goldisheavy

I don't think Hinduism is at the bottom for Vajrahridaya. He probably has "it" (or maybe some specific flavor) in the top 3. That my guess. Not that it matters all that much.

Well said.

You mean, Vajrahridaya's way of seeing things has no .... drum roll please ... (puts on the shades ) essence?

Calm down Ralis. Yes, shit is going down. You're right. Find some time to have a quiet cup of tea even in the middle of the Earth collapsing. I think most people here care about the environment more than profit (except a few rabid capitalists), and I think most of us would spend more money and take more precautions at the helm of BP than Tony Hayward took. I think most of us would rather make a smaller profit, safer, with more compassion and more kindness to the fellow human beings, both the ones in the Gulf, and the employees of BP and others on the rig, who are treated worse than farm animals in the name of profit. So when some assholes put profit ahead of everything else, what can we do? Short-term -- nothing. Long-term we can speak against it and hope to change the business culture that regards profit more important than anything else. We could try starting companies and run things the right way ourselves. Etc. Meanwhile there is no need to burst your vein. Relax. There are more things in the Universe than what's happening here on Earth.

I emphatically agree with this. Religion very often carries within it an enormous perversion of morality. And yet, real morality does exist, don't you think? Real morality is not what the Bible "commands."

Those mountains are staggeringly beautiful and tall. I felt a little sorry for those guys. I mean I know they enjoy it, but I was thinking they must be cut to shreds by having to climb through all those bushes and then it started to rain on them. Still good fun, but tough at the same time. I am not a climber, but I enjoyed this video, thank you.

I like this dwai. Where is it from, if you don't mind me asking?

Since the obstruction is only imaginary, and everything is naturally free from the very beginning, the will is free. I think pretty much all the Eastern philosophies agree on this. In fact there are some tales of the encounters between fatalists and Buddhists, for example, where the fatalists are exposed as frauds. There is one particular example that comes to mind of someone who was very calm. This someone encounters a Buddhist meditation master who at first is impressed. He's asking, "Why are you so calm?" And the calm guy says that "everything is predetermined by causes and conditions, so why worry." Upon hearing this the master exclaimed something like "Well I thought you were a Buddha, but turns out you're just a deluded moron." Also Buddha himself disagreed with a hard causes and conditions case. In particular there was an argument between Buddha and Hindus who said that karma vipaka was frozen in place and couldn't be changed. In other words, these Hindus were saying, for example, if you commit murder, you're going to hell and there is nothing you can do about it. Buddha disagreed. Buddha said that bad karma can be dissolved in the good, just like one grain of salt inside a thimble of water makes it salty, but inside a big gourde of water is impossible to taste. So Buddha was saying that people with a big heart can commit quite a lot of wrongdoing, but still, due to their big heart, they will not have much, if any negative fruition. On the other hand, a small-hearted person would suffer grievously from even the most tiny of misdeeds. He then gave an example of a beggar being put to jail for owing a rupee while a rich man goes free even when hugely in debt. All this I read in the Pali canon, but unfortunately I don't have the energy to cite it for you. As for Taoists, they believe in destiny but destiny is governed by free will. You are destined for a certain future based on your disposition. When you change your disposition your destiny also changes. So destiny is not something fatalistic in Taoism, but it is something in flux. And then Taoists have examples for this too. For example someone heard it prophesied by a seer that he will die form starvation. This guy climbed into a tree and waited to die there. Some Taoist spirit saw this and came down in the form of a man to talk to this fool. This spirit asked the man why he was waiting in the tree. The man said it was foretold to him, based on the lines of his face, that he was going to die from hunger. The Taoist immortal said that, it's true that the lines of the face reflect one's current destiny. However, the destiny can be changed by changing one's disposition. And the immortal said that when you change your disposition your facial lines will also change. This man was elated. So this man in the tree said, "So I don't have to die from starvation?" And the immortal said, "That's right. In fact, since your disposition has changed, why don't you go back to the same seer and see what he foretells you this time." And this guy goes back and confirms that indeed now his fate is not to die from hunger but to die a wealthy man. So most Taoist sages, it seems to me, also believe in free will. Most spiritual people believe in free will. The only people who seriously do not are materialists, because free will comes into conflict with the doctrine of material causes being the ultimate ones.

This was interesting. Thanks Drew.

That's generosity in practice. Usually people who talk about making ego smaller or even removing it are the biggest assholes. You are demonstrating it.

