Creation

You've ragged on me about the importance of traditional verification methods before, and the reason I don't put as much faith in these as you in the context of sudden awakening methods is because people can be given authorization, for essentially social or political reasons, or refused it when they actually deserve it for the same. (This doesn't apply to the kind of practice where success gives physically verifiable transformations.) You mentioned the traditional Buddhist criterion of decrease in negative mindstates as a sign of accomplishment which would be necessary to teach, I counter with the case of Trungpa Rinpoche. Now, if all I had was the self reporting of people on the internet to select who I will learn from, I would be in a sorry place indeed. Traditional authorization and moral vehavior are things I do give weight to, as well of other types of evaluation .

You're making this about Yang, I really don't want it to be. I refuse to give my personal opinion on his personal history or lifestyle, because that's beside the point. It's about the experiences common to all people claiming MCTB/Daniel Ingram definition 4th path, which is what was clearly described in that article. If you think Yang hasn't really experienced this, or to the extent that he has, it is solely due to drugs and mental illness rather than meditation, I don't care. Ingram himself seems to accept that Yang has experienced the same shift as him from his practice, but it makes no difference. If you think experiences of perceptual boundaries permanently dropping mean nothing because people have them on psychedelics, I guess experiencing unconditional universal love is meaningless because it's similar to what some people experience on MDMA. Or loosing the body and experiencing a sense of infinitude is meaningless because some people experience it on DMT. If you keep making it about either Frank Yang's lifestyle, or psychedelics in general, I won't be discussing this with you any more. This is about people putting in serious hours on the cushion and having serious changes to perception as a result. Serious questions to ask are: what is the traditional Daoist or Buddhist view of such perceptual shifts? What is the value or risk of such shifts? What is the relation of such shifts to what other paths value, such as hard jhana, development of virtue, or energetic development? Etc.

I wish I could. It's mystery to me. I'll defer to freeform's response to the article I posted to explain the difference from what Ingram is describing.

No, I don't, sorry if that was unclear. Where are all these people whose perception permanently lacks center or boundary after one ayahuasca trip? If we can't agree this is something nontrivial, then there not much to be discussed.

I'm not sure why I'm spending my time defending Frank Yang, but really, I think you're being rather uncharitable here. He talks about doing ayahuasca like 2 times and doesn't recommend it for serious practitioners. And can you blame a person for saying they awakended kundalini when they experienced exactly what others told them kundalini is? Just as freeform said. And speaking of: If you'd like to read the article I linked, you can see an extremely sober and rational discussion of the perceptual shift in question. Then we can separate out what is being claimed from the deliberately bombastic youtube-influencer style presentation that has triggered you.

All I'm saying is that he self reports to have the same permanent perceptual shift as the fellow in the article I posted, and the same as Daniel Ingram, and I see no reason to doubt this particular claim. I didn't make any other claim about him, about his character, if he is an "arhat" (lol), if anyone should like him, listen to him, respect him, etc. We all know you can have various perceptual shifts and still have all sorts of issues, so...

A very fair assessment. I've been talking to someone who will be studying full time at Damo's Bali school who got some of these shifts from these types of practices, and he said something similar, that he never touched on anything like what Damo calls soul or spirit. But for the record, this is what Ingram and Frank Yang are claiming to attain, and calling arhatship. (At the very least, in Yang's case, it's not just a bipolar delusion IMO). Just for your reference. These kinds of shifts, as far as I can tell, are also emphasized about in schools of Buddhism that emphasize sudden awakening - certain types of Chan/Zen, Mahamudra, and Dzogchen. Though they also emphasize an initial shift into something totally beyond mind, the pure consciousness that knows all experience, in a way that Ingram's material doesn't. I suspect this is at least an aspect of soul or spirit. Among these, only Dzogchen has a track record of building on these realizations to attain rainbow body though.

