goldisheavy

Where is this lack you speak of?

You didn't finish your analysis yet.

It depends on what you look for. When you try to find yourself, what are you looking for? It's graspable if you don't grasp too tightly. Don't you see, that's the whole trick? People grasp identities because the grasp in a medium strength grip. At the same time, people make too many simplifications and their imaginations are impoverished. The sage sees this and the suffering it causes. How can we help? Well, there are tricks. Basically there are some lies we can tell people to free them. One lie is this: if you think you can grasp something, just grasp it as hard as you can! What happens? Well, when the person tries to grasp things way too hard, he or she gets exhausted and the fist naturally becomes limp after some time. So it's a way to get the person to leg go by lying and tricking the person. Of course if the person was not tricked into grasping way too hard, if the person continued a medium-strength grasp, the grasp would continue indefinitely. As soon as you trick the person into loosening the hand, another disease starts. This new disease means the person now thinks nothing whatsoever can ever be held. So now you have to teach the person how to pick up objects and hold them. So you have to basically re-teach the same thing you tricked the person out of in the first place. So what is the point of all this? The point is to eventually show the person that the hand is capable of this entire range of ability. Range is the key word. Grasping and non-grasping both fall within the range of ability. Neither ability is absolute. Grasping is not absolute. Non-grasping is also not absolute. Non-grasping only makes sense in contrast with grasping. The reason we can talk about non-grasping is because grasping is as real as non-grasping. When I type this post, are you typing my post? No, you are not. When you type your post, am I typing it? No I am not. There is an obvious distinction between you and me. You need to face the truth of this. Don't run from it.

I realize this. I think that's a terrible definition of what a mind is. It's not in accord with reality. It's like saying that space is whatever is inside the bottle. As soon as you discard all the bottles, all the space is gone. That's a very limited conception of what a space is. You limit what a mind is in a very similar way. Mind is what holds and experiences the point of view. By thinking of mind and Nature or God as distinct and different things you create a difficulty for yourself.

That's better. A seer is just a way to refer to a person. It's not some metaphysical particle that anchors seeing. Of course there are people, hence there are seers. A seer is a subjective point of view. Of course people have points of view. From this people fall into two kinds of exaggerations. One way to exaggerate the situation is to pretend there is more stability and endurance to a point of view than there really is. From this arises the false idea that at the bottom of each seer there is a kind of metaphysical anchor or particle, a kind of eternal object that persists through all time. This errs on the side of eternalism. Another way to exaggerate the situation is to pretend there is a lot less stability to a point of view than there really is. From this arises the false idea that there is no seer at all. This approach leads to a total denial of the seer, and of all the objects of perception as such. This errs on the side of nihilism. The real situation is in some sense inconvenient because it cannot be captured by simplifications. Saying there is a seer in a kind of absolute and definite sense is a simplification (or an exaggeration). Saying there is not, again, is a simplification. Depending on what the person is more attached to you use different antidotes. If the person is attached to nihilistic attitudes, then you correct it by asserting a self. If the person is attached to eternalistic attitudes, then you correct it by asserting the absence of self. But each antidote is a kind of poison and a lie in its own right. All medicine is poison. If you give a bunch of antidote to a healthy person you will kill that person.

