Bindi

How can the shadow self whatever it is be integrated if you’re deliberately holding it at arms length? But perhaps it also depends on the status you give to the shadow self, ranging from it’s just a block to it’s a negative aspect and the polar opposite it’s a powerful consciousness within us related to the Yin aspect that needs to be integrated but remains as a “potent and creative force”. It sounds like a Buddhist perspective to me, everything is a mirage so this too must be a mirage. What if the shadow self is an aspect of the true self though, then it would be pretty weird to think it was a mirage. Would you deliberately ignore and neutralise a potent creative force? What would you gain from that?

parallels between the shadow self and kundalini: “What is especially interesting is the idea that the shadow contains not just destructive aspects of the personality, but also potent, creative, and powerful capabilities.” What is kundalini if not potent, creative and powerful, albeit forgotten in most people? “For the sake of our personal development, we must, therefore, become more aware of our shadow and open our mind to the possibility that maybe we are not so friendly, righteous, and moral as we think. We must consider that perhaps there are unconscious aspects of ourselves driving our behavior “behind the scenes”. We must look down into our depths and realize that our conscious ego is not always in control, but is often overtaken by the power of our shadow.” What is this unconscious aspect of ourself? It’s named the shadow self here, but it may have a different name in different cultures, surely Jung isn’t the only one to have ever noticed an unconscious aspect within ourselves. What is the nature of kundalini? IME her nature isn’t kind but selfish. On her own she has the moral compass of a two year old, in partnership with shiva she may be directed more appropriately. What if it’s a catch 22, I want to be a nice kind person, so I can’t acknowledge the selfish 2 year old (kundalini) energy within, so it gets locked away and forgotten, unnourished and unable to complete her part of the circuit which would ultimately lead to her maturing? BTW and perhaps irrelevantly this was never my problem, I’ve never cultivated kindness as an end in itself. Whether the shadow self is kundalini or not, it is the right place to be looking, and whatever the shadow self is it needs to be accepted exactly as it is, not strangled by our moral codes.

My best bet would be “Clair” knowledge, clairvoyance, clairaudience etc. Things we might be aware of subconsciously but not yet consciously, this seems the most likely path for human evolution to me. My mother had these abilities, on demand for her last few years, and she told me a lot of what she saw (and occasionally heard and very occasionally smelt) but she herself didn’t really have a clue about what her visions meant, she had no ability to place it in the context of this world. Seeing stuff is one thing, but the ability to make sense of what you see is also required for it to be useful information. At best I have occasionally dreamt useful information about other people’s health, for example a lack of calcium in my mothers body, and a gall bladder issue in a friends body, but my mother could see physical issues in other people and in herself whenever she felt like it. But say she saw someone’s gall bladder as mushy and unwell, she wouldn’t be able to recognise that it was a gall bladder in the first place, you need the basic skills of a good researcher to figure out what it is that you’re seeing, and this is the role of regular thinking, so it’s a joint activity between a higher comprehension and the normal mind to establish a complete picture. What she saw wasn’t limited to the physical body, in fact what she mostly saw was information about the state of the subtle energy body, which not surprisingly I found fascinating to say the least, especially when I could find similar descriptions in various ‘spiritual’ literature. But I was always aware that she was unable to make sense of any of this information. Evolution hasn’t stopped in human beings, it remains in process, and increased sensory information is the most likely direction it will go in, and that increased sensory information needs to be processed appropriately.

I see something cyclical, a small part of the highest knowledge is gained and cycled back into the standard mental plane, and this is repeated many times over time, in subtle energy terms the highest knowledge at the crown in the central channel is cycled back into the lesser channels beside it over time, primarily into the mental channel, so the system as I see it is ultimately practical and is aimed at evolution of consciousness here and now, in that I can comprehend higher knowledge by bringing it into the conscious sphere. In this sense it becomes the time for the mental side to shine, whereas before the emotional side was the priority.

I am proposing that the shadow self is actually a fully creative and powerful consciousness within ourselves that is denied because it carries so much pain, equivalent to the power of kundalini, just by a different name.

To allow the unconscious to become conscious, we need to allow the language of the unconscious to be given a voice. That language is primarily emotions, if I’m looking anywhere else, I’m not looking in the right place. The language of the unconscious isn’t rational, and it can’t be accessed rationally, or suppressed rationally. Say you have an unconscious proclivity developed at an early age, and your only awareness of it is the emotion and action it promotes in you. Just stopping the action requires endless willpower, but looking squarely at the underlying emotion and consequent action allows the entire issue to dissolve. To be honest, I think think Suzuki is too worried about suffering, I would rather embrace the suffering and in the fullness of time see it dissipate, rather than skirting around it and trying to find the thin line between attending to it and not being caught by it. Far too much work IMO.

