Showing posts with label BK Frantzis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BK Frantzis. Show all posts

Monday, September 01, 2008

More on Dissolving Knots


Marigold in Water
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

The water method of Taoism is initially strong on the dissolving, or the breaking up of energy in the same way that water wears away a rock.
If you throw sugar inside of water, after a while it breaks the sugar down.
The water completely emulsifies it.
B.K. Frantzis

Well, just like that “Bruce Lee” did bring a visitor who left a comment on my last post.
Actually, he is a fan of B.K. Frantzis and he mentioned a nice link to a more detailed explanation of “dissolving.”
I want to share that here in a more up-front manner, as I think my Taoists friends will find it interesting.

These words by B.K. Frantzis touch on several things that interest me.
I've mentioned that my Taoist practice aims at creating “good human beings.”
Seems to me a lot of this transformation involves “dissolving” those “hot button issues” we all carrying inside our psychologies.
Adya also mentioned that he finds most students could benefit from psychotherapy either before or after awakening.
However, Frantzis seems to be saying meditation doesn’t work on the level that psychotherapy does. ... Or maybe "level" leads to mispintrepretation, and it'd be better to say the "methods" aren't equivalent. Here is exactly what he says:

Frequently I am asked if this method of Taoist meditation can replace the need for psychotherapy. Generally speaking, no. In modern life, you have to make a living and interact with other people. You can't withdraw to a monastery or ashram where all your needs are taken care of while you work through your problems…

Psychotherapy is more appropriate for dealing with the dysfunctionalities of a level of emotional development where taking full responsibility for one's emotions is not yet within an individual's capacity.

In Taoist meditation a worthy student was one whose emotional suppressions were such that the individual could feel that what was emotionally arising within themselves was essentially their own responsibility and not being caused by something outside themselves. …

Ahh! Actually, this is exactly the ability I developed through my Taoist practice.
I’ve learned to sit alone or with a group letting loose powerful emotions deep inside and when told to take a bow and stop meditating, I can quietly do that too.

Clearly there are different methods within Taoism.

Perhaps, we could say I have now become a “worthy student” having recovered from the great dissolving initiated by that awakening I had in 1975. Within a year that awakening had blossomed into a full spiritual emergency rather than emergence. The knots were not dissolving but were unwinding like supercoiled rubberbands generating so much heat that I was essentially fried.

Frantzis clearly describes working with the dissolving I spoke about last time, and he takes the consequences in an interesting direction:

All of these basic lower emotions are dealt with by first ferreting them out of where their energy is embedded in the actual tissue of the body; secondly by actually going into the energy channels of the body where they are located; and finally dissolving them all the way inside the system.

Then you start to literally transform these emotions as they extend outside of your physical body. Your own personal field has the ability literally extend to the end of the Universe.

If you do not clear out your own energy fields beyond the body, then all energies coming in from an external environment activate the unresolved energies in your own personal Qi. This causes you to be somewhat manipulated like a puppet by the energy emanating from the huge Qi fields of the stars. This creates a pattern that comes back in. That is what astrology is based on.…

Whoa! Astrology. Or why we can feel the feng shui of life.
And then Frantzis takes us back into the physical realm and very practical concerns as to “What does this mean for Me?” He shows me why meditators can sometimes become plagued with physical challenges, and why we should remain open to and respectful of paths that others tread.

When you start reaching into the emotions it is important you start tapping directly into the glandular system, as well as into your internal organs.

There are so many techniques it depends upon which ones are appropriate for a particular type of person or a certain situation. I am not going to get down and just talk about this technique or that technique. That is like a cookbook approach and the fact is that human beings don't quite work that way.
B.K. Frantzis

Not exactly my path, but Frantzis is well worth reading. In fact, here’s one final link that explains even better the process of dissolving those inner knots via the Water method of Taoism.

Namaste and Enjoy.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

No-mindedness


Myth 2
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

A gung fu man employs his mind as a mirror—it grasps nothing and it refuses nothing; it receives but does not keep…
Bruce Lee

I have a little site-meter attached to this blog.
It reports on how people find me.
So, I can tell you that many people come here after a Google search for “Laura Croft.”
I have to chuckle.
I must be such a disappointment.

And now, today, I find I want to quote Bruce Lee.
Well, perhaps he’ll boost readership and lead to more disappointed seekers.

Why Bruce Lee?
Serendipity.

For once again, my mind was feeling rather vacuous, quiet, and not so amenable to effort. Still, I was clearly awake and needing to look busy at work, so I thought I’d visit Seeker After Truth, the Mystics Reference Repository and do a random read.

There I found a long and thoughtful article written by Bruce Lee.
I also found an explanation (perhaps) of why writing entries here has become so difficult of late.

It was Bruce Lee’s mentioning of “physical loosening” that first caught my attention.
Last week at my Taoist group, a friend had mentioned she could see my hands holding onto these knotted ropes, and that I needed just to let them go.
It was simply an intuitive image that she saw.
But it alerted me to knots and there unwinding and dissolving.

Maharishi spoke of how stressing of the nervous system caused knots. Back in 1972, I thought "knots! - How can you get knots in neurons?" Alzheimers has shown us one way, neurofibrillary tangles they are called.
B.K. Frantzis in his book, The Great Stillness, writes about other kinds of knots. He writes about dissolving subtler and subtler, layer after layer of knots with his Taoist practice, deep within our psyches.
These knots must be dissolved if we are to grow, and if anything,
I have been “dissolving” lately.

So, Bruce Lee caught my attention during my random read:

To perform the right technique in gung fu, physical loosening must be continued in a mental and spiritual loosening, so as to make the mind not only agile but free.
In order to accomplish this, a gung fu man has to remain quiet and calm and to master the principle of no-mindedness (wu hsin).
No-mindedness is not a blank mind that excludes all emotions;
nor is it simply calmness and quietness of the mind…
it is the “non-graspiness” of the mind...

let the mind think what it likes without interference by the separate thinker or ego within oneself.
So long as it thinks what it wants, there is absolutely no effort in letting it go;
and the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker…

Chuang-tzu, the disciple of Lao-tzu, stated:
The baby looks at things all day without winking,
that is because his eyes are not focused on any particular object.
He goes without knowing where he is going, and stops without knowing what he is doing.
He merges himself with the surroundings and moves along with it.
These are the principles of mental hygiene.

Yes, that’s it. I have been something of a wide-eyed baby of late.
Most evenings I sit in the backyard with my face raised towards the treetops.
I’ve no idea why I do this. It simply seems what I'm called to do.

It’s disorienting a bit, not in the sense that I’m spaced-out or non-functional.
I look at the trees. I throw the kong for Bennie. I pet and placate the cat.
But, all in all, I’m not doing much. And that’s what feels so strange – so empty.

From time to time I have the thought, “What are you doing?”
… Nothing. Sitting.
“Shouldn’t you be doing something?”
(I give myself a long and valid to-do list.)
Then, I’ll look back to the treetops.
It seems more important to simply, deeply experience not-doing anything.

There’s a silence here.
So I look at that.
And "Who is looking?"
No one apparently. "Oh, dangerous ground! No one!"

"Is that a thought or is that an experience?"
I watch some more. Now, maybe this is meditating, but it's not the way I’ve ever done before. It's not anything that I've been taught. Heck, there's nothing to this! ... simply sitting.

Ah, “mental hygiene.”
There you go!
Thank you Bruce Lee.