Orion

Guess I'll have to reply the sloppy way. I don't apologize for abusers, rapists, users, conmen and manipulators. I used to, but not anymore. I don't hate them or forgive them. I simply blank them out of my life. They are irrelevant. Trying to be a martyr or take the higher road is partially what got me into the mess I'm in. I refuse to invest energy in those kinds of people. There have been too many of them in my life. I understand their roots and I really don't care. There is no excuse for bad behavior. No matter what mommy and daddy did or didn't do, or what the world has done. Everyone has free will and adults should behave as adults. In other words, boundaries. If a patient comes to see me, once they walk out the door I don't think about them anymore. The cord is cut. Same thing with relationships, or any given moment. I don't feel that people are out to get me -- not sure why you got that impression. I understand that how we perceive and treat others is a product of our internal world. At the same time, we can't just pretend things are all sunshine and lollipops, and that love conquers all. Sometimes you have to go to that hateful, angry place in yourself to know what it's about. There's no integration without doing that work. Yeah, we are love, foundationally... but that doesn't change independent arising and dissolving. It doesn't change circumstances that are out of our control. And you can't pretend you love something that you don't, that's control. In order to really embody love, you have to deal with your crap; and that might mean being not so loving for a while. It might mean embodying something quite grotesque for a while. It might mean you totally lose yourself for a while. It might even mean that you die in the course of your own trials. I've met so many "peace and love" types over the years who were busy denying their own shadow. Spiritual people too... you know, the ones who are only into bliss, beauty, and feeling good. To them that's the Divine. Start talking with them about the nitty gritty of the world, or how their personalities aren't real, and they don't want to hear it. Just keep the pleasure endorphins flowing, or kundalini, or your LSD trip, whatever... the depth of denial and cognitive dissonance is astounding. I agree that the inner child is key... going back to origins, to basics. I have been doing that. Again, I must emphasize that most of my life is spent doing inner cultivation. I'm not enlightened, but I am more realized than practically everyone I know. I'm always the wisdom guy, the healer, the one who speaks remarkable words from emptiness, the guiding principle. But I have plateaued in my own development and I can't see myself through this patch, and I have no gurus of my own, except the inner guru. But that leads me back to the conundrum of inner cultivation vs. taking some kind of action. How long do you sit on the lotus before you get of your ass and contribute something to the world, however transient? My main issue holding me back is debilitating health. Everyone has a pet theory on why I'm sick. I've done thousands of hours of research and inner work on this issue. I am beginning to suspect that maybe my body is just fucked, and that's all there is to it. Our bodies are not impervious and beyond permanent harm. Maybe I am being shown a true limitation that I just have to live with. What haunts me about it is that I don't know how to conduct my purpose in life with this limitation, if it's forever. I can accept the limitation itself, but not the stagnation it has brought me. But it's impossible to really convey that reality to someone who is able bodied. People who don't have disability will never truly understand.

I would love to respond what you said more succinctly but the quote function on this forum is incomprehensible. I can't break up your quote into smaller portions, I tried for 15 minutes.

I suppose suicide is always an option. Why suffer indefinitely? I'm holding out hope but, I would not want to go on like this for another 10 or even 5 years.

I wouldn't say I'm in bliss either way.

Well that is the very crux of my question. If someone is torturing you, you can do all the inner cultivation you want, but maybe getting away from the torture is a good idea -- if you can. I'm not saying that crafting a life around avoidance of suffering is realistic... but sometimes it really is the outside world that's the problem. I appreciate your approach as it's my base nature, to be more yin. But sometimes excessive yin is dangerous. It creates acceptance of circumstances that could be otherwise transformed. My question isn't whether yielding or action are always appropriate, but how to distinguish when it is best to apply one or the other. The answer seems to be, to trust my own mind / intuition. At least from what people have said so far.

