goldisheavy

Has it?

I am very careful in just that way. Take your pride in your lineage. Magnify it 1 million times. Now internalize it. What do you get? You get me.

Don't underestimate ralis. Ralis doesn't concern himself with the outward appearances of Buddhism, but only with its very heart. Of course that's just my opinion, but I think it's more fun to stab myself with a fork than to dismiss ralis out of hand just because he doesn't speak using the "properly Buddhist" words. The point is this. When we keep using the same word and over and over, we tend to forget what it means. The word becomes automated in our habtitual speach patterns. We lose consciousness of what it is we're actually saying when we say it automatically. And words do become automatic from overuse. Aborting automatisms is a big part of what Dzogchen is all about.

It's fake, but then so is this Earth and your human body. Choose your fakeness carefully.

Ultimately everything is spiritually caused, even the phenomena we ordinarily tend to consider as being governed by some objective laws. So can voice loss be caused spiritually? Yes, of course it can be. That said, since you have doubts about it being possibly caused by acid reflux (which by implication you don't consider a spiritual condition), you should take care of acid reflux and eliminate it as a possible factor. Personally I doubt your voice loss is caused by acid reflux, but since acid reflux tends to be annoying in its own right, why not at least try to manage it for a while to see if it makes a difference? Then if you go with spiritual (read: mental) causality, it becomes tricky, because using the POV of magick, all phenomena are ultimately ambiguous. Which means, whatever you end up determining, ideally you should not be latching onto it as "the only possible" explanation or "this is how things truly are." This way you can use your determinations to heal yourself while retaining your original freedom. Otherwise, if you make a spiritual determination and stick to it as the only truth, then you may heal yourself, but at a cost of becoming spiritually rigid internally and temporarily losing your ability to perceive spiritual alternatives. In practice, for me, I tend to self-diagnose 99% of the time. When I have a spiritual malady, I self-diagnoze through introspection and through creative phenomenal reality construction. But that's what works for me. I don't want to give too much power to others, so I don't let other people, even doctors, define what my maladies mean to me. This doesn't mean I ignore the doctors. It does mean that whatever the doctor says is not considered to be final by me. However, if you have a trusted spiritual friend who is known to do some doctoring, you can do something I don't do, and that is, just trust your friend to deal with the issue for you, the same way you'd trust any expert. Of course placing your trust in the experts is a tradeoff. You get something and you lose something by doing it that way. But it might be a good tradeoff for you.

It means you look at the suggestive appearances without falling for any of the suggestions. It means you look at your experience as "what can be" instead of as "what is." It's this but it's also deeper. It means you also have reversed or relaxed away all the mental habits, expectations and commitments that are rooted in the ordinary conceptual analysis of phenomena.

For most people, yes. For most people yeshe is not something that's attainable (in this lifetime).

Three long aeons.

First. I don't let anyone test my understanding of Dzogchen, because if I do, I lose yeshe. Second. Taking your scenarios, if you're drinking coffee and suddenly it becomes tea, and you have yeshe, then you won't be surprised by this. Or if you have yeshe, you can drink 100 cups of coffee without becoming full. Or you can turn your coffee into wine. Or a million other things. You have yeshe if you realize that drinking coffee is not "what is" but only "what can be" and that no experience represents "what is." The same with the dog, etc.

