goldisheavy

Everything is possible. But I like to imagine that I don't abandon people and I don't hole myself up together with my elite band. As long as the person is curious, and I am not in need of a healing and restoration myself, I am there. I also don't tell people "just do this." I might suggest something and if someone can't do what I suggest, I will be interested to know why not. I will try to listen and to understand what is causing interference. I am open to possibly discovering that my original suggestion was not a good one. Another way I am not like that Croatian guy is that I don't believe I am in charge of anyone. I can be opinionated at times and a little on the fiery side, but I don't want to own people. I don't want to dominate their souls. I like when people are free and powerful. Therefore I like to empower people even if this is dangerous for my own well-being. Healthy people should have some power in my opinion. I believe it's wrong to create a culture of submissiveness. Why can't people be happy with good friends? Why do they need a dominant father-like figure? I don't think I can understand that. Well, I guess I can. People want the responsibility for making them safe to fall on the shoulders of a strong and perfectly dependable man. I think such desire is spiritually regressive. Tyler: I don't mean to hijack your thread. I am guessing you really like the idea of God. The thing is, I am looking at the pain that the idea of God is causing to you and I have hard time keeping my mouth shut. It's obvious to me that what you believe God is, is causing tension, contradiction and dashed hopes in your life. Why doesn't God help Gurus be nicer? Seriously, why not? For someone who believes in God, that not a question that can be answered satisfactorily, without creating some kind of consternation in the psyche. If a teacher shows such dismissive attitude toward you, how do you resolve it? If you simply accept the situation at face value, you probably have to believe one of the following: 1. "I am not good enough for my teacher. Maybe I really am as stupid as my teacher says." 2. "My teacher is not a good enough teacher. My teacher doesn't understand how to reach me." If you keep coming back to the teacher after being dismissed, it seem more likely that you believe you really are sub-par, a substandard specimen. Well, I don't know you, but I don't believe that you're inherently incapable. I think you can achieve anything you want given enough time and effort. I don't like it when people think overly poorly of themselves.

You don't think your situation is karmic? You're showing support for the very policy that's hurting you. I don't believe in an absolute karma, but this is so karmic. You're getting the results from the world that are completely aligned with your own intention. So the result that you are deprived of quality teachings is completely aligned with your idea about how teachings should spread (invitation only). I hope you are successful, but I also hope that people outside your envisioned quasi-secret group are successful as well.

It's a great honor to have a student who can learn too. The sifu should be flattered and stuttering and getting red cheeks as much as the student. This good student can go to another good sifu, unless you think you are the only good sifu in existence. So this whole dynamic of flattery and honor really has to go both ways, if it is sincere. When a worthy student walks into the room, it's as if God walked into the room. The sifu should immediately drop on the floor and kiss the student's feet. Without this kind of grace, the sifu's lineage is destined to die out. See? This logic works in reverse too. As a rule, when you sign up, you place yourself in a bad position. Namely, by an act of sign-up, it's like you acknowledge that you have no right to give constructive criticism and so on. That's unfortunate, but that's how it is in a lot of places. It's not a big deal where you have many competing places you can sign up to for cheap. So if you don't like this place, you go to another one. But this kind of social dynamic becomes a huge problem when there is only one or two of expensive and unavoidable groups that you must sign up for (for example dominant gangs, or dominant corporations, etc.) "if you know what's good for you." In martial arts, this is less of a problem, because frankly you can just beat your teacher to the head if you don't like your teacher. It happens all the time too. So if you have a pansy teacher you can knock your teacher out and teach him a good lesson. But keep in mind that More Pie Guy is not seeking martial arts instruction. He wants to become an immortal. It's a totally different thing. Your martial arts experience simply does not apply here. Punching your teacher in the context of immortality is simply irrelevant and demonstrates nothing. Immortality is not a skill of ass kicking, like martial arts is. That's fine for martial arts. That doesn't cut it if you want to transcend convention. You can't rely on convention to transcend convention. It just doesn't work like that. It's like eating more salt in an attempt to reduce the amount of salt you eat. Some things work well within convention. Some things do not. Mysticism is by its very nature convention-transcending. Mystics do not arise by conventional practice. When you use reason as a mystic, you don't use it precisely in a conventionally accepted manner. Never seen it happen. What I do see is that most people don't want to know or understand anything, but instead they want to be given a 1-2-3 step by step instruction so they can jump ignorantly and mindlessly into doing. I see this everywhere, especially at work. No one gives a fuck why something happens a certain way. They just want to be told how to get it not to happen now. They don't care that their non-understanding of the problem will result in this problem recurring in the near future. That's the attitude I see the most. Westerners are not thinkers. They are doers. Worse than that, they tend to be mindless zombie doers. "Just do microcosmic orbit?" "OK!!! Let's do it 1000 times now!" No one says "why?" Everyone is saying "how many times? when?" etc.

