I think it's both "chi" or "qi" or "ki" depending on which tradition is examining it. I agree that qi can be explained in part by physics, chemistry and biology, but my view is that it's sort of like a complimentary/supplementary view of the same phenomena. It's sort of another way of explaining phenomena we've already identified. The problem occurs when it (seems to) go above and beyond a uniquely complementary explanation. The evidence I refer to comes from both videos I've posted where scientific observers were present during both fantastic demonstrations that had no traditional explanation or detection of foul play (although of course the integrity of the videos come into question, and we don't want to get sucked back into that circular debate), but then there's also the very physical interactions I have with an unexplainable very physical feeling, dynamic, magnetic-like energy that after continual scrutiny seems to bare a lot of similarities to descriptions of qi. A lot of people say that one must see it to believe it, and I feel like I have seen it, and the interactions I have with it are very real, so my own experiential evidence affirms the existence of qi for myself personally. I understand that this may not affect others' views and that's fine. I'm simply speaking for myself here.

I want to examine a crucial part of the way that this "DMT energy" (whether qi or not) interacts with my body. I see these plasma-like holographic energies/objects in my open-eyed room. If I go to grab one, it may repel or attract my hand (or whatever part of my body makes contact with it) when my hand collides with the localized hologram. There are some fundamentally different ways to look at this, but I don't think that even the "less fantastic explanations" dispel the myth of qi so easily. One way of looking at it is that my hands are actually being "biomagnetically" repelled by the qi. Perhaps assuming that there is qi in my hands, other qi in the holograms and not so much in an object on the desk that "like" or opposite charges in the holograms as opposed to my hands create this sense of attraction/repulsion amongst themselves (hand and hologram) but not so easily with other physical objects (like the hologram and physical object). It would be like taking a magnet and trying to move a piece of wood as opposed to another magnet. [Edit]: Qi is commonly and traditionally identified as a "life energy" so it seems logical to conclude that inanimate objects (as opposed to people's bodies) would be rather deficient in qi. Perhaps we need a demonstration of a master repelling a dog (or even less intelligent organism) backwards.

On the other hand, perhaps when my body makes contact with these energetic holograms, the brain is making some odd but extremely refined calculation whereby it sends signals to the muscles in the hand to move in ways that bypass my normal voluntary motion (though I must say it feels like an external force acting on my hand). The thing is that if the holograms are not qi or some external phenomena (or internal phenomena projected externally) then that would be to assume that the brain is creating these hallucinations and making precise calculations in regards to touch sense and physical movement, the likes of which are unprecedented for the brain. Of course the brain is more amazingly complex than we can fathom, I'm just saying that it strikes me as a bit far-fetched as we don't see our brain make such calculations on objects that it's just making up in any other interaction in life I can think of. If the above case in bold is true, then perhaps in the qi demonstrations of the people being flung back by the master, the qi is not exerting a force on them, propelling them backwards but rather may be interacting with the skeletal nervous system in such a coherently strong way that their voluntary conscious signals that they normally use to control their bodies are being overridden.

While it does seem very amazing, the brain can actually make these calculations. It can be tricked using illusions like described in this article. People, when hypnotized can also demonstrate the behavior of tactile engagement with hallucinations.

I'm not saying that this is the case, and am rather agnostic on the phenomena you describe, but it's not as outlandish as you suggest.

Chi / Qi

=

Reiki / ki

=

Shakti

All different interpretations and labels for what is essentially the same thing. It's not exclusive to just martial arts , nor is it exclusive to just eastern 'spiritual' or religious practices...It can actually be a very useful and applicable practice for those that are encountering it from neither of these avenues.I can only attempt to dissect what i think it actually is based on my direct experiences with 'it' over the last 3 or 4 years.

From my understanding, i see it as a type of Polarized energy. A vibratory resonance that permeates between all living matter and beyond.

Certain Martial arts, and countless other practices such as Reiki and [/b]Kundalini Yoga (yoga meaning Union) are practices in which an 'awareness' is cultivated on both the mental and the physical level until a stable symbiosis is formed, which can lead to a clearer inner flow of vital energy ,thus expanding whatever it is our consciousness is.

