goldisheavy

Vajra, What would you say if I said the source of experience is the matter and energy present in the world, hitting our sense organs?

I agree. I think a lot of the anger comes from the business community that treats people as expendable resources. Work consumes the biggest chunk of time, or the second biggest right after sleep, if you divide the day into sleep, work, leisure. In our society leisure is practically non-existent for a lot of people, which is very unfortunate in and of itself. And then if at work you are constantly treated as a resource and not as a person, it has a way to make a person angry. Business leaders need to wake up before the society boils over. When times are good people tend to lose themselves in consumerism and other distractions in order to forget all the humiliation they experience at work. But when opportunities for distractions dry up, humiliation stands out so much more and anger goes to the forefront. This is why people in ghettos tend to be a lot angrier. It is the result of poverty combined with our (USA, but I hear Chinese businessmen treat employees like trash even worse than USA, and I don't hear anything good about Japan either) nasty business culture. Poverty doesn't have to lead to anger. In a different culture, if you are poor, but otherwise don't feel humiliated, and if you're treated as a real person, and don't have any of your own problems, it's possible to be content and happy.

There is no such cause. Alternatively, if there is, it is beyond the scope of my awareness and ability to know or recognize, and is thus irrelevant to me. When we say that the mind is primordial, it means nothing has created it, it has no beginning.

Very cool, Vajra. I'm glad you're happy (I'm serious).

My own intent?

It's fun and maybe it gives people confidence that more things are possible than we normally imagine?

Yes. Now where is my cookie and a gold star?

Wooo hooo! Right. So, did you read various studies on the effectiveness of bullet calibers? Do you know that some people will fall down from the slightest wound from .22 caliber bullet. Other people will have at you, and possibly even kill you, after being fatally shot through the heart with .45 ACP. Bullets are objective. The heart is objective. And yet, people respond differently to these "objective" stimuli. Some people drop at the slightest indication of pain. Others keep going. Also drugs make a difference. It's widely accepted that drugged up people can stay up, even while grievously wounded, and continue to fight back. So as you can see, even the hardest-core objectivest shit out there, like a bullet, is not a guarantee of a uniform response. So if you're a reasonable person, and you don't demand a uniform response even from a bullet, why do you demand an iron-clad uniform response from a chi projection? At the same time, please don't interpret anything I say that you should settle for anything less than a robust system. I'm not asking you to believe in something that you know doesn't work for you. Crudely speaking, things are neither 100% objective nor 100% subjective. Some people call this inter-subjective reality. But it doesn't matter though. What matters is that some things work more reliably, and other work less reliably. The best way to know what's what is to try it. This is why if you need to be absolutely certain that what you're learning is worth your while, you need to spar and test. If your system doesn't do anything during sparring, you should probably abandon it. But sparring is not really objective though! Don't delude yourself. Sparring is as much a mental game as it is a physical game. If your opponent is scared of you, even a weak punch from you will level your opponent. If you watch boxing or MMA, you will notice that as soon as the fight starts, for the vast majority of fights, immediately two people fall into two different psychological roles. One becomes dominant and the other becomes submissive and a whiny little bitch. This happens right after the bell rings. And usually the fight results simply confirm this mental/psychological self-assignment. At the highest levels of competition, you can observe fights where no one is clearly dominant. But for most fights I think you can notice this. I do. So even if you have success in sparring, can you be 100% certain it was your awesome technique that did the trick? Maybe your opponent was scared of the shape of your nose or ears, or felt threatened by your mustache? How can you be sure it was really that chi or that punch? You can't be too sure. The more menacing or insane your appearance is, the less sure you can be it is your technique that's winning you the fight/sparring match. Furthermore, chi doesn't have to be projected outward to be used. One way to use chi is to project it into your body and use it to give your body unusual properties. This way, you have a strong subjective-to-subjective connection, chi to inner body, both subjective and this connects well, while your opponent is only interacting with your outer body, which is objective to your opponent. This way you don't need your opponent to believe in chi to benefit from chi. At the same time, if your belief in chi is deep enough, it also doesn't matter what your opponent believes, as you will then override no matter what. People who don't believe in any spiritual forces still have the same power that everyone else has. So skeptics use the powers of their minds to squelch all the spiritual powers. So if you're a die-hard skeptic, it's possible that most of the chi powers will fizzle in your presence. It doesn't mean your skepticism confirms some objective reality though. Who cares? What matters is how portable and how reliable your trick is. If you need to carry a lot of props and special equipment to do your trick, it's not useful in real situations. But if you can whip out your trick with some regularity on even just 70% of people, that's damn useful. It doesn't matter if it's a trick or real. What matters is the result. If you can fraudulently convince 70% of people to give up without fighting, that's good! That kind of fraud is not actually fraud. Do you catch my drift? Can Dan Brown take his skill into the field? I bet there are some hypnotists who can. Maybe not Dan Brown. Maybe Dan can. Who knows? Milton H. Erickson could hypnotize people who were resistant to hypnosis and who couldn't be hypnotized by any other hypnotist. That's real power. It's not fraud. Let me put it this way. If I simply say "pain" in your presence, you will feel slightly less comfortable from just that one word. That's power right there. It's very small, but it's greater than 0. If you understand the implication of this, you can see how immense (but not absolute) power can develop given the right conditions.

