goldisheavy

No one can empower you. When you understand this, that's called "empowerment." When you don't understand this, that's called "disempowerment."

Malcolm wrote:

 

"While I don't believe in restricted texts either..."

Cool, so Malcom doesn't believe in placing restrictions on texts! That's the only thing that really matters. He also happens to think someone has misunderstood a text, which is not at all surprising.

People each understand texts they read subjectively, from the POV of their inner and outer circumstances. I personally don't think there is one correct understanding of any text, but instead I think there is a range of skillful interpretations, and the less skillful ones, all appearing on a continuum of interpretation and understanding. So it's not a sharp distinction of "you got it, and you didn't get it" and not "right/wrong." It's a continuum of skillfulness, subjective, and there is an entire range of skillfulness as opposed to a single point.

This supports my own conviction, that significant meditation (at least for Dzogchen purposes) happens in the GAMMA RANGE!,

the range of utmost conscious alertness & attentiveness!

How do you use this knowledge in day to day practice?

where is the mind located ?

Nowhere. The mind cannot be located because location is itself is a cognition. Cognitions cannot and do not explain the context they arise from, but on the contrary, cognitions require context to be meaningful. So not only do cognitions not explain anything outside of themselves, but it's worse, because cognitions themselves need to be explained, and they depend on context for their own meanings.

This context that cognitions depend on is a volitional formation of the mind. It's 100% immaterial.

does a chair have a mind ? if no then " without a mind" is an option

Technically things can't be said to have or not to have mind. Mind is not like an optional attachment to a vacuum cleaner.

I'll put it this way. Does dryness have water or only wetness? What has water and what doesn't? Well, this is a confused question. Water has the property of wetness. It's silly to talk about wetness having and sometimes not having water.

It's the same with the mind.

Cognitions are to mind what wetness is to water. The mind is a greater context, whereas individual cognitions are specific, delineated, distinguishable events.

So when you recognize the distance between the chair and a table, that's a cognition of distance. To experience this you need a mind. The mind as such is not an actual experience. Instead the mind experiences cognitions like thoughts, distances, hopes, fears, pressure (felt as weight, mass, inertia), expectations being fulfilled or frustrated, etc. Nothing that the mind experience is mind as such. Instead the mind experiences consequences of its own functioning, but never directly itself as an object.

Similarly, no specific posture of my index finger is my index finger. If I hold my index finger in the shape of a hook, I cannot say, lo, this hook is what is my finger. That's nonsense. Likewise, when the mind undergoes any cognition whatsoever, whatsoever, without exception, that cognition is always optional the way a hooked finger is just one of millions of ways of presenting your finger to awareness. So no specific deformation of a finger is uniquely the finger to the exclusion of all else. Cognitions are like the deformations of mind, and none of them represent the mind. The brain as something experiencable is not representative of the mind, because it's just one of many possible deformations of the mind's experience.

So the various states of mind are not closer to the mind or further away from it. In fact, the states of the mind cannot be related by distance to the mind at all. They can't be said to emerge from the mind, as if leaving the mind behind. They can't be said to stay in the mind, as if contained by some kind of membrane. States of mind don't stay and they don't leave. We just can't even talk about them in those terms if we want to be precise.

you can consider any things to be physical or not but the consideration does not make it so .

This doesn't matter. Depending on how you consider things, your experience of life will change. That's what's important. What everything is or isn't is of no value at all. What's valuable is this: "What can I get away with?" That's something we need to investigate. If at the bottom of it all it turns out there is a series of infinitely descending turtles, who cares?

The whole point of making the study of mind pivotal is precisely because we no longer want to think what is behind the mind, if anything. We give up on that idea for various reasons.

solidity is determined by the amount of particle in proximity to one another .

What determines the solidity of particles? More particles?

what is a considration made of ?

It's not made of anything. I suppose I can say it's made of questions, hopes, fears, imagination, experience, etc. None of those are physical.

is a thought a physical thing?

