goldisheavy

This is one of the (many) problems with lineages. Lineages are quasi-secret/quasi-formal organizations and whenever someone makes a claim about lineage affiliation, it's often next to impossible to verify. But lineages have only themselves to blame for this.

This is a pitfall that's natural in the language, and if I take pains to word around it, everything I say will be 2-3 times less concise. So, depending on the feel, I sometimes take the effort, and other times I speak using absolute language hoping people will understand that it's just my opinion. You have a good point though. It's good to be reminded, and thank you. Ah, this is a tricky subject. This is a public forum. For intimacy to develop I must be participating either one on one or in a tiny group. And the setting must be right. We must be relaxing somewhere, having tea or beer, or something like that. The forum medium prevents intimacy because even though I reply to a person, I am really speaking in front of a group. Secondly, for intimacy to develop, I must personally like that person. And what happens here is that people I like don't talk much, but people who get caught in arguments with me, I don't much like and don't feel inclined to be intimate with. Now, I am not stuck in that frame of mind. My likes and dislikes can change. But I am just a person like anyone else. So don't expect too much. The reason I sometimes critique the high and mighty is precisely because they are also just people. People elevate their teachers unduly.

I think that intuition informs logic and logic informs intuition. In other words, it is not two different processes but one process. People in whom these become two distinct processes are sick people in my view. Intuition is a conditioned phenomenon. In other words, what you consider intuitive can change if you change your deeply held beliefs about something. In order to change beliefs they must be challenged with something authentic. In other words... if you believe that the sky is blue, but want to learn how to believe that the sky is green, you must have a weighty reason to change this belief, because beliefs do not change haphazardly. So for example, if you believe that you are ultimately nothing more than a bundle of atoms, then no matter how long you meditate you will not experience any benefits of meditation beyond what you would experience from ordinary relaxation. If you believe you are ultimately limited and stupid human being, then no matter how hard you try, you will not attain any degree of success in anything. If you sit in a chair and someone draws a circle around your chair with chalk, and you strongly believe that this circle is an impenetrable barrier, you won't even make an effort to get off the chair to even attempt to cross it. Why not? Because we are incapable of producing irrational intents, except in rare and extraordinary circumstances (which you shouldn't depend on for growth and maturation). And what we consider to be rational can change. It can especially change if you lead a highly contemplative life. As your sense of what is rational changes, you will be able to produce intents that would have previously been considered insane. Intent is the driver behind change and beliefs are what condition intent. We cannot sincerely intend that which we believe is impossible. So before you can produce an amazing intent, first you have to restructure your mind body to support such intent. And you cannot reliably and predictably achieve this through quietism, passivity or good luck random 1 in a million event. Quieting meditation is good only if you will then use that quiet for contemplation. Let me compare this to cooking. Quieting and calming meditation is like cleaning the cooking table. A clean cooking table is very good (and some would say, essential) for good cooking. However, if you clean the table for hours and hours and never begin cooking, you will die from hunger. This is why techniques do not lead to immortality. This is why sages like Zhuangzi laugh at the artifice of techniques. Contemplation is not a technique. It's fully alive. It consists of pondering over relevant to the now profound questions, and as the now changes, what's relevant changes and your contemplation changes too. It's not a fixed technique that is unable to change with the times. There is no such thing as delusion. There is just conditioning. Intuition is a conditioned phenomenon. To make intuition reliable it has to be conditioned properly. But a reliable intuition is still as empty as a non-reliable one. Rainbows in the night. To say that some view is deluded is to imply that some other view is not. In reality while some views are relatively more beneficial for certain aims, there is no view that is absolutely the best for all aims. This is because the views are empty. This is why we do not become attached even to the view that works well and gives good results for now. You can have views that work well for your aims and views that don't work well for your aims. This has nothing to do with delusion. Delusion is just a convention and nothing more.

