Qigong,
The Secret of Youth:
Da Mo's Muscle/Tendon
Changing and Marrow/
Brain Washing Classics

I came across this book about the Yi Jin Jing and Shii Soei Ching in a strange way. If you've read much of my blog you may know that some unusual things have happened to me from time to time. This was one of them, although actually when it happened it didn't seem all that strange. I had become accustomed to strange things.

Literally what happened was that something woke me up in the middle of the night about twenty years ago -- just a feeling that something odd was going on, that creepy feeling you get that something or someone is in the room, and almost always that's just silly. This time, that feeling woke me up, and I opened my eyes and looked around to see if anything was happening for real, and there actually was. To my right, beside the bed, a fellow was standing and staring at me with an impish grin. Not that he appeared to be real or solid -- in fact he wasn't, and seemed to be composed entirely of green light. If you could produce a green laser hologram image of a person, I suppose it would look like that. All the details were there and he was fully life-sized -- an Asian looking fellow of middle age, slightly balding and wearing an odd headband and what looked like a martial uniform of some sort. After I shook my head a couple of times and forced myself completely awake, he was still there. I thought, well, I ought to be polite at least, so I said out loud, "Oh! Hello, there!" He didn't respond, except that maybe he grinned a little wider. We looked at each other for a little while and after fifteen or twenty seconds he faded out, kind of like the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, and I went back to sleep no more confused than usual.

In the traditions I follow, these things aren't random events or meaningless hallucinations. It may take awhile, but if you keep looking you do find the meaning behind the event, and a few months later when I was looking through the martial arts and chi kung training section at Barnes & Nobles and trying to find something pertinent to the questions I had, I picked up a book. While flipping through it I found a picture of the same fellow I'd met that night. He was Dr. Yang Jwing-Ming, the author of many books on Shaolin and Tai Chi Chuan, and a follower of Jou Tsung-Hwa, someone I already knew from other strange things. Dr. Yang had written many books but this one was the first that I'd come across, and that made it special.

If you're interested in the Asian Internal Martial Arts, then you know that there are many layers to practices like Shaolin kung fu and Tai Chi Chuan. Some people practice them purely from a physical approach. Others choose something more esoteric, the system which is based upon energy instead of physical strength. Not everyone believes the energy practice is real -- some very masterful fighters completely disregard it. The people who are interested in the internal side of the practice tend to not be involved in fighting, and you could argue the reason for that in all sorts of ways. My argument is that the internal side is about something else, something which used to be called enlightenment. Compared to that, fighting isn't very interesting or even very difficult. Enlightenment is the hard part, and it certainly isn't what most people think it is.

Da Mo's system of enlightenment training is still one of the best and the most direct. Finding out what it is, well, that's tough. It's been kept secret for a very long time. We live in a fortunate period of history, when those secrets are available to anyone who has the curiosity to seek them out. They're in this book, and anybody with the ability to read and think could put them into practice and judge the results for themselves. Very few people will, because there's a price. The book's cheap, but the discipline involved is beyond the reach of most human beings.

This isn't a book everyone should read. Probably out of a population of six billion people, about six hundred are qualified to understand and practice what's written here. Those six hundred people will be seriously looking for this book, if they haven't found it already. Everyone else would be bored, confused, and probably very shocked at what the monks were actually doing behind those monastery walls.

Hand of God Digital Dose

The best way to get a solid opinion of "unusual technology" is always to try it out yourself, so I've been experimenting with the Hand of God binaural beat "dose" from I-Doser, manufacturer and purveyor of what the company calls digital drugs. With a few free doses for download and trial and several others posted here and there on the internet I've been able to acquire enough material to try the system out again. I'm not new to the system since I played with I-Doser for awhile several years ago.

Hand of God already has a mystical reputation, probably intentionally built by the company. I'm a little skeptical because it looks like a marketing strategy. The story of Hand of God reminds me of an urban legend about Ron Hubbard, author of Battlefield Earth and founder of Scientology. In his early mystical career, Hubbard was reported to have written a book about the secrets he had discovered. When he lent the draft of the book to several of his friends, just to get their opinion, those who read it went insane. So instead of publishing the book and driving the world mad, he invented a system which acclimated truthseekers gradually. That became Scientology. The legend of that mysterious book was great advertising for Scientology over the years.

Hand of God is I-Doser's pinnacle achievement so far. According to the company material, only five people have ever "gotten it." Effects could be grand and mystical, or self-revealing and shattering, if you do get it. So statistically speaking, for the rest of us it's an adventure. We go into it not knowing if the legend is real, full of doubts about ourselves, and hoping for something really cool to happen.

