Earl Grey

Ah, I get it! Leafy is avoiding the use of actual examples or citations because testing this vague hyperbole would immediately show its absurdity! Then he hides it behind this wall of text and complains when people actually read it (or suffer through it) and says we've left him a mountain of text that he doesn't even read! And then he calls people who disagree with him "hostile trolls", especially when they don't tolerate his insults! My guess is that he doesn't have any friends who are blacks and other minorities, working class, foreigners, elders, cancer patients, military veterans, or people who don't have their parents paying for them still who would all quickly put his weird theories to rest.

I just thought it would be pertinent to talk about a different kind of suffering, a perpetual helplessness that isn't just poverty, but systemic. Let's look at the pandemic and poverty here. Do the people living in rubbish heaps and sheet metal huts and making maybe $2 a day find joy in their unending suffering as ol' Leafy ascertains? A serious brain drain because a lot of people in this country I'm in can't afford to educate their kids because of social distancing protocols? Even Cambodia has more preparation to accommodate in-person learning, and so only very recently were a few more schools allowed to have standard in-person classes instead of forcing people to learn online. Learn online? When it's ranked the worst Internet in the Asia Pacific region? When people can't even afford a computer, desktop, or Internet connection? Hey, at least mobile data on their phones allows free Facebook... This is about two years of a huge chunk of the youth being held back in learning, and even before the pandemic were lacking plenty of resources for learning. Is it a surprise that parents sell their kids to brothels or young women go there for opportunities? Or why 8 year-olds sniff glue? Meanwhile, mandatory face shields here and a recent revelation that the shady business dealings involved former drug lords running a questionable business, Pharmally, working with the authoritarian regime to benefit $100 million dollars selling expired face shields and antigen tests while only having less than $10,000 in their accounts prior to securing deals with the regime? And somehow, they became the number one distributor in the country out of nowhere? I wonder... dumping all the costs of avoiding the virus on the poor, who are already struggling to get ahead, while also having no means of either paying for healthcare or even having access to healthcare, then losing loved ones quicker than those with financial means to seek help? I wonder then if Leafy thinks that this perpetual suffering from systemic, societal, and overall corruption does lead to happiness. Maybe people can rise out of happiness if they have the means to bounce back, but if you don't and just remain stuck? Well, happiness is a quick spray of rugby on your jacket sleeve and a snort away...

I wonder if victims of bullying, rape, and school shootings, especially families of victims (yes, I went there) are happy after all this suffering as asserted by Leafy here. I also wonder if people who’ve had cultural genocide would celebrate the erasure of their past and many of their people, Tibet, Xinjiang, and so on. On the subject of erasure... If ol’ Leafy says slavery is a good thing and makes people happier when they’re free and they won’t be miserable nor will their kids, I dare him to say that in some parts of Chicago... ...but we’ve already established he’s just trolling. If he actually believes this drivel, then the pandemic has really shown what isolation from other people has done to affect someone’s ability to understand and empathize while being stuck with the Internet (and some light novels and manga). Also, knowing Leafy, he’ll complain about this “wall of text” but still never look at his original post and his abundant lack of paragraph spacing or punctuation.

I hope he doesn't paste an entire FREE PDF here, not just the link, but the ACTUAL contents in one post like he did before in a thread. Maybe because he's busy reading light novels and manga? And probably not the last... Hey, apparently I post "mountains of text" and am "impatient" for "replying too fast for him".

In general, Medicine Buddha is pretty accessible. The practice from Dzokden group is free and requires neither transmission nor empowerment. Before transmission, I felt it was a good practice in general to make the vicinity feel more sanctified and elevate my state. After transmission and learning Dzokden's practice, I felt like I could bring Medicine Buddha and the related Tathaghatas to enhance the practice, even tasting sweet water after blessing my offering. When I got empowerment, I felt more compelled to do the practice and aware of people's states, even people acting weird, hostile, or generally unpleasant as merely having an illness affecting their conduct, whether it is emotions, poverty and other circumstances, physical pain, or karma, and animals definitely respond more.

I got oral transmission earlier this year and empowerment recently via Khentrul Rinpoche. It's one of my favorite practices.

