Cheshire Cat

Side note: if you shake too much (like 1 hr a day), it's possible to develop some sort of insomnia.... Bushmen use to shake once a month for healing. 

What do you think of the mantra HARE KRISHNA HARE KRISHNA KRISHNA KRISHNA HARE HARE HARE RAMA HARE RAMA RAMA RAMA HARE HARE? 

1 minute ago, Lightseeker said:

Do you have this ability?

Yes, but I can't prove it. 

4 hours ago, Lightseeker said:

True entering the astral at will is very impressive. Not sure weor teaches it the best way.. lots of mantra usage right? Also have you gained the ability of conscious projection? I know that members of Oto (another group no one talks about here) can do it

Plenty of people claim to possess this ability, yet none can prove it. 

3 hours ago, Lightseeker said:

What’s your view on succubi 

Harmful entities. They're supposed to be a curse, not sex servants. 

2 hours ago, Lightseeker said:

Weor is a bizarre in general. But another aspect I should’ve been more transparent about here, was the goal to enter a half awake half sleep state synchronous to Jungs. He did many interesting things here, such as speak with demons and enter hell. I figured one could summon the goetia with ease from this state..

No idea about Jung, but maybe there could be a parallel with the shamanic state of consciousness outlined by Michael Harner. 

It's far less fascinating than the idea of entering a subtle body at will and turning all of your nights into lucid dreaming experiences, but it's definitely something more realistic to achieve and cultivate, in my opinion. 

I can still remember the samaelian  gnostic re-branding of dream yoga in which the master urged the disciples to reach the subtle plains and visit the sacred temples for dream initiation. 

Over the years, I found the main ideas of dream yoga in different forms and styles and I gradually matured the idea that... it's just a very old scam practice. 

I think that maybe the idea of sex with dakinis might reflect something substantial... although it's really about power and you may not experience the thing as a sexual act at all. 

I once heard a dharma talk by John Peacock, "Buddhism before theravada" which you can find online with Google and that helped me a lot by pointing at some relevant information on how therevada came to be and especially how their meditation system - which has wisdom as a crown jewel- was adopted. 

As for the mantra practice, I think it's significant that it's not mentioned in the Suttas and it's present in the theravada tradition just as a personal contribution of some teachers (there are theravada practitioners who use the mantra "Buddho" for example). 

I would also like to know why mantras are not described as meditation objects in the visuddhimagga. 

They were developed/revealed later or just kept secret? 

Anyone experiencing loss of smell as a CoVid-19 symptom? 

10 hours ago, Miffymog said:

WHY IS CORONAVIRUS SO BAD IN ITALY? 

Italy made more than 36.359 tests and they found a large number of positives, while other European countries like Germany and France don't even have an official number: according to Der Spiegel, in Germany it's around 11.000 and it's just media rumors. No official data released yet. 

There's a statistical correlation between tests made and positives found. 

On 3/2/2020 at 2:37 AM, Heartbreak said:

I feel extremely uncomfortable with spending any money on kriya yoga teachers as I simply do not have any budget for this.

Teachers, Gurus, money and the philosophy of the righteousness and inherent virtue of paying... sometimes it's worth and most of the time it's not.

Get this book https://www.amazon.it/Kriya-Secrets-Revealed-Lessons-Techniques/dp/1479109517

On 12/11/2019 at 7:11 PM, voidisyinyang said:

For those of you who are PMing me questions you can first make a $20 donation to http://paypal.me/ecoechocultivation and then I will do a four hour full lotus meditation session for you to properly answer your question.

thanks for your interest.

 

What kind of questions you can answer? Is there some concentration powers involved? 

... or is it just sharing information about cultivation methods, results and theories? 

I've recently found this article 

https://www.lionsroar.com/research-suggests-tibetan-buddhist-monastics-are-much-more-scared-of-death-than-average/

What do you think? 

I'm not a US citizen, how do I know if I'm leftist enough according to this new rule? 

On 26/7/2019 at 5:41 PM, voidisyinyang said:

So for example Ramana Maharshi states to at first repeat, "I, I, I, I, I, I" in the mind but NOT as a Mantra - rather as logical inference. So Ramana Maharshi then states that mantras become just as a trance and so lose the focus of the logical inference - instead the mind becomes lazy.

