goldisheavy

This is not terribly as bad as it could have been, but this is not a complete insight. You have to tell the person how is it that one's current belief reached godly level, and what to do with it to change it. What's funny is that I talk about this all the time on this forum, and yet you can't even repeat it (or at least disagree intelligently). This bit is horrible. A complete waste of words. Ah, Atlantis is not strongly established in our convention, so referring to it as if it's definitely real is a big mistake. Even if you want to explain the deepest mysteries and the miraculous, you always have to start where the person currently is, namely in the predominant conventional mindset. If you fail to do that, you will be perceived to be out of touch. So in other words, you have to build a bridge between the current conventional understanding and what's beyond convention. No. If you believe the fire is caused by laws of nature, you already lost and no amount of willing will help you. You'll just burst your vein from concentration but nothing good will come of it. No. Wrong answer. Furthermore, I didn't ask about meditation. That's no answer. I knew you'd be hand waving and equivocating and specifically asked for concrete and actionable steps. You fail miserably. That was a trick question and you give a middling answer. Not the worst you could do, but not the best either. You fail at mind reading. I don't like your answers. I think some of them are barely passable, but mostly they are either too vague, or wrong, or simply missing altogether. I wouldn't say you're a complete idiot, but you're far from being enlightened though. You need to keep at it. Your wisdom is still very tiny. Just my opinion.

First of all, what is SRS? I have no idea what SRS is. Is there any way you could avoid using bogus abbreviations? Other questions: How can a person learn to go through a wall, or to survive in the middle of a raging fire? What causes diseases and how to heal them? Why do people need to sleep? Please give an actionable, concrete, almost step-by-step plan on improving social conditions? What is the root cause of desire? Good enough for now. I give you plenty of rope to hang yourself with.

This is pretty standard fare. The interesting bit in your sentence was your suggestion that injustices give people the desire to suffer. That's the part I was curious about. I see nothing controversial or interesting about the existence of injustices themselves. Furthermore, I would also say that the poor, middle class and otherwise disadvantaged people are partially responsible for their own state. Not fully responsible, but they are partially responsible in that they passively acquiesce to the status quo and refuse to fight or stand up for anything better, if there is even the tiniest risk to their security. So the middle and lower classes trade security or illusion of security for freedom and partly they deserve the shit life they get. But partly they are innocent too. It's not a simple picture. I would lay 70% of responsibility on the socially dominant class, the upper class faux aristocracy (of course no one would admit to being an actual aristocrat in this day and age, but the attitudes and the sense of entitlement is still there and comparable to the aristocrats of the past times). But still, 30% of responsibility falls on the oppressed themselves. When oppressed people acquiesce, they partially deserve their lot.

It's a complicated question. First of all, is suffering predicated on a mindset? I would say, yes it is. However, is it easy to change such mindset quickly to one that causes no suffering? I would say, no it is not. But is it possible to change it in that way, maybe not quickly and maybe not easily? Yes, it's possible. To illustrate the situation, imagine this mental experiment. A person has a painful condition. And let's assume for the sake of experiment, this condition can only be cured if you climb to the top of the mount Everest, with minimal aid from others, then climb off the mountain and repeat this 10 times back to back. So the person suffers and we approach the person and say, "Well you know, if you climbed Everest 10 times, you'd be healed. Therefore we have no pity for you. Fuck you. You sit here and choose to wallow in your own self-pity, blah blah blah." Is it easy to ignore another person's suffering? Or your own? Apparently it's easy to ignore other people's suffering. The world gives much evidence in support of this. This is how people have no problem enriching themselves at a great personal cost to others. But is it easy to ignore your own suffering? Again, the evidence points to the answer "no." What about my own suffering? Well, I don't even try to ignore it. I actually think I should be paying attention to my suffering. So I can't even answer if it's easy or not to ignore my own suffering, because I've never attempted the feat and I doubt I ever will. I believe part of transcending suffering is paying attention to it, rather than ignoring it.

I would be interested in a 4-5 paragraph long treatment of this one sentence.

