UTI
01-27-2009, 12:46 AM
What do you think about him? My obsession, as for most others I suppose, started with this (http://www.youtube.com/v/77nD5xmL0kU&hl=sv&fs=1) clip.
Now, I realise these things are often fraud, and I would have dismissed it as so If I hadn't, at the same time, been delving into a book by Danaos Kosta called "the Magus of Java, where he describes how he becomes the apprentice of the man in the above video, John Chang, and how he is admitted into his branch of internal alchemy, called Mo-pai. Danaos Kosta is, thankfully, happy to reveal all he can about his practices through stories of weird things that happen to him, and with some pictures of meditative stances. He describes the Mo-pai system as consisting of 72 "stages", where one gradually fills cakras with qi and depolarizes them. The most important of these stages is the fourth, where one fills the lower dantien and depolarises it. The last stage consist of filling the upper dantien (unclear as to whether this is the baihui, the mud-pill-palace, or the entire brain) and depolarising it, making the spirit body completely free from the physical body. This system has some similarity to the idea of refining the jing and converting it into qi, purifying qi and converting it into spirit, refine spirit and convert it into nothingness, and crushing the nothingness.
The first stage in Mo-pai is described as a basic purification of the body, and filling up the lower dantien with yang-qi. Basically, refining the jing and converting it into qi would be a prerequisite for this. One is meant to abstain from sex for 100 days, eat only vegetarian food, and meditate in absolute stillness for roughly 80 hours. This, they mean, take around 4 years for most people, since usually meditating for an hour may result in a total of 5 minutes of stillness. The idea is probably here that if the body distributes qi effectively there's an abscess when no thinking (since thoughts and feelings consume qi), and that is stored in the center of gravity, the gut, which is supposedly made from roughly the same kind of tissue as the brain, and has a capacity of storing electrical potential. Yang Jwing-Ming talks a whole lot about this in his books on nei dan techniques.
In the second stage on starts to "move" the dantien, which is described as being connected to five sets of "strings". I'm not too sure about what this is supposed to refer to, but I think that four of the pairs are the ba mai, the eight extraordinary vessels, and that the last pair is simply a depolarization of it. The second stage, however, only concerns with moving it.
This talk of purifying the qi and converting it into spirit can refer more generally to practicing lesser and greater heavenly circulation, where converting qi into spirit would be thought of as leading qi into the brain, where it will be used to fuel the mental capacities. I haven't really found any reference to the whole "moving the dantien around". The only things that come to mind are telekinesis (of course). The reason one should fill up the dantien first would perhaps be that it is more like stretching out a balloon, creating a potential. Moving the dantien around would then be spreading the potential around the body, making it able to contain the same amount of potential all over. sort of like becoming oblivious to mild electric shocks by licking batteries too often. Then when the whole body has the same ability to with stand the tension, the qi is "released" from the channels it's been circulating in, becoming more concentrated, becoming a free cakra. I have never tried anything like this, so I wouldn't know. The few times I have experimented with focusing what I have on one spot, moving it around, it has resulted in blisters, burst, and what looks like cuts and scratchmarks on my skin.
Refine spirit and convert it into nothingness is more straight-forward imo, speaking directly of depolarizing, or a process of reducing the steps of polarity. Walking from bagua to yin-yang to no-polarity. In that state, supposedly, in the kostas book, one then proceeds to step four, breaking the last two constraints, which he describes as the yin-curve and the yang-curve. He describes everything in physics terms, and it was a long time ago I read his stuff, but he likens yin to time and yang to space in a very factual manner. So, severing these last two bonds would be to make the created electric (?) field in the small intestine a quantum (again?) field? Here is the roblem of trying to put a term for what is beyond yin and yang, what state energy exists in when it is not adherent to time and space. Perhaps they means that first energy is made to manifest outside the reaches of the body (space) and then as a constant current that doesn't need to "recharge" (time). I don't know, by this point I'm swimming upside down against my own currents.