If course not. If thought was physical, it would have weight, length, inertia, wavelength, etc.

how about a mental image of a chair / physical ?

It's not physical.

Laws are considerations that things must be a certain way . Considerations are physical things so that Ipso facto makes law physical . Every particle in the universe is bound by law ( yin ) without law there would just be life , nothing. No thing.

Considerations are not physical things. An example of a physical thing is a chair. An example of a consideration is "I need to go bowling soon."

There are obviously not quite made it to the asylum levels of this that lead to strength . I think I also mentioned the needing to recoop after a year or two, then strength... but... just from what I have seen so far... I haven't seen any cases of just went that far off for a year or two and fully recovered . There was always something not quite right afterwards that tended to lead to not being able to function in some major way, from all the cases I've seen. (I've been hanging around with far to many practitioners for far to many years, and seen a lot). But I'm sure it's possible. Now the nearly made it there sure; that is extremely common I think. By asylum I mean not able to care for oneself for a time longer than a couple of weeks due to emotional or mental troubles and having to be helped before one hurts themselves due to behaviors or not being functional enough or whatever. I have seen this far to many times to be comfortable with, amongst dabbles .

It's impossible to know what is functional and what isn't. If you judge function by things like taking a shower, shaving in the morning for men, putting makeup on for women, going to work and maintaining a "respectable" career, having a home and paying for it, going to sleep every night, eating on time, etc... then you need to be aware that many sages were not functional in this way.

A lot of the activity that we usually consider functional is the activity of maintaining a human body and the activity of maintaining one's reputation. Such things are necessary to live in the world of convention.

Once you reject the world of convention, once you realize you no longer want to be human, your idea about what is functional and what is dysfunctional can and should change. Sometimes gradually. Sometimes drastically. Most people on our path don't want to be humans forever.

Yes that. When things start to warp and wave "how they shouldn't" it gets downright freaky. That tends to be when I slow down or go ground . Though I do enjoy a good 1-4 hour temple session where I embrace it when it happens. Also when what one thought was physical objects come and go.... I seem to recall myself saying to the powers that be or whatever "OK guys, this is a bit much for me at this time" before lol. Glad I have had more experienced folks I could ask stuff of when odd things came about. I would like to figure out how to be more open to seeing past the illusion, but also be able to function well in my daily life. A very slow and gradual process is best I figure.

From my own experience I've discovered that I needed a new way to find stability.

Previously stability was assured in my mind by my willing and unbending tacit adherence to the idea that there really was an objective, solid, unchanging, eternal realm "out there", and that no matter what I thought or did, it would always be the same familiar place. This had comforting qualities. I actually believed I lived inside a Universe, and I thought that the Universe was a constant and real place outside of me where my human body was located, etc. Well now that belief system is on its way out. And so my previous source of stability (and familiarity) is gone with it.

My new source of stability is my own will. I've done a lot of work on the nature of my own volition/intent. I've realized that my will has no starting or finishing point, and that its apparently vigorous activity is only vigorous from a very detailed perspective, but when taking a long view, it's very stable. I've realized that will is one unbroken flow without segmentation. I've realized that intent is layered, and this layering brings all kinds of complexity into how intent manifests. (An example of the layering would be playing a game where the will to play the game is one layer, and how you choose the individual moves inside the game is another layer. The layer of volition where you choose the moves will make no sense without the supporting layer of volition where you are committed to playing a game.) I realized the previous stability of the seemingly external and seemingly self-existent objective realm was actually a reflection of my own will's stability. What I experienced as the stability of the world was me disowning the function of my own volition, basically. So my new stability comes from trusting myself. I know I can always trust myself. I know my volition ultimately makes no mistakes. It always moves perfectly and it's always in a fulfilled state at the highest level of insight. This is something I've been learning to trust more and more. It's a completely inner, secret reliance.

