How The Point of Contact Is Established
How to pay attention to your senses and maintain?
Our senses are our receiver. That’s why I keep on saying “you feel yourself being touched”; you don’t feel someone touching you.” You receive and feel through touch. On the Point of Contact, you connect.
How do you connect?
Practically speaking, everything comes down to the point of contact. So that’s why first you have to unify your self. Unify yourself means there is separation—there’s more than 1 thing: a minimum 2 things. One cannot unify—you need 2. Same thing: one cannot separate—you need two.
So how can this unify? How can this have a separation and unification? This is the Balance Point. Separation and unification is also a balance point. Work on these two things together—to have this complementary—because this cannot violate that and that cannot violate this. You have to maintain that yin is yin and yang is yang. The front is front and the back is the back. How can my back go to the front and the front go to the back?
Pay attention to each characteristic of the function—this is yin muscle and this is a yang muscle. If I draw the yin—I don’t draw yin to the yang to violate. If you say there’s a separation clearly, then, if I draw the yin here then the yang has to follows.
[Sifu demonstrates the difference between a yin grab and a yang grab.]
If the yang follows, yang is only supporting. If I start with the yang first, if the yang initiates, I stretch with the yang first, then the yin follows. Then the same thing, if I draw first, then the yang follows. There’s no beginning or ending any more. It’s a matter of function: of what leads what, what supports what. It’s a complete cycle.
A complete cycle must have a separation. Without a separation, things will be confused. Without the center of bone supporting, how will the yin yang muscles work? It won’t work. Yes? Because everything also works with pressure. It comes down to different pressure: Day and night have different pressure, hot and cold have different pressure. That’s where the cycle is. Within our body the same. Within our body the yin muscle pressure is condensing; the yang muscle pressure is expanding. So you help the cycle of flow. Sometimes because of the training, body fitness, they train the yin muscle up to here (mid-chest) but it’s too tense. They look fit but practically they don’t have much power.
Q: How would someone know that?
Sifu: Many don’t know. That’s why the theoretical information we provide is important. A lot of people don’t have the chance to even get the right information. Sometimes listening to the right information.
Q: “Aren’t there people practicing ILC also doing it wrong?”
Sifu: Only a small part. More people like ‘body beautiful’/body building better (laughs)
Comment: When something you know is interfering, you have to let go of that view.
Sifu: Why is it that many bodybuilders have heart problems. Their muscles aren’t functioning the way nature should be. They build up this muscle then yang pressure and yin pressure become quite the same—there’s not much difference. The heart has to work harder to pump the flow. If he can do his relaxing and expanding, then the pressure is different, like day and night. Like high tide and low tide—that kind of function: because the pressure is different, it helps the cycle. That’s why we use the dan tien 丹田
and ming-men 命門 in the cycle. It helps the function.
“When things become clearer, you can see more.”
~GM Sam Chin
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Build Up Discipline To Direct Our Attention
If we can’t flow, it’s because our attention is not there. It’s not strong enough to hold, to be there. You can’t even last 1 second—the mind is already somewhere else. Some thought already pulls you off.
Here’s where our training of meditation comes in. We try to look into our mind to clear the thought, to build up this discipline so we can direct our attention. We can put our attention where we choose. When you can hold over there, you start to became calm, and then you become still. Still means things start to become clear because you can see things clearer.
When things become clearer, you can see more. Your attention can hold more. If it’s not clear yet, attention is very hard to hold. That’s why the meditation, people will use different methods: breathing, counting, if they can’t just watch the breath (if they can’t, they add in counting—1, 2, 3, 4, 5—up to 10 or however many they want to count).
It’s just another method of trying to draw the mind to there first. We say that the mind—the monkey mind—it runs around, so it needs a job to do. As the monks say, ‘give a job for him to do: call him to come and give him something to work on: give him an order. If you don’t give him something to do, he plays around.
A job—like counting or doing something to hold the mind there. So sometimes some people, in Pure Land, will use mantra—will use sound even to listen, to pay attention, to give more things to hold. Some use beads. Some use their hand just to rub. Some circle their thumbs. All these kinds of things—slowly, slowly then you try to drop that off so you can feel the breath more…drop, drop, drop, until it becomes very refined.
Q: “If we just focus on the breath should we also try to make our senses less, like Jiru described?”
Sifu: No, because you are training concentration now. You try to separate things now.
If you can separate that means you can unify. This separation with the attention on separation is so you can unify. They need to focus so still until they separate the feeling of the body—they don’t feel the body anymore, the senses gone: only that one point. They can see: that is where the concentration is—they can see the concentration there—so they know ‘okay, we have been attaining something.’
Sometimes you start to observe, yes, this is what sometimes they say is concentration and Vipassana.
We do Vipassana more. Observing is Vipassana; you do need attention for Vipassana. Right? The problem is—how deep you don’t know. You feel that you can maintain. Especially when we do martial arts; we are very good at observing also. I’ve been training for so many years, we know that we can observe. So, why is it that we cannot go in-depth?
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