Orion

I understand why you are asking this question, but it's a little bit misguided. The purpose of cultivation in most higher level systems isn't to stop thinking, but it's to awaken the mind-body to the wisdom of the soul. Eventually the mind/ego comes into alignment with the soul body and begins to carry out its wishes. The mind/ego then becomes of service. You can never really stop the mind, you can only channel it into better uses. A lot of modern twists on traditional systems demonize the mind and this is a big mistake. The mind-body is the vessel through which the divine projects its infinite energy into a finite, experienceable form. The the divine, which is non-dual and not experiencing anything, gets to experience its own illumination through the projection of that mind-body. It's a gift, really. The problem is when the mind is given superiority and preference over everything else, such that faith in the mind becomes priority. This is when societies get ill and start to blame the mind for everything. The problem isn't the existence of mind, it's the misattribution of the mind's purpose and function.

I enjoy Vedanta because it's really paired down and simple, yet it's not an easy system. You have to come at it already awakened to the samsara we live in, as well as the nature of presence as being different from the dualistic ego. They don't hold your hand through those basic realizations; they assume that you already have most of your preliminary spiritual "shit" dealt with. Vedanta is really the road map for once you've done all the personal psychospiritual drama and trauma work of the mind-body, and now you are on the actual pre-requisite road to enlightenment. This weeds out a lot of weaklings, woo woo new agers, and people who would otherwise suck too much energy from the tradition due to their basic-ness. The other thing that I really value is that you can approach this system using the intellect because the mind is seen as a technology that can be used for the intervention of enlightenment, rather than being seen as an enemy to be silenced. You can bring all your questioning, all your intellectual ideas, and they will be met. Because Brahman is projecting himself through a mind-body and experiencing himself-as-that-person, the mind is a legitimate tool for tracking back to Reality, if you know how to use it. The few high level cultivars I've come across in this tradition, they really emanated... stronger than other traditions I've seen. The difficulty with Vedanta is that because it can get deeply intellectual, it allows some minds to mimic awakening, even though they haven't attained it. I have seen this over and over in online videos of various gurus talking, often white western ones. Their words seem right, but nothing about the energy feels like, "This person's got it." But there's no other real way to tell other than to rely upon the guidance of resonance or dissonance which you feel in your own core reality.

Sounds a bit airy fairy, if you ask me

I don't do isms

What's the point of realizing and observing wu wei if you can't learn your place in it? It creates a hollowed out reality where nothing is happening to anyone. And technically that is true - there is no person experiencing anything, but you can't just jump to that and spiritually bypass the person. The person, through the experience level, has to be brought into resonance with the truth of his/her own abdication. The route can be one of utter torment or bliss, depending on the methods. A good example is telling someone not to intellectualize because the mind is not connected to reality. That's not true. Reality consciousness (or wu wei) is seeing itself through a mind-body that it has illuminated with itself. The product of this in infancy is that the individuated wu wei accidentally associates with and believes it is the mind-body, resulting in the formation of "personhood", which is also the level of the experiencer. This happens to everyone born, it's unavoidable. Wu Wei isn't actually experiencing anything, only the "person" is. No person = no experience possible. Wu Wei never changes. The mind, the body, the emotions, they are all an outpouring of wu wei, experiencing itself through those faculties. It's why I find a lot of the Daoist discussions rather wooden and hollow. You see people whose vitality is actually waning and their unresolved tendencies leaking out of them as they abdicate themselves to the Absolute. They do things like jing conservation and other techniques yet they won't embrace the bliss of core reality that is already inside them, and illuminates them, and IS them. They are rejecting "I" instead of acknowledging that there is a misattributed "I" and a real "I" talking. One is the personality identification, and one is core consciousness conveying reality. Most people fall into the former, few into the latter. The whole point of the correct speech and other modalities is to evoke mind-body into recognizing the source of its illumination, done by correcting the thoughts, speech and actions that reinforce misattribution. You can sit there all day meditating on Wu Wei but once the meditation ends, you get up and stub your toe, and then you get angry, and then you're back in the mind-body rabbit hole. The language of the Daoist texts is also incredibly outdated and linked to lineages. You have people in the 21st century running around using old (and translated) language with the utter conviction that the undefiled word is the only way to go. And yet Daoism is steeped in right speech, right physical practice, and all the things that are meant to guide you toward the key realizations. Those things are happening NOW. To me, the point of Daoism is not to abdicate the mind-body to Wu Wei, but to dwell in the very presence that is illuminating them, without misattribution, here and now. Only then can the "person" come into resonance with what already is and be self-abdicated. Please, let's use modern language? We're talking about reality consciousness illuminating a mind-body to see itself, that through misattribution believes it is the mind-body (person/experience). The point isn't to toss out the person, it is to show the person the blissful resonance of the true reality so that it no longer has to cling to its own temporary form as the only way to the truth. The point is to realize the real you that is attached to a false "you", which our language fails to differentiate because almost nobody has the recognition and most old-world spiritual systems are focused on total Absolutism.