The nearest thing the actual energy it's self can be likened to ,is that of electromagnetism.
Polarity is present in various scales through out the universe. The polarity is obviously expressed in our planet through the poles, so it seems logical that the organisms operating within a larger biosphere would also share these fundamental characteristics.

Even those who are unaware of Chi/reiki/kundalini, will all be experiencing it either way and to varying degrees of 'voltage'. It's not an exclusive tool to the people who swear by it or to the people who are aware of it.

Think of our bodies as opened circuits. We dispell a lot of energy at any given moment. These practices are ways of completing those circuits and in a way creating feedback loops between out subtle energies.

Learning to cultivate it,harness it and direct the flow of it, and more importantly, tuning into the abundant source of it is the ultimate practice for people involved in developing this type of thing.

The reason the sciences have trouble measuring it i think, is simply down to perhaps the wrong measuring devices being used.

A slightly tongue in cheek analogy;

You wouldn't try and tune into a radio with a ruler .


I can't speak for everyone, but i know a nice amount of changa allows my eyes to tune into the frequencies my electro-magnetic/ auric/reiki/qi field sits on. Even without it, i've been able to see it at night time maybe 10 minutes after turning the lights out over the last month at least 2 times a week more. Which is ironic as i used to practice trying to see it in daylight a few years ago with no success and now i'm seeing it without even trying to. It's very fun to see an energetic field move parrell to your hands/arms. I can even see very tiny tiny burst of light sometimes- i can't fully say what they are btu i would imagine it being something to do with positively charged photons.

I realize i have been 'lucky' in the sense that my body has had a increasingly sensitive awareness to subtle energies which i can physically feel (even before i even knew what it was i was feeling! ) So deciding whether or not the energy is real or not has never really been an issue.

It's one of those things where you can argue for ,or against it ,for as long as it takes science to catch up and finally prove or disprove it. The most ideal thing to do, would be to find out for your selves first (and second) hand

Even if you don't ,you already are.

(edit - Global, i'll share some of my thoughts about your last posts tomorrow when i'm more awake to do so )

What? lol I'm not attacking him personally, I'm just calling him out on his what I believe his true intentions are. As far as me being closed minded, well, one could argue that he's being closed minded towards the reality of Qi. But when it comes down to it, it's not about personal belief- people can try it out and see for themselves if it's real.



See my last sentence above.

Spartan, your post was indeed, the way I see it, unnecessarily attacking citta, and what you perceive to be his true intentions. In your post there was nothing constructive regarding the arguments he or anybody else made, and it had these passive-agressive kind of smilies and expressions that do not help making this a better thread.

Do you have a problem with Citta's arguments? Express what it is and what you think is a good counter-argument, and in this way he can learn from you or he can give you yet another argument you hadnt thought about, and then maybe you can change or it can be a stimulus for you to improve your own knowledge and arguments.

Do you have a problem with Citta's presence in general? Ignore him... Or maybe send him a respectful pm when you think there's something he can do better, or what not.

Also, your rebutal of the "closed-minded" claim was lacking imo. Instead of immediately pointing the finger to someone else's mistake, did you take a moment to reflect if you arent indeed falling for the same mistake you are denouncing others, except from the other side of the argument? Seems to me you have a problem whenever people suggest a scientific attitude, instead of realizing it is a method of deriving one kind of knowledge, and it doesn't need to be published in peer-review to be science and neither does it need to go against spirituality. If you try half your mimosa with limonene and half with naphtha and compare, thats science. You can try different yoga or meditation techniques and compare results, that could also be science.

If there is such an interesting phenomenon as Chi, I dont see why you would have a problem with people trying to isolate variables, eliminate possible human error and self-suggestion (because you do know that, regardless of the science debate, there IS such a thing as being subjectively mistaken, right?), try to further the understanding of a phenomenon instead of dogmatically accepting it.. This doesn't have to mean you are closed minded, it is a natural curiosity to try to understand things.

Lastly, your answer to swimfriend's quote does not really touch on the point he mentioned. The point is, that if Chi interacts with matter in some way (like lets say, you can move an object at distance), then u can certainly analyze it scientifically because its acting on matter. Even if you have no idea where the source of Chi is, at some point it has to cross to "this world" and affect it (in this case, the object must be acted with a certain pressure to move, or whatever). So directly or indirectly, I dont see why you couldnt in theory study it. If people who have chi dont want to be studied, thats a whole other argument, but then we're not talking about the nature of Chi...

