Seeker of Wisdom

For the sacred word - how about 'This' or 'Truth' or 'What?'.

I think he meant, 'who's that?'.

I'm not sure what to think about this, but would dessication make the bones shrink? Do you know of a natural process that could make that happen as it does in these cases? The transference of enough matter to account for this shrinkage into the material world's photons or energy would be, given E=mc², a lot. Hypothetically - what if only a little matter produces rainbow lights, and the rest is directly transferred into something not within the domain of physics at all? That wouldn't break the law of conservation of mass and energy if the law included nonphysical substances and energies, as there would be a loss of matter and energy on the physical level but an equivalent gain elsewhere.

Short sarcastic statements, focusing on faults in others rather than yourself, liking your own posts... Careful, don't turn into Rongzom Fan. You're an intelligent guy, with much more knowledge than me - I'd love to see you be a good Dharma practitioner, as well as a good scholar.

Hell, that sounds amazing. I don't know much about magick, but it seems tricky for beginners to get started with. I'm going to try module 1 and see how I find it. Anyone with some interest should donate a few bucks, there's noble intent behind this. *edit* I'll be posting my thoughts and experiences from this here.

Well, you're welcome to feel that way. I'm not trying to be a teacher. I'm still new to this stuff, loads of the people here have much more knowledge and experience than me. But if someone asks a question and I feel like I have something to say that might be helpful, or if no question was asked but I feel like writing something anyway, I'll say it. I won't just put it aside for a few years until I feel worthy. I don't know you, maybe you're a great cultivator, maybe you're even less experienced than me and just don't like me. Either way, if I come off as arrogant from what I say or how I say it, please tell me exactly what the problem is, because I need all the guidance I can get. Arrogance is definitely one of my flaws, and if you can call me out on it for me, cheers. *edit* if you want to talk to me more about this, click the 2nd link in my sig.

Perhaps this may help? I'll also add - we can only become stronger by facing challenges. We can't develop truly robust love if there is nobody around that we could hate, any more than an athlete can become strong lifting up feathers. Hang in there, cultivate the immeasurables - emphasising loving-kindness and compassion for yourself and sympathetic joy and equanimity for the people who bother you - and find some way to have an open heart that's still defended by your ribcage. It's disappointing that most of society seems to be mired in mundane concerns, but we have to accept that all we can do is work on ourselves. Trying to teach people who aren't interested just leads to frustration.

Like ^ says, get your bearings. Research in brief the main paths out there, then go deeply into one or two that fit your needs. Cultivators need to be able to explain what they do, what it achieves, how it achieves that, and how the results fit into the big picture of cultivation. Otherwise you will get confused and distracted, and lack motivation. For example, shamatha is currently the core of my practice and I can explain that it achieves access concentration and the jhanas and what they are, the basic mechanics of how shamatha practice leads to those results by pacifying the 5 hindrances with the 5 jhana factors, and why access concentration has a significant role in cultivation as a whole by steadying the mind for deeper virtues and insights. I advise you keep up whatever practice you're currently doing for the time being, so you are doing something there, but focus on research until you feel clear about what you intend to do. See this Yoga Sutras commentary, and the Hindu subforum, if you are interested in things like Vedanta. See the Tao Te Ching for Taoism, and the Taoist section. For Buddhism see The Attention Revolution by Alan Wallace and, if you really want to go deep, Satipatthana: the direct path to realisation by Ven. Analayo. I'm also doing a bare bones guide in my PPF from the foundations up, suited for confused beginners.

I got into cultivation in the first place because of this kind of thing. I was a staunch atheist, yet while trying an astral projection meditation I came across on YouTube (literally laughing at how stupid I thought people who believe that sort of thing are) solely out of boredom, I had a very strong sensation of my astral body attempting to rise out of the physical body. I aborted the experience out of fear before I managed to get anywhere. Obviously not a placebo: maybe if it had merely happened unexpectedly or with drugs or something I could have thought that it was some idea of OBE from my subconscious playing around, but this was actively against my expectations and entire view of life, while I was awake and in a normal state of consciousness. Some would say that the experience of astral projection is just from mixed up proprioception signals in the brain, but that doesn't explain why my tactile experience (vibrating, etc) perfectly matched what everyone into OBEs describes, without me so much as hearing in passing about that before. So suddenly my certainty about atheism and materialism was shattered. Really life-changing. I got into a new-agey phase for a year or so, while I went through the disorientating process of trying to learn about the different POV's out there and get a new one of my own. During that time I tried to astral project, but never had real success. By the end of the new-agey phase I was turning towards the Buddhist POV, and soon stopped trying to project because I saw it as completely irrelevant to enlightenment. Now I still don't consider it a high priority, but I'm not so dogmatic as to call it a complete waste of time - it would probably be useful for insight into the nature of rebirth, the flaws of heavenly planes, meeting great teachers and stuff.