I do daily inner work around this issue. Prayers for guidance, and focused intentions. What I need is a place to go to. There is nothing in my life that is beyond my reach once my determination and intention are honed upon it. I just need to know "the thing" and feel it in my heart centre, and boom, I'm off. That is the only missing piece right now. But it's the chicken and the egg... wait for "the thing" to come and show me the way out, or try to make little temporary in-roads into other locales that may provide me with the brief new input necessary to kickstart something else. I also agree that the health issue may be a result of where I am, and leaving will resolve it. That intuition will take a whole other level of courage to manifest, only because if it's not true, then I could have a real calamity on my hands if my conditions flares in a place where I don't have resources to deal with it. On the other hand... my health condition is part of a trial. Maybe I'm just framing it that way, but it feels real. It will make me a better healer to crack this code, and it will open other doorways. In the mean time, I have some decisions to make. Should I just pray for guidance?

Been quite ill for a couple of years now, to a disabling degree. It has limited my life and opportunities. I have tried to make the best of it, especially this summer, and have succeeded in some ways, not in others. Most of my friendships have fallen away. People have progressed in different directions, and being stuck where I am due to poor health has left me in the dust in many ways. The friends I still have are experiencing new and profound beginnings -- again I seem stuck in the waiting room. I'm very unsatisfied with where I'm currently living. It is hard to cultivate a peaceful spiritual practice here. I live in a city where the housing market is crazy and the population has densified greatly in the past few years. It has become a small, dense noisy place, with all of the accompanying human dramas. Problem is, the market has become untennable, so if I want to move, I have to move out of the city entirely. I tried living in a small country town for a time. I loved the natural setting - something that I'm really craving as part of my next step - but the social and economic isolation was brutal. I have tried looking for camping spots this summer to create my own shorter retreats of sorts, but literally every campground in this province is booked solid for the rest of summer. Because of the increased population, competition is way higher. I had a healing practice for others, but I don't have the energy to do that right now. It drains me significantly and my body is spent. My own healing progresses slowly because, due to the population issue, resources here are more scarce. Good healers cost money, and the modern medical system doesn't know anything about holistic medicine. If I had my health, I would just sell all my stuff and live a nomadic existence for a time. My desire to detach from this way of life is very strong, but due to health and limiting factors it doesn't seem like I have an out. There has been a great deal of anxiety due to feeling trapped... can't stay but can't go either. I have cultivated contentment and positivity as much as possible, but it seems that meaningful action is now called for -- and yet, there isn't an obvious pathway of action to take. I have a lot of free time, but it's in a location that causes significant stress. I know that the current configuration isn't working, but I don't know how to break it. If I just did that nomadic thing, my body would run into problems and I'd have no refuge. So you see the dilemma. It seems like continuing to endure is not the answer but I don't see an out or a way to transform this. People keep telling me to be patient, that the next thing will come. Well it's been 2+ years of this waiting game and my creative intuition is still not yielding fruit. If all that's needed is a perspective shift, then I welcome it, but I can only meditate so much on it.

I could provide more context by telling the story I guess. I just thought I would condense the story to the essence of the issue I'm experiencing. I'm willing though. What do you think?

I'm definitely in the waiting room, in the liminal space, in the transitory spot of not being sure what comes next, but that I am currently stagnated. And I 100% relate to what you're saying about creating more karma. A younger version of myself would act out, perhaps by traveling, or doing something external -- but I feel creating more psychodrama is not the answer. Creating more karma just creates more situations that need to be resolved. Yet sitting here is not productive either. Just trying to trust that the next obvious thing will occur when the time is right, and that this current experience is temporary. I don't have much else to go on.

