goldisheavy

For Pete's sake, I hope no one strives for intent. Striving has nothing to do with intent. You can intend to strive as much as you can intend to remain effortless, and because both of these are but possibilities, intent itself is beyond those. Intent is a given. It's something to be realized rather than attained. It's kind of like realizing that you have a nose, or realizing that you don't have a tail. It's not like attaining a nose or attaining the absence of tail.

I am thinking a lot about the role of convention in my life. I thought maybe some of you have opinions you'd like to share, so I decided to expose some of my thinking on the topic to see what you think. I am surrounded by convention everywhere I look. I cannot even fart without hitting convention. My dress. My behavior. Fully 99% of the cultural input is conventional. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad had I not felt it so lifeless and constricting to my spirit. I want to find a voice that's true on one hand, but that doesn't stem from convention on the other. Imagine living in a world where your name and face changed every 2 years. Imagine living in the world where books older than 100 years were burned? Older than 50? Older than 25? Or is it our attitude? I know when I was young I took ever written word and every word spoken by anyone in a position of authority as an indisputable golden truth. It didn't occur to me that people could distort reality for personal gain. It didn't occur to me that people didn't even KNOW reality! I never thought that people just make the bullshit as they go along, and they get a big group of people to validate each other and call it "expert knowledge". The amount of times the experts have been wrong cannot be counted. Later I discovered that it was all a house of cards. That no one really knew anything. And often people that knew something were not allowed to have a voice. I don't want to say that every expert is an idiot simply by having the title "expert". However, the incidence of mistakes, and worse, the kind of blind reliance and blind adherence that experts foster in society is killing our spirit. It's definitely killing my spirit. Well, it used to, but I have since emerged from that system. Having experts in society encourages people to rely on each other. It's basically labor specialization. And I think labor specialization has good and bad sides to it. The good side is that you can pump out more stuff. And it really is stuff. You cannot make more spirit or more joy by having more experts. You can increase production of some gadgets though. A non-expert person can feel the same joy and bliss as an expert. The concepts needed for spiritual evolution are subtle, but easy to understand. What do I mean? I mean the principles are easy to understand. It's like the game of Go (or Weiqi/Baduk). To master the implications of these simple concepts is hard, and it takes one's own effort and one's own attention to do so. Experts can explain to you the rules of Go and some principles, but they cannot explain how to become a 9th Dan player. To summarize there are two main problems: 1. Experts are wrong a lot more times than people imagine. 2. The presence of experts creates an attitude of "suspension of critical thinking." It's almost like a movie. You go into a movie and you have to suspend disbelief to enjoy it. You go to an expert, and you have to turn off your critical reasoning faculty to enjoy what the expert has to say. I don't think that's a sustainable lifestyle long-term. I like free thinking people because they usually are disorganized and that makes them peaceful. People who can't think for themselves comprise what I call "drone power". They organize around some expert or group of experts, and become ditto-heads. They form powerful armies that ideologues can deploy with but a few words. Of course there are some limits to what these armies can accomplish, but having these drone-groups roam around is an unpleasant reality for me. Well, I barely scratched the surface of how I feel and what I think on this topic. I think convention is dangerous in general, but our particular Earth variant of it is particularly bad.

But if we do that, we'll soon see the entire topic has no meaning. It's best to avoid asking such question so we can continue our dream of alternating self-preservation and annihilation. (tongue in cheek).

Good advice, except it's not always so clear cut. Sometimes a person takes alcohol and things get better. They notice that if they keep taking lots of alcohol, life is not so bad. So the medicine is working. Or maybe not. Like I said, all kinds of good advice falls apart in real life because advice is often some sound bite and doesn't account for nuances and shades of meaning you encounter in real life.

That's how I see it too. I think that everything is good in moderation. Even bad things are good. Salt makes soup tasty. But you'd not eat a salt brick, right? Even wrong practice when done in moderation is right practice. For example, effort in moderation is effortless and is right. Cursing, breaking rules, being bad -- all that is good in moderation. It's the excesses and getting stuck in this or that pattern that hurt us, or so it appears to me. If you have kindness, everything is permitted. If you don't have kindness, then even the correct actions become all wrong. Intent, mind -- these are mysterious, but their mysteries are your intimate secrets. If anyone can know such secrets, it is you. If you can read this, you can know it.