I don't resonate with Ramana Maharishi and I don't practice his teachings, but I think that the logic of this instruction is to avoid a state of passive repetition, a condition that it's very frequent in which the practitioner uses a portion of his mind to repeat a mantra, while the rest of the brain ponder its own things. Under those conditions, the rhythm empowers distracting  thoughts.

I don' think that to adopt a melody could fix that. Also, I believe that to reach a platform of fullfilment in compassion and love (which partially correspond to a peculiar inner activity of some nerves in the chest region) doesn't require the adoption of a specific philosophy that theorizes about the self. Although, it may surely help to believe not to be a material body and thus achieve a degree of detachment.

The idea is to practice long enough calming thoughts with rhythms and eventually things will develop by themselves. For example, think about novice bushmen healers who have distinct feeling of "power"to fight the disease... and elder healers who talk about compassion from the gods and the ancestors, not really about fighting, but love.

Refinement takes time.

I believe that some "winds" that travels the spine play a role in all of this and they're influenced by sexual energy.

23 hours ago, joeblast said:

Samhadi is absolutely low frequency high amplitude waveforms like delta waves - I contend this because of the level of action that cascades once its perturbed - its so noticeably different and takes some time to recondition the patterns back proper, I dont care what EEGs have measured on a lab from some random meditator or monk

I can't say very much about the "practical" differences between using faster rhythms and slower rhythms because I don t know. 

I think that, in the long run anything will do to quiet the mind, but ideally samadhi should help the practitioner to "forget" about his physical body and I've found fast rhythms to promote lucid dreaming, oobes and the kind of things in which one starts to lightly detach from a material self.

Also, the sudden appearances of  "whirling sensations" during meditation lead to the direction of going beyond the body.  I believe that the perception of a physical self is a kind of big, unquietable energy-consuming composite thought that requires specific sleep-wake rhythms to be pacified temporarily (and don't kill us) ... Basically, I try to go in the direction of quieting all of the subtle thoughts that tend to persist in quietude and detach from the idea of having a body... unless someday I find some secrets of immortality and rejuvenation in quietude, then I'll be ok with having subtle thoughts

8 hours ago, voidisyinyang said:

So rhythm and melody are not the same as noncommutative phase.  The topic of noncommutative phase is not acknowledged or recognized except only by a few scientists. But quantum physics professor Basil J. Hiley responded to me that yes he was aware that time-frequency is noncommutative.

I agree that rhythm and melody are not strictly the same, but still the repetition of the same melody over and over constitutes a rhythm. You can think for example, of the popular mantra Hare Krishna: devotees are often fascinated by how easily this mantra can be held within the mind and they attribute some supernatural power to it. This mantra has rhythmic qualities of simmetry that the human brain respond to... and - this is more esoteric- it confers a certain power to human thought: India is full of stories of sadhus, gods and demigods who achieved supernatural power with the repetition of secret mantras. 

As for melody itself, I believe that - in some inexplicable way- it comes directly from some basic rhythm. It's born with simmetry and it has repetitive components. It just appears in consciousness. 

When I run in the forest, I meditate on the rhythm produced by the regularity of my steps: at first I have the disappearance of extraneous thoughts, but later some mysterious spontaneous melody comes to my hears and it substitutes the raw rhythm I was focusing on. There are no intentions of changing a rhythm for a melody: it happens spontaneously and it retains the repetitive quality of a sublimated rhythm. 

I believe that Beethoven received a lot of melodies with a similar exercise of meditation on rhythm while walking. 

When a melody is born out of a mental rhythm, the human brain loves it immediately: think again about the popular Beethoven melodies "Fur Elise" or "Moonlight sonata". You love them from the first time. 

But I think that elaborate Rhythms can be applied to any sequence of sounds to transform them into melodies in the brain on the listener. 

Can skip the first 3 minutes 

I'm not talking about how reality works according to some model. This is just how the brain works in meditation: it responds to rhythms (mantras, breath, visualizations, etc...), it produces rhythms (circadian rhythm, sleep cycles, etc...) and when the rhythm is fast enough, there's the perception of emptiness.

The stability of one-pointedness is a fast rhythm: there's a tantric visualization trick to achieve stability and that is to imagine a point of light pulsating, flickering at a very fast rhythm. 

