snowymountains

Nobody said it's bad, it's not an ethics or a religious discussion, the question by the OP was why is this happening.

It's not about teachers, I had teachers in the past and currently do have a monk teacher, from whom I learned a lot and respect a lot. I'm not anti-mediation, nor anti-monks, teachers. For *some things*, like removing conditioning, therapeutic techniques are way more efficient than meditation. Meditation indeed connects to some degree the conscious to the unconscious and "stuff" does become conscious, it's just not the most effective way to bring the unconscious to the conscious and practice while just sitting will miss things as well. Without a long response, at the risk of some sloppiness , any interaction that triggers overly positive or negative emotions is worth gold in terms of looking inside us and some the data that comes out won't be activated from meditation while sitting. The retreats & trauma topic is a long discussion, Gabor Mate included it as one of the main topics in a recent workshop. What you say is correct, it does happen, I've seen it too but it's also a long discussion, as to why, who should go, who shouldn't etc. It's also not always possible to know in advance what will someone experience. Btw I don't conflate the Unus Mundus with the Tao or anything else, I don't practice Taoism anyhow but conflating between different traditions is effectively cognitively bringing spiritual experiences, which can only create an ontological salad, a la Blavatsky. Imo meditation is for things like concentration and spiritual experiences. Eg samadhis or experiencing interconnectedness between living beings and perhaps more experiences that I haven't had yet. Therapy will not provide any of these. It can't and it's anyhow out of scope for therapy ( unless it's Jungian analysis, which is also spiritual ). But for removing conditioning, therapy is king.

As it's something that's impossible to prove and at the same time impossible disprove, it's like the universe is trolling us... I ignore them because what is one to make out of them, fry their brain if it was a synchrinicity? Impossible to answer. And let's say, for the sake of the argument, there even was a way to tell in retrospect. Then what? What is one supposed to do with their next dream, assume it has predictive value and act on it? They're bound to be disappointed after 1-2-3 dreams. Hence I ignore the cosmic trolling

I don't know what the events are, but to causally link them one would need other planes/dimensions a la Plato's cave ( or Jung's Unus Mundus ). Now as to what the events are there, no clue. Another interesting nugget, this one not from my own, but from someone else's experiences ( without going into details publicly as it's someone else's stuff ), is that for the vision/dream component may [*] be linked to a different point in spacetime, which I found interesting. Without going into details I fully trust that experience as a genuine one. [*] may, as in it could also be memories of the sort epigenetics describes and the physical part that followed can be a coincidence, impossible to tell if a candidate synchrinicity is after all just an odd coincidence.

That's a good point, things need definition, otherwise we could well be talking about a voleyball ball a football ball and describe different things by referring to them as ball. The definition of synchronicity I had in mind is the Jungian one, so a spiritual event ( be it dream, vision etc ) followed by physical events that are connected to the spiritual event but not causally connected. E.g. you dream of X , whom you haven't talked to in 10 years and see they face a health issue, then next day , out of nowhere, you see them on the street and they say they do face that health issue.

This is what Pauli and Jung were trying to prove without success though, so it's not clear if the observer effect is related to synchronicities. which is impossible to know, synchronicities can almost never be distinguished from unlikely coincidences. It can always be a story our minds made to explain a coincidence. I'm not saying synchronicities do not exist, as they're also impossible to disprove. But given the above, how much of our time are they worth...

That's the problem with synchronicities, it could always just be a coincidence, there's no way to validate that it wasn't, not even in principle. There's also no way to disprove that synchronicities may in principle exist as they're meant to a non-causal so eg physics would not find a linkage by definition. A friend keeps a notebook of his synchronicities, I don't enter a long analysis of what could be perceived as a synchronicity. There are + & - in each approach. He does look however into great depth if there is any possible causal pattern at play and also if it was just his unconscious signaling him something he hadn't become consciously aware of ( which, also means he has centered his personal practice around dreamwork, active imagination etc ). For me this sort exercise is just too time consuming and one has to consider what's the benefit (and minuses) to spending that time in this way compared to taking a long walk in the forest. I mean, let's say that after doing all that it turns out that X was a synchronicity, so what, what really changes.. is it so important.. ?

