Grasp vitalism here and now, vitalism and biospirit.
https://youtu.be/KiSyRxgcxRo?feature=shared
The important thing is moving into a position where you learn and accept responsibility for working to nourish vitality, as ownership. We nourish vitality by doing well, eating well, working well, resting well, sleeping well, loving well, fucking well. No one is going to do the work for you. Following qigong or biospirit. Qigong is a word, two words qi and gong, originally from China which meant nourishing/cultivating, working with vital energy, so biospirit work to ensure mutual benefit. What is biospirit? We take the position that spirit can often be a misleading term to use because it posits a portion of ourselves like a spiritual soul that exists apart from our physical body. So we want to avoid this duality, this opposing strategy of body and spirit. So biospirit is stating the goal achieving a unity of intention and practice, bio referring to the actual body of biological process, and spirit referring to the intangible qualities of will, intention meets practice, so biospirit. People may say ‘I’m spiritual not religious.’, meaning they have a personal private way of maintaining their dignity and viability as a person, which of course is wonderful. Equally wonderful is to say, ‘I am not spiritual, I am religious.”. Practice has nothing to do with rejection of a group practice in favor of a personal practice. So we are not advocating ‘jiriki vs tariki’, self power vs other power. I prefer to say owning the body, occupying the body, embodying the life process, embracing life process. Mutual benefit means whether one practices alone or with others, due to the interconnected nature of things there is connection and the benefits identified as accumulation of self also benefit others.
https://youtu.be/bYd03dxyXQc?feature=shared
Qigong, biospirit is contained right here right now in the actual moment, your moment, your best you in terms of mutual benefit. It is all mutual benefit, nothing is done alone. We continuously barter with experience never acting within a vacuum. More better for self and more better for others. Creating an appreciation for resilience with intention, and so using precious time and energy in a good way, for mutual good you well being.
Here is the english translation from James Legge of an old Chinese book, Daotejing, also known as Tao Te Ching. The reason I use the James Legge translation, is that Legge went to China as a missionary in 1840 and began his translation in old China. His translation also seems more free today in directly translating terms. His translation was not published in english until 1891.:
“Heaven and earth do not act from (the impulse of) any wish to be
benevolent; they deal with all things as the dogs of grass are dealt
with. The sages do not act from (any wish to be) benevolent; they
deal with the people as the dogs of grass are dealt with…May not the space between heaven and earth be compared to a bellows?
'Tis emptied, yet it loses not its power;
'Tis moved again, and sends forth air the more.
Much speech to swift exhaustion lead we see;
Your inner being guard, and keep it free.”
-Daoteching Tao Te Ching chap 5 James Legge trans 1891
Chapter 5 of the DaoTeJing offers us a sobering observation, it says that the power of heaven, vitality that is life here on the earth, is quite neutral to our plans and objectives. Nature has no human sense of honour, gratitude, family, kindness or morality. In the words of the Daotejing our lives resemble straw dogs used in an elaborate ritual sacrifice, constructed as an offering in ritual sacrifice, treated with reverence, used, then cast off and trampled underfoot as the straw that they are, these human constructions are after all not real dogs but dog image symbols made of straw. Likewise the sage, the government of the people, the current regime, whatever, uses and sees us in the same way as valueless straw dogs, fit for heroic soldier cannon fodder in wars and so on, then discarded. Used then thrown away in a modern analogy, disposable people. People used then forgotten, erased from memory as so much garbage to be hauled to the solid waste disposal site.
Further, nature is like a bellows which has its power rooted in its ability to suck air and blow it out. The power actively functions only within that empty space. In order for the bellows pump to function it requires fluidity within that space, free from blockage. Regarding both nature’s lack of morality, and government regimes who treat their citizens as means to their ends? It's best to fly under the radar and do the work one has to do to preserve life rather than single oneself out as a target of regime erasure. In other words it’s better to exercise restraint rather than be restrained.
We can here elaborate on grandiose pretensions and the importance of being rooted and grounded. Frequently when hearing of natural disasters the question arises, Why place oneself in harm’s way? Why live on the gulf coast or Florida with hurricanes? Or in midwest Kansas in tornado alley? Or in the mountains of the west with wild fires? Or along rivers that flood? Along the ring of fire with earth quakes, tsunami’s and volcanoes that erupt? Well people live along oceans in Florida because there are mild winters there. There is beautiful land with open skies and rich soil in Kansas. The mountains are mountains. Rivers have life, where there is water there is life. The earth is already populated and the good places are already taken. As far as tyrannical governments? Well again the flight of moving and leaving home, jobs, family is not an option for most.
We have many examples from our own history of erasable, replaceable situations, and erasable replaceable straw dog people. In the American west there are many example of the fantastic grandiose bizarre disregard for things, places and people in regime objectives. There is the Nevada test site where 1000 atomic bombs were exploded for tests. If you trust the statistics, the regime claims 100 of these tests were above ground atomic explosions. In cities like St George it was common to know old men and women, casualties of these atomic tests. Straw dog people with leukemia, old women with spontaneous abortions and miscarriages, all kinds of cancer, mostly among the healthiest, longest lived americans, the traditional Mormons. They were called down winders and could claim a monetary claim for their cancers and suffering due to radioactive fallout drifting on prevailing westerly winds from the regime atomic tests. The going compensation with inflation was less than the value of a new pickup truck. Later these radioactive isotopes were recycled into the grass and forbs, then into meat and milk. Likewise with 900 underground atomic explosions the water table was contaminated with radioactive cancer causing elements. These irrigated farm lands use groundwater from slow moving aquifers that depending on depth are a kind of semi-fossilized water. Farm lands and grass lands in the area of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona supplied and still supply all kinds of crops that people consume. The down winders program expires this year in 2024. The downwinders program was extremely limited and was only for people who lived in select counties like Kane and Garfield counties between 1958-1962. Numerous studies indicate the radiation was not limited to these counties but deposited over the whole of North America. There were thousands of soldiers, civilian and military workers employed directly at the test site in Nevada, uranium mines, and millions more who lived in the inter mountain west. This is an example of a principle that confirms the ancient Chinese notion that governments have to be viewed with caution. We could go on with examples of governments treating their citizens without respecting their citizen's inherent value, yet that is not the intention here.
