Lucky7Strikes

If not from deep existential suffering, spirituality can be initially studied because of personal greed. Some people are drawn to spiritual practice because it adds to their identity, or it promises fantastical states like immortality, powers, altered states, etc. You are basically seeking to either enhance yourself or to make up for a deficiency, and at worst to feel superior to others you feel you should be superior to but are not. It's all an ugly sentiment and quite a pathetic attempt of the ego to protect itself from its own insignificance. It's understandable because people place all their value and the little love they have in their identities...attached to thoughts, memories, the body, and innumerable silly things as "mine." But I believe just beginning to study spirituality, of something beyond physical limitations, is worth whatever negative intentions one might have had in the beginning. Because when you start to really practice and study ancient teachings and energy work, they will all tell you that the only problem here is you, your personality, and all your stupid ideas about yourself. There's going to be a struggle for someone whose initial intentions were centered around achievements of the ego, because progress with energy work will be difficult when you are holding onto a false entity within the mind. If the practice is genuine, it will melt you down and loosen your sense of selfhood, at which point attaining supernatural abilities or immortality begin to matter less and less. They might still be there as unconscious motivations, but practice will reveal clearly in depths of mediation that your inner being is becoming something beyond your current identity. It will begin to feel like you are dissolving into existence, and moreover what draws you deeper won't bliss or powers (even the most intense orgasmic bliss states won't matter much), but an inherent tendency of life energies within you trying to evolve and break beyond the physical. It becomes a natural and effortless purpose of life.

1) You can't accept yourself. That's like trying to stomp on your right foot with your right foot. You can only see the things which you are not. Accepting the world "as it is" is a misunderstanding of wisdom teachings. Telling yourself "accept, accept, accept" isn't such a good way to lead your life and will lead to problems like apathy and desensitization. Acceptance means to see the falsity of the many boundaries between you and existence. Your mind can't accept things, it can only realize its own falsehoods so that your awareness can become more open and free. 2) Life, which you are, naturally wants to do stuff, to evolve, to observe, and most of all to expand. This is usually expressed in all the wrong ways via desire for power, sex, territory, and yes, to the mind this tendency becomes a "one more thing then I'll be fine" dialogue. The intentions are always good, but interpretations are mostly bad. Instead of trying to diffuse this dialogue, try to find the underlying drive behind it. Whether you are directing life inwards into energetic states, or outwards into the material world, its basic liveness should never be denied under "acceptance" philosophies. In my opinion, it's much better to live a driven, intense, and expressive life of a criminal than as an oppressed "good" citizen at the office. You're doing life great injustice by trying to put it in a box.

Yeah, from what I've read, you have to be willing enough to give your entire being to the guru. Throw everything that is "you" away and be completely receptive. Not many people, especially today's society of individual thinker can do that. I know that I can't. It's very difficult to open up to someone you see as a guru that way.

Just become aware and don't identify with your body and mind, or the energies as is arises as "bliss." If your awareness is unburdened it will naturally be blissful. Why would you drive yourself into materialistic pursuits if you know it will be a dead end anyhow? I like your honesty. Good luck.

If you are an energy practitioner (prana/qi) coffee can really throw off your natural rhythm. It can give you a short boost, but drain you afterwards. If you find yourself tired, just sleep. Or eat less processed food and less food that takes a lot of energy to digest like meat. I used to drink a lot of coffee without much of a problem, but after beginning meditation/energy work I became really sensitive to how it destabilizes the body's energies. IMO you should just use it in emergency cases when you have to stay up.