It has no source.

So true. But isn't it like this with everything? How many of our desires are truly ours? What can we do? Other than giving people this warning from time to time, I don't see what else can be done. It's a fair warning though. It's a good idea to make sure we actually want something for a legitimate reason and not because someone else thinks it's "cool" to want something, or to impress some girl or whatnot. I am strongly opposed to fear mongering. At the same time, calm and analytical discussion and examination of fear is a good thing to my mind. Certainly fear is used to manipulate people for selfish and greedy purposes. That's something we should try to watch out for. I think the first best defense is to try to empower people. The more empowered a person feels, the less fear they feel. At the same time, the second best defense is to teach people not to grasp after the forms too much. The more one is grasping at some form, there more fear there is when some life situation or some idea threatens that form. And dying and death is also a life situation. So empowerment means we can go after our dreams, but non-attachment means we are mentally internally flexible, and various upheavals and challenges cannot smash our internal world.

Marblehead, this really depends on your experience. You have admitted in the past that you are not all that interested in dreams, which is fine with me. However, if you take a dismissive attitude toward the world of dreaming, you can't really make intelligent and credible statements about it in a debate. So when you state that the body doesn't rot away in the dream world, you really don't have a lot of credibility. I say the body rots in the dream too, you just don't dream long enough or pay enough attention to notice it. Things break apart in dreams and there is entropy in dreams. Broken eggs tend to stay broken in the dream world as well as in the waking world. OK, good! So we have some common ground then. If logical inferences are valid, it then becomes possible to infer spiritual reality, other realms, life after death and so forth.

Astral, I think you're trying too hard as far as I am concerned. You can state your concerns in half the text volume you use. I think that all the people who teach about chi should come clean about the subjective nature of chi. So if this is your demand, I will agree with that. But you seem to have a kind of dismissive and/or pejorative attitude toward the subjective experience, and I can't possibly agree with that. Bullshit. There is no such thing as "objective" experience. Nothing in the so-called "objective" world offers a guarantee against disappointment, and really being tricked is a matter of being disappointed. It's when you expect one thing, but get another. That's what being tricked is. It is disappointment. How is it possible for some parts of the experiential space to be real while others to be illusion? That makes no sense. If you conclude that experiences are illusory, you must conclude this about all experiences and sensations: sensations of other people are illusory, but so are the sensations of one's own body and mind. Besides, having an objective bent to your thinking is just as dangerous. A person with objective bias might reach a conclusion that people's internal states are invalid, and are illusory, and thus the pain and suffering people subjectively feel is illusory and irrelevant. This way of thinking may lead to treating people as no more than meat bags, just like insensate and irresponsible bio-robots without any volition. I believe this. Now what? So does objectivity.

I agree. That's a good criticism as well. The standard answer to this criticism has been an appeal to complexity and particularity, something like, "Well, when the pattern of matter is very complicated and just right, consciousness is born." Seems like bullshit excuse to me. It's a cop out answer that tries to avoid the obvious reality that a person doesn't know. Other people have answered this criticism by saying there is some level of consciousness that's associated with any and all matter, no matter how simple. In other words, a billiard ball has some rudimentary awareness, according to people who put forth this view. This view is somewhat interesting and is not a cop out, but a real attempt at the question, but it's not very popular and I am not sure how true it is, and also, it seems to rely on the dualism of matter and consciousness to make sense.

Agree. Of course this can also be said in the dream. Not exactly. You seem to be implying that only direct empirical evidence is admissible in determining the truth of a statement. Ever heard of logical inference? For example, the scientists infer that the universe was born in a big bang. We accept this, even though none of us were there during the birth of the universe. But we don't have to talk about the big bang. A simple casual thing like tomorrow is a logical inference. None of us exist in the future. Nobody has traveled into the future to verify that it exists, and yet all of us unflinchingly believe in the reality of the future time without any direct evidence. That's logical inference again. You haven't proven this.