The problem is not that you find mahamudra video to be a joke. The problem is that you think something else is serious. The world of appearances is a big joke. Your precious "authentic" lamas are frauds. Dreams. Demons. They steal your vital breath and seal your freedom.

I don't have an opinion on it. But I trust that you have enough wisdom and good fortune enough to have some friends, so that at the end of the day you can decide for yourself. When I say that something is "false", it shouldn't be taken too literally. I don't mean it's false, because something else is true. I mean there is potential for disappointment. For example, is my image in the mirror false? Well, if I know it's not exactly me, and that it's just a mirror image, then it's not false. But if I take my mirror image to be myself, then I become very disappointed when I walk out of the mirror's range, and I seem to be moving around without an image of myself -- this seems incongruous with the belief that the mirror image is who I am and creates disappointment. So when I say "false", I mean there is a capacity for deception. In that sense, also, everything is false. Everything I say is false too. So please be careful. I hope I don't come here to replace one dogma with another.

From my understanding (and this should always be assumed, because I do sometimes get lazy and don't type that disclaimer), what you are saying is close to truth, but distorted. So let me offer you a "fixed" version of what you're saying. Let's start at the beginning. Once upon the time you have existed as a stainless lordly being which had nothing but joy and freedom and no limits at all. Experiences appeared and disappeared precisely according to your intent and all was bliss. Then, because you were not differentiating, you gave rise to a certain mental formation that produced a mental split. This mental formation is maintained by you, dear drunk immortal, in an ongoing fashion even as we speak right at this time. From the point of view of infinite bliss, there is no such thing as harm. Because of this, you enter into such formation joyfully and play with it. This split divides the appearances into what you will consider valid appearances (a.k.a. real) and invalid appearances (a.k.a. unreal/hallucinations/dreams). Because of your propensity for entertainment, when structures arose, you gave them weight from your heart and thus imbued them with the weight of validity. All that is maintained in an ongoing fashion! Which means, it's not something you do in the past. It's something you do right now and outside time too. So what happens then? Your intent became committed to so many things! Out of all the appearances you only identify yourself with a tiny fraction. Then you believe your intent is only valid within that fraction and outside what happens is NOT your intent. However this seeing of "outside" as "not your intent" can only be maintained by your consent and ongoing commitment -- and this takes energy! Further, since your intent as a mortal being flows through structures, it is not efficient, and much energy is lost for useless things. Let me give you example. For example there is a cup on the table and you need to lift it to your lips. If you had your original intent, then the cup would miraculously float to your lips. However because your appearances are structured by your ongoing commitment, your remaining intent has to flow through the structure of your anatomy, through the structure of what you believe to be laws of physics, overcome inertia, overcome gravity, overcome other forces like friction, and finally, finally, after much struggle the cup is there by your lips, and you need a nap. In essence your intent is working against itself, and this is perceived as "effort". The reason that happens is NOT because you LOST your QI!!!! Not at all. Recognize this -- your qi is there, but it's committed to so much work! You're maintaining structures everywhere in your experience! You're maintaining the whole universe with your qi. Even when you use the "fraction" of your qi that you believe to be yours (as opposed to the universal qi), you can't use it directly, but you have to employ it through the structures. That's why you get tired. If you store qi in the manner you describe, you can marginally improve your health, if you don't overdo it and if you focus more on kindness then on raw energy storage. However, in the grand scheme of things, you'll still be getting tired and maybe even sick, because your qi is tied up in the universe, in the structures, in all your commitments. Even the idea that you have to SUCK qi, as if this other qi is not yet yours and you have to forcefully attract it and store it, that idea itself is tiring, just even thinking about it makes one want to take a nap. How can you spend energy to store energy? It makes no sense! If I spend 5 newtons to store 3, I am still losing 2. So where is the storage? The only way to store, is if you spend 1 to store 10, but how will that work???? You need energy to hold energy in place. To restrict energy, to prevent energy from escaping, you must resist the natural impulse of energy to escape by using your own energy! Thus you cannot truly store it. It's a MYTH. Chuang Tzu knows this and laughs even right now. I can hear him laughing. All the FALSE taoists with no understanding at all try to store energy like fools. But if you are wise, if you want to be like Chuang Tzu, just stop and think for a moment. The notion of storage involves the notion of containment. Containment is a kind of restriction, a limit. That means that storage has a limit. For example, if you store 2 liters of water in a 1 liter bottle, the bottle explodes. If you store too much electricity in a capacitor, it explodes. Every contemplator knows this intimately. If you store too much fat in your body, it explodes slowly and you die. Why? Because storing implies a limit, and exceeding that limit breaks the identity of the storage containment field. It breaks what it means "to be a container", and thus the process of containment passes beyond recognition. And like I said before, containing something takes energy in the first place! So in reality you always end up using 10 units of energy to hold 5. It's never 100% efficient and never mind being 200% efficient! In truth all qi is your qi. When black holes suck in matter, that's you. When Sun shines, that's you. When someone threatens you, that's you. When the country runs poorly, that is you. All energy is yours. And your identity is something you can change, thus all identities are yours and you are also none of your identities. I hope this explains things. Don't look far. You have the heart of immortality right within right now. It's very near. Only fixed beliefs block perception of it.