IMO, there is a lot of effort in Western spirituality to bridge the gap between one's external desires/attachments and spiritual endeavors. I find this to be just a cunning manipulation of spiritual teachings to justify one's impulses. You can see this when it comes to worshipping one's own body (modern versions of yoga), collecting spiritual jargon/books, irresponsible sexuality, or just irresponsible behavior under ideas (and not experiences) of popular sayings like "we are all one/God/karmic force/ruled by stars or whatever." For a earnest seeker, there has to be a deep understanding that the yearning for wholeness and expansion we have within (this has to be identified foremost) cannot ever be satisfied with external conditions. Since today's society is constructed upon consumerism and entertainment, the purpose of which is to convince your being that ultimate satisfaction is dependent on external situations, there are so many unconscious layers I find within myself affected by a misguided search outwards, whether it be vanquishing your foes, romantic love, triumph of the ego, popularity or the few of many supposed ultimate "goals" peddled into our awareness from birth by Western culture. I am not advocating giving up material wealth or ending sexual desires and becoming a hermit, but the right understanding has to arise that the deep dissatisfaction of the human being cannot be appeased in any way by material or mental means. A significant shift has to happen where even the smallest investment one has in the outer world is turned inwards, without it we are forever bartering between our delusions of satisfaction out there somewhere and hobbyist attitudes towards spirituality. Perhaps at a certain point, the external world simply becomes a decoration.

LOL You are definitely fucking her!

Yup.

Passivity can take a lot of work because a significant aspect of you is activity. Acceptance can become a very passive way of existence when the mind utilizes the concept to cope with conditions. Your second point is pretty moot. People have said lots of things, even more so of the things you wrote. I never said this is some great insight or an original thought. But what I write I write from experience. Whether you believe that or not is not up to me. Meaning of life? I never wrote anything about the meaning of life. You are insinuating too many ideas from an experiential insight I've had that I am sharing. I don't know what the meaning of life, or what God is. Also I have no experience (nor do you I presume) of what you wrote about the non-separation between you and I. I can theoretically guess that might be true, but it also might not be true. So since it is not in my direct experience that this so called "I" is at one with the "world" or "you" I can't really comment on what you wrote here. But my guess is you haven't experienced these either. But they are merely ideas. I never wrote about any of these things. If you simply discard all these idea you seem to have about "no supernatural" "no meaning of life" "no God" "karma" (it appears you have a set of "anti"-beliefs) or whatever and simply just see your awareness and the life energies vibrating as your being, this intesive aliveness begins to arise and it becomes clearer and clearer that it is trying to expand beyond its current limitations. The more familiar I became with this tendency, I saw that most, if not all, of my externally driven efforts arise from it. But here you are talking about all these terms, God, karma, supernatural, meaning of life, greater purpose....endless ideas! I think this is written more for yourself. But why care about the universe? Just simply discard all this and see your awareness and life energies as they are and what they are doing. Live in contentment as a mere bodily existence...I'm telling you you will become very lukewarm, disassociated, repressed. All sorts of attachments start to happen to material things and persons. And your mind will go roaring every time small agitations come, "accept! accept! accept!"

Nice poem. I found that at certain points, reading spiritual texts can become great hindrance instead of support.

Well, first I don't feel like there's a void to be filled. I feel, no rather, I AM this nature that is yearning for inner expansion. It's a fuel synonymous with being alive. When you isolate the energy of desire from all the external things it's been attached to, and it is simply there with a pure sense of being, it is a tremendously blissful energy imploding within. And, IMO, your stance is an example of another popular spiritual teaching that has been misunderstood: acceptance. The type of mindset you are advocating is one of passivity that caters to a search for security, not transcendence. I think this happens when one suffers consistently from the ups and down of emotions, bodily pain, etc, he/she sees that there is problem with desiring for certain conditions so they stick to the mantra of "accept, accept, accept." IME when you do this you become very lukeworm, dull, liveliness really goes down. You end up a repressed being, and basically on a slow walk to the grave, all the while pretending this is being content. That type of contentment is a protective layer from suffering, not a genuinely spiritual life. You are really cutting off a very basic nature of yourself simply because it's not properly handled. Acceptance as a teaching, I believe, is not so that the mind can go "accept, accept, accept" whenever a unfavorable circumstance arises, but it is to guide the seeker to see an aspect of his being that is always already in acceptance. It's a characteristic of awareness, when it is not intertwined so much in mental and bodily activities, to be completely open like space.