Allow me to run something by you, a very thoughtful description of the permanent shift in perception that occurred for someone at the far end of the path Ingram teaches: https://medium.com/@rogerthis/centrelessness-boundarylessness-phenomenology-and-freedom-from-the-cage-of-the-mind-4bccbf65c539 Would you let me know what you think of this, and what it has to do, if anything, with real Dharma as you understand it?

Ingram's influence is due to his book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and his forum Dharma Overground, which initiated the Pragmatic Dharma movement some 15 years ago. The reason he just talks about phenomena and magick on podcasts these days is because the influence of this work is already so complete and pervasive among Buddhists whose primary exposure to meditation instruction is through the internet. He is an emergency room physician who is extremely technical and emphasizes good maps of the territory experienced in meditation, who simultaneously takes the possibility of massive perceptual shifts that can result from meditation seriously while being skeptical of traditional claims that as a result of these shifts you will be unable to take certain actions or feel certain emotions. This appeals to highly technical and rational people; as Wilhelm said, he inspired thousands to take up very serious meditation practice, and explore dramatic shifts in consciousness and perception, who would have otherwise been completely uninterested in Buddhism. The author of famous Bayesian Rationalist blog Slate Star Codex is a high profile example. As I mentioned, his practice lineage is through Mahasi Sayadaw, who considers jhana unimportant, only the progress of insight through vipassana is considered important. Much of what he describes as the results (and the non-results, as mentioned above) of his practice match what certain Buddhist non-duality authors I like say, who also emphasize insight to the exclusion of (hard) jhana, energy practices, or other aspects of the path, thought the practices Ingram utilizes (from Mahasi) are completely different and don't personally appeal to me.

The Mahasi Sayadaw lineage equates stream entry with cessation experience. Ingram's practice was in this lineage, and he took his cue from them when he equated permanent dropping of the subjective center of experience with arhatship.

This is a fabrication and of no relevance to discussions of actual Tibetan practices.

Oh, I should specify, for completion stage specifically, eg tummo and manipulations of the drops, and also thogal, because those are the practices related to "internal skill". For instance, in anuyoga visualization is less important even in the generation stage, one would expect this is even more the case for the completion stage, that as genuine feeling develops, the visualization falls aside. Not that visualization might not still be used in other ways.

I saw Mizner as dismissing visualization for developing "internal skill", something with a very technical meaning, while also allowing for it's effectiveness as mind training (which he divides into something potentially useful and something that conditions you to propagate dogma). As far as internal skill is concerned, seeing as some Tibetans have it (rainbow body being an extreme example), the question is, did the ones who have developed actually internal skill do so relying entirely on visualization, or was it a type of training wheels that they eventually discarded? The other point I want to mention, which I actually think the most salient with regard to the role of visualization in Vajrayana, is that Vajrayana is geneologically a path of sorcery. And even @freeformhas said that visualization is important and powerful for such paths. I am genuinely mystified by this not being discussed when talking about the role of visualization in Vajrayana. Perhaps because this origin has been edited out in presentations to Westerners.

Perhaps Mahamudra and Dzogchen practitioners will see why he finds common ground between those practices and what he practices, given that quote? But the major (very major indeed) difference that I can discern is the fact that he is saying to completely absorb into this empty clarity, whereas Mahamudra and Dzogchen emphasize seeing it as nondual from it's objects, what Mizner calls "thinking you know water when you have only tasted it mixed with milk."

Oh come now, this isn't so recent or unique to others' paths as that - what dwai described aptly describes Vajrayana's self identity. Vajrayana has been positioning itself as the highest path for a good thousand years, cavalierly setting up and knocking down straw man ideas about "sutra" Buddhism. And it generated a lot of buzz.

Intense hatha yoga, partner dancing, and looking after my nutrition/food choices are what took me from feeling completely nonfunctional at regular life to feeling much more capable in regular life activities. So here's at least one person who isn't laughing when you suggest this.

