sean

Thanks. Likewise. Sean

I'm sure there are dozens of ways to personify it all. I think a funny sexual implication of how I like to frame it is that I see emptiness as yin, which explains why masculine essenced men tend to seek it ... ultimate release into a soft open space, whereas form is yang, which is why feminine essence tends to seek it, becoming filled up with something firm, loving, tangible. Something like that.

Light could be described as the feminine side of the form/emptiness coin. I think emptiness is kind of a manly quest kind of thing. Adyashanti says "Light -- " ... well actually he says Love but I equate the two ... ok, he says "Love is the first movement of emptiness". But he is a dude, a woman might word this differently, with the emphasis more on the Love side. I find both to be so so important. Devotion and Stillness. Compassion and Emptiness. I think without a deepening into both, things get really wacky. On the emptiness side it just leads to deadness. Maybe what SeanD is calling Pratyeka. Adyashanti refers to it as being stuck in emptiness. It's really a wrong turn. The sense of no-self turns into an identification with witness-as-self which is actually a colossal aggrandizement of self, not emptiness at all. Think of, like, a hardcore zen guy who just meditates all the time but forces himself to be this kind of detached asshole to everything. Emptiness is in a dynamic tension with Love, or relationship. Emptiness is only possible because of fullness. This is a nondual view. It's not that first there is this beautiful emptiness at peace and then these damn ten thousand things swarm out of it to piss the quietists off. The existence of emptiness is dependent upon the ten thousand things. Both are eternal. Both co-arise together in an eternal moment. Reality is compound. On the too far on the Light side there is danger too, I think mainly of just getting so lost in relationship to everything coming up in awareness that awareness of the space things arise in is obscured. You become immersed. Think of a woman who is just totally not present, flitting from one whim to the next, crying one minute, laughing hysterically the next. No bigger picture. No stability. As Adyashanti says, "you're sunk". Sean

Pero, I agree. Lot's and lot's of teaching strategies. I find that some teachings are better pointers than others, but I can only really speak for my own experience. The point of meditation is the same point as anything as looking for the meaning of anything deeply enough leads you to the ultimate questions such as the Western favorite "What is the meaning of life?" The ultimate point can't be defined because it's alive in this very moment, in this very transaction between us right this second. In order to articulate an ultimate point to anything, to yourself or to someone else, you have to choose a reference point, which is a rapidly disintegrating abstraction. An analogy is like being asked by someone "Where is Tai Shan mountain?" Well, ideally you can just point in the direction of the mountain. The person asking the question still has to take the journey and go to the mountain to have the question answered, but you are doing the best you can. Metaphorically speaking, I think a lot of people will end up just looking at your finger, so even direct pointing is flawed (as you've pointed out ). But I think there is even more potential for confusion inherent to trying to formulate a coherent reference point with words because, to continue with the analogy, this would be like picking a cloud drifting through the sky and saying "See that cloud over there? Well the mountain is northeast of that cloud". That cloud won't be there the next day, so unless she can really follow through the whole abstraction, the directions are not given at all. In fact much confusion follows when this beautiful young woman and all of her sexy friends are at the same spot the next day and now they are looking for a particular cloud instead of the mountain. (Hey, it's my story. ) It's totally a contradiction for the mind. The mind does either-or. It's just a tool that has limitations like everything. All of this genuine awakening enlightenment language folds, pulls, expands and collapses on itself. It's alive in way the mind can't get a handle on, the way mind-tools do. No big deal. Minds don't really have a whole lot to do with what happens in our life anyway. Our lives unfold in a deep mystery. This is what I mean by saying we have no control. When we try to control things, that is almost always are mind getting involved. And our minds have so very little say in how our destiny unfolds. A distinction between awake and enlightened may be useful. (Who knows, I am winging this). I think we are all already awake. This is our access to pure, timeless awareness in any moment. It's what is aware of experience without any judgment or concern or interference. It's untouchable. Each of recognizes this awakeness to varying degrees. As we are drawn into a deepening of awakeness, ie: via skillful means, at some point there is a deep recognition of unity that occurs that there is no returning from. As Joshu said, "Suddenly I was ruined and homeless." This seems to be capable of happening suddenly or gradually. But the belief in an abiding self is torn apart for good. Or so the story goes. This how my mind currently tends to think of enlightenment, though I really prefer not to get hung up on concepts or take things I don't understand very seriously. So, the Sage, by not striving for greatness, Achieves greatness. -- Laozi There is always a higher teaching. There is always a more evolved teacher. There is always a more evolved you. There is always room for advancement. There is always room to embody truth more deeply. There is always something being left out or under emphasized. There is always something missing. There is always misinterpretation. There is alway space for clarification. There is always something bigger and better. There is always a way to make a hierarchy out of anything. There is always "what's next?" There is always something moving. There is always evolution. But where is silence in this unending cacophony? Where is there stillness within this infinite dance? Where ever is there to rest in this constant commotion?! ... ?! Nowhere. Sean

