Bindi

If I can insert ‘spirit’ for mind, to extend the concept of mind, emotions inform mind/spirit, just as mentation informs mind/spirit, but I agree they are not the fundamental thing, mind/spirit is, and mind/spirit has the potential to exist beyond emotions and mentation. In saying this I am also implying that the two subtle side channels inform the central channel, that is their role, but the central channel is the fundamental channel. The thinking mind and the emotional stream are conditioned, and can perhaps be unconditioned, their conditioning perhaps occludes our posited mind/spirit, and looking at it in this way what was occluded was never conditioned except for the thoughts and emotions that had become monstrous hiding it. I wouldn’t be inclined to believe in the occluded mind/spirit, I would only be prepared to remove the conditioning to see what is then revealed, and this still leaves me working within duality in an effort to resolve conditioning to reveal mind/spirit. What about qi, it’s neither conditioned emotion and mentation nor is it unconditioned spirit/mind, yet it wants to flow in certain ‘extraordinary’ channels to accomplish certain extraordinary tasks, perhaps as someone posted earlier this is the toolbox for mind/spirit, and thus equally worthy of being developed. Thanks for your post. edit to add: conditioned emotions and mentation occlude mind/spirit, undeveloped qi leaves mind/spirit ineffective in the world.

Which bit is embarrassing?

The mind has its own mind nature, but the emotions have their own nature as well, and qi has its own nature, and we’re a mixture of all of them, why prioritise mind above all other fundamental natures that exist within us?

I recall I was once aware of two levels of mind, two spinning discs one on top of the other, both contained in a thick flat bottomed metal bowl. The top one was the everyday voice in my head and the bottom one was half that speed and thinking with this one was calm and clear. This bottom disc is a good candidate for me for ‘nondual perspective’, the subtle body form of the mind, valid within itself, but at the end of the day just one more level of mind.

Do I have to practice Islam to know I don’t like it? I read the Koran, that was enough. Do I have to get sucked in to conspiracy theory, or get involved in a suicidal cult to know that they’re not for me? I think not. In the same way nor do I have to try the nondual view.

Would you kiss this Salome?

“self” is empty, but identification with a new “Self” beyond “self” would surely be just one more identification to a Buddhist or non-dualist. I am an alchemical factory, not a paper tiger. You’r welcome to consider yourself a paper tiger. Someone once described his accomplishment of the MCO as spinning his wheels. I think he was right, because it was just empty energy without “the medicine”. All the intention in the world could not produce “the medicine”. Same with healing, all the good intention in the world will not produce actual healing apart from a placebo effect. Empty achievements deluding self and others, until like my ‘someone’ above you have the guts to look within and say I am kidding myself, and in that moment one will be a little less deluded, until the next delusion comes by that one can hold onto of course. Because of the shallowness of non-dual realisation.

“You open the gates of the soul to let the dark flood of chaos flow into your order and meaning. If you marry the ordered [Elijah] to the chaos [Salome] you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.” (C.G. Jung, “The Red Book”, 2009: 139)

What of those with real non-dual realisation at the level of ‘Self’? Agreed. Do you really believe that non-dualists are paper tigers? If so I rest my case Definition of paper tiger : one that is outwardly powerful or dangerous but inwardly weak or ineffectual. If her distance healing doesn’t work, even though her intention is to be helpful, I would find the whole endeavour to be deluded. Kind is good. Some beliefs/practices just make me cranky, for example, Conspiracy theory, dangerous cult practices, Islam, and the self-proclaimed nondually awakened. C’est la vie.

I would say you can’t be in wuwei if you haven’t arrived at hsuan kuan, like which comes first the chicken or the egg, I’d say hsuan kuan. But then again we’d have to agree on what wuwei actually is. Which to me begs the question what is the great medicine?

I like the topic, and I liked your OP video, things that resonated with me were hsuan kuan as the gateway from youwei to wuwei and from action to non-action, found in the upper dantian, a stage during the course of practice, formless but revealed when ‘the energy’ rises, and the Great Medicine will be generated when hsuan kuan emerges.

A technique for feeling painful feelings. I’ve been actively working with stored painful feelings for literally decades, and I still have to remind myself to feel a painful feeling in the present, because I believe we are naturally pain averse, as the linked blog suggests. I have a difficult situation at work, and I’m having painful feelings about it, I woke up early because of it and couldn’t get back to sleep, that was four hours ago, and only now, four hours later, have I remembered to allow the painful feeling, it’s like I had to get through the fear of emotional pain first before I could accept feeling this feeling, and it has eased the pain a little, and allows a little more objectivity about the actual work issue, a little more neutrality. Almost in the now, just a four hour lag 😄

At best we can both humbly disagree with each other. This is your belief system yes. My path tells me otherwise.

The foetus of neidan is not a focusing method, it is a fundamental aspect of the whole endeavour. This foetus develops and matures, and in the end can be sent out into the world at will after it has been brought up to the head. This might be a million miles away from your belief system, but your belief system is not the final word in what is possible/real on the subtle body level. This Self that sits on a lotus in the heart is a potential in the subtle body that can only be realised when the flower itself Is brought into place, the flower faces downwards and clearing Ida specifically allows it to travel and face upwards. This is visible to those with subtle sight, and the sort of happening that can cross different religions and cultures because it is real on the subtle body level. To be sure nonduality doesn’t cultivate the subtle energy body in this fashion, and has no interest in cultivating the subtle energy body in this fashion, but my interest in clearing the subtle Nadi’s does allow exactly this as one step on the way to actualising the immortal body.

Agreed, though I suspect these beings are representations of the Self. 3bob, I did not know that, but it allows me to make sense of when Ida and Pingala are cleared and merge in the heart, this Self on the lotus is revealed. I suppose the halo appears when Ida and Pingala are cleared and merge in the head, not something I have achieved yet.

