snowymountains

Enlightenment is about to get an IPO 🤣 I propose ENLT as the ticker name 😁

I believe the early Buddhist monks did carry a bowl and those who attended the Dharma talks did fill that bowl with food. It was not compulsory but it was the social convention of the times. Today in Theravada they typically charge nothing, in Zen practically they typically charge something very nominal and typically it's optional too, which is more or less analogous to a bowl of food. An optional bowl of food donation is ok in my view, I mean ultimately those who teach the Dharma need to eat somehow, but it should not be a barrier to entry for those who want to attend Dharma talks and have themselves trouble securing food, the monthly bills etc.

we also seek, fear, get angry, experience lust, nurture, get sad, we play and lots of other stuff. The definition you give is a cynical one, it is also unfounded. Maybe (?) this is an effort to define what we are in terms of behavior, but even within strictly behavioral terms we are not just sleet/work/eat.

These are good questions on life and ultimately linked to death. Marcus Aurelius said a few things. Each year I contemplate along the lines of , "if I were to die next year, what things do I really want to do before I rest". So in a way death makes clearer one's priorities and values in life. If I don't live this year according to my values and priorities to the extent that I can, then I will have lived according to someone else's values and priorities, not mine. If there's an afterlife, how would it look like?, what happens after then? etc, no clue really and I don't believe anyone amongst the living has any clue either.

(bold is mine) What are the historical roots of Wiccan rituals? Are the wiccan rituals something new or they're deep rooted in history? Rituals sometimes are even inherited from previous religions which the newer religions replaced, and hence sometimes a ritual is practiced for thousands of years. Some of them are very tried-and-tested.

Breathing meditation is a type of Samatha meditation, it's probably the most common type of Samatha If you want to go solo, that's probably also possible but easier if you work with a teacher the first years. Probably the best approach is to get find some sort of structured instructions on breathing meditation+open awareness+loving kindness. These three are the most common and most important ones. But to begin with I'd stick to one school, as each school has their own style and subtleties, mixing them may be confusing. You could visit meditation centres near you, to find a teacher and group you like working with. Some of them will charge nothing or something entirely nominal btw.

Indeed, after those secret books at Amazon.com and secret Wikipedia pages, which nobody really asked for, on a (non-existent) secret food meditation, a return to the topic is the only sensible course. A good way to do the carbs diet, or any diet, combined with exercise is a combination of a Fitbit or a Garmin coupled with myfitnesspal, the later for accurate calorie tracking. Eyeballing the calories of a portion is more misleading than we perceive. As not all days are made The same, the sports watch will also show daily a very good estimate of how much calorie burn happened during the day, which is important to keep an eye on as the daily calorie deficit needs to be moderate, not excessive to avoid exhaustion.

For anyone interested the actual Wikipedia page on Theravada looks pretty ok https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theravada , it describes the history, the textual basis, practices. Offshoots/small sects which deviate significantly simply aren't representative of Theravada, they're can claim what they want to claim of course and whoever wants to practice them they're free to do so. But Theravada monastics are also free to mostly prefer to have nothing to do with them. From the wiki In short, modern Theravada is as close to the original form as can be, forms that emerged with later medieval additions and took different paths have been reformed away and are now minor sects. Theravada is open, no secrets, and that's the beauty of it. Anyone can follow whatevs they want, even if it's practiced in just one monastery. What is entirely misleading though is to call an 100% open tradition as secret.

Personally I don't care about a duel. I don't care much about that practice either, whoever wants to practice it, they go ahead and practice it, it's a personal choice. It's just not Theravada by any measure, it's a small sect. Theravada is 100% open, with no secrets.

Sorry but what you say is completely misinformed on Theravada, it represents a small sect, which others have isolated, not Theravada, which is completely open and has no secrets. You sincerely believe you're handing over some trusted secret information that others would be glad to get, I get that. But what you say is simply not true. Suggestions on how I should be responding are not welcome, sorry, I'll call a spade a spade, if you don't like that that's fine. Perhaps patronising works well to "others who are rather glad" to get all this secret information but you're knocking on the wrong door here with these tactics.

They may pitch it in that way but they're very minor and are considered a heresy by other monastics, and hence mostly isolated by other monastics. It's the second time you mention dhammakaya when you respond to me. Is there a reason you do that ? Because for sure I've never mentioned dhammakaya nor am I affiliated. It's not a matter of access to secret teachings, because they don't exist. Theravada is a very open tradition. Proof of what ? The goal of Buddhism generally and also Theravada is Nibbana. In any case someone can visit and see with their own eyes, or talk to a Bhikkhu from the region and ask.

