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Enlightenment, the end of the spiritual path. I also want to live a skilful life that helps make the lives of others easier as opposed to being a burden.

I practice because I can, and it helps keep the mirror of my mind clean from the proverbial red dust of this world.

One

I practice for good health by improving my respiratory system to breathe better. It is only good for health other than longevity. However, longevity might come with the package. I rather die on my feet than lying in bed with trauma.

I was just thinking ... clothes horse and fire ... can we use this???

Someone asked me this question about a year ago and, without thinking much about it, what came out was... I am practicing for my death. It sort of surprised me, and them as well. My practice has become mostly informal, meaning not just on the cushion but in my day to day life, as often and consistently as possible. It's wonderful to sit in a quite, comfortable room and practice but if my practice is not there for me when I am challenged and stressed, when I am suffering; if it is not enriching my life, and the lives of those around me in the moment, making me more kind, flexible, resilient, resourceful, creative... what is the point? (that is a rhetorical question, I am only speaking for myself - everyone has their own path and objectives). So my point is that I continue to practice so that I can be supported to show up fully in my life and to be able to access and bring all available resources to any and every given situation to the best of my ability. Death is likely to present the biggest challenge in my life. How to let go of everything I have, everything and everyone I've known, and everything that I am? And how to do it without too much suffering for myself and for those around me? Of course, it's nice to say things like - I am God, I am the universe, I am the non-local awareness, Buddha, the Nature of Mind. I am birthless, deathless... I have no fear of death. But they are all words... the test comes when there is extreme pain, illness, when the body and mind are close to the end and loved ones are waiting and suffering. What will it be like then? I watched my father die not too long ago and there was so much pain, so much fear. It was excruciating for him and those around him in the last few days. Wouldn't it be interesting to navigate that with some peace, some confidence, some equanimity and directly experience that transition and what lies beyond with as much clarity as possible? Rather than be heavily drugged and hooked up to all sorts of high tech garbage? I think so... at the moment. And of course, circumstances may change my mind when it's my turn. Time will tell! In the tradition I follow, it's said that we should be able to bring all life's experiences onto the path. Life itself becomes the practice. So for me, at this moment, practice really has no endpoint, I guess I can say I am practicing to live and to die.

@liminal_luke Well that proves it then, Chinese astrology is hogwash. @ChiDragon no worries, no hurry. The horse will get extra time next year this time. Seriously, work done by volunteers must not be hurried along but appreciated. Thanks Luke.

Say what you like about astrological omens, but I guess I´m just not that fired up.

I am no longer practicing, but actualizing enlightenment. One can actualize enlightenment by dropping all contrived thoughts, ideas, and practices. From the viewpoint of awareness it can be seen that all appearances in consciousness, including the "self", thoughts, and other worldly phenomena arise and When you practice in this way even the walled-in concept of enlightenment drops away.

There’s no need to apologize but I think that people who read the threads benefit from being able to follow the conversation. If you delete posts it makes it very hard to follow what’s going on and also less interesting/ enjoyable. Perhaps if you post something and later change your mind, you could self quote the post and make a comment/ correction.

Nungali can’t reply because he is currently manifesting in my living room.

I dreamed you were going to delete that.

You take a leap of faith assuming that Laitg himself has the capabilities he claims. Put a claim to the test, the classic is ‘appear in my lounge room’ for people who claim special talents. But other tests might be better. Why would anyone just believe a claim without it being substantiated, unless you’re buying a bridge for sale?

Throwing away scientific ‘stories’ Is not necessarily wise. The Dalai Lama, a fairly respected Buddhist, is quite interested in science - I think reality is more interesting and more nuanced than just letting all stories go.

The problem is Lairg, you expect others have the same capabilities as you. You ask things of others like "see where the white light goes" or "go back on the timeline" not realising that just because you can do these meta-physical experiments doesn't mean everyone else can, so your method becomes less like a helpful person saying things and more like a guy just saying odd things.

A lot of people here on daobums, myself included, do spiritual practises. But I have to ask... what are you practicing for? Ill answer for my self first, as is polite. Well, I dont really practise, but I am supposed to. By that I mean, I have been told/adviced to do certain practises by quite a lot of people. Some of them, truth be told, strike me as truly illuminated beings. I also has experimental evidence that the process does indeed work (for me). However, I am also very "obsternasig," in lack of a good sounding english word. So I let google translate that very funny sounding word, and it chose "cheesy nosed." So I dont really practise regulary. Hope that make sense. (the main practise of my cult is chanting the mahamantra) (also obstinate is the correct translation it seems, but ill let cheesy nose stay)

They fear this Animal. Well for starters: "Quod es fui quod sum eris" That is "what you are, I was; what I am, you will be." So nothing to fear because WE ALL BECOME A FIRE HORSE starting on 17 February this year and ending on 5 February 2027. Likewise on 2020 and the fear the Metal Rat brought along (pandemic). Humanity lived in fear that year. Rat = Water = Kidney and associated emotion Fear. The Horse is Fire = Heart = Wisdom = Joy Time to look within your Heart and resolve blockages in the organ and associated meridian of energy (unresolved chronic anger, resentment, hatred, restlessness, palpitations, insomnia...) The Horse is the only Animal that entails complete change and transformation, which is a wonderful thing. There will be a new YOU emerging after the Year is over. Enjoy the Fire Horse.