What you seem to implicate here is 'seeing is believing' and that has been shown to be false in certain settings. There are many optical illusions out there (I'm not saying here that Qi is an optical illusion or not) that will trick your brain into seeing something that is not really happening.

Here is one of my favorite optical illusions (under a spoiler else it would make the page annoying to read):


If we follow your 'seeing is believing' and put some nice new age sauce over it we can turn this optical illusion into "the consciousnesses influences the pink particles to convert into one green particle". And funnily enough that would actually be kinda true since your mind is filtering and interpreting the information it gets from your eyes in such a way that your mind makes the wrong assumption and thinks that there is an actual green dot circling around. However, cover parts of the image with your hand and you will soon see that your mind is tricking you: subjectively you see a green dot in this optical illusion but objectively there is no green dot at all.

Also if you are watching a magician act (again, I'm not saying that Qi demonstrations are a magician act or not), you will see that things will seemingly appear out of thin air. You are really seeing this but that does not make David Copperfield supernatural, it makes him a very clever and nimble showman.

Again, I'm not saying that Qi is real or not, I'm just pointing out that your quoted statement looks like a fallacy to me. Seeing something does not by default make it real.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

I think it's very important to come to the realization that people (and societies) are CHANGING, and have been continually and directionally changing for hundreds of years now.

FIRST, it is becoming more and more difficult to believe in "magic," as civilization progresses. A few hundred years ago not only was it EASY to believe that some sort of "god" must have placed life on our planet, it was almost NECESSARY: giraffes, after all, don't just "pop" out of rocks! These things had to come from SOMEWHERE--they don't just grow from nothing (until, that is, we discovered a great deal of evidence and process that shows they probably did that very thing!). Fifty years ago it was PERFECTLY reasonable for most major universities in the US to have departments of parapsychology: SO MANY people reported psi phenomenon, after all--it was taken as a given that such things EXIST, and it was time to focus some scientific investigation on the phenomenon...until those departments couldn't seem to actually FIND the phenomenon to study!

Furthermore, worldwide communications and mixing of cultures have shown what is ANALOGOUS among all or most cultures--that they all seem to invent gods and create and sustain superstitious beliefs. People have come to see that others seem to love to report FANTASTIC things, and then others follow. It becomes more and more apparent every year that MAGIC THINGS DON'T EXIST. The Leprechauns have vanished.

SECOND, at the same time, we're finding more and more that the very FABRIC OF EXISTENCE seems to be magical! Using the most ORDINARY of processes: observation, consideration, testing (i.e., science) we've visited the moon, we can schedule to fly around the world, we make machines that do something quite close to thinking out of exquisitely structurally detailed pieces of rock (silicon integrated circuits)...not to mention the revelations of quantum mechanics.

It used to be that anything could be true, that you were stubborn and incurious if you didn't admit some plausibility for ANY report of ANYTHING, that belief DEFINED YOU, and that you HAD to believe something...or else you had NOTHING in your head.

Now...reality is STEAMROLLING over belief. A significant part of the world now sees "belief" (in anything not directly observable) as nearly a JOKE. Beliefs are seen as "local quaintness." And strangely, the same people who "believe" seem BLIND to the ACTUAL MAGIC that is created every single day, all over the world. Technology is taken for granted, and is intellectually uninteresting to "believers." Such people are more fascinated by "magically" flying that ACTUAL MAGICAL FLYING (in a jet, for example). And the ACTUAL magic that has been created in the last hundred years goes UTTERLY BEYOND THE MAGICAL IMAGINATIONS of people only TWO hundred years ago.

We're living in interesting times, where people's attitudes are ODD (more odd than they used to be), because the world is CHANGING SO FAST--and people aren't keeping up with it.

....but for those who wish to keep up (i.e., those who want to "take in" new realities as they are unveiled) it's necessary to develop ability to DISCRIMINATE the real from the imagined, and to understand the difference between magical thinking and rational thinking. And lots of people are lagging a bit in that area, IMO; again, because things are changing radically even from one generation to the next--so the attitudes and sensibilities we take in by osmosis from our parents NO LONGER WORK WELL in the world we live in.