Anyways. It makes for interesting speculation. I'm only a novice in these fields, so my speculation is limited.
Now, I realise these things are often fraud, and I would have dismissed it as so If I hadn't, at the same time, been delving into a book by Danaos Kosta called "the Magus of Java, where he describes how he becomes the apprentice of the man in the above video, John Chang, and how he is admitted into his branch of internal alchemy, called Mo-pai. Danaos Kosta is, thankfully, happy to reveal all he can about his practices through stories of weird things that happen to him, and with some pictures of meditative stances. He describes the Mo-pai system as consisting of 72 "stages", where one gradually fills cakras with qi and depolarizes them. The most important of these stages is the fourth, where one fills the lower dantien and depolarises it. The last stage consist of filling the upper dantien (unclear as to whether this is the baihui, the mud-pill-palace, or the entire brain) and depolarising it, making the spirit body completely free from the physical body. This system has some similarity to the idea of refining the jing and converting it into qi, purifying qi and converting it into spirit, refine spirit and convert it into nothingness, and crushing the nothingness.
The first stage in Mo-pai is described as a basic purification of the body, and filling up the lower dantien with yang-qi. Basically, refining the jing and converting it into qi would be a prerequisite for this. One is meant to abstain from sex for 100 days, eat only vegetarian food, and meditate in absolute stillness for roughly 80 hours. This, they mean, take around 4 years for most people, since usually meditating for an hour may result in a total of 5 minutes of stillness. The idea is probably here that if the body distributes qi effectively there's an abscess when no thinking (since thoughts and feelings consume qi), and that is stored in the center of gravity, the gut, which is supposedly made from roughly the same kind of tissue as the brain, and has a capacity of storing electrical potential. Yang Jwing-Ming talks a whole lot about this in his books on nei dan techniques.
In the second stage on starts to "move" the dantien, which is described as being connected to five sets of "strings". I'm not too sure about what this is supposed to refer to, but I think that four of the pairs are the ba mai, the eight extraordinary vessels, and that the last pair is simply a depolarization of it. The second stage, however, only concerns with moving it.
This talk of purifying the qi and converting it into spirit can refer more generally to practicing lesser and greater heavenly circulation, where converting qi into spirit would be thought of as leading qi into the brain, where it will be used to fuel the mental capacities. I haven't really found any reference to the whole "moving the dantien around". The only things that come to mind are telekinesis (of course). The reason one should fill up the dantien first would perhaps be that it is more like stretching out a balloon, creating a potential. Moving the dantien around would then be spreading the potential around the body, making it able to contain the same amount of potential all over. sort of like becoming oblivious to mild electric shocks by licking batteries too often. Then when the whole body has the same ability to with stand the tension, the qi is "released" from the channels it's been circulating in, becoming more concentrated, becoming a free cakra. I have never tried anything like this, so I wouldn't know. The few times I have experimented with focusing what I have on one spot, moving it around, it has resulted in blisters, burst, and what looks like cuts and scratchmarks on my skin.
Refine spirit and convert it into nothingness is more straight-forward imo, speaking directly of depolarizing, or a process of reducing the steps of polarity. Walking from bagua to yin-yang to no-polarity. In that state, supposedly, in the kostas book, one then proceeds to step four, breaking the last two constraints, which he describes as the yin-curve and the yang-curve. He describes everything in physics terms, and it was a long time ago I read his stuff, but he likens yin to time and yang to space in a very factual manner. So, severing these last two bonds would be to make the created electric (?) field in the small intestine a quantum (again?) field? Here is the roblem of trying to put a term for what is beyond yin and yang, what state energy exists in when it is not adherent to time and space. Perhaps they means that first energy is made to manifest outside the reaches of the body (space) and then as a constant current that doesn't need to "recharge" (time). I don't know, by this point I'm swimming upside down against my own currents.
Anyways. It makes for interesting speculation. I'm only a novice in these fields, so my speculation is limited.