goldisheavy

Who is "us"? Maybe you don't feel you should be asked. That's fine. Speak for yourself. I am OK being asked these sorts of questions. If you want to say "Please don't ask me" you are well within your moral right to say so. Nothing more.

That's because you already know everything. What matters in this case is what tulku prefers. He obviously has questions and doesn't know what will happen to him after death. So if tulku thinks steve is more helpful with his Zen puzzles, by all means, more power to steve. Try to remember what it was like not to know things. Imagine you were confused and asked a question. How would you like it if you were given no straightforward answer? Wouldn't you be pissed?

If words are meaningless, then your entire post is meaningless. Obviously that's false. This question is based on an assumption. The assumption is that your physical body generates mind as an epiphenomenon of the brain activity. If you don't start with this assumption, what do you have? To put it in other way, is the mind in the body, or is the body in the mind?

Aha! I knew it. So this suggestion is based on an assumption, isn't it? You think you didn't exist before birth, so you won't exist after death? Well, if you assume you didn't exist before birth, it's symmetrically logical that you won't exist after death either. The problem is that you did exist before birth and this can be logically proven. And the proof is simple -- your mind needs to have context in order to understand and assimilate experience of any kind. So prior to even the first experience of "this" life, you already must have had some context to make sense of that experience. Where would this context come from? Almost obviously not from anything in this life. I say "almost obviously" because for physicalists, what constitutes and substantiates continuity is physicality, matter and energy, stuff, substance. But again, the notion of substance can be dismantled by analysis. So what do we have? Substance is a garbage idea that's easy to disprove and that's pretty much impossible to prove (it has to be taken on blind faith if you believe in substance). OK, then in the universe that's fundamentally insubstantial, what is the "substance" of continuity? What provides it? Easy. It's called mind! The unborn, deathless mind. See how I explained things nice and simple? This is much better than "what were you before you were born" puzzle nonsense. Just say what you mean to say. Please don't throw around puzzles and witticisms. And if you're going to throw around witticisms, a much superior one is not "who were you before you were born" but "who are you NOW??" Right now! Unlike your past, your present is actually available to you for empirical analysis. The past is only available through inference and logic, but not directly or experientially. If you understand who you are now, you'll understand who you will be after death and who you were in the past as well, before birth.

*facepalm* That's not a helpful thing to say, imo. This is where Zen goes wrong.

I strongly disagree with this simplistic, almost mechanistic plumbing-like caricature. What happens after death is affected by your entire psyche. How you feel at the time of death is important, but it's not all that's important. Your core beliefs are important. Your mental habits and propensities are important. Your aspirations are important. Your fears are important, both present fears and buried, subconscious fears. Your wisdom and/or ignorance is important. Every single aspect of the psyche is important. Every single one. And chakras have nothing whatsoever to do with anything, unless you make belief in chakras a fundamental core belief for yourself, in which case it may start being important in some ways specifically for you and you alone. In short, all of your being, all of your mind is important. Not just one feeling at the time of death. This is possible, but chakras have nothing to do with anything. In Surangama Sutra Buddha specifically logically negates the idea that the body is like a hotel with doors. Please use critical thinking. Don't just absorb bits of tradition mindlessly. Test things for yourself. Investigate. Don't just accept what floats around at face value.

Except you aren't actually anything specific. If you discard one mask, another appears in its place. All masks are you and none of them are you. All is true. None is true. There is no contradiction. Why is it like this? It's because of the infinite potentiality of mind. If you discard persona that you think is false, instead of truth, you find another false persona there. It might be formless and infinite, but it's still false. You can keep discarding forever and ever and all the resultant states of mind, being conditioned, are in some way false, but equally, in some way true as well. Thus your current ego is in a sense the real you as well. But all this talk is absurd anyway. In reality almost no one will discard their ego. Why not? To do so you have to discard not just your body, but also the world as you know it, your mother and father, your sisters and brothers and so on. Many people are ready to discard or even to destroy their bodies and personalities. But few can discard their families. And even fewer would discard the entire world as they know it. And for what? Only to realize some other world, a different world, spontaneously takes the place of the previous one. Instead of phrasing the path in terms of discarding, it's better to talk about understanding. Know thyself. Don't discard unless discarding is called for by your own wisdom and not by some stranger.

