[Soda]

While you’re on the subject, I’ve some related questions..

I’ve been trying to understand these vital paragraphs from Michael’s recent answers on this question:

-Color,sound, rhythm/breath, feeling, intention/shape – these are the five attributes covered in the Fundamentals for shaping the healing sounds using the five shen. You are reversing the flow of chi in fusion from the healing sounds, and need to give that instruction to all five phases simultaneously.

If you only activate one or two of them, i.e. the capacity to create a color and shape, you will only get a partial result. When you tap all five, you get a collective result that will override all resistance that is hidden within you. Then your power to change is maximized many times over a partial “head command” trying to boss the chi around, and encountering unconscioius resistance.

-it appears you are attached to believing that the visualization process begins in the head and is layered onto the body experience. This is the standard mind-body dualistic perception, the modern scientific view that the head generates our reality and is the “mind”. The Taoist notion of xin (heart-mind) is that the vital organ spirits create our reality – including what passes through the brain at the end of the creation process as thoughts, feelings, sensations. In this model, images can only be shaped AFTER you have the chi to shape it into an image.

What still puzzles me (btw, my apologies to anyone reading this in the hope of answers!!) is this:

If we learn a technique, we always appear to learn it verbally.

If we seek to ensure that we are communicating with all five phases, by simultaneously employing “Color,sound, rhythm/breath, feeling, intention/shape” how can it be other than a head command doing so?

In other words, unless we’ve already integrated the five shen, how can we communicate effectively with them? It’s like trying to lift a dustbin in which you are standing. Isn’t it?

If you get in the qigong state, either the process you want to happen is already happening, or you will have to impose on it from the part of you which remembers what it is you want, the head. No?

Sorry to be dense, but this seems really vital.

PS Is “Color,sound, rhythm/breath, feeling, intention/shape” a direct correspondence to liver, kidney, lung, heart, spleen?

[Soda]

If you are afraid to express your personal will, you are a human cripple. And yuou will never fulfill your personal destiny, or worse, you’ll never go beyond the cards that fate dealt you. In short, you’ll be totally boring to yourself, to others, and to the mind of humanity that took a risk in letting you incarnate in the hopes of getting some fresh resolution to old issues.

Alchemy is just the science of speeding up what occurs naturally in life – the integration of the one original will that emerged from Tao with the many wills manifesting each moment.This is a process of the individual will gradually making the collective will conscious.

Can you explain why this is not a contradiction? How can you make the collective will conscious while still exercising your personal will? Does it not get in the way?

And, please, how is it arranged that we have a personal destiny, which is both beyond what fate deals us, and dependent on our exercising will? Is destiny really the word for something so easily avoided? How is such a destiny allocated?

Can it not be a fresh solution to ignore all promptings of one’s personal will? Are not the difficulties of so doing multiple and varied enough to avoid being bored? And the enormous willpower required to get into the swing of doing so, does that not produce enough contradictions to keep the mind of humanity entertained?

Over and out.
S

[Soda]

What balloons? How far in? Inflated how much? Up there for how long?

Can you tell us enough to do it ourselves and get the same effects without having to go pay someone?

Thank you,
Soda

[Soda]

In that case, I beg your pardon. Pray continue…

(the answer “no” would have been quite satisfactory, tho 🙂 )

[Soda]

“He who has meditated upon and clearly comprehended the entire sphere of materiality will begin to understand and clearly comprehend mentality. If one tries to meditate on mentality before he has come to comprehend the entire sphere of materiality the meditator will fall from his practice as a mountain cow falls from the path on taking an unfamiliar route.”

– The Buddha

All just semantics? Seems direct enough to me. But then I have no claims to make about the state of my game. All I wish to state is that you have spent at most, a year following the instructions of Nan and Bodri, and yet you talk as if you have the authority to make pronouncements of truth. Does everything you say come from your own experience? Is your meditation really progressing that well? Or are you parotting other people’s words, however sincerely?

[Soda]

Max:

Please don’t be too sure that yours is the only way, or even the best.
You will waste time trying to convince others who should only be convinced by their own experience. Go meditate!

The passage below I have anonymised slighly, but have changed nothing imporatant. It may help you with the idea that empty mind is not the only way up the mountain.

The three fundamental techniques taught in this practice:

1.Mindfulness of breathing (Anapana sati),

2.Awareness of the four elements in the breath and body (mindfulness of material states)

3. Mindfulness of the various body parts (Kayagatasati).

The third of these techniques is then expanded considerably from sutta teachings as the yogi is guided in developing mindfulness of the detailed cellular anatomy and the subtle systems of the body.

Why develop such a complete system of meditation on the body?

The reasons are twofold:

1.It enables us to dig out and heal all the dysfunctional energy stored and blocked within the body at its many levels. Thus we heal and make healthy the body as a support to higher and more rigorous meditation in the future. To develop high states of concentration & mindfulness requires tremendous energy, and we have to properly prepare the body to sustain such effort. It has become apparent from interviewing numerous practitioners of Vipassana meditation, that so many yogis make great initial progress and then get stuck, sometimes for years, without making much further headway. The reason for this is that the base of mind is not yet strong enough to overcome the deeper defilement, and the physical body cannot provide the energetic support that is required to break through. For this reason we must develop and build into our system stronger energetic pathways as a basis from which to progress.

2. The second reason for such a detailed investigation of the materiality of the body is simply explained by the words of the Buddha himself –

“He who has meditated upon and clearly comprehended the entire sphere of materiality will begin to understand and clearly comprehend mentality. If one tries to meditate on mentality before he has come to comprehend the entire sphere of materiality the meditator will fall from his practice as a mountain cow falls from the path on taking an unfamiliar route.”

The knowledge of mind and matter and their producing causes is the first level of insight knowledge. It represents Samma Ditti (or right view). This is the first stage of the Buddha’s eightfold noble path. Only once we have successfully established this view from our own investigation, can we consider ourselves ready to successfully practice Vipassana meditation.

Only then can we expect to meet with real success in our endeavour. As the nature of materiality becomes known to us, the nature of the mind reveals itself gradually. It is not enough simply to make the reflection that the materiality inside the body is impermanent and void of an inherent self. We have to diligently investigate all the various types of materiality, right down to the ultimate level (the four elements which make up every particle of matter). We have to observe the producing causes of this materiality (temperature, nutriment, consciousness and karma) and see that it is all conditioned. Only then can we finally come to know that it is all, without exception, impermanent and selfless. This then forms the first stage of right view – the other being the similarly exhaustive investigation of mental states.

Cheers
S

[Soda]

to see if it works

[Author]

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