markern

Most my friends are actualy atheists or at least agnostic and non of them are anywhere close to nihilism. Budhism woldnt have to be strange that way at all. You could just aspire to get enlightened and stay that way for as long as you live. I know of a bunch of people who both belive in enlightenment but no afterlife or that are agnostic and they are not nihilistic at all.

Go to dharmaoverground. There you have a bunch of expert vipassana people that can give you very very precise and efecient advice. You could also consider the mahasi sayadaw style of vipassana. Somewhat more gentle I think. And probably more effective since insight meditation society have experimented with teaching people both and say that get way more stream enterers with the mahasi style then goenkas. However the body scanning technique can probably have some beneficial psychological and grounding aspects that are not found to the same degree in the mahasi style. Since you say you experience a lot of extreeme emotions it might be better to only do shamatha/concentration practice for some time because it is very stabilising and good for dealing with your stuff wheras the insight meditation part can be a rough ride sometimes. Also I wonder if you are doing practices that adress the emotional volatility like healing sounds, inner smile, secret smile etc.

I dont remember were but I have read, in two or three good books on budhism, a dialogue between the buddha and a student were he adresses this by inquiring with the student how he would live his live if he knew reincarnation to be true and how he would live it if it were not. I dont belive in reincarnation and I am not a nihilist, that conection is meaningless.

So hatred of other religions is thus a required part of being a budhist?????? The Dalai Lama as the head of Tibetan Budhism should cary some weight and he is extreemly clear on this issue. Other religions should be respected and are valuable. . Spotless history ha ha. Tibetan monastaries were waging war against each others like crazy over the most minute details of dogma for centuries. Even during the Buddhas time some of his monastaries or groups of monks got into heated conflicts that the Buddha could not resolve and ended in the splitting up of monastic communities. If this Namdrol guy does not know this he speaks with no weihgt. If he does know then his statement makes him a lier. The Buddha was explicit on the fact that you did not need to belive in reincarnation to follow his teaching and that it did not impact how one lives ones life so I dont see what the fuzz is about. ESangha is the most unwelcoming forum I have ever attended.

I forgot about the whole thing but at 23 I started feeling something opening and then bliss and then I looked at the time and tought damn its started. After that half an hour of a very blissfull experience. Nice. Thank you.

I have not been locked out but i have had a lot of posts locked out. All those posts have been posts were I have criticized known abusive gurus like adi da, or when I mentioned a documentary that through film could document that Sai Baba did not manifest material objects as he does to impress his followers but took them out of his sleave in addition to presenting a dozen people acusing him of abusing them when they were children or teens, or when I argued against ayp linking to scientology sites because the church of scientology is so obviously an abusive cult. Yoganis argument is that such posts can stir arguments that can take away from spiritual discussion and the foloowers might have their feelings hurt. My argument is that if such people are not exposed several people who pass by the ayp forum will gravitate towards these people and end up suffering their abusive and completly sidetracking their spiritual development untill hopefully they leave these abusive false gurus. In the thread I wanted to post the documentation that Sai Baba was a fraud several people had been his followers and bowed and kissed his feet and others where considering learning from him. Because my post was censored Yogani made sure these people were not warned about the evidence that this guru is a fraud. That is grave responsibility. That has very real consequences for those whom yogani take the possibility of a warning away from. For all yoganis other excellent qualities this makes me litteraly sick to my stomach.

Intu-flow is supposed to be superb for joints

A friend of mine has a heart problem. I did not realy understand what kind of problem it was but at least it was serious enough in the long term and gave her some trouble breathing. THe problem surfaced after someone realy broke her heart badly. In general what practices are good for the heart and heart problems and what kind of safety issues might arise? I am afraid some practices esepcialy those working directly with th heart could make things worse. Even a practice that is helpfull long term I think might risk something bad happening just because strong procesess start happening in the heart. I am going to find out the exact condition but just wanted some general input. In general I think that ordinary breath based meditation would lay a good foundation and could heal a lot of the problem as the research I have seen on meditation and heart problems suggest it has a powerfull healing effect. Just general yoga and qigong would also be great. After a solid foundation in this that presumably improves the general condition inner smile and healing sounds working directly on the heart could be the next step. Because of the breathing problems some sort of breathing practices would seem good but I am cluesless to what would be beneficial and what could be risky. Anyway I will find out the exact condition in a day or to and get back to you about it.

Great insights combined with stuff I think he said just to anoy people and have fun. Still he wa basicly a complete psychopath and to a large degree lead people astray. Lots of good stuff came out of the osho community but also a lot of bad stuff and damaged people. Imagine if he had been a real spiritual master that actualy took care of his students and lead them somewhere that was actualy totaly wholesome instead of somewhat good and very bad at the same time.