And there is a meditation that goes along with this. It is calm and effortless abiding in whatever situation I am in, while knowing my will is timeless and perfect, and I am always, always doing the right thing, because ultimately there is no external angle of viewing from which what I am doing can be corrected in an objective manner. When I abide in this way, I feel like my being pools itself together like a lake that's getting deeper and deeper. I feel my mind pooling and crystallizing itself in my body. All points of tension relax and go away. Anxiety goes away. Uncertainty and doubt go away. I experience nothing short of lordliness at this point, and a complete and total solitude -- I am alone. In this state I am alone. There is nothing and no one else. Oh how I used to fear being alone. How I used to fear not being known, not being seen, heard, understood, acknowledged.

Especially being understood was a big craving for me. This is where my ability to explain things so well comes from! I want to be understood and I could not tolerate the idea that maybe I cannot be understood. The notion that I pass through time in perpetual obscurity, never understood, never known by anyone other than myself, that was truly a frightening notion. But actually it's only frightening from one perspective. From a different perspective it is a great source of power and peace.

Thought experiment time:

Let's say 5 people witness you doing something amazing and they all agree that something happened. Then for various reasons they die and you no longer repeat your prior deed. Once the 5 people who saw you do something amazing die, their power of testimony dies with them. What is the status of the deed at that point? Is it an illusion? Is it real even though all the people who could testify to it are now gone? Is your own memory of those 5 people agreeing that you've done something amazing itself the testimony required?

Even assuming the 5 people each left their testimony in writing before they died, without them being alive to defend their written words from critics and doubters, what power will such testimony have? Won't that power wane with time?

Even when consensus is widely shared it doesn't seem to have a lot of stability. For example, look what happened when classical physics got displaced by the quantum-relativistic physics. Classical physics is now more like a distant memory rather than something we consider real. Nobody thinks atoms are like billiard balls anymore. That's gone. But at one point everyone agreed that atoms were like tiny little balls. And now what?

So even if many people agree your powers are "the real deal" so to speak, how reliable is that? Public opinion is not guaranteed to be constant. For whose (or for what) benefit is such testimony?

Please don't get me wrong, I think involving other people into the world of greater possibility is a fun thing to do. I am all for it. I'm just saying that the issue of testimony and objectivity is not so clear cut once I think about it deeper. I've had a lucid dream once where I reached out my hand to another dream character, and by doing this I was able not only fly myself, but to have this dream character fly with me. In the context of that dream, that was basically objective proof of my flying ability. When I woke up, the character who could testify for me and my objective proof were gone.

Even if you convince everyone on Earth that you have genuine psychic power, where will that crowd of people be once you die? Will these folks follow you to the next life and offer their testimony there too? I think that's doubtful.

I would most definitely agree, it is at those times when we are close to death, that we allow more. Or situations similar to death.

 

Now that whole conscious mind snaps (Magento for example thing), what decided for us regular human folks after something which pushes us that far past our limits and ourselves, whether we will be one of the myriad of practitioners who end up in the asylum, compared to someone who grows and finds strength from it afterwards (sometimes after a year or 2 of recovery)?

I think firstly there is a false dichotomy there: either your destination is the asylum, or you grow from it. Why not a situation where you spend a year in the asylum and grow from it? Why does it have to be one or the other?

That said, I understand the nature of your question and I believe the difference between people who crumble and can't put themselves back together and those who outlast all difficulties is one of inner peace. The people who end up lasting have some reserves of inner peace which allows them to be resilient and which supports diamond-like resolve. It's hard to maintain diamond-like resolve to see a difficult stretch of practice to its next phase if one is constantly paranoid, frazzled, absentminded, scared, etc.

I think all of us have felt fear. I have certainly felt insane fear compared to which fear of mere bodily death is but a joke. But what gets me through is that fear is not my defining characteristic. No matter how intense my fear, it is not able to overwhelm me, and I am always able to touch a core of peace deep in my inner being. This way it's hard for me to become discouraged or fragmented. But because I do feel fear it does mean sometimes I need to pull back and stop doing certain things.

And maybe that's another thing. Maybe the people who crumbled with no hope in sight went too fast? Too much, too fast? Maybe this ability to pull back once in a while and take a breather is what keeps some of us going for the long haul. This is not a sprint. It's a marathon. Right?