The pyramid is more of a practical statement, if eg someone is hungry and doesn't have food, they'll focus on getting food, only then will they move to other needs. One way to see it is that it's harder to work on the upper parts of the pyramid unless the lower ones have been taken care of at a reasonable level. So it's effectively a statement on how people tend to prioretise. "Living to the fullest" that you mentioned before needs some context, Maslow's pyramid does not provide the full context for this, without engaging in a long post at the cost of exactness, indeed not living life to the fullest according to one's true needs may cause neurosis ( and even psychosis ).

It would take a long response as to why I meditate but the short answer is whatever may also be a therapy goal, therapy is much more efficient. Now there are some things which are out of scope for therapy, ie samadhis, jhana states, these are pure meditative goals. I also do see value in insight meditation but less so for removing conditioning on its own - it is very good to build the habit of observing conscious thoughts, sensations on the body, feelings and their interpedendence. So I see it as means to an end, a sort of drill if you like. In general, I view meditation exercises as training exercises btw, so for skills to be applied each moment in the day, as eg a runner may do weightlifting for strength training, to run better, not for the weights per se. Weight training has its own goals and progression of course and it needs to be taken seriously but it's there to e.g. run faster and with less injuries. As for conditioning, to remove conditioning one first has to observe it and "record" it. To observe it, is has to occur. To occur, one needs an environment which triggers manifestations of the conditioning, so interactions in all sorts of relationships and situations. Now that's the first step, observing and recording is not the end of the story but wanted to show why just sitting is not the way to make all things manifest. So one has to separate what is an exclusive meditative goal (and positive side-effect) that does not have a therapeutic equivalent. The self I was referring to in my post was in the sense of values that stem from the experiences of our own organism vs values that stem because of past needs to be accepted by our environment. So truer in the sense that the values will be close to the experience of our own organism. So not directly relevant to "internal family systems", but indirectly related as this sort of process also brings all these parts into negotiation with each other. Terminology in the above is far from being exact btw, even the word self is used a little sloppily, but in any case the idea of having values aligned with the experience of our organism is Rogerian, that is what I refered to as truer self. I know you're not gaslighting, never thought you were 🙂. Dogen not really, was not into Soto. Having a self is not incompatible with e.g. connecting to the Unus Mundus. Actually without realising there is a self and what it looks like, it is impossible to step out of it. Also, stepping out of self does not mean it doesn't exist. Actually one must know self very well to be able to observe and record it when it interferes. The self in the above paragraph is more in line Jung's concept of "ego" (which is not the same as ego in everyday parlance), the center of our conscious mind, so somewhat different to the "self" used previously in this post.

Forums are not a good place to gain understanding for something like this. The only way you would be able to go in depth and understand why you see what you see is to find a psychotherapist close to your residence and work with them.

One thing that's lacking from this discussion is how common disorders and trauma are. For disorders the official number in the current population snapshot iirc is close to 10%, I know nobody who takes this number too seriously, it sounds way too low. Also about half the population will develop a disorder by the time they reach old age. Trauma is very common too. Disorders and trauma is not a niche that concerns a tiny fraction of people. I was not referring only to ephemeral states. Eg after long term therapy people see the world very differently too, it's not an ASC like a Jhana or like a psychedelics-induced state, but it's permanent, people who are there quicky recognise one another, cannot go back to a conditioned way of seeing things etc. Self remains, because it is a real thing, but it's a "truer" self. Insight alone can't remove conditioning, at least not for most people ( even without disorders or trauma), more tools are needed but also in practical terms, the tools cannot be self-applied as they rely on transference - not the intellectual framework of transference per se, rather the phenomenon which the intellectual framework attempts to describe. Also the whole process works because of the therapist's many years of own therapy ( perma-therapy essentially ) and having supervision on top of that. If you remove that structure, the methods won't work. ( CBT methods don't rely on transference ( though they are affected by it) but others methods do rely ). Now it is true that therapy, in general [*], won't bring cessation, as this is not a therapeutic goal nor does therapy in general even have tools for cessation but with respect to removing conditioning, it's extremely effective at that. [*] For spiritual goals the only form of therapy which explicitly has such goals is Jungian analysis and its individuation process. In that framework, the "Unus Mundus" is the ultimate reality that can be experienced, though this is by no means guaranteed nor trivial.