The way the human mind and body is constructed means that all stimuli are processed a fraction of a second after they happen. This is to make up for the limited speed of nerve signals, so there isn't a lag between, for example, seeing something touch our feet and feeling it. If you never blink, you will still be seeing an image fractionally in the past. But that has nothing to do with cultivation. If you recall an event from 10 years ago, that experience of remembering is still a present moment eexperience although its referent is in the past. You can still recognise the reality of the ever-fresh suchness of the moment. You think recognising Truth is about blinking less? Instead of trying to blink less, try to recognise the true nature of your experience: constantly shifting moments, a constantly flickering Now that the mind cannot grasp.

Some of the people interested in this stuff are going to be fruitloops, or prone to it. Also if you can injure your body exercising wrongly, stands to reason cultivation can cause issues in some people, especially if done wrongly. The moral of the story is, let's sort ourselves out.

Don't apply the idea of 'foulness' too literally, the reason for such language is to jab people out of attachment and aid recall, not to go to the other extreme of aversion. People have gone nuts from that. If you're going to use these body contemplation methods, while you're doing the practice take a neutral, 'ah, the body is just these parts' tone, like so:

Spotless, could you give your perspective on what 'Awakening' is, if it is different to 'enlightenment' and, if so, what the difference is. My POV is that not many have achieved full enlightenment and this is very unlikely or even impossible to just happen, but there are sort of checkpoints along the way, which can happen with little apparent cause in ripe people. Also how you pass through them differs in your path - this accounts for some batgap people describing Awakening as clearly different things but all of them being lasting positive shifts, some people have emptiness-style realisations e.g. anatta first while others have luminosity-style realisations first e.g. pure consciousness. From your knowledge and experience is this a fair way of viewing it?

I just hope I can afford it, should've taken advantage of that Black Friday sale. Maybe I can pay $0 per month for the next 6 months?

Cheers.

With a slight change: "I can write pages and pages on this, but in brief, civil rights is a leveling. It seeks to make equal what is inherently unequal. It's one thing if whites are above blacks, or vice versa, and the leveling is an average. But there is no above or below. White and black are totally different, like apples and oranges. They are not on the same scale to begin with. The only way you can level the two, and put them on the same plane, is to black up the white and white up the black. BOTH are therefore dragged down..." Think about it.

The physical appearance of a woman is irrelevant to the quality of her arguments. Men and woman are both humans, the differences are significant but not to the extent that it's a perversion of nature if women are allowed to vote, drive cars, get equal pay and so on. Feminism is an imperfect movement in the West, but do you seriously believe women shouldn't be allowed to work? That husbands should still be able to rape their wives legally? That women should have no access to higher education? Because these are some of the things that feminism has sorted out in the West. Personally I don't like some points in recent times (like the quota thing BD says ^, jobs should be on merit with gender irrelevant), but the larger picture in the benefits for the economy and society of female workers and voters, the ethics of women not being an underclass, and the benefits for men of being able to relate to women as people rather than fragile decorative cleaning/sex robots makes me hope feminism really takes hold in countries that need it. Mike, you need to find a view of masculinity that is about your true values rather than 1950's gender roles. If you need to be telling a woman what to do to feel like a man than that's sad. A real man knows he's one, whether the women around him are cooking him steak in the kitchen all day or researching autoimmune disorders in biochemical labs.

