Creation

Alan Wallace was ordained by the Dalai Lama, ie. Gelug order. Long before "The Attention Revolution" he transcribed a Gelug Lama's Shamatha instructions: www.amazon.com/How-Practice-Shamatha-Meditation-Cultivation/dp/155939384X/ Also, I am not saying Alan Wallace made anything up without lineage precedent, I don't think he would do that. As you point out, what he is teaching comes from Dudjom Tersar. But there are many actively practiced Terma tradtions, and all I'm saying is that maybe Alan Wallce likes that one because it fits with the emphasis on Shamatha that he already had before he started practicing Dzogchen. Speculation aside, I still maintain that there are authentic Dzogchen teachers who do not emphasize intense Shamatha practice. But I'll stop trying to pontificate to you.

Alan Wallace teaches his own blend of Theravada, Nyingma, and Gelug. I respect him quite a bit, don't get me wrong, but I don't take his writings as the representing the traditional Nyingma view or the ultimate authrotiy on Dzogchen for that matter. For example, This is just not true. The text you quoted was referring to Dzogchen Semde. You had a preconceived view of Shamatha being integral to Dzogchen from Allan Wallace, so you read that in to this text. Shamatha is integral to Dzogchen Semde, but not necessarily all Dzogchen. Wallace teaches to use Shamatha and Vipashyana to get you to the point where you can practice Trekchod. That is one way of doing things. There are also others. Namkhai Norbu explains all three series (semde, longde, and mennagde) in his works, and if you have received transmission you can get books on how to practice each. From what I can tell, he focused more on Semde (four yogas, one of which is shamatha) more when he first started teaching in the West, now he emphasizes different practices.

I like to go on walks around my neighborhood. If I do this after an intense meditation session, whenever there are power lines above my head they make me feel really weird, even giving me a headache sometimes. What can I do about this?

I just had my first distance Pranic Healing treatment this morning, from my Pranic Healer friend who recently moved out of town. Definitely not fake.

In my experience, it is easy to get lost in a bunch of nonsense if you jump into the psychic world without having some sense of goundedness and letting go mental filters. As far as teachers go, I don't think he is saying no one can get anywhere without one; there are some naturally psychic people out there. Just that a guide for the territory will help you get somewhere beneficial and not get hurt.

If an attutude of being generous and open and humane is equivalent to tonglen, I imagine devout Theravdins practice Tonglen as well. Also, devout Christians, etc. I assume you would know if the formal practice of Tonglen existed in East Asian Buddhism, so I'll take this as a confirmation that it does not. I actually wasn't 100% sure.

I've never heard of Tonglen being practiced in East Asian Buddhism.