3 hours ago, voidisyinyang said:

Yes this is a Western projection on the idea of repetition. As Yogananda stated, reality is "everfresh, evernew." There really is no repetition due to noncommutative phase as the foundation of reality or what science also calls "time-frequency uncertainty" or "Fourier Uncertainty." So westerners are brainwashed at an early age to think of time as a symmetric geometric wavelength but you can not SEE time.

It's possible that according to your philosophy reality is everfresh, evernew and that there's no repetition ... but your brain couldn't care less. The fact that you can tap the tempo of a metronome almost spontaneously... while a monkey could do that only after extensive trainings, is a clue. 

Also, consider how shamans use rhythm to alter their consciousness... Or think about the rhythmic shaking of bushmen healers. 

Human brains react very peculiarly to rhythms: try to Google "rhythm neuroscience"  and you may find very interesting articles. 

4 hours ago, joeblast said:

Faster works better....well, yes, "speeds in the right range" work better...try drawing a bath and lean back in it, let the water against your eardrums, and then use the things I wrote to figure out how to breathe silently with everyone being underwater-loud   It may be a bit weird to carry that to sitting, but that's the way!

This is a very interesting  exercise 

On 24/7/2019 at 2:16 PM, joeblast said:

What I describe really is anapanasati, just in different words that include the anatomical structures - because the streamlining, harmonization, and efficiency increases are indeed significant - but they need attention and some work in order for those gains to be realized.  So in a sense I'm restating anapanasati in modern terms that attempt to include emphasis on the things that will help one achieve that very high efficiency state that leads to samhadi.  And make it happen as a matter of regularity (as an emphasis!) not just as a glimpse here and there because things happened to accidentally "line up."   As we all know, if the conditions for samhadi arent fulfilled, then samhadi aint happenin.

I'm glad that your meditation is going in a positive direction and although I'm not sure to understand completely your terminology, I feel that this might actually be an improvement of the actual anapanasati.

It just doesn't work that good for me because I'm used to faster rhytms than breathing to get samadhi, but I feel that it's an excellent method. I would be interested to know about its effects on health and longevity.

Also, I'm not sure about what a thoughtform is because when I experience thoughts in meditation, I can't locate them in my body.

On 24/7/2019 at 2:32 PM, voidisyinyang said:

So at that stage - this is called Shen-Qi because you visualize the shen going in one direction while the Qi goes in the other direction. But in fact the Qi is guiding the Shen. Think of the Qi as a Horse in a River and the Chariot is the mind as Shen that is being guided through the water by the Horse - and the water is the materialistic medium - the jing.  So then new jing is created from the Qi which is actually a cosmic spacetime vortex from the Future - this is called the "virtual information field" by qigong master Yan Xin or the "Golden Key" as "superluminal matter" by qigong master Zhang Hongbao.

This seems to be quite an exercise in visualization.

The rhytmic component is the repetition of the same visualizations over and over.

On 22/7/2019 at 1:48 PM, joeblast said:

But whoooo likes to do things the rote way, "its too contrived" and "its not relaxing enough" (at first) and whatever other excuses I've heard over the years

My main excuse is that I literally can't understand the descriptions of  the method that you're using for your meditations.  

Apart from a general idea on focus awareness on various respiratory muscles and functions to make breathing "deeper" (which - in my personal case and subjective experience- is one of the lesser effective meditation method I've ever tried), I've no idea of what it is, but I guess there's a rhythmic component to it. 

10 hours ago, voidisyinyang said:

yeah the heart is undervalued - look into it.

Have you heard of the I AM HEART meditation method of Puran and Suzanne Bair? They teach to combine heartbeat with breathing in different ways. 

10 hours ago, voidisyinyang said:

Micturition (or post-micturition) syncope

I quote from Wikipedia 

When one strains to increase the flow of urine, it stimulates the vagus nerve(usually more pronounced in elderly men with large prostates). The vagus nerve stimulus causes slowing down of the heart (bradycardia) and a drop in blood pressure. The heart cannot perform effectively as a pump because insufficient blood comes to it. 

17 hours ago, voidisyinyang said:

 

OK I already cited the science stating that retaining breath AFTER EXHALE activates the PARAsympathetic nervous system - which is deep relaxation.

There is a number of vagal maneuvers which activate the parasympathetic nervous system and slow down the heart and promote relaxation with other things. For example, even the act of urination can provoke sudden collapse in certain subjects because it activates the vagus nerve. 