Some advanced Vedanta teachings I've heard come the closest to describing what I've realized in the past 4 years. Every other system I've looked at is incredibly heady (at least, in the way it's taught and discussed), and fails to address core reality consciousness in a personified being. Most systems just address "oneness" or the Absolute, and the extraneous intellectualism is all about discussing variations of that. I have not come across a system yet that is prepared to discuss Brahman experiencing itself through an individual, and the technology to work with that - except Vadanta. The other issue is that most systems are steeped in human hierarchies wherein you're not permitted to receive certain teachings or have questions answered until you achieve a certain level or kiss enough asses; whereas Vedanta expects you to already have the basic work of sorting the ego done before you can do the real work. I don't want to worship gurus, or sort out my childhood trauma, masturbate about the nature of reality all day, or "feel better". I want THE TRUTH. For this reason, I recommend Vedanta. You have to have some entry level realization before you can really get what they're talking about, which is another thing I like about it. They don't do hand-holding for people who want to debate about whether or not Samsara is a thing or not, or who can't differentiate their own minds from reality consciousness. It's for people who are already awake and now are going about the task of possibly enlightening.

I've worked a lot with tinnitus in my practice. If it's one sided, then the most common reason is skull bone misalignment, particularly of the temporal bones. Craniosacral practitioners and osteopaths are the ones to see to get the subtle adjustments to alleviate the cranial nerves, in those cases. I wouldn't bother with a chiropractor because their adjustments are too gross and lack that micro-specificity of the other practitioners. If you have a doctor of osteopathic medicine you could go see, I'd do that. They can be pricey but it's worth it. I once had a horrible 3 week migraine that nothing was fixing - I was even giving acupuncture to myself - and an osteo fixed it by adjusting the bones in the roof of my mouth. It was pretty remarkable. If the ringing is in both ears, then it points to a blood issue... like blood toxicity. You said you're doing some kind of detox, so that could be involved, potentially. The reason why the ears and the kidneys are connected in Eastern medicine is because if the kidneys are off kilter at all in their filtering of the blood or they're overburdened (like by a herx), the auditory nerves are the first to suffer distortions. It can also point to hormonal or electrolyte imbalances, again both of which are governed by the kidneys. Tinnitus is very common during menopause, for example. But... you did say it was left ear only. Yes, excessive upper chakra work can make the energy want to habitually go there, and this too can cause tinnitus, but persistent ringing no matter if you're meditating or not sounds like a physical problem to me rather than an esoteric one. If at the end of the day the problem seems more energetic, then I'd recommend acupuncture above all else. The practitioner would probably work on your kidney meridians to get the energy going downward. Tinnitus can be temporary or permanent. Generally, the longer a person has it, the less likely it's going to go away.

Like any ghost, it depends on the person. I imagine that someone who killed themselves in order to escape tyranny, torture or political injustice would perhaps have done so with greater resolve, knowing that the alternative was bleak. Compare that to someone who kills themselves in a moment of haste because of an intense emotional situation. Just because you die doesn't mean you suddenly become enlightened. Dead people are just as messed up as when they were alive, if not more so. That's why it's important to try and deal with your issues and imbalances while you're alive. Death itself can be traumatic but I think if you die at a point where you've made peace with your life, it's less likely to mess you up. Of course, not everyone is so lucky when it comes to the circumstances of their death. That said... all deads reside in the Earth plane. The only difference is whether or not they're at peace. The ones not at peace never fully dissolve and so they become errant spirits. I think that's the "purgatory" that various wisdom traditions refer to. It's not an alternate dimension it's just a place of unrest. The Earth is always going to accept them into stillness and silence, but if they are messed up or unresolved then they won't be able to rest. The part of us that is Divine always moves on and returns to the Source, regardless. The part of us that is doing the immortal work doesn't get stuck, it just learns lessons and proceeds through the ages. It's the human body and its corporeal soul that has to deal with any stuckness.

