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Western Mo Pai
There is one school of cultivation that has drifted far from the original intent of chi kung and that is Mo Pai in the West. Some westerner tourists ran across a guy known as John Chang. Western Mo Pai Students is abbreviated as WMPS and pronounced Wimps. John had cultivated chi power for many decades and had the ability to give people electric shocks. The travelers were very impressed and made some videos of him giving people shocks, lighting small LED lights, and igniting some paper on fire. You can buy LED lights that anyone can light up by holding, and iginiting newspaper is a popular trick using chemicals, which are rubbed together as the paper is being crumpled. A book titled "Magus of Java" was also written about john, in which it is claimed that John is an immortal, as if amateurs would know. They made it up to sell books.
For many people in the West the book and videos were their first exposure to the idea that chi power and special abilities really exist, and naturally, many people want to learn to do these things themselves. However there is a big problem with all this:
John Chang got in trouble for demonstrating abilities in public (a mistake a Taoist immortal would not make) and for teaching Westerners, for which he was fired from his teaching position. Westerners are now not allowed into the school for a good reason. There were a couple of short term Western students who were strictly beginners, they learned 2 of the supposed 72 levels, or 2.7% of the system. They were absolutely unqualified to teach and did not have permission to teach; yet they disobeyed and taught the very little that they had learned anyway. Based on these meager and misled teachings some egomaniacs have created an internet forum or two in order to cash in on the popularity of Mo Pai. The important thing to note is that each level consist of only ONE technique, which is a huge joke.
Those guys spent two years ‘learning’ only those two exercises, they received no corrections of their obvious mistakes. Even beginners who have seen the pictures can spot the glaring mistakes and see those technique smugglers learned incorrectly.
The fact that only two techniques were taught in two years should be a big red flag for anyone interested in real nei kung. Chi kung normally consists of small sets of low power exercises while real nei kung systems are vast holistic systems which contain thousands of techniques.
When students learn only two techniques and the teacher doesn't explain much it is normal to try to figure out what is happening and this leads to arriving at some crazy ideas, many of which one finds are incorrect as they advance further. However these Westerners can not advance further and so they filled in the blanks with some wild imaginings, which they passed on to the Wimps. The Wimps, in turn, are ruled over by a high pressure egotistical Western dictator type, who made up further things about the practice.
For example, the original stolen teachings mention sitting in full or half lotus but do not mention grounding. In his wild imaginings the dictator of the Wimps took it a step further and declared that people who sit indoors need to sit with their bare butt on a bare copper wire and have the wire go outside and be connected to the ground. He declared that it is best to sit on the bare ground with a bare butt while meditating, which, as anyone who has read a bit will know, is not only comical, but patently ridiculous. It ignores some basic facts about cultivating chi power, and also ignores some commonly known scientific facts which are that both people's skin and the soil on the ground are good insulators and not conductors. It is possible to cultivate all the power one could imagine by sitting in chairs indoors as most readers with common sense are well aware of.
Edit: The latest news has it that all three of the practitioners of Mo Pai known to the west, including John Chang, now have or have died from, prostate cancer, which they developed at relatively young ages, and this is said to be a result of doing Mo Pai.
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Warning about the second exercise:
So while the first technique, called level one, is fine as plain old low power meditation, there are some serious problems with the second exercise, called level two. It is concerning level two and the requirement to create a lot of tension. Lao Tsu wrote in the TTC that rigidity, which is the same as the tension used, is the way of death, while softness and flexibility is the way of the vibrant and living. It has similarities to Iron Shirt, and Iron Shirt is for creating resistance to blows and is not for health or longevity. This is what I have to say about chi kung that uses tension, and you can quote me on this: "Most of them are going to die young", which echoes the sentiments of Lao Tzu, who appears to have been a nei kung master.
To create a lot of tension while breathing in slowly and then holding the breath and tension for as long as possible is very unnatural and is 'backwards'. My friendly Taoist wizard/immortal/teacher and mentor put it this way: "Never hold your breath!"