Just wanted to add that one thing I'm noticing a lot in this consciousness work is how selection biases work. For instance, in any given day, we could write thousands of pages about the fine details of stuff that happened, if we had no filter. Yet when people sit down to do journal writing, they choose what they want to write about, perhaps unaware of why they focus on those things. Doing journal work is a great way to cross-examine how our ego level awareness chooses to receive and interpret information. Dreams are also good for this because the dream ego tends to react automatically (until it is trained) and those reactions tell a great deal about how we behave in the waking world. Do we react passively or do we take action? Are we leading or following? Are we angry, scared, jovial, apathetic? Do we wait for things to come to us or do we go to them? Is the world offensive or helpful? I believe that a major part of personal progress has to do with perspective shifting. If there is an experience of limitation, then it's because of a limited perspective. It is a linear, personality issue perhaps... because the spirit is fine to do what it does. We can do a simple emptiness practice and the experience of spirit shows us that nothing is wrong. Then we step out of that practice and the discursive thoughts begin, the varied perspectives, and the feelings of dissatisfaction which temporarily arise. Modern psychology makes the mistake of saying... if only we just focused on being happy, we wouldn't be so sad. That's not the perspective shift I'm talking about. I'm referring to the shift that can occur which puts personality level awareness ("you", who I'm talking to) in alignment, cooperation, and collaboration with the Absolute. As a suggestion, maybe all you need is a shift in perspective? Keep asking questions? You can live any life you want but if your perspective is that of pointlessness, then everything will be pointless.

I've been doing a lot of dream work lately, through the Jungian Senoi process. The more I do the work the more I see that one thing that most "seekers" share in common is that they are all looking to realize that intangible thing, what is nameless. They do it by making manifest in the external world whatever it is that evokes the intangible thing to spring forth... as an olive branch of insight, a sensation, an experience. In other words, we are all trying to realize something that is already inherent. It's like seeing something at the corner of your eye and then attributing it to something in the world around you. It's like a photographer who sees a spec on all the photos, and tries to figure out what that spec is about, rather than looking at the camera lens itself. We are trying to make what is subconscious, conscious. We are seeking integration of what is already realized, with what is unrealized. So what I propose is... trust that your process is unfolding the way it's meant to, if not by Divine design, then by pure psychology. Whatever remains unlocked inside of you is looking for you. It will lead you to it as you seek it. Right now you are experiencing apathy to the external world of seeking... you know, deep down, that there's nothing out there that can really show you what you're looking for. You've explored the abstract world extensively and now you are feeling stuck sitting in one place wondering what the next step is. Your privileges in life have afforded you the opportunity to explore a huge deal of worldly distractions and information gathering. Now you are sitting in place... To me, you are on the verge of a breakthrough, because now that you have explored the world of "things", all you can do is with yourself and turn inward. There is nothing left outside that can satisfy you until it is met by what is inward. In a nutshell - and not to sound totally cliche - what you're seeking is genuinely inside of you. The realization you're looking for is there. You can't be taught something you don't already know. No teacher can lead you to this. It is there already, ripe for the picking. So you're asking what the point is of everything? There is no point unless you create one. Until you realize that essential thing within, you will live in perpetual sensation of disconnect. It's an illusion of course, but it's brought on by a need to integrate. The world cannot connect you to your own source. I know I've given a lot of "answers" here, they're just my projections. As a really fond author of mine once said, answers end reality. Questions keep it open. The problem with so much intellectualization is that we begin to answer reality, we begin to antidote it until we are stuck in a corner. There is no point to reality = Can I create a life that is meaningful to me? There is no next step = What would it feel like to know the next step? There is nowhere to go = Have I really reached the end of the road? You are doing great!

Creating a persona is a different phenomenon than saying you were an animal in a previous lifetime. No matter what persona you create, you're still a human spirit doing it.

