Seeker of Wisdom

Oh, silly me lol.

So far, I've had no contact from Zhunti. To tell myself that she exists just because scripture refers to her and other people believe would be blind faith - intellectually lazy, superstitious, and (re: the Kalama Sutra) not the Buddhist way anyway. If Zhunti exists, she won't hold a grudge against me for my doubt, and may make contact in some way when I'm ready.

Try using the search bar on archive.org for 'shamatha' or 'Alan Wallace'. I can't remember exactly which recording the heart thing was in, but it's in the latter half.

I doubt Zhunti exists, but the mantra still works. Just use the idea of Zhunti as an archetype of the nature of the Buddha you can become, instead of invoking a person invoke your own wisdom and compassion. There's no point debating whether or not Zhunti exists... we have to assume something doesn't exist until a good reason to accept its existence comes up.

Just found this: http://archive.org/details/ShamathaRetreatWithAlanWallace2012 The word 'shamatha' may be Buddhist, but the practice of focusing the mind on one object to develop clarity and stability is universal to all cultivation traditions. TTC verse 10: 'Can you coax your mind from its wandering and keep to the original oneness?...' and 16 'Empty your mind of all thoughts'. Hinduism - last 3 limbs of yoga. Even Alastair Crowley practiced some sort of concentration exercise. For those of you who haven't read The Attention Revolution, or similar, you'll learn a lot of new stuff. Those of us who have will probably also learn a lot of new stuff, particularly from the Q&A's. Enjoy.

I actually find myself relaxing on the out breath and arousing vividness on the in breath automatically. I guess it's a natural mechanism when you get out of your own way. Currently my major practice is anapana (1 hour) and I just changed my minor practice from metta (28 mins) to resting the mind (30 mins), also a little chi stuff. I think when I'm a bit further on I'll make resting the mind my major and anapana my minor. Then, I may replace anapana with awareness of awareness. In the home straight, I'll just focus on awareness of awareness.

The issue there is, what is real and what is junk swirling in the subconscious?

In Tibetan Buddhism it's said that near to when the death process fully ends, the mind is absorbed back into the substrate consciousness so you fall unconscious like in deep sleep (unless you've achieved shamatha) for several hours. Perhaps that's part of why many people experience nothing. Also, maybe some experience something but their brain can't process it upon return to the body so no memory is formed.

I've listened to all the 2012 shamatha retreat now, I've got a much better understanding of resting the mind, awareness of awareness, how shamatha ties in with alaya and rigpa, the 9 stages and other stuff than I had before. Excellent. I'll listen to the Dzogchen retreat again now. I don't intend to formally follow Dzogchen, but the theory and principles from Alan's overview should really complement my current mix of Zen, Taoism and Yoga.

Be reasonable, the plant was hit by a tsunami and earthquake. This isn't proof that nuclear power is dangerous in normal situations, only that there are problems if the plant is hit by two major natural disasters. That's just common sense, nobody would deny that. A modern nuclear power plant not located in an area with high risk of natural disaster actually releases less radiation into the environment than a coal fired plant. You could camp outside a nuclear power plant and get less radiation doses than someone simply living at a high altitude nowhere near civilisation. It would be unsafe to build a nuclear power plant on the San Andreas fault line or Tornado Alley. France has loads of nuclear power plants with no problem. All the facts suggest nuclear power is really the only choice. Fossil fuels have obvious problems. Renewables simply aren't anything like efficient enough. Nuclear produces loads of power with very little fuel and no pollution. Accidents with modern plants are practically impossible unless there's a massive earthquake or something. Oh, and thorium based plants don't make any nuclear waste. And they can use existing waste for fuel. And they can't meltdown. Oh, and when we get fusion going there will be ridiculous efficiency with no nuclear waste or meltdown, just turning hydrogen into helium. Hmmm... yeah I don't see the problem.

Something interesting I've been thinking from http://archive.org/details/ShamathaRetreatWithAlanWallace2012. In one of them, Alan says that during the waking state a variety of chi connected to consciousness is in the third eye; during dreams it's in the throat; and in deep sleep, or samadhi in which the coarse mind has dissolved into the alaya, it's in the heart. Also, when one breaks through to rigpa this chi merges with the indestructible drop in the heart. The Zhunti mantra focuses chi at the heart, and so I've been thinking that perhaps the way it helps prajna build (as the first post suggests it does), is by directly stimulating the chi conditions related to samadhi and to breaking through the alaya to rigpa... helping speed that up. And as Zhunti is called 'Mother of the Buddhas', I'm thinking that she could be taken to symbolise rigpa. The mantra itself could then be interpreted as a call for rigpa to destroy the conceptual delusion of the alaya and coarse mind. I don't know much about Dzogchen, so maybe I'm misusing terms here.

