I had a fascinating conversation over the weekend with a reader who requested a free meetup as I've often said that I'm happy to do for any decent interested party.
Meetup: what does that mean in this fallen time? Normally, as this guy is semi-local to my region, we'd have found a way to get together in person. I like to be real, be physical, not combative but ... substantive. So normally I get into (my peculiar version of) kuzushi with them and so on.
But of course, due to the CerVeza-19 scam, and the fact that even local travel these day for various reasons has become nearly medievally arduous and perilous, we had to do it via Facebook video. How are the mighty fallen!
But it was well worth enduring that indignity as this reader was among the purest examples I've ever met of a certain type of distant outlier on the broad spectrum of energetic experience. See, when you start talking about this energy stuff, at least to the average martial artist (but even yogi's, meditators and other self-styled 'spiritual' types aren't that different) they tend to think I'm exaggerating at best, or just downright lying for the Big Buck$ that my book $ale$ supposedly generate (yeah right). Deep down, even those who've had the occasional little heat flash in their palms, or expansive feeling in their heads, don't really buy this whole energy-centric proposition. It's not real to them.
But we can understand that. They read my stuff the way colorblind people would react to descriptions of vision from people with normal color sight. Or like Plato's cave people, etc. You know the drill. But let's look at the other end of the curve. This reader I talked to over the weekend was the scarcest type of rara avis (unusual bird) - The Natural.
Natural means those very few people who either experience the immediate, unfiltered onrush of full firehosed internal power without doing any special practice, or else right away after just trying some very minimal standard practice, like just a bit of meditation or Qi Gong. And they get totally blown away, with unbridled torrents of power surging up (usually along their spine) - and that's actually painful to them. Then it explodes in their heads like a mortar hitting an ammo dump.
Contrary to the ecstasy that I emphasize, these effects are experienced as unwelcome and undesirable, and even tortuous. These days that whole package of bad stuff related to energetic overload is even called a 'Kundalini Emergency'. But there's nothing new under the sun, all that was prefigured in great detail by an Indian mid-level bureaucrat, a regular guy, not a yogi or a guru or anything, who got his circuits blown out merely from dabbling in minor sedentary meditation practice after work in the evenings. He ended up writing several books detailing all the horrific lows and occasional highs that ensued. Since he wasn't a martial artist or healer or cult-leading guru figure, his power immersion never really paid off for him in any big way, though he did state that his poetry writing skills were sharpened up by it.
But even before GK there was Krishnamurthi, erstwhile Future Messiah of the Theosophy cult who was groomed from childhood to be their God-Man but who ended up biting the hand the fed him by rejecting the whole Theosophist godman thing lock stock and barrel on the very eve of his coronation as top dog. Turned out to be a good career move in that he went on for like 60 more years as a revered anti-authority spiritual authority. Anyway when it came to personal energetics, he definitely did have some moves and grooves, to the extent that he spent many days lying in bed in his Ojai (California) guest residence, unable to function or even get out of bed. He was experiencing being washed over by the energy so intensely that he couldn't function as a regular guy at all for long stretches. I sometimes call this Ojai Symdrome.
Anyway the gentleman I spoke with over this past weekend is basically this type of Natural. He'd read a couple of my books and wondered did I have anything better to offer him, not for the usual purpose of amping up the power, but more for shutting it off or at least making the effects more manageable. Super intelligent and interesting guy, and he's been through every internal training course, guru, program, book, and teaching you can imagine. Spit me a big name in this field and he's tried that person's program.
Sadly I didn't have any magic elixir to offer him. I so rarely encounter this type in my work that I was caught on the back foot so to speak. But here I want to make a few general points about this not so much expecting to be of any use to him but it may be interesting background for others here.
There are VERY CRUDELY SPEAKING three ways to approach this game (I'm going to frame this mostly in terms of training methods - if you're a true spontaneous natural like my new buddy you are just so rare it's hardly worth discussing)
- Quietistic
- Qi Gong
- Martial Arts
Before you blow a gasket and start raving that these categories aren't real, they're arbitrary, the list has massive overlap, the list has massive gaps, your system does all three plus the dishes ... etc etc etc. (Yeah - you know you want to) let me say back off. I'm aware of all that. Just let me make my point and get out of here and y'all can argue terminology among yourselves while I kick back with a Mountain Dew).