Understand this opportunity to practice in this particular moment. Time and place is fortuitous in itself without adding anything extra. Many people shill various kinds of end times, doom and gloom, woe is me scenarios, end of the line, disaster prophetic ending scripts. Let’s not descend into useless talk. We are here. You are here and you are you, that is enough. Regardless of how you view it, everyone lives in precious finite time. We do not need a special narrative to understand our human bodies, all created things have expiration dates stamped on them, from the tallest mountain to empires, nations, regime queens, kings and presidents, republics, religions, temples, cathedrals whatever, down to the foreheads of our faces. Finite time not only for the life process but the finite aspect of stages in the life process. All created, amassed, gathered things inevitably tend with time to separate into component parts. Once the point of maturity is reached, whatever skillful action you do connected with your own human body tends to decline, break down, become weaker, more fragile. Maybe you are too young to realize the truth of mortality. Maybe you have been fictionalized into a cult narrative of singularity where 75 year old’s appear to have found the fountain of youth and you interact with their AI holograms online in fun virtual totally fake events. Or perhaps you enjoy watching long dead film stars from bygone times kiss and romanticize in cinema? Life does not matter a flying fuck how you see time, father time wins all battles. If there is a victory in singularity it is precisely in the enslavement into paranoia and the enrichment of elites. First, AI has already approached human levels of consciousness, intelligence and doingness. The complex known as artificial general intelligence AGI, is integrated into many human ecosystems. AGI is localized and those isolated areas free of AI contagion will continue to see de-population strategies and harm resistance strategies. Full implementation will be gradual, the analogy of a frog in a pot of water, then gradually heating the water to boiling. So a large part of your life has the potential as occupied space for various kinds of bio-havesting. Within all this is grasping the unique nature of birth in a human body and the work, the real work of establishing relationships, and family networks.
Once a person reaches maturity a gradual decline begins, merging into a sharp decline as the aging process tends towards dissolution, old age and death. That is if you’re lucky to reach maturity and have developed the capacity to love deeply in the face of mortality. There is often a denial of aging and decline but a simple visit to a hospital with an orthopedic unit, a oncology unit, a dementia unit, the retirement home reveals the situation. The body decays and because the mind is inherently body the mind itself decays. Nothing is preserved from decay except the process of becoming and there, in that process of further becoming, there is no personal space, no personal history. So we are deeply interested in human becoming. Not so interested in vitro further becoming. There is a reason why all olympic athletes are at their highest physical potential in their teen age years, in their twenties, not in their thirties and forties. Why are 20 something men and women so compelling, energetic, attractive? Youth is the possibility of further becoming. Both men and women in this complex mind-fuck of a society are strongly under the delusion of eternal youth. Now the ascension into singularity is part of this activity. Maybe you’ve been escalated into timelessness by digital photo filters. You’ll merge into digital space with a holographic essence. Life in digital photo shop heaven.
Let me tell you quite simply, most of you have already seen your best strongest years. It’s downhill from this point on. Prepare for the inevitable. Women, biological women, is that a term? Women, frequently have a deeper, more fundamental understanding of this universal end time scenario because they are born this way. They are alert and a little more cunning, scrupulous because they have an intrinsic wisdom, cultivated over endless generations to be life creators, mothers. Motherhood is the ultimate creativity. Women have been both fundamentally gifted and fundamentally burdened with bringing new human life into the world through their bodies. If women have penis envy then men have an even deeper neurotic fixation, vagina envy, uterus wanna be, breast fixation. And guess what, she can’t be an excellent he, and he is a much poorer compensating she. The whole yin yang love dance is based on incredible pleasure for further becoming. Further becoming is not a gimmick, it’s the be all end for all mutual benefit. Every dopamine, junky, john whore, addict gangsta staring relentlessly at their cordless portable telephone, got their first bang from their endogenous estrogen testosterone glands intelligently leading the way. Sex is the ultimate intelligence and a person who neglects this reality existentially suffers infinite loss. Celibacy never has and never will be an option. Women are intensely aware of finite time because it’s not forever they can achieve their highest good and highest potential for realization. This is in no way to say that non-reproductive women are useless. Neither are they to be in any way discarded. Even to say out loud that a woman’s highest ultimate good is to bear children is to voice a kind of hate speech or banned idea, which shows and illustrates quite clearly the strength of delusive social programming even in supposedly enlightened modern society. This negation of biological birth mother mom as the queen of heaven is of course a tenet of AI singularity. We’re stone age neandertals with cell phones, drones and nuclear weapons. If left to our own devices we would use all three simultaneously. Techno preachers drone on how machine self-awareness is our friend. Now already begun, there is no return back to a hate speech past. This is a safe space love fest with ongoing adaptations in unsupervised learning algorithms offered freely free first taste to unsuspecting children on their mandated tablet device designed to destroy all possibility of intelligent action. It’s frequently screamed, ‘You have no choice but the choiceless choice of submission to an unalterable future’.
