goldisheavy

Of course there is no value for incoherent beliefs. Think about it. The same guy that made the video, do you really think any prayer works for him? Even one? I will bet anything that not only do prayers not work for him, but that they are a hindrance and a nuisance in his worldview. That's why he's making those videos to help eliminate the phenomenon of prayer from his life. He explains that prayer is like the lucky horseshoe -- a useless superstition. Let the horse mouth speak for itself. I let him say what it is for himself. If you take an average self-proclaimed "Christian" and dissect their REAL beliefs, not what they claim to believe, but what they actually in-their-bones believe, you'll find that they don't believe anything in the Bible. This guy is right. He has another video that talks about that too. "Christians" don't really believe in Christianity, and perhaps that's good too. If they believed in it, they'd be even crazier and worse than they are currently.

That's funny. If you tame the mind, it sounds like the mind is like an object to you. But the mind is not an object! The mind is also what does the taming. So if what does the taming is not already tame, then you are screwed, arencha? Even if you take ordinary tamers, the kind that work in a circus, imagine if they tried to tame the tiger while their own minds were not tame? This is why I always say you have to contemplate. If you just think a little bit about what you are trying to do, like what IS mind, etc... then maybe you wouldn't be trying to tame it. That said, instead of taming the mind you can pacify the appearances. In order to pacify the appearances, you have to understand where the distress (lack of peace) comes from. Once you understand the root cause of distress, then what needs to happen in order for appearances to become pacified will become obvious. Also, have you read Zhuangzi at all? In particular, have you read this passage: This says something about taming. On the Zen side of things, Suzuki Roshi said "To control your cow, give it a bigger pasture." I think that's good advice.

I love this video: No matter what you think, this guy makes great points that cannot be ignored. I don't agree with his worldview, but I don't ignore what he's saying either. We need little video clips like this in our world so that religion can become honest or become irrelevant. I can't wait for his clip on Mohammad as well. He did a good job with Jesus.

It doesn't matter who Jed McKenna is. Why is everyone taking apart that guy? Maybe he's a nobody who hasn't had a single student, and never mind a student Arhat. Who cares? Is the point valid or not? It seems the point he's making is valid and stands on its own. The point Jed is making does not depend on Jed's character or on his beard's size.

These people need to study something called "coherence". In other words, if you know in your bones that disease operates based on random chance, and you temporarily "adopt" for the sake of an experiment an incoherent belief in prayer, of course it won't work. Furthermore, prayer almost always indicates incoherency in belief anyway. If your belief supports your desire, why would you pray on top of that? If you're praying, then something is not being delivered. Something is lacking. And if something is lacking, it must be because you don't believe in it, right? There is also a coherent way to pray. For example, you believe you can go to Florida. You stop at the gas station and ask for directions. That's prayer too. There is no way for you to be certain that you'll get good directions, and yet... on average if you continue this practice of stopping and asking, eventually you end up in Florida. Why? Because that was an example of a coherent belief. You still had to ask for direction, but you asked in a manner that was coherent with all else that you believe. Beliefs do not exist in isolation and you cannot casually supplant one just like that. Beliefs exist in a network and to change one means to change all of them to some extent. The closer the belief is to the core belief, the harder it will be to change it. This is why "The Secret" really is fraud. Because "The Secret" makes it sound like beliefs have no weight and like coherency doesn't matter or doesn't exist. Furthermore, all examples in "The Secret" are grossly materialistic, superficial, while work with beliefs transpires at a deep level. And deep level does not correspond to the superficial in such a straightforward and trivial manner as "The Secret" implies. "As above so below" does not work in a trivial naive manner. It's an abstract principle and every time you have some abstract principle and try to apply it to something concrete, you run into all kinds of trouble. The same happens with karma too. Karma is abstract, but it doesn't work in a straightforward manner at the concrete level. But that doesn't mean that anything non-straightforward and non-concrete is false.

Ohhh.... that's gooood!

Good shit. Seriously good shit. Buddha was surrounded by an army of Arhats. Not one or two or three. But the number was in the hundreds or more. Most of the "systems" in practice today don't even aim at enlightenment. They talk about it. They joke about it. But if you ever reach enlightenment, you're thrown out of school! If you reach enlightenment, you break the whole game. The game is to talk about enlightenment and to strive for it, in perpetuity, without ever reaching it. That's where the money's at.