On the flip side, being an idiot is not nearly as damning as it may sound. Still, it's not exactly something to be proud of either. Everything is an attachment of some kind. This is why viewing things in terms of attachment and non-attachment is only helpful in a limited manner. Being steadfast in Nirvana is an attachment. This is why Bodhisattvas vow not to enter the extreme peace, which is what Nirvana is. It's natural to want to enjoy things and there is nothing wrong with it. Having an interesting experience and enjoying it is perfectly OK. Buddhists have a disease whereby they can't seem to enjoy anything without obsessing over getting attached. At some point worrying about non-attachment becomes an obsessive compulsive attachment in its own right. The medicine becomes the basis for the disease. That's the disease of fundamentalism and Buddhism is not exempt from the danger of fundamentalism. Or maybe it does point to idiocy, but being an idiot is not a big deal. If we wait for the totality of the term "breakthrough" to be fulfilled before we feel free using that term, then we may never use it under any circumstances. It would be foolish to imagine that breakthroughs have to be special and rare. That's one way to create a self-fulfilling prophecy for oneself and to stunt one's inner development. It depends. I consider some negative experiences to be breakthroughs, even if the person is not yet able to overcome them. As a metaphor, imagine I tell you that to get somewhere you first have to travel through a big wide plane, and then you'll find yourself at the foot of the mountain. When you reach the foot of the mountain, you are close. Once you climb over the mountain, you are there. Let's say it takes about 1 year to cross the plane and only 2 months to cross the mountain. So the upward climb on the mountain symbolizes a difficulty that hasn't been overcome yet. Going over the tip of the mountain symbolizes overcoming the difficulty. So in this setup, even just reaching the mountain is a breakthrough. So someone experiencing a correct kind of difficulty for the first time is much much closer to freedom than someone else who doesn't experience any difficulty whatsoever and lives in the bliss of ignorance. If freedom doesn't cause elation, there is no point in seeking it. Why would you seek something that you are indifferent toward? At the same time, if you consider yourself unfree now, why aren't you indifferent to it now? If you are bothered by feeling unfree, surely you'll be happy when that feeling of unfreedom vanishes. There is no need to lie to oneself. Buddhism is full of liars who pretend to have no feelings. I have feelings along with reason. I value both. That's why I am not a Buddhist and never will be. I find some things in Buddhism valuable, but it is too much of a shoe-sized box for me to take refuge in. If you leave the feeling of indifference alone, it will dissipate and only elation will remain.

I think this is completely wrong. Morality is egoistic as well as anything is. When I help people, I receive pleasure from it. If it didn't feel good for me to help, I wouldn't be doing it at all, even if other people demanded it. Everything is selfish from top to bottom, all the way to enlightenment. Wanting to have more wisdom is selfish. Why should you have more wisdom than someone else? Wanting to have more patience is selfish. Why should you be better than someone else? Etc. Everything is selfish. The difference between what we call immoral and what we call moral is not ego vs others, but it is this: how do you see yourself? A moral person sees oneself in everything and everyone, and thus, naturally, to benefit oneself, a moral person benefits everything and everyone. An immoral person sees a sharp distinction and a boundary between oneself and everything and everyone else. When an immoral person seeks benefit, it is often not in the form of an overall improvement, but rather a shift from some people to oneself, from some other places to one's own place. A moral person is not happy to just shift from one person to another, but rather wants an overall improvement. But both moral and immoral person are selfish. Moral selfishness is simply a more encompassing, a more inclusive and more evolved kind of selfishness. I would say that a moral person's ego is much larger than an immoral person. An immoral person think he/she's only a body and that's it. A moral persons sees oneself reflected in the whole universe and sees the entire universe as oneself.

Meditation is like patience. Do only good people benefit from patience? An honest answer, I think, is no. A thief benefits from patience as much as a generous person. If you are a patient thief, you'll stake the place out and enter only when no one is there. If you're impatient, you may enter only to be shot dead by the owner or guard. What about modesty? Again, a criminal will benefit from modesty as much as a good person. A lot of times criminals get caught when they brag to the wrong person or in the wrong place about their exploits. If a criminal were modest, one might not get caught. So it's clear to me that virtues help everyone, good and bad people. And I think the same is true with meditation. I would even say that if something only helps sometimes or only a certain set of people, then it's not a virtue.

