Seeker of Wisdom

Different karma would cause rebirths in different places, so there would be a correlation with race because the different races aren't spread equally over the world. But it would take the same karma to be born one race in a particular area as it would to be born a different race in an identical area and situation. Race itself is entirely irrelevant.

Maybe technology could give glimpses of facsimiles of states like jhana. But, only the conscious and subconscious functions closely alongside the physical brain. The substrate consciousness is simply not something technology can really deal with, and Tao is realised after breaking through the substrate. Any change would only be a facsimile, and would be lost upon death. That said, anything which would give people an impetus to change themselves and to cultivate, a rough idea of a bigger picture, I would wholly support... so long as they actually go on to cultivate instead of clinging to a machine.

Are you going to coat the world in leather, or put on shoes? Seriously though, this is a good mindset. Great hunger for something *real*. See the defects of samsara, see how others are in a worse position because they don't even know that they're trapped, and determine to become free - not merely for your sake, but so that you can help others free themselves (bodhichitta).

Body of the Tao? The fundamental principle behind existence doesn't have characteristics, it's beyond all phenomena, not an object or a subject. If it had body it would have form. It doesn't have form, but nor can it really be said to be formless. You don't connect with Tao, you realise it's there and that everything is just a mirage within it. To connect would imply things can exist independent of it.

The Chinese have a curse - 'may you become enlightened in one lifetime.' Yeah, anyway... I don't see karma the way some people present it, as like you hit someone, and that magically causes you to trip over a rock and bruise your face in a future life. My interpretation is that acts and thoughts leave imprints in the substrate consciousness (the nature of which depends on the mindset/intention behind the acts or thoughts) and you are reborn in a place/body matching those imprints. What happens during those rebirths isn't explicitly determined by karma. Born with a genetic predisposition for cancer - that's karma. Get cancer from smoking - I'd call that a mundane level of cause and effect (initiated by stupidity). But karma could cause a rebirth in a place rife with cigarette addiction. In case anyone here is offended by an implied 'they deserve it' - I'm not saying that, the mindstream the karma ripens on isn't the same as the one that planted it, just a continuity... besides, I'm not vengeful. Some people object to the idea of karma as suggesting Holocaust victims deserved it. In my view of karma, Holocaust victims weren't being repaid karma: their karma gave them good rebirths, but then the Nazis killed innocent people by their own will.

The secret lies in uniting stillness and motion. If you allow angry, etc, thoughts to flow through your mind unimpeded like clouds in the sky, not attacking them directly, being still in the flurry, your mind will heal itself and there will be corresponding changes in your chi. Obviously we aim to not have angry, etc, thoughts, but stamping on them doesn't help. Let them be, maybe gently acknowledge that they are unskillful and cultivate the opposite, and the natural luminosity of the mind does more uprooting these tendencies than conscious will can. Then kinks in your chi will straighten out with no forceful effort on your part. In this process it may seem your chi is temporarily unbalanced... in reality it is working towards flowing smoother than ever. Letting the river carry you aimlessly or fighting the current both lead nowhere. Nudge yourself down the wanted tributaries. This is judo, not boxing or being a mat. A relevant thread: http://thetaobums.com/topic/31033-resting-the-mind-in-its-natural-state/

There's your evidence. Real open-mindedness involves being open to the views of the minority AND the majority. It's much easier to brush aside an argument against a strongly held belief as 'they discount it because it doesn't fit their framework', than it is to ask yourself whether your framework should be reconsidered in light of their reasoning. If someone had told me 3 years ago I would end up more or less Buddhist soon, I would have laughed. I was laughing at how ridiculous the idea of OBE's is while messing around with an OBE meditation on YouTube, 'ha ha these people are dumb'... up to the moment I felt a powerful force pulling me out of my body. Some would say that was a placebo or something... but I was laughing at it being stupid seconds before, normal mental state, no weird lighting, drugs, or anything! When that experience forced me to question all my beliefs and rebuild them, I ended up with a completely different perspective from before. I had been a convinced atheist, unable to see the problems with that belief system. It took completely tearing old ideas down and reconsidering everything to change that. Maybe you should do the same with astrology.