It is safe to say that doing level two is unsafe and will hurt you, not maybe, and not if you do it a lot. It will hurt you for sure, and every time. Every single time chips another little bit off the longevity measuring stick off your life, and it isn't worth it to be able to give people little electric shocks, there are other, better, softer ways. There are other ways to gain healing abilities that do not involve creating tension. In fact all legitimate schools of Taoist nei kung will lead a person to experience magic, real magic, and they are done softly.
It's different for the Western Mo Pai psychophants though, they only know about level two and so they will be continually doing this tension creating practice, which is shortening their lives and creating not only physical tension which stays with them when they aren't practicing but a lot of emotional tension which blends with their egotistical desire for power in ugly ways. As we can all very easily see.
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Warning: Since some spies infiltrated the Wimps and shared everything with the public, the Wimp’s dictator is claiming to have discovered the third technique for, TAADAA, a grand total of 4% of the system. However it is a carefully guarded secret that only those who suck up to the dictator for a long time are given it. The Wimps imagine themselves to be quite exalted and advanced in the west West from knowing 3 - 4% of a defective system, and will tell you this for sure, because there is a video of John giving people little electric shocks and playing some common tricks. BEWARE of this. The Wimps do NOT have this information because the real Mo Pai students, the Asian Mo Pai students, hate them, will not help them in any way, and sincerely hope they go and burn in hell ASAP.
After more than a decade of them, this was my first time participating in a thread on this topic.
With some persistence, creativity, and personal abasement, I managed to ascertain from MegaMind that Jim McMillan and Kosta Danaos, the sources of the instructions that he follows, were not (so far as he knows) formally initiated into the Indonesian Mopai, and therefore none of McMillan's and Danaos' students received formal induction into the living Mopai lineage.
I actually think this is important information to have out there. It tells prospective students that there is almost certainly no link between what they can get in English that is labelled as "Mopai" and the actual "pai" (lineage/sect) that uses the name of Moh-Tzu in Indonesia. To those prone to believing in such things, it also raises the question of whether or not the spiritual guardians of this lineage would approve of the teaching that is going on on the English-speaking internet, and the spiritual/karmic consequences that could come about from this. Finally, it makes it extremely clear that when (not if--no practice is without pitfalls and dangers) problems arise, the English-speakers who use the name of "Mopai" really and truly are incapable of seeking out their would-be elders in the lineage for instruction in order to learn how to solve these problems. In all honesty, I tip my hat to MegaMind for finally putting this information into the public sphere.
As for whether or not the behavior in this thread--my own included--shows anything even remotely approaching the Noble Eight-fold Path, well, I will not defend it. I am sure kleshas were on display from a great many people, me no less than anybody else.
And yet,
I think there is a certain honesty in this. People showed their "true colors," which I'd rather see than any contrived veneer of civility, behind which who knows what lurks. So often what lurks beneath "good behavior" is so much uglier than foul language and name calling that I'm prone to say that I'd take the latter any day.
Is lots of the behavior in this thread shameful, from a certain standpoint? I won't say it is not. But is it all pointless? I do not believe so. Some important points have been made by a great many people in between the name-calling, mockery, swearing, raw emotion, attachment, vengefulness, and so forth. These important points are that: the so-called English-language "Mopai" practices may be dangerous; the practices are extremely incomplete; the practices are wholly severed from their still-living transmitters (to wit, Chang and Danaos, though it seems there maybe other teachers in the school in Indonesia); they may or may not be different from what is/was taught in Indonesia (although MegaMind stresses that they alter nothing they learned from McMillan and Danaos, and that may well be true).
You say that none of this matters beyond a tiny sliver of people, but have you met people with psychosis related to qigong practice? Physical illness related to qigong practice? Years of their life wasted in cults combined with the trauma that comes from this? I have, and it has left me with the strong sense that the more information that is out there about any shadowy group (sorry, MegaMind, but you keep much in the shadows, I think you can agree with that) with a very questionable past, the better. I want it to be public knowledge where the so-called Levels 1-2B come from.