Bruce Frantzis himself addressed this in the interview he did for the Tao Bums, in reply to the question "Many Tao Bums who resonate with the material in your books yet are also interested in practices that work with Chi and Shen levels. What advice would you give to such seekers?" (starting on page 20). http://thetaobums.com/share/thetaobums-interview-with-bruce-frantzis_march-2011.pdf "Initially, when I left China, Liu Hung Chieh proposed that I first teach, download, put into the air, whatever way you want put it, the body practices of Taoism, the term is jing shi shen or body, energy, spirit and emptiness Tao. He said to initially put out the physical stuff and whatever chi and spirit aspects that were related to a person needed to be able to open up their body without leaving their body behind. The body practices in Taoism are for most people. Working with people at that level is a bit like going through concrete, especially at the psychic level, because most Westerners are so dead to their bodies. They are dramatically deader to their bodies than most “native” peoples around the world because we don’t really have a culture in the West of people feeling their bodies and having direct personal knowledge of their bodies. They know about their bodies as mental images of their body rather than actually feeling and being present inside their body. When we talk about the physical body, we’re discussing your flesh, then we’re discussing the chi that makes your flesh work and then we’re talking about the chi that makes your lower animal emotions work. So in a sense your internal organs generate emotions just like all of your neurotransmitters. Most people hear the word chi and they think that is the next phase of body, energy, spirit but in actuality, the chi of the body is still the body. When you talk about the term chi, you’re into the emotions, what lies behind the ability to create mental symbols, what lies at the bottom of the words, where all this thinking comes from and the entire psychic realm. I started teaching the energy of body-energy-spirit a couple of years after the millennium rolled around, sometime in 2003 or 2004 and it’s actually in many ways a lot easier teaching that. If a person is going to engage that level, then you have to start looking at what really lies behind not just ordinary emotions but what about their more subtle shades? What about higher emotions? What about the emotion of love, kindness, generosity, the ability to truly emotionally connect, the ability to truly emotionally nourish someone, and the ability to be emotionally nourished by someone. What about mentally? Where does your creativity come from? Where does the ability to know where that thought came from, before you start talking in your head about it. Then you start talking the whole psychic realm. At this level, you know you have external senses but do you know you have internal senses? You can obviously see something that you look at externally, for example, a wall or a picture. Well, what about when you see the future? What about when you can see energies inside people, etc., etc.? So just the same way you have internal hearing, you have internal senses. This is very well known. Buddhism very often talks about consciousness but they’re really referring to senses. In India, it is referred to as external senses and internal senses - you have five of each. Taoists have a very big thing about this but it simply gets rolled into the issue of chi. I do not expect personally for a while to be teaching about shen which are the issues of karma and what a person’s essence is beyond personality or whatever. To engage this, the middle stage of energy needs to be worked out and reasonably stable or there can be problems. However, when this energy is stabilized for my students I will be very happy to teach about shen. I believe safety first is a wise way to go. This is mostly because if you do not have sufficient body stability and stability with your chi, when you start answering questions in the psychic realm what we can say is that very few people can hang with it. If you want to really start going into karma, if you don’t have the subtle awareness of emotions behind thought and the psychic realm, it’s very, very hard to see anywhere where the karma of energy is abused. My advice to anybody who wants to learn the Chi and shen levels or Taoism is there’sonly one way to do it. You’ve got to start personally interacting with a live teacher. To think that you’re going to get it purely by reading is a bit of a problem because all those mental symbols will not take you into your body and all those mental symbols rarely, if ever, take a person to the place from where those mental symbols arise and can internally imprison you. All I can say is that I’m teaching as the years go by and we’re trying to get our filming and production to put out whatever materials, videos, audios and books are within my limited capacity to produce and generate. And if there are other authentic teachers out there who can get you to the same point all the better. It has been well known in the subject of rhetoric for hundreds of years, even thousands of years, that there can be a person who is intellectually an absolute genius and a totally emotional wreck in the psychic world. Mental IQ is not necessarily going to help you because psychic energy can take anybody’s ability to meditate and blow it up like a little bomb or more accurately, it is like having an EMF field all of a sudden scramble a computer’s hard drive and memory. That’s pretty much how it goes and do bear in mind when those things happen, the energies are running through your body and it’s not really good for you. It’s nice to be stable. This is a subject when you start going into the level of Chi, when you start going into the level of Spirit, you really need to be with someone who has been there and done that. It’s a bit like thinking, “I’m just going to start walking in the middle of the Canadian wood somewhere.” It really helps to have someone who actually knows, hey, don’t eat that berry, it’ll poison you or, listen, don’t walk over here or you’re going to get some big animal attacking you. The reason there have been teachers is not simply because they’re some exalted beings but simply that they have been there before and at least they have some idea of what’s going on so they can give the student some sort of needed context."

All right, I'll give it a go again as well. It really helps me to feel that others are doing this with me. I made it 12 days without masturbating and 16 days without ejaculating last time. Toward the end there I was so horny it was just ridiculous. Maybe with more concentration exercises and qigong I'll get further this time.

I imagine it depends on the transmission. It could also be from no location in the body. As for any particular Vajrayana transmission, I don't know.

I think that Wallace's teacher only gave him permission to publically teach shamatha and vipashyana. So he won't be coming out with a book on treckchod and thogal any time soon.

I think I may need to elaborate. When you go to a teacher of any kind, they can transmit knowledge to you in many ways. Through words, demonstrations, etc. Any particular method may or may not get the point across. One method is direct mind-to-mind communication. This isn't the most efficient way if the knowledge you are looking for is, say, how to fix your car, but if the subject pertains to the subtle levels of reality, this might be more effective, and at the very least accelerate your ability to understand. In particular, if the knowledge you are seeking is knowledge of your real condition, and the teacher has this knowledge, the methods used like visualization the teacher above the head, blessings pouring down, mingling of the mindstreams, etc. are trying to facilitate this kind of psychic contact. I'm no expert on Vajrayana, and I'm not trying to give teachings to anyone here, but to my way of thinking this is just as plain as day.

Any noteworthy dreams that night?

cat, We sure do like to read the same authors. Just a few days ago you were posting Mark Griffin and Jerry Stocking, now Robert Masters and Phillip Yancey! My first exposure to Masters was an interview posted here: http://thetaobums.com/topic/20822-spiritual-bypassing/ Thanks for the heads up about the new book. When I was an evangelical Christian, one of my three favorite Christian books was Yancey's "What's so Amazing about Grace?" I never read "The Jesus I Never Knew". I wonder what I would think of it now that my beliefs have changed so considerably?

As you say, a sangha of experienced practitioners and close relationship with one's teacher are ideal. What is at stake here is the mind connecting to another mind directly. All the visualizations etc. are methods of doing this. But genuinely understanding the level of reality on which such a thing is possible is another thing. People whose minds are very open to that level will have a different experience than those whose minds aren't. That's just part of their path, and it comes with it's unique challenges. All too often sanghas just tow the party line when presented with a problem that they don't understand. I think it was Trungpa Rinpoche who said that Sutrayana was like walking up the mountain, and Vajrayana was like being shot out of a cannon aimed at the top of the mountain. May all those who seek the blessings of the Vidyaharas have their aspirations fulfilled.