What do you think I am doing now, fool? Do you think the cosmos is the same as yesterday? It's working subtly differently every second, and it's all intentional on my part. It's a slow process at the moment because I am not committed to a drastic and fast change at this time. It all depends on what you define as omnipotence. In any case, our sphere of influence is incalculable. Maybe not omnipotent, but it's larder than you imagine. And by "our" I am including you, even though you're just a little turd off to the side, by your own admission, oh humble one. No I can do worse. I can kill a person's spirit. I can change the person's subtle body, their mental body, not just their physical body. And by spirit I don't mean metaphysical essence. I mean destroy the person's ability to enjoy life for a long time. Destroy their belief in their own power. Destroy their belief in success or love, etc. Killing the body is nothing. That's the materialist's worst nightmare, but it's not the worst that can be done. Close, but you make it sound very sentimental. The best I can do is to show the person their own potential to live life beyond grief, to be able to face any circumstance with a peaceful mind, to cure the incurable diseases and to reverse the irreversible processes at least for a time, to allow people to die happy, with dignity and with full awareness. Fine by me. I respect your freedom of speech as long as you respect mine. Everything we do is sheer egomania. Every thought is egomania. Every absence of thought is equally egomania. Why? Because there is no basis to think anything. There is no basis for avoiding thinking. That's the meaning of emptiness fool. Nothing to do. Nothing to avoid doing. Given that, I think my current choices are pretty kind and compassionate.

Terrible. You get an F, sir. Reason is not about breaking things into parts. For some problems examining parts is moving away from the reason! That's what reductionism is, and a reductionist approach is hardly reasonable! There are many very cogent critiques of reductionism. In fact, something that Buddhists are fighting with (the guys you praise as logical) is physicalism, or substantialism, explaining everything in terms of substances -- this is precisely where the reductionist approach leads. So the reductionists came up with the idea of atom first, by thinking that you can break a thing into parts and eventually you end up with an unbreakable part. Then they have tie the idea of substance into the idea of atom. Buddhists fight this kind of reductionism. Post-modernist philosophers also fight it, so much so, that in some corners of academia they have become rejects and outcasts. So you do logic and reason a great disservice by strictly connecting it with reductionism, which is arguably illogical, if anything. It's not that good. But some aspects of it are fun. And I suppose fun is good, but it's not as good as joy. Fun is like a cheap version of joy. It's better than nothing though. This is what real logic is all about. Without correct intuition of the whole you cannot be logical at all. Logic strongly depends on the correct perception of wholes. Without correctly perceiving wholes your reasoning about relations is distorted. Someone like Zhuangzi is superbly logical while western logicians are busy body clerks in comparison.

Loved this. Thanks for sharing.

This is absolute piece of crap. I don't want a slave as my life companion and partner. I want a free-thinking individual. I could never love a slave. It would be a waste of my emotion. Slaves are property, like chairs and cars. I don't have any sentimental feelings about chairs and cars. I replace them on a whim and if one breaks, I don't cry over it. It's an inconvenience, but not a major loss.

It's possible. Or maybe he doesn't give a damn, as in, he hasn't even considered the issue and just worries about his next meal, shower and whatever else mundane detail that people worry about. I am not so taken with myself as to think that various teachers come here scouting for students and specifically scouting and evaluating me from behind the scenes. In fact I am 99.9999% convinced that forums like this are ignored by all the famous so-called "teachers" (read: losers). It's a shame, because a lot of good could be created if these so-called teachers descended from their comfortable surroundings and mingled with the people, including and maybe especially on various internet forums. I have a feeling that many of them fear this place because if they come down here, they won't get their customary cushion of the undeserved respect. Instead they will be treated like anyone else (and this just won't do for these soft egos), and people like me will argue with them and show them to be either fools, or equally bad, not in any way superior to a nobody like me and their little scam will be exposed. That's absolutely true. This is why I am never without a teacher in reality. What this really amounts to is Vajrahridaya's suggestion that I find an acceptable teacher. See, this is not about me having no teacher. It's about me having a recognizable teacher with the various bona-fides and so forth. Conventional signifiers of authority and blessings. Things like that. I know this game well and I am the master of it. I think I must have run this scam myself in previous lives. Well, it was not exactly a scam, because I was sincere and wanted to help, but I was also deluded because I must have believed that for learning to occur, someone must be dominant (the teacher) and someone else must be submissive (the student). It just didn't occur to me that this mindset could do harm. But now that it occurs to me, I no longer stand for it. P.S.: My bowl of pop-corn is enormous. I can do this for a very long time.

So the first lesson is to get rid of the tassel. Got it. You really hate those tassels, don't you?

Promoting peace is a worthy cause, but being a shaman is not defined in political terms. To be a shaman means to be an intermediary between the human and the spirit worlds. If you're a rock musician who has fostered peace, maybe you deserve a Nobel Peace Prize, but you're not a shaman unless you can also enter the spirit world. Just a minor little detail.

I love this technique. I use it from time to time to relax my eyes and it works very well.