I started out by simply sampling the "musical dose" and not seeking any great effect from it. To get the strongest effect you'll need the MP3 download from I-Doser, an MP3 player and a good set of stereo earbuds. Well, add to that a darkened room and a couch or bed, because you should do these doses in the dark without other distractions. I was interested in the technical aspects so the first time through I just listened.

Technically I'm impressed. Instead of the minimalistic electronic beats of most mind machines and brainwave generators, there's enough art thrown in to keep a person listening. The composers use volume and balance creatively, giving the sense that the source of the sound circles within you or around you. Sudden shifts in frequency and volume level add shock value and emotional impact, and sounds so faint you're not quite sure you're hearing them form a background of what might be subliminal chants, voices or even choirs. There doesn't seem to be any real vocal message, but the nearly inaudible portions are easily interpreted as that. It's not boring. At least I'm assuming those things are part of the download, because that's what I heard. If they aren't part of the download I guess it works better than I expected even just running through it.

Hand of God did interest me, so I gave it a second try under better lab conditions, with the room darkened, stereo headphones properly set, and as relaxed as I'm ever going to get. Both times I found the experience pleasant, with trickles of creepiness and the impression at times that someone was standing behind me watching. Flooding your mind with this sound has a similar effect to sensory deprivation, because suddenly you aren't getting any other signals from the outside world. Not many people meditate these days, so the new users of Hand of God probably will be new to that experience and will find it unusual.

I didn't have any immediate psychedelic effects to report, but both times several hours after the test -- both the initial play-through and the second serious effort -- I had unusual experiences while doing my regular meditation. It isn't uncommon for the effects of artificial stimulants like these to manifest after the session when things are more relaxed. Part of the first experience was much like another user reported. I felt I was looking out into an open gray space, with my eyes open instead of closed as they actually were. In front of me I saw a large rectangular screen -- not a physical thing but something that looked as look it should display information. A few grayscale images came and went but nothing spectacular.

Several hours after the second test, the one I took seriously, I had a similar experience but this time the screen lit up with golden light, symbols appeared, and information flowed. Unfortunately it's not information I can actually use, but it was truly an unusual experience and one of a kind for me. Possibly with some practice I could get better at this, or possibly the impact will fade, but to me it was certainly worth the effort.

See the Mind Machine section here at Skinwalker Files: Bones for more information on binaural beat generators and brainwave stimulation systems.

Hand of God currently (July 21st, 2010) sells for $199.95 at I-Doser. Nearly everything else is cheap.

Do an internet search for information on the crystal skulls and you'll quickly find articles which discount the skulls as fake relics and depict the stories surrounding them as urban legend. Most of those articles probably were written in a couple of hours after a brief search for information on the internet. The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls: A Real Life Detective Story of the Ancient World, written by Chris Morton and Ceri Louise Thomas, gives an entirely different side of the story. To get the information presented here, the authors spent years traveling the world, consulting experts, visiting the skulls and their caretakers, and interviewing people directly involved in their discovery and subsequent use. Though many do believe the skulls to have been officially discredited, this book contains the real information which gave rise to the legends and the arguments.

Many of us who work with crystals know that something very unusual happens on occasion. Although it's not a dependable event, when it does happen there's no denying it was real. Unexplained flows of energy, strange electrical effects, and mental interactions all do occur with crystals, which some mainstream scientists have pointed out do share many of the fundamental characteristics of living things. Crystals certainly seem alive at times.

Skepticism is a good habit to have, but skepticism without research and open-minded testing is only ignorance. If you aren't too set in your beliefs to actually read this book, you'll enjoy it. Maybe you'll even want to test some of the crystalline concepts on your own.

Click on the picture below to expand the image of this excerpt from the book:

Alice sent me a link to this story -- Teens Using Digital Drugs to Get High -- a couple of days ago and at first it didn't connect to my memory banks. Then, it started to sound familiar. I-Doser? Wait a minute . . . .

Well, yeah, I remember I-Doser from years ago when it was a sloppy webpage and a free download that looked like an outdated zip file. I-Doser gave you two or three free downloads of binaural beat sound files called "Alcohol" or "Relaxation" and then if you wanted more, I think it was six bucks a pop back then. I tried them out, wasn't impressed, and erased the program.

Yesterday I went back and checked out the new I-Doser and Wow! Things have changed in the I-Doser building. It's like they're making money or something, and they have all these new files called Orgasm, Hand of God, and Gateway to Hell. That's a huge improvement over Alcohol and Headache Remedy -- obviously somebody signed up who knows something about marketing.