Nice post. Here is my perspective. The teachings that can be most credibly traced to Buddha himself, the man, not the legend or the God, are the Pali canon. In the Pali canon the Buddha teaches, essentially, a single approach to meditation. There is really no mention in the Pali canon of the Buddha engaging in convoluted esoteric practices. There also isn't this firm distinction made between stabilizing tranquility practices and insight practices as the Tibetans are fond of teaching. The Tibetans have a particular style, but it's probably not authentically what the Buddha was originally teaching. Not that this really matters, who knows? maybe the Tibetans made things better. I'm sure they have for some beings, but this is just an FYI. Really though, the Buddha just simply sat under a tree with utter resolve. That's it. No method. No secret teaching. He just wanted to be free of suffering with all of his being. That's what it takes. No matter how cool your library is, no matter how much you think you know, how tremendously powerful your teachers are, and how arcane your esoteric knowledge, IMO it all just boils down to, do you really want to be free or not? No one can give that to you. You can't learn that. You can't even make yourself have it. It just comes or it doesn't. Also, one more clarification. My intention here is not to use words and thinking to try and grasp direct truth. My intention is to point to an experience of direct truth that is always accessible. This is my experience and the experience is accompanied with a sense of incontrovertible truth and clarity that it is unlike anything else. It's untouchable. The experience (it's actually not an experience at all - but attempting to language this sounds ridiculous) is humbly much much bigger, though also much simpler, than the words chosen as pointers. Sean

This is what I'm getting at. A recognition of no-self. There is no fixed location where a self resides. There are just habits. Habits of perception. In energetic terms a habit that occludes natural flow is a blocked flow. Natural flow is without fixed reference point. Like the wind. No-self is really more like no-executive. No-self is really another way of saying infinite selves, infinite diversity, in dynamic, inseparable relationship. Allow me to ramble, this isn't necessarily directed to you Trunk, or anyone else specifically, I just feel drawn to clarify. There is a very common human habit of perceiving as if there were a fixed location, ie: in the head somewhere - behind the eyes. The sense is that this place is where all our perceptions get filtered through and where major decisions get made. The sense is that this is where the "real you" is and there is often a strong accompanying identification. "This is ME." Yet this sense of a fixed location ME is just a sense amongst many other senses. It just happens to be arising so frequently, and without insight into the fact that the "fixed" location is not only not fixed at all, but can never be found. (What is looking for it?) This is what Buddhists and Taoists and many other great contemplative traditions call delusion. "In humans the 5 spirits arrive (from ancestors, Heaven or Dao) to animate a developing fetus, take residence in/near the 5 yin organs, dwell within the body during life and depart/disperse unchanged and certainly undead at the moment of so-called death. Together they give us the phantom impression of being alive as a solitary and abiding self. This delusional impression comes from what might be called a lack of reflection on our components and their relationships and the exertions and outflows of qi that result." --- Liu Ming There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the sense that there is a fixed reference point for "self" or "you" or "I". It's just a sense that arises and crowds out deeper truth. Like a noisy neighbor that interupts your silence for so long, it's forgotten to exist. All that it really takes to see an insight into this is to just try to find a fixed location where your self is. "Where am I?" Truly try to pinpoint a self. This is a scientific method of contemplative spirituality. Maybe you think there is a self or all this sounds really abstract and far out. Fair enough. So look! And the answer is immediate. Do by not doing. Practice by not practicing. "This advice is not about being passive or lazy but relaxing the compulsion to be active, busy, successfull. It suggests relaxing the subjectivity of your life/path/practice. This subjectivity is based on the false notion of an abiding self - an extremist view that we are the masters of our destiny and/or the creators of our life in some absolute sense. Laozi challenges the roots of such false views. Dao, nature itself, and de, self-nature (common to all beings/things), are mutually arising in an interwoven experience too vast to comprehend. Relaxation of our subjectivity and our compulsive activity describes entry into Laozi's transcendent and yet constant naturalness where Daode is our experience." -- Liu Ming Sean

