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I think time factor is something to consider for anybody who wants seriously to practice qigong or yoga.
1.5 to 2 hours is not really much even for single thing like Iron Shirt. To make results I mean.
I some months ago leafed through some monograph which dealed with history of Buddhism in China.
When Shaolin Temple was established, the author said that every fifth male person was living outside of regular society. They were monks, beggars, revolutionaries, pirates, robbers, hermits etc., all kinds of misfits. These kind of people have been those who have traditionally been real serious practitioners. India is of course still more extreme with it’s naga sadhus, aghoris and so on.
It’s easier to be Olympic Games’ athlete than to really master so many disciplines than Healing Dao offers.
In my opinion, though it’s good to investigate all kinds of things, Richard Hoagland is clearly person who is able to make quite big number of himself, but he has not any kind of credentials himself to be any kind of authority. Because on this forum there are at least two professional mathematicians, I don’t try to make more serious comment on his follies. There are also some good critical sites about Hoagland like the one below.
HOWDY
http://www.math.washington.edu/~greenber/moundillustrations.html
If you go to the website
Click on “Healing Love” on the left, then scroll down and click on the essay “Semen Retention: Danger”, you’ll see an essay that basically says what I have discovered the hard way on my own, which led to this thread getting started. Cheers.
Maybe we’re getting into a controversy that won’t be considered particularly relevant to what this site is all about, but I think it raises a couple of issues that really would be of interest to this crowd. First of all, if I am asked to judge people by their official credentials rather than the quality of their evidence, logic of their arguments, and the number of issues they are willing to look into, that’s called “arguing from authority” and it’s the usual crutch of those who support old, familiar paradigms against new evidence that comes in. I think the most destructive tendency in human nature is the tendency to notice what needs to be noticed to reinforce the familiar picture of what reality consists of, to see what we have been trained to expect rather than what’s there. Sometimes the more highly trained you are, the more credentials you have, the more you tend to do this. Galileo had colleagues who refused to look into his telescope because they didn’t want to see his evidence that the sun, not earth, was the center of the solar system. Several centuries later John Brandenburg took photos of some anomalous objects on Mars to a NASA conference where another scientist literally covered his eyes and refused to look at them during the discussion. As the old French proverb says, the more things change the more they stay the same. The infamous “Brookings Report” of 1960 openly recommended that evidence of extraterrestrial life past or present should be carefully covered up to prevent the destructive effect to entrenched priorities and political, scientific, or religious institutions. They were afraid of the same thing the Church was afraid of back in Galileo’s day.
Hi Explorer,
This sort of goes back to what I said in the post I wrote on
Semen Retention that I linked to you.Extremist practices may not be wise.
I mean this is clearly my personal opinion, but I look it at this way:
Is it natural for the human body to retain semen for long periods of time? NO
Does the human body naturally lean toward releasing semen daily? NO
The human body left to its own without any funny psychological ideas from the
head, or mental obsessive behaviors, is going to naturally seek a middle ground.This means semi-regular, but not overly frequent, releasing patterns that
are typically more frequent during mating periods (such as spring/early summer)
and less frequent during hibernation times (dead of winter).This is what the body *Naturally* gravitates to.
Doing anything other than that, by definition of the word “naturally”, is
by definition UNNATURAL.If a person wants to do extremist practices for a particular gain, then in
concert a person really needs to provide extra support in direct proportion
to the amount of deviation from the mean. (say–but not limited
to–supportive qigong) Otherwise, it should be no surprise to see negative consequences in my view.As I mentioned in my post, I do *not* do long term retention, as I can’t
extend daily practice during busy times past about 1.5-2 hrs max, and I
feel that 5-6 hrs is what I realistically need to provide support to
long term retention (as in the amount I do for daily practice on a hermit
retreat). Of course, everyone is different with their own time frame of
needed practice, but in my opinion far too many people do long term
retention without enough supportive practice to back that up.If someone is doing retention and they say it is working for them,
then great . . . I’m likely to not say too much.But Would I personally recommend it as a practice? NO . . . because of
all the reasons above, and because I would never recommend something
that I don’t do myself.Getting back to your particular case, at the same time I wouldn’t
worry about what you did before. Who knows whether it was a good
or bad thing at the time? All you can control is the present.