This seems to be a good topic that's properly ticklish while at the same time, very good, and I would say, essential for contemplation. What does it mean to be offended? It means to have one of your values violated. So, let's check out some possibilities. For example, let's say you draw a funny cartoon of Mohammed fucking a goat. Who is offended by this, and what does that offense say about such person? Well, the offended people are conservative Muslims. And what does it say about them? What value is violated by such cartoon? It's a superficial value! A value of appearance! A value for proper decorum! That's what it really is. Conservative Muslims value decorum so much, they are willing to kill for it. They value decorum so much, they are willing to restrict the freedom of speech to protect it. Valuing decorum too much, incidentally, is precisely what idolatry is! So it is very ironic when Muslims get upset over cartoons. It's like they have really missed the boat on idolatry and the whole point behind it, which is not to take appearances to be your God. See, to these conservative Muslims, making a funny picture of Mohammed is the same as insulting the real Mohammed! So the entire admonition not to get hung up on images went right over their stupid little heads. Ask yourselves, how valuable is decorum to you? What are you willing to give up for it? Would you give up your life for decorum? Would you dedicate your life to the upholding of decorum? Would you make decorum the center of your life? Let's take another example of this. This one is also pretty common. Suppose a person walks around the street with tattoos, piercings, and a strange haircut. Some people feel insulted by this. Why? Because the value of the decorum of "proper" personal appearance appears to be visually violated. What if you reach out your hand to do a handshake, but the other person refuses to shake your hand. You might get insulted. If you get insulted by this action, what does that tell us about your values? What's being violated here? A broken handshake violates a ritual of greeting. So if this is very upsetting, given that the other person did nothing else you'd find disagreeable, it means you value rituals greatly. What if you are the kind of person who doesn't judge the book by its cover? Would non-standard decorum be upsetting to you? Would you perceive it as an insult? Think about it. And then, let's say you go around saying you value cogent reasoning, but then you never get insulted by any written or spoken argument. What does this say? It says you are lying! That's what. It means that while you put on airs about putting a high value on cogent reasoning, when people violate that value in communication with you, you don't get upset because you don't feel any value of yours has been violated. See? Sometimes it's good to be insulted. But be careful about what it is you allow yourself to be insulted by. Make sure that whatever insults you is something you truly value! If you get insulted by stuff you claim not to value, and vice versa, if you don't get insulted by the stuff you do claim to value, you need to re-examine yourself. You are being dishonest before thyself.

As for awareness being flavored by intent, this idea arises from a simple consideration. Let's say I close my eyes. This results in a visual field appearing one way. Then let's say I open my eyes, this results in a change of appearances. Let's say I turn my head to the left and then turn it to the right. Again, visual field changes corresponding to intent. That's one way one can begin this contemplation. Then you can see if perhaps some mystical ways of perception are able to side-step this principle. In my experience the answer ends up being, no. At any time whatever appears is supported by intent. So at any point, whatever we observe, is always partial, it's always intentional on some level. The trouble with this caricature of an explanation is that intent is able to have depth. So for example, you can have a habitual pattern that plays itself out on autopilot. It seems that such habitual patterns are unintentional, because you don't have to struggle or do something specific to make them be the way they are. At the same time, I say they are intentional, because habits rely on non-interference. If you begin to meddle in some habit, you may eventually either change that habit or dissolve it. And how hard various habits are to change is a spectrum or a continuum that goes from easy to arbitrarily hard. So just because ultimately everything might be intentional, that doesn't mean it's easy or practical to change some deeply ingrained patterns in two weeks or 10 years (habits, psychic inertia, etc.). So when I say "depth" I mean that some things are intended lightly, superficially, and those are easy to change. Other things are intended deeply to the point of being almost unconscious, and can be hard to change. If anyone wonders why this is relevant, I believe that some of us seek to transform habitual appearance patterns (the contents of awareness) in our practice, rather than say only reduce suffering, but leave all the habitual appearance patterns intact. So if you agree that habitual appearance patterns are intentional, it opens a clear avenue for practice for those who seek to reshape some or all habitual appearance patterns. I'm interested in your opinions and/or disagreements.

Please watch this documentary film made by a real moderate Muslim who wants to stop the threat of radical Islam: http://blip.tv/file/1382254 Wake up and open your eyes.

