goldisheavy

So you don't see how what you describe is nothing more than thoughts and judgements?

I might have the wrong impression, but I always thought ralis was relaxed and just posting comments based on reasoning. It appears that most of his comments are questions, and they're good ones in my opinion. In other words, I don't detect a whole lot of suffering from ralis.

Who said anything about suffering? A siddha doesn't even have to remain in the body, unlike an ordinary being.

Phenomena appear ornamental to realized beings, however, realized beings when they are moved by compassion address non-realized beings for whom the differences are significant. So for a siddha losing a leg is ornamental, but a compassionate siddha would not say to a non-realized being "hey, don't worry about your legs, if you lose one, who cares, right?" Even then ornaments still presuppose aesthetics. If aesthetic preferences are insignificant, then it's OK for any being to have an aesthetic preference. And "any" is rather inclusive. Meaning, I don't have to like your preference because my preference is OK and your preference might offend me, and that's OK too. That's what it means for preferences to be insignificant. Such things are of consequence for people who are not realized yet, as I said above.

So you have judged that judgements are problematic? I'm not surprised.

When I read a great book, I don't go, "Now I understand the book!" I go, "Now I understand myself."

That formula is very good, but I doubt many people will understand it. I will try to explain what it means to the best of my ability. Going from left to right, we see a process of volition unfolding. Volition is not always simple, and from most beings' perspectives it should be considered to have many aspects to it. So on the left we start with an aspect of volition which anticipates or expects or craves something in the future. This leads to the orchestration of sensation that is the fulfillment of that aspect of volition. However, there is typically also an aspect of volition that clings to sensations, because we tend to believe that only things which appear are real (that's basically what empiricism is about). So after sensation happens, there is clinging to it, which confers a quality of inertia to the sensation. Thus what at first appeared to satisfy becomes an entrenched expectation and a memory and something we see as "having been before," something imbued with a sense of the past or a sense of history. This inertial quality stabilizes experience and it also hinders experience, both. It can be seen as a good quality or a bad quality, depending on what you want your experience to feel like. If you prefer magical experiencing modes, then clinging and the resulting inertia are considered mostly bad qualities, since they rob the yang-side volition of its power to manifest things without any obstacles. In other words, one's initial successes become the obstacles to one's later successes because of clinging to that very success as a sensation.

Let's ignore the dictionary. I'll give you a better definition: the mind is a capacity to know, to experience and to will. These three capacities are actually one single holistic capacity but I split it into three aspects for explanatory power. Thus, there is no knowing without willing, no willing without knowing, no knowing without experiencing, no experiencing without knowing, no willing without experience, and so on. Any combination of the three aspects is a good contemplation of the mind. Since the mind is a capacity, it's not a "part" of a "human" being the way the dictionary claims. On the contrary, what look like parts are the specific aspects of of specific cognitions, which are the function of the mind, and thus are not the mind which is a capacity and is not anything specific. The mind exists unconditionally. Technically no one and nothing has the mind. But the mind can have all kinds of cognitions. To say that people have minds is like saying ocean waves have their respective oceans. This is nonsense, but at the same time, you really could think that each wave has equal claim on the ocean and can be regarded as the center of the ocean without being the center in any objective sense. When thoughts vanish they still exist in the mind as latent knowledge. The mind has no location because location is a type of cognition. No. No, they do not. Thoughts come "from" the mind. Of course saying "from" implies the mind is some kind of origin from which thoughts depart, and this is wrong. Instead, the best way to understand thoughts is to say that thoughts are aspects of the mind's current condition (or volition). The mind's condition doesn't depart from the mind to go elsewhere. It stays right where it appears and when it disappears it simply returns to a latent state. How nice of you.