Your seating position doesn't matter as long as you're doing the inner work. Personally I have always found half lotus a lot more comfortable than crossed legs or full lotus. I have naturally very narrow hips so it's more accommodating to let one leg swing a bit looser. There's not much point in being attached to classical imagery of what meditation "should look like". Yes, it's true, some positions offer better energetic structures, but on the whole it can be a little proscribed if you're not careful. I've had some wonderful meditations from sitting in chairs an even on couches with soft backings that you sink right into.

And the award for missing the point goes to...

It's because money has destroyed so many lives and caused so much suffering over the years that as an energy form it is very loaded. I feel like even when people can afford something, involving money as the energy exchange immediately downgrades whatever process is about to happen. It's a low vibration energy. That's why when people can, it may be worthwhile to try to exchange in other ways, or rely on Source to replenish them.

If money were no object, I would teach for free, but I would screen my students. It has nothing to do with one's social standing but their potential to have insight. I understand that money is real and it's also a form of energy. When we pay for a service (like a teaching), it's trading energy (teachings) for energy (money). At some point though it becomes a bit much... like when teachers are obviously gouging students in order to pad their luxury lifestyles. When I pay a teacher, if my funds are going toward their further development on the path, which in turn becomes of benefit to everyone, then I am okay with that, within reason. Some people are just selfish and have no ethics. They think their teachings are solid gold and they don't care if their students live in poverty in order to learn them. To me, a teacher who is self-realized will have a compassionate nature and have workarounds for this. Maybe we can do an exchange. Maybe I can do grunt work for them for a while. Or maybe they just see that I'm worth it and will teach me because the higher power (or whatever you want to call it) is directing them to teach me. I've met people like that... who are so difficult, but I know they MUST know something I know and therefore I should stick around. But there are a lot of teachers out there who don't look beyond the material and see those kinds of virtues. They think about their lives, their immediate gain... there's no understanding of Source and universal regeneration. I find that the more generous I am, the more I am given to, even if it's not from the person I just gave to. Some other aspect of life comes through. Giving and receiving are part of the same channel. Denying one is denying both. Too bad capitalism doesn't see it that way.

This is BS.

In cranioscaral work, great attention and detail is paid to the cerebrospinal fluid and the ventricles of the brain. The cavities of the brain that are mostly empty aside from fluid are said to be seats of consciousness. I wish I could remember more but CS is something that takes a lot of dedicated time and effort to grasp and I'm not there yet. I just remember a practitioner telling me about this.

I'm not cynical. Jing is real and the benefits are clear, but that's different than the legends about immortals. It's not cynical to point out that people treating immortals as a factual thing are merely engaging in a belief, not anything evidentiary. People get fanatical about every day practices that are meant to enhance our lives and our spiritual cultivation. It goes from a very grounded, practical thing to suddenly we're spinning out into the ether talking about superior beings who have cultivated some kind of transcendent physical reality. There are certainly gifted, high level people on this planet. None of them live forever, not physically anyway. Immortal ghosts, now that I can buy into. Shed this decaying body and then continue your work, that makes a lot of sense. But this notion that there are 300 old men living in secret in China somewhere is just face palm worthy.

My point is... where are these immortals? Are they immaterial spirits or are we talking physical humans you can touch and feel? Because if people are claiming that immortal humans are walking the Earth, there has not been one single iota of proof other than superstitious stories. The excuse is that they're always in hiding. But why? If you're immortal then you have centuries to become enlightened. Why would an enlightened person remain hidden? It just doesn't make any sense. I believe jing practices are very useful for longevity but human immortality is a farce. We're supposed to die, it's part of nature. The spirit returns to Heaven and then resumes its next leg of the journey. You want to be this ego forever??