Two

ONE PS IMMHO The color blends in with the landscape is much better.

TWO

I sometimes cannot relate to things you post, but I can say that about every person here. I love our idiosyncrasies and our collective weirdness. I for one hope you stick around. It just wouldn't be quite as interesting or exotic without you!

Female dragon. Avalokitesvara/Guanyin has a Dragon Female Companion (and is the Great Bodhisattva of the Western Pure Land).

@Nintendao Guanyin 觀音 (guan1 yin1) = 觀 陰 (guan1 yin1) female outlook on life. 氣 功 (qi4 gong1) = 導 引 (dao3 yin3) = 道 陰 (dao4 yin1) the female way. There is some evidence old Chinese did not use tones.

Thanks yes that’s true yes that’s the right way to do it, and I will keep it in mind. Thanks for the feedback.

Goosebumps aren't specifically a symptom of qi flow (though i guess that gets complicated as some medicinal systems attribute everything to qi) You've basically trained your nervous system to release a small amount adrenaline similar to what a person gets when they see an exciting movie or an emotional song, the warmth is a better sign that's more often spoken about Goosebumps are a sign that you're using your emotions in the healing which depending on your system of practice may be good or bad, but it is a diagnostic to be aware of The eight touches of qi are common things that all practitioners may experience, i cant find a google english source at the moment so im using a rough translation from a chinese site: "Movement : Irregular or regular vibrations such as shaking or jumping of the body. Itching : Breath enters the tiny nerve endings, causing the body to itch. Cool/Cold : When the consciousness enters the water element, the body experiences a feeling of coldness. Warmth : When the heart is filled with fire, the body experiences fever, heat, or sweating. Lightness : When the mind is in the wind, the body feels light and airy, like clouds or dust, with a sense of flight. Heaviness : When the heart sinks into the earth, the body feels unusually heavy, like a giant boulder. Roughness : The feeling of roughness or lack of smoothness in the body. Smoothness : The feeling of oiliness or slipperiness on the body. " These of course all have different meanings in different systems of practice, they're generally nothing to worry about unless they become excessively unpleasant

I thought this article on health during the Fire Horse year was interesting. Chinese Medicine Doctor's Guide for the Year of the Horse

Plasma My interesset in the natural sciences is very limited, but I recently heard about a fourth state of matter (beyond liquid, frozen and gas) called plasma, that apperantly consistutes 99.9% of this universe of ours. To me, this belongs in stranger things as it is very strange to me. Q: I am considering opening a thread about this in the section where the rabbits go and explore, in hope to learn more about this. Is this of interest, and do someone here have a good understanding of plasma?

Yes, you are playing with fire and that there could be potential health consequences. You should quit that practice while you are still haven't gotten to that point yet. Otherwise, you will be living a very miserable life for the rest of your life. I hope you don't have any health issue right now. If you do, no problem, there is a way to correct the problem. It just require some patience and discipline on your part.

I realised my stupidity. I forgot I want to just let CD's views exiist in parallel to mine.

That cat in you pfp looks like it has a good head to pat.

Hi Apech, it was me that deleted my posts. Not in any way the doing of CD. And I agree with you that I should "Think first and post after." My apologies, and I will try to do better.

You are assuming Lairg can do them . We need an observer to verify it

I agree that Mantak Chia sexual practices is more of a trouble than a solution. Generally, Chia is OK, just not his sexual part. Porn is an addiction and you should address it as such. If you can't find a solution yourself, go to a doctor who specializes in addictions.

Don't be like that, Lairg! To me, the things you talk about are like dreams, but as Bindi points out dreams can piece together images in a way that has significance outside of dreams.

To find some balance and sanity in this crazy world we live in.

If I have an emotional reaction to someone or something and it’s a painful emotion or just something I’d prefer not to feel, I will catch myself tightening against it and remind myself to allow myself to fully feel it, so I agree there’s more than just dreams to do this with. The thing about dreams is I see them as a programme that a governing part of myself, some very broad knowledge part of myself, an overarching consciousness, is running over time, designed to undo reactive history at the root, both the historical emotions and stories that have conditioned us. I did identify with the feelings, I did see them as me, but there came a time when I started to shift my primary identification from being my thoughts and emotions to different aspects of myself. From all the information I’ve gathered the thought/emotion level is the paired side channels, the emotional channel going up and the mental channel coming down, creating a circuit. I see it as my consciousness travelling up the emotional channel (which took thirty years or so) and down the mental channel (which took a couple of months), removing all blocks as I went. Completing one circuit of the side channels allowed the consciousness’s of the central channel to activate, and my identification as being my emotional/mental level is diminishing. But in my paradigm though emotions and thoughts dont not drive me like they did, they remain as valid informants giving my whole organism important information. Energy still flows through them, they’re part of my subtle body, but they’re not the governor.