Ah, but don't enlightened people claim to be above suffering? What is this "lonely" you speak of?

That's a bit of a problem, isn't it?

I notice this board has a lot of frightened individuals whose hearts are the size of a peanut due to fear. I order to allay their fear as well as to allay all the fear they like to generate around themselves, I will say a few things about psychosis. All people who do serious spiritual practice can encounter strange phenomena. Therefore it is important to understand the causes behind psychosis, how to prevent it, and how to deal with it if it arises. Psychosis is caused by a discrepancy within intent. How does this work? Intent is conditioned by our ideas. For example, if I intend to eat an ice cream, I have an idea of an ice cream and I have an idea of what eating entails and so forth. These ideas give shape to intent, and therefore condition it. So what happens if the ideas are contradictory and our intent stands equally strongly behind contradictory ideas? Trouble! That's what. Or rather, an experience of trouble. So a typical scenario will run as follows: We have all kinds of deeply established beliefs about reality. For example many people, even many highly spiritual people, strongly believe in a physicalist worldview. In simple language this means such people expect laws of physics to work. For example, gravity is real, matter impedes other matter (as in, you cannot go through walls), and so on. There is also a hidden attachment to normality. We don't realize we care about normality until it's gone. So for example, feeling nothing special inside the body, that's normal. We take it for granted and don't think much of it, until it's gone. Because we often underestimate our thirst for normality, we are often eager to give it up, only to regret it later. But "normal" "physical" life is not good enough for a lot of people. This kind of life feels suffocating and constrained. We feel robotic and trapped and our hearts yearn for more creativity and more freedom. So we want to experience something strange. We want to experience something novel. We want at least a touch of magic and the miraculous in our lives. We want to experience some sign of infinite possibility of manifestation. Let's say this is a second factor. Third factor is all the stories we've heard in the past. Oh, we might think we don't believe them, and we might think we are rational beings, and think we are above such things as superstition, but deep in the mind stories still can have some power. So for example, if you've heard a story about kundalini causing heat, even if you doubt it, there is a possibility that such story can later manifest. This is especially true if you keep hearing some story repeatedly over and over. This doesn't mean the story is real or true! That's simply the power of the mind. It's how the mind works. And even if you have a skeptical and critical mindset, you may not be completely immune to the effects of the stories, at least, not right away, and not without some effort put into draining some obstructing stories of their natural creative energy. So what happens, when intent behind the creative, spiritual (as opposed to say, mundane) aspect of life gets mature, it manifests! Intent always manifests once it reaches a certain level of honesty and perceived truth deep within our being. However, what happens is that likely the person has done no work to soften up their conceptions of how the world should be and what reality is truly like. At the same time, there is an overabundant eagerness for the new. So there is an immense conflict. For example, you might see light inside your body, and on one hand, you're elated, because it shows how creative and wonderful your mind and heart is, it shows how mind can summon such light into being, but at the same time, such experience conflicts with everything you understand about physicality and normality, and it is scary. You might wonder if you've detached yourself from the physical world. You might even think you've died. You might think you are losing your sanity. All this can create an intense fear and panic, because on one hand we would like to feel miracles, magic and creativity but just as strongly and at the same time, we don't want to feel those very same things. So, roughly speaking, this is the process that causes the perception of danger. If you wholeheartedly allow yourself to let go of your previous worldview and allow yourself to fully go with the newly arising phenomena, you will not have any fear. Even heat will not be painful. Heat is painful to us because we believe our bodies can burn up and feeling heat is a sign that the body is in