Pete A. Nicholson

Sunday, December 14, 2008

The Tao of Rejuvenation

From the introduction:

…Countless words have been written on the proper definition of qi and prana, but for our purposes it is sufficient to simply understand that the physical body is run by energy, or qi, just the way an automobile is moved by the energy liberated through the combustion of gasoline. There is qi in the body, in the food we eat, and in the air we breathe. There is qi in the sunshine that falls on our faces, in the rain that seeps into the Earth, and in the very Earth itself. The human body, these early practitioners found, is a qi machine, living on it, manufacturing it, and passing it on to others…

From Chapter One — The Human Body Contains a Great Healing Spring:

…These “healings” and “miracles” — and, sometimes, even rejuvenation itself — are often presented in the kind of whitewashed, quasi-religious way that paints them as acts of some higher, external force, and the language of rejuvenation as something merely hopeful and inexact. In reality, as we will see, the body’s healing system is very much energetic and chemical in its nature, generating specific, appropriate responses in order to heal and regenerate itself…

Once the regenerative science of our own bodies becomes clear to us, we no longer have to be either a hopeful believer or a rational skeptic, either believing or not believing in “miracles”. Instead, we become active participants in the body’s higher processes. And, suddenly, miraculous healings like that of Tapasviji cease to be a kind of dubious “magic” and, instead, become simply examples of people successfully tapping the body’s rejuvenative well to restore themselves.

A truly healthy person is someone who, through observation and practice, comes to really understand this chemistry, doing whatever possible to enhance it and make it effective in daily life. And a true doctor or healer is someone like Tapasviji’s sadhu, someone who works to find ways to magnify and optimize that regenerative response in others, unlocking the patient’s own healing chemistry, presuming no limit on the power of the body to heal itself…

From Chapter Two — The Ancient Regenerative Secrets of Faith Prayer and Fasting:

…In a sense, the modern view of life is perfectly understandable. It might even be a result of our physiology. As the great European philosopher Henri Bergson pointed out, the brain and the nervous system stand in the midst of infinity, filtering out a broad range of light vibration. To prevent ourselves from being overloaded, our brains function like a TV tuner, narrowing the chaos of light vibration to a specific channel or band of experience. Our apparently physical and mortal life - what appears to us as the whole world — actually represents only a very narrow spectrum of this vibration. But we are taught from birth to identify with just this channel, to believe without question the brain’s hallucination of an apparently solid, sensory, immovable world, to see rock, steel, and sky as separate from Earth, to presume inviolate boundaries between beings. We receive this limited information from the brain, and then presume its ultimacy…

From Chapter Four — The Regenerative Power of Conscious Exercise and Sexuality:


…In TCM and Taoism, the male is understood to be the embodiment of the ‘yang’ fire force to the female’s watery ‘yin’; in the Tantric teachings of India, the male force is Shiva to the female’s Shakti. In both systems — and there are many others that use a similar framework — conditional existence is seen as a great play of opposing forces: light and dark, hot and cold, pain and pleasure, birth and death. It is a play of endless modifications. Opposites attract each other, looking to find equanimity and resolution in each other. The hot yang of the man seeks balance in the cool yin of the woman. When the yang force of the male builds up, he finds himself moving quite naturally towards the female, looking to be relieved of the excessive fire he feels. Even among homosexual couples, sexual activity and attraction arise out of this play of yin and yang — someone is predominantly yin, someone is predominantly yang.

In our sexual lives, we make this ‘polarity’ truly effective, truly powerful, when we conserve the reproductive substances our lovemaking stimulates. In doing so, we unlock a tremendously potent force, one not only regenerative for our sexuality, but for our health altogether…

From Chapter Seven — Unlocking the Secret Spring of the Endocrine System:

“…The ancient sages of China founded an entire medical system on one essential observation: The body, when brought into a profound state of balance and equanimity, heals itself.

    In many ways, this wisdom has been lost to us. So much of the focus of modern medicine is on our being healed — by technology, by doctors, by medicines, by anything but ourselves. When we go to the doctor with an illness, it is almost as if we are making an admission that we have given up on the body’s capacity to heal itself. As ‘patients’, we become passive participants in our own health, reliant on medications and sophisticated treatments to get better. Too dependent on being ‘cured’, we have forgotten about the body’s native intelligence, its remarkable capability to restore itself to balance and equanimity.

Once we begin to cultivate the body’s regenerative capabilities, we suddenly have tools at our disposal far more powerful than any conventional treatment. And among the body’s tools, there is none more powerful than our own endocrine system, a system so advanced and intuitive that it can literally perform miracles…”

From Chapter Ten — The Regenerative Effects of Sleep and Death:

…As a species, we have never really become comfortable with the fact of our own passing. Death, we feel, is the fundamental problem with life. It frightens us to our core. This primal fear, this never knowing how or when the end will come, becomes a stress that informs our whole life, an underlying sensation that lies at the root of all our reactivity. Thankfully, though, we can free ourselves of this stress, in life and in death. As we will see, this fear is less a fundamental part of being human, as many people think, and more an unnecessary by-product of a society that fails to understand the natural pattern of our appearance here. With the right approach, we can prepare for death, and we can understand it. Once we do, it becomes possible to make our passing — and the passing of others — a peaceful, even happy event…

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