Today I'd like to discuss what I like to call "spiritual habituations." Some examples of these include chakra perceptions and reliances, aura perceptions and reliances, and nadi or meridian perceptions and reliances, to name a few. But the phenomenon is not limited to just those. For example, if you learn to dislocate your astral eyes, that would be an example of a spiritual habituation. We can conceptually divide all habituation into new and old. New habituation always goes up against the burden of the old. So for example, if you're not accustomed to seeking chakras, that in itself is a habituation and for a lot of people that's what the "old" bodily habituation will look like. Then when you train yourself to see them, you're going up against your previous disbelief, non-expectation, and non-reliance on chakras. When the mind is rigid, old habituations in the form of experience patterns are very hardened and they can seem nearly impervious to change. So now the pros and cons should start to become evident. The pros of spiritual habituations are: 1. They get easier and easier with practice. 2. Eventually they can go on auto-pilot and they can stop requiring active participation. 3. They demonstrate a side of experience that appears amazing and extraordinary at first, and this can be very mind-opening in a good way. The cons are: 1. The mind begins to cling to these habituations as "this is what truly is." 2. Habituations when engaged constantly harden over time and especially once they become conventionalized (you get lots of people to agree with you about them), they can be hard to get rid of later on. If you think you'll never want to get rid of them, consider your possible dissatisfaction with the old habituations in general. What seems shiny, amazing and new today may seem old, limiting and annoying 1000 subjective years later. It may be hard to imagine, but consider that at one time your body's dense and simple physicality itself seemed amazing and satisfactory at some point. 3. The mind starts to become stupid by losing sight of alternatives. This is related to point #1 above when the mind clings to a habituation as "this is what truly is." As a result the mind cannot understand that all experiencing is completely wide open at the root. So in practical terms, for example I convince myself that I am being healed when white light suffuses my body. If I make a habit of this, I can get better and better at this as the experiential pattern gets habituated through repeated practice. The downside is that now to heal I need white light. I can't heal with blue light anymore. I can't heal with sound. I can't heal with touch. And so on. As we get better and better at a habituation it begins to displace alternative experience paths. Another example. Suppose I practice a microcosmic orbit and I experience tranquility as a result. The pro of this is that with time it gets trivial to feel the pattern of experience that resembles the flow of energy in that path, and as it becomes associated with tranquility and/or other qualities, these qualities become easy to bring forward. With enough practice the whole visualization can go on auto-pilot and stop requiring moment-by-moment deliberateness to maintain. The downside of this, is that now if this visualization is disrupted for any reason, there go all the associated positive qualities like tranquility and whatever else (like health, for example, or whatever spiritual qualities). And another downside is that the mind starts to think that the pattern of experience involved in the microcosmic orbit is a true existent, like it's really "out there," truly real, and like it can't be any other way. So alternative experiences become locked out, and clinging commences in full force, especially once this becomes conventionalized. So if you live in a culture where not just you, but everyone agrees that they experience the same "flow of energy" then it becomes extremely hard to get rid of this specific flow and to replace it by an alternative pattern of experience. So if you prize flexibility as a virtue, then obviously this is a demerit. So any habituation is in truth a re-habituation, because we go from old to new habituations. When the mind is in a state of clinging, experience is very rigid and replacing one habituated pattern with another requires intense amounts of work, and once accomplished, it becomes very hard to change once again. But the upside is that for a short time new habituations can demonstrate some very amazing and heretofore hidden sides of experiencing, and they can lead to some important "a-ha" moments. And this can be done without any overall softening of the mind, so in other words, in some sense, this might be the quickest short-term path to your next "a-ha" moment. This might be a good thing. An alternative to this or that spiritual habituation is to lean toward the overall softening of the mind. In this scenario the mind is trained to loosen up old habituations without replacing them with any overly specific and dedicated new habituations. The downside of this approach is that initially it's very very hard to accomplish and it's also hard to believe because it's so unspecific and in the mindset of an ordinary being specificity is often a prerequisite for believability. So it's hard to get started with this approach and it's hard to master. It's much easier to train oneself to experience energy meridians than it is to train oneself to stop experiencing one's own Earthly body as a fixed shape and therefore learn that it's lacking in any fixed meridian paths. So general mental (read: experiential) flexibility is a boon for people who prize freedom of experience, but it's harder and scarier to acquire than the more specific and more repeated visualizations and associations. If we go back to examples, suppose I train myself that when I press a certain point on my forehead, my vision becomes magnified. With repeated practice you can make this work like a gadget, you press a button and voila, it's like you have a set of instant binoculars in front of your eyes. Awesome, right? But the downside is that you now need to press that spot on your forehead to activate this. What if your hands are busy? This sucks, right? This places a limit on your experiencing. Another example. You train in incantations. When you repeat a certain specific incantation you enter into a different world. The upside here is that with practice this becomes a highly reliable and highly repeatable process which works like clockwork eventually. Downside? What if your mouth is taped shut? What if you can't speak for whatever other reason? You just lost your ability to travel to a different world in that circumstance. Another example. Suppose you train yourself in meridian perception and reliance. Then you can strike your enemy's meridians. The problem is, your enemy can now strike your own meridians for the same effect. Had you instead trained in the overall experiential flexibility, you'd never become stuck no matter what. Every experiential end point can be achieved by a myriad of ways. So for example if you were interested in realm travel and if you learned to put your mind into a state of traveling between realms using abstract and general understanding and approach, you could activate it at will no matter the circumstance, which is very flexible. Similarly, if you are interested in combat, and if you learned to use raw intent to disable your opponent, then you'd no longer need to strike specific meridians, and your opponent would have no easy meridians to strike on your body. The downside of seeking general flexibility is that you have to give up convention to the extent you acquire flexibility. You won't be able to agree with people on a fixed way to do anything. You'll be more and more by yourself, alone, and your definition of yourself will also become and more and more generalized when eventually you'll lose a sense of a fixed phenomenal self completely if you keep going that way. This can be a huge boon, but this can also be a huge detriment if you actually like convention for some reason. This flexible mode of experiencing when pursued can eventually lead to being completely untethered from any phenomenal reality, which can be super-scary for the uninitiated and those lacking in commitment to the ultimate wisdom. The good thing about habituating one specific flow of experience is that you can keep your old rigid patterns and just keep slightly modifying them in a way that feels incremental and additive. So for example, learning to perceive meridians can appear like an addition to the typical experiencing of the human body which lacks the perception of meridians. This makes it less threatening. It's psychologically easier to change your experience in a way that feels like you're adding to it than to soften up your experience in a way that feels like you're subtracting from it. We could say what I call "spiritual habituations" are habituations leaning to phenomenal specificity, and the more general kind of flexibility is a habituation leaning toward the phenomenal ambiguity. Ambiguity is harder to cultivate initially because conventional beings lean toward specificity by default, but over the longer term it offers more flexibility.