danger. And since we base our identity on the body, this is truly scary, especially if the sensation of heat is not mild. So in order to tolerate phenomena like that, either you have to be ready and willing to die, or you have to stop identifying yourself with the body or bodies (and there can be many kinds of bodies, physical being just one of them). So how to avoid this mess? It's easy! If you understand what's going on, and if you understand the power of mind, you naturally know what to do. But let's spell it out. There are two approaches. First approach is to go slow and gentle with the creative intent. Allow the creative spiritual freedom of perception to seep in ever so slowly and ever so gradually. Simply thinking to yourself that you're not in any hurry to get enlightened and that you're not in any hurry to manifest any kind of powers will do the trick. In this case, the change will be slow, and every time you feel a subtle change in your appreciation for life and in your daily experience, you will have time to adjust and time to get used to it. This incremental approach makes sure that each manifested creative experiential change is small and subtle and because of that, each change is feels safe, good, and fun. Second approach is a moral radical one. You have to address the clinging, the entrenched, the dogmatic aspect of mind. Namely this has to do with our unwavering belief in physicality, and our belief in the physical body being "me", and a desperate expectation of normalcy and so forth. These beliefs should first be softened, and eventually completely melted away (like an ice cube melting in water), as they represent an obstacle. You can soften these beliefs by steadily questioning them in a very sincere and sustained manner. So you question all these beliefs that you take for granted every day. You ask yourself over and over whether these beliefs make solid sense, and without any pretense and without any wishful thinking, but rather, by relying on cold hard logic you can eventually see that those beliefs have no merit. This is also a slow but very powerful process. In this approach, phenomenally you experience lots of routine and mundane life because your intent is not busy conjuring creative manifestations little by little as it would be in the first approach. So you have a stretch of seemingly boring life where you do nothing but contemplate the validity of your core beliefs. But then one day you wake up and realize with great immovable certainty that you no longer believe all those things about reality that you used to believe. And then very very quickly from this point forward all kinds of amazing and creative phenomena can arise completely without fear, since at this time you will be full-hearted in your intent. Examining the causes of fear of death, fear of disease, fear of change, and fear of unknown relate very strongly to the second approach. The first approach is more hands on. Energy work falls into the first approach, and playful gentle magical manifestation also falls into the first approach. The second approach is more contemplative. You can combine a little bit of both approaches. You can play with subtle and small creative manifestations while you contemplate the validity of your current beliefs. Generally there are two sides to this conflict. There is a thrust for newness and a thrust for maintaining the status quo. So either your thrust for newness has to be gentle, or you have to dissipate the energy behind the thrust for status quo, and this is done by undermining the inner doctrine that holds the status quo locked in place within our hearts. Now, should the panic happen anyway, you simply need to be patient and to remind yourself that the phenomena you experience are visionary, like seeing fur on a tortoise or like seeing a horn on a rabbit. Be patient, relax, and the phenomena will pass. Finally keep in mind that allowing intent to operate on this or that detail of the manifestation is always more dangerous than having a general abstract high order intent. Example: let's say you feel tired. If you then try to send energy into kidneys, that's much more dangerous than visualizing an overall gentle field of refreshment bathing you from head to toe. Why? Because it is likely you don't know what kidneys do in the grand scheme of things. So for this reason, using detail-oriented intent is always more dangerous. That's why it's more dangerous to play with particular chakras or with particular nadis or particular body organs. It's much safer to use your intent in an overall, holistic, broad manner without micromanaging. If you follow this advice, you will be safe in your solitary practice.