There are two types of "can." Can I ever? Or can I conveniently and readily now? The answer to the latter question is "no". But the answer to the former question is "yes." To give you an example of this, suppose you didn't train much, can you then lift a 60kg weight over your head with one hand? Probably not right away. Probably not readily or conveniently. Not by tomorrow morning. But you can ever? Yes, you can. Eventually you can. So what I am saying is that eventually, if you want, you can lift a house off its foundation and float it around the city just by intending it so. So ultimately intent is free. You can do this. There are beings who can do this. There are realms of existence where such transformations are commonplace. This way of thinking postulates that the present is fully arisen from the past. I reject that. Buddha has rejected such way of thinking as well. So has Nagarjuna. The past doesn't fully determine the present and the future. Check this: http://rywiki.tsadra.org/index.php/Investigation_of_Time Ignore Tsongkapa commentary. Tsongkapa is an idiot who tends to cloud the issues more than clarify. Nagarjuna is perfectly clear by himself. What happens in the present is a mix of the past plus intent in the now. That's a crude way of saying it and is not 100% correct either, because you can (learn how to) change your past from the present too. So a crude example is me deciding to pick up some paper off my desk. I put that paper there 2 months ago. That doesn't mean that 2 months ago, by putting the paper down, I have set in motion some fatalistic destiny where I will be destined to lift that paper in 2 month's time. Nor is it the case that the entirety of the world's conditions has forced me to act that way (Nagarjuna's logc -- if the past is sufficient to manifest the present and the future, why aren't they in the past? Why is there ongoing-ness? Ongoingness indicates some kind of insufficiency. If the past was fully sufficient, the entire timeline would sprout forth complete, from start to finish. It wouldn't need to slowly unravel ongoingly. So the past conditions are important. But they, by themselves, are not enough to determine what happens next. I see the past as a kind of prejudice or propensity. If you've habituated yourself to act a certain way, chances are you'll keep repeating the pattern. But that isn't a guarantee. That's your propensity. This propensity is not in full control of you. It's like a magnet which exerts a pull on a piece of metal, but doesn't by itself determine where the metal will go. It simply adds the force of the magnetic pull to the totality of forces that will operate. When I say "force" here I mean it the way it's used in physics, and not a struggle on a personal level or something like that. You can! But to do this isn't trivial. You have to open yourself up, move aside, or soften your conditioning, so significantly, it's like being insane. I've experienced such things. They don't happen often, and they seem crazy because they are not normal and they are inconceivable. Generally we remix what was known before. But does that make it a hard law? If something has repeated itself 10,000 times, is that evidence that it repeats itself eternally? Still, we like to play with qualities we have ready access to. But that doesn't mean those qualities are inspired by an external world. What if "external world" is internal to begin with? Then what? Where is your inspiration coming from then? So normally people would think: "saw color red on a bus." "went to dream" "saw red shoes in a dream" "red in a dream inspired by red seen during the day." It's obvious there are holes in this thinking. First the assumption is that the bus is real and the dream is unreal. The bus is external and the dream is internal. All these assumptions can be challenged and reversed. We externalize our inner world so that we see ourselves as hollow, quality-less entities inhabiting a rich world full of qualities. The qualities get disowned. Inside you have nothing, because you gave it all up to the world, which you then severed in your mind from yourself by a delineation. In this state there is very little power still left over for you. Just enough power to reverse this condition, but not to do much else beyond following the rules of the external world. The divide itself is intentional. Because of that, one can chose to stop dividing that way. I can. But doing so deflates other people. If I want to see other people be powerful and capable of surprising me, I have to keep feeding them my power (by me continuing to believe in the independence of others, by honoring the separation and by taking all this seriously). If I lose faith in other people, they go away. You might think they only go away from my world, but how many worlds are there? Do you think we all live in one common world? That would require the world to exist independently of people and mind. Is that the case? Conditioned =/= determined. Intentions do not arise from a cause. Intent is not an effect of anything. Intent itself is the primal and total cause. If intent arises from causes, that means everything is locked down by fate. That means it makes no sense to practice anything, to think about anything, because everything is already determined beforehand. And some people believe that. Think about this. Freedom is expressed through limitations. It's freedom to choose our own limitations. When you program a computer, you inject it with your chosen limitations. As a result, the computer can be endowed with an ability to play a game. This game is a set of limitations. Creativity consists of being able to erase these limitations only to replace them with a new set. Without limitations creativity would have no outlet. Because intent is always a selection of an option, a directional quality, it's always limiting at the same time as it is limitless. So when I am going forward, I am not right at the moment also going backward. That's the limit. But I can turn left. That's freedom. But if I turn left, exercising freedom, I can't at that moment also turn right. Left is not right. Left is only left. That's limitation again. So freedom and limitation are friends. One is used to express another. Thinking that freedom implies absence of limitations is crazy. It just means not understanding the role of limitations. What sucks about limitations is when they get stuck. When you forget how to replace one limitation with another. That's what sucks. So if computer didn't have RAM, which allowed you to erase programs and to write news ones in their place, if it only had ROM, it would be a much less useful and much less interesting computer. It would be a single-purpose device with closed horizons. A computer with RAM is a general purpose device with open horizons. Relatively. And what about mind? So what makes RAM useful? The middle way. RAM is malleable, it's able to absorb change. If RAM was utter immune to change it would lose some of its utility. But at the same time, RAM is also able to maintain state. If RAM was utterly volatile, it wouldn't be able to maintain state, and again it would lose utility. And the mind is like this too. The mind is between totally volatile and totally immune to change. It's even better than that. It's got areas of rapid change. Areas of long term storage. It's fully 100% reprogrammable. An area that was previously be used for long term storage can be made volatile for example. Etc. Computers are pathetic and limited things compared to mind.