Anderson, if it's so easy, are you liberated yet? Clean the mirror, then try looking in it. Otherwise you only see the dirt. If you haven't attained samadhi, you simply can't see your nature because only the coarse layers of the mind are visible to your coarse awareness. I said 'Zen type stuff' meaning 'advanced teachings with no path or attainment, just seeing your own nature, that are completely impractical for people who aren't as advanced as the original intended recipients'. Skilful means - these sorts of teachings are useful at very advanced levels, not at our level. If we try to follow these teachings, they are useless impractical words which become just another belief. Be practical. Walk up to the Gateless Gate before trying to walk through without moving. I'm done here. Best of luck, if you suddenly get liberated with practically no effort I'll be glad. But tbh, I won't be holding my breath lol.

How do you propose to know your nature without stabilising the mind in samadhi first? If you haven't done that, only the conscious mind is visible to you and the roots of delusion lie far deeper. Letting go leads to liberation, but realisation is needed to let go naturally, from actually deep levels, rather than forcing it. Otherwise letting go is just another action with an outcome being sought! People love talking advanced Zen type stuff with no understanding or experience of the context, foundations and stages of progression needed before this stuff applies. Not that I'm advanced, hell no, but I wouldn't have got even this far taking teachings intended for people radically further on than me and trying to apply them to myself. Letting go of everything is all that's needed, but is that easy? Can someone who hasn't got reasonable wisdom do it - nope. Can someone with no samadhi develop reasonable wisdom - nope. Can someone develop samadhi without a reasonable level of virtue - nope. Back to basics, folks. More 'profound' stuff applies later.

No, I mean that I am not satisfied because of ignorance and clinging which I aim to be free of, I want to let loose my Buddha-nature (although there is no attainment or hindrance or liberation, on the absolute level). Don't you feel like there's *something* missing right in front of your nose? My main desire is to realise that - Tao. Don't get me wrong, I'm not burning with craving for it, it's just a niggle which drives me. If you don't see it that way there's no point arguing, I can't make you want to know and be what I want to and I doubt anyone could change my mind about this. I don't have that much desire for stuff - like you, I'm fairly content. Nobody's saying the world is base and evil - our false conceptions cause us suffering, the world itself is great and so are we. There's nothing pessimistic about that. "But most of all we believe that we exist and we do not see that we also do not exist." I don't know where you're getting this unity thing from. Please read http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta. No-self doesn't deny individual existence, it simply says that individuals are sets of processes and no one of these processes 'does' or 'owns' the others.

1) Are you really absolutely satisfied, meaning you want nothing? What is your motivation for cultivating if you are completely satisfied, why are you on this site? 2) You misunderstand, he's not saying that all is uniformity. He's saying that we aren't inherently existent on our own, we only exist as effects of other things and causes of other things and also there is no part of us that is complete by itself. The packet of processes that each of us is, is individual and unique.

I think the intellect really does have a part to play. Intellectual wisdom is extremely effective for cutting through the coarse layers of craving, delusion and ill-will. However, I think true realisation is a shift in perception that thought alone can't deliver. Conceptions have a place, but plain perception is vital because no amount of thinking can capture the nature of qualia. And going further, prajna wisdom is beyond even perception, letting go of all boundaries, markers, and points of reference so that the true nature of reality, beyond any way of describing and mapping reality and its aspects, can incinerate the last traces of our delusion, craving and ill-will and push us through the Gateless Gate. I love philosophy, it's been so helpful for me to get an accurate understanding that supports my practice, but I don't see it as complete. Meditation is necessary to perceive the nature of a thing or of reality itself directly, rather than (even accurate) concepts of it.

I don't think people have concentration anything like samadhi concentration. The concentration used in school isn't absolute one-pointed effortless vivid focus. Attention spans these days aren't great, people multitask constantly and are addicted to entertainment more than ever. The situation now needs more focus on relaxation and contentment than in the past. I agree in altering with the times, but the basic principles will always hold.