When all your external needs have been fulfilled are you happy? Are you truly joyous in the satisfaction of your bodily needs? Maybe you are at a moment of peace. But what comes after? Boredom maybe. Restlessness. I would speak from first hand experience that it is not enough. This isn't because someone told me about God, but it is at the very core and the very wonder of being human. Humans want much more than mere survival, there is this deep yearning to evolve, to expand, to experience, to discover. Gods, heavens, and all the tales of something beyond have been invented from this inner yearning. All perversions of greed and lust also are rooted in it. To dismiss them as a mere "wants" to be curtailed and suffering is to deny a very essential energy within you that seeks for something greater than bodily existence. I would say one should want, and want very intensely in the purest sense of desire without it being attached to material delusions. To trace that wanting back inwards and see that your awareness has this necessity to evolve.

Are you able to feel the world as you feel your own body? Are you able to freely be with and without the body? IMO if you are not at that level yet, this popular "no inner, no outer" shouldn't be said as if it is truly in one's experience.

I'm not a Buddhist and what I wrote isn't a bleak world view. It's an assessment of the mind, at least my mind. There are deep rooted ideas in the mind, mostly unconscious, that external activity or success of any sorts is the solution to an inner yearning. This is reflected in the smallest choices we make, such as the constant search for entertainment. But the way is not to cut off desire or yearning. That makes you as good as dead. The essentials of desire IME is a very basic expression of life in its efforts to expand and evolve. Needs are just to survive, but as human beings this isn't enough. Satisfaction doesn't come from being merely content. As cultivators, one's wants should be harnessed in a very powerful way but inwards. Being content shouldn't be seen as an admirable trait, but it often is because so many of us suffer due to unfulfilled desires in the external sense.

Yes, this is what I'm really getting at. There's so much spiritual information available today people often mistake expressions of enlightenment for methods of cultivation only to fall to mind's tricks.

Well, now that you acknowledge the health benefits of qi gong, I don't understand why originally you wrote, "and there are no facts to back up the sheer magnitude of followers taoism has accumilated, to be honest it is starting to remind me of christianity and what it has been molded into." Here are more studies on health benefits and studies done on qi gong practitioners: http://www.qigonginstitute.org/html/database.php But really I think you are asking for studies of people's abilities to manipulate their inner energies to "heal beyond modern medicine, move objects, catch them on fire, and halt gravity in its tracks." Good luck finding subjects to study first. The only person really public about such abilities is John Chang with that Youtube video. So your best bet is to contact him so he can go through various testing facilities so that people can map out what exactly is happening within his body, and the procedures and results from those testing to be peer reviewed and reproduced by others by repeated trials. And only then when this is published, you can start practicing. But only practicing what John Chang teaches, well, because he's been tested. The better question to ask is, why do you need convincing for doing something that will supposedly have remarkable effects on yourself? Would you need someone to convince you that nei gong is real when your body is filled with bliss and awareness that you are neither eating or sleeping for days? Or when your bodily sensations are exceeding beyond the skin? If you are cultivating to solely perform miracles, I'd caution against studying any energy related practices. You would basically be studying for occult purposes of which you have no idea how it works or the consequences of. IMO, the problem here is that you are untrustworthy of your own self assessment of body, mind, and energies, and so when you practice you are scared of making a fool out of yourself by doing these hokey exercise that new age baby boomers do to feel spiritual or whatever, which is completely understandable. People imagine all kinds of stupid things happening when they get a tingle of new sensation called "energy." That's why as a preliminary practice, it is urged to practice perception enhancing techniques that will quiet your mind so that you can be able to see your whole system as is without imagination and see thing happening within very tangibly like your own foot.