That's an important option to keep in mind. If you don't enjoy the process of choice, you can always know that the best is selected automatically. However, if you do enjoy it, then that is the best too! They are all the best. Evaluating, making careful decisions -- this is the best. Acting on a whim, relying on a gut feeling -- this is also the best. They are different kinds of best. If you get tired of the first best, you can switch to the second best. If you get tired of the second best, you switch to the first. It's always best though. All meat is best here. I agree but with a small distinction. God can work in unforeseeable ways. That's one way for it to work. It doesn't have to always work that way. It's wrong to say that if something has been foreseen, it's not godly, but if it's mysterious then and only then it's godly. Sometimes God works in foreseeable ways, for example, when you're an electrical engineer designing a circuit. Sometimes God works in unforeseeable ways. And sometimes both simultaneously. Sometimes you can foresee things in ways that make no sense to others. So it's foreseeable to you but not to others. Or vice versa. All is open. If you can imagine something, anything, there is a place somewhere where it's happening, no matter how crazy it is. From a practical point of view, this way of living is very valuable and I think people should try it. But it's one of many valuable ways, not the only one. And it doesn't contradict anything I am saying about intent. Intent is not effort. It is direction. This direction doesn't have to involve a headache or a huge amount of deliberation. If you allow things to spontaneously manifest, they automatically manifest according to your intent. Your intent, in other words, is not something you have to strain over. It's automatic to begin with.

This function of the mind is effortless. For example, when you see a chair next to a table, without straining yourself, without deliberating, you can instantly recognize that the chair is smaller than the table, and that it is below the table. This happens as a moment of instant recognition, and yet it involves comparing and measuring. To be at one with the Tao is not a good definition, because Tao is something mysterious to begin with. The spoken Tao is not the real Tao, etc. When I asked for a definition, I asked for something that's relatively easily understood. I didn't ask for what is essentially a non-definition. Still, even working with your non-definition of god awareness, I would say that all awareness is god awareness because at no time are you something distinct or separate from Tao. Tao (the way) embraces all things. Tao is the working out of all things in life and in the universe. Deluded awareness is god awareness in this sense. Wise, expanded awareness is also god awareness. God isn't limited to be only this way or only that way. The word God, outside of its crazy burdens from the Abrahamic traditions, refers to something limitless and beyond concrete knowing too. I disagree. Analyzing something over and over again helps to gain confidence if the outcome of your analysis contradicts habitual way of thinking for you. So, for example, if you habitually think that all things are discrete separate self-existing entities, but your analysis tells you otherwise, then by performing this analysis over and over (each time in a slightly different and fresh way), you gain confidence that indeed your initial impression of things was wrong. This later presents an opening for intent. It later allows you to produce intentions that would be nonsensical from the point of view of your old mindset. How can the dead be given anything? You need to be alive to receive a gift. Correct. That's habituation. As you habituate a new pattern of behavior into your mind, it takes less and less effort and also less and less conscious awareness to do. You fall asleep into a new pattern. Still, all habituated patterns can be reversed. A habituation is an expression of intent, because you have to agree to live with that habituation at each moment. If you don't consent, you can begin contradicting, changing, reshaping or dissolving that habituation. So this kind of absentminded careless aloofness can be broken. It's not permanent. It continues only with your ongoing consent. Well, that's been my experience. Intentionality doesn't involve fighting unless you specifically intend to fight. Fighting is a feature of certain beliefs, not a feature of intent itself. You can for example be intentionally peaceful and intentionally inclined to peace. So if you intend to survive, but you were brought up to believe that the universe is a hostile place, then the intent to survive can lead toward fighting. That's not a necessary feature of intent itself. I believe intent is yi in Chinese (correct me if I am wrong), and I don't think it involves fighting all the time. What I am trying to convey to people is that intent is deeper than just the conscious portion. Consciously trying to accomplish something is not all that intent is. That's only the tip of intent. Again, only in my experience. When I try to follow where my intent comes from, I find surprises. I find things I thought were against my intent turn out to be things I wanted on some level of my being. So I realized my intent is complex. It's not something simple that just guides my body here and there. I think you give good practical advice! But nothing in your practical advice contradicts the way I understand intent. You believe some things become unintentional with time, like say a constantly relaxed attitude that's become habitual. And I am saying that's how we lose touch with things. That's how we forget that the universe "out there" is ultimately our own intent playing itself out. We put it on autopilot, habituated it, and forgot about it. Now the universe runs seemingly on its own and we don't realize it's not on its own. It's us.