Currently you'll find all sorts of youtube videos displaying the reactions of teenagers to these sound files. If you don't understand what's happening it probably is disturbing -- especially if you're a parent. After all, Oklahoma's Bureau of Narcotics warns us that I-Doser downloads could be the new gateway drug.

Oops, sorry guys, but this stuff has been around awhile already and it hasn't ruined the young minds of America as yet. Robert Monroe, founder of the Monroe Institute, first developed the technological concept of binaural brainwave stimulation but many others have observed it. In fact, it may be one of the reasons we enjoy music -- any music; even classical music. We get in tune with the beat. Music makes us happy; music makes us sad. The world hasn't collapsed because of music.

Binaural beats just take the art out of the music and get down to the nitty gritty functional data. If you listen to Gateway to Hell, you'll get the idea quickly. Some of it's startling and the sudden contrasts are intended to jolt you out of a calm reverie, that's part of the bit. Much is unpleasant and even painful, especially to a person of my age. After all, it's Gateway to Hell. If you're the type who enjoys being scared, you will be. Lots of nearly subliminal voices towards the end so if you want to fear subconscious demonic conditioning you have that option, too. I personally think it's about as dangerous as watching Damien, which was longer and much creepier.

This might be best described as music boiled down. All that's left is the primal stuff that makes people react in emotional and instinctive terms, either towards the positive or the negative. Sometimes the new I-Doser series works pretty well, but I would expect the effects of any single "dose" to fade rather quickly as the audio becomes familiar. Then you'll want to try a new "dose." No problem. I-Doser makes plenty, and they'll probably all be lots of fun until you get tired of it.

Some people do react very strongly to auditory prompts like drumming, chanting and binaural beats. I don't. Sometimes I feel bad about that, because it seems like a convenient way to reach the higher mental states, when it does work. I have no criticism of anything that actually helps people do that, and individuals must find their own route if that's what they seek. Some people might find these audio files helpful. Others will simply find them to be entertaining for a little while. It's still pretty cheap entertainment.

I'd not be concerned that experimenting with I-Doser might lead anyone to try hard drugs or even soft drugs, unless that person was headed for drug addiction anyway. If life doesn't provide the emotional high you seek, you'll find it somehow. What returning to I-Doser has taught me is that a long time ago I was a teenager looking for new experiences and grand adventures. Much of what I did to find that emotional high was a lot more dangerous than lying down on the couch and listening to Gateway to Hell.

Adults be warned: this isn't music and you won't want to hear it on the commute to work. You probably won't care for it and you'll probably be puzzled by it, which may be why teenagers love it right now. Eh, if you're over forty you've been through hell already, you don't need MP3's for that.

Tips for enhancing the experience:

Lie down or recline in a quiet place. Turn lights out or blindfold your eyes. Do a relaxation procedure first, focusing on the different parts of your body from feet up to the head and intentionally relaxing each. Then just take the ride without preconceptions. Forcing things won't make things happen and having clear ideas of what you want from the experience just gets in the way.

Links:
Check out our Mind Machines articles for more info on binaural meditation tools.
I-Doser Free Download and Samples
Gateway to Hell on Youtube
Hand of God on DIY Dharma

Years ago when I bought 72 Consummate Arts Secrets of the Shaolin Temple it was newly printed and hard to find. It was also a lot cheaper than it is now. At least for the time being, the book is available on Amazon, and when 72 Consummate Arts disappears from there it'll probably still be available to the good hunter/gatherer/shopper who's willing to search.

My copy of this book was printed in Beijing in 1992, compiled by Wu Jiaming, translated by Rou Gang, and revised by Yang Yinrong. This is a very popular book in The People's Republic of China but not famous at all in the West, where such things are still looked upon as magical and silly. In China people train to actually do these things. Most of the books about wushu kung fu are published only in Chinese and the western resources we do have are pitiful primers in comparison, often written by people with very sketchy knowledge. We think we've got all the good knowledge over here in the west, but most of the Orient's storehouse of wisdom hasn't even been translated to English. Tibet and China both must have tons of volumes westerners haven't even seen yet. All that material isn't a collection of bright and shining gem amongst the trash, but I'm sure we're missing some really good stuff.

This book is a great example of what we're missing and will certainly be totally misunderstood by nearly every westerner who reads it. We don't think in the traditional Chinese way and don't have the same foundation of knowledge. We're technical. We believe in hardware, strength, and intellectual prowess.

Our first mistake when reading this book: skipping the little introductory section on Four Step Exercise. Eh, that's just a warm-up, let's get to the real stuff. Back up, that is the real stuff, essential to all the rest of it, and every system of internal training has a counterpart to it that westerners find equally pointless and boring and skip. If you don't do this training you don't get the rest of it.