We could only speak authoritatively if we had achieved a final outcome of course, but I’m not convinced philosophically that 1. Shakti comes from shiva or 2. That they are not still two in the end. Re Shakti coming from shiva, in daoism yin doesn’t come from yang, yin just is and so is yang, and they unite to their mutual benefit, yin doesn’t disappear. Then there’s true yin and true yang, a more refined iteration of yin and Yang, neidanists are convinced that true yang is the ultimate achievement, but I personally think that is an androcentric view. I do believe that there is Shakti and shiva, and that they are drawn to each other, but when they unite instead of shiva subsuming Shakti there could instead be the product of their union as seen with Ganesh. Who knows?

Perhaps the shadow self is more abiding than just the devious side of ego, for example what if the shadow self was the shadow face of kundalini, a potentially powerful and creative aspect that is not accepted by us on a conscious level. I see the shadow self as the equivalent of the unlovable female side within that needs to be embraced to reveal her true vital and powerful nature, associated with emotions and black and female and water. Just following this possibility, the potential coexistence becomes Shakti and shiva. From the article above “What is especially interesting is the idea that the shadow contains not just destructive aspects of the personality, but also potent, creative, and powerful capabilities.”

Radical Nondualists (aka Neo-Advaitans) do indeed propose that all that is needed is an understanding that there is no “I”, but all nondualists have that tendency to a degree, IMO because it is an intellectual position. Why is there so much intellectualising and headiness when talking about Buddhism? Because Buddhism is just a theory, and that theory can be debated on the mundane level on which it was created. It’s similar to the theory of God, billions of people live and die believing that there is a God, but it too is just a theory that someone made up. The God delusion, the Buddha delusion, the Islamic delusion, they are all just creations of the mind. Meditation might work, stripped of all belief directives, but that isn’t how it is taught in a particular school, in Buddhism isn’t the dharma taught alongside meditation? Quiet time to get in touch with what is within would be valuable, but it would likely lead to awareness of internal emotional and mental turmoil which Buddhism seems to contain by promoting nonattachment, perhaps to contain the unendurable emotional pain that we reject throughout our lives. What was Gotama’s big problem? Suffering. “In the past, monks, and also now, I teach suffering and the cessation of suffering.” And his solution for how to not suffer seems to me to be by a variety of psychological tricks to reduce the pain - I’m not attached to this suffering, it doesn’t really exist, it’s as empty as everything else. The alternative, accepting the suffering and pain as absolutely real and feeling it fully, is like filling a dry stony riverbed with cool clear water. Without water life feels sterile, it’s a parched desert, allowing oneself to feel brings green growth to a stunted tree trunk. Emotions are real and should be embraced, both the pleasant and the unpleasant ones, that isn’t clinging to them or being overly attached, that’s just accepting that they’re a wonderful and vibrant part of life, and we don’t need Buddhism to interfere with that. A question remains though, and that is how does accepting emotional suffering as real lead to letting go of the “I”?

The main thing that needs to be let go of is the idea that “I” am in charge and that “I” know anything. Installing someone else’s ideas only compounds the problem because the mind can then justify itself in thinking it now has the keys to know something, so a secondary mundane “I” has been created, and if that secondary mundane “I” is socially validated, then it may be impossible to ever go beyond it. Deliberately trying to let go of attachments and aversions is actually adding to the psyche’s baggage as it’s a contrived philosophy that can only ever deliver a shadow of the real thing, and apparently cannot deliver the ultimate state that some people seem to subconsciously sense. Actually letting go of the notion that “I” am in charge will lead to the true “I” taking charge, a very defined “I” with expanded awareness and understanding, energetically speaking the union of Siva and Shakti in the central channel and their freedom of movement there. Letting go of the “I” artificially, ie. because someone said this is what you have to do, will not lead to the true “I” taking charge because it is a step further away from living the actual process. “Absolute emptiness” is a philosophical view, not reality, instead of absolute emptiness in reality absolute completeness should be the ideal, all levels of the human being functioning and integrated. There is a Self, there is a doer which may be called Shakti/Siva.

More or less at this point in time I perceive the subtle energy body operating fully as the true Self. This means the subtle channels up to and including the central channel being cultivated, and Siva and Shakti being fully operational. Someone can voice a multitude of wise sounding conclusions and perspectives on life, but without their subtle energy body being operational their words can only be created on the mundane plane. The subtle energy body was recognised by the spiritual system Gotama was born into, but it seems he didn’t meet a teacher who understood this system because he was left less than convinced by those that did teach him. I would contend that if he had met a teacher who knew the nature of the subtle energy body and how to cultivate it and who was able to share that knowledge with Gotama, then Gotama’s realisation would have been much more in line with previous Indian knowledge, perhaps extending it at best. The Tibetans seem to have come full circle and reinjected this fundamental knowledge into their version of Buddhism, IMO at least they’re looking in the right place.