The mind has no confirmatory forms. It's silly to speak of "glimpsing" the mind. The mind's functioning is what creates a flow of experience, and this includes ordinary and extraordinary experiencing. So whatever you glimpse, you can be sure it isn't the mind. The mind is never an object of cognition because all cognitions are partial (they exclude alternative cognitions), and because the mind is a capacity (to know, to experience and to will) and a capacity has no shape of its own. It's not brown or yellow or red, not long and not short, not southwest or east, not up or down and not middle, not in the center and not far away. What people call "pre-celestial mind" is a mind that's been released from Earthly commitments and habits. Such release should be cultivated at least at first, because people don't understand that they're not actually people deep inside. Since this confusion exists, there is at first no obvious way to understand one's own mind, and one can gradually learn about one's own mind through the trial and error of spiritual practice. And you don't need a human teacher for this. You just need to be resolute and attentive. In fact, stopping your reliance on others is an important step in restoring what is called "pre-celestial mind" because such mind is independent and not reliant on anything outside itself. The chance of meeting a perfect teacher in this realm is pretty much zero percent. This means whatever good things you learn, you'll also inherit your teacher's closed-mindedness and your teacher's unhelpful assumptions. You'll be taking good and bad, everything, if you rely on your teacher instead of yourself. What's worse, without self-reliance, you'll never be able to tell apart powerful knowledge from limited knowledge, because such discrimination requires a mind for which following is not important. Human beings depend on each other for everything. They follow each other all the time. This is what keeps them trapped in the world of convention. Zhuangzi talks about this, btw. See if you can find the relevant passages on your own.

I could tell you my personal views if you like. But I don't know of any spiritual path that takes a formal position on insanity, at least, not directly, and not in that language.

I don't agree. The only way someone with realization appears to "have" little power is if they don't care to exercise it. It's impossible to be realized and yet be consumed by passion to the point where you can no longer exercise psychic power. Although the thing with the power is a mind and not a person. We usually equate the mind with a person, but for a realized being, they can manifest as 10 people at once, for example, so there is no longer a strict 1 mind = 1 person equivalence. In that case there is just mind which can do anything, pretty much. It's like I have a kettlebell over here, and I don't lift it very diligently because I am not interested, but I can still do it any time, including right now. Something like this can happen with the powers. But there is no way someone with realization will forget how to transform appearances, or suck at it, it's just impossible. That's because as I said, realization has implications on how the mind behaves. It's not an implication-free knowledge.

Thanks Mandrake.