People who answer just "yes" or "no", are of the following types: 1. They don't want a discussion. 2. They don't know shit, but they do have a preference and would like to vote on a topic instead of discussing the topic. 3. There is no third.

You don't understand then. If you do thogal, your ordinary world appearance will be gone. You won't have anything called "ordinary" in your life. Namkai Norbu talks like a hot potato, and he's a good guy, and I like him, but he was also very afraid to climb over a tantra that was written in the stone, because he was afraid to offend it. That means he's not quite ready for thogal. This was in JUST THIS lifetime for him. If you think appearances have even the tiniest amount of truth and power, then the demons and nasty things that can appear from thogal would be so scary, the person would lose their mind easily. That's because during thogal the mind is made much looser, and all kinds of appearances that used to be blocked, float up. This is fun and joy and bliss if you are ready, but it's madness if you're not ready. If you have anyone on this planet you are attached to, and if you're attached to belonging to the human race, then doing thogal is not recommended. It's when this world has nothing for you, and you are totally done here, then you can melt it all away and enter into a new vision. By "this world" I don't mean this particular world, but I mean a way of life within structured appearances. In reality there is no such thing as a demon, but then in reality there is no such thing as a CEO or a police officer. Now, if CEO tells you he'll fire you, are you scared? If cops aim guns at you, are you intimidated? If you answer yes, don't do thogal. Try to transcend CEOs, Gurus, cops and so forth of this appearance here, and then play with wilder appearances. If you think CEO is damn imposing and impressive and if you think Gurus are damn authoritative, then the demons that can be unleashed by a looser mind will make quick work of you. On the other hand, if you can rise above appearances, then thogal is entry into total freedom. Thogal is like pulling out your baby tooth that's already just hanging by a thread. If that tooth is not hanging by a thread and you pull it too early, it will hurt, you might chip the tooth, etc. Ok, to return back to the issue, the price doesn't matter. If you are ready for thogal, you're exiting this Earth appearance. You're moving out of this reality. Price is irrelevant. You'll steal it if you must. You'll cook your Guru and eat him if that's what you must do. In reality if you are ready for thogal, you don't need a book to tell you. By the time you are ready, you don't need to pay 1 cent for it. YOU WILL KNOW IN YOUR BONES what to do. You won't need a book or Guru or initiation at all. So if you're complaining about the price, then just don't worry about it. Just don't buy it. Thogal is not for you. But you can still discuss it. Why don't you post what you know about thogal, then post your question and let's discuss those questions. So far your only concern is the price of a book.