This kind of thing is very difficult to answer in the most appropriate way possible. There is a way toward health, but whether the way is easy or not depends on a lot of factors. It depends on what you believe the world is like, which will affect what you believe is reasonably possible. And it depends on your perseverance. People often think some ailment is not worth curing if it involves more than X amount of effort. I speak from observation of others and myself. I've had conditions which I've ignored because they didn't bother me enough to make it worth my time to cure them. I suggest the following approach. First, make sure your basics are strong. This means good nutrition, good sleep, good exercise, low stress, good sunshine and air. These are the basics. If your basics are missing or distorted, you can be curing yourself every hour of every day and still just get sicker and sicker. Good nutrition -- Avoid extremes. Avoid fad diets. Eat everything in moderation. Make sure things you buy are reasonably high quality if possible. If you have access to a farmer's market, use it. If you have access to trustworthy organic vegetables, take advantage of it. But if you don't, don't go crazy. Just do the best you can with what you have, and let your mind rest. Eat some of everything. Some fat, some vegetables, some meat if you're not a vegetarian, etc... Avoid fads. Don't overeat. Don't generally starve, etc. Good sleep -- 7-9 or even 10 hours, depending on your individual personal needs. Good sleep should be solid and uninterrupted. The most important key to sleep is your mind prior to sleep. If your mind is relaxed and peaceful, you'll sleep well, whether you're sleeping on a hard rock in a forest or in a soft bed. If you're anxious then your sleep will be shit even in the best bedroom on the planet. Good exercise -- Use reason and avoid extremes. Exercise should work you out but it should not be so painful and unpleasant that you'll want to avoid it the next day thanks to a negative association of exercise with pain. So exercise should not be lazy, but not so fanatical that you're in pain. Exercise whatever you can for however long you can within reason. If you can only do 5 minutes, start there. Your body will tell you what is enough, just listen to it attentively. Don't be too easy or too hard on yourself. Low stress -- This is your mind. It's all about your beliefs. This whole forum is dedicated to that topic so I'm not going to say anything about it. You should eventually be able to rise above any and all concerns. This doesn't mean you'll become numb. It just means where some concern used to take your breath away, it won't happen anymore. You being the master of your concerns is good. Your concerns being the master of you is bad. Meditate. During meditation let everything be and relax your mind. Give yourself some space. Good sunshine and air -- This means don't spend all your time in a room with windows shut. Air out your room and take walks outside when the sun is out, preferably avoiding the blistering high noon sun. As with everything, just use reason and moderation. These are the basics. It's like a foundation from which healing manifests. Now assuming your foundation is strong, use visualization as follows. See a healing soft light penetrate your body. The color and direction of entry is not important as long as it is pleasant. You pick. See the light go toward the affected area and melt there. Spend some time like this, however you think is appropriate. Then move to a higher order vision. The higher order vision is more holistic. So instead of focusing on the affected area, observe your whole being and see your hole being as healthy. Feel health surging, flowing, brimming, shining in your being all over, from inside and out. Include the whole universe into this, from the innermost depths to the outermost limits of imagination and conventional knowledge. Spend some time feeling health in your general being. Then comes the third stage of visualization. The third stage is forgetting. Forget you ever had a problem. Forget yourself. Forget the exercise you just did. Let it all go. Let go of the expectations. During the first two stages you expect to be healed. During the third stage you place yourself in a space beyond expectations. In this stage whether you heal or not is not important because you are beyond whatever is happening, good or bad. When you are healing yourself via visualization I describe above, it's important to avoid two things: 1. Don't feel pity for yourself. This puts you into a victim role. 2. Don't feel indifferent and callous to yourself. This puts you into a pretentious bully role. The ideal state is one of firm equanimity where you are soft, kind and compassionate toward yourself without feeling pity or sorry for yourself. How well visualization works, or whether it even works at all, will depend on how you believe the world works. If you believe the world is made of physical substance and the mind is an illusion, then visualization will not help you because it will not be something coherent (believable) within that frame of mind. If you believe the mind is a fundamental reality and matter is an illusion, then visualization I described above will help you a lot. Happy healing!

That's not true. Both asserting and denying a seer are extreme views. When I said that there is a seer, I was challenging you. I then backed up my challenge with a reason. You ignored the content of my post and spammed me with a huge cut-n-paste which I didn't bother reading (not to mention I can guess what it says... I've probably read more Buddhist books than you). I knew as soon as I mentioned that there is a seer you were going to switch out. You're predictable.

There is a seer though. The seer is not an object. So when you think the seer is an object, you look for it, you fail to find it, you declare there is no seer. If the seer does not exist, explain why do you see things differently from me? What gives you your uniqueness? In truth no-self is the extremist twin to the view of self. Both no-self and self are wrong views. The view of self exaggerates the apparent pattern. The view of no-self exaggerates the apparent instability and shiftiness of the pattern. Both views are exaggerations. Check this out: http://meaningness.com/nebulosity I'll mention in advance, I don't agree with everything you may find on meaningness.com, but it has a lot of helpful stuff on it. In particular all the writings about nebulosity and the eternalism and nihilism as two strategies of trying to simplify nebulosity are relevant to what you're trying to say. No-self belongs to a family of nihilistic simplifications. It exaggerates instability of meaning and it exaggerates the rate of change.