Drivel? Rubbish? Multicolored fonts of different sized texts and abnormal paragraph spacing? Choosing one word and taking it out of context to post a music link and stupid puns or rhymes that have nothing to do with what’s being discussed? Someone could program this posting style into a bot and it would offer just as much conversational value to any thread!

You said it, not me, I just bolded it. Your assertion is so absurd at this point that you remind me of a guy who told me nobody knows suffering because of ONE autobiography that he read about a guy who came out of Auschwitz and became a millionaire, ignoring the fact that a lot of people who came out of the camps committed suicide, even if there are the occasional guys happy to have survived and happy to be alive. And also, if suffering leads only to happiness, then why have we not become a happy world like a Carpenters song long ago? Suffering creates more suffering and contentment is just an interphase from suffering to suffering? Gee! Who woulda thunk it?! 🙄 You have gone past my point of giving you the benefit of a doubt because as an added benefit of answering your question about my age, I’ll explain that and why I’m not going to bother with this cacophonous exchange further now. The answer: I have better things to do with my time after wasting enough of my youth engaged in pointless conversations that not only aren’t paying me, but absolutely bore me with how unoriginal they are. Time to have fun with my friend @Nungali here instead!

LOL "Great Walls" that had paragraph breaks and were concise compared to your OP. I read a lot too dude, whether it's literature or your favorite, "manga and light novels", in addition to sutras and other texts. So excuse me, I can make my points quick, elaborate, and concise. Try responding to the first message before trying to immediately get to the most recent one, dude. Figure out your priority before reacting. Hell, follow Gurdjieff's method of waiting 24 hours to respond if you need to, even. This isn't a race, it's a dialogue.

"Do as I say, not as I do." You just said You replied after only going through "like half of what I said" and already started responding to me instead of responding in full after reading the whole thing. Double-standards, much? Nothing to do with my patience, dude. Yeah...sit on this a bit more, ideally with a good dictionary. Your word choice and your analogy talking about rich kids when I already pointed out other examples. "I believe everything I see on TV and hear on the radio! But I am SO SMART because of the INTERNETZ! I AM SO SMART I AM SO SMART! S-M-R-T--I MEAN S-M-A-R-T!" Actually, you summarized it incorrectly. Now you're just trying to mischaracterize and distort what I said, which was Which means that you basically ignore that a good teacher can't bring you up, "only suffering can" as you stated. Nah, you just aren't listening and not even bothering to clarify. Now you're putting it on us as though we have the mental block. You get one more try to engage rather than convert, then after that, I am not even going to bother any longer because this is too basic even without the weird assumptions and logical leaps, dude.

That's like saying YES to someone who says FREE SEX before they actually get to finish their sentence and say "CHANGE". You seem too eager to respond before actually taking time to consider responding, which means you're reacting more than responding. Making a judgment so quickly is an emotional reaction and doesn't usually characterize people with strong development and insight. This means that your definition of suffering discounts good teachers. I'm not sure if you've had any good teachers or systems to guide you forward or if you were advised by Dr. Google, Wikipedia University, and Professional Redditors. You think there's only one kind of contentment? If you think the contentment of a mountain hermit yogi is the same as a trust fund kid in Los Angeles, this false equivalence fallacy is a poorly-constructed argument. It's the same as saying a sorority girl with a pimple on her face is as bad as our friend with the tumors on his face--their suffering isn't the same condition that leads to the same outcome, as this suffering is both different extremes and derived from different origins. That's the Stanford Prison Experiment and you seem to only know not only superficial elements of the study, but have made false conclusions and added details that weren't there. This is a real ass pull here. I think the core of your fundamental misunderstanding is that you're not only oversimplifying, but you're referring to concepts and words that do not mean what you think they mean...

You're confusing terms, dude. You say "transcendent meditation" as a generic technique, but this is about Transcendental Meditation, which is an institutionalized practice, that celebrities from the Beatles to David Lynch are fans of practicing.