‘I’ sit on a lotus in my heart, but without the bottle or the mudra or the halo…

How attached self-proclaimed nondualists are to nonduality is a question nondualists should ask themselves, often. One who is fully present in this very moment is fresher, I recall this was one of the attributes of anandamaya kosha, being present in the moment, fully absorbed in the task at hand.

The neidanist would say transmutation of the body is exactly what is required with the production of the immortal body, I think I would be able to present this as a Christian ideal as well in the transfiguration of Jesus when he reveals himself as an ineffable/indescribable manifestation of light and glory in the physical dimension. Jonathon Livingston seagull would also concur, but Buddha and Buddhists and nondenominational nondualists believe that this is not it. It may be that it is simply not a Buddhist or a nondualist attainment, therefore devalued. A well thought out philosophy will cover itself. A Nondualist walks into a bar where a man shining with ineffable light is drinking a beer, everyone in the bar is astounded and thinks they are seeing the face of God, and the Nondualist says Meh, a visible light body, how very dual. Because nondual philosophy is so absolute siddhis ar not of any import, but if someone is suffering physically and someone comes along who can remove their pain, cure their blindness, help them to walk again, is that really of no import? It is more noble to let the physically disabled remain disabled and in pain because the body is nothing anyway? What if you had the choice of action, say you were a naturally gifted healer who was also a nondualist and someone in your family is dying from cancer, or bed-ridden and suffering, do you say ahh, such is life let’s embrace this moment, or do you wave your hand over them and heal them? What would a disabled nondualist choose, the healing or accepting things exactly as they are?

Freud’s ‘Complexes’, yes I agree thoughts and feelings are clumped together, part of the method I use is methodically teasing them apart, acknowledging the mental aspect mentally and then feeling the feeling aspect feelingly (!) I have noticed that the feeling aspect is the harder to work with because the pain level involved tends to be so high, I would have spent a ratio of 1-2 weeks dedicated mental work to one year emotional work to resolve complexes over the decades. Just to be picky I would say mental obscurations are to me more like rubbish piles that have to be burnt, after my couple of days of free flowing thoughts I almost saw them suddenly stop flowing through and instead start piling up on the ground like leaves falling and the pile growing bigger, old thought complexes and karmic thoughts seem more like dense and compacted piles of rubbish than simple leaves but it’s along the same lines, and I think it can all be burnt.

I have a concept that a feeling once created remains with us until it is fully felt, Apech was saying something similar I believe in more Buddhist terms. I would use as an analogy for unfelt feelings, mud and sh** in an emotional stream, which ideally should be flowing freely and clearly. To be honest I think this is the fundamental human problem, how to re-establish the flow of the emotional stream, which to me necessarily involves removing the mud and sh** first. I have developed my own methods to do this, part of which is accepting and feeling these ‘forms’ until they have no energy left in them. This is a question for Stirling. The above is my position more than stirlings, but I wouldn’t use the word obscurations which sounds like a mental approach to me, Stirling uses the analogy of obscurations on a window which prevent a view, but feeling freely isn’t a view, it is more visceral than that, closer to rushing water or energy coursing through channels within the body than seeing out through a window. Stirling’s again. Knowledge of the subtle energy body is somewhat equivalent to knowledge of physics or biology, it’s a more complete picture of life which needn’t distract from our ability to function holistically. Interfacing between the subtle and the physical should itself be effortless, I as conduit, not as engineer, though setting the system up for this requires some very specific engineering initially. Is this a Buddhist conclusion or is it echoed in all philosophies? It may simply be a wrong conclusion which my end point is not required to integrate with. Seconded!

This is where I suspect disassociation can set in. In the earlier conversation about fear, there was the notion that an unresolved fear remains in the subconscious field, Apech mentioned Alaya, and whether this subtle form is disassociated from or resolved when it is noticed from the perspective of nonduality is the trillion dollar question to me. My best guess remains that it is disassociation, and this is my fear of premature nonduality, a bit like premature kundalini, the gain is not complete though people on either journey love the ride. I believe you are equating nondual perspective with reality as it is. I suspect nondual perspective is only partial reality, reality to me would involve complete knowledge of the subtle body, interfacing between the subtle and the physical, and evidence of multiple siddhis. I further suspect that these things are considered dual to the nondualist, which I can only explain as an error in comprehension.

I’m not actually working from any tradition, I follow my dream guidance and my mothers ‘seeing’ exclusively, and notice some similarities in my path to established traditions, but I don’t accept any of the multitude of possible outcomes these traditions propose until my actual outcome, and then I’ll look around and see which traditions resonate most. Any thing I say now would be at best an educated guess, and my educated guesses have proven to be wrong so many times in the past, I’ve learnt to not make them so much. I don’t really understand these words in a meaningful way, they’re too removed from my own understanding and my own way of going about things. edit to add: More meaningful to me would be the concept of Shiva and Shakti, where SHIVA symbolises consciousness, the masculine principle, and SHAKTI symbolises the feminine principle, the activating power and energy. 🙏

No, but that direct road wasn’t available to me perhaps given who I am. It might be that the four paths of yoga are a good model, and I am simply on another path. Thinking it through, my Christian hero St Seraphim of Sarov was an old man before he was cleansed enough to be a conduit for the divine when he was directed in a vision to “open the doors” to people in need. His path took him decades, and he completely relied on Jesus as much as a person can IMO. The thief might have just been given a new start in that story, not a new finish?

It’s like a program I’m running, it will be clear when I get to the end of it, I will literally be informed in some way because it is a feedback loop program. I don’t understand your saying “most of the major ones need to be cleared before insight”, and then say the nondual understanding makes this possible, which sounds like after the insight. What is the insight you’re referring to?