by klonk on Sun May 06, 2018 1:03 pm
There is little to worry about. Part of the AT instructional canon is that no one is to do AT who is currently psychotic. That takes away a lot of risks. I think that if qigong teachers would look for a few signs of such trouble beforehand there would be fewer cases of qigong disorder. In both cases, the risk is increased somato-psychical activity acting as a trigger for trouble that was lurking already.
There is an advanced level in AT in which the exercises actually try to bring forth visualizations of people and situations. Such exercises are beyond my interests, for I do not consider them useful, but they show that the trainee is in control and can actually call forth something like visions, in a controlled manner.
In my own experience, when unbidden and unwanted mental imagery occurs during AT, which happens rarely, I can get rid of it either by directing my attention to other thoughts, or by passively observing the imagery as if seeing a movie, understanding that if it even has any intelligible meaning, it is unreal in the sense a dream is unreal. The mental imagery shortly evaporates in either case.
To touch very briefly on the religious angle, very few dreams and visions are of deep religious significance. The religious authorities have, over the centuries, become practiced in reviewing false alarms.
Last edited by
klonk on Sun May 06, 2018 1:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I define internal martial art as unusual muscle recruitment and leave it at that. If my definition is incomplete, at least it is correct so far as it goes.