Qi is just a very broad term for life energy. There are varying types of qi. It isn't some mystical "force" as you understand it made up of midichloreans or some thing. What you can do with this life energy with nei gong or internal cultivation method in terms of taoist alchemy is hardly attained by enough people for there to be some general study released (I think you are confusing facts with scientific, able to be reproduced, peer-reviewed evidence). Why would anyone doing such cultivation want to subject themselves to such tests anyway. Because they want "facts"? I never understood this type of mindset where it's almost expected for you to go into the lab if you are attaining to something beyond the norm, as if this person, experiencing tremendous changes in his own being needs a guy in a white lab coat to verify it with measurement tools. Only fools who can't distinguish between illusions of the mind and actual experience need that. But I have no doubt internal cultivation and its effects can be measured. As a very simple yet telling example, you can look at various studies done on long time meditators and their brains. Thats an example of life energies being directed to change one's inner physiology of sorts. But really so is eating a banana and it being turned into poop.

I have always struggled with the idea that if there is no-self there is no free will, which seems like the most logical conclusion. And often you will encounter teachings that say, "there is no one, and therefore was no one to choose in the first place." Ideas such as, "there is just things happening with no one there," are abundant. But in direct experience it is not like this. The less you identify with a self, the stronger your sense of choice is. Why? Because when you believe you are something, such as the body or the mind, you are constantly reacting as that object you identify with. For instance, patterns build up around a mental personal identity and form a personality. When you are engrossed in a personality, an idea of a self stuck to these thought patterns, or in attachment to the body, actions don't arise from a conscious choice, but a conditioned reaction. So the purest way to express free will is when I am perfectly present, and without identification with any "thing" in experience as a self. How can any-"thing" in existence have any choices anyway? It will always be conditioned. But if I begin to see life in it's immediacy, seeing everything as they are, then the choice is true. You are creating a new situation that is not a reaction, but a creation. Note: I'm not saying there is no-self or a Self or a background consciousness or whatever. I am speaking from what I perceive. And from what I perceive, acting with this sense of free will is much more rewarding than convincing yourself there is no free will and only scenery of life happening.

I had similar impressions. Very down to earth and strong ties to his lineage. At times he just seems overly burdened. I did think he was too...human. Not necessarily in the good way. He didn't even seem that happy especially in the later years. I really don't think he is as enlightened as his followers make him out to be. Or he reveals very little of the depth of what he knows. My impressions from meeting him or his students wasn't, "wow, I want to be enlightened like that." I see him more as someone carrying the mantle from his teachers, with an enormous tradition backing him. But who knows. My field of vision is limited. He might be a truly enlightened siddha.

I'd say you can only reach enlightenment if you want everything. .

thanks for bringing back this thread.

More enlightened beings coming on here to the taobums to dispel our collective ignorance on the right and wrong teachings! Wonderful. Long line of teachers coming down from GIH, TCO, (and me included of course), Xabir's Thusness, Everything, oh and of course all the neo-advaita teachers out there along with the new age jnana yogis...it will go on I guess, and this has always been the way spirituality has happened. Well, I, for one, welcome Boy as another enlightened being to thetaobums, and his knowledge of mind of "God."

The ego is just a thought that distinguishes you from others that's necessary for physical interaction in the material world.

...ah forget. I'm taking a break from here.

The criticisms you've listed here can be applied to anyone asserting a point to a mass audience using rhetorical language. Blanket statements are just generalizations. Of course there will be such statements when answering such a question as "purpose of life." Straw-man arguments? No one is debating him. Someone asked him a question. You can't have straw-man arguments when there is no original position to make a straw-man statement out of. "Stupid ideas, avoidance..." These aren't really objective criticisms (although you seem really hard to sound like it). You are too focused on the language use to see the essential meaning of what he is saying. And you are not even that good at using logical criticisms against Sadhguru's language. Also, what do you think he means when he says "live totally"? This video is part of a longer lecture, and I don't think you understand what Sadhguru means by living totally. Have you watched any other videos of Sadhguru? If not, don't you think it is a bit rushed to conclude he is some fraud? You wouldn't even do that with a normal person you've met, would you? 10 minutes in and you suddenly know him completely.