Reality doesn't play itself. You play it. You're a player. If you stop all your playing, reality will stop playing too because without your input it has nothing to do of itself and for itself. Just to be clear, I'm talking about the phenomenal reality here and not secret reality.

I'm going to cater to people's laziness and lack of search-fu here and provide a link with a quotation to make things easy: It was then that the Rishi Paratsa and his wife, Enchanting Maiden, had a son called Atsantra Aloke, who became a master in the teachings based on cause and effect. He was extremely inspired by the essential truth and requested the essence of the teachings from Princess Gomadevi. She bestowed it in full and summarized the meaning in a song: Hoping for bhumis and liberation postpones enlightenment; Hoping to attain bliss is great suffering; Hoping for nonthought is itself a thought: When you realize this, give up seeking. This is from a Dzogchen lineage. Not Mahamudra.

This is nonsense. In fact the Buddha had something to say about this kind of stinginess/secretiveness: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.12.0.than.html

Read princess Gomadevi's poem then.

You don't understand why I am listing those "ordinary" powers. Let me put it this way. Individually no extraordinary or ordinary experience of any kind is proof or validation of anything. Supreme knowledge is secret for a reason. It cannot be proven to others or even to oneself. Supreme knowledge (vidya) must be understood, claimed, and confidently assumed, but it's never proven or verified. However, supreme knowledge is not an implication-free knowledge just because it's secret. The very first and the very obvious initial implication of the supreme knowledge is your ability to exercise countless "ordinary" psychic powers. If your vidya doesn't have this implication, then it's not actually vidya because it lacks the required confidence (ding). This is why it's better to guide people toward extraordinary cognition. Extraordinary cognition is a modification of the ordinary. Because it's a modification of the ordinary, it's a path that's both gentle and yet mind-blowing at the same time. Vidya is not a modification of anything ordinary, on the other hand, so what often happens is that people upon hearing of the supreme knowledge, remain right where they are, don't change a thing about their commitments, learn no yogic skills, do not become liberated in their own minds, and call it "done."

And who qualifies the tantras as worthy? You're just postponing the question instead of answering it.

Who decides on qualifications?

I agree with your conclusion, but I don't see how Tibetan_Ice's descriptions of his experiences prove anything.

I disagree with this assessment. I think Tibetan_Ice is doing just fine.

When the mind seeks to experience a greater degree of freedom, that's not grasping. That's striving, but it's a "correct" striving. Eventually even this striving is abandoned when you actualize the freedom (the same way you no longer strive to get home after you arrive home and relax on your couch). It's not wrong or bad to seek the rainbow body.

These descriptions of an experience, and meditative technique, are excellent and I am glad you're sharing these with people so that they can try this if they are inspired. However, stream entry doesn't have an associated experience. Experiences are not sufficient basis for interpretation of anything because experiences themselves are interpretative by their nature. Your description of the bubbles is not a description of actuality, but one very cool way of how to structure experience. Grasping is stranger than what you describe. Grasping is simply a certain kind of expectation that we approach all experience with. This expectation exists before any specific experience can happen. It doesn't arise 1 second later. However, when you move your vision around like this, this does create a flow of experience that is not as expected, this then allows you to recognize your expectation and relax it. So it's a good technique, but you shouldn't assume from this technique that grasping is something so late! 1 second is too late. If grasping was delayed by this much, then we would only be grasping things in the past, and there'd be periods of non-grasping, etc. It would be weird. Grasping is just an expectation and as such, this expectation is constant and unwavering in ordinary beings. So it's never late, and under ordinary conditions it doesn't have periods of being absent, although it may be slightly more relaxed at times, but not absent only to start up 1 second later. The gist of what I am saying is that your experiences I think are very helpful and so are your techniques, but you shouldn't be in a hurry with your conclusions about what they imply.

I agree 100%. But to relax in togal one needs to have a very refined understanding of "the view." So in a sense, some conceptual training is completely unavoidable. Without conceptual training one is stuck discriminating the visions as if the visions were actual objects or imputing necessariness as a quality on top of what are actually optional relations. So, "this comes from that" is an optional relation like "The egg comes from a chicken." But we tend to make it necessary. Then we say "the egg only comes from a chicken and not from a cow." This way we restrict the way our heart can move and we lose our ability to perform magic. So the loss of freedom comes from reading necessariness into something that is in truth just one possible way.