Oh the irony. So you suffer from these policies yourself, and as a result, you'll make your own secret group. Great! Just great. I guess if you're a victim of abuse, the answer is not to fight the abuse, but to switch sides from victim to the abuser. Makes sense. And you're about to make more lemons for yourself. Make more of that which has hurt you in the past. Keep the cycle going.

Both.

Oh, and one more thing. Being enlightened and being helpful are two different things. Someone can be wizard in mathematics but can't explain even a simple arithmetic to a stumbling student. Someone else might only know arithmetic, but is able to explain that arithmetic so well, that even a cow can understand. Being able to teach is a separate skill. On top of this, there are people with amazing abilities who are neither enlightened and nor can they teach. So again it goes back to you. What is useful for you? Do you just want to be next to someone you think is enlightened, just feeling close? Is that all? Or do you want to associate with someone who can actually help you? Some people are fully happy just putting the person they think is enlightened next to oneself, kinda like a little statue. Like a lucky charm. They don't care about understanding anything. They don't want to practice anything. They just want the lucky charm to be next to them. And some people think this is actually good, this is merit-building. I think it's a waste of time. It's like sleeping on some sacred text -- it doesn't make you more enlightened. It just serves as a bad pillow. What matters is not how someone is on the inside. What matters is how that someone is able to affect you. If an idiot can effect enlightenment in you, go with the idiot. If a wise man can only effect confusion in you, avoid the wise man. You might need to follow some street sweeper or some regular Joe. Maybe become friends with a politician. Something like that. That might be better for you. Oh, and I'm not telling you what to do and how to be. By all means, do what you want. I know if I was suffering like you, I'd want that someone to tell me what I am telling you.

I do get it. Belief in God is superfluous. It doesn't enrich anything. It doesn't improve life. It doesn't explain anything at all. It produces fear, anxiety and confusion, and it serves as a context for manipulation by others. Not believing in God is also a belief. And in my opinion, it's a better belief that leads to a better life. There are less distractions that way, because there is no all-powerful entity to blame and to appeal to. That's what I'm saying. The difference between an enlightened man and an unenlightened one is that an enlightened man understands the nature of beliefs and is not confused. Unenlightened one doesn't fully appreciate the power and the nature of beliefs, and doesn't feel free to select for oneself a better set of beliefs. That's not true. It is possible to rise above your beliefs, no matter what you're indoctrinated with. Indoctrination is weighty and influential, but it is not all-powerful. You enjoy being helpless, don't you? You like being mistreated. That's why you keep going back to a teacher who doesn't care about you. But if someone gave you good bread and water, you'd spit on that person. That's because you don't think you deserve better.

Good observation. And why can't people "just" still their minds? What stirs the mind? In a positive sense, we could say it is curiosity, and in the negative sense it is concern. Either way it is some level of discontent, which is not always a bad thing (for example you might not be content with slavery or ignorance, etc.). Driving discontent, positive and negative kinds of discontent, are foundational beliefs, values, and expectations. Or if you have a wide understanding of what a belief is, you can say it's all just driven by beliefs, because values are beliefs, and so are expectations and so are tacit assumptions and so on. These are just different ways to say "belief." These beliefs give a person his or her unique mentality (privately observed) and personality (publicly observed). Now suppose you believe that your body is absolutely essential to your identity. And suppose there is news of an oncoming tsunami. In five minutes tsunami will be here. And someone tells you "just still your mind." Can you do it? No. Not honestly. Not sincerely. You can pretend to still it. You can try. But it won't work. It won't work because you have a concern. This concern is caused by your beliefs about yourself, your body, about the nature of the tsunamis and so on. If you try to mechanically force your mind into stillness without modifying these beliefs, you will have an unresolved concern shoved into the background at best, or in the worst case, you'll just continue to have a disturbed mind. There are some people who can be calm in the middle of a tsunami. These people have different beliefs about themselves, tsunamis and about reality. It is these different beliefs that allow them to remain calm. It's not just a mechanical skill. A good teacher will understand this and explain it like I am explaining to you now. And yes, if you think I am implying I am a good teacher, you are correct. There is no way to say this with any more modesty, and so I don't bother. There is no God. Period. People have made up the idea of God, but whatever people imagine as "God" is not real and doesn't exist, because the ideas people have for God are self-contradictory and logically inconsistent. Even if such a thing did somehow exist, you'd not be able to recognize it or sense it, as it would make no sense to you and you'd have nothing to connect with. God is a blind alley. You should focus on real problems in life. What's your problem? Something hurts? You are anxious? You worry? What are your worries? These are the real problems. Get to the root of these problems. What is causing them? Do these problems have something in common? Just do a down to earth analysis of your situation. Give yourself an honest self-appraisal. A moment of reflection. I think just one honest moment of reflection, without inventing things and making things up, without relying on what you have read from various books/teachers/forums (yea, without this post), just between you and you, without a hint of pretense, just discuss with yourself what your real problem is. Not what people tell you your problem is. But what you think and feel in your bones it is. Then you'll be half-way toward enlightenment just from the one reflection alone.