Simply, the days are nearing an end where simply asserting something fantastic (chi "works" ) is meaningful (or indeed even INTERESTING) to a thoughtful person. We've discovered, finally, after thousands of years of confusion, that not everything is "real," that people make things up or are deluded in what they believe, that some things ARE true, and that mere THINKING and TESTING of what IS true can produce MAGIC! It's an EXCITING and MAGICAL WORLD! And it's no longer NECESSARY TO INVENT THINGS for that to be true!...and it's necessary to be able to separate the true from the imagined in order to best take advantage of human perception and knowledge.

As I've pointed out in my last post, I too have struggled with this question regarding Chi's interaction with matter, and while thinking all the arguments over in this thread here yesterday, it finally occurred to me why it may be that it's easy to throw around some people while it may not be so easy to move some wooden blocks or apply a force to a measuring instrument. Since Chi is traditionally regarded as a "life energy" by the traditions that study and cultivate it, then it seems logical that Chi would be present in human bodies, but one would expect wooden blocks to be rather deficient in life energy (since they're not alive). If we think about this in terms of magnets, if you take one magnet and move it near another magnet, we can expect the second magnet to be attracted to or repelled from the other. However if you took the magnet and tried to do the same exact thing with a wooden block, there would be no motion at all. Now we wouldn't conclude that there's no such thing as magnetism based on that experiment, just that it has limited interaction with the world. In the same way, Chi has limited interaction with the world, so one would expect limited interaction with the non-living and much stronger interaction with living matter that itself contains other Chi. As I suggested, perhaps your experiment shouldn't be in regards to measuring a force from a non-living instrument, but rather to move a rat or something with very low human suggestability to minimize chances of the master issuing commands.

Er....what's necessary is to throw around some people who are neither your disciples nor people who WANT to believe. The evidence presented--apparent "magical" forces applied to willing disciples--is...silly.

Waco or Jonestown, anyone? The testimony of disciples for the "greatness" of their master is...something more like ANTI-evidence than evidence.

In terms of researching psi phenomena, I refer you to Albert K Lloyd's thread on Remote Viewing which I believe is in this subforum. Also, if you wanna know why the leprechauns have vanished, it could easily be because of modern attitudes and lifestyles that you describe in your post. People were seeing leprechauns and faeries because they were connected to nature and their lifestyles reflected being in harmony with nature at every turn. Now we look to dominate nature every chance we get and subsume ourselves in the various electromagnetic fields of laptops, cellphones, televisions, electric light, etc...it's no wonder we've lost contact with the forces of nature. This is really a simplified argument, but Evan Wentz wrote a rather detailed book that delves into these topics in great detail. In terms of the societies all around the world sharing the same "superstitious beliefs" there are a variety of cases where due to constraints of time frames and our traditional understanding of anthropological dissemination of information, it would be impossible for certain parts of a culture to spread by word of mouth across such a distance in so little time.



Please refer to my post before the one you quoted. I'm not merely talking about chi moving people in videos, but from my own experience with the energy I encounter on DMT that I talk about at length. This is my own experiential evidence, so whenever you say where's the evidence, for myself, it's my own experiences.

Sorry Global. I wasn't really even talking about anything from your posts. My main point is that the video presented almost serves to better demonstrate that there is NO SUCH POWER as chi, instead of that there IS--because the use of subjects who have a vested interest in the outcome in the video is so OBVIOUSLY useless, and the use of truly disinterested people so OBVIOUSLY vital...that the video is nearly a comedy.

Which then goes to what you report. And without being disrespectful (because I'm NOT disrespectful, I am a FULL BELIEVER in something that could be called "spiritual power"--but just not in a "cheap way" ), I would say I grow tired of reports of things that are "real" but which, apparently, can't be shown...

I've heard about such things MY ENTIRE LIFE (and I'm almost sixty years old). But no one has been able to really SHOW such things--except in examples such as the video, which would be impressive, really, only to a child.