I never said that life can't start over again, or that that this is the only life. I said we don't move backwards. I love animals and many have been my dear friends over the years, but they cannot realize spiritual consciousness. It's obvious that humans have a different spiritual trajectory than they do. What we share with animals is an animal body, and various survival egos; but unlike animals, we have a spiritual body that can transcend them. We have animal and spiritual bodies, as humans -- we have language and society along with all the complex abstractions they contain. Humanity has the substrate for the more complicated spiritual trials and expiations that we must undergo as part of our more advanced learning. The animal kingdom can't provide that. That's not to say that animals aren't on their own trajectory, and that there aren't more advanced animals than some others -- but none of them will be born as human, and we won't be born as them. Humans are certainly not the "most advanced" in the universe, but we don't go backwards. Maybe at some point in our distant collective past, we had more animal consciousnesses... more survival based, more material. But now most of us are more immaterial than the animals that surround us. Humans don't reincarnate as animals. Animals can't contain the complexity of our current spiritual consciousness, nor can they provide the format for our next stage of learning. Take one aspect of consciousness - the intellect - which is just as much an outpouring from the spirit as it is stuff acquired in this lifetime. Why would the spirit reincarnate into a form that is incapable of manifesting its spiritually-ingrained intellectual abilities? Its senses? Its full faculties? That doesn't make sense. You aren't born into an existence that doesn't match your level or your trials. As an aside... I've worked closely with people who have done past life regressions in a highly succinct, accurate format for many decades. Not one person has ever expressed an animal lifetime prior to being human. It's more likely that before each of us were human, we were some other kind of pre-human sentient life. People who think they were animals in the previous lifetime to this one are usually on ego trips or living a fantasy, often rooted in their personal disconnect with their relationship to their own humanity. They want to be other creatures because the human world eludes them. Rather than face that trial head on, they'd rather adopt a fantasy existence. There are also living human beings who think they are part animal, right now. There are conventions and gatherings for such people. Sadly deluded, unfortunately. That doesn't mean you can't work with animal spirits or animals as part of your human level learning experience. But you'll never be an animal. A human spirit is a human spirit. Why would Nicholas Tesla or Albert Einstein be reborn as ants, or bunny rabbits? They entirely lack the faculties to develop further intellect or morality. What about Mother Theresa becoming a butterfly? It sounds poetic, but what would she learn? How would her love and charity continue? The stuff that comes from some of the Eastern traditions, about humans being reborn as animals or into hell realms as a result of karma, is mostly non-sense. They teach that stuff so that people will take advantage of this "one and only precious life" by adhering to their strict religious dogma. I was taught in the Tibetan sect that human life is as rare as a turtle swimming on a planet entirely made of water, surfacing every 100,000 years -- and if it happens to surface with its head bursting through an egg yolk that happens to be floating on the surface, then that tells us how rare humanness is. But it's BS. You were human before this life and you'll be human in the next life. Teaching people that this is their one and only chance to reach enlightenment is as immoral as teaching people that they better do X, Y and Z or they'll go to hell. There is no escaping being human, until such point that you've mastered all the lessons that humanity can teach you as part of your spiritual design, and you ascend to the next level. Yes it's true, you should do as much as you can with your human life, but you don't have to reach enlightenment or be perfect in this life time -- your soul has all of eternity to do that, under the direction of its guides and helpers, and the Divine influence. Enlightenment happens to the spirit, once it has reached a certain level, which emanates from that particular human body at that moment, making it seem like that human personality "did it", but it was a spiritual phenomenon. When Jesus appeared on the scene, his spirit probably had thousands of lifetimes to get to that point, before becoming Jesus and gracing us with the gifts that we witnessed. (As an example.) Jesus would not in turn be reborn as a goat, or a whale. And if you do something horribly bad in this lifetime, you'll be reborn into situations where you have to learn humility and compassion the hard way, through relevant trials. But you're not damned to hell. You've just created a living situation that you yourself have to learn through, in order to attain greater progress, evolution, and perfection towards God. Even the worst people were somehow instruments in the grand design. Some of the worst mass murderers, the worst tyrants... they will probably be expiating all the horrors they unleashed on the world for lifetimes to come (maybe); on the other hand, they set the stage for humanity to evolve, through harsh wake up calls and suffering. So in that sense maybe they did us a favor. After all, we progress collectively just as much as we do individually.

My suggestion would be not to take such images literally. They are archetypes and symbols of your own subconscious that only you can decipher and bring into conscious awareness. The law of human progress means that human beings will never end up in such literal hell dimensions. It is not our trajectory, even among the worst of us. Progress only plateaus, it does not regress. What seems like a regression is actually still taking place within a larger progression. The fire and brimstone hell depictions were invented by Dante's Inferno in the Middle Ages, inspired by the Greek depictions of the Underworld. When a human being does wrong or works contrary to their own nature, they are not sent to hell. They have to endure expiations. The goal is not to punish but refine the spiritual component of the being toward greater perfection. The Divine does not abandon anyone. Saying that human beings can be born into a firey hell dimension is no different than claiming human beings can be reborn as animals. Both claims are absurd. All of the learning, growth, perfection, trials and expiations you could ever need on the road to enlightenment are achievable right here on this Earthly plane, at least for this portion of your learning.