It's not a coincidence. Because all the clans operated in secret, the side-effect was that there was not much interdisciplinary testing. And because of that, every clan could regard every other clan as amateurs and frauds. It's only natural. Everyone is proud of their own skill and clan. Martial arts history is rife with people touting their own horns. Wait, so your teacher is cocky and arrogant? I am so shocked and surprised. That's truly new and unheard of in the field. If I understand correctly, More Pie Guy wants to become a Taoist immortal. That's quite different from martial arts. While it's obvious how the secrecy has harmed the martial arts community, at least martial artists can meet sometimes, if only rarely, and test their skill. When it comes to immortality, you won't be meeting anyone and you won't be testing your skill. Immortality is not a contest. As the Taoist sages said, "A sage doesn't contend with anyone, and therefore no one contends with the sage." I think that More Pie Guy should by all means start that forum. It sounds good. I just don't think his expectations will lead to anything other than crushed hopes, so I am trying to save some pain. But maybe I am too cynical and wrong. That's possible.

I want to riff off this comment. Basically, neigong, for better or for worse, has a historical baggage of being shrouded in secrecy. This has a couple of problems. First problem, many teachers will (foolishly, in my opinion) advise and demand that their students do not discuss anything. But worse than this, because of secrecy, it's nearly impossible to verify any credential. What credential? All the clans are secret! What confirmation? For example, if someone claims to have a Ph.D. from Harvard, you can contact Harvard, which is not secret, but rather is a very public institution, and have them look up their alumni roster and get back to you. There is simply no such mechanism for much of neigong precisely due to the baggage of secrecy. Because of this, it's very easy for two things to happen. First thing, someone can claim to be a real teacher, but have no lineage, and there is not much you can do to verify. Second, someone can be a real teacher, but look and sound stupid and untrustworthy, and there is no way this foolishly sounding person can convince you. So my suggestion is this. Forget neigong. In other words, forget tradition. Open your own mind. Experiment. Meditate. Contemplate. Then share these experiences with others who are as open-minded and as dedicated as you are. This group of yours will be free of the old baggage. You might make some mistakes, but having a teacher is absolutely no guarantee that the teaching will be appropriate for you either. How many teachers are there that actually care about their students and take time to sync up with them to see what is best? Most Chinese take a very authoritarian approach. Do you understand the implication? The implication of authoritarian approach is that student is not important. Only what teacher thinks is important. Student is nothing. Teacher is everything. That's the mindset. And the teaching is strictly top-down. It is force-fed. You either accept it, or you do not accept it. There is no third option, no creativity, no circumstantial adjustment, not in traditional Chinese method. Traditional Chinese method is "You lick my ass for 3 years, and then, if I like you, I will maybe you show you something." So get a group and dig in. You'll learn more than any teacher will ever teach you. Because you'll be free of baggage, you won't have arbitrary and idiotic constraints on your practice. Simply accept that you may make mistakes, but don't feel bad about it. If you make a mistake, be ready to admit it, and move on. It's worth it. If you keep chasing other people's gold, you'll never be rich. Find your own goldmine and mine it. Teachers will for the most part do nothing more than disempower you and make you dependent on them. These teachers will, either directly or indirectly teach you "you need me" and "without me, you are nothing." The downside of what I am suggesting is that you'll be unable to easily capitalize on your knowledge. If you have some kind of formal lineage backing you up, later on you can charge people for training, even if you're a total idiot. People will buy it on the strength of that credential (which is of course, dubious -- just try to follow up some of these credentials and see how well you do... it's not like Harvard or Yale, which are old public institutions that operate transparently and thus trustworthily). So if you want to become a money-charging Guru, you might be better served by looking for a lineage to hijack for your profit motive. If you just want wisdom, forget teachers and learn on your own. And if you can get a group of likeminded individuals, so much the better.