In any case, each can follow whatevs they want, minor in the region , major in the region, whatevs, it's a personal choice. Someone can visit the region and make their own mind on what most monasteries practice and even ask them if everything is in the Suttas. My main point is desensitisation techniques are usually not a good fit for personal meditation practices, even if one happens to be in the Suttas.

He's sincere, don't question that, but only few monasteries engage in this practice. They're isolated and it's not representative of Theravada in the region. If anything that's the beauty of Theravada, practice is all based on Suttas, teacher commentary more or less follows Buddhagosha's work. Though minor deviations do of course occur, there are no secrets. Practices that were created later eg tantric practices were not incorporated into Theravada, nor has it incorporated elements from other spiritual practices ( eg from Taoism ), it's in a sense as close to the Buddha's teachings as it gets after thousands of years have passed since then

Or they don't exist

I'm aware of this, which is why I asked if it's an offshoot, this one is considered a "heresy", it's not the Theravada tradition that's practiced in most monasteries, only few, which are also disconnected from the rest of the monasteries. They also have some tantric-like practices like bringing a visualisation of the Buddha inside their bodies etc. It may not matter if you enjoy the practice, but it's not representative of Theravada Buddhism, where indeed there are no secrets.

for me thoughts are either internal verbal communication or internal imagery. No-thought can certainly be achieved and actually there are even evidence based protocols for that, which are not seen a lot though as they require a lot of commitment. Correct - from the body. It's definitely internal. It is imagery though, so according my definition of thought above it still needs the ability to think. According to these folks, there was EEG activity after the heart stops JNDS_40-1 3pp (2022).indd (virginia.edu) , if their finding is accurate, this means should still be brain activity ( though they do of course say it's one case hard to generalise ) To which energetic system do you refer to. Central channels are from Tibetan systems ( maybe others too ), middle dan tien is a concept in Daoist practices. I am not aware of a system that unifies the two. It's weird and it's all unconscious for me, though I do recognise I am in the said psychological state and know what might happen through mindfulness of emotions/emotional affect, I have no bodily affect mindfulness for it. For me it's electrical equipment, it's weird to change rooms and see the effects change rooms. I'll give a pass on that thread because tbh MCO is so disconnected from my regular practices that I do not practice it. I don't see a point, I'm sure there is a point for other paths, that work with energetics but I don't work with energetics and it seems pointless to just circulate something for the sake of doing it ( though in other practices I understand there may be reasons to do it ). I'll look at energetics from an acupressure point of view actually, my goal is not to do something with it but gain sort of "mindfulness of energetics" That's how I see it as well, didn't say which of the two points of view I personally choose (for myself that is) in my previous post I think it's so vast that it's unintegratable and one may as well let "it" run his life at some points. it's a certain version of what's called "living the symbolic life". Imo this is the big gap in spiritual paths and even structured therapy goals, sometimes "it" just needs to take over the flow of events. Deal

You don't need to expand where & with whom you practice, it's not why I responded. What you say is not the case though, Theravada has zero secret/esoteric teachings. A teacher is needed for practical purposes, just like a trainer is needed for sports, but the teachings are not secret.

Are you sure it is Theravada and not something based on Theravada ? All Theravada practices are in the Suttas and slight variations of them, with commentary, in the visuddhimagga ( or equivalent commentary works ). There's nothing secret.

All of Thai, Sri Lanka and Burmese Theravada have all their practices fully open, there's no non-public part. Some meditations are not practiced by laymen but they're not secret.

Honestly not worth it, it's not meant for a diet anyhow, it's also de-emphasised in Theravada practice. It's aim is to work on attachment to food, essentially it's a decensitisation. To do decensitisation specific good reasons are needed, eg smoking cessation, and is almost never done in isolation. Decensitisation makes someone detest something but alone it's typically not enough as equivalently strong sensory stimuli are also needed as a replacement. There are a few other important factors on this as well but expanding would take a long post. As an example from the relatively recent past, decensitisation was the main technique used in conversion therapies, which did tremendous damage to people because decensitisation succeeded ( they detested having sex with a same-sex partner ). This led to depression, suicides etc. So I guess what my message is that decensitisation is in general better avoided as a personal meditation practice. It needs specific reasons, specific scope, doesn't apply to everything, needs to be complemented with other techniques.

