because you must keep in one certain state in which you are paying attention to your own body. It is opposite to the core spirit of the Taoism or Buddhism.

That can only help you feel the Chi. It can hardly help you make you more healthy.

 

I have nothing to say except you are so wrong here, you store energy to develop your spirit. Also the health benefits of neigong and qigong are the main focal point of many schools. You may be well versed in certain forms of Buddhist or Taoist philosophy but you are ignorant of Taoism as a whole and the point of practices like neigong. Taoism is a big catch all phrase, there are religious schools of Taoism, philosophical schools of Taoism and neigong schools which dedicate themselves to internal arts and extracting Qi from the environment and developing internal power and developing their spirit or shen.

 

Studying some philosophy or practicing some certain way of living isn't going to do anything to help you develop spiritually.

Edited December 23, 2011 by More_Pie_Guy

[Protector]

You are almost correct with that statement. But only almost. Hehehe.

 

Well Taoism has as much to do with it as it has with anything else

But I'm still surprised that this stuff wasn't common knowledge hmmm

[Lao Tzu]

Chuang Tzu, Section IV, translation by Burton Watson:

 

"Make your will one! Don't listen with your ears, listen with your mind. No, don't listen with your mind, but listen with your spirit. Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but spirit is empty- and waits on all things. The Way gathers in emptiness alone. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind."

How to comprehend such words is the key.

[Jetsun]

 

I think it's a little silly that you have to ask what meditation is (there are millions of types of meditation) but yet you think it has nothing to do with Taoism and is a waste of time.

 

It's not such a silly question, many methods of meditation may just be self hypnosis and other may just be worthless or ways of repressing yourself. Many masters within lineages like Dzogchen say what most people practice isn't actually real meditation yet they are called meditation methods, so it depends on your definition of meditation.

[Marblehead]

Well Taoism has as much to do with it as it has with anything else

But I'm still surprised that this stuff wasn't common knowledge hmmm

 

That is because we are always trying to define things. Not that this is necessarily wrong because that is the way our brain normally works. It is when we try to define what cannot be defined that we get into all these disagreements.

[Lao Tzu]

I have nothing to say except you are so wrong here, you store energy to develop your spirit. Also the health benefits of neigong and qigong are the main focal point of many schools. You may be well versed in certain forms of Buddhist or Taoist philosophy but you are ignorant of Taoism as a whole and the point of practices like neigong. Taoism is a big catch all phrase, there are religious schools of Taoism, philosophical schools of Taoism and neigong schools which dedicate themselves to internal arts and extracting Qi from the environment and developing internal power and developing their spirit or shen.

 

Studying some philosophy or practicing some certain way of living isn't going to do anything to help you develop spiritually.

You misunderstand what is real neigong. That is not your fault. That is because most of the Chinese people who study Taoism misunderstood Taoism, and their thoughts were spread to the whole world.

[Marblehead]

How to comprehend such words is the key.

 

So how do you comprehend those words?

[Thunder_Gooch]

You misunderstand what is real neigong. That is not your fault. That is because most of the Chinese people who study Taoism misunderstood Taoism, and their thoughts were spread to the whole world.

 

No I don't misunderstand what real neigong is. If you have a better explanation please enlighten us, or shut up and go away.

[Marblehead]

No I don't misunderstand what real neigong is. If you have a better explanation please enlighten us, or shut up and go away.

 

Hehehe. Aw, let him be. This is actually a pretty good discussion of the concept of meditation. (Yes, I know you know what you are talking about.)

[Wells]

You misunderstand what is real neigong. That is not your fault. That is because most of the Chinese people who study Taoism misunderstood Taoism, and their thoughts were spread to the whole world.

Still only claims and hollow words so far from you! =>No discussion possible!

So, please enlighten us what real neigong is in your opinion!!!

[Lao Tzu]

Still only claims and hollow words so far from you! =>No discussion possible!

So, please enlighten us what real neigong is in your opinion!!!

It is not easy to explain. A good point about Tao has to come up after you read lots of books which were written by the chinese ancient sages.

 

Let me try to find some way to help you understand what I am saying. So give me some time here.

[joeblast]

How to comprehend such words is the key.

yup, and it can be summed up in one word: experience - if you have no experiential understanding, which is obtained by many different forms of meditation, then you are going to flounder in wordville until you get up the gumption to sit down on your rear and practice.

[Protector]

Or maybe just drop it, it wont make a big difference proving it here on a small forum

It takes so much time to do it here, it would be even more annoying going from person to person, which is how this feels like

[Thunder_Gooch]

According to Huston Smith, author of my world religions textbook.

 

http://www.worldwisdom.com/public/viewpdf/default.aspx?article-title=Taoism_by_Huston_Smith.pdf

 

 

"Three Approaches to Power and the Taoisms That Follow

Tao Te Ching, the title of Taoism’s basic text, has been translated The

Way and Its Power. We have seen that the first of these substantive

terms, the Way, can be taken in three senses. Now we must add that

this is also true of the second substantive term, power. Corresponding

to the three ways te or power can be approached, there have arisen

in China three species of Taoism so dissimilar that initially they seem

to have no more in common than homonyms, like blew/blue or sun/

son, that sound alike but have different meanings. We shall find that

this is not the case, but first the three species must be distinguished.

