Lucky7Strikes

I think it more than freaked her out. The story goes a bit deeper than that. What would you have done?

Can you support these claims besides that they look fishy?

:lol: Max does a lot of those demonstrations, and it's not something that's totally out of the line from what I've seen at the seminars. There's a video of him doing demonstrations in front of Jenny somewhere too. As for random people attacking him, I think Witch here at thetaobums tried something in those lines. I don't exactly know the details, but I think it was pretty ugly. Yea, but none of these stories are a major concern for me. The practice works, Max seems to know what he is talking about, and they are based on legitimate lineages. He talks about stuff way more out of your imagination than just subduing another person with energies. For me they just leave room for possibilities, whether they are true or not, as with anything, I'd have to experience it myself.

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I didn't know Sifu Matsuo had a separate Wu Dang master. From my knowledge Max had first learned Qi Gong from a Wu Dang lineage... It's good that fiveelementtao can clear up these things so we can be more discriminating. So thank you 5ET.

Ah, I see. Thank you for the great info. The reason I got the dvd in the first place was because Trunk recommended that it would deepen one's knowledge of the Kunlun practice, especially the RP. I assumed that what Sifu Matsuo shared came from Max and not from his separate Wu Dang master since you see the GF mudra as well as the RP breathing. I didn't know they were from different traditions. My mistake for mixing them up.

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Edit: lol, what I wrote sounded more hostile than I meant. Hehe, I think using movie taglines to explain esoteric principles is a bit silly.

Seth, I don't understand where you see the inconsistency? If you are referring to Kan's interview on PA website, how Kan mentions the shaman telling him about Max, it was during his travels where the shaman foretold of him meeting a profound teacher. As for the actual meeting, Kan tells a very similar story to the one about attacking Max because of his teacher's orders. At one of Max's seminars, Max told the same story. So it's been consistent...I don't know where you are seeing all this blatant lying..? There seems to be a misunderstanding.

You're looking at this possibly backwards.

I've been to both teacher's seminars. Both are great and have utmost respect for one another from what they said. Also, Max teaches it differently from Jenny in terms of context and purpose, not to mention it is only a part of what he teaches.

@ Everything Awesome! Yes, I think I am a bit familiar with the states you are talking about. Did you feel incredibly awake, like more awake than you have every been in your entire life? As if the past daily awakeness was comparable to being drowsy? Taste, hearing, and touch were vivid and blissful? Is your heart pounding strongly but very slowly nonetheless? And it seemed as if your awareness was not in your body, but everything was of your awareness, but then you notice that your sense of "I" was just a thought looping around the head and the aliveness you felt was impersonal yet total? You can't induce that state through words. Basically you have to detach yourself from the words like deci belle said, because words are rooted in ideas, and ideas are concrete. The only way is to cancel the words out with words like Nagarjuna would do and make them so abstract you can't even make sense of what is and what is not. And breathe! Put your attention at the heart, and breathe! And let all thoughts happen but as you say treat it all as fake, a dream. Let all these questions go, let go! and Let go! let go until you have have let go of the letting go and just let your intuition of being take over and faith in your own death and as long as you do not disturb the process, everything will vividly manifest spontaneously, the wisdom, the energy, the creativity. Creativity is wisdom! Wisdom is not some analyzing of reality or metaphysics of some deep insight. If you try to consciously develop insight what's going to happen is you are going to just create a reflection, which is false. Wisdom is in the obviousness and how much you open up will reveal that as vividly as your hand. How fearlessly you delve into it is important. Then you won't know whats you or whats not you or what your aim is or whether this is a state or some trance or what not. Let reality reveal itself and do not try to box it in to neat ideas. If you return to these habitual tendencies to construct goals, identities, concepts, inevitably you will be sucked back into your so called "dream" states. And in my experience, that return is literally a crash into the earth like someone abruptly chopped off your wings.

Haha! I love the comics you post! They add a lot of freshness to discussions! Much thanks!

So you don't know, but base your knowledge on the faith of your teachers. Ok. Can you describe this experience of self-liberating?

Can you share your insight into the difference between them?

As a Christian will tell you that belief in God will get you eternal salvation. Man, who should I believe?

I heavily edited the post.

I separated this out because I find some things in it that needs to be cleared up. You say it depends on how much they are seen to be insubstantial. Just what is the degree of insubstantiality? Can you share your experience with this? To not dwell on whatever arises without rejecting them or accepting them is a confusing sentence. If you do not accept or reject whatever arises, you are inevitably dwelling in it. Actually you are not even dwelling in it, but being dwelled by it. How long it dwells is merely left to that very arising because you are neither accepting or rejecting it; its arising has become your whole being, as with the process of d.o. Or maybe you are talking about the duration or the impact of that dwelling. Like how long or the power of a certain thought. But ime the length and the power of thoughts are useful depending on what situation I'm in, or what type of thoughts they are. So liberating from those two qualities of length and impact can have negative consequences. Maybe you are talking about the experience of owning thoughts or senses, due to our beliefs in "self." But all thoughts are ultimately owned in that they happen in (or as) your awareness. You can't disown thoughts. The difference is probably, as I mentioned before, of the degree of impact they can have to lead us to do one thing or another. Also, repetitions of that reaction, or habit, strengthens that pattern of reaction. You do not have to call these recurring negative impacting experiences "insubstantial" to loosen their effects, but just to understand and observe how and why they arise. Seeing it as insubstantial probably lessens their effect time after time. But what remains after you have insubstantiate (a made up word I realize, but you get the point) everything? Insubstantiate insubstantiate, empty out emptiness? Now you are just chasing your own tail.