*The shamanism question - I'm not familiar enough with shamanism to comment on it properly, but regarding the idea of 'allowing Buddha to take over' - so far as I am aware there's nothing in Buddhism about channelling/invoking Buddhas. Remember, they are not gods and do not have the ability to make us enlightened. Rather devotional practices, particularly stuff with yidams, is based on the rationale of modelling yourself on that figure in order to help you recognise their traits within yourself. Whether that figure even exists is irrelevant from my POV. It isn't actually about worship or allowing another entity access to your mind (although some people do seem to see and receive teachings from Buddhas along the way). 'The Buddha you bow to is yourself'. If you read the Platform Sutra, Hui-neng gives an interesting interpretation of taking refuge in the Three Jewels along those lines. *On Buddhism and Taoism not being religion, I would argue that the systems themselves are religions, but they are religions that practitioners can USE rather than religions that practitioners must BELONG TO. Alan Wallace describes Buddhist perspectives as working hypotheses - and these are meant to be tested and ultimately left behind when their purpose has been achieved. *As for the differences between Buddhism and Taoism... I know less about Taoism than Buddhism so my comments will be flawed, but here's some thoughts: 1) It depends on the form of Buddhism. Zen is very similar to Taoism, others are more different in approach. I have a mix of Therevada, Zen, Vajrayana and goodies beyond Buddhism right now, which means that some of the time I'm basically practising Taoism and other times I'm being far more analytical. 2) So Buddhism is often much more analytical - not necessarily in terms of intellectual reasoning, but definitely in close examination of experience, with the practice of vipassanna/vipashyana. Therevada especially uses probing into intricate details of processes like perception and so forth to discover their impermanence, dukkha and not-self nature. Breaking everything down into the smallest parts and how they interact, for example as outlined in the satipatthana sutta. 3) The ideas of dukkha and emptiness are also really key to Buddhism and not emphasised in the same way in Taoism. I'm aware there is an idea of void in Taoism, but when I've seen that discussed it seems people are talking about a 'thing', unlike the Buddhist concept of everything lacking substantial existence. I use the word 'Tao' as more a verb than a noun for the same reason. The idea of not-self isn't explicitly described in Taoism as far as I know, while it is a cornerstone of Buddhism. 4) Taoism, like Zen and Vajrayana, seems to focus on transcending dualistic concepts by releasing into Tao, so that wu wei flows. But even Zen and Dzogchen have methods for actively developing specific mental qualities with linear progression, which Taoism doesn't tend to favour. As stated above, some forms of Buddhism are more analytical. Therevada and non-Zen Mahayana works by replacing a false concept with a correct one, which then dissolves by itself as it is no longer needed. Hence 'form is void' (destroying the ideas of substantialism and nihilism) is followed by 'void is form' (the idea of emptiness is now another object of attachment, so gets released). This vipashyana practice is also combined with shamatha. 5) Most forms of Buddhism have little direct focus on issues of chi, and when they do look at the body it tends to be to remember death, or consider the body parts to recognise that the body is dukkha and not-self. Taoism and Vajrayana actively deal with chi to facilitate faster unfolding of the mind.

Of course they're made up. You'd have to be mentally retarded to believe such stories - but that's not the point. Fables and fairy tales tend to be extreme across all cultures, Goldilocks didn't really deserve to be eaten and the original Cinderella story was a real river of blood. This shocking people to ram a point home thing is far from being just a Tibetan Buddhist thing. It's universal because it works and it's less boring, and especially useful when it comes to remembering an oral teaching. What can be believed in Buddhism is the practice and its effects. Strip away all the Asian cultural artifacts on the surface. You know from your own experience, TI, that shamatha is a legit thing. Is it such an extrapolation that the realisations attainable through the union of shamatha and vipashyana may also be legit? I think it's a reasonable working hypothesis.

I see where you're coming from, but just because time is an abstract concept and human ways of measuring it are arbitrary, doesn't mean it's illusory. The seasons do follow a predictable pattern, it is reasonable to say 'winter begins in X months' and plan ahead. Animals do have a sense of time. They would not be able to survive long if they didn't monitor natural cycles to determine when their prey/predators will be most active, when they will need to prepare to migrate or hibernate, etc. A bear notices when the weather starts to change and knows to binge on salmon to survive the coming hibernation. There is some understanding of time, of what is coming up and what needs to be done. Dogs often know the routines of their owners, they wait at the door when they know their owner will be back soon. That involves a sense of time based on circadian rhythms, light intensity and temperature.

I see working with the chi side of things as auxiliary to my mental development. The mind and body are connected, so I think working with both is the fastest way to go, but, ultimately, it's the mind that is either deluded or enlightened, so that's the priority. Mind development alone is enough, but it's slower.

And how many had the guts, determination and patience to say 'no, I came all this way, you will teach me!' and refuse to go? That sort of test has been common for ages. People respect Milarepa's determination to get teachings, but who can emulate him? I doubt I could to be honest. In the East the useful techniques have been more available than in the West, where the exoteric forms of the Abrahamic religions are fairly useless and dominant. Someone practising yoga in India would get respect while someone practising magick in England would get executed for heresy. It's just unlucky that the West has been dominated by unhelpful dogma while the East was developing effective practices for realisation. An anthropologist would probably be able to explain why. Well, we're all here for you... I don't have a teacher myself, and right now that's OK. Unless you want to devote yourself to a specific tradition, you can manage with the advice of fellow cultivators and the information publicly available. Your desperation is good. It's what drove every great practitioner, the refusal to stop until every bond is cut and the light has burned away even itself. If you want to find out directly, as we all do, all you need to do is work on these universal things: virtue, samadhi and insight. Just get walking and see yourself unfold. If you try to figure this all out you'll just frustrate yourself - I've been there! Instead just practice, avoid making any assumptions, see what you find.

Perhaps Robert Bruce could help? Look him up.

Being strong enough to not want to fight but be willing to do so if necessary may look outwardly the same as being too weak to ever fight, but one is grounded in wisdom and the other in fear.