The biological clock is ticking for each of us which makes the present moment more precious and precarious for both men and women of all ages. To persevere and struggle knowing full well our transient ephemeral nature is your personal selfie story. Some people, because of terminal illness, are suddenly aware that their own personal time is inherently limited according to an unalterable fated script. Mortality comes knocking on the door in all kinds of different ways. Life is terminal illness and the outcome is well known, poignantly documented, barely grasped or understood. From the toddler in the terrible two’s saying no, no, no to the adolescent who thinks it a revolutionary concept to discover a penis or clitorus, to the boomer hanging on for one more miracle medical procedure, it’s an absurd I, me, mine shit show. That is precisely what we are countering, all of it. The shit show denies and distributes with a teaspoon the water you need by the gallon.
Right now at this moment there is a kind of break in the action. There’s some other clown world mystery being orchestrated, check for new updates. Or don’t? Some people have an opportunity to regroup and take advantage of this opportunity. Of course not everyone has this opportunity. Things when they reach their extreme then dissolve into the opposite. So we can say inclusiveness when taken to its extreme includes precisely no one. The desire for inclusiveness when taken to its ultimate becomes exclusionary. However ‘not everyone’ is a trap, because to include everyone in a sense is to both dis-include and make trivial the invitation. You are you for a reason. Your opportunity is your opportunity. Pathological altruism is a trap. Inviting everyone for dinner is not a possibility. You can invite a few guests, family, and maybe invite a few friends for dinner. That’s it. Not everyone can come to dinner. There is no table where everyone can be seated. Let’s be frank the intranets are a sham and including everyone in virtual reality means disassociating mostly everyone from reality. Each age has its challenges. Our challenge is to include love and human intimacy as the biological family in an age of addictive dopamine medi pharma dope fiends, and key board and smart phone junky gamers with no skin in the game. Our challenge is to be ourselves, human, flesh and blood, in an age of relentless automation. Our challenge is to be real men, real women, real children in an age of co-opted psyop hologram hybrids masquerading as our allies, our friends and our blended family members. Our challenge is similar to what it’s always been, to be or not to be, to find your family, your kind, your tribe, and hold on through thick and thin, sickness and health, death do us part. So essentially little has changed. It’s an old play and the actors change but the roles remain constant in the drama.
As an example, there’s a concept that by recording a musical performance, and sharing that digital recorded image of a perhaps real event, you can have everyone experience the musical event. So we as a society create and sell universal music performance. This is a fundamental gimmick and rip off. The problem is under those constraints, under that narrative, no one has music. Music has been destroyed by recording music then marketing recorded music as saleable digital product. Musical experience is the whole gestalt of getting dressed up, putting your clothes on, leaving your house, travel, going out to the theatre or musical venue. Sitting down, actually walking to a chair and sitting down. Listening and hearing the transient ephemeral fragile sounds. Then you have the musical artists. You have the actual musicians practicing, performing on stage, or in a living room, it doesn’t matter. That whole experience is music. The actual sound is just a little portion, a little slice of what music is. The other thing to grasp, the next thing to understand is that when the musician blows the horn, or plucks the string, that’s it. Then it’s over. There is a vibration, a sound, someone hears it, then it is over. It can not be taken back or redone. Music like most authentic, essential tasks in our boring face to face human life is quite fragile.
Some people are not hungry. They have lost the sense of hunger. They live as victims far beyond desire. Desire and longing, mutual benefit replaced by addiction porn hooker models of interaction. They have lost the ability to taste. They consume and would as soon launch a drone attack against you because your desire, your desire to taste is a threat to their narrative of addiction as health. The idea of feeding everyone is not an option. Even if you offered them food it would be misunderstood. For the work ahead you need to eat. We used to say quite emphatically, Painted cakes will not satisfy hunger. This goes exponentially for virtual digitally generated cakes. Many have the idea that a digitally painted AI cake may possibly satisfy hunger better. Of course we know we can not eat pictures in a cook book no matter how enticing the photographs in the cookbook. But maybe digital virtual motion pictures on a cordless portable telephone can satisfy hunger? Better than a hand painted printed hard copy cake. Let’s be clear, neither digitally painted or hand painted cakes will satisfy hunger. Whether your food picture is fine art in a museum or on your computer screen, good well prepared tasty food remains looked in its identity of food-ness. You need to chew the food and you need to swallow. The idea of saving others through the act of you swallowing food is fiction, undesirable fiction. But..I like to say the word ‘but’ disqualifies everything said previously. In a sense saying ‘but’ does disqualify everything. The new intricate dharma of computerized painted cakes is the dopamine trap of addiction models of health.
So this is understanding vitalism from an easy perspective. Let’s begin with biospirit. Biospirit is flesh, blood, bones, sinews and muscle expressing itself in the bioregion. Biospirit is blood and soil. There are many so called religious, spiritual, social political paths that attempt to nourish us by demanding we deny the reality of our body. They promise to nourish by somehow denying the obvious. The vital fact is not that we have a body, it’s that we are a body. You are first your body, that is the hierarchy of needs. Neglect your body and you negate everything.