The first time I popped out of the top of my head it felt like I was going to die. There was a type of dread and fear accompanied by a feeling of great danger. It took me ten years before I decided to see what would happen if I really got out. I did a meditation, focused on the hole at the top of the head, found the opening and could see the space on the other side. Then I jumped out. Well, much to my surprise, I bounced right back. I had hit a kind of barrier which was invisible, kind of like a plastic wrap, but when you made contact with it, various multi-colored lights would appear. I tried jumping out several times but I kept bouncing back. I had conquered my fear of death but there was still something else to overcome.

Exactly! But before you conquered your fear of death, you wouldn't even dare to practice something like that in earnest!

I am sure that scene in X-men is not just invented from thin air. There must be real life inspiration behind it, because it's too realistic for lack of a better description.

And remember the subsequent scene where the young Magneto can no longer duplicate his power? And so what does the camp commander do to unlock it? He shoots Magneto's mother to death, and this does it.

My opinion is that when Magneto's mother was killed in front of him, something in Magneto died, and that something was the human aspect of himself. So in a way, Magneto was dead inside, because an important part of his identity was tied to his mother, and when she died, that part of him that was tied to his mother died as well. And in that moment of extreme duress Magneto didn't care about anything. I am sure he didn't care about reality or unreality, and that's when his power was unleashed for the second time.

Why do we consider some situations to be extreme? I think the entire point of an extreme situation is when something very important to us is threatened. Isn't that in some important sense very similar to being on the brink of death?

ZOOM,

If I eat sweets before going to bed I might have dreams which seem even more real like my "real" life (and by far more interesting).

But as my logical and mental abilities in my dreams are strongly limited due to parts of the brain regenerating / "sleeping", I am pretty sure that the "real" world is the real world.

I can tell you from experience that my logical and mental abilities are at their peak when I am dreaming. At least as good as right now, but maybe even better sometimes.

The psychokinesis...well, if you are in a situation where you feel emotional pain so extreme that you experience it like hell-like physical pain and like burning up internally so you already contemplate suicide as a good option to get rid of it,

then I can teach you the exercises to inclose & store up this energy internally and release it as psychokinetic energy, lol!

This being ready to die is actually a very, very important clue. You were able to let go of your limitations when you no longer cared whether you live or die. I don't think this is an accident at all.

You'll be able to repeat your performance once you embrace death 100%.

I have always found the dreams inside of dreams really interesting!

 

Though at one point where I was practicing most of the day everyday, and into my sleep... I started to not be able to tell the difference between dreams and this "reality". It all started to merge together. Not very handy when one is trying to keep track of what has happened "here" and what hasn't! I decided to slow down on some of the practices. I figure dreams are just as real and valid as what I think of as this reality, but fortunately can keep the two separate enough to not think I already completed and mailed the work project for example .

 

Definitely interesting stuff.

 

So how does one keep from falling back asleep in the bigger sense?

Well now, you've opened up a big can of worms. Firstly I want to say that I've had numerous experiences of losing distinction between dreams and the so-called "reality." These experiences were eye-opening, to say the least.

As for your last question, I don't know how to answer it because I am not sure what you're asking about. I think in some sense we're always dreaming. Lucid dreaming means bringing an aspect of wakefulness into your dreams. Lucid waking means bringing an aspect of dreaming into your wakefulness. Lucid waking is hard because it's frightening. And it's frightening because we tend to want to feel like there is solid ground under our feet, so to speak, and when you know you're dreaming the whole time, the solid ground is gone. For someone who isn't used to living without a solid ground, that's a scary proposition. I speak from experience here.

I too had to abandon an entire type of practice because it was producing experiences I just could not psychologically handle at the time (and probably would still have at least some trouble with it today, if I tried again).

People tend to think that psychic power is all fun stuff, but I don't think that's the correct picture at all. In fact, what ZOOM said earlier about being nearly suicidal during his psychic episode is very relevant to what I want to say. Truth is, when things start to move in ways you don't think should be possible, the first reaction will be fear, and second, disbelief. It's not fun at all.