But this is my point. That you should share any personal or direct knowledge you have regarding these. And since you are reluctant, I get the feeling that you have no direct insight into any of these things you propound to be true. If people want better understanding of the Buddha's teachings there are far better sources to learn from than you or me. And if most fundamental aspects of the teaching have not been self verified, I'd present those teachings with caution, because I wouldn't know for sure they were true or not. All I have is my experiences. I do. Your posts can be readily found on a Buddhist wikipedia page, a book on Buddhism. Anyone can write out what you did after reading an article on Buddhism. They show understanding of how certain ideas relate to another, but not necessarily how you came to believe in them or their logical or experiential evidence. The present moment doesn't bother me as much. My day to day attachments don't cause me too much suffering, and I think these are generally overstated. I don't see much self-created suffering from day to day. It's rooted much deeper in our ignorance of our identities, and this includes insight into our past and future births, karma, the role of consciousness, generally the big ideas. Actually I believe It is the primary cause of these day to day attachments if you dig far enough. Yes, yes. But let's not put this state of mind on a pedestal. It's just a psychological shift in viewing things. That's all. It has potential to lead to greater awakening because the depth of the shift can alter denser forms of our existence and deeper conditionings, but there are other ways I can use to not dwell on things so much. It's not so special in its ability to remove attachments as you seem to think. For instance this body, in your idea of things, is considered another form of attachment. But believing things to be mere lacking of substance does not remove the body from experience. In my experience, to put over emphasis on these ideas can be counter productive to cultivation, because it can delude oneself into becoming stuck to shallow states of awareness that regurgitate on its own fascination with non-attachment. Or you may begin to consider everything to be a dream, like phantoms, but don't really delve into how it is like so, the mechanics of it, or why you have came to such a conclusion. To me this is an important part of the spiritual path, the "how things work" aspect. Only then can we utilize our understanding to truly lead out lives. You don't haver to prove to me that you have good reading comprehension. That's not what I look for when I'm having a discussion. I like it better when people share experiences and verified knowledge. That quote to me is filled with unnecessarily repetetive. It's really just pointing to a state of mind. See everything as a dream. See everything as impermanent. See this in everything. They are just pointing to a relaxed, spontaneous, clearer state of mind. And this can lead to deeper effects, but calling it nirvana or enlightenment or effortlessness is mere wishful thinking. Classic cases of overestimating one's attainments in this natural states can be found in a lot of teachers, in neo advaita or even Tibetan traditions, like Sogyal Rinpoche, Kalu Rinpoche, or Chogyam Trungpa, who left their fare share of scandals despite all this supposed knowledge. It's not so easy. I'm not criticizing any "head" realizations. There are actually no such things because any realization affects the whole awareness, the term is really a straw man idea one develops due to arising friction among beliefs. And one's inability to console them results in labeling one a "head" realization and the other something else. There are depths of realization and in my experience it's not "head" or something else but how willing one is to delve into one's being. This willingness is an attitude of the skeptic, an openness, that is usually set back by a lot of these useless terminology and ideas we develop from reading terms like "everything is like a dream." Two people saying that can have extremely varying degrees of how this idea has penetrated his being. And if one does not know how that idea holds true, worse, one becomes a slave to that doctrine. And doctrine, imo, is never any good unless it is utilized to rise interest in sets of ideas that aid in one's own evolution.

Yeah, maybe I ought to cool down here. . But I still stand by what I've written. I don't have much problem with what SJ attained or not. Just that we need to agree on knowledge that is verified through experience vs. faith.

Because it's bunch of stuff you have no real experience of or know to be true besides from the suttas or on faith. But if you are just talking about "notions" of birth and dead, ok. I can understand how you can get rid of those things. But you don't need all that Buddhist doctrine to do that. You can get rid of those "notions" easily by taking a physicalist point of view that you are just a bobbling protein made up of millions of cells that live and die every day. So there is no real birth or death there either but just cells interacting from parent to child, and if the body dies and returns to earth, it feeds the soil to replenish plants and other animals and so forth. So if you take this paradigm to be true, not just entertain the idea of it, then you are just likely freed from the notions of birth and death. As for Samsara and Nirvana, you can interpret those terms in the way you did. But Samsara by tradition means cyclical existence. And Nirvana is to be freed from it. You have no insight into neither but only theories and assumptive conclusions. You don't know if karma is true or not. If you did you would have knowledge of how you came into being, your past and future lives, the process of death and rebirth, and things of those nature directly like knowing that you can move your arm up and down; like knowing you can walk to the kitchen now and get a glass of water. Basically what I'm asking you to do is put all those Buddhist terms, doctrines, and books aside, and sit down on your meditation cushion and examine what you know, how you came to know those things, and what "knowing" is, but most importantly weed out stuff you actually don't know.

