markern

No, I hadn't thought of that. Thanks for the suggestions I will check it out. Came across a standing version of the brocades yesterday that looks like it will be gentler on my spine so am going to try that too.

Thank you! This looks promising:)

Being involved with and competent at normal life and especially the physical world adds to safety IMO. My chi deviation issues was so bad I couldn't use grounding methods from qigong or other arts to sort them out (it only made things worse). Instead I have focused on things like addressing trauma but also things like becoming a practical person through doing physical labor, learning to fix things in my home and summer house etc. Doing any sort of sport or hunting, fishing, carving things out of wood, learning to fix your car yourself etc. are all things that make you more connected to the physical mundane world and daily life. For me that grounds my energy and reduces chi deviation issues. Learning to connect with the world in that way before issues arise should help with avoiding them too.

Bruce Frantzis advices that people start off with a very modest amount of practice and then gradually increase practice time by only five minutes a month until the desired length is reached. He says this is safer. I think that sounds a bit too conservative but I think the general point is good. Start off with a moderate amount and only gradually increase practice time. The whole energy connected to plunging into intense practice is something I think can contribute to issues and side effects. Do a moderate amount and learn to digest it properly and give the mind and body time to become familiar with the effects instead of shocking the system by rapidly creating very intense experiences through a quickly ramped up intense practice. Another safety advice I think is good is that basic mindfulness should precede deeper investigations into the natura of self and reality. People who struggle with feeling their emotions with equanimity or being aware of their emotions at all should probably not plunge into noticing the three characteristics and dissolving their experience into little pieces right away but focus on feeling their emotions and bodily reactions in a healthy way first. A good system like Damo Mitchells Lotus Nei Gong has safety built into its progression.

What Damo Mitchell says in this video about emotional releases is an approach to emotional releases that adds to safety. Less chances of old wounds coming to the surface destabilizing people when it is approached like this:

Yes, he SAYS he is deviating from the classical definition. So he isn't lying. He just has a different view of what an Arhat is because he doesn't believe in some of the criteria. As I understand it he deviates by keeping the parts that are conserved with a loss of a sense of self and similar kinds of criteria which are more experiential and removing criteria related to things like loosing all desire for sex, having your penis shrink and being able to turn yourself into a giant. He says he thinks what he thinks he has achieved is all there was ever to it not that he fits all the classical criteria.

Given that Chögyam Trungpa was an alcoholic and a sex addict and a rapists and still he was seen as highly attained by traditional Tibetan Buddhist systems as he was both the holder of two key lineages and some other prestigious stuff: "holder of both the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, the 11th of the Trungpa tülkus, a tertön, supreme abbot of the Surmang monasteries," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chögyam_Trungpa It seems clear you can both have deep insight and some deep attainment and still be completely messed up. I think it makes it reasonable to be quite open to the possibility that some have deep attainment despite being bipolar. And to be more open to discussions about wether deep realizations really do lead to moral perfection along the lines of what has traditionally been claimed or wether it just entails shifts that makes it potentially easier to become a really, really good person but do not guarantee it in the sense of having overcome lust, anger, etc. That said I agree that being bipolar and having the history that he does makes it much more likely he is deluded or just lying.

I agree he is not an Arhat but I disagree that he is lying. He is saying what he genuinely believes which makes it not lying even if it is wrong. I perceive him as very genuine when I have seen him in podcasts and debates. And also very open to investigating wether he is wrong in thinking he is an Arhat. For example when he encountered a lot of people who claimed the practice called Actualism lead them further than he described himself as having come, he took up the practice of Actualism in order to see if he could go further with it as well. While I disagree he is an Arhat I think it is quite reasonable for him to believe it and believe what he believes about awakening in general. If I recall correctly he was told by teachers in Burmese monasteries that he had achieved second path. That makes it quite reasonable to think that the various paths do not match up perfectly with traditional descriptions but has more to do with the changes he did see in himself, which where more perceptual. Over the years he has had contact with an enormous network of people and teachers who have practiced for decades in traditional lineages, some of of which have been told they have achieved this or that path or studied with teachers that supposedly had. When he has met them or people he knows and trusts have met them and they don't perceive them as having overcome lust, anger, fear or whatever is supposed to have been overcome at that level, I find it reasonable to start to distrust that the traditional claims are right. You also have a huge number of traditional teachers that where supposed to have gotten very far that have had scandals showing they certainly hadn't achieved the personal/emotional/ethical transformation that was supposed to have happened at their level but they did appear to still have achieved huge perceptual shifts of the self etc. I find it quite reasonable then to start to doubt the personal transformation that is supposed to come and believe what can be achieved is more things along the lines of the centerlessnes he describes. Which in itself is very profound and reduce suffering an enormous amount and help a lot in making people potentially better humans, just don't guarantee it. He is looking for reasonable proof that traditional claims are true and haven't found them despite enormous effort and an enormous network of dharma friends, many of which have years and years of practice in monasteries and under traditional teachers. I used to be very skeptical traditional claims of personal transformation was completely true as well until I eventually met a teacher that had clearly changed her operating system completely and was functioning differently then any other human I had met or listened to online. She clearly had achieved some sort of transformation none of the supposedly enlightened people I could find on YouTube seemed to have. And after interacting with her for years it still holds up. That gave me a GOOD reason to believe traditional claims had more to them than I used to believe. I didn't have a good reason to believe it before. I am also inclined to mostly believe what Freeform and Damo claim about their teachers as well based on my trust in them. But before that I don't think I had much reason to believe enlightenment was more than what Ingram claims. You could also add that when some traditional classifications of stages of awakening, such as the Tibetan one, claim certain stages include the ability to change your body to the size of a giant, it is VERY reasonable to think that much of these claims are metaphorical or just plain bullshit.