I think of it like this: We do not know if the law of attraction works. If it does in fact work ir requires very strong mental signals being sent by you which means great mind power, which again means it would probably require similar meditative abilities as for quite powerfull siddhis. If this works in principle normal people just do not have strong enough energy and concentration to make this work. And even if normal people are capalble of making this work I don`t see much evidence at all that many actualy make it work. So using the law of attraction to attract women is at best something which might work but might very well not. Pickup skills on the other hand we KNOW can be learnt to the degree where you get the women you want. Even those that used to be completly "out of your league". Making the law of attraction work for you probably requires as much work on yourself as making pickup work. Since the law of attraction has a questinable ability to yield results whereas pickup skills has a 99% certainty of general success if one realy tries to learn it, the rational choice is pickup skills. at charismaarts.com you can learn pickup skills that are natural and does not require lying or misrepresenting you in any way or manipulating etc. etc. It will actualy help you be yourself more than before while also heloing you get the women you want.

Sounds good but add some basic breath based meditation, zazen, vipassana, taoist stilness whatever. That will harmonize a lot of things and digest the more active stuff you do, get you deep and build concentration and awareness that will make everything else so much easier. Also do something very grounding from early on and you will avoid trouble.

A friend wants to learn basic meditation so I want to find some good and simple instructions for shamatha/anapanasati/basic breath based concentrative meditation. I am thinking a page or three, just explaining the basics of attention to the breath and bringing attention back without frustration when distracted etc. I only have long books with instructions scattered all over the place and too much writing on topics that she would be uninterested in or just confused by. Does anyone no of such instructions online? Or have something they could email me? If so that would be awesome.

Thanks

Thanks guys. I know primordial qigong so I will see if it is something that resonates with her.

I can absolutely see the connection to the fire chakra but I think it is a lot more complex. Training what is called working memory, amount of information you can hold in your head for a short time realy helps with add: cogmed.com Any sort of meditation and focusing excercises and stuff that creates calm also helps a lot. So although I think just a lot of energy (fire energy) can be a large part of it, the ability to regulate attention and relaxation seems to me a huge part of it. A chineese doctor who claims to have made a herbal medicine that helps a lot says that imbalances of the kidneys are central. Rather than medication I think yoga, meditation, breathing excrecises, training working memory, diet, herbal medicines, aromatic oils for the skin, aromatic candles, feng shui, looking for enviornmental influences at home and in school, possibly physical bodywork, accupuncture/self accupressure/self massage, energetic healers, adapting the environment, talk therapy (quite succesfull in many cases with add) and last but not leat apreaciating the difference in personality of a person with add is what is needed. If you add all ore the most important of these elements the diagnosis would disapear in most people and those who keep it would be a lot more balanced but still more impulsive, driven etc. Accepting that this remaining difference can be a good thing and pursuing what this type of personality makes you excell in would be the way to go. Depending on how much of a problem there is conventional medication scan be used for some time. However, the last study I saw claimed that over a few years time pills are nor more effective than talk therapy.

I figured it would be a good idea to make a thread were we can post links to and excerpts from studies that show evidendce of the effects of meditation, yoga, qigong, herbs etc. I will be posting some myself. Good double blind studies are particualry welcome.

I had an idea the other day. Since pulse diagnosis can be used to asses your health quite precisely it could possibly be used as a form of biofeedback. Since it is possible to learn to control things like relaxation, bloodpressure (I think) and various other things using a devise wich creates a sound or color to show you have your state is and that changes accordingly if you change your own state. If one can listen to ones own pulse and nows what an ideal state is one could presumably in the same way learn how to put ones body in that ideal state by seeing what makes the pulse go in the right direction and what makes it go in the wrong direction. Since pulse diagnosis embarces all aspects of health it would presumably be the best all round measure of the state you want to move towards. To feel ones own pulse in this way seems very advanced so doing it directly would probably be a very advanced practice. But if one could find something that measured the pulse according to the various criteria of CCM and have that translated into colours sounds or numbers people with not so much experience could presumably make dramatic changes in health. I realy have no idea if this could work but thought it sounded possible. What do you think?

Student comes to his master asking "master where is my mind". The master replies "well were do you think it is?". Student replies "I think it is in my head, right behind the eyes". The master steps on the students foot as hard as he can and says "where is your mind know?".

Dig your post. Especialy for energy practices but also for wisdom paths I think loving kindness practice is very important because the developed compassion will help you stay focused on the real goal and not energetic experiences or power, or in the case of insight practice al the strange phenomena, energies and beings you might or might not encounter on your way.