You don't have direct insight into the arising of your consciousness, form, mental formations...etc, the 12 links. I know and have heard of people who attain insight into their own coming into being, so I know that this is possible. Right now you just know the principle of dependent origination and have applied that principle to your immediate experiences, which is what Nan Huai Chin is referring to when he says that today's cultivators often practice backwards. They don't realize dependent origination. They take it and apply it to reality instead. This is like learning about the principle of causality and thinking you now understand how it applies to all things because you choose to observe it. And dreamless sleep isn't luminous display of Mind? How do you know beings bob up and down in cyclical existence? Do you have insight and proof into their past lives and how this thing called karma guides them? Do you know anyone who has freed himself from birth and death, as in have you met or had experience with them? Probably not. Freeing yourself from notions of birth and dead does not free you from birth and death.

I never said it wasn't possible. Just that you don't know it. Please don't pretend you do, about conscious only, 12 links of d.o., bardos, rebirths, karma, interdependence of consciousness, and generally most of the stuff you wrote in that post and onwards. You don't have direct experience into any of these. You are just aware in your dreams (but not sleep). You see life as it arises and passes. Experience is spontaneous and ungraspable. Everything is relegated as an empty appearance. When your view becomes effortless, all experiences are also so, hence the view needn't be upheld anymore. Boundaries between I, you, in, out, here, and there all melt into the cause and effect processes flowing on as this experience of "you." You tend to call this "self-liberation." Now leave it at that. Anything more and you just sound like another New Age nut job but with a head band that says "Buddhist." I'm assuming a lot here and may actually be attributing much more than you actually have experienced. But do you understand where I'm coming from? Hence I said most of it is taken on faith. What you are talking about is a psychological shift. Which is good. But don't delude yourself into believing that you truly know that there is no birth or death of an individual. Or that you can direct your life in the bardo states. This is like someone who just learned to ride a bicycle and believing he can now drive a motorcycle down a freeway, but not only that, feels like he knows where you are supposed to drive it towards. We need to bring Buddhism back to more realistic and practical measures. This is what the Western mindset has to contribute to Buddhism as it evolves here, to really bring it back to what the Buddha said in the Kalama Sutta. There's just too much fascination with mystical language, theories, stories and assumptions made too quickly without discerning how one has come to that knowledge. I know traditionalists like Namdrol do not like this, as I've read him making harsh criticisms of Western teachers taking the more skeptical stances regarding teachings. But I think it's a very positive development. It leaves room for true self discovery and autonomy, where the knowledge is yours and you know how you've come to that understanding like the back of your hand and not from some sutta, or a teacher, or "oh, I just experience it that way." Otherwise, people can easily become deluded in making themselves believe they know or are capable of much more than they actually are, too much of it shrouded in faith.

I read a nytimes article the other day on experimental education of character to kids in such things as curiosity, grit, gratitude, and the generally considered virtues of people. One word that stood out to me was "grit." It reminded me how I used to really prize the idea of grit, of endurance. How we are taught that it is a noble (and mainly masculine) attribute, to endure pain and suffering for a perceived goal. And on the other hand, those who give up are losers and quitters. This was a very strong motivation for me until I began to think that maybe this idea is a cycle of delusional back slapping among people who have questionable and silly goals they refuse to rethink because, hey, you'd be a quitter if you did that. Maybe that term "grit" is there to console us when there is doubt or a series of questions one is not willing to acknowledge, because grit is really an addition to our egos and pride. How many times have you heard the stories of, "I've been through a, b, c, I can handle anything" type of language not only from people but in your own mind? It shows lack of true conviction in what our effort is geared towards, and fear of its true value. It's perhaps not even that positive of an attitude as we generally value it, but more often, not even what it truly means when it passes through our minds as motivators: "you have grit! you can do it! don't give up!" Because if our conviction is there with complete faith in its meaningfulness, the ideas of grit or endurance are unnecessary and repetitive. Quitting doesn't even seem like an option. Grit and endurance, in some paradoxical way, are already there.

I guess tenacity to adapt is a good term for using endurance with wisdom. I think you also brings into point the strong dichotomy of failure vs. success in our society, or losers vs winners, poor vs. rich, outsiders vs. incrowd. All these are false notions of hierarchy based on the ego oriented me vs. you type of mentality shaped into us by society from early school and on. It leaves no room for true sense of self worth that arises solely from the individual mind. Happy-go-lucky wouldn't really be the term I use. More like chained and dragged by their pride, or as you put it, lack of insight into the future.