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.

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:

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.

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.

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I'll just tell you the legend as I first heard it, since there's no solid factual foundation for most of the Star People concept. Many of the criteria are subjective and the Star People I've met share only a few fundamental qualities or life events. Those I know each derived complex stories from their triggered memories, but only superficially similar. Some based the tale in outer space, and some in ancient Egypt. The idea is intriguing, that a colony of space travelers -- humans -- crash-landed here a hundred thousand years ago or thereabouts and began the technological civilization we know today.

People were already here, since human civilizations have colonized this galaxy's habitable worlds for millennia and our species is scattered everywhere. The humans indigenous to this world had no advanced culture in the terms that the crashed ship's crew knew it. Faced with quick genetic dissolution in what were to them the ignorant hordes of savages around them, the scientists among them devised a patch. The patch was something that would continue after the artifacts and memories of the ship and its people were gone. Hidden in the DNA of the ship crew's descendants were packets of encoded information, designed to open at critical times in the lives of those who carried them, and guide their actions in ways which would carry on the culture of the ship. Over time the information has become sketchy and distorted, so those of us who receive the message interpret it in different ways, with only a few common points which seem solid. One of those common points is the memory of the crash itself.

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Lamp of Mahamudra:
The Immaculate Lamp
that Perfectly and
Fully Illuminates the
Meaning of Mahamudra,
the Essence of
All Phenomena

Taking up meditation for the first time, practitioners nearly always want to know how it's done and what's supposed to happen. There are so many ways to answer that question that immediately things get confused. Zen meditation, Tibetan meditation, Taoist meditation and many more -- what happened to the thing that Gotama Buddha talked about; his discovery of the simple system for all people, the key to the lock? Of all the different systems for learning this alternate way of perceiving the world, the Path of Mahamudra should be the simplest and best, for any style of Buddhism or for anyone else. Hardly anyone explains it simply.

This solution to the yogic puzzle was supposed to be something anyone could do. No matter what your level of intelligence or education; no matter what you did for a living or how much time you had to devote to the practice; and no matter what your age or level of health, the Path of Mahamudra was built to work. Everything else that constitutes today's practice -- and the religion which grew up around it like an obscuring jungle -- built upon that first simple method and complicated it. Today we're told many strange things about meditation -- that we can't possibly do it well if we're living as ordinary people live, that nothing unusual should be expected if we do practice, and even that the ultimate understanding is that the whole thing is pointless anyway. Hey! Enlightenment was supposed to be something cool!

One book I have that cuts through all the crap to the essence of the work is The Lamp of Mahamudra by Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, who says that today's world is filled with so-called meditators full of learning, words and pride; trapped either in a rigid asceticism or the pursuit of purely material things. Talking to these people about meditation, he says, is like trying to explain water to people who know nothing but desert. The people who do understand are the ones who come to that understanding through flawless direct experience. They don't need books.

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Wade Gordon's story
began with an
explosive flash of
light that triggered
buried memories.

I only know a little about this book, but I'm posting it here anyway, since the author mentions some things only a few of us remember. Although New York isn't a place I'll visit again, I do have some interesting memories of the area (a sample at The Academy), and possibly I share some of them with Mr. Gordon. We did recover ours in much the same way. The flash of light and the explosion is familiar to me, having happened not once but several times.

If you don't know about the Montauk Project and the other modern legends about what happened at Ft. Hero and a few other places on Long Island, The Brookhaven Connection by Wade Gordon and the other books about that subject written by Peter Moon and Preston Nichols will seem fanciful and pointless. It's a story that goes nowhere. That happens to be accurate, because it's a project that failed. If you believe the accounts, things were going great guns for a few decades and then just stopped. The base at Ft. Hero was nearly abandoned, although there's some evidence that a power grid still functions there. Rumors of some massive underground disaster still float around, almost literally since the main part of the facility is believed to be flooded. A large sinkhole partly filled with water is part of the evidence for that, or so I've read. How much of that is true is impossible to know, since only a few memories come forward out of that mess, and we can't trust any of them completely. On my one recent visit to the area I had such a negative reaction to the place that I just got back in the car and left. So much for rational investigation, I guess I'll leave that to other people.

The odd memories I share with other people are the most intriguing to me. In his prelude to the book Mr. Gordon mentions an underground cavern where a UFO was displayed. The UFO was deep black in color, and I'm guessing from my own experience that it was completely non-reflective, absorbent of both light and radar waves. That's a clue to the nature of what the facility dealt with, since only military craft need that level of camouflage. The last mental view of that cavern I have shows it in ruins, partly collapsed and half filled with debris.