For something to be false, something else must be true. What our minds have trouble with is something that's neither true nor false. What is that? It's something indeterminate. That's reality. Reality is indeterminate. Out of this indeterminate reality, brimming with all potential, we intentionally select some point of view. Within that point of view, some things will be more true than others. If you want to be pragmatic, you have to honor, to some limited extent, the weight of these relative truths. Take another point of view, and what used to be true can become false and vice versa. Nothing is inherently true or false though. If you want to look at reality as is, it doesn't even exist as such. There is no reality 'as is'. Even the indeterminate state of reality is not its true nature. It's one of its states. The state where a point of view is assumed is another possible state. It's not more or less true than the indeterminate state of relaxed intentionality. Seeing things this way requires being comfortable with nuance. If we insist on neatly and conveniently separating the true from the false without any personal appreciation for the dynamics of perception and knowledge, we just end up with a dogmatic caricature of reality at best. And at the worst we end up with something completely unskillful. Arguing whether something is or isn't within alaya is pointless unless that argument strikes at an important painful conceptual hairball for you. It's much better to talk about these painful hairballs, if you even have any, then to talk about what is or isn't. And if you don't have any painful hairballs, it's best not to invent them. Just because someone called "Buddha" said all beings have hairballs doesn't mean it's true. If you don't have it, don't make it up. If you have it, talk directly about it. In other words, go straight to the root concern without any regard for what is or isn't. What do you want there to be and why? That's a more revealing question than talking about what is and what isn't, which is a pretentious way of talking (it pretends that some things or states of affairs are beyond intentionality, which is not honest).

The ego is mind's own commitment. It is intentional and it's not going anywhere. By relaxing commitments you can transform the ego, but since intentionality can never be abandoned (nor can it be taken up), ego is never abandoned. Ego is a really dumb word. A better word is subjectivity or personality. You'll always have some personality. Be it earthly or not. Be it mundane or not. And you'll always have subjectivity too. You'll never learn the objective truth. If you're lucky, you'll eventually at least understand the meaning of your own subjectivity and the meaning of commitments you maintain. Talking about the mind and the ego as two different things is like talking about the finger and the tip of the finger as two different things. A finger isn't itself without some tip. A finger tip has no meaning without some finger. There is no place where the finger stops and a finger tip begins. It's the same with the mind and ego. And even as I say this, I can already hear idiots thinking, "Ah, but our secret teaching goes beyond mind, nyak nyak nyak." Some people are just hopeless. They don't even know what mind is, but already they think (using their mind) they go beyond it. I wish instead of beating down on egos people actually investigated them. Of course we ideally want people to be accommodating within reason. If I speak I want you to pay attention. If you speak, you likely want me to pay attention. That's what I mean by being accommodating. But this desire to live among reasonably accommodating people has lead to a nasty spiritual disease of ignorant, dogmatic ego bashing.

The mind can make the body itch when it's anxious for whatever reason. Also sometimes what happens is that the mind has background anxiety which is normally suppressed by absorption in the daily world. When you do any kind of practice that reduces your absorption in the daily world, the suppression weakens, and the background anxiety can then make the body itch. So, I agree with Scotty. In my opinion, Scotty is right on. If you follow his advice you'll get your itch sorted out relatively quickly. I believe it's basically going to go away on its own, but if you do what Scotty says it will go away sooner. Don't fixate on that itch and don't stabilize the itch by giving it a detailed background story.

This thread gave me lots of belly laughs.

I meandered across this person on youtube and I have enjoyed the "favorites". I thought you people might enjoy some of these videos too. If you have seen these already, I apologize. http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=9ninja...;view=favorites Also 9ninja's own videos might be interesting. Check out the "russian shaman" video on page 4 of favorites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-gXCOOG_ig I also like the vajrayogini dance. Opinions?