Pretty sure that observing the observer is an oxymoron... whatever is trying to observe the observer is a temporary, transient layer that will dissolve once the exercise ceases. While it's being generated, it would become *the* observer observing an observer observing it, but since the temporary observer is a generated phenomenon from the permanent observer, they are really one thing. Jeeze... experiencing it is so much simpler than explaining it, lol Emptiness meditations are kind of redundant for me at this point... I'm aware of the observer all the time now, so everything that's happening seems like a meditation. When we wake up in the morning, most of us immediately do the meditation of "me", and the story of the day begins. Right now I'm meditating on the subject at hand as I write this. In a minute I'll meditate on cooking dinner. When you do literal meditation where you sit and relax into presence, you're just meditating on meditation. The observer never changes. It's always the eye of the storm of whatever is going on.

Anyone who thinks that Christianity is solely responsible for dominion over Earth needs to do a little reading on the history of... pretty much everywhere else. My specialization is in East Asia... there have been plenty of tragedies of the commons there. In China someone sneezes and millions of people die. Humans reproduce like any other animal and our intelligence regarding our own resource management and respect for nature is an evolutionary process. Personally, I would blame capitalism and its predecessor mercantilism, in combination with over population, for the ills of today's world. Whether Christianity taught "go forth and be fruitful" or not, people are still going to have babies. In the poorest countries, people have a lot of children because most are expected to die before adulthood, so they have more to increase their chances. Improve conditions for people and increase access to education, and suddenly a lot of these issues improve. And you know what? In my times in South America, I learned that the Church often provides more than the government. More food, more sanctuary and housing, more community, more services, more everything. Christianity is not to blame. Certain Christians are. In the west we have the privileged luxury of having these philosophical debates but in the developing world religious institutions are often the difference between life and death. It's not so black and white.

I think you'll be S.O.L. if you ever lose your phone service.

In the city I grew up in, I am friends and a former student with the first Reiki teacher to ever set foot there. She still teaches there, has been for 40 years now. I became a "reiki master" through the usual weekend courses with her. I've abandoned the practice because I don't find it very useful and it's not my path, but it got me on the trail to other things so I appreciate it. Healing the hands is possible for anyone, you don't need special initiations. The majority of Reiki people I've met are totally mundane. I would count most of them as part of that modern clique who really want special powers, without putting in much work. Many have compassion and want to help others but it's in a misguided way. They're not really doing any harm I suppose, but they're not accomplishing much either. That said, this teacher I know is amazing. She has taken the practice of Reiki and used it to cultivate loving compassion, service, and non-violence in her life across all areas. Every now and then you meet new agers who are cultivated. They're not common, but they do exist. She is cultivated to the point that I don't believe she is doing Reiki in her treatments anymore, but something else -- though she would still frame it as "Reiki". I also agree that Reiki is a subset of a much larger practice. Even as a teenager I felt that the system was incomplete.

Depends on the person I guess. Sometimes by acting, you become the act. It's hard to really know what's going on inside any given person, even those whom we might deem as insincere. So modeling is for sure one approach. Debunking all your inner crap and gradually peeling back the onion layers of ego leads to natural compassion IMO because those layers are what causes the veil of separation. Without so much duality, inner peace and love are our ground states. I don't mean love in the platonic sense but the interconnected sense. Since this is all one, anything acted upon from the inside affects the outside, and vice versa, because neither is really separate. Love is what you already are, so it's ironic to observe ego trying to achieve loving compassion when it is in fact ego which stands in the way of its inherent splendor.