I don't think it's possible to get rid of one's core beliefs. It's only possible to change them. You'll always believe something. Even a committed nihilist maintains a coherent view of nihilism. If a true nihilist says "nothing is important" reply "then if that is so, why don't you start deeming something as important?" Then nihilist will have to reply, "No I cannot do that because it's important for me to believe that all views are unimportant." Oops... So you can't get rid of core beliefs. If you stop talking about beliefs it doesn't mean your beliefs are gone. Professed beliefs are known to deviate from truly held beliefs. It's common for people to claim to believe things they really don't believe in their hearts of hearts, especially those people who have decided to fit in with some organized religion. A reasonable first step is to try to become aware of your beliefs, and especially of your core beliefs. A second step is to critically examine those beliefs and see if they serve you well. See how well they match up to life experience. Do they lead to disappointment? During this process, even without consciously trying to find an alternative, a true alternative might spontaneously become apparent to you. As you engage in this process, the alternative and healthier core beliefs will seem more attractive and the old core beliefs will seem less attractive and less true. This of course assumes your core beliefs were not serving you well. It's also possible your core beliefs were actually perfect and that all you needed was just a bit more confidence to reject external doubts and to go with your core beliefs. No matter what, the process I am talking about here has huge benefits, in my opinion. But it is also a dangerous process because at times extreme questioning can make one despondent or insane. To me, it's all worth it, and it's the price of admission. You are absolutely right! Not everyone. "Get rid of all beliefs" is just pop-Zen.

My way of thinking about the mind is powerful because using my way you don't have to step outside of yourself to become liberated. You simply realize that you are not what you thought you were. In your idea of "mind" you have to discard mind to have some other experience that is outside of mind. If such a thing exists, where is it? Where is the experience taking place if not in the mind? So your way has two challenges. It's logically inconsistent. It posits an experience without a context for that experience (mind is context, a "place" is a context also). And the second challenge is that it estranges you from the liberation. It makes liberation something foreign to your being. Something completely and utterly beyond you as a person. This creates a chasm that shall not be crossed as long as you remain a human being. My method blurs the distinction between a human being and non-human being. It blurs the distinction between what is ordinarily thought of as "intimate" and what is ordinarily thought of as "out there." My way relies on blurring distinctions, on questioning the delineation we throw up all around us and even inside of us. Your way relies on maintaining the distinctions and then trying to jump over from yourself to non-yourself. Your choice.

Thrill? You're scaring the fuck out of Vaj. He doesn't like you questioning him or "his" tradition. He's merged with Buddhism to such an extent now, that if you question Buddhism you are questioning Vaj's own being. He's freaked that you are destroying his being. You're pulling the rug from under him. He's defending his turf and he's defending himself because he confused himself with the turf he stands on. He sees Buddhism as beautiful and precious and as something he'd hate to see gone. But it will be gone, and people like you and I hasten Buddhism's demise while preserving its inner wisdom. Alas, it's not easy to build one's identity on wisdom. It's much easier to associate with outward trappings which you can readily see and touch. Vaj doesn't want to die. Vaj wants to live forever. Buddhism living forever is Vaj's plan for immortality. It's his pension account.

Exactly. When these elitist people crap on the New Age movement, they also crap on people like Osho. I don't agree with everything Osho said, but he was certainly a good voice to have in the discussion, saying many worthy, thought-provoking things. You don't have to agree with Osho's behavior or with every single thing he said in order to benefit from bits of wisdom like this one in the video.

This may be a pleasant approach, but as a view it's a wrong view. Seeing is not "just the seen". What is seen only has meaning in terms of what else could be seen but isn't seen now, as well as in terms of relations between various positively present manifestations and the seen thing under analysis. In other words, all meanings are deeply and endlessly contextualized. This contextualization extends not only to the manifestly neighboring meanings, but even to the unmanifest potential meanings. Also important, due to the principle of uncertainty, all the vividly manifest meanings are ever-so-slightly unmanifest, because no appearance-meaning reaches the extreme of 100% certainty during the manifestation phase. Similarly, all things that are currently unmanifest, all the infinite potentials, are ever-so-slightly manifest, because due to the principle of uncertainty the unmanifest appearance-meanings do not reach the extreme of 100% certainty of absence. This is the non-extreme nature of all phenomena. Thanks to the non-extreme nature of all phenomena and endless contextualization, each meaning includes within it limitless all possible meanings. Dogen realized this too. Seeing a blade of grass not only do you see the whole of the present universe, you also see all possible universes. So seeing is not "just seen." That's a wrong view. Read "kuge: flowers of space" if you want to read the same thing I wrote here but in dramatically harder to understand language. This is exactly the reason why it's wrong (painful) to get bound up in the objects you see. Because objects you see are not the true extent or the true nature of seeing.