The problem is obvious if you read what Thogal is. And these days Thogal is available in an openly published form. Once you understand the gist of it, you can invent your own Thogal too. So let's go over this briefly. Thogal involves opening yourself to manifesting spontaneous miraculous visions right within normal waking experience. Right then and there you would be qualified insane according to the DSM IV manual of western psychiatry. That's not to say the psychiatry is correct, but it should give you an idea of how unconventional this already is right at that point. So first is you notice various visions appear. For example, you look up at the sky and you see colors twirling and dancing in the sky. The colors then shift to become a face you know or don't know. This face floats in the sky. Then the face becomes a triangle and it spins around. Then the triangle bursts into a rainbow and moved into the ground. Now it's under your feet. Now this energy changes into mist and goes into your nose. And so on. When this begins to happen, there is still clear separation between what is obviously a visionary energy and what you call "real world". So you can still clearly tell them apart. For example you might think the face in the sky is fake, but the sky is real. And you might think the mist is fake, but your nose is real. Then, as these visions manifest, you are instructed to BLEND THEM with reality. What does this mean? It means you can no longer tell if the world is real or a vision, and you cannot tell if the face in the sky is just a fake vision or a real appearance. That's what the blending is. Once you accomplish this, you are utterly GONE in every sense. You don't exist in an ordinary space time. Laws of physics DO NOT apply to you, and there is no such thing as "normal" for you. At that point you've destroyed the world as you know it. It's gone. If you are not ready for this, you'll go so FUCKING MAD long before you finish this practice! Why? Because as long as you maintain a belief system about what the world is, what reality is, what is possible and what is not possible, and you don't understand what does it mean that appearances are empty, and you don't understand the nature of intent, as long as you maintain that structure in your mind, all the visions will seem maddening, crazy, scary, wrong, sick, repulsive, disturbing and you'll QUICKLY run either to the hospital or the Guru and beg the Guru to take all that crap away and make it all go away and make all your vision go back to normal, back to what you're used to seeing. The only person who experiences joy and bliss and freedom in thogal is someone who is utterly, UTTERLY beyond the mundane world. Are you ready? You don't mind dying? You don't mind torture? You can eat slime from the toilet? You are not afraid to be eaten by animals? Good! That means you are almost ready. If on top of this you also have great kindness and a fun-loving mind, you are almost ready. Then you can begin thogal. Truth is... by the time you are ready for thogal, you DO NOT NEED thogal, because you will intuitively know what is thogal, how it works, and you don't need lama to give it to you. You'll know it in your bones.

Transferring your mind into Buddha's form sounds like a very cool practice. It's a way to transform one's own identity and not just something that's useful after death. I'm glad to see the conditions softening up. It's feeling warmer in here.

I'm contributing from experience. Qi doesn't come from anywhere specific and it's not stored in Dan Tien either. Qi is the natural propensity of awareness to shimmer with change. Controlling Qi is using intention to give structure to these changes for the sake of pleasing yourself. Let me give you an example. There is a river flowing. That's Qi. But it's useless to you because you don't care about rivers. You want to mill grain. So you dam up the river and put a water wheel there. You're basically hijacking natural energy to do your work for you. Result -- you get your grain milled, but there is a side-effect on the river. The side-effect might be OK, but it's there. So you channel natural energy into a structure that's mind-made (the water mill) (well, the original river is also mind-made, but let's forget that for a second). So in this way, you took unstructured energy and structured it for your purpose because you like to eat farm food. This is useless to a hunter-gatherer. So it's basically just pleasing yourself. It's not essential for life, because life is all there is. The other side of death is birth. Life is the ground where birth and death happen. So qi is like that. You intercept the natural energy of awareness by using intent + beliefs. It's fun, but, there are side-effects. Sometimes they are unpleasant, and sometimes they are ignorable. It all depends how careful you are and how considerate you are of the consequences of your intent. When you move your intent beyond fixed structures, then you don't hijack/separate Qi anymore. Storing Qi is like storing energy in the form of fat. It's OK to have 30% fat, if a little ugly. If you have 300% fat, instead of food energy storage master you become a tub of lard who has an increased risk of a heart attack. Qi is like that too. Don't store it. It's always available. You can always channel it when you need it. You don't have to stock pile it.