Doing self-hypnosis or meditation for pain control is the holy grail. But when I was in extreme pain (I'm talking real extreme here, maximum pain) I would use a hypnosis tape. Just a generic tape with a generic hypnosis script read by a decent hypnotist. I think the script was oriented toward well-being. There was nothing special there. It would just relax my body and mind, then tell me I will feel good when I emerge from hypnosis and then guide me out of hypnosis. I remember my body relaxing so deeply with this tape that I couldn't feel my body at all. It's as if I had no body. It was amazing. This tape would put me so far out that while I was hypnotized my extreme maximum pain would vanish completely. I mean totally! It was like an impossible miracle. I mean, I believe in all kinds of far out stuff, and even I was amazed. Then I also got a second script that was supposed to open my mind and being to a magickal ability. That script was also really really good. It was more complex. There were more sounds, more whispers and strange stuff going on. And that script also could control my pain, but not as effectively as a "dumb" generic relaxation and wellness script. I loved both of them for different reasons. But it was a lazy way to do it. Because the non-lazy way is to make your own script. Well, I was in extreme pain and just wanted it gone. I didn't want to sit there developing a script, then narrating it to a voice recorder and all that rigamarole. Then when the pain left and my condition healed, I left all that business behind. I don't even know where my MP3 player is anymore.

Interesting website. I hope some of you people come here to chat and not just to advertise. Otherwise, best of luck. I hope someone from Virginia reads this post and finds you. I am far away from Virginia. If I lived 10 minutes away from you guys, I would certainly visit.

God doesn't exist as something separate which makes transactions with me in this way. God doesn't send me emails. God doesn't ship things to me. I don't relate to God as one being to another. What you seem to call God I call myself. It's just a deeper aspect of my own being. I disagree. When I simply open my eyes, I immediately am aware of space in front of me. Without analyzing, without thinking about it, I instantly intuit that I can move through this space in front of me in any number of ways. So I am aware of open optionality without any special deliberate effort on my part. If I engage in a deliberate effort, I can deepen my awareness. So instead of 3 options, I might see 10, or 100, or eventually an infinitude of options. But even without any deliberate effort whatsoever I constantly am aware of options. I am constantly aware that whatever I did, whatever I thought, however I moved, I could have thought something else, I could have moved in a different way. We are free already. But we don't feel it. We feel as if we are trapped, even though right now we are free. I agree. I disagree. I am not lead by anything. I don't defer to anything. Nor should spiritual people feel like they are led by something outside themselves. That's what crazy people do. Crazy people hear voices telling them to do things. That isn't healthy. Two drivers driving the same car. It's bound to crash. Best one? Things are best only relative to some purpose. For example, if you want to drive a nail, then scissors are not the best, but a hammer is. If you want to cut paper, then the opposite is true, the scissors are the best, but a hammer isn't. Something can be the best and the worst simultaneously. If I have a paper that needs cut and a nail that needs to be hammered laying on my table, next to a pair of scissors and a hammer, then the scissors are simultaneously best and worst, and the hammer is also best and worst simultaneously.