Speaking more generally, beyond the scope of what this thread originally centered on (but came to include now that Dawei's appearance has widened the scope), it is a fact that nowadays one finds more cussing, name-calling, and general rowdiness in some threads than used to be seen here.
But I don't think it's gotten out of control. Matterofact, as I said a page or two back, I think it's been limited to only a few places. I see a lot of pleasant, focused, informative, deep threads coexisting at the same time.
As for where the low-brow behavior has come into play, my personal (and yes, of course, biased) opinion is that there's generally been a point to it all, and a method to the madness.
Back in the days of the "mod squad," what with their stern, blue font warnings in officialese (not to mentioned red font fiiinnnaaallll warnings), it was indeed often off limits to call people out, especially if that was done in a way that involved any "playground tactics." A certain culture of politeness was, for lack of a better word, enforced.
But my observation--after about a decade of all that--is that a certain type of troll and a certain type of sicko thrives in the polite, policed environment. And the Dao Bums, for a long time, was a platform, soapbox, and playground for a good number of those trolls and sickos who figured out the rules, and played by them.
Since the mods got sent back to the peanut gallery half a year ago, I've seen a certain anarchic "immune system" kick into action more than once here, and I've seen a couple of people and groups with long histories of very disturbing behavior get their noses rubbed in their shit in a way that was never possible in the past, because calls for politeness quite often ended up trumping calls for accountability.
The anarchic immune system sure does get ugly sometimes, but I study medicine, and I'll tell you, sometimes a bout of explosive diarrhea, vomiting, and delirious feverish ranting is just the ticket for expelling deadly microbes. My current working hypothesis ('cause I'm not sure I'm right about all this) is that we nowadays sometimes see something analogous to all that.
Shit, could this thread be handled better? Could the thread with Drew busking for $20 be handled better? Sure, I guess so. Are some of us going too far sometimes? I guess maybe, maybe probably. But from my standpoint, where I look onto the world with admittedly one-sided vision and far-from-total wisdom, what might look like simple bullying here has an element of protecting the vulnerable from self-appointed teachers who can, will, and too often do suck aspiring practitioners into weird, dangerous worlds that are not what they claim to be. If indeed that's what's happening, and we're all not simply sick puppies fighting for the sake of it, then may it continue.
Bringing this concern back to this thread:
The English-speaking "Mopai," it can now be said without doubt (thanks to MegaMind's eventual admission), is in no, way, shape, or form affiliated with the actual, living, extant Mopai in Indonesia from which they take their name and (controversially) some teachings. Furthermore, the so-called "Mopai" of the English-speaking world was not founded by any individual who was ever, in any formal and traditional manner, made a fully-fledged member of the Indonesian Mopai.
This is information I, personally, hope remains easily available for aspirants to take into account before they begin practicing whatever it is that's in those PDFs.
Was it extracted at cost to the civility of this board and maybe my own personal integrity? On the real, I dunno. I accept my inability to know, and the possibility that I may pay a heavy karmic cost. I was doing my best, and I know it might not have been good enough.
All that said, sometimes you gotta speak up, sometimes you gotta act. I do so plenty "in real life," and sometimes I do so here. That might just mean I'm a pompous megalomaniac who's going to spend a long time dealing with the consequences of my actions. I guess I'll learn whether or not that's the case sooner or later. But, as your own foray into this thread shows, Steve, even when one is laying one's eyes upon something wholly "irrelevant," sometimes one stops and decides to get involved, as pointless as I guess that might be.
I don't begrudge you your jumping into the fray to try and set the course of a ship that you seem to think has gone astray.
Matterofact, I relate to it.
And welcome it.
Though I don't wholly agree with it.
Good day to ya.