Regarding the feats of breath retention, they can be achieved with greater efficacy by breathing pure O2 as a preparation for diving (record is about 20 minutes, if I remember correctly) . The deep fast breathing produce a similar effect, but with more modest results. 

I don't think that those things hold any particular importance in meditation solely for the fact that they can be combined to achieve some states of relaxation. 

17 hours ago, voidisyinyang said:

So it's not just breath retention but meditation is based on cardio-respiratory synchronization

I believe that meditation isn't strictly based on cardio-respiratory synchronization, but on brain rhythmic functions. Therefore, one can - for example--meditate with a mantra without paying attention to the breath. 

17 hours ago, voidisyinyang said:

yeah so just so you know - the breath retention AFTER EXHALE is to be more like 1 to 2 minutes or longer than 2 minutes!

I don't think that we can consider duration as an indicator of the relative importance of single steps to the efficacy of the entire method. 

By actually trying the WHM breathing pattern, you could understand that "something" happens during this brief retention after the inhale that doesn't occur otherwise. I can't say what it is because I don't know, but it feels good and sort of spiritual. 

17 hours ago, voidisyinyang said:

But you seem fixated rather on some purified sutta reading or something, rather than what Master Nan is teaching.

The video that I posted have Master Nan teaching to hold after inhalation, but basically to focus attention on every pauses in the breathing process. He taught not to use force, but to use a little force at the beginning. 

One doesn't need some special skill. Play the video, activate English subtitles and go to minute 2,23 and pause when needed. 

"Don't force it. [...] In between the IN and OUT breath. OUT, IN, CEASE. As soon as you fix your awareness on that moment, your CHI will feel like that it flows freely [...[

17 hours ago, voidisyinyang said:

Yeah half quoting sentences to try to imply they say something else

I'm not that good at implying things. In my personal experience of the practice of breathing meditation with breath retention, I noticed that at times it was very easy to get angry for insignificant matters. 

The proper practice of the Wim Hof method requires to hold the breath with empty lungs at first and then to inhale deeply and hold the breath for about 10 seconds with the lungs full of air... only under those conditions, some "feel good" chemicals are released in the brain. 

Therefore, I wrote that Wim Hof teaches to hold the breath after inhalation AND exhalation. 

As for Master Nan, I have the impression that he said to hold after exhalation AND inhalation, but giving - in private circles--more emphasis to holding the breath after the exhalation. Also, in the video that I posted he actually said OUT, IN, HOLD (giving emphasis to retention after inhalation). 

Those are the points that I made. The fact that Anapanasati doesn't describe kumbhakas was just for developing the discussion a little bit further. 

I should also point out that the practice of certain forms of breathing meditation (especially with retention) may cause at times some "internal frictions" with consequent outbursts of excessive anger for futile reasons ... 

I find it not surprising that Master Nan contradicts himself on certain points (sleep deprivation) , but apparently - and entirely based on the blogpost that drew quoted- it may be that he placed a special emphasis on practicing brief unforced breath retention after the exhalation.

I'm pretty sure that this method isn't described in the anapanasati Sutta. 

On 18/7/2019 at 11:37 AM, voidisyinyang said:

But essentially Master Nan says that at first you can use some force to retain the breath after exhale

No, he doesn't.

He says in minute 2:23

"Don't force it. [...] In between the IN and OUT breath. OUT, IN, CEASE. As soon as you fix your awareness on that moment, your CHI will feel like that it flows freely [...[

7 hours ago, voidisyinyang said:

oops -someone can't read two sentences?

This is how I read it

to focus on the inhalation and to try to hold on to it (the inhalation) .The truth is just the opposite( NOT to focus on the inhalation and to don't hold on to it) (OR to focus on the exhalation). 

6 hours ago, voidisyinyang said:

That's the actual Master Nan quote at 1 minute from that video you posted. Thanks for corroborating the other evidence quotes I posted.

You point to a quote, I point to another. Why he contradicts himself? Is Master Nan hiding a secret breathing technique for enlightenment? 

Maybe the idea of the practice isn't to hold on a secret moment when the breathing ceases, but to observe the mind ceasing. 

And this Master Nan teaching to hold after inhale 

Minute 2:15, activate English subtitles 

Your quotes refers respectively to

1-sound of breathing 

2-focus on exhale 

3-a mind state 

No actual anapana methods