What's happening is that you're encountering claims of phenomena that don't fit into your validation framework. That's perfectly normal, although most people are unconscious of their validation frameworks and I guarantee you, that based on how you talk about phenomenological issues, you are unconscious of yours too. Guaran-fucking-tee you. Regardless of whether or not Vajrasattva's claims are true, you should at least examine your own bias and your own core beliefs. Instead of challenging everyone around you to prove their core beliefs to you, your task on this forum is to challenge your own core belief by yourself and rely on other people for help, but not to do the legwork for you!

I think the intent was to discuss a particular application of karma rather than to discuss the karmic principle in a more abstract, more general, and more theoretic sense.

You're a free man. But this place would be better if you stayed and just posted your opinions instead of noticing that the opinions here don't match your own and taking your leave as a result. Sure, there is some circle-jerking going on, but where is it absent completely? Do you know any such place? Fact is, like-minded people do occur, and their behavior, on the account of their like-mindedness can be seen as a circle-jerk. It may be bad. It may be good. It's hard to say without seeing a more concrete, more fleshed out criticism. Besides, it's often when you try to criticize something that you learn something. Maybe you'll come here and get your criticism taken apart by a counter-criticism. Then you'll learn something. Maybe. If you stay quiet and only engage when the people are agreeable, you may be avoiding a good deal of learning. So the more disagreeable people you find here, the better, as long as you share the same goal! You should reach out and touch everyone here. Everyone here is yours to play with and to do with as you please. We are your children and your slaves and also your God. You worship us on one hand, but on the other hand, you make us what we are! So don't run. Take responsibility for your children. Stop being an absentee father.

It's impossible. If you stop making distinctions, you are making a distinction between making distinctions and not making them. Know that the radiant nature of Mind cannot be blocked or stopped by anything. You can change the flavor of appearances, but you cannot change the fact that there are appearances (hence, duality). Daoist explanation of one coming from Dao, then ying yang coming from one should not be viewed in terms of time. It's not a historic event! What it describes is the cake of Dao that exists right now. RIGHT NOW there is the level of Dao that's beyond designations (beyond even oneness). RIGHT NOW, this "level" supports another level called "one". It's the principle of wholeness. It's the principle that says that right shoulder cannot exist by itself without the left shoulder. This is wholeness. The emphasis is on non-separation. If you look at the same shoulders and emphasize the fact that one shoulder complements another and that they have different names and are relatively different and that we call one "right" and another "left", that's the level of ying and yang. But none of those are historic events. So right now, there is a level of ying/yang. Right now there is a level of "one". And also right now there is a level of Dao. These levels are nothing other than levels of insight. They are not actual "levels". The designation "level" is misleading because level indicates some separate region, but in Dao there are no such regions in reality. All the regions appear to us as appearances though, which is to say, appearances have no enduring basis. This lack of enduring basis behind appearances is called "the empty nature of appearances". The fact that appearances are so compelling, visceral, bright and very believable is called "the radiant nature of mind". All this is right now. It's not like Dao birthed The One 6 thousand years ago. That kind of chronological understanding of Daoist creation myth is wrong.

Not only do you not have to give up the flowers, but in fact, you cannot. Empty cognizance is the nature of mind and you cannot dismiss it or practice it away. You can change the smell and shape of flowers but you cannot change the fact that there are flowers. Many people have written at length about it, in Tibetan Buddhism, Zen, Mahayana, etc... no need to repeat.

I believe things are the way they are for a good reason. That doesn't mean they should stay like that by any means, but I mean that if you are sad, it's not just some stray feeling barging in or some chemical imbalance. There is some meaningful cause behind it. Sadness is a feeling that tends to arise when there is a vision that's not being fulfilled and at the same time there is a sensation of hopelessness, so not is it not being fulfilled, but it seems like it won't ever be fulfilled. It's a mild feeling, almost peaceful surrender into hopelessness. If it wasn't mild, then it would be anger instead of sadness. That's how I see sadness. And sadness tends to lift when one of two things happens, or a little bit of both: a) you realize it's not hopeless and/or you accept things as they are (lowering ambition).

