I have been doing tummo preliminaries half-heartedly as an aside to my primary shikantaza-ish practice but with omega point's recent instructions I've started the actual practice. Tummo is supposed to direct energy to the navel chakra, in my experience it is intense enough that I'd go to the hospital if I didn't know I was fabricating it. Anyway after a 2 hour tummo session today when I went outside there was a strong pce with a really strong quality of spontaneous action and wonderment (I said without any pre-thought "whoa those are some fucking awesome mountains" which is really out of character for me). Anyway the navel chakra is associated in tantra with emptiness and with naïveté in actualism where Richard calls it the sweet spot, and praises it as effective, seemingly same phenomena... Anyway thought I would point this phenomena out in case anyone wanted to try tummo or if they are just interested in this parallel.

As far as I've been able to tell, the "sweet spot" is neither the navel chakra nor the base chakra. It seems to lie ever so slightly above the base chakra, around maybe 10-15 mm above it (bearing in mind that this is just the way I've noticed it in my own body) and leads to a very distinctive sensation which is, what I'd describe as being, like a sexual warmth but not in the same way that heat manifests below the navel chakra when doing tummo.

I've thought about this too, and also considered that they may refer to the same thing for quite a while. I no longer think that this is the case though, the quality of sensations which arise when attention is placed on both points seems quite different and I haven't found any specific correspondences in any other models between the two physical locations of each point. As always, I could be wrong but this is what I've found so far anyway and thought it was worth mentioning.

tommy, i am curious, can you do tummo despite having no affective experience? it seems to require a faculty of 'hacking' the energy flow, like expecting or 'believing' that it is very warm... i always associated all that stuff with affect. or is it just that there is no longer reactive affect? can you cause affect to arise? am i mixing affect (in the way it is normally talked about here) with something else?

Yeah, I seem to be able to do it without any difficulty but I did wonder the same thing, like how it would be possible to recreate these sorts of experiences basically through imagination when, according to the Actualists, imagination is entirely affective. This is where it gets a bit more difficult to describe 'cause what's required isn't really imagination, at least not in the sense it's used normally, but the ability to fabricate sensory experience. I don't really know how to describe it well enough yet 'cause I'm still getting used to it and getting to grips with the basics, but it's more about intent and malleability of mind as far as I can see so far.

When the heat arose, as I mentioned in my practice thread, yesterday there was no requirement whatsoever to believe it was warm. It was simply a tactile sensation of heat occurring 'within' the body, the same sort of way you'd normally experience heat but with a different quality to it that I find hard to describe; I know it's being fabricated but there's just something about it I can't put my finger on yet.