Astrology only seems to work because the predictions, deliberately or accidentally, use a lot of Barnum statements. And when they are obviously wrong, confirmation bias swoops in. As far as I'm concerned, it's pure bull. How was it decided what a particular planet being in between earth and a particular constellation signifies? It's completely arbitrary. What about all the stars and planets we didn't decide to consider important - what's so special about the zodiac constellations? How could there be any correlation between the movement of astronomical bodies vast distances away, which are predictable cycles dictated by physics, and the lives of humans? And if one actually directly causes the other, that suggests that a physical force, violating the inverse square rule, somehow manipulates the brain in an extremely precise way - and if astronomical bodies produce this force, we'd expect the earth, moon and sun to easily dominate. Many smart people believe in astrology - smart people can be very good at devising arguments to justify hokum.

First I'll define some terms: *Coarse excitation - awareness completely leaves object. *Moderate excitation - awareness only slightly on object. *Subtle excitation - awareness not quite fully on object. *Coarse laxity - completely spaced out. *Moderate laxity - dull level of vividness. *Subtle laxity - object vivid but dull attention. Brief summary of the stages of shamatha: 1) Can place awareness on something. 2) Avoid coarse excitation for about a minute. 3) Can avoid coarse excitation for majority of session and quickly correct it. 4) No coarse excitation. 5) Take satisfaction in samadhi, no coarse laxity. 6) No moderate excitation, lots of junk in the mind clearing out. 7) No moderate laxity. 8) No excitation or laxity, but effort required. 9) Effortless samadhi, but causes of excitation and laxity are still latent. Shamatha is achieved when stage 9 has deepened into access concentration, which makes the jhanas possible.

Oh, I'm aware that this is just a shamatha practice, which can lead to some insights, but doesn't have the full vipasanna side or capacity for breaking through to rigpa needed for liberation. Basically my plan right now is to: 1) Reach stage 4 focusing on anapana, while also doing this as a secondary practice to cut at my hindrances from another angle. 2) Switch focus to resting the mind, but continue with anapana as a secondary since it's so good for relaxation and so on - and reach around stage 7. 3) Replace anapana with awareness of awareness to get started with that super-subtle practice. 4) When I've got the hang of awareness of awareness, just use that to achieve shamatha. 5) Use koans for vipasanna. Of course, I may end up following a different route depending on my experience.

No idea. Alan Wallace, who is fluent in Tibetan, said it and that Tibetans therefore say "I am practising/accomplishing shamatha" in The Attention Revolution. It's like the tree is latent in the seed, but it's still got to be planted and watered to really have a tree. It's important to just enjoy doing the practice while doing it, and afterwards recognise that the seed is sprouting and look forward to that tree. Also, even in poor sessions obscurations are being rubbed off.

Let's not make this another alwayson vs. the world thread.

So Alan Wallace compared resting the mind to very deep free association, and I can see why. The chain of thoughts, memories and quite elaborate images that come up is surprising, and really shows how much inadvertently repressed gunk there is in a normal person. The average person is so badly misusing the incredible capacity of their mind. Dive deep into the crazy!

Can this thread not get derailed with arguments irrelevant to the actual topic out of a minority's pathological need to make everyone else agree with them and join the one true tradition, as though they are omniscient and someone else being wrong about a little thing is the end of the friggin' world - when most of the time the other person was right anyway but used different terminology or was making a subtle point which the antagonist minority couldn't be bothered to consider, or maybe did consider but deliberately strawmanned to be an awkward trollish nuisance? Cheers.