Good to know. Still, I've yet to read something from you that didn't slam the essence. While I share some of your enthusiasm in that area, I do think that at times, because you're so focused on finding essence-tainted thinking, that you can't see the forest for the trees. Sometimes it's good to take a step back and use normal language for a while. Buddhists have their own language. You must realize that. Buddhists have a ton of jargon and plus they have their own private meanings for many common words. Luckily I can speak 90% of the Buddhist language, and I say "luckily" because I do value Buddhist insights. When you hang out with Buddhists a lot and when you talk about Buddhists topics, you tend to forget the language of non-Buddhists. This has been my experience in the past.

When I look at Taoism as a practice and a philosophy of life as defined by the 3 great Taoist sages, I don't see anything there that is in any way inferior to Buddhism. Zhuangzi got interdependent arising covered, as far as I am concerned. I know this idea bothers the Buddhists a lot, because they like to think they have a monopoly on certain ideas. I like Taoism because it appears to be less formal and less dogmatic. Buddhism is a lot more dogmatic and structured. That's just my perception. Still, I do admire many Buddhist characters like Bodhidharma, various Chan/Zen patriarchs, Nagarjuna, Milarepa, Padmasambhava, Garab Dorge and I like Bonpo guys like Tonpa Shenrab/Tapihritsa, etc. And many others. If I list them all, it would be a very big list. I like some Native American and Siberian shamans and various odd people here and there, including some "Western" guys like Richard Bach.

OK Just like I wasn't talking about metaphysical essence when I was talking about awareness, but that didn't stop you from arguing with me anyway. You detest the essence so much, eh?

When you sit, not in meditation, but just sit on a couch eating chips and drinking beer, do you have eye strain? If the answer is no, then I can tell you that you are meditating incorrectly. If the answer is yes, please go see a doctor, because there is something wrong with your physiology if that's the case. I think the problem comes from your idea of "concentration". You probably believe it implies a kind of eye-squinting, brow-furrowing and vein-inflating strain. Instead of concentration, maybe try relaxation instead. Try to be natural, as if you are not meditating at all. Don't put a mental burden on yourself. Keep meditation informal.

Context goes beyond that which is obviously conscious. That's wrong. While awareness cannot be examined as something separate from phenomena, it is wrong to say that awareness is merely the phenomena that appear. I already explained why it's wrong and I am not going to repeat myself. The unmanifest is the context for the manifest. There is more to things than meets the eye.

Cosmos doesn't work in any particular way. It is empty, which means it is malleable and is in constant flux. This is absolute, total, pure, unadulterated, unalloyed bull fucking shit. Even a great being like me, who loves all beings to some extent, is nonetheless not sentimental about it and I do not love anyone more than those same people love themselves. That's just absurd. I am here for you every day. Tell your high and mighty master to join this forum and to mingle with us as one of us. We'll see how much they love us, or me in particular. I can't stand this kind of bullshit. These "masters" are regular sentient beings who have, if you're lucky, contemplated and meditated enough to have something to say of interest to others with the same interest as them. They are not anything more than that. I've been kind of easy on these guys in the past, but I'm going to be more critical of them going into the future. If these people are as altruistic as they claim to be, I'm going to demand more openness and more participation from them. These people need to come down here, into the market, and level with us. I come here and talk to you as one of you. I don't isolate myself and make you beat your way to my door. I don't tell you you need my teachings or else you're fucked. I would appreciate a similar attitude from these so-called "masters" and their willing peons. I want to see your master come here and tell me, straight to my face, than I need him to be my master. Let's see this happen. If your master truly believes he will benefit me as a master, let him come here and declare that. That will be more proper. As a master he can assess this much better than a half-baked student such as yourself. So let's see it.

This is pure bias. It's equally as valid to say that the formless realm is repressed by our obsession with the sense locations and that the formless realm has sway over us even if we do not acknowledge it. And yet Buddha didn't talk about the power of the formless realm to sway us... he chose the 5 aggregates because those are close to Gotama's and his listeners actuality at the time. You can also say that there are 10 aggregates and that you're repressing the other 5. And so on. I was trying to remove the shine from the Buddha, but every time I try that, you are unhappy. You really need your pet Buddha to shine and you need him to be right about everything. And you seek out teachers who best fit this immature and useless fetish of yours. By so doing you harm both yourself and those who claim to be your teachers. No shit? That's kind of why I said that. Vajra, I don't need anything. I'd be happy to be a friend of a good and realized person. I am free to learn from anyone. I can learn from a stone or from a conceited asshole like you. I don't need a realized teacher to enable my learning process.