You know, this topic can end up a very long discussion 😁the two most common definitions/points of view are from neuroscience or from behaviouralism/physiology ( which uses the body-mind connection ). One may well add a ton of philosophers on top of that. So the point of view depends what you ask for, this merits its own thread. It does, but so does our physiology, thought-activity can be detected using EMG. Dropping the baseline tension of our muscles, particularly the vocal ones stops verbal thoughts, there is an ideomotor linkage between the two. This actually is something that's applied therapeutically to people who suffer from psychosis, voices stop when they lower the baseline tension from their vocal cords. Please expand, this is very interesting, I don't have a good answer to this personally. I haven't had an NDE myself but I'm aware of what you say through first-hand accounts of other people who did see the "life review". Ok, so if I understand correctly, you attribute to electromagnetic activity that is innate in the body, you say we're just not mindful of this activity and someone can become mindful and also control it. Do I understand your statement correctly? I wouldn't rule it out, though I'd need to see it myself to believe someone can control the activity to the extent they can light fires. Edit: I decided to share something, albeit I'll keep details out of public discussion. I am familiar with it personally to an extent, something related to electromagnetic activity does occur with statistical significance when I'm in a certain psychological state. I also know it comes from me because I can use the conscious mind to pause unconscious mind activity as well ( there exist both evidence based and yet-to-be-evidence-based techniques for that ) and the activity does stop. Not at lighting fires level but fully observable, also by others. Incidentally I have plans to explore more into this the coming year. My personal experience with MCO is that I do feel "something" when I do it, that something does feel like electricity but what is not clear is if it actually is an electric current. For sure drawing attention to the right places though can generate sensations similar to an electric current. So you're saying effectively there are simple ways to become mindful of this activity - please go ahead, I'm interested in hearing more on these practices. I'd assume it's a practice that does have differences to the Buddhist "mindfulness of the body" to emphasise more the energetics parts. Indeed more than ways for everything, the reason I mentioned is that if we take that case at face value, it indicates for the person who did this, it was not his conscious mind doing it, he attributes to other forces, and since it was done through him, this implies unconscious forces ( and hinting at transcendental parts of the unconscious that act as receivers ). So for that case there was no mindfulness of this, no coming to awareness, it was below the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of depth in this, whether someone should integrate what they can into consciousness, or surrender consciousness to some unconscious forces. Specifically for archetypes that is not the "simple" personal unconscious. it's a philosophically different point of view, it's also what led to the split between Hillman/archetypal analysis and mainstream Jungians. But you say these can come to consciousness, they don't need to remain unconscious, so interested in hearing more on this. let's keep a tab, I may PM you in the coming days, if that's ok with you.

ok I see how it works, then in neurofeedback it looks like indeed it's possible to blind. define mind then, by mind mind I was referring to thoughts, this is brain activity. I'm fine with locating our "core" to the heard, not the thought center though, because of a spiritual experience I had. it's interesting you mention memory in the context of NDEs, before we discuss this, do you refer to memory of the NDE ( during which the brain had no activity/clinical death ) ? Our difference is you view energetics as a system of it's own, with layers distinct to the brain-nervous system-glands-hormones dynamic system. I view energetics as an effort to approximate that, which has gotten a lot things right including things not yet proven. The gut's role was also unproven 30+ years ago and there it is today. Why do you believe energetics have components that are undiscoverable in principle ( not due to current limitations, pace of research, direction etc ) ? It wasn't but 50 years ago people also grew up in a different environment, it's both the current environment and the environment where developmental changes happen. I expect it to be worse in +20 years btw, hope I'm wrong. An important part of therapy is exactly resilience building. But it's a loop, personality structure and behavioural patterns often prevents change, therapy changes these and this enacts change in the external factors. This is a personal view, indeed a lot of the factors are societal. But this means they're difficult to change, therapy helps with shedding introjections and breaking some of the societal factors, feel free to disagree. Agreed on medication, disagree with state of NHS re mental healthcare, it's way worse than you believe it is. Prescription straight away is not uncommon, short term therapies are also not always delivered by well trained staff. This is not because shorter term CBT is bad (it's not), it's because the real motivation is cost cutting and delivery often is of low quality. I'm actually being very honest, as you said yourself, psychotherapists don't diagnose, it's also not as common to refer someone to a clinic to get a diagnosis by a clinical psychologist (it's rarer that a psychiatrist does the diagnosis, they also often lack the proper training, but of course they prescribe based on the diagnosis of the clinical psychologist). In therapy someone could go all the way without diagnosis and not even set goals in some modalities. If someone does go to a clinic to get a diagnosis, then of course, they do learn the diagnosis. Have you observed it as a common occurrence (not 1/2 offs) outside this context? - if so, then agreed it's horrible and I can understand why you left. We were referring to different things here, I was referring to that someone coming to psychotherapy won't hear "you have PTSD", which is true, also nobody would refer more than once to a psychiatrist who screws up the therapeutic progress like that. Overall society in the west doesn't have good mental health overall, there is tendency to prefer medicalisation by healthcare systems both because they're cheaper than therapy and because pharma is happy with this. Of course meds are also needed for some people and there are good psychiatrists out there that do put the effort to find what is right for their patients. If someone can shut pain without energetics, then energetics are not needed to shut it down. As it can all be also explained without energetics, then energetics are not a needed concept for shutting down pain. So what you're saying is that the nervous system cannot function without an accompanying energetics model ? I'm not a neurologist to answer how the signal goes down but do you really believe that? For psychological healing I know people who are like that, there are some famous ones too, e.g. Milton Erikson. For cancer look, I'll tell you, I have mixed feelings on believing it, a friend who is an oncologist has witnessed what you describe and their words were like "this should not be possible" and I trust their judgement but it's a bit on the tail of the events I'd believe. So let's say I'm rather open but not a believer either. It was not a Daoist who did the healing though, nor did they practice energetics of any sort. In all honesty, from what I've heard at least, the person who did the healing said "God did this, not me". For psychological healing I know the mechanics down to a good level of granularity. I'm interested in hearing about cancer. I have, see comment above on the heart, I know my answer but I'll never be able to prove it to anyone.