I have been doing TCM for over 5 years, and I've been involved in the Tantric community for even longer. I have never seen anyone at any age reverse their aging process. People with grey hair stay grey, even after they take the jing tonics and do the practices. And we're talking about people who are highly experienced and have been doing tantra for 30+ years, teachers, some of whom are lineage practitioners. People in China take He Shou Wu to keep their hair black and most of the time it doesn't work, and they damage their livers all the while. My impression is that it's mostly superstition. You can reverse some aging and you can prolong your life beyond 100 years. You can conserve jing and even restore it but this idea that there are immortals walking the earth is mythological. Every time you question someone about it they just say that the methods are top secret and the people who are practicing it are hiding out. Whatever.

There are other things that deplete jing, like serious illness or injury, and trauma. Not to mention a high stress lifestyle. In the past few years I have gone through chronic, life threatening illness, and I've noticed things like my beard getting more grey in it. I still look my age otherwise, but grey hair is one sign of jing depletion. During my healthy periods, I'm on top of everything. My nutrition, exercise and state of mind are all in good shape, but things like the grey beard never reverse. So I think it's true that jing lost is lost forever. I have read all the ancient Chinese medicine texts, in the original Chinese, and what we know of jing is that it has a natal aspect that you're born with and an acquired aspect that comes from food and air. You can build acquired jing with spiritual practice all you want but if natal jing is depleted or damaged, it's gone for good. I feel like natal jing is some kind of very core nutrition that we can't replace, even in the modern world where we have access to all the herbs, vitamins and supplements, good food, etc. Some modern people have interpreted natal jing as our parents' DNA but I don't think it is. It could be the telomeres on our DNA though. Telomeres get smaller with each cell replication, and the more the telomeres break down the more you age. In lab animals they have restored telomeres and the animals stay young.

I found 6 months to be optimal to retrain the jing --> qi --> shen pathway. There's something about holding off from ejaculation for that long which builds critical mass and causes the energy to overflow into the internal pathways. It's as if consciousness can't handle the lack of external release, so it becomes rewired to flow into the only remaining pathway available. It's not so automatic... it does require effort, but once the pathway is formed there is just this default bliss that is always there. For me the biggest challenge was sexual dreams, they were sabotaging. I had to get good at being mindful even in my dreams, which oddly enough translated to being mindful while awake. If I spurred sexual advances in my waking states, then it made it easier to do in my sleep. The general effects of jing conservation were... way, way more grounded. More vital. Ironically a lot more people were attracted to me and wanted to date me. People noticed my presence more, more eye contact with people just walking down the street. It's like the density of the jing creates a sort of gravity to your field that is hard to ignore -- for lack of a better way of putting it. I had a much stronger weiqi field. My kundalini practice was stronger, and my upper chakra contacts were significantly more empowered. Psychologically I felt way more stable, less easily influenced by outside disturbances. I naturally don't ejaculate very often anymore. Maybe once a month or less, and it's not due to low libido. The tantric practices just... made me care less about doing it. In hindsight I was kind of addicted in my earlier years. It was a relief valve for so many issues in my life. Now that I've refined a lot of my emotional problems and I have other healthy outlets, ejaculation seems kind of pointless. I mean, you feel good for 10 seconds and then depleted and foggy for days. What's the point? It's like doing a bad drug.

The lungs are responsible for dispersing qi to the entire body, and generating the protective field of the body. It doesn't matter how strong your jing or kidney fire are; it doesn't matter how strong your digestion is; if the lungs aren't strong then none of that vital qi will go very far. They also just discovered within the past year that the lungs produce white blood cells, contributing to immune function. Chinese medicine already knew this in their own way but it's good to see modern science catching up.

Good topic. My time with western Buddhist communities frustrated me because they were being too secular about all this. They pitched Buddhism to newcomers as a form of ancient psychology, but it's not really comparable. You can't deny that the spirit world is happening and has a relationship to humans, especially humans that are engaging in deep consciousness practice. Besides that... I found it very challenging to track down any worthwhile knowledge about protection from Buddhism until I came across some lineage practitioners from India and Tibet. They came to Canada to offer teachings in a limited capacity and I was fortunate to be included. It was a two week program with a lot of isolation, purification, and discussion of how certain rituals, prayers and tools worked. I found it amazing because if you watch these rituals not knowing, they seem pretty standard; but once you receive the teachings and the secrets, you realize there is so much going on in the rituals that is precisely proscribed for protection and thwarting of malevolent spirits. In a nutshell, it seems like the real deal of Buddhist magic is behind locked doors, like most worthwhile things. I can understand why. The last thing they'd want is a bunch of western new agers and sangha taking the knowledge and profiting off of it. Or worse, watering it down and rendering it less effective. You need to gain their trust before they're really tell you anything. But from what I've seen and experienced, the rituals are real and incredibly powerful.