It's a primary topic in this thread, while in all the other threads I've seen this come up, it was always a secondary topic. Furthermore, there is one other thread where it's the primary topic, but I strongly don't like the tone of it and decided to start this one, because a reply is not as powerful as a statement sometimes (but sometimes it is more powerful). In this case I needed to make a general statement.

It seems this discussion is more for Stephen's benefit than anyone else's. Stephen appears to have something he wants to get off his chest, and that's fine. But if that's the case, why should I pay to hear him voice his difficulties with Buddhism? I suggest Stephen join this fourm here and discuss what bothers him. I shouldn't have to pay money to hear someone's confession. That is insane. I live in LA area but I won't be coming to that talk.

I strongly disagree. Not only that, but I will say that anyone who subdues one's own powers of critical thinking in favor of receiving input from a supposedly enlightened teacher is doomed to fail. So in a sense, you must practice alone if you want to succeed. Having some like-minded friends is a good thing though, if it works out that way for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLN2k0b3g70...player_embedded I stumbled on this and enjoyed it. I thought you might like it too. I like what he says about death and dying.

If the car can write a novel, I'll eat my cell phone. Oh wait, cars cannot write novels, therefore they are useless. If the cow can eat my hat, I'll drink cow piss. Oh wait, they can't eat my hat, therefore cows are useless. If you can sweeten your coffee with a pencil, I'll eat my shoes. Oh wait, you cannot sweeten your coffee with a pencil, therefore pencils are useless and stupid. Oh yea, and I am a moron.

I welcome my solipsistic overlords. Surely you jest. The amount of critique on it is huge. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/052...hemetapsycholog http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Belief-Lynne-...r/dp/0691073201 http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Physical-World-...0070&sr=8-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism (criticism section) http://philosophy.uwaterloo.ca/MindDict/materialism.html ("materialism and mind" section) And so forth. That's not even counting the classic Buddhist refutations of materialism.

I think avoiding excesses is more than good enough. There is no need to become a hardliner about anything. Taoism is anti-dogma. Ever read Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu)? Confucianism is more similar to straight edge, IMO, and Confucianism is one of the things Daoists have ridiculed.

Well both tomorrow and what you call death are in the future. You haven't been dead yet, so you don't feel qualified to talk about it. But you haven't been to tomorrow yet either, but strangely, you feel fairly decently qualified to talk about that. Sure, you don't know exactly what will happen tomorrow, but you have a general idea. For example, you know you will probably eat lunch and other details like that. I just don't see how death is different. Both tomorrow and death are speculative. But we feel like we know a lot about what tomorrow might be like, and yet nothing about death. If it's prudent to plan long term and to plan for tomorrow (and I believe it is), why not extend that and plan for many lifetimes? It seems like a logical extension to me. The only thing that can make it seem illogical is the doctrine of physicalism. If you believe that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain and the brain is gone, consciousness is then gone too. But this is an assumption. No person on Earth has been able to prove physicalism.

I doubt it. I am sure someone does, but it's not often. Ok, I'll give some hints: 1. Imagine the best practitioner you can think of, with the best lineages and credentials, dropping their name, getting a plastic surgery, and showing up somewhere in a disreputable location, like on this forum, or at a bus stop, or something mundane like that. This person says hi, you chat, and this person gives you the best advice he can, the exact same kind he gives when he is a becrowned glorious lineage holder on display with a big name. So same advice, down to the letter, down to the facial muscle movements, but you don't recognize the face, or name, basically just any random dude. What happens? 2. Imagine the most credentialed super holy lama with many many lineages, in very high esteem, widely adored, giving slightly broken and somewhat bad advice. What happens in this case? 3. Imagine someone with fake credentials giving bad advice. What happens in this case? 4. Imagine someone with fake credentials giving good advice, as good as the real lama, but credentials were faked. What happens in this case? Now when you ponder these 4 cases, things to consider: What attracted you to a certain lineage or teaching in the first place, in the very beginning? How can you tell good advice from bad? How can you tell who is and who is not authoritative? Where and how did you learn that distinction?

I wanted to clarify. I think using the word "worry" is too vague. What is closely related to headaches is conflicts and contradictions especially when connected with intent. So if you want to do one thing and another thing that's directly contradictory to the first, at the same time, that causes a headache. Mentally going over deep contradictions with the desire to resolve them but being unable to do so can also cause headaches. So it's not just worry.