Lesser heavenly orbit, also known as the microcosmic orbit. What happens outside of the body, happens in some form inside the body. People are contained within the environmental process, that’s why many miss it. We are environment. It is a unified bounded whole. In terms of this people have various stories to describe what is happening. Fairy tales are probably the most scientific way of describing what is going on. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Children and Household stories, because at the deepest level for authentic biospirit we are children living in a house, under a roof, ecology, the earth household, Hansel and Gretel, the Goose Girl, Rapunzel, Snow White. It nearly possible to describe the you who you are and what you’re doing in the act of being you. Descriptions and explanation come much later. We are talking about repair. In that way it's hard to describe what you are intrinsically part of, and can not be separated from. So we have the difficulty of defining a word while not using the word. The Oxford english dictionary OED, defines life by using life in the definition of life, as, “The condition, quality, or fact of being a living person or animal; human or animal existence. Cf. soul, n. I.1.” We can with some training, define a word without using that same word. Websters Dictionary of 1828 defines life as, “In a general sense, that state of animals and plants, or of an organized being, in which its natural functions and motions are performed, or in which its organs are capable of performing their functions.” Maybe the OED is a better definition, life is living, life is life. It becomes harder when we attempt to define a word by not using language words. It becomes problematic when we attempt to communicate, demonstrate talk silently without language or sounds. Here we are in a dokusan room, demonstrating mu, doing mu. Define life without words, without saying anything. Show colors to the blind, describe birds singing to the deaf. Define life without making a sound. Perhaps the idea of a fish attempting to describe the lake to another fish, contains this. The fish is totally immersed in the water, contained in the water. So the fish is unable to explain in any accurate description the lake because the the fish can not leave the water. All of the fish’s fishness is contained in life within the lake. The fish breathes water through its gills. The fish lives water. The fish is water. If the fish leaps onto the shore, in a few minutes the fish dies. What could the fish gain within fishness to flop on the shore? The frog probably best describes a creature, a living being, who could describe the lake in terms of the land and sky. The frog is fish and yet is not a fish. The frog begins as a tadpole, as an adult the frog can breathe air and also process oxygen through its skin surface while submerged in water during the winter. Perhaps in terms of animal living creatures, creatures like dolphin, whale, could describe the land vs water. A beaver could also describe the lake. The beaver has his mud and log lodge on the periphery of the lake. The beaver enters and leaves the lake. The beaver lives near the water. The beaver has lungs and breathes oxygen. The beaver swims in the water, leaves the water, gnaws on the poplar and willows.
In the womb, the baby has the microcosmic circulation happening. In the womb even though the circulation occurs with mama power, it is done completely spontaneously without interruption. The baby takes in the mother’s oxygen air through the placenta and the use of the umbilical cord connection. Although the umbilical cord is severed the connection with life can never be severed without ending life. The adult umbilical cord is not visible at the navel but the vital force connection is maintained. That is life, you are alive now, so that means likewise the circulation through connection is occurring. Circulation of what? That is a good question and answering the question of ‘what?’ is easy. It’s so easy. It is easy to miss. What is circulating is the vital force. What is the vital force? The answer to what is the vital force is a kind of superfluous question. You are the vital force. You are. You. Qi is a word for vital force. Qi gong is working with vital force and so doing mutually benefiting by maximizing life force. Whatever the vital force is, try submerging your head completely under water, what happens? So the answer to what is the vital force is a visceral answer. Submerge your head under water and you immediately have a single objective. Breathe. Get to air and breathe. Suck down air. Struggle with your whole being to suck down air, to breath. Yes, the vital force is connected to oxygen, to breathing, to the endless heartbeats and circulation process. Circulation is movement. Without this vital force moving, circulating within you, you are dead. The process of death, dying, old age and death is the absence of the vital force. Sickness is thus a blockage of the vital force. Sickness is an inhibition of flow of life force. Death is the going away, the separation of the body into its component parts, dissolution. We can call life the skillful gathering of the vital force, and death the loss, subtraction, separation of this vital force. The goal thus becomes staying alive and mutual benefit. You want to stay alive with the caveat of life abundantly, bountiful life, lot’s of life, abundant supply so you can easily do the things you are called to do. Mutual benefit is the essence of a sound practice. The whole thing in the world, what you’re doing knowing it or not, is mutual benefit. There’s a viewpoint that prostitution is the oldest profession. We should respect that profession’s willingness to barter. All of us are prostitutes, sex workers, elaborate hookers with our community of pimps, john’s, tricks, protected markets, protection rackets, madames and so on, the bartered, cultivated GFE girl friend experience because it’s all about mutual benefit. We need to guard against absolute purity and impurity. Life is life and regardless of our little keyhole viewpoint, life makes its own rules. No one is absolutely pure or absolutely impure.
An important inescapable principle is that when things go so far they return to their opposite. The taiji symbol, means the great extreme. You see two intermingled swirls of white and black, in the center of dark is a drop of light, and in the center of dark is a drop of light. This is observed in the seasons. The shortest day occurs in December and already after December 21, the winter solstice, the days begin to lengthen. Even though in a sense winter has only just begun. Likewise in summer, by June 21 the days start to shorten even though the hottest days of July and August haven’t even begun. So we don’t want to pretend we are too pure, too perfect, too invested in the morality of a situation, because it is precisely in that impeccable place we meet our nemesis. It’s better to prepare to meet our nemesis, otherwise we get caught in a trap of purity and in that perspective we lose our way. It does no good to live as villain role players in a loser narrative. It’s peace and quiet that we need to go back to work again.
https://youtu.be/ntWXAA4Rpm0?feature=shared
The cycles occurring in the small body-body and the cycles occurring in the big body world could also be called patterns of process, patterns of change in the I Ching. The pattern process is likewise happening in both the small actual body and the greater big body. The greater big body outside could be called the ecosystem body. The sun yang and moon yin are important luminaries visible in the unlighted, unelectrified sky, the outside world. The sun and moon are patterns we can see and observe in the sky. The moon has a 28-29 day cycle of returning fullness and decreasing process. The sun has a diurnal, daily pattern, sun rise, sun set. The moon is more subtle than the sun, yet both cycles are valid. We are not attempting to make the sun fit into a 29 day moon cycle. Our process is to work within the various cycles for mutual benefit.