I wouldn't know about "generally speaking"; I don't know many practitioners. I am a Westerner who is devotionally inclined, so the idea of Guru Yoga is quite palatable to me.

Like I said to C T, that's how it's supposed to work. Look, every kind of practice has the potential to not work the way it is supposed to. Denial of this will just alienate the people who are having difficulty. I believe the general term in Vajrayana for the kind of thing I am pointing toward is "obstacles".

It would be nice if everything always worked the way it's supposed to, but sometimes it doesn't.

I just want to point out that Malcolm's statements are from the perspective of Tibetan medicine. As snowmonki and others have pointed out many times on this forum, the view of the body/energy body in TCM doesn't always agree with the view of the body/energy body in the highest echelons of Taoist alchemy. The relation of Tibetan medicine and Dzogchen is surely analogous.

I realize it is ridiculous for me to recommend a book about sex to you, so thanks for playing along. I think you'll really like it. I am realizing how much of an information glutton I am. Thanks for setting a good example in that regard. Robert Augustus Masters is awesome!

Plus there are so many books, DVDs, and CDs available to those who have obtained transmission from Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche to learn actual practices to to induce the knowledge of one's natural state if they don't get it straight away. Rinpoche's teachings are an amazing resource.

From two of Bohm's collaborators: "The world we seem to live in - the world of classical objects, the world of Newtonian physics - Dave referred to as the ‘explicate order.’ He felt that what we take for reality is only one particular level or perception of order. And underneath that is what he called the ‘implicate order,’ the enfolded order, in which things are folded together and deeply interconnected, and out of which the explicate order unfolds. The explicate is only, you could say, the froth on top of the milk and the implicate order is much deeper. It includes not only matter, but consciousness; it’s only in the explicate order that we tend to break them apart, to see them as two separate things. Dave spent a great deal of time in the last decades of his life trying to find a mathematical expression for this vision of reality." F. David Peat "Thus, there exists the possibility of a whole series of noncompatible explicate orders, none being more primary than any other. This is to be contrasted with the Cartesian order in which it is assumed that the whole of nature can be laid out in a unique space–time for our intellectual examination. Everything in the material world can be reduced to one level. Nothing more complicated is required. This is why it was such a shock when it was first realized that quantum mechanics requires a principle of complimentarity. Here, we are asked to view complementarity as arising from uncertainty principle operating within the Cartesian framework. However, it is not merely an uncertainty; it is a new ontological principle that arises from the fact that it is not possible to construct a piece of physical apparatus that will allow one to display complementary properties together. Within the Cartesian order, complimentarity seems totally mysterious. There exists no structural reason as to why these incompatibilities exist. Within the notion of the implicate order, a structural reason emerges and provides a new way of searching for explanations." Basil Hiley For more on Bohm's ideas: helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/37374/Futura_2_2012_Pylkkanen.pdf?sequence=2 www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/PWT/lectures/bohm8.pdf My views on how all this ties into a conceptual framework for the subtle levels of reality is something I have synthesized from reading a good deal on physics and cultivation, plus my own experiences. So there is nothing to read on it until I write it. But the material on the mind-matter connection in the above articles is a good starting point.

I can't praise it enough. It's not just about sex, it's about the Taoist path in general, the various topics unified by the common thread of sexuality. Frantzis trained for years in a left-hand Taoist sect, and he brings an incredible amount of knowledge and experience to his writing. There is information on techniques for enhancing ordinary sex, synergy between taiji, qigong, etc. and sex, Taoist morality, five phase personality and compatability, all sorts of useful stuff. But when it gets into sexual qigong and sexual meditation it really shines: It is nothing short of astounding to me that information about inter-personal energy work and meditation at that high of a level is available in print. Check out the table of contents here: http://www.energyarts.com/sites/default/files/Taoist-Sexual%20Meditation-Table-of-Contents.pdf

cat, have you checked out Bruce Frantzis' book "Taoist Sexual Meditation"?

I went to a New Agey place this weekend hoping to meet some spiritually minded people. There were several people who seemed to be making spiritual progress following their path, and I felt like I "clicked" with them on a personal level as well. I looked at their book shelf and there were a bunch of books about Kundalini, Quantum Physics, and the teachings of the Buddha. These are three subjects that I happen to have researched extensively, and as such it seemed to me that these books did not actually have much to do with the traditional understanding of these subjects. That is my personal "bias against the New Age". All these strongly judgmental and condemning thoughts came to my mind, and a sense that I was better than them because I had the correct understanding of these subjects. Those thoughts occur to me when ever I come across New Age stuff, and I don't think too much of it. But in this case I was especially strongly convicted of my own pride and arrogance, because there I was trying to befriend these people, and yet I was looking down my nose at them.