With headaches you have to delve into the person's psyche and environment to see what's up. In my experience headaches are caused by worry. It's that's simple. Big worry gives big headaches. Want to test my theory? How about moving this person somewhere where she is completely taken care of, for life. No work and no obligations. Tell her everything is fine. Her family is taken care of. Whatever else is worrying, remove it. And see if the migraines still continue. It's a somewhat expensive test, but my bet is "no", meaning they do not continue. This is just using obvious environmental manipulation. But using an inner approach is also good and possible, but harder. Because if you take the inner way, you are saying that you are at least partly, if not completely responsible for your own headaches and that you're causing your own headaches. Many people with illnesses get very very angry when they hear this. They believe that you're slighting them or that you're attacking them or that you're not taking their illness seriously. So that's the big obstacle to the inner healing. Inner healing absolutely cannot work without responsibility and responsibility means "I have caused my own problem at least partially." But the problem is simple. It's worry/stress. The reason I am saying this though, is that if the root cause of stress is not addressed and you give her some treatment, her problem will not go away in a complete and decisive manner. At best you will be required to perform life-long treatments (as long as stress source is life-long). Also, another suggestion is hypnosis. Hypnosis might be more powerful as a cure than any kind of beats. Of course the beats are easy to try, so why not try them, right? But if that doesn't work, and if she doesn't want to investigate her own psyche, I suggest a qualified hypnotherapist.

I find this whole thing to be hilarious. So does anyone understand the implications of this? I doubt it.

Epic troll is epic. And lazy too. What a lousy cut and paste effort. http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/27...geneva-goes-on/ Look here first comment.

Unfortunately at some point you have to decide between making more money or delivering quality. If you focus on quality you will make less money. Obviously you need a modicum of quality to attract customers, but once the customer is in your trap, any extra quality on top of that is "waste" from the POV of sucking the money from the person. So real quality always comes from outside business. Business is good at delivering mediocrity. At the same time, business makes more money. I've heard stories of Chinese martial arts masters teaching utter bullshit to people for money. I mean literally teaching wrong stuff or made up moves. Anything. Then using earned money to live and to support 1 or 2 real disciples whom they taught correctly. To my mind, this is fraud. These so-called "masters" are going to hell. On the other hand, they were successful businessmen because they attracted lots of people and were super-lenient and allowed them to do whatever they wanted and so forth, so everyone had this illusion of success. Horrible crap. EDIT: I should say that faster teaching approaches do not have to be crappy, but in the end there is no short-cut, because the faster approach amounts to explaining everything up front, but the time you need to spend practicing what you've been told is exactly the same. So the only difference is that in the slow approach the master slowly removes the veil of secrecy, while in the faster you get the whole system explained to you in a week or two. But once you get the explanation it still takes you 30 years to practice it to get good. So it's less frustrating because you feel like you're not treated as a baby because you're a responsible person who knows how to use information and when. Just because you know something doesn't mean you have to do it too soon or in the wrong order etc. In the slow approach you're treated as an irresponsible imbecile who uses information impulsively and incorrectly and who has 99.9% chance of self-combustion if explained even one extra bit of information. This is of course nonsense and insulting.

Is is better to hire a carpenter or is it better to work with the wood on your own? Well, there are pros and cons to both and it depends on what you want. If you want to understand various properties of the wood and construction, you can't get that by hiring a carpenter. You must engage in carpentry yourself. On the other hand, if you're happy to remain ignorant, then hiring a carpenter might be a good choice. But even then... let's say you're ignorant of carpentry, so you hire a carpenter to do it for you. Is it a good carpenter? Is it a sucky one? You'll never know! Credentials, references, all that is flawed information. But if you yourself are a master carpenter, you can tell if another carpenter is good or not. BUT! Even if you can tell the other carpenter has good skills because you're a master carpenter, and you're willing to hire this other guy, what guarantee do you have of motivation? None. A person with good skills doesn't have to use them for you, even if you make a deal. So delegation has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that if you hire a carpenter whose intention is aligned with yours and who has a good skill, you can do other things in the same time that the carpenter is busy doing carpentry. But it's not free because why should someone work for you for free? Maybe if someone loves you, sure. But if someone loves, you have other problems... for example, you might want solitude but the loving person might be unwilling to leave you alone, etc. In other words, nothing is absolutely better or worse, but if you know what you want, you can definitely make a good decision. Do you just want things done? Do you want to gain an understanding of things? Are you content being ignorant? Etc.

This would cause an alarm bell to go off in my mind.