We actively pursue healthy living. We seek out nourishing, tasty nutritious food. We seek out clean fresh air. We look for good marriage partners with happy smiling faces who support us with positive regard. We want good neighborhoods to live in. We look for good schools where our children are educated with compassion, kindness, and learning to prepare them for a good, long happy life. These sorts of things are not on the periphery, they are central. They are fundamental. Healthy living maximizes healthy body. Healthy means balanced cycles and patterns. The key here is bio-spirit. Our best interests, our highest good involves accepting our physical body as fundamentally good, beautiful and central to our path. Is that spiritual? Why? Although seemingly obvious there is this question, ‘why pursue healthy living?’ The answer to, ‘why pursue healthy body?’, is biospirit. In the long range goals a healthy life requires a healthy body. Sickness, weakness, infirmity is not a legitimate authentic goal for self or others. We can not authentically establish our well being in the harm of others. Suffering is indeed going to be there but we don’t cultivate suffering. We can not advocate suffering for others without harming ourselves. Pain here is legitimate, pursuing suffering is not.
We can speak of legitimate authentic life. We can speak of a legitimate tradition. Anyone attempting to convince us to legitimize a goal of life that offers weakness, cowardice, apology, sickness, pain, original worthlessness sin, self loathing, self hate and so on must be understood as a mind rape within a cycle of abuse. Likewise because we can only live authentic lives in community our well being is group well being. Therefore our group well being is our own well being.
If you have ever met persons enslaved in a cycle of abuse you may see them at various places in the cycle of abuse. You may see them alternately hating and attacking their abuser. Or perhaps later gushing. praising the abuser in the kiss and make up stage. The abuse cycle is like the addiction model to substances. You may see the addict praising sobriety, later in an alcohol drunk, a meth or marijuana euphoric delusion high. All these mind states are part of the addiction process, the cycle of abuse process lifestyle. The addict and the abuser-victim inevitably go back to their abuser overlord, or their drug of choice in an endless cycle, back and forth in the addiction model of behaviour. A legitimate tradition is one that honours us exactly as we are, where we are, as fundamentally sound, good and worthy. While suffering is in some ways an inescapable part of human life. We can not authentically support a value construct that prioritizes our suffering as individuals or prioritizes our suffering as members of a group. It is within groups that we can best work for our well being. Nor can we authentically support the suffering of others as individuals or the suffering of others as members of a group that prioritizes their well being . The only way a tradition can legitimize suffering as essential is by postulating unsolvable riddles and mumbo jumbo that basically denies our identity as biospiritual beings, or selectively denies the identity of others as biospiritual beings. The purpose of all these systems that deny our biospiritual nature is to ultimately elevate an elite within a social power structure and justify miserable conditions in the here and now for those supposed non-actors in the elite’s self sustaining elite group narrative. A perspective that denies our body as a vehicle misses the mark and if taken to a logical conclusion will support suffering and trauma as a spiritual process. When we examine these meta rules, and meta beliefs there is always an elite power structure lurking in the background harnessing the power of failure, that is benefited by these value structures. Within these coopted value structures there is a subtle paradigm that where we are, is not where we are. The place where we’re at is not very fun but eventually we will get to a better place. Yet our basic experience reveals to us that where we are is indeed where we are. Where we are is our spiritual home. There is no promised land awaiting us in heaven or in the middle east. Our promised land is right here. We have to take seriously birth, life and death in this particular body, life in this particular place. When conflicting statements within a value structure taken to their logical conclusion leads us to devalue our existence, then we must disavow such value structures and move forward psychologically without those value structures and outside those value structures. When our life in the here and now is devalued by the regime agenda for some version of a utopian future awaited paradise, we must immediately assume a posture of suspicion of that regime as a co-opted regime script that does not honor our biospiritual interests and well being.
STANDING PRACTICE:
Taking the stand. We are going to stand. Begin by standing, legs apart, as wide as the shoulders, knees loose, soft, arms at the sides. Everything at this point relaxed without manipulation or tension, you are standing, that’s all. You are not attempting to stand better. The way you are standing is enough. You listening to and feeling what it is like to stand, supporting your own weight. You are perfectly ok just standing exactly the way you are standing. You are really not trying to achieve anything special by standing upright. You are just doing what is done by standing. You have a body, you are your body, so you are owning your body. This is the mountain stance, a firm, solid stance. Concentrate a little attention on your breathing, not controlling your breathing. Just be aware of your breathing, loosely through the nose. You are breathing, in and out. That’s it, you are standing.
Feel the balls of your feet, on the ground. A note on the contact space on the foot: While on the one hand you will be merely standing, called only standing. Yet at the same time as your practice changes over time you may want to investigate more closely what it means to be an upright standing human on two legs. Later we will investigate what it feels to be standing in more elaborate terms. We want to investigate deeply the foot and how it connects to the ground, to earth, especially when engaging with trees, plants and other life forms outside. The foot has 10 points of contact. Each of the five toes, the big ball below the big toe, the small ball adjacent to the small toe, the outer edge, and the heel, along with a more central point called K-1, so ten areas of contact. In addition the big toe aligns with the tendons of the thumb index finger, and the little toe aligns with the tendons of the pinky finger on the same side hand/foot complex. A similar arrangement also occurs with the hands, and although the hands are not grasping anything or weight bearing these centers on the feet are analogous to the centers of the hands and fingers. When engaged in the mountain standing posture we feel simultaneously the hands and feet. When integrating movement awareness is centered in these outer hands and feet while again simultaneously focusing on the solar plexus, dantian or hara and the core spine complex.