It could also be you've independently reached similar conclusions to ones made before. With a little extrapolation, there is some truth in what you're saying, but through observation throughout the ages, suffering begets suffering and it takes special individuals to rise above it...which is why so many spiritual teachers and religions formed to help alleviate that and educate others to transcend it. I believe you are probably talking about two things here: suffering itself and the inspiration to rise above suffering, because suffering itself could be considered a state just as much being sick doesn't mean you'll get well, such as people with cancer! Likewise, if we frame contentment as a state, this doesn't necessarily make people "corrupt, perverted, and destructive". I think you mean "apathy" because you can be spiritually contented, though it's not the same contentment you refer to where you're satisfied and bored, it's closer to the contentment of having achieved a small feat such as 1.2 million repetitions of chanting Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hum. I'm sure someone will bring up the Holocaust or Pol Pot, the AIDS crisis, and famine in East Africa in the 80s. What you are more likely to understand is that attachment to outcomes is more of a cause for suffering rather than the things themselves, especially for more everyday obstacles to awakening. "I'm rubber, you're glue..." I find you can respond appropriately to whatever comes your way without reacting--important distinction there. See my above examples, or even Uighurs in concentration camps now and cultural genocide on the macro level. On the micro level, think of the hell realms, the hungry ghosts, those born with disabled bodies, hereditary health conditions, or even abnormal conditions like those with tumors on their face as you can see with this guy in India (YouTube video for it). It's not as simple as "thinking positively" because it takes a lot from proper teachings to good community, teacher, and personal effort. Personal effort with inadequate means actually causes harm to others as much as it inflicts self-suffering. Having friends who can challenge you to some foosball to see who picks up the bar tab is as fun as friends who are there to comfort you and play Care Bears hugging and saying "You rock, rockstar!"

Thanks for editing the first post--now I can see all the fallacies and lack of historical or technical understanding there. I think going through each instance is going to only reinforce your belief in this, and you seem to be quite happy with yourself. One thing I'll challenge you with is this, however: what makes your analysis unique? Is your analysis synthesizing everything that's already said (or as some would argue, syncretizing)? What do YOU bring to the table that is of material value? Don't mistake my challenge for being a pinprick or devil's advocate, dude. This is just so YOU know what makes this useful for you, because even if nobody gets you, it has to mean something to you. No platitudes like "knowledge is power" or "it makes me happy". DEFINE how this knowledge gives you power that would prevent others from taking advantage of you or give you an edge over others for knowing. EXPLAIN how this happiness you feel from what you've posited affects your overall being and brings balance to yourself. Or, ignore this and have the best day ever, dude! No sarcasm here, just friendly ribbin'.

You're not an impostor. Just enjoy exploring and discovering.

A good rule of thumb is if it’s too long to read aloud in one breath, the paragraph break needs to come in and give us a literal breathing space!

One thread is enough to compare. To the OP: paragraph breaks are your friend. Makes it easier for us to read.

Personally, I thought it sounded more like Everything.

@beingnature

Whomever attended the seminar this past weekend, what did you think? Post your answers on this thread:

Except it achieves none of those objectives and does precisely the opposite 😜

Saw my name tagged here, and I can’t really say much about Flying Phoenix for someone who is exploring besides the fact it is accessible and has verifiable, consistent effects on students. In lieu of a teacher, it does things most people think they won’t find without traveling to China. For more details, there is an abridged section on the AG forum linked in my signature that condenses the 200-page plus thread here into just a few without any repetitions. At the moment, I think you’re still in exploration mode and it’s best if you stick to Flying Phoenix for a few weeks before I can really say much, as I’m not a salesman—the system and its benefits already sells itself for the laymen and those just looking for a simple, accessible approach to health and bliss.

Source citations might help before the more invested people scrutinize this statement.

The average person can practice Reiki. A cultivator can practice Reiki, but the question is should they practice it. Most people don't run into this problem unless they're doing something that leads to faqi as @freeform is explaining. Reiki isn't a problem with Flying Phoenix, but it is a problem with something else I practice, so all three levels of empowerment that I have in Reiki have served their purpose for the first few years of practice when I was tasked with healing people as a volunteer at a mental health and trauma sanctuary. I haven't seen much use since 2017 or 2018, which were the last time I taught a student from level 1 to level 2 and gave Reiki therapy to some guests during the World Cup. Now, I probably won't use it only because of the limitations of my current practice.