The question isn't 'how does the body cause spirituality?', but 'how does our spiritual state at the end of one life determine what body we get in the next?'. The body definitely has relevance, there are correlations, but not everything is an emergent property of matter and energy. I see matter/energy and mind/consciousness as different but linked things. Spirituality wouldn't evolve, because it encourages contentment, and by contrast evolution would encourage stocking up on resources and mating with everyone. I'm not getting into a materialism vs. dialectical monism debate, because I just don't see a reason to waste time and energy arguing on the internet, but I wanted to suggest a different viewpoint.

Rex - the Tibetan word for 'achieving' also means 'practising'.

Formally the full koan is 'Two hands clapping makes a sound. What is the sound of one hand clapping?' So 'clap' here refers to the slapping of one hand against another, in which case the idea of 'one hand clapping' is nonsense and this koan has no answer. And even koans with answers aren't supposed to be solved intellectually ('I always thought that there is a valid answer) - the intellect doesn't do gnosis.

You don't cease to exist and dissolve into Tao. You know the true nature of things and the Tao they emanate from. The property of existing comes from Tao - so you have to exist to be within Tao, and can't exist outside Tao. There's a kind of non-duality there so deep it's beyond duality and non-duality.

Vashta Nerada? Run. Just run.

A koan is a statement, anecdote or question used as a Zen Buddhist form of vipasanna. In zazen, there are three main stages. First, achieving shamatha, usually with emphasis on anapana sati. Second, developing some realisation with koan practice. Finally, in shikantaza, which is like Dzogchen non-meditation, letting go of everything without intent to let go, resting in Suchness. It's possible to skip shamatha as a separate stage and achieve it with koan practice, but IMHO it's easier to achieve shamatha faster with methods designed for it specifically, then make faster progress with koans. It is not possible to jump ahead to shikantaza, as unless there is serious prajna wisdom you will be pushing away clinging while actively trying to let go with an aim in mind. There are two types of koans - those with answers, and completely nonsensical ones with no answers. "If a tree falls in the forest with nobody around, does it make a sound?" - an example of the former. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" - an example of the latter. A person concentrates on the question or concept raised by a koan, not thinking about it but just concentrating on something impossible to solve with the intellect. This is done in sitting practice and constantly when off the cushion too, to generate Great Doubt. This kind of doubt smashes the obscuration of dualistic ideas and preconceptions about the nature of the koan. In the case of the latter type of koan, no answer will be realised as there wasn't one, but the practitioner has a shift in perception which may lead to profound realisations. In the case of the former, the practitioner's innate prajna wisdom bursts forth to solve the koan, with a resulting shift in perception. Master Nan also said that koans tie up the omnipresent mental factor of intent.

Your friend may be interested in this analysis of The Song of Songs from the OT: http://www.meditationexpert.com/comparative-religion/c_Song_of_Songs.html

Stosh, consider a pilot's HUD. It's useful for the pilot to see numbers and lines superimposed on the landscape while he's flying, but he doesn't see them when out of the plane on the ground - if he does, he should see a doctor! Which view is 'right' and which 'wrong' out of the one with the HUD and the one without? You exist because, well, of course you do. But also, you are relative as experienced by different people (including yourself) and 'exist' only due to a set of causes, with no innate characteristics or existence independent of other things. Thus, you exist and don't exist. Any conception of reality is, like the pilot's HUD, relative truth; while absolute truth is non-conceptual.

I suppose there's a risk of kids screwing with kundalini and whatnot, but it's still a censorship of different beliefs. I totally disagree with the New Age bullshit out there, but I don't want it censored.

IMHO... Anything that is an 'experience' that seems to be 'attained' and 'perceived' is not Tao/Self/etc, but a phenomenon on the path. Don't cling to this experience and reify it as something ultimate. This stillness is a subtle foundation to forms, and consciousness functions in relation to it as they are complementary opposites. Neither of them are Tao because they are two phenomena which affect each other. Tao is beyond forms and consciousness, so realising Tao won't be an experience with a sense of attainment, but an inconceivable switch (with no actual change from the highest perspective) to a completely different state of being neither one way or the other, and not in between or both either.