Two have standard designations, Philosophical Taoism and Religious

Taoism respectively; and because many more people were involved

with Religious Taoism it is often called Popular Taoism as well.

 

The third school (which will come second in our order of presentation) is too heterogeneous to have acquired a single title. Its population constitutes an identifiable cluster, however, by virtue of sharing a common objective. All were engaged in vitalizing programs that were intended to facilitate Tao’s power, its te, as it flows through human beings."

 

"Philosophical Taoism is essentially an attitude toward life,

it is the most “exportable” Taoism of the three, the one that has the

most to say to the world at large"

 

 

Vicarious Power: Religious Taoism

 

Philosophical Taoism sought to manage life’s normal quotient of the

Tao efficiently, and energizing Taoism sought to boost its base supply,

but something was lacking. Reflection and health programs take

time, and the average Chinese lacked that commodity.

 

Yet they too needed help; there were epidemics to be checked, marauding ghosts to be reckoned with, and rains to be induced or stopped as occasions demanded. Taoists responded to such problems. The measures they

devised paralleled many of the doings of freelance soothsayers, psychics, shamans, and faith healers who came by their powers naturally and constituted the unchanging landscape of Chinese folk religion.

Religious Taoism institutionalized such activities.

 

Popular, Religious Taoism is a murky affair. Much of it looks from the outside, we must always keep in mind—like crude superstition

 

 

The texts of this school are crammed with descriptions of rituals

that, if exactly performed, have magical effects

 

 

 

 

"Augmented Power: Taoist Hygiene and Yoga

 

Taoist “adepts”—as we shall call the practitioners of this second kind

of Taoism because all were engaged in training programs of some

sort, many of them demanding—were not willing to settle for the

philosophers’ goal of managing their allotments of the Tao efficiently.

They wanted to go beyond conserving to increasing the quota of the

Tao they had to work with. In accounting terms we can say that if

Philosophical Taoists worked at increasing net profits by cutting costs

(reducing needless energy expenditures), Taoist adepts wanted to

increase gross income.

 

The word ch’i cries out to be recognized as the rightful entry to this

second school, for though it literally means breath, it actually means

vital energy. The Taoists used it to refer to the power of the Tao that

they experienced coursing through them—or not coursing because

it was blocked—and their main object was to further its flow.

 

Ch’i" fascinated these Taoists. Blake registered their feelings precisely when

he exclaimed, “Energy is delight,” for energy is the life force and the

Taoists loved life. To be alive is good; to be more alive is better; to be

always alive is best, hence the Taoist immortality cults. To accomplish

their end of maximizing ch’i, these Taoists worked with three things:

matter, movement, and their minds.

 

Respecting matter, they tried eating things—virtually everything,

it would seem—to see if ch’i could be augmented nutritionally. In

the course of this experimentation, they developed a remarkable

pharmacopia of medicinal herbs,2 but in a way this was incidental.

 

What they really wanted was not cure but increase—increase and

extension of the life force, the ultimate guarantor of which would be

the much-sought elixir of life that would insure physical immortality.

 

Breathing exercises were also developed. Working with air, the subtlest form of matter, they sought to draw ch’i from the atmosphere.

 

These efforts to extract ch’i from matter in its solid, liquid, and

gaseous forms were supplemented by programs of bodily movement

such as t’ai chi chuan, which gathers calisthenics, dance, meditation,

yin/yang philosophy, and martial art into a synthesis that in this case

was designed to draw ch’i from the cosmos and dislodge blocks to its

internal flow. This last was the object of acupuncture as well.

 

Finally, turning to the mind itself, contemplatives, many of them

hermits, developed Taoist meditation. This practice involved shutting

out distractions and emptying the mind to the point where the power

of the Tao might bypass bodily filters and enter the self directly.

 

This third way of increasing ch’i is more abstract than the others, so

more needs to be said about it. The quickest gateway to understanding

meditational Taoism is via Hindu raja yoga, the way to God through

psychophysical exercises. Whether or not China borrowed from India

on this score, the physical postures and concentration techniques

of Taoist meditation are so reminiscent of raja yoga that sinologists

import the Sanskrit term and call it Taoist yoga."

 

 

 

Taoist yoga had an appreciable core of practitioners. Some sinologists consider it the basic perspective from which the Tao Te Ching was written. If this is true it is a testament to the veiled language of the book, for it is usually read in the philosophical way we shall come to.

Edited December 23, 2011 by More_Pie_Guy

[ChiDragon]

Or maybe just drop it, it wont make a big difference proving it here on a small forum

It takes so much time to do it here, it would be even more annoying going from person to person, which is how this feels like

You reminded me of an old saying:

隔岸觀火: watching the fire burn across the water bed.

 

I thought you were enjoying that....!!!

 

hehehehehe..............

Edited December 24, 2011 by ChiDragon

[Protector]

[Lao Tzu]

金丹四百字（张紫阳）:

 

不可执以无为，不可行于有作，不可泥于存想，不可着于持守，不可枯坐灰心，不可盲修瞎炼。

 

Four hundred words about NeiDan(Zhang Ziyang):

 

Can not run to inaction, is not feasible to have to make, not like mud in the deposit, not forward to hold on, not just sit and lose heart, not silly religious refining.