So this whole channelling issue that's come up: *An advanced person can receive clear channels with helpful entities because their mind is on the entity's level. *New Age channellers can access unhelpful entities from the Desire Realm and not even with reliable clarity, and are probably often not even doing that but spewing rubbish from their own subconscious. Basically, I will trust a channeller if they have at least achieved shamatha, because that means they have a clear enough mind to actually do this sort of thing properly. How many New Age channellers have achieved shamatha? Anyone who believes in New Age channellers should be asking themselves why nothing happened in 2012 like they promised. Yeah, tell yourself large-scale ascension is a gradual thing for the next few years... don't hold your breath! What makes all these random people with no meaningful cultivation qualified to contact beings with meaningful cultivation, and receive messages without them being warped by the crud swirling in the channeller's mind?

The way I see it, we need a definite path with meditation and stages of attainment to get the kettle full and switched on, then the water just boils... these teachings of no path and non-meditation need to be taken in context IMO. Most people aren't meditating or following a path, and I don't see them being spontaneously enlightened. And if you purposely follow a path of no-path, that's still a path because that non-doing is itself an action with an aim in mind! Real non-meditation is for people who have got to the stage where they experientially see no distinction between samsara and nirvana, so they can just rest in rigpa/Buddha-nature/Thusness/Tao, and Buddhahood just blooms. It's for people who have mastered shamatha and have deep wisdom from vipassana, who have done lots of meditation in the past. Hui-neng's comments were made in reaction to dead-tree Zen being rampant in that place and time. If he were alive today, he would be screaming at people to work on shamatha. Water goes instantly from not boiling to boiling - but it has to warm up to get to that point. Zen also says to get a foundation with sila, samadhi and prajna. The advanced no-path, no-meditation, no-attainment stuff comes in when you have enough clarity that you are at the clifftop, the end of the path - THAT is when you just leap.

One problem with New Age is how watered down it can be. A lot of important nuance is lacking. Things like all paths being provisional, and the final leap being pathless, are taken as a reason to disregard the concept of paths and stages of attainment entirely. You can only leap off a cliff once you're at the clifftop - when you've seen through phenomena enough to let them all go and just be. Otherwise, try to let go and that letting go is itself an action within the bounds of the mind, a dualistic pushing away of clinging to beliefs and things. The vast majority still need disciplined practice, real effort to stabilise the mind in samadhi, then use that stability to foster insight, all the while being introspective to reduce flaws and cultivate virtues. Eckhart Tolle's present moment awareness is a powerful practice... for people who have already followed a more systematic path to the level where they can just let go and rest in reality. Other people will end up clinging to their own concepts superimposed on the fresh thusness of the Now. So hey, new teachings and teachers can be good. I don't want to be a stuffy traditionalist either. Tolle's practice is kinda like a modern shikantaza or non-meditation... but like them, it needs to come in at the right time. Advanced ideas out of context of the basics progressing up to them are misleading. There is also a troubling spiritual materialism in there - for example, the obsession with energy. Not everything is energy. There is also emotion, thought, beliefs, the mind, consciousness, and so on. Energy is just a kind of form object, which is just one aspect of reality. How does that relate to Tao? Saying energy is everything is not so different from saying atoms are everything, if you think about it. Energy has a place in cultivation for sure, but let's keep our heads and not fixate on chi, chakras and kundalini to the exclusion of everything else in the universe and in ourselves. Similarly, astral projection, channelling and so forth is interesting, but higher planes and the beings who live there are not any more or less products of Tao than this world and our fellow animals. So many people get obsessed with flying around in realms of light talking to 'mystical' beings - but apart from a thrill, what does that achieve? This world and life is a priceless opportunity to improve our selves and step out of the limitations shared by even the most heavenly entities. Someone with three eyes and an aura ten miles wide is just another deluded and unsatisfied being if they have no realisation. Be a human with transcendent wisdom and virtue beyond all realms, even the sparkly shiny ones. Angels - whatever, man, who cares. When they die they are thrown to a birth elsewhere, maybe a grotty one, and are trapped by craving, delusion and ill will just like us. They just do it with more style lol. Thirdly, the pseudoscience and magical thinking bothers me firstly as it's dumb, and secondly as it means society sees all cultivators as weirdos. Science and reason have a place. It seems that someone says something and New Agers never question it or look a bit deeper. *Cough 2012 cough*. When I hear about a conspiracy or something sciency related to cultivation, I like to browse the blogs or forums of sceptics to see what the other side has to say. More often than not, science and reason utterly smash the claim - from fluoride phobia to the moon landing conspiracy to Masuro Emoto's water experiment, it turns out to be bullshit if you take a few minutes to look at it from both sides. It's ironic that New Agers accuse sceptics of being closed-minded, but are often too closed-minded to consider their arguments. I have no patience for the Law of Attraction. Did the Jews manifest the Holocaust, or Darfur's people manifest famine? It's easy to believe The Secret with a roof over your head, good food and no major diseases in your water sources. Obviously not all New Agers are fluffy twats. But the movement as a whole seems to me like an attempt at building a syncretic modern cultivation tradition that could have been awesome, but that sadly suffers from the same naievity, shallowness and need for instant gratification as the society it developed out of and as a reaction to.