I've experienced the void in my own way. Your experience is very special and unique to you. I really doubt anyone anywhere has duplicated it. If you are content with some degree of similarity, rather than a perfectly exact duplicate, I think you can find people with somewhat similar experiences. These experiences are interesting. For example, prior to this experience, did you know that blackness could have a dimension to it? Maybe not, right? But this experience showed you that it could. As I see it, it's telling you that awareness allows for more things than what we normally allow ourselves to experience. When you report experiences like this to other people who are unfamiliar with them, they will usually dismiss them as hallucinations. This is normal behavior, because people have a worldview that they like, and want to maintain, and they have a mechanism in their mind to automatically invalidate and discard unwanted and contradictory information and experiences. This mechanism is what is known as "validation framework." Most of us have it. For example, if you were walking down the street, and someone flew up into the air, what would you think? You'd probably immediately dismiss it as unreal. Why is that? Because you know what real is. Why do you know it? No one taught you! You just know. In school you learn how to add and subtract and the ABC's, but you don't learn what's real. You come to school already knowing intuitively what is according to laws of physics and what isn't. This means the laws of physics exist in your mind before they exist anywhere else. How do you know what is real or not if no one taught you? Think about it. That kind of knowledge is not exactly unintentional, but don't take my word for it. Maybe I am wrong. So when people challenge our understanding of reality, that challenge is discarded and if we can't discard it, we at least try to disempower it by invaliding it, or by smearing the character of the person who is reporting challenging things and so on. Visions we consider hallucinations and visions we consider real occur in the same mind. What does this mean? Because the beliefs and expectations we have so powerfully shape our experience, these are very important in meditation. I'm not saying which ones are right or wrong, only that they are important. The mind is very very powerful. The mind is not some small ghost in the brain. It's way beyond that. The brain is in the mind. The entire universe is in the mind. What is everything you've ever experienced other than knowledge? If you reflect like this and then meditate, you will experience different "things" from someone who doesn't reflect like this and also meditates.

Only the most excellent people. For example, Buddha was meant to be a prince, but instead he tried to do something impossible, all the while renouncing a comfortable and fun-filled life he was meant to have. Some would say it was a mistake. Would you renounce 10 concubines to go sit in the forest, when your dad and everyone around you tells you, you are meant to be a ruler? You'd have to be crazy, right? Or maybe not so crazy. Maybe you have to be crazy to believe that you are meant to be or do something specific.

This exact thing hasn't happened to me. But other strange things have. The way I explain it is that when you first meditate, you remove some of the boundaries usually present in the mind and allow a freer expression. So you don't know what's up and you don't know what to expect, but at the same time, you do expect that meditation is new and different and is not "business as usual." And guess what? More open + "not business as usual" and the mind is only happy to oblige. This can be considered a breakthrough. In that I disagree with CowTao's teacher, who I think is an idiot for just parroting a standard Buddhist thing "it will pass," which is also stupid. When you see a vision like this for the first time, it's a sign that your mind has experienced a new degree of flexibility. And when it's new, it is a breakthrough. You are opening up. However, when this is not the first time, it is no longer a breakthrough. The content of the vision is not as important as how it happened and what you felt when it was happening. For example, if you weren't scared, that's very good. If you were scared, that's not so good. The exact content is not that important but it's also important. First, why it's not important. It's not important because the mind is like canvas and things that appear in it are like a painting. So here you're learning how to paint something new. So what exactly you end up painting is not important in that sense. What's important is that your painting technique is changing and growing. And now why it is important. Painting would be irrelevant if you didn't care about the subjects of your paintings. So when you are learning how to paint, what you paint is not as important as how well you paint. However, when you are a decent painter, there comes a time when you want to actually express yourself. When that happens, what you paint is every bit as important as how you paint it. So when you first begin, the content of visions is not important. What's important is how you relate to them, whether or not you can accept them with equanimity, whether or not you have preconceived ideas about them and so on. At the same time, eventually you'll want to envision something not for training, but for the purpose of experiencing it and enjoying it. Then the content of your vision will be as important as every other attendant quality of the vision process. So when you are just learning about new ways of seeing, if you focus on the content too early, you may miss the boat. You may get addicted to visions well before learning all there is to know about the vision process, which would be a tragedy. At the same time, there is no denial that visions are important. This life is a vision. Even the very idea of "unimportant" is itself a kind of vision. Breakthroughs come in many flavors. Having a breakthrough simply means you've tasted something for the first time. It doesn't mean more than that, but it's still important, at least at the time of it occurring.

Usually they are abducted by the retreat organizers. This may be true. Retreat organizers should be able to reveal this information in the interview you can give them over the phone or in email. If the retreat organizers have only a tenuous and uncertain connection with the teacher, then I suggest the retreat should be avoided. It's not complicated. There is no need to hope for anything. Everything is obvious when you pay attention. If the teacher is going to be open to you, the teacher is going to be even more open to the retreat organizers. If retreat organizers, who have a lot more chance of being close to the teacher, demonstrate that they hardly know anything about their teacher and what their teacher likes/dislikes and intends on doing, it's a strong and clear sign that the retreat is a waste of time, because the teacher is either emotionally closed off or incompetent. If the teacher didn't share anything with the retreat organizers, chances are excellent he or she will share nothing with you. So you can indeed get everything you want to know about the teacher present at the retreat from the retreat organizers.