Buddhism is not a complete path IMO because it negates the mundane mind as Self (correctly) but it fails to comprehend the True Self beyond the mundane mind.

What’s fundamentally wrong with feeling? Why is having an emotion referred to negatively as clinging, or rebranded as sluggish qi? Emotion is a *legitimate tool to help us make appropriate decisions. The beauty of they system goes wrong IMO because of stored emotions and the isolation of our emotions from our logical thought processes, but this common error can be fixed, and the first step is releasing stored ie. unexpressed emotions. But how to do that? If you’re trying to force any sort of prejudice on an emotion, that you don’t want to cling, that it can just be observed, that you don’t want to become lost in emotion, that it’s not a legitimate emotion, then you’re limiting the simplicity of emotions. A feeling is felt, end of story. Stored emotions have to be felt, they were created in the language of feeling, and they have to be expressed in the language of feeling, there is no alternative. Granted it’s a rocky road, and people thrown into the deep end are being damaged, but then the method for clearing stored emotions needs to be blamed as inappropriate. I propose that a primary purpose of dreams is to clear stored emotions as a self-cleaning self-fixing system, much like our bodies self-fix a wound. I contend that we are self-fixing organisms on both the physical and psychological level, and dreams are the expression of psychological fixing. In a dream commonly there is a feeling. This is the purpose of the dream, dredging up an irritant in the psyche in order to remove it, and the way to remove it is to fully feel it within the dreams boundaries. This is also the safety mechanism of the self-fixing system, our psyche doesn’t want to destroy itself, it wants to fix itself. Going at it and expressing feelings in an unboundaried way is an unbalanced start that is more than likely to end in unboundaried and unbalanced ways, maybe this is why so many restrictions are put on emotions, they can destroy an individual who has lost contact with their own internal cleaning system. Dreams contain more than that single level of information, but decoding the other levels is harder, and feeling the feeling is enough information on the first run. * One example of the use of emotions for making good decisions that has been known for decades: Would it really be in our best interests to detach from this feeling and keep heading merrily in the direction of the snake?

A friend who was a TCM practitioner and had been taught that anger correlated with liver once told me that when his Chinese wife got angry she used to clutch her liver which was a sort of proof to him of the correlation. Where does your idea that it’s non-emotional stagnant qi come from?

An uncleared heart is a cesspool, clearing it requires standing knee deep in the muck, feeling the feeling. Over time more and more clear water starts to fill it, but that doesn’t make you a saint, that just makes you more and more “hyper-emotional”, until you find the door that leads beyond the heart and upwards. But first you have to be saturated in the heart. It’s a very long journey but the only worthwhile one I believe. If meditation is getting you to walk around in the muck then it’s sure working for you! Good luck 😊

The Black Madonna In approximately A.D. 797. St. Meinrad was born of royal parentage in Central Europe. In 822 he was ordained as a Benedictine priest, eventually becoming a hermit six years later. Ultimately, his hermitage was founded as the Einsiedeln Monastery, which now lies within the borders ofSwitzerland, and is dedicated to the Black Madonna, the Virgin Mary. A universal phenomenon, the Black Madonna still lies within the sphere of mystery. There are an estimated 400 shrines to the Black Virgin, yet she remains little known, a subterraneous figure even within mainstream Catholic cosmology in which she is firmly rooted. As will be more fully explained below, the Catholic Church has little explanation for her blackness, except to surmise that the figures have been long exposed to candle soot and therefore darkened. Seen from a psychological and historical perspective, however, the Black Virgin is an archetypal figure of pre-Christian origins and has always been black. She carries the dark pole of the feminine archetype. As such, the Black Madonna is the religious expression of one aspect of the Godhead, revealing its dark, unconscious, mysterious and unpredictable side. St. Meinrad’s initial approach into the realm of the Black Madonna began with his hermit’s journey, delineating the religious expression of his desire for greater intimacy with the unconscious or the Unknown. To establish a hermit’s refuge, St. Meinrad travelled deep into a dense and virgin forest: the dark and mysterious aspect of the unconscious, the Black Madonna in vegetative form. Soon after establishing his refuge, St Meinrad was confronted by an overpowering multitude of spectral demons that arose from the forest. To these fearful figures, he surrendered completely, lying prostrate in prayer and terror on the ground. After a long time, an Angel of deliverance appeared out of the east, and the demons were dispelled. At the threshold of unpredictable and utter demonic destruction, a redemptive, fecund beginning presented itself. Through his prayerful surrender to the demons of the dark wood, St. Meinrad plumbed the darkest depths of the unconscious - existential terror and a sense of total abandonment - out of which new life, a new beginning, emerged. Here in the dark wood the hermit built the first edifice of what has now become a foremost point of pilgrimage to the Black Madonna. Like Bonhoeffer, St. Meinrad survived the trauma of God’s abandonment, in and with God. http://www.cgjungpage.org/learn/articles/analytical-psychology/574-the-dark-feminine