Me confused. Willing surrender. Think what that means, especially the first word in that phrase. What do you mean by analytical? I've never heard "analytical" used like that. I can't respond because I don't understand what you're trying to say here to me. So each layer has to willingly defer to a deeper layer. At each step there is an element of willingness, allowing. This deepening happens in an atmosphere of allowing, cognizant permissiveness, relaxation. What is "complete god awareness"? It probably doesn't exist as such. I bet if you define what it means, it will be easy to see that it's just your imagination. Analysis is always intentional. It's always purposeful and never aimless. At the very least each instance of analysis has some object that's being analyzed. That's intentional. If my awareness is given to me, then what am I prior to that gift? What am I without awareness? Because to relax intent, or as you say, to give it up, one can't just give it up once and forget about it. It's an ongoing state that has to be maintained continuously. You have to be a willing participant in each moment of such surrender. It's not something that's automatic. If at some point you suspend your willingness, participation stops, and the entire exercise stops.

Why? Am I pulling you back in against your will? I hope not. Well now... now you're saying I shouldn't believe anything you say. That's not what the expression "take with a grain of salt" means, imo. So I am not going to take that advice literally. I don't think you mean it that way. Interesting choice of words. "Acceptable." Not "advisable." Just acceptable. Interesting. OK, when it comes to conventional knowledge and skills, it's easy to identify experts, because there are lots of people available with the same or similar skills and knowledge, and these people can arrange themselves in a social ladder by voluntarily deferring to someone they believe is more knowledgeable or skilled. If we then investigate these relationships and see who defers to whom, then we can get an idea of who is an expert. That's one way of doing it at least. In this field of knowledge and skill though, everyone keeps to themselves. There are lots of secret clubs. Chains of deference are short or even meaningless, such as when you defer only to your lineage elders, meaning, you defer to your own base, meaning, you defer to yourself. So if I defer to my teacher and his teacher and then teacher's teacher, I'm basically strengthening a thin pole of opinion upon which I stand. It's a vertical relationship (as opposed to horizontal, reasoned peer consensus, etc.). So when people in the spiritual field claim to be experts (or their students say so), it's not the same thing as someone claiming to be an expert on plumbing, which is a widely available and readily understood discipline, lots of horizontal relationships, very little verticality at all (is there some godly/enlightened plumber at the feet of which all plumbers bow?), etc. So you don't feel strange about the label "expert"? In my time I've met some exceptionally wise people. I would just call them wise. I wouldn't call them experts. I'd say they are worth paying attention to, but I wouldn't suggest to make any single one of them your exclusive source of knowledge. But that's just me. Anyway, it's not a big deal. I am actually more curious what kind of progress Kunlun practice called "red phoenix" enables. People have said there is progress. Progress from what to what? What specifically is attained? For example, if you lift weights, you'll get stronger. I can understand this sort of progress. I know what it means to be stronger, etc. When someone practices "red phoenix" correctly and successfully, what specifically improves? Is this possible to explain? If yes, I'd be curious to hear it.

What I don't understand here, Scotty, is why do you suggest that apprentices should be taken with a grain of salt, but Max should be believed wholesale and without any reservation? Why don't you warn people to take what Max teaches with a grain of salt? Wouldn't that be a fair warning? Is there a teacher who can be approached with a grain of salt and still be of benefit? Or do teachers naturally require and expect total suspension of critical thinking these days?