So here's the thing about each of those, relative to my reader's interesting case:
- Quietistic: This is a large family of mostly sedentary (some standing and lying) meditational approaches, centered around mental activation of various hypothetical channels and point in the energy body. It's great! I learned this and practiced these Nei Dan and Dao Yin methods for many years. However, they can lead to the over-amped negative condition described by my reader. The activated energy isn't integrated with your body, and you have a huge shitload of unprocessed physical tension that power needs to battle its way through, leading to both gaps and surges. It's also overly focused on the spine, internal organs and head (小周) as opposed to full body.
- Qi Gong: This really is kinda hard to discuss as one category given the gigantic number of systems that could fit this label, many of which are basically the same as Quietistic, but ranging from there all the way into systems that are extremely vigorous, and which can involved extreme physical contortions, pressures and impacts, not even mention all the complicated breath regimens. So here I really am overgeneralizing. As a practical matter however, for most average practitioners these systems suffer from faults as follows: (a) way too arm centric, in a way the opposite problem relative to the Quietistic, but similar in that its not balanced (though of course practitioners will say it is but in practice most people are just arm waving); (2) people don't know how to relax from the outset, tension nullifies everything right at the outset. But even though these systems don't deliver deep immersion into the power for most people, they do have the advantaged that most of them will not blast you into the uncontrolled negative space experience by my reader.
- Martial Arts: The so-called 'internal' arts, these systems have sucked in elements of both Quietism and Qi Gong but they generally will never lead to the uncontrolled negative immersion states. The reason is simple, the people who put these systems together were practical. They were body guards or caravan escorts or door men or secret society rebels or whatever. Historically there was no way they could lie around immobilized in their beds all day. Definition of martial arts is 'ready to roll now'. Obviously with time these system have lost their original connection to the real world, and yet traces of this grounding still remain. So all my drills stem from this tradition.
Thus I personally though I've read all about it have NEVER experienced this 'Kundalini Syndrome' as a negative thing. Quite the opposite. It's true that the energy experience is unspeakably powerful. That's for sure, it will roll through you like winter surf on Oahu North shore, but that's an incredible HIGH - nothing remotely unpleasant about it.
But at that intensity, it's best to be somewhat physically fit and posturally stable.
One antidote to even the possibility of any negative overload is to stress energetic conditioning of the lower body. So important. It's confusing to people, because the original source and storage of the power are the niwan center brain point and the qihai lower abdomen area, respectively. It's also confusing because when I rant about 'power deriving from lower body' average people just can't help themselves - having never taster the real internal in themselves, they just have to jump to the assumption that I must mean some kind of mechanical power, like 'put your hips into' something like that kind of generic mechanical training tip.
But no. I'm still talking purely about energy here, the internal power. In terms of experiential immediate cultivation and deployment, the power must be sourced via the feet, legs and pelvis - your lower body! This is extremely important and I'd go as far as to say that insistence on this point is what truly differentiates the martial arts cultivation methods from the quietistic and qi gong styles.
Yuh don't believe me? Well then just re-read the Tai Chi Classics where they make this point over and again, yet even most Tai Chi people are way too arm centric and mechanical. Or else re-read Sagawa Yukioshi's training concepts ('Transparent Power' by Katsuo Kimura). There he talks repeatedly about training the legs and hips - but he's talking about aiki power, not doing the leg machines at Gold's Gym. The power blasting from the legs and pelvis is not a word, symbol, idea, philosophy, cultural entity, nor is it fascia tissue or nerve endings or enhanced blood flow. Someday you'll get to this and you'll laugh in scorn and pity at your former self who thought so. It's just an overwhelming firehose torrent blasting up from your lower body to totally immerse and suffuse your upper body and finally your whole self. Couldn't possibly be more obvious or real.
I've kinda wandered off the point but I just wanted to assert that you can experience the fully massive immersive amazement of this stuff without the debilitation downside, if you work mainly along the martial arts path. The best antidote for my reader would have been a rigorous course of hardcore Zheng/Lo super-grounded style of Tai Chi. But that training is no longer available.