How is Ingram a proven liar?

Could you describe does what Damo calls soul or spirit? What does Damo say it is and how is it different from the Ingram type of awakening?

That does make sense and match some vague impressions I have of bipolar people. Could you say more about what you mean by energy mismanagement and possible solutions to that? I think I have read bipolar disorder has a heavier genetic component than a lot of other mental illness. Though based people I have talked to that have it or have had it trauma seems to often be involved as well.

What do you mean by this?

But don't Taoists, at least in the lineages with very gentle methods, tend to think forceful methods are wrong and don't take you as far as less contrived methods? So doing something different would be more effective. Even though this may still work in some way.

Sp do you think this is a wrong approach to practice? That they should learn more from the Taoist approach?

Anyone know what's up with Drew these days?

Like Jesus here:

I thought it was supposed to go the other way. Water into wine. It would be an incredible impressive yet still disappointing siddhi. Being able to do it would be amazing, true magic. But no one really wants their wine turned into water. Water into wine on the other hand would be a popular siddhi. Especially at parties.

But so many of these signs are bodily signs that aren't obvious unless you get to test them very directly. Do ask do feel peoples bellies and such in order to see if things have manifested as expected?

What level of hole are we talking about here?

How do you discern this?

I'm interested in hearing about it. Just to learn about what can happen.

I want to see pics of Damo from his angry Emo phase

Wow. Fascinating. I have seen a lot of people on Dharmaoverground.org and r/streamentry write about getting more and more memory problems the deeper their awakenings become. And Jeffrey Martins research into people who have had awakening experiences describes memory problems as becoming quite frequent. He seemed to say that long term book learning memory and similar types of memory did not get impacted but that things like what people where going to do that day or what they did the last few days become very difficult for people to remember. I remember you writing about some sort of practice of trying to remember the entire day or something. When I have looked at Damos curriculum I have thought that maybe some of these practices are there to balance out the types of imbalances that can occur when people have non dual experiences and awakenings. Some of the mental trainings seem to be about very left brained logical linear types of thinking. For example one of them is about learning to follow a trail of thoughts for as long as you like in the direction you like without becoming distracted. It seems to me that quite a few people who get deep into spiritual practices start to struggle more and more with that. They become so "floaty" and right brained in their being it becomes hard for them to be linear in any way, including their thinking. I have also been curious about that exercise for remembering the day because I have long thought that I could develop an almost absolute photographic memory for things I read. I have a very strong visual capacity and visual memory and I usually remember what the pages of books look like and can vaguely recall what is on each page and sometimes what is in each paragraph if I focus enough on it. But I can only rarely actually read the text. I tried to experiment with trying to focus in and start reading text and eventually managed it sometimes. It was like suddenly my mind managed to zoom in and the text became perfectly readable. Then I did a period of Yoga Nidra, which includes a lot of visualizations, and that made it way easier to actually read the text. It seemed like if I kept it up I could start doing it without any struggle. But then I got very serious chi deviation issues and had to quit all practices and haven't been able to resume any sort of cultivation practice yet. But I am stil very curious about what training that capacity can bring. It seems like to me that almost everything that I have seen is still stored and that with enough concentration and clear enough visualization ability I can recall almost anything.

How did you work with memory and what where the results?

What is all the stuff and why is he sitting with all of it?