I think in some ways psychic powers are like the tricks of high flying acrobats in a circus. For the viewers it is all pure fun. But for the circus athletes who are flying high above the ground, swinging from one trapeze to the next, they know an element of fear, and they also know a few who have died doing the very same "trick." Even an experienced circus performer probably experiences some fear, but what to say of a newbie? A newbie might vomit just from getting up close to the ceiling before even swinging on a trapeze. I think real psychic power is a lot like this. It's fun for the viewers, but no fun for the performer, unless the performer is either a natural freak of some sort, or extremely experienced in the course of some training, extremely familiar with what is about to happen, accustomed to it, and knows there is nothing to fear.

Is a law a physical thing ?

Because laws don't have weight, spacial and temporal extension, they are not physical. They don't have the qualities of physical objects.

Can you describe what the mind actually is ? For you ?

Sure. The mind is a capacity to know, to experience and to will.

How would your life be different without one ?

"Without the mind" is not even an option. I can be without a limb or without a body or without thoughts, but never without mind. In fact, sensing absence is a type of cognition, which of course requires mind.

ZOOM, you must have had quite an interesting experience.

Everyone who's practicing something, anything, has reasons for doing it the way they're doing it. I don't bother with external validation of anything, even though I've had at least one shared experience where it wasn't just me. Why not? That's for two reasons.

One, I know where I am stuck. I know where my mind refuses to move how I want it to move, and I also know why it refuses. So before I start parading in front of cameras and crowds, I am basically busy with mind training, and the thought of validation doesn't even enter my mind, because I see a severe internal limitation to my psychic functioning, and until that's gone, there is no point in validating anything.

Two, there is an interesting class of thought experiments that conduces me to thinking validation is not important anyway. Let's not forget that Einstein's thought experiments have changed how we all think about physics today. I've always been impressed with this fact growing up, and I myself enjoyed the idea of thought experiments. And here's one thought experiment from that class of experiments:

Let's imagine I have lived 70 years, and on my 70th year I've contracted a fatal disease. I am laying in a hospital. The docs gave me 1 more year to live. One night during sleep I am dreaming that I am someone else in some other place that is not even this Earth. I end up spending 300 years in that dream. Let's say I appear in the dream as a 20 year old, and go on to the age of 320. I sleep in the dream world and dream inside the dream (I've done this already, so this isn't even theoretical for me -- dreams within dreams are possible). I go to sleep every dream day and wake up to the same dream world every dream morning. Thus the dream appears to stretch for 300 years of time. Lots of events happen. I meet people. I make friends and enemies. I have a number of careers and adventures. And so on. Among other things in that dream I am able to demonstrate all kinds of strange abilities and everyone present in that dream can witness me demonstrating those abilities, and everything is confirmed to be genuine in the context of that dream.

But as we all know, even 300 years pass in a flash. I wake up in the hospital. I am very disoriented. "What the hell is going on?" I am thinking. It takes me a few days to get my old memory back. Ah... so I was this aging human in this world... and I have 1 more year left to live. I see. Well, I take my meds, watch some hospital TV and get on with my hospital life. The year passes and I die.

Now the questions: which environment was objective and which one was subjective? Why so? Is the 300 year long dream the objective one because it's longer?

I think illusion is what we perceive when we are stuck in our closed off/down distracted so focused on ourselves state. Then reality is what we can glimpse when looking with our spirit/soul instead of just minds and conditioning. The illusion tends to crumble when we practice and open more and more.

 

Arg these things are difficult to put into words.

No joke about it being difficult to express to one's own satisfaction.