What you call 5 aggregates are a feature that's particular to our current mentality. It's not something that's inherently thus. There are realms where sentient beings have no 5 aggregates. For example, formless gods realm. They don't have reified sense organs in that realm -- hence "formless". Furthermore, what would happen if your eyes were gouged out? Would the visual awareness disappear? No it wouldn't. Sense organs appear as a function of localizing yourself within a larger space. If you relax this need, what happens is that sense organs are no longer reified, and sensations can happen in very different, strange and mysterious ways. This kind of localization is just one of the many modalities that are possible. It's unfair to point to the artifacts of our current mentality as "the all". Buddha's intent was a little different in that Sutta. Basically some people were going around saying that there exist things beyond mind and beyond sensations and so on. Even many Dzogchen people commit this folly, which is a shame (seems like a regression, whereas in many ways Dzogchen is a nice progression). Buddha was just saying "if anyone claims that something exists independently of awareness, they are full of it." He refers to awareness using the features of our current mentality. I have no idea what you're talking about. Our chains consist solely in intention. For example, if you intend to go south, you cannot at the same time feel free to go north. That's the nature of the chain. It's self-created and has to do with your direction. But! It's also your freedom! In other words, you are free to go south. You are free to go north. In other words, each chain can be viewed as freedom and each freedom can be viewed as a restriction. For example, Buddhas are not free to have wondering and clingy minds. So being a Buddha is a kind of restriction. It's a limitation. So in Buddha's unbinding there is a different type of a bind. Obviously Buddha is not going to say, "What I am doing, from a certain points of view can be said to suck donkey balls, and those points of view are just as valid and worth considering." In other words, no one is going to cut the branch they sit on. Everyone tries to put their best leg forward, so to speak. Buddha believes in what he does, believes in his intent, and thus puts his best leg forward by saying what is so good about Buddha Dharma. This is only natural. We all try to sell what we believe is good to others. However, one should distinguish between what is good for some person, or what is good for some time, or what is good for some people, vs. what can at all, ever be good. Because this second consideration is limitless, but the first one is always more specific and more limited. Now with regard to awareness vs. phenomenon. Let's bring the breath to attention. When you feel the breath as a phenomenon, what is it you generally feel/experience? It's likely something fairly specific and localized. For example, if you bring your attention to your breath, it's not the same as your feet or your hair. So you feel something windy inside your body, something rubbing against your lungs and other airways, and maybe even feel a little windy feeling slightly outside the nostrils or something like that. This is the phenomenon of breath. But what is the silent, tacit context? It is this dependently originated continuum of tacit understanding about what it means for breath to be "breath": There is no breath without lungs. There are no lungs without the body. There is no body without something outside the body. There is no external reality without the universe. In other words, when you pay attention to the breath, even though you feel something fairly specific and concrete, the tacit context is huge and includes the whole universe as you know and understand it. In other words, if you feel even so much as the tip of a hair on your cheek, you feel the entire universe as you know it. And by universe I mean something very expansive, and not just something physical. I mean the universe of ideas. The universe of understood relations. And so forth. It's everything as you can know it (and beyond). So there is no breath without the lungs, but there are no lungs without the chest cavity, and no chest cavity without the body and no body without the functioning heart, and yet there is a clear difference between focusing on the breath and focusing on the heart. So phenomena should be distinguished from context. Context gives meaning to phenomena, and vice versa, phenomena give meaning to context, but they are not extremely similar, nor are they extremely different. When you say that phenomena appear within awareness you're acknowledging limitless possibilities. If you just say "phenomena appear", then the context is not clear and the possibilities are not obvious. And everything I just said is not dogma either. It's hopefully skillful for now, but not more than that. It's definitely not "how it really is" or anything like that. I disagree. Awareness is not simply manifestation. Awareness is manifestation that is surrounded by the unmanifest context. For example, when light manifests, darkness does not. And yet you know what light is because you know what darkness is, and so on. In other words, when you experience manifestations, you understand them in terms of what is not currently manifested. So awareness is beyond manifestation. And you need to fire that teacher that sent you that email.