As soon as one gives up trying to be a Buddhist one can benefit to a much greater degree from the Buddhist wisdom. Wisdom is one kind of commitment. Trying to conform to socially expected appearances of a group identity is a totally different commitment. At some point the person stops caring about the truth and only cares about fitting in the group. At that point Buddhism destroys the Buddha. It's much better when the Buddha destroys Buddhism and even better still when you destroy all Buddhas and Buddhism, together with all the ignorant beings. Buddha said he wasn't a person or an angel or a ghost and so on, rejecting all manner of self-delineation. If you're a Buddhist when Buddha refused to acknowledge even his identity as a person, then you are not really paying attention to what Buddha was talking about. Buddha was like a good drug dealer. A good drug dealer sells the drugs to others, but doesn't take the drugs oneself. Likewise, Buddha didn't follow anyone, but told everyone else to follow him. Buddha wouldn't be his own disciple.

The important thing here is not the technique. You can stare at the wall for 9 years and develop a sore butt as a grand result of that practice. What matters is your level of wisdom and intent. If you sit with the resolve to be enlightened or die trying, that's going to be very very different from merely sitting. If you add some wisdom to your sitting, such as for example, the ability to appreciate how you make sense of various experiences that occur to you, that's going to help you tremendously. So it's not really the technique that does the trick, but the total package of the circumstances, both inner and outer. In the most simple language you get whatever you believe you should get. If you believe you're just sitting, you get just sitting and no more. If you think your sitting has a deeper meaning than the bodily function of resting on your rear end, then you'll get a result that corresponds to that deeper meaning. I suggest you read Zanmai-o-Zanmai, and then read Kuge: the flowers of space. If the above is confusing, try this.

It's not an actual place, hence the quotation marks. But we can say the place is made of possibilities. Where a thought can be, another one could be in its place. The mind is this space of possibilities. For example, I am seeing a computer in front of me. I could be seeing many things instead of the computer. Those things are possibilities. Those possibilities are limitless. And that's what the mind is. It's also something very intimate. It's your heart. That's why we call it heartmind sometimes. It's more intimate than breath and closer than the jugular vein. It's the core of your being as well as the background against which your being appears. There are many ways to think about the mind. Almost any way to frame the mind is just a limitation on it. But the best way to understand mind is to understand it as the mind where you consider issues. It's the same place were you can reflect and consider issues, the same place where experiences take place.

I think what is simple is relative. To me what I said is simpler than what you are saying, even if only a tiny bit simpler. This is one of the reasons I also have a problem with the idea of Occam's razor. The idea behind Occam's razor is that everyone has the same intuition about what is the simplest and most elegant. I don't believe that's the case. As for the linguistic constructs, I believe whether we are trapped by them or liberated by them depends on how we relate to these constructs and how we use them.

Wow, that's terrible. You really don't understand what mind is. Mind is not thoughts. Mind is the "place" where the thoughts occur. When thoughts stop it's precisely in the mind that they stop occurring.

OK, two questions: 1. Are you going to die believing roughly the same things you were born believing? 2. If you had to live your life over again, would you do everything the same way?

Maybe you can empty your cup Aaron? I mean, maybe you can stop talking about emptying the cup as if it's actually a good advice? Have you considered the possibility that not emptying your cup is a good idea? If you haven't considered it yet, then I suggest you empty your cup. Empty your cup of the empty cups.

Welcome to the forum Adishakti, There is nothing you can say that has already been said. Even if you repeat the same saying twice, the second recital will not be perfectly identical to the first. Everything I know is not known by any mind outside of my own. At best you can know similar things, but never exactly the same things unless you become me, but then you are me and not something else, so once again, only I know what I know. Who is showing? I am the blind man seeing rainbows and I am the deaf man hearing the music. I am wherever I mean to be. I type this post because I mean to type it. Yes, it is.

Heh. If you could see through walls and hear for 10 miles, it would be a serious limitation as well, don't you think?

Of course ideas keep idea-ing no matter what people do, just like water keeps watering.

Buddha wouldn't lie, would he?

How do you know you have not? What are you expecting to happen? You notice you are being unusually honest and mentally/innerly relaxed. Strange. I thought you knew the answer to this question when you claimed you definitely weren't there yet.