Happiness is a temporary state though. How do you make it happen? How do you make ti stick around? You can't. My understanding of true contentment is being able to abide in any state, in whatever is happening, because it's always just this present moment. Even if you're totally pissed off and hating the world, there is a present awareness to it. The issue isn't really materialism, but the nature of impermanence itself. Even ascetics who live in total self-deprivation of all material things can still experience desire and dissatisfaction if they become too attached or expectant of what will always be temporary circumstances. Nothing is happening to you or because of you. It's just what's happening.

Is this the same Sogyal Rinpoche who wrote the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying? I watched the OP video and I am sick to my stomach. I don't care how willing the victims were, the gurus are in a position of power and they are taking advantage. The power disparity is obvious. People are surrendering themselves because they trust the guru and believe it to be part of a sacred process, when really it's just the master succumbing to lust. Gross gross gross!!!

I'm not sure how I feel about these programs where you sign up to become a Daoist Priest. Will their lineage accept you just because you paid the money and put in the work? Or do you have to have natural talent, ability and affinity? I respect JAJ's work but I really question the commodification of his school. Here in my city, there is a totally mundane woman with no real ability who was rich enough to do the full master qi gong program, and now she is the foremost authority and teacher here. But she is totally mundane, not one iota of natural talent. Her movements produce nothing and her healing is mediocre. But she sure makes a lot of money as evidenced by driving her Mercedes around. $900 per module per student x 15 students x 8 modules for the whole qi gong program. We are talking obscene amounts of money.

I think drugs can be an essential consciousness expansion tool on the path, but they eventually outlive their usefulness. I used to take LSD a lot and I owe a big part of my "quantum leap" to the realizations I had while using it. I feel that entheogens have been put there in nature to help us evolve. But the downside... how can I explain this... When you develop spiritual pathways on your own, without substances, you form delicate connections and there is a lot more subtlety. Taking a drug turns up the volume and the intensity, and blasts the whole system wide open -- every channel, every pathway. It makes everything louder. All subtlety is lost. The LSD trips I used to value, started to give me anxiety attacks because once the high wore off it felt like I had blasted all my hard work to smithereens. To use an analogy... it's like turning off all the lights and letting your eyes adjust to the darkness. You see subtle energy, subtle forms. If you suddenly turn on a bright light and then turn it off again, you are night blind. You don't see anything. All you see is the light you just shone in your own face. To me, psychedelics are like this. LSD, ayahuasca, mushrooms, all of them. They cast a huge light on your global consciousness but in doing so they light up every pathway and turn it into a mono-form where there is no longer any uniqueness. It's why, to me, acid heads all end up sounding the same after a while. Same with pot heads. Same with ayahuasca people. The drugs are complex but ultimately they are just doing the same thing to everybody. No different than religion, or any other program. Accept the program as part of your temporary growth but don't get stuck there. Don't settle for it. You are capable of so much more. I would say that psychedelics gave me what would've taken 40 years of sitting and meditating to realize. But I'm done with them now. There are also those who are chasing the Divine through psychedelics, such that they begin to form a duality between their divine highs and their default-reality lows. I've met people who live for LSD and they shun what they consider to be the mundane world. I believe psychedelics can break down old pathways, increase novelty, and show us amazing realities. But they are glimpses of potential that we have to develop and integrate the slow way, otherwise there is no real progress. If you're on the spiritual path because you love intensity, then maybe you should just keep doing drugs. But if you want to witness the subtle mysteries, you have to be willing to fully accept the moment as it is, no matter what state you are in, and develop insights through your own unique efforts and experiences. I don't want or need the structures that drugs provide anymore. I have surpassed them. The last time I smoked pot I felt like I was constraining myself. I don't need their programming anymore. I used them as a trellis to help my consciousness grow, and now my garden is full. To go back to the trellis would make no sense at this point. I would prefer to sit in the dark silence and see what comes from the emptiness.