What are we really talking about here? Progress involves levels of attainment by overcoming various trials, but in the end there are no levels. It's like progressing through levels one at a time until finally you break through to an empty plateau. The "levels" look like achievement until you peel back the last onion layer and simply live in alignment with true nature. In my experience, things were the most difficult right before they were about to disintegrate. After that, there was no difficulty, just stillness. And it doesn't mean the end of suffering, it just means non-attachment to practically everything. If you're talking about the physical energy body, life can become more challenging with each degree of refinement if you're still coming into contact with unrefined energies and realities. For instance, I find living in the city more and more difficult as my refinement level increases, to the point that only natural settings are truly tolerable. Things become more abrasive. I practice TCM and my life used to be at a point where the degree of focus on my energy state was so refined that I was literally using milligrams of herbs rotated regularly to fine tune my body. But you know what I realized? The act of trying to be so in control ended up causing a much bigger imbalance. How much fine tuning do you really need to do? It's not like you're "getting anywhere". After facing major health challenges, the resultant chaos brought a new eye of the storm that was an untold awakening, more than I ever could have achieved with such fine tuning. But to each their own.

Anything that channels the earth into the body, is pretty much guaranteed to strengthen wei qi. It can be simple body movements and exercises, no mind or intellectualization required. Do the right movement and it just happens. Trust is a big one too. When you're in a state of constant resistance, it shuts down your energy or stagnates it, and you are less protected. When in a state of trust and acceptance, things bounce off. Even when bad things happen, if you be in a state of trust, you will fare better.

My cursory understanding of enlightenment in the energetic sense is that it represents a lightening of energy, a decrease in density, and a greater level of dematerialization. One spirit inhabits the body, but the vessel has a dual nature... it is part animal and part spiritual. The character of the spirit which inhabits the body will draw on passions from either, but the process of perfecting oneself involves eventually taming the animal passions. It's not that the animal body is "wrong" or immoral, it's that without spiritual oversight, its automatic natures don't yield fruits of insight. When religions staunchly denounce worldly pleasures, the subtext is that they are trying to promote a lifestyle that facilitates greater dematerialization. However, this can't be forced... hence there are monks all over the world engaging in worldly pleasures. There are always going to be different degrees of trials, expiations and attainments based on the level that the spirit is at and what it's here to achieve. Perhaps the spirit is not yet refined enough to avoid succumbing to worldly pleasures, but to proscribe punishments, shame, or belittlement based on that is not really productive. People are at where they're at. About procreation... that's a controversial topic. Procreation may be a trial for the parents or for the child. Is it possible to attain greater refinement through the experience of parenthood? Sure. You can also stagnate spiritually by being sucked too much into the material realm by having to worry about family survival. My point is... there are risks and gains to any path. It's not formulaic. There are tantrikas in this world who are gaining greater and greater refinement each day through the process of sexual cultivation. It takes all kinds. People who scorn worldly pleasures are, in a way, trying to compassionately steer you in what they perceive to be the right direction, by using your free will to avoid densification of the spirit. But I think it's a bit of a misnomer... spiritual progress doesn't go backwards, only forwards. The worst that can happen is that you'll stagnate and not progress. On the other hand, we hear about awakened people all the time who were former drug addicts and what not. Only God knows.

I never said that nothing exists. I said it's empty. And you're already enlightened. How does it feel?

It's not inevitable, it's not even a requirement, and you can't choose to get there because it's spontaneous. There's nothing in here making anything happen. Whatever is doing you, arises and dissolves of its own accord. It is empty of process. The only reason to want to be enlightened is because ego wants to get somewhere, but there's nowhere to go. Whether you fear enlightenment, covet it, get angry about not being it (even though you already are "it"), or whatever... you have no control over it. None, zippo. I forget who said it... but if someone offers you a million dollars or enlightenment, you should take the million dollars. You don't get anything from enlightenment. People go through gut wrenching experiences and painful ego deaths in order to realize that there is nothing to realize, that nothing is wrong, that nothing inherently matters, that it's all Emptiness doing itself -- through you, through me, through the entire universe. It's all the same thing. You are perfect just the way you are. Whether you get it or don't get it, is irrelevant to being it.

There's no "next".