All the strength is one strength. It's neither leg nor ear. Both spiritually and physically the strength is conducted evenly throughout the entire world. To localize strength in the legs or ears is a big mistake of understanding. On the other hand, maybe you don't mean strength but maybe you mean focus. If the mind was focused on the ear, that may indeed help. At the same time, if your legs were replaced by freely rotating wheels, you couldn't pull anything with your ear. You need friction to pull things, and friction means that the eggs do carry the car in the end. And yes, you need leg strength too. You don't need a lot of it, but you need some. But more than strength you need sensitivity and patience. You have to be sensitive to the condition of the eggs, so as to avoid squashing them. If you don't respect the eggs, they will get squashed.

Is it customary for retreat organizers to answer email and phone? If not, it should be. Then you can interview these folks directly and decide for yourself if they are worth your time. You can ask them in advance what they are and aren't willing to teach, how they teach, and what their priories are. I would suggest that if the retreat organizer is not willing to come down to Earth and talk willingly, openly and forthrightly about their offering, it's not worth the bother. I would avoid it as I would any cultish organization. I'm not exactly against cults either, but there has to be some honesty. You can't be both a cult and a public organization. You have to pick one and stick to it. So, have you tried giving these people a call or sending them an email? I would try that. If they snub you, or act in any way cagey with information, don't bother going.

It's funny how the guy squashes an egg at the end with his shoe. The whole point is that a soft foot is able to go around the egg to distribute the force evenly. At the same time, the egg is perched on a soft and accommodating surface on the bottom. And as we know, eggs are very very strong if we don't apply a lot of force to a tiny point, which causes the egg to crack. It's still impressive, because a clumsy or impatient person probably couldn't do the same thing. You just need to get on the eggs, have feet soft and accommodating enough not to squash the eggs, and be patient as you slowly apply the force to the car. If you try to hurry, of course you'll tear your ear off or break the eggs. Have you heard of a guy called The Mighty Atom? He pulled an airplane with his hair. That's much more impressive, and he didn't do any qi gong, as far as I know. He was a strongman.

Small correction: the logical compliment of death is birth and not life. Life is the larger ground upon which both birth and death appear. So you have good/bad, birth/death, up/down.

I like it. I would also say that we are constantly reborn. Just as we are reborn now, at death we will also be continue to be reborn, because rebirth is just another side of the impermanence coin. If impermanence is a transcendent truth, meaning it is always true, then rebirth is also a transcendent truth, simply by extension. Rebirth is a logical complement of perishing just like left is a logical complement of right. You can't have a right shoulder unless you also have a left shoulder. There is no way for a thing to perish without simultaneously create a new thing. So if you are quite certain that inconstancy is a transcendent truth, then you can be equally certain about rebirth. Rebirth is such that the two extremes are avoided: the extreme of complete and perfect discontinuation and another extreme of complete and perfect continuation. In practical terms it means that the you of today is not completely the same as the you of 10 years ago. At the same time, the you of today is not completely different from the you of 10 years ago. Is that a transcendent truth? Does this truth change with circumstances? I don't think so. So for me, rebirth is certain. What's not certain is the exact degree of similarity. I might be very different, but I'll never be fundamentally different. There is still an unbroken line of ongoing causality and conditioning that affects the mindstream. Consider this. We accept that things that we take to exist "out there" in the world change in such ways that new things are causally born from them. For example, if I heat up the water, it becomes vapor. If I then cool this vapor, once again it becomes water. So simply heating the vapor is not sufficient to annihilate it. In fact, if you consider every means we have to affect water, you can't annihilate it. All we can do is convert water into something else, be it vapor or "pure" energy, but whatever it is, there is definitely a way to convert it back to water. So if we accept this for ordinary material objects, why then do we believe that mind is a special case? If mind is a thing, it must be like any other thing -- it can change it's state but it can't simply vanish. And all the changes are ultimately reversible. There is nothing that fundamentally prohibits reversal. And if mind is not a thing, it is obviously immortal. Only things are subject to birth and death. Non-things are not born and nor do they die. So if mind is a thing, it can transform at best and it can't vanish. If it's not a thing, it doesn't even make sense to talk in terms of appearing and vanishing, which are terms that only make sense with regard to things. All these are pretty damn good reasons to believe in rebirth. If you don't agree, I'd appreciate a counter-argument. But I won't insist on one.