@xuesheng: For some reason my mind got focused on the drummers! This happens to me a lot for some reason. I drift toward the drumming and I can't hear anything else, especially if the drumming rhythm is something I like. The guitar seemed very subtle and didn't dominate the sound.

This is a very crude statement. Language is capable of great nuance. Everything depends on how the subject is defined. So, depending on how the subject is defined, such identification can be correct and not wrong at all. If you think about it, any statement whatsoever can be considered an extreme view from the point of view of the ultimate truth. However, not to say anything is just as extreme. With that in mind, it's better to say something that's 90% correct but is intuitive and helpful than to say something that's 99% correct, but is damn hard to understand. In that sense, Advaita is often something that 90% correct and is easy to use. Buddhism is 99% correct and is hard to use. Buddhism suffers from its absolute obsession with correctness at the cost of approachability of the message. Everything has its place. Sometimes you really need to, and it's worth it, to spend 10 years to get from 99% correct to 99.99% correct using insanely refined language that's not at all intuitive. And sometimes you don't need that at all. Alas, if reality has to be free of conceptual limitations, or if reality has to be freed of conceptual limitations, that's rather limiting in and of itself. The most refined message you can give, and one you don't hear often, not even in the Dzogchen crowd, is that conceptual and non-conceptual is one whole, one continuum. Instead, most Buddhist strenuously hammer at the conceptuality as if it were the Satan. Not good. From my point of view, Buddhism is just as deviant as is Advaita. Both Buddhism and Advaita can be useful in contemplation.

I think we agree. Dan Tien can be as real as a computer or a chair or anything else considered to be conventionally real beyond question. Dan Tien can even become conventionally real and not just personally real. It depends on the culture and how it grows. At the same time, something everyone thinks is real, like say an arm, can dissolve into something that's almost unreal. This happens when people report certain meditator's bodies having no shadows or similar phenomena. What happens in that case is that the body, as it becomes more internalized, withdraws from convention, and loses its definite reality, and so it might retain, a "somewhat real" sense about it, and the mind adopts to it by projecting the body as something you can see but not feel or something like that. The mind is imaginative, so it can manifest this idea in more than one way. It doesn't have to be a "system" at all. But in either case, nothing becomes permanently stuck. I like to think that form is like a play putty that is malleable, but then if you freeze it or bake it, it can harden and be somewhat long-lasting. But then you can also thaw it back up and remold it again. Or you can let things mold themselves however they please and just watch, like if you are tired of playing around and want to rest. That said, I like to point out that where we are, we have a unique blessing. We are exposed to multiple traditions all at once, and it would be a shame to merely just pick one tradition and stick with it. It's one thing if some Eskimo child is born in a tribe and can't learn anything besides the Eskimo culture. But it's another thing to be born in the West, and to have access to so much diversity, and then to ignore all that diversity and to "pick" one system or one culture an to stick with it. I think one does have to stick with something, but that something should be your effort, your resolve, rather than something external like a system or a foreign culture. In that sense, Dan Tien is just one option available. There is also, for example, the idea of an assemblage point. Why not investigate that? Assemblage point talks how there are parallel realities and how we tune into this or that world by fixing our assemblage point in a certain location. See how different of a concept this is from Dan Tien, which never shifts location (unless you make a woopsie-daizy), and which serves only for accumulation purpose? Don't we accumulate enough already? I don't really want to knock on Dan Tien, but I do think that we are sort of like stewards of many many traditions and not just one. It's our blessing and our curse.

I don't exactly disagree with this. I would say that cognition and perception are ultimately inseparable. In other words, it's one process. or one functioning and not two different ones. The mental image of "two pillars" gives the wrong impression I think. It's more like one pillar with two sides and the two sides are purely imaginary for the purpose of discussion. It's impossible to perceive anything without having some kind of belief (a.k.a. mindset, inner context, etc.). Things can transcend real/not-real designation. For example on Tuesday Dan Tien can be real, but on Wednesday it might be unreal. Mind has the capacity for that kind of adaptability. Dan Tien doesn't have to be firmly committed into the "real" category or into the "not-real" category. It can shift in and out and it can be fuzzy (opposite of well-defined). A fuzzy perception can resolve into clarity. Clarity can resolve back into fuzziness. It's a dynamic and wide open process. Nothing has to be anything, but anything can be anything for a time. When we say "for a time", this time can be arbitrarily long, but never infinite.