And then the water evaporates and the sugar crystal is back. Oh, alas... This is why suffering is escaped not by going into non-suffering, but by something more subtle. If suffering is a bad country that you leave on an airplane, then you just need a ride out and you don't need to understand why it hurts. But in reality suffering has to be understood. You cannot escape it, because it follows like a shadow until one understands why it happens.

If you think Zen is different from Dzogchen, then you are getting a watered down Zen, a castrated Zen and not the Zen of the patriarchs. There is a huge misunderstanding of Zen in the West. Zen is as conceptual as Dzogchen. Just read Dogen, for example. He's highly philosophical and logical. Understanding "the view" is as important in Zen as it is in Dzogchen. Some westerners like to think Zen is just counting your breaths and then "just sitting". That's the clown Zen. Zen is about liquefying your worldview, just as much as the Dzogchen is. It's not strange at all. Do you understand that the meaning of "light" is "not dark"? The meaning of "left" is "opposite of right"? The meaning of "conceptual" is "not non-conceptual" and the meaning of "non-conceptual" is "not conceptual?" In other words, these seemingly polarized notions are whole and one within cognition. When you treat some experience as non-conceptual, it's because you compare it to conceptual! How can you know something is non-conceptual if you don't set it apart from the conceptual? But do you understand that this very "setting apart" process is what conceptuality IS in the first place? See, if you contemplated these issues besides just following along mindlessly, you'd know this intimately. Just think about it. Seriously. Thinking really has an unjustifiably bad reputation in Buddhism. Maybe being part of an "ism" is part of the problem.

Seriously? So what kind of stuff did you invent? Do you understand what spirituality is about? It's not about how to polish your current appearance and make yourself more presentable to the world. It's not about how you can increase your earning potential and do better at interviews. And it's not even about health. Do you know what it IS about? It's about rising above appearances. It's about fearlessness. It's about unconventional inner wisdom. People are willing to kill themselves for something stupid, like getting strangers to believe what they believe, or just to get attention. One guy in Germany killed himself when he became a mere millionaire whence before he was a billionaire. And you're not willing to die for something billion times better? For spiritual freedom? You're not willing to own your mistakes? If you made a mistake, first thing is to own it. Second, look where you went wrong. You don't need to cry for mama to come rescue you the second something goes wrong. If you could put your dan tien into your chest, you certainly, certainly can put it back into the stomach. It's just COMMON SENSE. If you can do one, then you can do the other too. If you can move your energy channel outside your spine, you can put it back. If you cannot put it back then you cannot move it out either. Either you can do both, or none, but there is no way you can only do a half of an action. Let me tell you a story. One time I had a terrific experience. One night I felt my body shake very violently. My bones and my entire being shook with the most violent energy you can imagine. I thought I was going to explode and that my entrails would cover the walls of my bedroom. I was afraid for about half a second. Then I thought to myself, how in the world am I ever going to become a great siddha if I am afraid of silly stuff like this? Then I was utterly without fear. I watched my body with calm curiosity. I was completely content if it exploded, hell, even if my body destroyed the entire universe together with me. No matter. This is what I signed up for. This is part of the spiritual path! I SIGNED UP FOR THIS SHIT, so I do not run away. I do not cry "mama". And guess what? After the body realized it wasn't getting any rise out of me, it stopped shaking and became very calm and peaceful. I then had a great restful sleep and woke up refreshed and very content. In fact, I don't count it as a bad experience, but I count it as an amazing experience that makes me who I am together with all my other experiences and beliefs. So I suggest that you not be afraid. First your life is not over. It's obvious that you are quite alive. Second, if you could break yourself, you can fix yourself too. And third, you're the only person I know with your symptoms. That makes you kind of cool in my book! You just went ahead and proved the illusoriness of all that energy perception. Don't you see that you really have diamond in the rough there???? Many people believe that kundalini is "the truth", that it only works one way, like the physical reality. But you showed it's not so! Another person in your place would cry "Eurika!" Seriously. Don't give up. May you become infinitely wise, strong, peaceful and liberated from fixed views. I think if you wish for it, your health will return. But don't think your experience is worthless or a "mistake". It could be a mistake in the sense that it's not what you wanted and that it causes you suffering, but it's also a gem of wisdom that's showing you something important. Learn from it so that it's not in vain.