As you are standing observe your posture and be aware of these roughly seven centers. The 1)top of head, the brain, the inside of your skull near the intersection of the ears and eyes, 2)the center of your chest, the heart, 3)the area around the navel, just above your hips near, 4) the base of the spine, 5)the hands, 6)the knees, keep your knees loose, and 7)the soles of your feet where they connect or touch the ground. For the purpose of what we are doing you can consider these seven centers, seven places, as seven brains, seven ways to gather information, experience and sense. It may be awkward at first to think of the feet, the hands, the heart, the navel and so on as points of perception like say for instance the eyes, sight, or the ears, hearing. That’s the whole point of this training, to gain subtle input into who we are, where we are and what we are doing so we can increase health and wellness in the here and now for mutual benefit.
It’s quite familiar to use words, sound, the tongue to advise and council one another. You may be familiar with answering questions like, “What does the book say?, “What did so and so say?”, “What do you believe?”, and so on. Then there are the relentless histories of fighting, wars with clubs, spears, guns, marching armies, now guided missiles, jets, chemical, biological weapons. Here we aren't interested in how to pray, what belief formula to recite, dogma, and so on. It’s more like, how do you feel? What are you feeling?
I say roughly seven centers because there is a front and back to the body, anterior and posterior portions, or edges of the body, along with the medial or center, an inside the body and outside. Deep within the upper body trunk are many organs, and groups of cells doing all kinds of processes, moving blood, lymph, breathing, kidneys filtering blood. Many complex interesting processes are occurring deep inside the body.
You may be familiar with inner techniques like guided meditations of various kinds’, loving kindness, prayer, perhaps done sitting in an auditorium mega church, in a therapist's office, or a gothic cathedral, lying down, in a church pew, or sitting cross legged, and in one sense this infinity standing form is similar, yet different. Sitting meditation and most inside building work, therapy, various church temple work has a tendency to immobilize the legs and disassociate the biospirit into component parts. We want to include the whole body biospirit and invite the outside inside. We invite the outside to join the inside. The legs, although not formally considered organs of the body like the lungs, heart, spleen, liver and kidneys and so on, play a huge role in our health from a biospiritual perspective. We move through our legs. The legs are the major pump for the lymph system.
Since movement and flow is both the end and the beginning. Dogs, cats, reptile pets, snakes are good ways to practice doing outside the digital world. Pets can be a part of a practice yet they can monopolize consciousness. By accepting outside, accepting flow and movement we avoid the pet concept of control and heightened emphasis on personal history within a narrative of control. Pets, dogs and cats are opening access to victimhood, control bondage. So we have a bait and switch tactic to occupy mind while moving towards singularity. People pull pet dogs, cats and small birds on leashes through their experience to demonstrate their personal power as a trinket. See my cat. I am the owner of my cat. My cats and dogs sleep on my bed. I allow that, I control that. I control when he eats, when he goes outside. I clean my cat’s litter box. I dutifuly walk my dog, I control where he goes, I lead him through life on a leash. Or I allow my dog to wander about creating chaos. I am the all powerful dog master, the cat master. I allow my cat to wander freely to kill songbirds because singing birds are not my concern. I wander the wilderness with my dog, it’s my right to control experience through my dog. Welcome to dog park world. So we need to take a break from continuously owning everything as the king and queen of dog park world view.
Likewise the so called alchemical organs like the hara, the heart, the so called wheels or chakras in the spine are in some way separated from the legs and hence when doing various meditation work we can ask, ‘What about the legs?’ In addition there seems to be some kind of disconnect when one is doing all this profound work seated, motionless, visiting all these spiritual heights that vanish as soon as one leaves the sitting position. The experience we’ve all had when we feel all this unconditional love inside the church with the beautiful music, incense, stained glass windows and one gets up to walk around, leaves the church parking lot and curse the driver next to us in a fit of road rage. One type of solution is kinhin or walking meditation. To alternate walking with sitting, to integrate movement with stillness. Yet there is something off, something wrong with all these once a week special services, and it doesn’t really seem to matter what the practice calls itself. It might be Zen, traditional catholic, Odinism, feel good protestantism, non-denominational dog park Islam, yoga, some kind of new therapy. Yet all of these are good, useful and beautiful if they allow us a little time. A tight community where mutual benefit is held in high esteem is time well spent. The problem is we have to meet our mind directly in the present moment without a filter, right now because of an emergency. We have to engage with our own thoughts, body and emotions without a filter of belief and dogma. Otherwise we just blurt out, burst out our emotions in the same pattern that we learned them in the abuse centers.
As we said before, as above, so below. So it’s not only us in our personal lives that blurt out crazy. The world itself we live in blurts out and rages crazy. We have to get grounded face to face, filled with real information. We see the big world blow out, blurt out stuff that is quite delusional and neurotic. We don’t to have to go far to see the silliness and senseless arrogant destructive violence. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. We don’t need to study old history to see that the armies are still massing weapons. And they are positioning not only to create manufacture deadly weapons, this crazy rage is going to happen in real time, in real life. They are going to fire those weapons. Battles are being scheduled down to the latest weapons systems. We are intrinsically connected. Covid lock downs, bombing campaigns, let’s reinvigorate the military industrial complex, supply the world with bombs, planes, attack helicopters and drones to kill and destroy the enemy. So it’s important during these lulls in the narrative to touch base with what is real and substantial. Not touch base with their bizarre conceptual narratives of real. There is not a lot of intense vital anger in the church, or on the yoga mat, peaceful and idyllic in the dog park, seated in meditation, or even with the paid listener psychological professional listener shrink. There is something very fake about all these controlled environments. We are on our best behavior. Nothing is really at stake here. Our psychologist doesn’t challenge us, neither does the priest or minister, everything is rehearsed, contained and although all these environments can be helpful, we want to get something a little deeper while we can.