There are two issues that I see here. One is should you help those who refuse to help themselves? Another is, should you empower people if you think they won't use the power according to how you think it should be used. First, I would say that spiritual healers should only bother healing people who also want to heal themselves. If someone consistently and intently lives a destructive life style, and has no appreciation of health, and so takes health for granted and therefore pisses it away, and then runs to you for a quick recharge, that's not so good. It should be explained to such people that receiving healing is good in an emergency, but long term health must come as a result of one's own commitment to a healthy life style. And some problems are just unavoidable, and for those problems that are not avoidable, wisdom should be extracted from them, so that they are not wasted. So for example, if some condition is not yielding to any treatment whatsoever, one should meditate on that condition. Use that condition as a support in meditation. Become wise about it. Gain familiarity of it. Etc. If this is not done, then the disease has been a complete waste of time, and that would be sad. Secondly, I think you should always empower people, no matter what. If you are too scared to do so, then you should err on the side of empowering more rather than less. But also you should be discerning with regard to various kinds of power. Some types of power are powerful and naturally fairly safe (although nothing can be completely safe), others might be more dangerous. Generally, the more aggressive and violent visualizations and meditations are more dangerous. The more relaxing and peaceful and non-interfering ones are more safe. But at the same time, even the most dangerous danger is not all that dangerous and one shouldn't be too afraid of it. It should be viewed as porridge. Something not pleasant, but you can eat it if you must. And the safest of safe things is not all that safe either. It should be viewed as water, which is safe, except if you drink too much of it, you can die from water poisoning, and you don't want to drop a hair dryer into your bath tub either. Which is to say, don't dwell on the extremes too much and focus on the vision of life as you want it to be, while constantly adjusting your "wants" according to wisdom. And wisdom comes from reflection. That's it. That's a lot of shoulds, I know.

Wow, that was brilliant. It's too bad you're saving it up for so fucking long though. You should blow your steam more often and in smaller dosages. Well, your style is a little square for my taste. I'm more like an amoeba or an octopus or a jellyfish. Or maybe not. Also, being a blowhard is more like a hobby. I am not a pro at it. And besides, even blowhards have to rest sometimes to recharge the batteries. My perception is that things are mostly good, but there are some patterns I see that I don't like. So I like to wiggle those patterns to see if they would loosen up any or not. When all is said and done, I think everything is progressing swimmingly. Maybe that's your perception as well. So, I hope you feel better (if not outright good), and thanks for all the love. Why don't you stop saving up such big wads though? I am lucky I had a snorkel handy. Even with half as much you should have already ranted at least 2 times.

I am slightly familiar with UG. I read some of his writings and they don't really click with me. He says too many things I disagree with. I don't know how UG means what he says, but what I say is only to be used as a tool and not to be taken 100% seriously. I find that the trouble is with the extremes. When people don't take things seriously at all, that's one extreme. Or they take things 100% seriously, that's another. Between those imaginary extremes there is a nice creative middle ground where you take things seriously enough to be interested and to have fun and not seriously enough to hurt oneself or to get mentally fixated. In this sense, I think I am way, way more fun than UG. UG seems humorless and mentally fixated to me. That's just an impression I have of him.

No single person per se. At this moment Lama Itigelov comes to mind though. I hear he's been reborn. I am not itching to talk though. I mean it might be fun, that's all. I was also thinking that just talking to any non-physicalist practicing hypnotherapist would be fun too. Preferably someone who is not hung up on money, like someone who sees the point of life as something beyond wealth accumulation. This would disqualify a lot of hypnotists I've seen who post on various hypno forums though. I am sure there is one or two around the world that match my criteria. It would be fun to talk to them. But again, I am not really itching to talk. So I wouldn't travel more than 10 minutes. I wouldn't pay more than $5 dollars to listen. This reflects my desire at the moment, which is to say, it's low. I am pretty content in terms of knowledge/hearing words. I sincerely doubt I could hear something that would surprise me or open my mind even further than before. I do welcome the universe to challenge me.

Beautiful message. I salute the Hopi Elders.

http://www.damo-qigong.net/project/conscious/index02.htm This is excellent. In fact, it's so excellent that no one should be surprised if I talk about it 10 more times.

"Ever" is a very long time...