Well said! Appearing to die is one of the favorite tricks of immortals. Also, drunken immortals often claim to be mortal and go around even believing to be mortal. Although I don't think the purpose of life is to merely return to heaven. Life is like a roller coaster. You enjoy it on the way down and you enjoy it on the way up. Descending into the confused worlds of powerlessness and separation gives us many unique experiences that are simply impossible in the heavenly world. It seems like a good idea when we get bored of the bliss and freedom, but when we've been suffering for too long in these worlds here, it eventually doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore. For some people fear is just fear, and for others it's a rare pleasure. When fear stops being a rare pleasure and is just plain old fear, and when pain stops being an exquisite sensation and is just an old pain, that's when we've had enough. From an immortal perspective all sensations are good, that's why the decision to descend is an easy one. I bet some people here are thinking, "Why would any immortal want to descent into this realm?"

Don't worry about it sweet pea. Just tell me what you're thinking and let me worry about it. As long as your general overall intention is relatively nice, I should be able to figure my way around your words. Is? So you think Nature has its own true state and we obscure it with our own distortions? Then if we remove our distortions, we'll be observing the undistorted Nature? Is that your view? If it is, I'm sorry to say I don't share it. Nature doesn't have a self that's separate from myself. My opinion of Nature is not a distortion. It is itself natural, like grass and like rain. I don't consider myself to be artificial. Because of that, my thoughts are not artificial either. All the bendy shit that my mind does is 100% natural and mother approved. It's not artificial. I am Nature. Who are you? Are you an onlooker? I am not an onlooker. I am it.

That's a brilliant excerpt. The excerpt talks about the nature of intent. Ordinarily we feel that our intent is severed in two ways. It's severed in time, meaning we perceive our intentions to each have a beginning and an end. And it's severed in space, meaning, we perceive our intentions to have personal boundaries, just like each human body is limited in space, likewise we perceive our intention to have a similar limit. Unconsciously we also know that our intent cannot be arbitrary, but that it must flow along a conditioned route. Thus, the hand cannot touch the mouth without rotating the shoulder. The true condition of intent is that it's neither severed in any way nor conditioned. When the person consciously realizes this, it feels as though the entire universe is one's own will, and that the will is effortless. One no longer thinks of intent as a force that overcomes resistance. There is no resistance and no force. Intent always manifests effortlessly and even effort itself is an an effortless appearance without any predetermined meaning such as "overcoming." So it's not quite correct to say that one must cease patterns. Patterns always appear. What ceases are the mistaken ideas about the severed nature of intent and about intent being forced to only flow through fated routes.

What the fuck is that? Why not be a little rude? Relax. Immortals cannot become immortal by being mentally inflexible. If you can't even tolerate a little bit of rudeness, you have no hope of ever becoming an immortal who has to tolerate primordial chaos and the inconceivable nature of experience. Immortals do exist, but how they manifest depends on your own mindset. If your mindset is very rigid and materialistic, then the immortals will look like wise people who are very easy going and ordinary. They're the kind of people you'd have a beer with at the pub, with the difference that they are very wise. These people will appear to die. If your mindset is soft and immaterial then the immortals can manifest in a broad variety of ways. They may or may not appear to die. They may or may not appear to have strange powers. The wisdom of these immortals will be more powerful and more daring than the wisdom of the above immortal. So immortals exist no matter what, but how they will appear depends on you and your level of cultivation. This realm is like a TV channel. If your cultivation is low, you watch low channels where not many unusual things can happen and things are locked down by many rigid rules that are ascribed to Nature. If your cultivation is high then you're watching higher channels and there are more possibilities and Nature is less rigid and its rules are more abstract. But constantly looking for an immortal is a great mistake. Instead you should try to realize immortality within yourself. If you read the Daoist stories about immortals, there is almost no example of ignorant people finding immortals. It works the other way around. Immortals look around for people who are ready. Even then, immortals only do that when they are not lazy and want to contribute. Often immortals are lazy and just want to enjoy themselves and won't even bother to share anything they know and looking for them is a waste of time, because they didn't escape the mortal realm for nothing. The escaped it because it sucked, so obviously they don't want to dip back into it to teach people in a painfully slow way. So take care of yourself and then an immortal may or may not show up at your doorstep. If you don't worry about immortals and just focus on wisdom and cultivation, that's your best chance to encounter an immortal. If you try to go around looking for one, the chances of finding fakers and posers are extremely high. I would say 99.99% high.