There has been a few claims here about womens suposed moral, personal and spiritual superiority. I find that ridiculous. A very intereseting experiment was done to test male and female tendensies towards aggression. People were asked to play a video game where they bombed people and how fiercly they bombed was noted by the researchers. There was a clear difference with the men bombing people a lot more. However, this was when other people were present. When people did not think they were being watched the women were in fact more aggressive with the bombing than the men. It turned out it was just social control that made the women less agressive in playing the game. Being more likely to vield to social pressure is not in my ind spiritualy very mature. A number of other experiments have found the same. Also studies to see how much agressive thoughts men and females have during the day have found women to have slightly more so then men. Another interesting fact is that while women supposedly are nicer, men are much more likely, according to researchers, to help strangers on the street etc. This holds true for very smal acts of help but especialy for interwiening to rescue someone in dramatic instances. However, researchers also found women to be more helpfull towards people that they were frinds or neighbours with. It seems niceness is very contextual and that might be a large part of why popel belive women are nicer. A striking fact almost no one knows is that most children who get hit by a parent get hit by their mother, not the father. This has some to do with who sees the children the most, but if you see your children at all and are likely to hit them you are probably going to and as such end up in this statistic so we could probably presume men and women have about an equal tendency to hit their children. Interestingly that is completly different from what almost everyone belives and from how violence against children are portrayed in the media. Another interesting fact is that although the men are in most cases responsible for the domestic violence that has serious physical consequences, women are slightly more likely to hit their partner. If you look at homosexual and lesbian copules you find a pattern extreemly similar to heterosexual couples with the number of people who hit their partner without serious damage (a slap or a single punch) being about the same and the number of people that inflict serious damage and terorizing their partner being about the same. That means that women (lesbians) have the same likelyhood of being responsible for the extreeme violence that some men do to their wifes. What this shows is taht when women are the physicly strongest partner, as one of the two always will be in a lesbian relationship, they are as likely as men to peform also the extreeme violence. With women then being more inlcined to hit their men with a single slap or punch and as likely to inflict the extreeme levels of violence if they are physcly the strongest it is clear that one of the most important myths about men and females, their level of violence, is a lie and that should lead people to seriously reconsider how they see women. Not only in this regard but also in others because when the reality in such a serious case is completly different from what most people think in this instance, it is likely to be comletly different in others as well. Other interesting facts that counter conventional wisdom is that altough men are more likely to kill their own children when they are older women are more likely to kill them when they are very young. An other interesting fact is that women (in western Europe at least) cheat as much as men do. If women were on a higher spiritual plane than men they would progress a lot quicker spiriutaly. Jack Kornfiled writes that in Monastaries in Thailand the women progress slightly quicker than the men. Not much but slightly. More women are also interested in these things then men are. However, men are much much more likely to go al out and realy do the work required to get somewhere with meditasion. Women tend to spread their priorities on many things while men focus most of their energies on a few things. I see this, for example, in hte fact that although few, there are disproportionaly many men teraching yoga or having an advanced practice compared to how many men there are amongst the students. Saying something general about women and men in this gegard is just stupid anyway as the men I know that have taken an active role in spirituality are so much more evolved then the average woman is that somehow seeing the average disinterested woman as being on some sort of higher plane then these guys is just plain stupid. And you do end up with something almost like that if you realy strongly emphasize that women are not just perhaps a bit more inclined to spirituality but actualy on a different plane altogether. Interestingly enough Deida says that although men have a harder time then women connecting their sexual and emotional energies, once they are there the men usualy are much more inclined to take that further to a more universal, spiritual conciousness than women who more easily get stuck on the personal level. Although I don`t realy have an opionion on that in particular I think such a view, with women a nd men having slight tendencies to progress at different paces at different levels of practice to be quite plausible. So much for matriarchy!

I have been reading Deida today to see if I had him wrong and I think I did. I have been reading finding good through sex and in it he has advice for women and for men. In the enlightened sex manual which I read years ago he, I think, only has advice for men. In finding God through sex it is pretty clear to me that what he demands of women is equal to what he demands of men. He also give them an equaly active role to women in helping men opening up to love by themselves being open. Not at all does he say that men always has to take the first step. Maybe in some instances he thinks this is so, but in the pages I have read he gives women an equaly active role in being open to men when the men hurt them or are not being strong enough or clear on their purpose or are losing focus of their integrety etc. This is completly different from the impression I had of him but also completly different from what has been said here by some about men having to take the first step in pening up because they are yang by nature. I will write the page numbers were he writes this tomorow or during the weekend. What I read years ago was the enlightened sex manual. Possibly I just got him wrong, or possibly it is easy to get such an impression when you only read the, quite demanding, advice given to men, or maybe he frased himself differently or thought diffrently then. I am still pretty sure his examples of testing in that book would still be something I view as unhealthy but I will see when I read it again. Anyway in finding God through sex he is very clear that most good testing will not be hurtfull and will not be the type of payback bitching that many women put their men through a lot. He writes a lot about how women shal works towards not doing that but being more generous. It also seems clear to me that being open in love towards your partner during such an incident does not rule out being quite harsh in the respons if they cross the line of deacency. It seems one can easily tread wrong trying to do these things. He also writes about how, as they grow spiritualy both the man and the woman will need these things less and less from each other but be much more self contained. This duality will still be apreaciated but less and less needed.