Second mistake: westerners will read this book and think it's superstition. Those who train in these concepts will train in purely physical ways, from a western viewpoint; pass very few of the level tests included in the practices; and conclude that it's really all about being strong, tough, and limber and the stories were exaggerated. If you don't train in the Four Steps, don't live the lifestyle, don't follow the rules, you just get strong. Probably you'll also get badly hurt. If you follow the steps and make those changes in your life, you'll be going far beyond anything westerners know as physical training. A typical commando in the western military spends six months in training; some of these Consummate Arts require ten, and masters may train for forty.

Third mistake: westerners will think that they personally couldn't do any of this. Wrong again. The old systems were not based on body type or innate athletic skill. If you do the work you get the benefits. You may decide you don't want to spend your life training in a skill you probably won't ever use, and that's understandable. Getting a taste of it has been satisfactory for me, and I've gone on to things less martial but ultimately more important, or at least so I hope.

Many unusual skills and training methods are described in the book and most of them you probably haven't heard of or seen even in fancy chop-socky movies. Every now and then I hear of somebody who does these things and I say, oh yeah, I remember that one, or I see part of the old training in a documentary and I recognize where it came from and where it leads. Nice to at least understand what's behind it. I haven't run out of years yet, maybe I'll take up one of the arts and see what happens in the rest of my life. Everybody needs a hobby.

Chen demonstrates the steel
Tai Chi Ball routine. Snapshot
taken from the Chen video
posted below.

I took up Tai Chi Chuan in the mid-80's after getting so busted up by western style hard training that I couldn't do much. I thought I'd learn an old form of Yang Style Tai Chi Chuan while I got well, even though I didn't have any respect for "soft exercise." The specific routine I chose to study is an old one from the last days of Imperial China and was favored by a Captain of the Imperial Guard. He wasn't practicing only for health reasons, as most people do today. The Captain used the Yang style at work, and the stories told about him said that when he fought he drew blood with every step.

If you go far enough back in the history of Tai Chi Chuan you find that there was a different brand of it back then, popular with people who fought professionally, which was devoted half to hard techniques and half to soft, although to say that's all there was to it isn't accurate.

It's been quite a long time since I practiced that form seriously. I stopped because it made me sad. I often get unexplained emotions from doing the old things and it has been said that the intuitions you get from practice will lead you in the right direction, if only you pay attention. I'd felt many unusual things in the training and even entered the lower areas of energy ability. By some of the old standards, the striking tests for example, my ability had reached combat level. But at a certain level of ability I stopped progressing. No matter what I did, I could not pass that next barrier. Simply doing the form wasn't yielding the results I sought, and the other practices which support the form didn't, either. I felt that something was missing.

One Form of the Tai Chi Ball Training

Read more »

Does the resonance of storms
affect the human mind?
Photo by phatman; License CC 2.0

Being Heyoka is kind of special. We're the only type of shaman that has a special ceremony for breaking the contact with our spirit guides. The spirits who guide us are the spirits of storms, and they aren't really compatible with human beings. If you get chosen by the Wakanyan, the Old Holy Ones who guide us, you'll probably go crazy. You won't have any truly useful talents except fighting and maybe a couple of other things I shouldn't mention. Storms will go around you, and that's kind of cool, and every now and then you might get a mission, a dream that you have to live out in your waking life. Most people who become heyoka opt out, take the ceremony and break the connection. Then they try for a better guiding spirit, something less hazardous and more useful.

By the time I learned all of that I was several years into actually being heyoka, child of the lightning, and I was doing ok with it. I decided I'd just keep going, and at least for me personally it has worked out all right. Neat stuff happens, and if you don't pay close attention you get hammered by it. I truly understand the crazy part, if you didn't have access to the knowledge of the rest of the ancient world you'd drive yourself nuts trying to figure this out on your own. Being an electronics dude also helps, because a lot of what happens does have an electromagnetic basis, and that's why I'm so interested in things like the Stephen Gibbs Hyperdimensional Resonator. Haven't had much luck with it lately, but I'm not quite finished with the concept. There's something familiar about it to me, and that's the point of this post.

Read more »

Most photographic orbs depict dust motes close
to the camera lens, as has been demonstrated
by stereoscopic photographs (one shows the
orb, the other does not). This photo still
accurately represents some of the other types
of orbs I've seen. Photo by snowflakespice;
License CC 2.0

On an early summer afternoon in 1989 I happened to be sitting in my living room in the Ozarks looking out through the front door when something unusual happened. A silver orb of light moved through the clear sky in a descending curve towards the west. This globe glinted with metallic light but didn't appear to be solid. It moved faster than any airplane or balloon could move and seemed headed for an impact with the ground a few miles away. I jumped up and ran out, expecting to see a plume of smoke and a fireball over the west ridge, but I saw nothing. Throughout the afternoon and evening I scanned the local radio stations for news of what I thought must have been a large meteor, but no one ever reported anything at least that matched what I had seen. The few people I mentioned the sighting to thought that I was making it up or hallucinating.