In the present, trust that your body is open to all possibilities of
states of being, and that any dysfunction now is purely temporary
and may or may not have anything to do with the past.
And in the present, the only thing you do is ask yourself what feels
right for you to do now, and then act accordingly.No worries,
StevenI agree with your assessment.
Re: Richard C. Hoagland & Cydonia, etc.:
I personally do not look into such things, but if someone mentions something to me I find it interesting at any rate. Personally such topics which usually fall into the bookstore rubric “Speculation”, I do not look into . . . But only because I personally have trouble being able to sort fact from fiction; things that are real from made-up stuff or third-hand misunderstood things. As such, I feel like I would have to spend a lot of personal time becoming an expert on such things and investigating them fully to be able to give them credibility or to debunk them. Since I have a lot of other interests, and not a lot of free time to spare, I leave that to others that do have the time. ^_^If we ever meet, you can fill me in 🙂
In any event, with regard to this particular issue, maybe sometime within our lifetime, NASA and the related aeronautical engineers will get their heads out of the sand and figure out the necessary logistics for a manned trip and necessary safe landing on the surface of Mars. Then such things can be investigated directly.
S
Sorry, but I was actually misunderstood, but I think that’s also my own fault, because I have taken approach in my personal life which I would call contrapuntal. I try to use it almost everywhere (but to avoid it in writing), and from outside immediate impression can be schizoprenic or at least confusing.
With my posting I was simply thinking problem of condensing time in general and particularly problem which has been expressed sometimes earlier several times before on this forum: it’s difficult to find enough time to make one’s qigong exercise. I think somewhere Michael Winn humorously have warned about becoming qi-addict. He propably means when one has already gone far enough, because at earliest stage it could be simply be longing to try something new and refreshing.
I wrote few lines about Mr. Hoagland because he seems to be quite overbearing person (…mystical organizations quietly dominate NASA, carrying out their own secret agendas behind scenes…story of men at the very fringes of rational thought and conventional wisdom, operating at the highest levels of country…policies are far more aligned with ancient religions and secret mystery schools than the facade of rational science NASA has succesfully promoted to the world for almost fifty years…), somehow funny and entertaining clown for a moment like for example David Icke, but it’s not really worth of serious study any further, because he likes to use expressions like ‘hyperdimensional physics’ or claim that Jack Parsons was complete crank, because he recited pagan poetry for Pan even in the laboratory, but he himself has not really ever seriously mastered education in any science or engineering. (C. Sagan’s notice of science as a candle in the dark). Only my opinion!
I mainly wanted to say that many yogic and qigong practices have been created in the past by persons who could be labeled as misfits, freaks and even criminals, anyway not “good people” from ordinary point of view. These disciplines have been very far from the mainstream.
Steven has sometimes included statement within his messeges where he openly asks whether some object or article of study can be quantified.
So is it possible to quantify is it worth at all to practice qigong when you compare the results to anymore conventional athletic activity or where is the lim?
HOWDY
When you say “it’s not really worth of serious study any further, because he likes to use expressions like ‘hyperdimensional physics'” that’s kind of like saying at the time that the hot air balloon or airplane were being invented, that it would not be worth studying any further because in explaining how it worked they used expressions like “density of air molecules” which is not something people paid attention to much before. In the pursuit of new energy sources and new inventions it may be necessary to investigate or employ concepts not previously known widely. Didn’t Einstein define insanity as doing the same old thing over and over but expecting different results? What’s happening now in the Gulf of Mexico should be one more reminder of how important it is to investigate hyperdimensional physics and anything else that could potentially unlock new alternative sources of pollution-free energy.
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