Thanks TT. Yes, re the Buddhist ones, experiences are quite specific and reading a verbal description would be the same as trying to describe the sensation of eg a rollercoaster, impossible to really understand unless someone rides a rollercoaster. Are the Daoist signs different to the Buddhist ones? Intuitively I'd expect some overlap to be there, after all Samatha is Samatha and insight is insight. Which texts describe the Taoist signs?

In Buddhism the signs are "public domain", in the Suttas, or for a summary one can always use Visuddhimagga. While there do exist keywords, someone who progressed without knowing the keywords would be able to describe it in their own words and it would be pretty obvious what it is. In Taoism, are the signs described in texts or they're described exclusively via oral transmission?

Opinions on Fabrizio Pregadio's translations and texts?

Well it resonates with those whose ideas align with the absolute, aka agree with this theology. Indeed a conceptual framework can't exactly describe an altered state of consciousness, actually it can't always exactly describe everything in the "common" state of consciousness. But this doesn't mean anything, what's done here is simply pack everything but the ASC/nirvana into relative and when found faulty say it's relative and you get a self-coherent theology that can always excuse the doctrines found to be wrong or incomplete . So in that sense all that matters is the aluded ASC, but the tools to get there are not complete, and so the tools are called relative teachings pointing to the absolute. Isn't it simpler to just say the tools there are not complete to remove conditioning? 🙂

Yes, but I don't agree with it, it takes a very maximalistic point of view.

All branches are religious, some ( most ) branches advocate a non- theistic religion, but it is a religion. It does deal with cosmology, how the universe is created, destroyed and then created again , the 6 planes or more granularly 31 planes etc. There's a lot of cosmology in the Pali Suttas. In Zen too references to the 6 realms are common ( hell, hungry ghosts, animals, us, demigods, devas). The whole notion of rebirth is a religious notion as well, and so is Nirvana, it's cessation of thought in order to stop the cycle of rebirths and suffering. The meditative practice is excellent, that's a different discussion. Still other tools are also needed for removing conditioning or at least as much of it as can possibly be removed.

Beyond reading less Eckhart Tole and pop spirituality, perhaps it's also a good idea to read less pop psychology 😁

Opinions on Stuart Alve Olson's texts?

Buddhism hasn't figured it out either, it just makes claims on an axiomatic basis. It's a religion. Re the unconscious, never said it's the source of thoughts, can't understand it either tbh. There is much more experiental insight in psychological methods than Buddhist ones btw.

Finally we have the answer to "do cats have Buddha nature" 😁

Thanks TT As to what I want to get out, each of his books at least according to description, seem to be focused on a technique and in each book he draws from several original sources. It seems that he uses his own translations of the originals. So two important factors are the accuracy of his translations and also if he has included in the books any oral transmissions which are not part of the original texts. Also if he combined originals in a sensible way, instead of eg merging incompatible practices from different lineages/schools.

Thanks TT, I read a little bit of his publicly available work, he seemed very diligent and what I found very interesting was that he kept a timeline of the cosmology, how it evolved and how it was represented throughout the centuries. For me at least, this level of diligence is important for an author. Time to consider ordering his books then I guess.

There is an over prescription problem ( including disorders ) and it doesn't treat everything. There's no denying to that. But I'm also thankful I have my doctor and not a witch doctor from 100000 years ago.

Ok, armbar them then !