Wouldn't it be great if the person was just like a set of pipes? If the water level is high, you have enlightenment. If it's low, you have ignorance. This is a simple mechanical model. With this model any idiot can become enlightened by topping off the level, just given enough stubborn practice. It's encouraging and approachable and it gives you something obvious to do.

I don't associate kundalini sensations with inflammation. However, those sensations are of different kinds. Mine feel like heat, while I've heard other people feel them as water or electricity or something else. What I do notice is that if I allow the heat to remain in one place too long, that place can get sick and in particular the sickness will be related to drying out and heat. So a typical example, fire in the eyes will result in a dry eye. Fire in the skin can result in flaky skin. Fire in the tendons can result in tendons getting worn out faster. But fire is not automatically bad. Fire can also be healing. I notice that fire has moods. Angry fire is different from soothing fire. But generally I tend to think that I don't want any of these sensations in my body and for the most part I don't experience them. If they start showing up I intend to return to stasis and the sensation disappear. If I get angry, I sometimes allow myself to feel heat in various parts of my body, but if I do that too much I pay for it later. I've also sometimes done water visualizations to counteract the fire effects.

Interesting to see this level of openness.

Ooops... did I come off that extreme? I think it's fine to talk about one's personal experiences. I even think it's a good idea. I just think we should allow some room for individuality and not try to hammer every single experience into some traditional framework. I know some Buddhists who would immediately try to assign a jhana number to this one or just outright dismiss it. They go, oh, yea, based on that description that's 2nd jhana. Screw everything about that. No it's not. In fact jhana do not really exist as such. Describing deeply personal internal experiences in concrete terms as if they were public perceptions like trees and chairs is a huge mistake. It doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about these things. It's all about expectations. If the expectations are not out of whack, then it's good to talk about spiritual experiences. If we expect to box and bin every experience into a formal framework, then we do harm to ourselves and everyone around us.

To conceive of mind's activity in purely mechanic terms is a mistake. And yet when most people talk about quieting the mind and compare the mind to a pool of water, they really look at the mind in very mechanic terms, as if the mind was a substance and behaved like one. It's important not to take any metaphor about the mind literally because the mind is unique.

I don't think you should change anything. Do what you are doing. Give it 5 seconds, and people will frame your experience in Buddhist and Taoist terms in order to legitimize it. Alternatively, they'll find no way to do so, and will state that your experience is illegitimate. In my experience all traditions lie at least somewhat, if not a great deal. All the descriptions they provide are inadequate or worse, downright false and deceptive. When you're at the edge of contemplation, you're on your own. Tradition cannot help you at all. Traditions are helpful for those who are just beginning. Traditions get in the way of experienced contemplators. Why? Because when you're contemplating at a deep level, you're investigating way beyond convention. You're close to the source of the dream, and the dream's contents are no longer applicable. Traditions are just dream contents. They are not wisdom. The role of tradition is to form the basis for social groups and to maintain convention. Don't forget. If you try to match your experience to this or that tradition, you'll be severely hamstrung. It's like walking around with a ball and a chain. Free yourself. The downside is that it can be hard to discuss what you're knowing and feeling, because traditions provide vocabulary and frameworks for discussion (even if it's a deceptive and inaccurate one, it feels like you're sharing something, when in fact you're not). You may need to develop your own vocabulary if you're still interested in talking, but if you do that, you risk forming a new tradition. And while it will be fun for you, if you formalize your thought it will later harm and delay other people's progress. At "high" levels experience is very abstract. You know what you're experiencing, but it's so far away from the concrete world that it's hard to verbalize. The only thing you can do is deny this or that bogus assumption you catch people engaging in.

They enjoy that lifestyle more.

I think this story is pretty amazing. I found it on www.ted.com, but for some reason the youtube video seems to be of higher quality, so I am linking to the youtube version.

Beliefs. No, but you can improve upon the Unreal, which is the mother of the Real. What a waste of time. If Marble doesn't exist, why do you challenge him to realize something? Do words mean anything at all to you?