The way I see it Deida says a lot of goood stuff. I agree in general about men finding their purpose, that being very attractive to women and the value of men being able to stay ventered and strong in a relationship and how women respond to that etc. However, I have huge problems with how he describes womens testing of men. The type of testing he often describes I would characterize as very emitionaly unhelathy bordering on evil and bullying. Dieda uses the example of the man coming home proud because he made a million at work. Instead of giving the man positive feedback the Dieda woman starts bitching about lack of attention or something wich isen`t realy true in his example but done in order to see if she can push the man of center or if he will stand strong wich will make her feel good. Thain my opinion is just sick.On a broader and lighter level I agree with parts of what he says about testing. I know about it and how to handle it from the pickup community so I am familiar with the dynamic, I know its there and I know it does not ever stopp completly. But, the realtionships I see with strong loving men who has a clear purpose and healthy women do not work like that. Testing is extreemly unfrequent, when it is done it is much more moderate and inocent. If the man is in a bad financial situation for a while the women do not see if they can get him off center by picking on his insecurities in this regard but support him as any healthy person would do. The only realtionships I see that have such and extreeme and harsh testing dynamic are were the woman is quite disturbed often with a bad relationship to her father and she is dating a realy not good badboy and they have an intense dymnamic of conflict and passionate resolution. You could argue that if the mand responded with the right kind of loving reply it would be different but what I observe is that healthy women test little, and in a much more inocent and less evil way. Anything else would be bullying. In general I find that in realtionships between strong loving men and healthy females the women settle in to a comfort because of the mans masculinity and do not continue with these ridiculous paterns. Deida celebrates the continuing and intensifying og such patterns in its harshest form in terms of what the women do. I also have a huge problem with the lack of ordinary communication skills and conflict resolution as taught in a lot of more normal couples therapy. This sort of thing works wonders if taoght eraly on and is a well resaerched finding amoung couples who stay together. Someone saud that since such a man makes the wopmen happy and men are happy to be such men it is not a problem that so much more work is demanded by the men. I would say that a man of such quality would not put up with Deidas little brats with no self esteem and find a real quality women that puts as much into the relationship as he does. David shade I think speaks well on this. I also have problems with Deidas "loving" aproach. When women, or anyone, act as badly as they do in his examples they need to be ut in their place. That can be done with a clear communication of an underlying love, but they should be met with a quite forcefull but fair verbal response in my opionion. The way a zen master or Ajhan Cha scolded people harshly but still communicated a lot of love would be a good example of the genral aproach. In milder cases of testing a milder aproach is in order. Deidas respnse seems to me to be more in line with replying "someone needs a hug" when to woman belitles you for having a smal penis or something like it. It was said that the womans role of surrender was equaly hard work. When met by such a strong and loving response to ones bitching surredering is what most women do easily so no. Still huge task for the man and no work for the women. I also have a problemn with the way women are robed of agency in Diedas relatuinshipmodel. In reality I see happy and juicy couples with masculine men and feminine women often having a much more complex and often different dynamic. That the man always has to be the first to show love because he is yang just does not put up to reality testing of what happens in such good relationships. Maybe there should be about 70/30 or something but as a genreal rule this just is not the case in succesfull realtionships. It belitles women (or any feminine partner) and men to say that they are not able to make the mans harshnes melt by meeting it wioth strong love. I also have problems with Deidas ideal for men being to be always strong, never vulnerable, never resting, always centered always loving. To me this is totaly inhuman and a borderline fascistic ideal. It should be the way of superman rather than superior man. What happens when the man is weak for a while, a very human thing, does the woman start despising him, closing of her love, and testing hiim by pushing his buttons about his weakness?? I think a good analogy can be found in the pickup community. David Deangelo, Mystery and many others preach presenting and ideal of yourself that is always strong, always masculine, never weak etc. always alpha. Juggler on the other hand says that being alpha is never being afraid of being yourself including being week and he is a mcuh better pickup artist I am open to the possibilty that I have Deida wrong and I will read his books again to give him a second chance but I do think the fact that many of his former followers are very critical of exactly these things. Anyway I do find a lot of value in his stuff just not in following his exact advice or ideals.

Get your point but I still see this as the man being required to do a enormous amount of work and the woman to do the bare minimum of what is required of a person. Actualy still less. What is the work a woman is required to do that is as demanding as what the man is required to do?