That's funny, you've had the transmission and yet you even consider buying this book. I haven't, and I wouldn't buy it, at least not right now. Why is that? Because the teachings of thogal are about breaking the world as you know it and entering into the land of magic. If you understand what they mean, you don't need a book. If your view of emptiness is well grounded, just let your senses loose. Go crazy and don't complain or seek a doctor if your heart flies out of your chest. Go crazy. If you're not willing to go crazy, then thogal is not for you. Thogal is for someone who is ready to depart conventional reality 100%. If you're that ready, you really don't need a book to tell you how to do it. By that time you have intimate understanding of how appearances work. That's kind of what kundalini is about too, except when weird shit happens people get scared and want a "cure". The truth is -- there is no cure because there is no such thing as "normal" once you commit to a path of uninhibited appearance dynamics. Tantric practitioners are insane from a normal person's POV. And that's how it should be. If tantric people were like average joes with jobs and suits, making honest money, paying bills, they wouldn't be tantric practitioners at all, they'd be posers.

turns out this post has no context Emptiness...

This is an interesting point. I tend to agree with you, although I know a lot of people who think they take no responsibility for other members of the group they belong to. I believe even personal identity can be troublesome, but a group identity is even more so! Group identity comes with a lot of baggage. So if you say "I am a democrat" or "I am a republican" or "I am a Christian" and so forth, you are taking on huge amounts of baggage. And in my opinion, yes, you are responsible for that baggage. If you don't like the baggage that comes with the group identity, either work to clear the group identity, or don't associate with that group. It's that simple. My own attitude is that I can benefit from someone's wise words without subscribing to the group that got started in that person's name. If I like Buddha, why can't I benefit from Buddha's wisdom without calling myself "Buddhist"? If more people did that, I think we'd have more peace. Once the person commits to a group identity, the group identity becomes more important than personal identity. This is why people will often go along with the group, even if they don't personally believe in it, as long as that difference in belief is not too large. And that's how it has to be for groups to remain stable. If anyone departed from the group based on the tiniest disagreement with it, there'd be no groups at all. So group identity necessarily implies some level of ditto-headedness. An intelligent and wise person would know this and would chose the group identity responsibly. So if the group gets blamed for the action of some of its members, there is no dodging this. That's the baggage that you subscribed to, knowingly. The only sucky part is that in some countries if you quit Islam, you can get killed. So this makes it so that the only people who have a free choice in their associations are either the fearless ones or the extremely principled ones.

So just asking a question is bad you think? Can you show me something that's not an advertisement? A deep link or a screenshot please.

It's worse than that. It's not even harder. All experiences are dynamic. That means you cannot maintain the same flavor forever. While it's possible to undergo a period of perceived self-annihilation, there are two problems with it. First, during the experience of self-annihilation you still have your self-idea, but you cannot recognize the features of your self-idea within experience, and so perceive it as "self-annihilation". If you had no self-idea to begin with, you'd not feel anything was annihilated to begin with. Second, it doesn't last forever. You can't stay in any one place for too long, at least, as long as you have specifics in mind. And the state of self-annihilation is a pretty specific state.

Is this a product advertisement?

Are you disconnecting from the world as you know it in your meditation? Because if you are, and your mind is not flexible enough to "come" and "go" like that, it may have some inertia in adjusting to various states of being. I'm putting "come" and "go" in quotations because I don't want to suggest an actual movement. It would be helpful if you paid attention to subtle feelings or feeling present right as you emerge with the blurry vision and share those feelings here.