Our beliefs about the world tend to evolve, as in a single human life and societies as a whole. When you're a kid you believe in the tooth fairy, in Santa Claus and perhaps that there is a boogeyman under your bed or in the closet. Once you mature you find that there are no such things, and the continuous lack of experience from these entitites seem to suggest it as well. You also learn that your fellow human beings believed in these things when they were young too, but as they mature they neither see any of these things and can give rational explanations for what was previously attributed to them. Rational explanations are sought, perhaps it was your mother who placed the money under your pillow? Your dad, or grandpa or someone else playing Santa Claus? The weird creepy sounds you heard at night were perhaps just your cat, or the wind, or something else perfectly natural and not attributed to the boogeyman at all?

The analogy of the child learning a decent amount of critical thinking can be applied to humanity as a large. Certainly leprechauns and fairies have disappeared because of our change in lifestyle, but does this mean that these things are real? Early man were not stupid per se, they just didn't have any other explanations for what was happening in the world around them. Thus they created myths to explain creation, to explain thunder, the wind, the sun and all other natural forces that they perceived. Everywhere in the world cultures have created their own myths to come to terms with the world around them, and they represent a great variety of environments and forms of society. They also share many things in common, which is not very weird because we are all humans after all, built pretty much the same in terms of physiology and the way our brain works and perceives. All of these myths were also the sole truth within every culture, and they were not to be questioned.

None of this changed very much until about the 6th century BC, when a wave of tolerance emerged amongst intellectuals. For the first time philosophers and intellectuals could throw away these simple myths about our world and develop their own theories. At first, naturally these ideas were not very correct, but the important thing was that humans tried to really explain the world without resorting to God and the supernatural. The development continued, and the theories produced got better and better and we found that mathematics also were a reliable tool to describe and predict the world.

Out of this grew the first inklings of the scientific method, where we actually were genuinelly commited to the effort of verifying that our statements about the world were true (or at least not shown to be false). The better our observations got, the better theories we had, the more consistencies and consensus we could establish, the less were supernatural explanations needed to explain the world. Soon thunder wasn't because of Gods, but because of natural forces. Soon earth wasn't created a few thousands years in the past, but several billion years ago. Soon natural catastrophies were not because of angry spirits and/or Gods, but because of natural movements and processes in the climate of the earth. Soon disease wasn't caused by demons, but because of tiny little microorganisms and/or malfunctioning biological systems. Soon life wasn't created just as it is by God, but it had developed through the slow natural processes of evolution. The list goes on.

All the ideas, all the hypothesis, were falsifiable. They were vulnerable to objective observation and verification and/or falsification, whereas the old myths and religious faiths often were just that; propositions of faith, that were not falsifiable. If they were formulated in such a way that they were, in fact, falsifiable - they were shown to be false propositions. They had to get out of the way for far greater and beautiful explanations that were consistent with objective observations. This is real honesty and intellectual integrity in the search of knowledge. This is the state of our knowledge today, and it has given us a remarkable understanding of our universe and given us remarkable technology that could barely be dreamt about in the past. This is the methods that have landed rovers on Mars and humans on the moon, given us medicines to cure things that killed millions in the past, given us all we know about nutrition, given us the ability to sit here on our computers and communicate through invisible electromagnetic fields over large distances. The list goes on and on.

Now, I ask, what has religion, superstitious faith and supernatural explanations given us? Nothing. They have only gimped real understanding and knowledge, and have contributed nothing. In fact, superstitious faith have been a great contributer to mans inhumanity to man, all the while reason and rational discourse have given us a fast growing understanding of our universe and our place within it, human rights, secular politics, medicine, acknowledgement of women and homosexuality, among a great number of other things.

So to wrap it up; just because people believed silly things in the past doesn't make it true - in fact, there is everything to suggest that it was wrong. And if there is something we should wish to do, it would be to get rid of silly explanations and seek the real ones about the happenings of our world and our place within it. The more we do this, the more incredible the universe around us becomes - this, my friend, is true spirituality in the scientific sense

Oh, and this is also the way we should go about to investigate Qi phenomena if we wanna really learn about its falsehood or its lack of thereof. Anyway, this post was a bit off-topic, but I get carried along.

Let's just agree to disagree then because we've both stated our cases and it doesn't look like any of us are about to have any sudden change in opinion. Being that this thread is in the spirituality and mysticism subforum, perhaps we can get a bit back on track with talking about Chi and what we know about it under the assumption that it might exist.

Cleaned up and waiting for the OP to give me some extra input.

This thread will reopen after that input.


Kind regards,

The Traveler