Intent, on the whole, doesn't arise or cease. Rather intent changes its character. People naively split up or delineate these changes into separate individual intentions. If we then analyze these fragments of intent, of course they appear to arise and to cease. It's only natural. But if you heal the delineations, the fact that intent is there and changes is still real. In other words, experience is always selective. At any one time you experience a fraction of all possible experience. There is no way to experience everything that could be experienced at once. This lively flowing selectivity of experience is a reflection of intent. Conditioning is never able to fully guide intent. There is always at least a tiny fragment of intent that's liberated from all conditions. When one's mind is ossified by habitual beliefs, then it seems like there is very little power left over to intent. Some people even think there is no power at all that's left over. They think all the power of change resides in the patterns themselves, and none of that power is available to one's person. Let's look at a relatively very hardened experience, mine. I am surrounded by desks, chairs, cups, books, walls, Earth, sky, clocks, streets, and all these things seem very very stable. Let's say they are stable to the point of being locked down. Is there any freedom left for me? Is everything I do determined by my conditioning (internal and external)? To me the clear and obvious answer is: no. I still have the tippy tip of intent left loose. So while I can't readily levitate a house, that isn't a readily or obviously available choice for me, I can still make choices. For example, I can choose the topic of my thinking. I can think about what game to play next. Or I can think about wisdom. And I can think about how to feed myself. To me, these are free choices. People will argue that even these choices are conditioned, but I will disagree. There is nothing in my environment that makes me this way, but my mentality that supports certain ways of thinking is intentional itself. So for example, spirituality can be seen as an escape from the suffering of the world. But there are many approaches to suffering. One approach is to tighten your belt, buckle up, strap yourself in, and dig in. Work more, harder, ingratiate yourself more strategically, build more and more social networks, look for more and more money, etc. That's a valid response to a challenge. Many people choose this response. Another response is to turn away from the game. That's one of the spiritual responses. That's renunciation. There is nothing in the challenge of life that inherently forces one toward renunciation. One can equally as well choose to face the challenge in a totally different way. If everything is predetermined, we'd react to everything instantly. Why then are there situations that demand lengthy thinking and/or consultation with friends? A car engine doesn't stop once in a while to determine whether it should spin another cycle. If there is fuel, air and spark, it spins. It's a simple relationship. Do people's lives resemble this? In my experience, no. People are nothing like this. Sometimes people get stomped. They stop. They don't know what to do next. Finally if you look at the whole of intent, including the submerged aspect of it at the deep end, the aspect that holds the cities and stars together, the mystical aspect, the totality, is what we're seeing the only thing that can be seen? Is our past the only past? In the blink of an eye, intent can change your history and past. It can make it appear as if you never lived this life as you thought you did... perhaps you are a 30 year old person called Flugin on a planet Scoromax, and your past is a long and storied past. This change can happen in the blink of an eye. To know this for sure, or to have a good intuition about how this can happen, you need to have some mystical experience (lucid dreaming and dream awareness help). So if your conditioning is your past, and if your past determines the future, then how is it we can change our past? How is it that (to make this accessible) in dreams an entire array of different pasts can spontaneously emerge? Many people dream they are a character with a certain kind of past, and your dream past can be long and storied and it can have nothing to do with this life on Earth. Your dream environment can also have its own past. I own conditions. I don't externalize them. This doesn't follow for me. How can intent appear from an intent-less state? It would make intent unintentional. Seems absurd, doesn't it? If intent appears without a cause, that ruins all logic. If logic is ruined, then we can say anything we enjoy saying about intent, all arguments stop, there is nothing to talk about. If intent appears from an external cause, then we need to look at internal/external divide. As you are well aware, such divides don't last under examination. And finally we have to confront experience. This is required to be honest. Here I am. I am sitting and typing. I can type anything I want. I don't feel anything external telling me what to type. But the internal structures that guide my typing are themselves intentional. I don't feel them as if they were impositions. I don't feel pressure or a force that pressures me to type this against all resistance. And I am aware of alternatives. If I only ever needed to do what was dictated by some past, how would awareness of alternatives be useful? It would be useless. It would serve no purpose. What's the point of being aware of alternatives, if I am destined to only pick one narrow choice each time? That seems strange, right? This way of thinking would have an unexplained and crazy experiential element left-over, with no place to go or call home, post-analysis. Right. But I am not only my intentions. I am mind. Intentions don't make sense without context. Context is not something that drives intent, it illumines it. So if I shine a light on a car, I don't determine which turn the car will take next. I just make the car visible, I make it possible to apprehend the car, to see it, to recognize it as such, etc... that's what context does. It illumines. Based on one's prior intentions and beliefs (also intentional, but ossified), some of these illuminations can seem to guide choices. For example, if you illumine a hole in the ground, I will walk around it instead of fall into it. Does this mean context has chosen my action for me? Many people would think yes. I don't. Have all options been squashed? Is it even possible? I can walk around. I can look into the hole, get a rope and rappel into it if it's deep. If it's shallow I can step into it or get a shovel and toss some earth into it. I can walk backward instead of around. And if I am a mage, I can levitate over the hole (mages have more options!). If context could destroy options-perception, it would become the guiding force. But it can't. And the more options the person can perceive, the freer the person feels. Ultimately we are all infinitely free. But if people feel no options, they feel trapped. I would even say, if spirituality doesn't endow one with a sense of more options, it's a waste of time. This is why dogma is so antithetic to real spirituality. Dogma closes off options by disallowing questioning and by suggesting that only one path is to be followed.