So I take it, the implicit assumption here that's necessary for what you are saying to make any sense, is that personality is non-dissolving while we are alive. So in other words, the personality is permanent up until death and only at death does impermanence make a show. In this manner you see death as a special event, instead of as business as usual. If personality is always dissolving, then how would the death events be any different from any other ordinary and constantly ongoing dissolution? If I understand correctly, that's not the Buddhist view. The Buddhist view is that change is constant and at death, there is no more and no less impermanence than right now. This means a few things. First, you are dying right now. As they say, "You die with each breath." Not just something special that's saved up for the death bed. Dying is an everyday process. It's not something rare. Second, when you lie on a deathbed dying, the change that occurs then is in no way different from any other kind of change. The impermanence is the same. The four marks of phenomena are exactly the same. The 8-fold path is the same. All the transcendent truths are the same. Of course in real life we do think that while moving your hands around right now is a change, and lying on your deathbed is also a change, we take one change to be a sign of life continuing, while another change to be a sign of life discontinuing, even though they are both simply changes and the discrimination is not in the change itself, but nowhere else but in our own mind. Who makes one change a sign of life and another change a sign of death? Why can't change be simply a sign of change? It's the mind that makes that happen. Another way to say this: Delimiting your personality as something that starts with birth and ends with death is nothing other than a kind of self-delineation, and Buddha has constantly spoken against self-delineations. If you take this message to heart, you don't get born at birth and you don't die at death. What's not born does not die. Straight from Pali Canon: I do prefer Mahayana, so here's Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra:

I don't think everyone must have a spirit guide. Do spirit guides have their own spirit guides? Probably not. However, I do believe that anyone who is sincerely interested in a spirit guide and/or sincerely believes in such a possibility has a spirit guide. To contact one during waking, you must have a mind that's flexible enough to accept hearing voices and seeing visions that other people can't see. If other people can also see it, then it's no longer a spirit, but a being like any other. If hearing things and seeing things that others can't hear or see is disturbing, that means you are probably not going to contact your spirit guide during waking in that manner. You can still feel something though. So given this, the most reliable way to contact a spirit guide, if you have one, is in a lucid dream. If you know how to lucid dream, you can call for a spirit guide as soon as you become lucid. A word of warning: an incorporeal being is not necessarily wiser than a flesh-bearing one. Being of the spirit is not a guarantee of anything per se, it's just a different way of being and living compared to the fleshly ways. Spirit guides can have great wisdom, but at the same time, I don't think they are inherently infallible just because they are spirits. I don't have a spirit guide, but my wife does. Her guide tells her some very interesting things (mostly in dreams, as far as I know), but at the same time, when I hear those things, while I agree they are worthy, to my mind, they're not so excellent that I would feel envious of not having a guide. None of us are completely without a guide. If you know how to use it, your own mind is the best guide. If you don't know how to use it, your own mind is the worst enemy. I wish you luck and success and if you really want a spirit guide, I hope you find yours soon.

I really appreciate this point. Thanks More Pie. If you think about it, memory has to have a limit. Even if you remember 10,000,000 years worth of material, you can't remember 10,000,000+1. Or if you remember +1, then not +2, and so on. At some point remembering more stuff will seem to have no meaning. It seems to me that with that much memory, the situation approaches simply not remembering anything at all, due to the dilution of the specificity of context. The more you remember, the less specific your operating context is. Also, memory is an object of awareness. So remembering an infinite amount seems impossible from that perspective, since objects can't be infinite. Objects are known by their boundaries, by finitude. Another way to look at this, is suppose we start to have a perfect recall from now on. We still can't remember what happened before this life. So even if we could gain the ability of a perfect recall starting now, still have a memory with a starting point, and thus not an infinite one. But suppose it's possible to unlock past memories. In this case you must wonder how is remembering different from constructing new memories? At some point, remembering becomes no different from making new memories out of thin air. And in fact, that's how consciousness operates in dreams. In dreams you seem to remember dream-related context out of thin air. You don't set out to set up your dreams before you go to bed. You shut your eyes and in a moment an entire new context appear, with its own history, with it's own past. So just from 10 minutes of shut eye you can have a dream with a 100 year worth of past events represented in it. So memory is both visionary, empty, and finite because it's only an object of awareness. While memories can be arbitrarily many, and of arbitrarily high quality, they are still finite. Thus no matter how much you remembered, there would still be a point beyond which you couldn't remember. And thus if you only use your memory as a guide and not other higher principle, you'd call yourself a "mortal" based on the limited memory. I guess I've said too much.