That one sighting set me on an interesting personal journey which eventually put me in touch with many people in that area who were seeing similar events. Many sightings involved globes of light which moved in unusual ways, and most people thought of these objects or orbs as UFO's.

I didn't see just the one. Over the next few years I witnessed at least a dozen, and if I took the time to sort through my memories properly I'm sure I could come up with more. In the local newspaper occasional accounts of globes witnessed by dozens of local people surfaced. One large red globe was seen floating just over the treetops in a remote area, shortly before dawn, and appeared to move into the ground.

Brown Mountain, one of my favorite places to camp.

I became accustomed to these strange events, which at least where I lived were not rare. I saw them outside, or in the house, in daytime and at night, alone or in the company of other people. The orbs seemed real enough, but behaved as physical objects should not. The orbs emerged from walls, crossed rooms and passed out through solid objects. Sometimes the orbs stopped in midair and simply vanished. Outside I sometimes saw these odd lights hovering high in the sky, then abruptly moving away at impossibly high speeds or diving into the ground in an arcing or spiraling path.

Read more »

The Tao of I Ching:
Way to Divination

I always think that everyone knows about the I Ching but I'm usually wrong when I think that my favorite subjects have gone mainstream. Although I'm not sure what the public view of the old Book of Changes is, it probably isn't right or accurate. The I Ching has more to do with logical observation of the world than with mystical processes. Many seem to think it's something like a horoscope or book of philosophy, but it's really something else. I consider it a practical way to look at the probable future and I've used it for most of my life. It helps me chart a course through difficult times.

I knew the book (people who use the I Ching often get into the habit of talking about the book as a living person) for some years before I took up electronics as a vocation, and when I started learning about computers and binary code I immediately saw the connection. Hey! That's computer code! Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't, there's a story now that fifteen years or so ago a guy saw that connection and wrote an algorithm based on the 64 hexagrams, punched it into a computer and let it run. The algorithm is supposed to have charted the course of human history and run to a stop in the year 2012. I don't actually have any evidence that the story is true, but it's an interesting idea.

The I Ching: Or,
Book of Changes,
Wilhelm/Baynes

Although there are many good hardcover and paperback versions of the I Ching I will only recommend two. The first on the list is Jou Tsung Hwa's The Tao of I Ching. In this book you'll find the musings of a math teacher who took up the ancient mysteries as a hobby after he was diagnosed as dying of heart disease. In his last few months he intended to enjoy himself and learn some of the things he hadn't taken time to do before. Those old things cured his heart disease and set him on a new adventure. He includes in this book some of the old illustrations of the I Ching and explains how to use them intuitively rather than depend totally on the written interpretations. Jou also writes about the Plum Flower Mind I Ching, which is a very brief version of the I Ching based on observation of the physical world. That should appeal to any literalist who doesn't believe in the supernatural. Sherlock Holmes would have loved the Plum Flower Mind I Ching.

Read more »

Statue of Cleopatra VII, San Jose
Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum;
photo by myrkathika; CC 2.0 License.

Since I've been busy the past few weeks making a living I have only played with the Stephen Gibbs Time Machine or HyperDimensional Resonator once, recently. That would, I think, be my eighth experiment in the ten-effort series, and I got no results at all from it that I noticed. It's not really disappointing, since I've had some interesting results now and then, and I'd think I'm doing better than the expected ten percent success if I look at this in terms of something cool happening.

There is a simpler way to travel back through time and speak with the dead and I use it most of the time, instead of the time machine and whatever astral talents I might be able to trigger occasionally. This other method was well respected even in the old days when the priesthood was a closed society and knowledge was available to a select few. One of the requirements for a person wishing to become an adept of the Egyptian mysteries, for example, was the ability to read and write. It's pretty much essential, since books are the best time travel machines we have.

My interests include many other things besides mental or physical time travel, and I spend most of my days and nights doing those other things. Lately I've been taking renewed interest in books, researching old topics and conversing with dead masters by digging through the books I have lying about, looking for important bits and pieces I remember. I've been picking some of my favorites out and explaining why they were important to me (on Smoke, one of the other blog pages on Skinwalker Files. Many of these books are now available online at no charge -- some in public domain and others intentionally released.

Read more »