Oh and take it easy aim to lose 2kg-3kg a month, not more. If you lose more weight to get done quickly, it's more likely you'll regain it quickly. Another interesting stat I remember from my GP, most people gain weight during holidays and then don't lose it. Weight gains are not linear over time, so be mindful of what you eat during holidays.

In general eat normal food, properly cooked meals that have a balance of protein both from meat/fish and legumes, carbs, vegies. Replace saturated fats with fats from fish, olive oil etc. Reduce carbs a bit while you are trying lose weight. Eat fruits, salads Walk 5-10k a day. Have a cheat day once a week to eat sweets or a pizza. That's what my GP had recommended when, in a similar situation, I had asked him this, it worked wonders🙂

indeed, I see that, they say it's double blind and the reviewers agreed to this statement - still if someone knows the treatment they receive, it's not double blind by definition, I don't know what to say but in other communities, people usually call these just RCTs exactly because the subject can understand what treatment they receive. It's done via the nervous system The mind is in the brain, 100%, all our thoughts are in the brain and it's very tied to the body, e.g. thought activity can be measured from the body via EMG, for a long time now. If instead you refer to our pure awareness then I'm happy to discuss any scenario and science may never answer this. On a first level approximation the connection is via the nervous system, this in turns activates glands, glands emit hormones. It is possible to control, albeit indirectly, the switch between SNS/PNS and it's a skill that's built over time. On second level approximation it's more complex and of course not everything is known yet. Exercise helps, a lot, but its effects do not need an energetic makeup model, e.g. exercise increases endorphins, decreases cortisol etc. If you want to aggregate these in an energetic system that is also fine, but there's no need to use an energy language to describe this. 50% of women in their 40s-60s in the UK were prescribed antidepressants, 90% of people have a disorder - 10% of that at clinical levels. Therapy is badly needed. The reason they don't change their environment is exactly because they need to change first, to then change the environment. Therapy is not something abstract and detached, successful therapy will mean the client enacts real changes in real life. Going to a monastery may also make things worse, it all depends on why it's done. Perma-avoidance is not uncommon. The "I have a chemical imbalance", "I have PTSD" etc are mostly from misinformation from the web. Unless they have a clinical diagnosis that is, which means at the moment of diagnosis they had PTSD, not that PTSD is a permanent part of their functioning. Btw a psychotherapist will almost never communicate a diagnosis (it can happen but under specific circumstances), so I sincerely doubt the "I have .." come from someone's therapist. It's the exact opposite, clients are empowered. Blocking pain is fully explained by Gate theory+placebo+operant conditioning, there's no need to use an energy model. I can block pain entirely, to the extent I've tested it, and know others who also can, it's used daily throughout the world for people who have chronic pain. I'm sure that there's stuff in energetics which are not conventionally explainable right now, as in more research will be needed to understand the complex underlying mechanics and till then an emergent model via energetics may be the best way to describe them. Pain is not one of them though. Honestly, and I don't mean this in a bad way at all, I have no clue what he is doing nor what outcome he achieved. I'm happy to discuss the existence a "healing presence" and its impact on people, I'm positive to that, but I'm not sure that's what I see in this video. I'd say the source may be the only thing that science may never fundamentally answer. Just like it will never be proven if conscience is there as an emergent property of matter ( reductionist view ) or instead our heads are "conscience receivers" from "nature"/the source. All topics in the thread do not need this question answered of course.