I tend to think that illusion is any kind of disappointing reliance. I consider all phenomena to be illusory, without exception. All phenomena are disappointing. However that doesn't mean life has to be disappointing. If one's sense of satisfaction is no longer directly tied to any combination/configuration of phenomena, then one can be genuinely happy. This isn't a normal way of thinking because normally we do want phenomena to fall into expected patterns of health, success, social validation, etc., and we tend to suffer no matter what because if we get what we want, we fear to lose it and become anxious, and if we don't get what we want, we remain unfulfilled. The solution is to completely decouple one's happiness from the phenomenal state.

An example of what I mean by a disappointing reliance: water in a desert mirage, you try to drink it and it doesn't work, thus leading to disappointment. If one could slake one's thirst by drinking from a desert mirage, it would no longer be disappointing, and then it would stop being an illusion even if it did look whispy. So how things look/feel is irrelevant.

Another way to look at illusion is as a false advertisement. Desert mirage advertises water but doesn't provide it. In this way phenomena advertise objects but don't provide actual objects.

the mind is a physical thing and life is not . life is spiritual .

I don't see how the mind is a physical thing.

I think the main thing, which many Buddhist tantra teachings talk about is dissolving into the central channel and activating the third eye. My main secret is that love activates everything much faster and naturally too. Love your breath. Love your mantra, love your practices..

I think that's great advice. It also helps to keep things intimate, because love makes intimacy easier. This is important because the normal state of a typical human being is to be somewhat estranged from one's own experience and one's own being, basically.

This is also why I like to suggest that all the "minds" are friendly. Don't make an enemy of the thinking mind, for example. Conscious mind is not an enemy of the unconscious or subconscious. Etc. All the minds are friends, and this is consistent with the attitude of love that you suggest too.

You are implying that the grandmaster can pick which day to die? And that you might know how to leave and never come back? What is your technique?

Yes, that's what I am implying.

There is no technique. It's a question of resolve and not technique. I'm not talking about destroying or harming the human body here. I'm talking about making a conscious decision to leave the body and dying (to this realm) in meditation.

People who obsess over techniques will never comprehend this.

it just means i responded to education ,a mind is not needed to respond .

 

I have thoughts and considerations but they do not originate from the mind. its a spiritual orgination

 

i generate a thought , look at it and then vanish it out of existence

 

this is not the mind doing these things

 

only life has the ability to generate thoughts and considerations then vanish them .

 

we can consider having a mind but thats pretty much it .

What is the difference between life and mind?

Like what?

Doesn't matter. A man doesn't get rich by counting other people's gold.

Hmmm. There is no expectation when the visions occur at that time because the practice is just "letting be" and not grasping. It is "looking without being interested or impressed". Usually the visions dissolve into wisps of rainbows. I never see the same vision twice and I don't believe that I am generating the visions.

Those visions are happening only because you allow them to happen. If you close your heart to such visions, they'll stop happening.

The meditation is to sit and observe the space of the mind. First you watch to see what thoughts come up. When thoughts come up you don't follow the content of each thought, you notice things like the location, the clarity or the size. Then, you remain at that location until the thought dissolves. Then you wait for another thought to appear. Sometimes the thoughts that appear are far and few in between. Other times a whole series of thoughts appear, like a huge school of fish or a spinning tornado. With distance between the subject and the objects, when the thoughts thin out, that is when the visions start to appear. The simple thoughts appear at the left back of the head. The more elaborate thoughts appear near the top middle of the head. The visions appear towards the front of the face, mostly before the brow or the eyes.

 

The whole point is to be able to watch a thought or vision appear, remain for a while and then disappear, realizing the space that this process occurs in. When you remain in the space successfully, it produces a kind of even heat around the upper body and head.

This is a great exercise. However, you're back on Earth after you see the rainbows. That's important.

If you really had no expectations at all, you'd not return back to this realm. There is nothing that's keeping you here contrary to your volition.

Do you realize that if you really wanted to, you could sit down and simply abandon your body, permanently, and never come back? How do you think the various grandmasters know the exact day of their death and die in meditation? Do you think they're just guessing?

Let me ask you, have you ever had an un-Earthly vision where you intuitively felt that if you wanted to, you could stay there indefinitely? If yes, then what happened? Why are you back?