What's pushed is religion and not spirituality. You are asking about spirituality, right? You have to make a distinction between spirituality and religion. Do you know the difference? Yes, religion is often pushed on the kids, just like political affiliation and many other things. Or maybe we are genuinely curious and the topics like afterlife are not obviously unknown, but are subject to logical inference, same as big bang and so on? I could always fit into society, but what I found is that I didn't enjoy it. Being able to do something and enjoying it are two different things. I find the way most of society thinks to be dumb and dead-end. Experientially I seek more freedom than I can currently enjoy. I find the body experience to be unnecessarily limiting. I don't want immortality. I want a decent life.

That's not correct. First of all, if you shoot yourself in the head in your dream, you likely wake up and to people in your dream you are dead, while to yourself you continue existing in the waking world. If you shoot yourself in the waking world, what happens next depends on who you ask. If you ask some people, to us in this world you are dead, but to yourself, you are reborn in another reality.

That's your experience then, eh? In my dreams I most often have a body, exactly like the body I use now to type. Obviously inside my dream body is a dream brain. Of course I don't see my own brain directly just like I don't see it right now. I assume it's there, just like I assume there is a brain in my head right now, even though I haven't seen it. "God" is a loaded word and tends to mean a whole lot. My object is vastly more modest than proving God. I only need to prove that I am not a brain. That's much easier to do for a number of reasons. First, ultimately I know what I am and what I am not, but I cannot say the same about God. Second, proving a negative is much easier than proving a positive. Thus proving that I am not something is vastly easier than to prove something exists, especially when that something is a loaded and weird term like "God."

The state of your own mind is subjective, by definition. Does that make it useless? Would you want to fight mindlessly? If you use the word "subjective" as a code word for "ineffective" or "irrelevant" you are making a mistake.

Have you heard this expression from a Zen master that goes something like, "The best way to control a cow is to give it wide pasture?" Something worth thinking about. Another way to do what you seem to want to do, is to contemplate the drawbacks of various sense objects. So, for example, you might like nice shoes because of how they look and smell and so on. Well, if you think about shoes, are there any drawbacks? Tying shoelaces is a pain in the ass. Putting shoes on without untying them is annoying and sometimes requires an extra tool. Sometimes even the best looking shoes will hurt your feet. Shoes wear out and need to be replaced. Also, the very same shoe you think is pleasing to the eye can be considered ugly by someone else, and you may receive negative comments or subtle discrimination because of that. So see how I just went over the negatives of a sense object? This leads one to realize that shoes have good and bad aspects to them, and it becomes harder to be obsessed with them. The method of contemplating the negative aspects of sense objects is a very powerful method and it works very quickly and very deeply, and that's why it's important not to overdo it, or even better, don't bother with it. I put it here in case you are so disturbed by sense objects, that you don't have any peace at all. If things are a little brighter and a little more pleasant than normal, that's OK, just roll with it. Don't try to fight it. If some sense objects appear to completely possess your mind such that you can't even think of anything else, you may want to try the "contemplate the negative aspects" method as an antidote. But be careful, because dwelling on the negatives can lead to a bad situation, so it's a dangerous tool. So if you decide to use this tool, be responsible in how you use it or you will become depressed and you'll go into a dark place.

Past? No. Context? Yes. Everything contextualizes everything else.

This is actually very easy to explain. I have no idea why xabir wrote a book about it. Assume the eye is what sees. If that's the case, since you are not your eye, how do you see? You're going to say the eye has to pass the signal somewhere, right? Like into your brain perhaps? Visual cortex perhaps? OK, but since you are not a visual cortex, how do you see? Beyond the visual cortex, the signal in the brain is no longer visual in nature, and yet visual cortex alone cannot explain you seeing. Eventually, but with great difficulty, you'll have to say that it's the whole brain that sees and you will have to identify yourself with the brain. Of course by the time you move the function of seeing from the eyes and into the brian, you will agree that eyes are not what sees anything. Then you'll have a task of proving that you are not the brain. To prove that you're not the brain is a little more complicated, but not impossible. For example, in the dream you may have a dream brain, so does this mean you have multiple brains? One brain for waking and one for dreaming? Which brain is you? Then you may respond that only one brain is real, the brain you use now to read this, and the dream brain is a figment of this brain's imagination. If that's the case, I will then reply, if you accept that a brain can be a figment of another brain's imagination, then is it possible that this brain right here and now is a figment of imagination of another brain somewhere else? And you'll have nothing intelligent to reply to this. So basically there is no good reason, other than a lazy assumption, to think that you are a brain. There are other ways to disprove that you're a brain besides the one I've listed above. For example, you can examine objects of consciousness and conclude that no object of consciousness is what it is from its own power. Rather, all objects appear as they do due to some external-to-the-object context. Since the brain itself is an object of consciousness, since we can see it in the formaldehyde jar, we can refer to it in speech, like we refer to any other object, that means the brain is what it is only due to the external-to-itself context. So that means there is informational context outside the brain that is responsible for making the brain seem what it is. That means cognition is not happening in the brain, because cognition is precisely this awareness of context. So this is another way to prove that you are not the brain. So now you can be absolutely certain that eyes are not what see.