Mr. Gordon apparently stops his story in mid-telling at the end of the book, which I find completely understandable. You find out that there are things you shouldn't talk about, and decide you've said too much already. Should be a good read, and I hope to have a chance to do that soon. I'm not sure other people will find it very interesting although it does get a few good reviews from the uninvolved.

Sometime in the late 90's I was sitting in meditation and practicing one of the absurd techniques described in Astral Projection: The Out-of-Body Experience by Melita Denning and Osborne Phillips, when something very unusual happened. At least it was unusual for me -- I'd experienced the same thing many times but as a spontaneous event or the result of completely different approaches. I had taken up an experimental round of the exercises in this book just to see if they'd give me a better understanding of what happened, or more conscious control. For over a month I followed the course of instruction, eventually skipping ahead to things which did interest me. Much of the philosophy in The Llewellyn Practical Guide to Astral Projection: The Out-of -Body Experience does not appeal to me personally and many of the goals involve ideals I don't pursue -- I was looking for particular things I knew to be real. Not much happened at first.

In any of these practices, results for beginners are murky and unremarkable. As the authors themselves say, the first experiences are often thought to be imagination only and are easily set aside as such. Only the persistent and stubborn adept will be able to get past the first barriers of boredom, repetition and preconception to the unbelievable things beyond.

I'm apparently one of those people. If you can keep trying even when you're convinced there's no point, doing the practices without expecting results -- the old Buddhist concept of doing / not-doing -- you eventually get there. That's where I arrived that particular morning, when while doing an energy projection visualization I felt something new but familiar. A vibration began in the center of my abdomen and as I exhaled in the prescribed way I saw a stream of grayish energy flow out of me and disperse into a stable roiling cloud a few feet in front of me. After a few moments during which I examined what had happened and considered possible consequences, I followed the book's instructions and drew the energy back inside me.

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Written by Mantak Chia, who now runs a meditation center in his home country of Thailand, this book Fusion of 5 Elements I offered me the first controllable structure of a decades long experience that most people would not believe is possible. Many people have taken up Chia's training -- a modernized version of an ancient Taoist system with many counterparts in esoteric Buddhist teachings -- and have discovered genuine tangible results. Having gone through the system on my own from a number of different traditional approaches, I find it difficult to describe but unmistakable for hallucination or wishful thinking. As Chia himself discovered, this is not a religious practice and does not depend on faith-based training. Chia looked for a teacher of the old system for years and was consistently turned away because he was Christian, not Taoist. Finally coming across a crotchety old hermit with an advanced practical understanding of a secret process usually guarded from any but advanced members of religious orders, Chia learned the system as it really is -- a way of manipulating basic universal energies with the power of the mind.

I came across it in a slightly different way, through an experience that began in the 70's with kundalini yoga and which took me on a wild ride, culminating in a powerful vision quest in 1991. After that journey I began to dream of strange symbols and unimaginable events. Setting aside the possibility that I had simply gone completely crazy, I began looking for explanations of my dreams. The symbols brought me to this book, as well as many others, and I found that what was triggered inside me during that vision quest fed on the information here like a living creature.

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Link: http://www.paleobirdeffigies.com/

Weep for Arn . . . .

When settlers moved into upper Michigan many thought it was simply open country where no one had ever lived. The people who had passed that way before didn't build huge monuments of stone.

But they did build small ones, even using natural shapes which inspired reverence and ceremony. Wherever we travel we pass by such things without knowing their importance. History lies beneath our feet in layers.

That's the legacy of the Birdstones, discovered in a field in Michigan and still the object of controversy. Markings on the stones have been attributed to random damage by plow blades or the chisels of Viking explorers. One strange symbol scored into the side of a boulder was identified as a phrase from an ancient European language: "Weep for Arn."

Scattered through the site, not far from a still traveled ancient Native American trade route and footpath, are small chipped stones in the rough shape of owls. I spent a night there once, invited by friends who own the property, and I had a strange dream about the place. I saw an arbor of bent living saplings, visited by people dressed in animal skins. It was a vibrant place full of sunlight and birds. Maybe that's no evidence, but when you're a shaman sometimes you get a glimpse of the things and the people who were here before us.

Take a look at Paleo Bird Effigies and form your own opinion. Then pick up a stone and wonder how many people before you have done this. Fingerprints don't last long.