***Note: Our spirit is biospirit, not disconnected from our body. Likewise our spirit is intrinsically woven with our bioregion. Our authentic spirit is physical. Our spirit is material. Our spirit is local, bordered into place. Our spirit is thus somehow racial and geographic, racial spirit, ethnic spirit, biospirit. The west has in a sense developed and cultivated a disconnected universal spirit of separation by forced integration with these strange ideas that say that somehow we don’t belong anywhere. Even though we live in a specific place our spirit is universal meaning our spirit somehow dis-includes us from our own ancestral home. We are occupied, co-opted by displaced, disembodied floating, hungry ghost cannibal spirituality. The ideology is moronic and is a cult of victimhood and trauma.
The great cathedrals of Europe came from the biospirit of forested european people. These complex buildings on the inside with their diffused light coming from kaleidoscopic stained glass colored windows, visually, qualitatively have the same dappled sunlight filtering through the old growth tree covered euro forest. So let’s worship within those tree groves that still exist while we can. The sacred groves are there. The cathedrals of europe came from the biospirit of people in the forest of trees. Let’s investigate deeply our biospirit in the forest sitting, standing and walking. Let’s understand the mutual benefit of trees. The foot at the point of contact in standing, walking, bending, sitting and how it connects to the ground, to earth, especially when engaging with trees, plants and life forms around us. Living beings around us are significant forces with which we must interact to our benefit. For this reason we are going to explore how to deeply interact with trees. We could say we are going to authenticate both ourselves and the tree, Authenticate the place where the tree grows. Why are we doing this with trees? Why are we listening to trees? Why are we hugging trees? Why interact with trees? More authentically, why not engage with trees? Understanding trees as sacred big life? Trees are immense living beings living for hundreds of years. Trees survive forest fires, lightning, wind storms, floods, drought. Trees therefore possess immense intelligence in sustaining. Trees offer us mutual benefit and here we will explore the practice of honoring trees, loving trees. The answer is many mutual benefits relating to the trees. The trees take in our carbon dioxide we exhale and give off oxygen. Trees preserve the soil against erosion. Trees provide cooling shade.
Our basic experience reveals to us that where we are is indeed where we are. Where we are is our spiritual home. There is no promised land awaiting us in heaven or in the middle east. Our promised land is right here. We have to take seriously birth, life and death in this particular body, life in this particular place.
All living beings around us are significant forces with which we can possibly interact to our benefit. For this reason we are going to explore how to deeply interact with trees. We could say we are going to engage with trees as beings, as forms of living beings in order to authenticate both ourselves and the tree, and the place where the tree grows. Why are we doing this with trees? Why are we hugging trees? Why interact with trees? More authentically, why not engage with trees? Why prevent people from understanding trees as sacred big life? Why give legitimacy to a sacred book that attacks the worship of trees? Trees are immense living beings living for hundreds of years. Trees survive forest fires, lightning, wind storms, floods, drought. Trees possess immense intelligence. Trees offer us mutual benefit and here we will explore the practice of honoring trees, loving trees. The answer is many mutual benefits relating to the trees. The trees take in our carbon dioxide we exhale and give off oxygen. Trees preserve the soil against erosion. Trees provide cooling shade.
Our biospirit is nourished by interacting with other life forms within our bioregion home like trees but not exclusively limited to large trees that tower over us. Here I am saying tree to illustrate a point. I could as easily substitute herb, dandelion, small plants growing close to the ground, rose bush and so on and the same thing would be true. All life forms are cherished in the web of mutual benefit. We include of course other human beings, our tribe, family and neighborhood in mutual benefit. We also include the worship of our direct blood ancestors, our parents, grandparents, great grandparents because we are fundamentally sound good people. We love those people who came before us. We also love our portion of future becoming. We work to secure the existence of our people and a future for our children. We not only work for good beautiful things, we ourselves without doing anything special are intrinsically good people. The essence of who we are is bio-spirit. We embrace a spiritual biology. Eating nutrient rich organic food is a form of prayer. Honoring the world around us is spiritual work. Why biospirit? Because we are more than physical bodies test tube, mechanical style. We are a unified bounded whole. Our boundaries are good. Our biology is good and inherently intelligent. Our actual physical body is simultaneously spirit. It is not that we have a spirit and a body. Why or how this is so is again a mystery, beyond what little small me can understand and explain. It is just the way it is. For that reason we actually make offerings of actual pinyon pine sap, estafiate, dried manzanita leaves, juniper, canyon cedar, oak bark and as the fragrant smoke rises we bless ourselves and wish all people well. If I was someplace else I would do it differently. I am here.
We are nourished by engaging with rocks, hills, mesas, mountains, plants both great and small, trees, water courses, and these things are likewise wanting to engage with us to our benefit, to our healing, to our medicine. Wherever there are birds, there are bird songs. Wherever there are rocks and craggy peaks, there are rocks and craggy peaks to bless and be blessed. The genius of wild herb ways is where ever you are engaging with the genius creative force of living things, herbs and remedios.