Very interesting. You sound pretty grounded about all this, which is good because K is just the beginning! Definitely keep going with this, I don't know what your end goal with meditation/cultivation is, but you can go far.

Which is why I do some chi-related stuff like nadi shodana pranayama, horse stance and mantra to help things along. My understanding is that developing chi helps settle the mind, and is a factor in building the jhana factor of piti. Doing qigong for a while before beginning sitting meditation will mean you're starting meditation at a higher level. But sila-samadhi-prajna is still the core thing and is complete cultivation by itself. Do that, and chi will unblock and build in response to the more central mind and wisdom developments. The point isn't whether a given session was deep, it's whether there was progress in training out laxity and torpor. So it's valid to start with sitting meditation alone, and because the focus is on the mind from the start, if the person doing qigong first starts meditation after 3 years of qigong, after 1 year the person meditating from the start will be at the same depth of meditation - same reduction in laxity and excitation in less time, because that's what they directly went for. They'll just not have much relaxation, stability and focus at the start, but they can look long-term, not cling to expectations, do short sessions regularly and love it after three weeks. That's how it was for me. But why not combine them? Do both qigong and sitting meditation from the start. Start with the mind, and speed up the resulting chi transformation. Best way IMHO.

You're probably right, I would certainly advise against it for schizophrenics and such. But unless there's serious mental or physical issues, I would say this particular cultivation technology should be in the top of your toolkit.

An idea a lot of people have these days is this complete universalism where all paths are valid, 'what's not good for your path is good for my path', nothing can be criticized, there are no universal principles that cultivation must include to be valid cultivation, and so on. Let's illustrate that this is wrong with an extreme example. Human sacrifice. Now, loads of people in history believed that this was the right way to 'please the gods'. If you went back in time to see ancient Aztec priests, and asked them if chucking a freshly decapitated head down a pyramid is good cultivation, they would nod fervently and say 'yes, of course, the gods demand it'. If it is fair to criticize this practice, why isn't it fair to criticize others so long as the arguments are reasonable and not just ad hominems? My critique of AYP (http://thetaobums.com/topic/25632-a-review-of-ayp-from-an-ex-practitioner/) is just one example. You may disagree with my opinion on AYP, but is it ever a good thing to block opposing opinions entirely? In the drive to move away from religious dogma and exclusivism, it seems many of us are also disregarding rigor in establishing the fundamentals of cultivation, and discerning which paths include them and which don't. We are afraid to tell someone that their path is wrong, so we widen the definition of 'cultivation' so far that it becomes practically meaningless. A middle way should be found. My approach is primarily Buddhist. This absolutely doesn't mean I think someone has to be a Buddhist to progress to Buddhahood! Taoism, for example, (excepting those obsessed with chi and the body, which was not the original teaching) leads to the same place but just calls it something different. There are also simply excellent Taoist practices. However, it would be nonsensical to say that Aztec human sacrifice leads anywhere near to Buddhahood, and nonsensical to say that a partially correct path leads all the way. Although there are many valid techniques and we are unique, the Tao is the same for everyone and the obscurations preventing us from realizing it - although unique in detail - are always configurations of common themes, such as clinging to the body, that all unenlightened sentient beings share. Thus, all of the many valid techniques and paths will also share some common themes. The litmus test, as far as I'm concerned, is the presence or lack of five key aspects: Sila. Samadhi. Prajna. Keeps chi in context, and if actively works on it does so safely. Focus kept on realizing Tao to transcend craving/delusion/ill-will and rebirth. Any path lacking any of these is either deficient, or outright wrong.

I can understand his attitude, as a teacher he must have seen people harming themselves, getting ahead of themselves and practising wrongly. He's hoping overconfident people will be a bit more sensible with small universe, a valid concern. He's just taken his own bias against meditation and mixed it with caution on advanced chi practice, leading to another extreme where he thinks you have to do foundation chi practice for years before anything else. His heart seems to be in the right place. Sensible people will take his warnings with a grain of salt, and some of the arrogant will be given some pause for thought, so overall what he's said should be of benefit anyway!