http://www.physorg.com/news69338070.html

There is a Buddhist practice of offering yourself to the hungry demons for consumption. It's meant to cut down attachment to one's false identity. A variant of that practice is offering of your body to insects. Wear shorts and otherwise as little clothing as possible. Sit on the grass. Meditate. Let insects crawl all over you. If they decide to eat or bite you, give them your body. Offer it. After this, insects, and many other things, will not bother you. Disclaiming: your personal safety or sanity is not guaranteed. But then again, that's not the point, is it? If you can't do this yet, memorize this practice and do it when you get old and have little to lose anyway. When you're 70 or 80 or whatever age, and you feel you're about to kick the bucket anyway, then do this practice.

Well said CowTao. I think that everything has its place. The dirt is only dirty relatively speaking, but ultimately, it is necessary and pure. Out of the dirt grows everything we need to live well. On a personal level, we might think of excrement as something we need to get rid of, but on a global scale, excrement is natural earth fertilizer that should ideally be recycled back into nature. Consider that it is our faculty of discrimination that gives rise to perceived differences and sameness. So when we see one symbol as distinct from another, that's the discriminatory faculty. And when we think the mundane experience has ended and a mystical began, that is it again -- the discriminatory faculty. We are only able to cognize the mysterious in contradistinction to the reasonable, and vice versa. So both qualities have a place. In a big roomy mind there is room for everything. There is room for reason. There is room for mystery. There is no need for mystery to destroy reason and no reason for reason to destroy mystery anymore than the short should be destroying the tall, and the light should be destroying the shadow. Red is only beautiful on a painting when next to blue and green. If everything was painted in a single shade of red, the painting would be unrecognizable, featureless, boring and ugly. This is why I can't get behind any kind of extremism with regard to the mystery. Reason is what we need to acknowledge the true character of the conditioning. Mystery is what we need to acknowledge the limitation and the impermanence of the conditioning. We shouldn't lean too much toward reason or mystery. If you lean too much toward mystery, you fail to respect the conditioning. And if you lean too much toward reason, you overestimate the gravity of the conditioning and limit your options and imagination. A healthy balance is a good idea. If inside your mind mystery is fighting with reason, how can there be peace in the world at large? First make peace in your own mind. Make peace between reason and mystery and respect them both. Then there will eventually be peace in the world, and you'll have a roomier and less claustrophobic mind. There is plenty of space for mystery. There is plenty of space for reason. It is beautiful. There is no need to denigrate one to extol another.

There is not much room for disagreement here, is there? So if I disagree, I am dishonest. If I am honest, I have no choice but to agree. Needless to say, not only do I disagree with you, but I hold what you are saying in high contempt. Instead of engaging in a discussion in a reasonable manner, you just poo-poo-ed everything I said as "bah, he's using reason, he can't be trusted."

I disagree. What you are and what another is, is ultimately mysterious. We rely on delineations to tell us apart, but because delineations are flexible/mind-made, strange things are possible. For example, it's possible for two people to merge into one person, and back to two. This is one way of sharing an experience that doesn't rely on verbal communication. And then there is verbal communication. While you cannot explain what red is like, you can still say you see red, and we do this all the time. Should the descriptions of unique and strange spiritual experiences interpenetrate with the descriptions of the conventional ones? As I said before, I think yes. At the same time, some of the conventional experiences can be "uplifted" into the spiritual realm (well, they are already spiritual, so it's more of a change in how we see things than any actual uplifting). On the contrary. An enlightened person would understand that language is more than just words. It is gestures. It is intimations. It is hints. It is subtleties. It is context. It is everything. A cloud in the sky is a word. Your hand is a symbol. That's how deep the understanding of the language is for the enlightened person. Because of this, while it may be impossible to give an exact copy of an experience to someone, one can evoke a great many experience in others with language. Should one discount a tool only because it cannot generate exact replicas? That seems wasteful and stupid. A good likeness is enough. If you are happy with a good-enough likeness, and if you allow for other people's individuality, that's modesty. If you insist on transporting an exact replica of your experience, you are spiritually ostentatious and selfish (because you don't allow another's individuality to creatively corrupt your vision). Tao is not a frequency, and thus, nothing can be in sync or out of sync with it. All transformations embody Tao, including the permutations of ignorance and the flows of reason. I can do better than that. Just because some Zen masters are impotent, don't put all of us into that box. There is nothing to do, and nothing to avoid doing. That's the complete coin. If you just say "there is nothing to do" you get one side of the coin.