I more or less agree with you here. If you're aware of the dynamic I was talking about and you know how to avoid it, then more power to you in de-victimizing and empowering yourself.

It's hard to think of something specific. Magick is an art of non-ordinary intentions. Intent by definition always produces result. It has to be sincere. And besides that, it must be congruent with beliefs. You cannot intend something that's contrary to what you believe is possible or sensical. Eliminating misconceptions about intent is important. For example, some people think intent is actually a series of discrete intentions. Is that so? Examine this closely. When I examine this for myself I find directly that my intent can only be broken into individual intentions as approximations, but not in truth. In truth intent is one flow. It has no beginning, and no end. It changes smoothly. As it changes, no real boundaries can be discerned, such that I cannot say when some old intent stops and a new one begins. Another thing one should gain confidence in is that one can't drop intent. Dropping is itself intentional, so dropping something means exercising intent. This is conducive to calm and confidence. Then one should consider stability. Where does stability come from? Initially most people think that stability is an external quality supported by substance. So, for example, a mountain is stable because it's made of substance, and that substance just sits there. This ability to just sit there is a natural property of stability of substance. Or so it is thought. From this POV, intent is always seen as disruptive, unstable, unreliable, shifty, etc. This can lead to fear if you want a measure of stability in addition to a measure of change. This means you have to internalize stability. Realize that stability is actually an internal quality of intent. That intent has depth. At a deep end it's very stable, slow, abstract and high order. At the shallow end it's fast, concrete and low order. By embracing the deep end as nothing other than yourself, you can stop being scared of your own intent. In other words, you won't have to think that by exercising your intent in a magickal way you'll turn the whole world into meaningless chaos. Notice something? I am eliminating obstacles. Obstacles are simply objections. They are like, "But if I use magick all the time, the world will become unglued and it will all be fucked." If you can't answer this objection, you go nowhere. You are stuck. Either you have to become OK with this fast chaos, or you have to integrate stability back into your intent (or both). So the whole practice is to try doing what you want. When it can't work, you'll sense an objection. Work with that objection. Dissolve it. Try again. Then you'll get another objection and so on. Work through them all. The entire Buddha dharma is structured and setup to eliminate objections about solidity of objects. So the objection is, "I can't transform objects because objects are inherently what they are, independent of mind." Buddhist doctrine gives contemplative tools to smash that in every way: "Objects are not inherently anything specific. They are not independent of mind. Etc." It smashes every aspect of an objection. But the best way to deal with this is not to study religion or occult in advance, because that is a waste of time. The fast way is to instantly try living as you wish. Then if you can't, you'll sense an objection (blocking belief). Then you go work on it. That way you don't waste time spinning your wheels unblocking beliefs which you might not even hold and which might not even be blocking you. Magick makes sense when you can conceive of non-ordinary intentions. For this you must hold some intentions as ordinary. If you ever reach a point where ordinary no longer refers to anything, then non-ordinary disappears. Then magick also goes away. So magick is not something that necessarily has meaning at all times. It's like a medicine that only appears when someone is sick. When one is healthy, it disappears. In the healthy state, instead of magic there is simply intent. It's not split into ordinary or extraordinary. Enlightened intent always proceeds from totality of possibilities. So for this reason it's not a good idea to cling to magick, unless you think it makes sense to cling to medicine. At some point magick just becomes normal. But if you live surrounded by beings who are bewildered by the very word "magick" (this means they want and expect a certain pattern of experience they call "normal") then magick is still a relevant concept. This is what I think about it. I just explained, from my point of view, everything there is to explain about magick.

Alright. I'll get to it. But pls don't expect results too soon. I'll type it up into a text file first, then I'll try to post it here as posts. Personally, I highly recommend that book (thanks for the link, btw). Why? It's one of the very few books that talks relatively openly about Dzogchen practices. Bonpos are more generous, I think, than the Buddhists. I appreciate it. They give very simple, intuitive explanations for a lot of things. It's not written in a convoluted language. But like with all books, I always urge people use their own heads too. I don't agree with everything it says (but then again, there is no mystery tradition I am aware of that I summarily agree with 100%).