Bearded Dragon

I just wrote something about selfishness. Might post it later. The crux of it was basically that everything is selfish so the only thing you can do about it is refine your view of self. Then when everything is the same in the end you undoubtedly find that selfishness and selflessness are the same.

Ok looks like I'll have to spell it out. There is a lot of nonsense in regards to the various traditions. Stuff that is not completely useless but serves to direct benefit in regards to spiritual evolution. Perhaps you need a technique to still the mind. Great. Choose one then drop it once it's served it's purpose. Perhaps you're too weak to concentrate on that which matters most. OK, then maybe some energy work might be required. That's all energy work is good for (generation of a baseline of energy such that a continuum of concentration can be maintained). You will find as you search more on this topic that the most valuable material in each tradition is fundamentally the same. It's only the supplementary material that is different. As such you don't have to choose one. Real practice is void of labels.

Buddha wasn't buddhist. Laozi wasn't taoist.

The only hands on experience I've had was a weekend workshop with Bruce. It was the only time I've done something over a weekend and come away with a surplus of energy rather than being drained. I can tell that what he teaches is high quality from what I know from other stuff.

http://www.energyarts.com/instructors

You're probably tensing too much. Whether you have the sensitivity to feel it or not. Since it seems you still want to continue this practice then I would suggest refinining the process such that you only do it by intent. A thought of energy moving. If you do anything physically like trying to suck up energy or pump it with your breath you will invariably introduce tension. You CAN do those things but it would be wise to be good enough to be at a high level of relaxation like maybe 5+ years worth of experience. I'm talking about real relaxation. Not the superficial kind. If you don't know what I mean then you don't have it.

Fireflies.... You better be careful or they'll get canceled after their first season.

The gore in stuff like ninja scroll was good. A lot of the time it seems they might put it in the manga but tone it down in the anime. You still get it though. Just not that much.

Bankei talked about this a lot.

One wouldn't want to fathom how many people have gone cross-eyed or caused eye strain by not understanding this. Turning the light around is setting up the conditions for awareness of awareness. The light is awareness and the source is awareness. How do you become aware of awareness? By chipping away everything else. Whatever process. It doesn't matter as long as you aren't creating more fixations. If you want to do something with the eyes just practice letting the images come to you without looking out for them. Same thing with the other senses. This helps with the process because you feel like you aren't really doing anything (not so much anyway) and your focus can be moreso on awareness.

I didn't watch TV or play computer games much for years. Was on the computer enough at work and felt like too much exposure put me into zombie mode. Only recently did I start doing a bit more of both just to play around with that idea of staying in empty/aware mode. It's not easy, although it seems like it should be.

It really has not much to do with the Dao. You can understand that the Dao is outside of creation (yin/yang) from the most basic of Daoist theory. That's on an intellectual level. Then there is experiencing it. If you get caught up in creation then how can you experience what's beyond it? Any mind form is part of creation. If you want to start from engineering terms then take the concept of a potential difference and apply yourself in that manner. Our thoughts and concepts are resistors in that network, and those resistances are delusion since you're not really looking at potential across a single resistor but a whole crapload of others. The reference point is unknown so it's worth finding. Then you can work with potential freely without delusion. The method I use mostly is the one Bankei talked about. It's very simple and you don't have to actually spend time doing anything. Check him out. I know what it's like to be in that situation of relating things back to engineering. You can take it so far but in the end it doesn't really get you very far. The only thing that it helped me with is the idea of potential, which you will find that hardly anyone understands.

There is this duality thing. Fair enough. Most 2 year olds know about opposites. With any kind of knowledge in computers it's no far stretch to then accept that you can make any combination of things out of the base 2 number system. Again this is no great revelation. So, why do we care about this stuff? I'll highlight a few points and you can make up your own mind. The first point I'll make is that yin and yang don't mean ANYTHING unless there is a reference back to 'self'. I'm not going into what 'self' is as that's an entirely different discussion. I could make a computer game with a great big mass of dualities in it but if nobody plays the game then any kind of knowledge you think you have about the game is meaningless dribble. All these yin/yang combinations only come alive when you start to interact with them. Only in application are they relevant. There is no application without a doer (reference). As such, any talk of absolute yin and yang is part of the "knowledge of the game without playing it" scenario and has no practical value. If I was a builder it would be like having a tape measure. It just lays out the continuum without providing any information.You could talk about the poles of magnets. So what? It doesn't effect me so how is it relevant at all? Once I start interacting with magnets then it's relevant, but would you look at that.... now there's a reference point. Due to the reference to 'self' in the previous point it would be a good idea to make the next point in regards to figuring out what that 'self' is. What could be more of an illusion than going through life with the law of duality in mind but having the delusion of applying it to a reference that isn't really you? Any traditional methods from every legitimate tradition are very clear in regards to how to do this with respect to yin and yang. The idea in this respect is to have no preference to either. Non-attachment to either side of duality. When I see that people want to improve themselves by just having more positive attributes it worries me a little. This is the idea of society that we have to be more positive. In actual fact by encouraging attachment to positive attributes we're setting up the conditions for misery when life throws a curveball and you plummet into negativity. You really want to be able to handle life's little twists and turns, and to do that you have to be able to accept anything on either side of duality. In other words if you're serious about refinement then you'll take whatever comes along and not force a contrived existence of delusion by putting a bandaid over your issues by just merely having more positive attributes. So, you want to work with yin and yang directly. Since I have explained that the issue of 'self' is paramount, and that the legitimate methods of discovering this endorse non-attachment to both yin and yang, it should be more or less clear that you shouldn't really care about yin or yang at all until you solve the issue of 'self'. At that point it's not even intellectual, so to be honest I doubt there is much benefit talking about it much at all.