A very timely resurrection of this thread for me, it makes the hard stuff more bearable because it underscores the idea that the harder it gets the closer I also get to the new beginning 😌

Interestingly, to me the female aspect or Yin needs to sort itself out first, so it begins with female, but can only go so far without the interaction and direct instruction of the masculine or Yang helping Yin. In an even more direct opposite to your setup, to me the individual female aspect (Shakti would be the best term for me) fully awaits resurrection and direction via the individual masculine aspect (or Shiva). I think these differences do matter, as the starting point directly affects the end point.

The introduction from the book “Great Clarity: Daoism and Alchemy in Early China” by Fabrizio Pregadio.

I think there are two fundamental strands in a human being, reason and emotion, in western society in general reason is cultivated and emotion curtailed. To be truly whole I believe both strands need to be nurtured and cultivated and that’s just the starting point 🙂

I think the ‘container’ exists but it’s not full, by analogy the ding or cauldron exists but it’s not full of subtle ‘water’ and the subtle water doesn’t ‘heat up’ without certain conditions being met. What it’s for most directly is to enable the dantian above it - the heart - to fill up with converted ‘jing’ when it rises. When all the dantians are full and operating I think this leads to balancing our Yin and Yang forces on a very deep fundamental level.

Meaning of 神通 神通 (Chinese) trad. and simpl. 神通 Origin & history Originally a Buddhist concept, it referred to one who possessed divine powers. Later on, it came to be used metaphorically to describe anyone with a special talent. Pronunciation Mandarin: shéntōng Cantonese: san4 tung1 Min Nan: sîn-thong Noun 神通 special talent; remarkable ability magical power Odd reasoning. I think you are creating an interpretation that suits your preferences and experience as opposed to an objective understanding. Glad to hear it 😉 I was saying that I don’t think ‘enlightenment’ is a siddhi, as in its not a divine power or special talent or magical power, it’s a state that may be achieved, a divine state maybe, and a special state, just not a siddhi, not least because a siddhi is observable and enlightenment is not.

Enlightenment as the historical Buddha meant it, or in the sense of kundalini reaching the crown chakra, or the production of the spiritual child, each end point is different I think, and they might all be just steps on the way. I personally can’t see how any of these three could be called a siddhi, ultimately they’re just something that happens, they’re not a “power”. I do agree that the siddhis may be just facets and stepping stones, but they should be demonstrable if they have truly been activated. Are you claiming you have achieved the ‘great siddhi’ ie. enlightenment? And if so, enlightenment in what sense?

I read your first reference and from that searched ‘attamasiddhigal (ashtasiddhi)’ being the eight powers of a siddha. This site https://lifetimeyogi.com/what-are-siddhis/#google_vignette described these eight powers fairly well, and stated no less than three times that siddhis were not the aim: “It is important to note that the attainment of Siddhis is not the ultimate goal of Tantra Yoga. The ultimate goal is spiritual awakening and the realization of the true nature of the self. Siddhis are considered to be byproducts of spiritual progress and are not to be pursued for their own sake.” “In Hinduism, the focus is on spiritual growth and realization of the self rather than on possessing extraordinary abilities or powers. While Ashta Siddhi may be considered desirable, the ultimate goal of spiritual practice is to attain inner peace, wisdom, and liberation from the cycle of birth and death.” “In conclusion, while the Ashta Mahasiddhis may be considered extraordinary and desirable, the ultimate goal of spiritual practice is to attain inner peace, wisdom, and liberation from the cycle of birth and death. The attainment of these powers is considered to be a byproduct of spiritual practice, rather than the ultimate goal.” I’d have to do a lot more research to be sure, but I’ve never read that siddhis are the aim in the direct texts of Hinduism or Buddhism. If you can find an example of siddhis being the aim in a primary text I would be both surprised and interested. As a side note, this same link claimed that “Siddhis are supernatural powers or abilities that can be achieved through the practice of tantra yoga. These powers are believed to be associated with the awakening of the Kundalini, which is a dormant energy located at the base of the spine in Muladhara Chakra. When this energy is awakened, it rises up through the chakras, or energy centers, in the body, leading to a state of higher consciousness up to Sahasrar for achieving liberation.”

Interesting! Which original teachings?