Read the writings of the founder, Dogen Zenji. There is no substitute. Why would you read anything else if you cared about Soto Zen? http://www.wwzc.org/translations/oZanmai.htm http://www.wwzc.org/translations/zazengi.htm http://www.wwzc.org/translations/genjokoan.htm http://www.wwzc.org/translations/kuge.htm These are some of the writings of the founder of the Soto sect. And I believe these are good translations too. Always go to the source. It's not hard if you meditate and contemplate a lot. You can try asking questions if you have trouble understanding Dogen. I can't say I understand everything Dogen has to say, but if I see a question, I might try to help. I am sure there are some others here who could help too. Alternatively you can try contacting some established Soto Zen masters with your questions. Many of them would be happy to help you if your questions are sincere and you're not just entertaining idle curiosity. Don't be scared of Dogen. Even if you can't eat Dogen in a single meal, take a bite anyway.

There is no way to answer this correctly. Liberation cannot be summarized. It's not an attitude. It's not a state of some kind. It's not something that's separate from the states. Etc. Etc... If you will, liberation is a kind of mysterious maturation of one's reasoning faculties. Reasoning faculties are the ones that provide insight. Actually there is a spiritual practice of asking this question every time you get a chance. So you visit your spiritual master and ask this very same question. But each time your master gives a spontaneous and different reply. After hearing about 10,000 of those replies, you begin to get it.

Yes, this is much clearer. If I understand you correctly this time, you are saying that you don't want the woman to like you for something that can change. You want her to like you for the real you which does not change. Right? So for example, if the woman likes you because of a hobby and you lose interest in that hobby, then what happens? The woman leaves you, since she only liked the hobby and not you. But if the woman likes the "real you", even if you drop the hobby she will still love you. Isn't that wonderful? Then even if you change any of your behavior she will still love you. For example, if you begin to take drugs, she will love you. If you cut off your arm, she will love you. If you cut off your woman's arm, she will love you. If you run away from her she will love you. Why? Because she loves you permanently since you are a permanent and unchanging entity. So this will be the most reliable kind of love. It would mean you could do anything and still be loved. So is this what you want? By the way, do you love any woman in that manner that you want to be loved?

You don't want to do that. All phenomena arise within some larger context which is outside the phenomenon under attention. This is why awareness is more than just phenomena. Awareness points to the informational wholeness wherein some phenomenon or other is just one aspect. So talking about awareness has special meaning beyond just talking about phenomena. D.O. is an illusion though. It's skillful means that works well to bring the mind out of perceiving things in terms of substances. However, once you understand things to be insubstantial, DO must be dissolved via investigating DO itself as a well-defined process. Inquire whether or not DO has a stable identity and can always be identified as itself. Could you tell a dependently arisen object from an independently arisen one, if such things existed? See, dependency is taken for granted by materialists, that's why DO works well to trash their mindset. However, if you can understand beyond substance, is DO still true? Check it out. What gives conditions a status of certainty? What is the basis for conditions? Dependencies have the nature of appearances like rainbows appearing inside darkness or like the appearance of a tortoise fur. It's a grave mistake to think that things are apparitional because of conditions, but conditions themselves are really true -- this is like jumping from the fire and onto the grindstone. To say that awareness is the source is skillful means too. For whom? It is skillful for those who distinguish awareness from that which is thought to be outside of awareness. Again, materialists come to mind. Those guys think that objects exists inherently in and of themselves and sort of come into awareness haphazardly through the sense organs, but they might also just "stay there" and not come in. So for people who think that away, telling them about awareness and how it is the source of all things, it is illuminating and challenging. They have to fight very hard to understand the implications of this, to understand the uncertain and intimate nature of perceptions. Once they understand this, seeing awareness as the source makes no sense, since there is nothing "other than awareness". However awareness is still a damn useful idea and shouldn't be discarded. Not necessarily. You can have plenty of hang ups and problems left at that stage. Or, you can say it this way, living with pain and suffering is perfectly OK. If your "perfectly OK" includes everything, it is both correct and meaningless at the same time. Exactly. The same thing is true about all other aspects of Buddha Dharma, including DO. It's just skillful means and not dogma. And you have to keep in mind that skillful means only work against certain mentalities. They fail miserably if the right mentality is not there. For example, if you give tylenol to a healthy person, you can make them sicker. Medicine is not something that should be gobbled down without end. It should be used judiciously. This means one has to be honest about one's life. Is it really working for you in your life? Is the teaching transformational? If yes, use it. If not, don't use it. Skillful means work with our own prejudices. Buddha takes whatever prejudice and fixation you have and uses it skillfully against itself.