As far as I've been able to determine, the most correct term for someone inclined to physics for what Damo is talking about is "center of elastic tension".

It can be hard to remember what Damo has said in publically available material, but I'm fairly certain he has mentioned the jing hua in a YouTube video addressing misconceptions regarding sexual practices. Jing hua is the yang line in the middle of the kan trigram, which is what the firing process is extracting from the jing, and this is the energy within the jing that is used to create life. I don't think that was mentioned in White Moon.

I misremembered, it was Bhutan, not Nepal, he mentions it at the end of this talk. Another neidan practitioner in this forum's history, whose name I can't recall at the moment, mentioned this same thing many years ago, so it's not just Damo saying this.

Of course, it's not like the process makes you jing deficient in CM terms, but it does apparently make you sterile (per Damo's Nepal lecture), so some function within the body is indeed being rerouted to something else. Maybe this is the reason for the use of the term converted. Just speculation, I'm not the type of experience practitioner you requested to answer.

Some timely videos on this matter: A chat between my main two non-duality teachers, where one very clearly describes the first shift into pure consciousness starting at 16:49, and then goes on to describe the shift into beyond consciousness from 22:34-27:16. Check it out if you 10 minutes and the interest: Noteworthy is that he describes the first shift as "what everyone wants" and the second as "not something anyone would want". And another video where he and his partner talk about a further shift (in Buddhist terms, it is the shift from no-self to twofold emptiness): Almost everyone who even talks about these kinds of subtleties is doing so in an intellectual and philosophical way, Chandrakirti's reasoning and if something can escape it etc., but here is a clear description of different phases of actually experiencing it. To me, that is very precious.

No, it's quite the same, from the perspective that I am attempting to represent. The view that there is a substratum behind the rest of experience, whether Consciousness, Brahman, or Buddha Nature, is exactly what is being questioned. What isn't questioned is that pure knowing consciousness is present in all experience, just its ontological status. In his interview with Andrew Holocek, Swami S said that the Shentong view is the same as Vedanta, but IIRC he admitted that the Rangtong view is not the same. Because, of course, Shentong says that emptiness/dependent origination doesn't apply to nondual consciousness aka the perfected nature. Maybe I'll find time to watch that video if you think he says something in it that wasn't covered in the Holocek interview.

Whatever ghzi is is above my pay grade. All I know is that people in trust and respect say that the tendency to make the knower into the background or substratum can be released, and doing so makes the knowingness that was formerly perceived as a background to sink back into becomes spontaneously amd effortlessly present in every atom of experience, in which case everything is spontaneously and effortlessly perceived as primordially pure and luminous. And if you want to talk about gzhi or tathagatagarbha, I think the explanation from this perspective is that it refers to this way of experiencing, rather than a substratum.

The people I talk to that speak of a realization "beyond" the realization of consciousness are not talking about a "thing", level, or stratum of reality beyond consciousness. Instead, it is a realization that consciousness is not beyond, outside of, or in any way prior to the rest of experience, but is dependently originated just like everything else. Even more ironically, they say that this realization is what makes the experience of pure consciousness (pure knowingness/beingness) spontaneously present in all experience, rather than something you must withdraw into.

Hi Bogge, "spiritual" can mean different things to different people, but I can say that I also am primarily oriented to spirituality, and that the first year of Damo's program is very physical and mechanical, so coming from a primarily Buddhist background I didn't think it was very "spiritual". For me, there was some amount of faith that the work would eventually help with and lead to something more spiritual, just like I had faithfully practiced hatha yoga for years in faith that it was a good physical foundation for more subtle work despite it being so body focused. The second year starts getting into more subtle work, with qi, mind, and jing refinement. Also, be advised that Damo is very irreverent and has no inclination whatsoever to devotional practices, so depending the type of spiritual practice you are inclined to, he might rub you the wrong way. I have recommended to several people two give the first two months a try to get a sense for the system and format, if it's not for you, unsubscribe.