Anyone who functions in normal every day life gets the difference. This is part of the reason why this stuff doesn't matter so much. We already get it without thinking about it. The music thing is a good point for letting go and accepting all outcomes. If you drop the idea of harmony and dissonance in favour of a definition of music that encompasses any sound then you're open to the full spectrum of sound variances. Thus music can then tell the story of stuff that people generally don't like, such as noise. Noise is valid. Any sound is valid and descriptive. This is again part of the "why should we care?". In accepting everything you're free from dualism. It's there but you don't care.

Self consciousness seems to be the mud and self awareness seems to be the water. If you just aim to lose self consciousness then self awareness naturally takes over. This is what I have experienced. Having an unbending desire to lose any irrational thoughts about self (image, personality, whatever) has been the catalyst over the years. Things don't happen over night but if you make that refinement a part of you then it just becomes a part of growing up. People naturally do that anyway, to a certain extent. This is how I have refined myself without doing anything. Sometimes I throw myself in the fire to speed up the process. The problem that I see, especially in people twice my age, is that they don't want to change, they give up, or they self sabotage. This is the road to death, not the road to life. I don't think it matters what method you use. As long as it works. Esoteric or non-esoteric.

You could probably even put a name in there. It's not at all subtle even as it is. haha.

haha ok, whatever. I'm done with this joke of a thread.

' Does your profound understanding help you to come to that conclusion? It's funny that you're positioning yourself as an authority on reality and illusion and you make such a presumption. Hmmmm. That's totally ok also. We've all been there. Most are still there. Food for thought.

Sure, you could say that nothing is yin and something is yang (or vice versa). Why should I care? It doesn't help in any way to know this. Application is more important, and in application there is only potential. Potential needs a reference. Reference is perspective. The issue of reality has everything to do with perspective. Knowing this is not even the hard part. The hard part is dealing with having a reference outside of creation. BOOM! Then some-thing and no-thing are both things and thus by intellectual reasoning yin is also yang. Thus an intellectual can of worms is opened. I just let the worms do their own thing. It's not worth making your head hurt over something that doesn't help in any regard.

This is a key point. You want to be able to take the bad and the good, and not be bothered if they are there or if they don't last. The foggy thing is something I get every morning after waking up. It's a chance to penetrate through it in order to learn how (not that I'm too good at it since I never saw it in this manner until not that long ago). If you're anything like I've been with these experiences you'll sit down tomorrow and try and make it happen again. I eventually realised that in trying to make it happen again I was not correctly replicating the conditions that made it occur in the first place. So obvious, but that didn't stop me from trying.

Just do descending vipassana for a while. Go from head to toes, then jump back to head etc. Include the point just behind the eyes if you haven't already. I find that's a big one for allowing the energy to drop. If you look at something then stop and relax your eyes it's the part that you feel let go that I'm talking about it. If you don't have that free flow that Goenka talks about then work out what it is that's stopping it. If you do then perhaps it's just on the outside and you need to go a bit deeper to investigate what's stuck.

You missed something important, Panda. This is not an advanced practice. This IS the practice. We're not talking about a deep meditative state while you're walking around. There is stuff you can be refining right now without even considering meditation. Start with that. You just talked about a whole lot of bs which is nothing but a roadblock. Forget about it. You said "I can't do that. Not even a little bit". That is garbage. You don't have to do anything to exist so how could there be advanced practices? Just let go of stuff and wait. It's so simple. From my experience the more you let go of ordinary things the more time you're able to reside in the Unborn / more-or-less-empty mind, and the more time you're able to spend in the more-or-less-empty mind the more you can let go. Siiimmmpppllleee. Let go of the roadblocks.

Don't worry about it. Be patient.

Actually it's a good point. I don't have any grasp of the concept of reincarnation (mostly out of lack of interest). Maybe it would be a good topic for another thread. For the purpose of further defining the point of "no separate self".

Yep .