Infinity Standing Form
“Meridians are the energy matrix of our body. They are the invisible channels that link together all of our organs. They flow where the blood flows. When we are under stress the channels get blocked and this leads to physical and emotional illness. It is vital for our health that the Meridians are clear so that the Qi can flow properly.”(QiGong by Shifu Yan Lei 2009)
When we consider energy pathways of the body we can understand them as circulation channels. Again, as above, so below. Meridians exist not only in the small body. Meridians, energy pathways, channels of circulation also exist in the big body. Meridians exist in our actual mother, our mom. Our mother whether she is still alive or since departed had energy pathways in her body. The big earth mother mom also has energy meridians. One important thing to grasp is that we are not necessarily creating the circulation channel meridians. We are not magically creating some new thing not originally there in the imagination. We don’t need to anchor ourselves in any particular system as east or west, scientific vs religious or spiritual to gain this understanding. Look at your hands right now as they are, you can see the skin color. The hands are fairly dry, although there is an underlying moisture flowing through your hand. The entire body is mostly water and it has a similar salty taste as the ocean. If you place your hands on a concrete stone table or a rock on a warm day and then remove them, you may observe a palm print of moisture left behind. Or if you walk bare foot on red slick rock you can see the moisture foot prints from your steps. Likewise for instance if you are slicing vegetables and nick your finger with the knife, immediately blood will be released from the cut. It is not that the silvery steel metal knife created red blood. The red moist salty blood was there both before and after the cut. Because although when we look at our hand, our fingers, we see the skin, immediately under the skin is red blood fluid energy moving through the superficial, close to the skin surface capillaries or tiny blood vessels. Even though we don’t see the blood beneath our skin it is there continuously moving, flowing, exchanging in the circulatory system. The red slick rock did not create the moisture in our feet. Likewise the stone did not create the moisture in the hand, it simply made visible something that was there all along. We can touch our wrist with the palm turned up at the radial pulse point and feel a ‘boom bah’, pulsing, palpable to touch, maybe if we examine the point more closely we can even see a pulsing up and in. Maybe then we can simultaneously feel the same pulsing at our heart, maybe we can hear this sound of the muscular arteries pumping blood throughout the body, returning via the veins, to the lungs mixing with oxygen. Again we did not create our heart in the act of observation, yet at the same time the act of deep listening, somehow does create the heart. In one sense by listening deeply we didn’t create the heart. In another sense by deep listening we did create the heart. We observed it. Where before we did not know it was there. If a tree comes crashing down in the forest, and no one is present close by to hear the sound, did the crashing tree make a sound?
Let’s go into the infinity standing form. Again there is nothing original here. This form is something we do with remedios, with the person plant and place practice. The remedios are already here. The people are here. The plants and trees are here. The places where trees grow are here. This form could be called moving walking through the trees. It is a standing microcosmic orbit, a kind of qi gong, Infinity is the figure eight form standing. As a reminder, Last but not the least – very important – once you complete a qi gong series exercise, imagine that you are shrinking your energy ball between your palms, make it as small as you can. Then move it inside your body through your hara at the navel, this moves energy from the ball into your body for later use. For ladies – during your various times, please put the ball into your heart area and not into your belly.
Find a comfortable place to practice preferably outside with loose fitting, non-binding clothing, or inside doesn’t matter. These exercises, although described done standing, can also be done seated in a sturdy non enclosing chair, like an auditorium folding chair without arm rest, seated on the edge of the chair rather than in the chair if mobility is an issue. 1)Arm swings. Warmup from a standing posture. Begin with gentle arm swinging the flags from the shoulders, without raising the shoulders too much, side to side swinging the flags across the chest and forward and back swinging. Do sets of 40 or 50 swings for five minutes or so. With the arm swinging imagine your arms are cords or thick climbing free hanging climbing ropes and a lightly weighted pendulum, a small fist sized rock on the cord as your palm, swinging back and forth. Loose swinging of the arms. Hands open. On the side to side swing the humerus or upper arm will be parallel with the ground and the radius ulna palm will rise just barely into the upper plane and will raise slightly above the plane of the shoulders flexed at the elbow. Breathe through your nose, not holding or restricting the breath. During each set of arm swings mid way, do two gentle bounces, two slight partial squats with the knees, then return to an upright stance with bent knees and continue the swings.
2) then do a forward leaning posture bending at the knees with the knees touching and do knee circles while massaging the knees with hands. Do knee circles in both directions for several minutes lightly massaging the knee joint. Fix the gaze on the ground or floor immediately in front of you.
3) If standing spread the feet out to shoulder width, place the hands on the hips and begin hip rotations. If standing only the hips are rotated, the head is more or less motionless. So that the head remains in the same plane as the feet without bobbing the head side to side or moving up or down. The easiest way to ensure head stability is to focus on a fixed point in front of you during hip rotations. If seated on a sturdy stable chair rotate the upper body keeping the head neck spine in the same plane, doing gentle easy circles from the waist. Do 15 or so rotations in one direction, then reverse direction.
4) Double full moon, Raising the moon. Return to a firm standing position with arms relaxed at your side. Bring your hands slightly forward. Imagine you are lightly holding an inflatable stability ball between your palms, raise the arms holding the imaginary ball over your head. When you reach the apex, turn the hands outward, then imagine you are painting a full complete circle, and bring your arms down gracefully, slowly back down to your sides to the original position, touching the outside of your leg. Inhale through your nose when raising the ball, and exhale through the nose when painting the full circle down.
5) Zhan Zhuang, Stand like a tree. Begin with Wu Ji, then water strength testing. Stand loosely feet the width of the shoulders apart, arms hanging loosely not touching the trunk, as if there are two balls underneath the arm pits, soft gaze, eyes looking forward. Remain in Wuji stance, imagine standing in warm lukewarm hip depth water. Push two two balls, one in each hand floating on the pond at your sides downward, then let the balls raise to the level of the hips, returning the arms to wuji stance.
6) Now do microcosmic orbit with the bottom of the tail bone as the flip point for front to back with qi downward flowing out the back of the legs into the earth. Develop a loop with the tree. Understand the tree is at least as big above as below with the roots and crown. Now bring the qi from the roots of the tree to the ball of the foot. Spilling over the top of the foot, up the front of the legs to the tail bone and into the microcosmic orbit. Blessings to all beings engaged in the real work.