Besides the anti-reason slant which I didn't like, there is still a matter of whether or not we should share the spiritual experiences with others. So the argument made in the poem is that other people will make fun of you if you share, so don't share, because you need to retain your dignity and ego. I am not convinced. I think the best approach is a middle way. On one hand, I would advise against advertising your experiences and against aggressively pushing them on others. At the same time, to keep them altogether secret from strangers is also wrong. So, if we share too much too fast in too many circumstances, people can feel scared and weirded out, especially if they themselves haven't had similar experiences. I'm not saying we must avoid scaring people at all costs. People need to be frightened and pushed outside their comfort zone from time to time, or they won't grow. But it should be a relatively rare event. It shouldn't be something commonly done or aggressively done. People need time to digest things. So in other words, we should have some appreciation for the fragility of people's psyches and not make people uncomfortable unjudiciously. At the same time, if we cut ourselves off from society, and if we only share our experiences in our own cliquish and closed-off circles, we are doing both ourselves and others a disservice by creating a taboo wall in our psyches. This wall, if created, will have place both in our individual minds, and in society. This will lead to more fear and less understand, and needless to say, it will lead to more and more segmentation/segregation of society. If we take this too far, we may become foreign and unfamiliar, and thus scary and threatening. And you don't want that. Second reason we don't want that is because the more people are exposed to these experiences, the more people will feel free to join in both experiencing such things themselves and discussing these experiences more openly. This will create a warmer, safer and more normal atmosphere for the mystics and will destroy the last remnants of the need for them to exist in secret. I think today most people can share relatively without fear. So I am for judicious sharing. When appropriate circumstances arise, even with a stranger, share. We have to welcome people into our light. If we make our light narrow, we will have a small light. And if anyone worries about being made fun of, I have to ask whether such person has too much self-importance.

sifusufi, you need to stop spamming.

NLP techniques work well and quickly. Other than that, you need wisdom, and that takes time. So if you want a cheap and dirty method, check out NLP. The real method though, the heavy duty one, the real deal, is wisdom (which takes time and has no short-cuts).

That's how I understand mystery as well.

Reason is what we use to understand, for one. Two, yes, you can find a spiritual truth through reason. Wrong. All experiences are symbolic. You just don't understand the nature of symbols yet. Wrong again. There is no such thing as an indirect experience. All experiences are direct. You have to know how to employ reason. Reason is not something that generates stories. Reason is that which, through analysis, can dissolve stories.

I don't agree with this anti-reason slant. Everything is interdependent. Mystery depends on reason. Reason on mystery. To reject one in order to reach the other is like to cut off your left hand in order to gain control of the right hand -- it is senseless maiming.

http://theparisreview.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/6002 Usually I write little introductions for the links, but I can't think of anything this time other than various different things came to mind as I was reading this. I wasn't expecting much from this interview when I started reading it, but later I thought it was a very interesting interview.

Exactly. We're getting closer to truth now. Getting a little more honest. So what you are afraid of is people bending or undermining your validation framework, which is a framework of beliefs about how reality is. Trouble is, that framework is not indicative of reality. I would say that most of the time that framework is a source and a repository of all delusion. Unstructured view can still be a clear view. It's clear in the sense that you're not deluded. It's unstructured in the sense that you cannot demonstrate a structure within it. An example of a structure is something like a tree. A tree has roots, trunk, branches and leaves. That is its structure. Cities are structured in terms of city blocks. City blocks are delineated by roads. Roads are delineated by curbs and so on. All these are examples of structure. All structures depend on delineations. So a person who relies strongly on delineations most often produces a structured intent. A person who doesn't rely strongly on delineations can produce an unstructured intent. Non-reliance in this case doesn't mean ignorance. You can understand delineations and still not rely on them. Vice versa is also true. You can fail to understand the role and effects of delineations and yet rely on them ignorantly.

You should probably ask him. He strikes me as an approachable fellow. I don't get the impression that Harris only wants to engage in a monologue. I don't do this often, but from time to time I send an email to some famous author of some article, and a lot of times they do respond, and it turns out they are cool people, like most people on this forum, who don't mind answering my question. Without asking and without the ability to jump into his mind, all we can do is speculate.

Unstructured intent and its results. If reality can be avoided and distorted, it's not real.