March 26, 2002: Extreme Stillness

In terms of Master Ni’s background:

He studied with the famous master, we mentioned before when he was a teenager. When he was in his 20s he studied with someone who taught the Shanghai police - must have been a fairly hard style martial arts. He wouldn’t say much about his next teacher except that he belonged to the Taoist tradition of Wu Tang Mountain. He said that this teacher wasn’t part of the official Wu Tang Mountain lineage.

It seems that Master Ni belonged to the Kuomintang. He retreated with the Nationalist Army to Taiwan in the late 40s when the Communists came to power. He is virulently anti-Communist, hoping that they will fall in his lifetime, as they did in Russia. It seems that he might have been fairly high up in the Nationalist organization because he was given the job of organizing banquets in the energy department, which included water and electric. He was able to send all of his 7 children to prestigious universities as well as buying a house in Santa Barbara. He came to the United States partly at least because he hated Taiwan.

In Master Ni’s latest 10 minute lecture he said that ‘Extreme Stillness’ is a way to ‘return to the root’. In explication he said that standing exercises, i.e. Horse Stance, Mountain Stance, etc., are a way to approach the external root, but meditation is the way to approach Extreme Stillness and the internal root. He said that the external helped but that the internal was the target. Privately he said to me that some reach this point easily, naturally, while others will never reach it.

When ‘extreme stillness’ has been reached regrets and fears cease to exist.

That’s all for now.
the bundle of nothing called don