Your method for dream work is very similar to the method in my tradition for working with any experience, including dreams. Just as you recreate and embody the dream in your mind and feelings, we do the same with any experience or person that generates reactivity. These can be very recent experiences, alive in us at this very moment. They can be remote memories, dreams, people who generate reactivity, future worries, any life experience. We turn to the experience if it is active in the moment, or recreate whatever it is we want to work with as vividly as possible in body, speech, and mind. We sit with that for as long as it is fresh and alive. While we don't engage with it intellectually, we are often taken to earlier times and other experiences that may have some connection, often a connection we were not aware of. The one thing that may be a bit different is that we are working with the sense of a "me" who is being affected by the experience rather than hosting the experience itself. It's a very subtle but important difference in our paradigm. And we rest in the stillness, silence, and spaciousness. This is referred to as hosting pain identities. . It's a wonderful and powerful practice and one way we avoid the bypassing that can so easily happen to practitioners.

What is "direct sight"? I have actually trained in some of the Tibetan Buddhist energy and visualization practices, but the visual aspect is imaginative in my experience.

As a science, magic, and mysticism nerd from my teens, in the Sixties,I am pretty good at understanding these things. I mentioned this book on Dao Bums as being both well written and informative back in 2013-4: Physics in Mind a Quantum View of the Brain by Werner R. Loewenstein. You can download a good pdf of it here: https://www.docdroid.net/fURPkT5/physics-in-mind-a-quantum-view-of-the-brain-by-werner-r-loewenstein-pdf As they say, "Try it, you'll like it" I hope that you will find it as good and informative read as I did. ZYD

This is a depiction of the Hetu (河圖, “River Map”) and the mythic Longma (龍馬, Dragon-Horse). According to tradition, a dragon-horse emerged from the Yellow River carrying the Hetu diagram on its back — a cosmological pattern representing early foundational principles of taoism.

Part of my method for dream work is to “feel the feeling” after the dream has been interpreted to the best of one’s ability, which I did by recreating the dream in my mind and allowing myself as much as possible to re-enter the feeling created by the dream image. Doing this for decades, slowly getting better at it, allows the full force of a feeling to be experienced over time, and really this is what a fully open emotional channel is. Rumi’s poem captures the work perfectly - The Guest House Rumi Translated by Coleman Barks This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

Yes, but one can have one hell of an argument! DaoBums for the win!

oh heck - I used to have a lot flying, swimming and surfing dreams that were far out! The flying ones started out with short jumps which I extended in my dreams to longer and longer jumps which then turned into flying, and as long as I had a fair amount of energy I didn't have to land or sometimes end up crashing into the ground. Alas, after being a blue collar working stiff for decades I've been having a lot dreams of my old job and fellow workers. (btw, the being late to work ones are stressful since the company could fire people for that, but I'm relieved when I wake and remember that I'm retired )

The synchronicity of the DaoBums provides... a brief description of working with the tsa, lung, and thigles in the Bön tradition, recently posted on FB by a young practitioner from Menri monastery in Himachal Pradesh for any curious -

My own view is that spiritual planes are more important than the physical. Each to their own I won't bother you guys again

if you’re told that spaciousness and stillness is what we should be looking for, and you find spaciousness and stillness, then you can think you have arrived at what you believe to be the destination. But what if this as a destination is more like a model of consciousness, and as with all models they fray at the edges, and new comprehension of consciousness dawns. You believe your achievement is absolute, but it might be as primitive one day as the belief that rain gods needed to be sacrificed to to cause rain. You are working within the model you believe in, but in the future that model might have advanced significantly. From my perspective your model is incomplete because it doesn’t create flow in the subtle nadi’s, ie. the side channels and the central channel, it doesn’t activate chakras, it doesn’t build dantians, it seems mind based as opposed to subtle body based. My end point is direct seeing, resting upon one’s subtle body reality, of measurable, ascertainable things, within all levels of the body.

Interesting assertions @Bindi, thanks for sharing. I hope you don't mind a few questions to help me understand where you are coming from. You propose that dreams are completely independent of subjective beliefs. Do you feel that our lifetime of conditioning, our assumptions and expectations, our life experience and its effects on our body, mind, and spirit have no effect on what arises in the heart/mind during sleep? You suggest that dreams, which are limited to individual subjective experience, are the closest thing to your experience of objective reality. That begs the question - how to define objectivity and reality?

never thought this post would also have so many legs or words like "syncategorematic" which I'm still not all that clear about even after looking it up... ;-)

I will try to help here ... he is saying 'truth' ( alone ) is syncategorematic . :)

Is it worth pointing out that "truth" is a reification? The quality of being true to a context/relationship is turned into a noun that requires no context. https://grokipedia.com/page/Reification_(fallacy)