You have to incorporate the senses and the sensory input into your practice. Don't try to reject the senses. Don't try to pull away from them either. Instead, you can contemplate assigning less significance, less weight to the sense objects, but other than that, don't screw around with the senses too much. In the spiritual practice everything is used and there is no such such as a refuse. Nothing is discarded or shut out.

If you stick your hand in the fish tank, you'll feel fish brushing up against your hand. That's OK and it shouldn't be something that has the power to disturb. Of course this is only true if you don't want to control the fish in an absolute way. When people in the park say things, you can enter into a dance with them, or you can ignore them. Either way, to do it properly, whether you are dancing or ignoring, your mind has to be in a flexible relationship with other people's opinions. If you inflexibly, absolutely demand that people take what you are doing seriously, you will have a nasty vulnerability and one of these days someone will take advantage of that vulnerability (unlike those kids who limit themselves to harmless ribbing). So, in other words, trying to be invulnerable is what creates the vulnerability. Irony, eh? If you allow yourself to be flexible, to be bent and reshaped by the opinions of others, you ironically become invulnerable. Thus, a piece of steel or a piece of glass is subject to a shattering impact because they try to maintain their shape and refuse to let outside forces to reshape them. And a "piece" of air, or a piece of empty space, is flexible, it allows its own shape to be changed by other things, and is thus invulnerable. So vulnerability is the source of invulnerability. The weak overcomes the strong. That's a very basic Daoist principle. It's strange that you are practicing what is supposedly a "Daoist" practice, and yet you are ignorant of the basic Daoist principle. That just shows that energy practice is insufficient and in fact, can be a source of delusion if not careful. Be careful.

This is bad advice. Wisdom is vastly more than simply an understanding of impermanence. This seems like an obsession with impermanence, which will not result in wisdom, but will result in an attachment to impermanence and a distortion of understanding. To answer your question though, you should develop both concentration and wisdom, but wisdom is far more important than concentration. If you are able to think about a single topic without diverting into unwanted branches, you are good enough. If your mind can't stay on topic for more than 10 seconds, then you need to practice concentration. If you can stay on topic, you are good enough for wisdom. Once your wisdom gets very profound, you may want to return back to concentration to get magic power developed. By "return" I don't mean replace contemplation (wisdom) with concentration. It just means emphasis and doesn't imply exclusivity. Wisdom is something that's desirable from start to finish, but concentration is only necessary up to a point as a means to an end. So if your mind is nearly useless for normal thinking, you need to shape it up a little with concentration, then you are done. If you, much later on, want magic power, you can get back to concentration again. Concentration is a servant. Wisdom is the master. Impermanence is just a tiny fraction of wisdom. Wisdom includes things like understanding what it is you really want from life. Who are you? What does it mean to have a body? What is reason? Does reason have limitations? What is mystery? Is mystery fundamental or accidental? Things like that. Wisdom covers a very broad range of concerns, and in general wisdom is what leads one to holistic and interconnected understanding of all things. Wisdom is what allows you to see the big picture. And seeing the big picture is what allows you to avoid getting lost in details. It's like if you have a map, and you can only see a square inch on that map, it's easy to get lost. But if you can observe the entire map with one glance, you will know exactly where to go. That's how wisdom functions. Wisdom is what would allow you to not have to ask this question that you are asking right now, for example. So very obviously you want wisdom before anything else. The fact that you have to ask this question is because you lack wisdom and not because you lack concentration. Also, obsession with counting things is wrong. Counting stages, discriminating 10 bhumis, counting phenomena per second, all that is very wrong. It's not only a waste of time, it is deceiving. You might actually convince yourself there are actually 10 bhumis for real. In reality bhumis don't exist at all, we just invent them to have something to talk about. It's kind of like south and northern hemisphere. We say this to have something to talk about, but if you think hemispheres are actually real beyond mere conversational conveniences, you are very deluded. You should also understand that because something is merely a conversational convenience, there are *other* equally good conversational conveniences that can replace them. So instead of 10 bhumis you can have 4, or 35 bhumis. It is completely arbitrary. If you understand it like this, then you won't obsess on counting anything. Give counting a rest. Just my 2c advice.

You have way too much self-importance to succeed. You want others to think what you're doing is important and weighty. Terrible. Don't seek respect. Don't be a beggar.