I think you got 8 on one of the online tests didn't you?

Yeah, I was leaning toward six with five wing.

Hmmm... have we considered that "meanie" and "not meanie" are not mutually exclusive contradictories but instead are in a dynamic relationship of dialectical opposition? My guess is... SeanD is either an eight or a six on the enneagram. Am I right or am I right, Sean? Sean

I think you'd have to go into theoretical physics to hear the kind of interconnection concepts you are getting at. Cognitive scientists I've read don't really talk about things like that. What I like about science, particularly cognitive science, and I had a discussion with Todd on the forum about this recently, is how it can slap my hidden desires for unsupportable new age fantasies in the face ... making me recognize that the mystery can be much deeper than my beliefs. In this sense I still say the best introduction for the "Western mind" to the concept of no-self is "Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett. I've only recently been introduced to U.G. Krishnamurti, but intuitively speaking Dennett is like a calm, logical, not pissed off version of U.G. Krishnamurti without even the spiritual context U.G. has, that still lets you still weasel around and hold on to "spiritual beliefs", despite his rantings otherwise. What beliefs are we holding on to about the way we really want the mystery to be? Is the mystery gentle / violent? Does it care / not care about our feelings? Is the mystery even "spiritual"? What does the word spiritual mean to you? Is there even a mystery at all, as Taomeow provocatively suggests? I've noticed that spiritual communities tends to, in one way or the other, sweep the more disturbing aspects of "no-self" under the rug. Exalt a witness state or a "higher self", or a soul in heaven, or, here's a good one, a future perfected enlightened self ... and ten thousand other attempts to spiritualize the REALITY that there never was is or will be a separate YOU. That's the whole Teaching. There is no individual reading this. There is no you that wants anything. There is no you that needs to be perfected. There no that can even do anything. What if what the Buddha and many many many other beings tapped into is not mystical or spiritual at all. It's just tended to be framed in the only language capable of communicating something so abstract, namely, philosophical language, which historically tended to be the domain of religion. It's only recently these roles have separated in the West. What if enlightenment is just the simple recognition that the appearance of an I and a you co-arises from a pandemonium of concurrent, purely mechanical processes through which a sense of a separation emerges but in reality there is none at all. Just thoughts... Sean

Via The Radical Middle Turn off The O'Reilly Factor. Take Al Franken's book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them back to the bookstore. It can be satisfying to think of our political opponents as unprincipled and corrupt, and a threat to democracy and decency, but what kind of dialogue are we creating? And what kind of world do we expect to come from that? Most Americans aren't nearly as polarized as the media suggest. Most of us aren't at some mushy middle point either. Talk -- really sit down and talk -- with your neighbors, colleagues, friends, and here is what you'll find: There is a hunger in this country for a new kind of politics. There is a hunger for a politics that can take us beyond the usual venomous blame games in Washington, D.C. There is a hunger for a politics that appreciates the genuine and often very reasonable concerns of the left and right, and builds on them toward something new. There is a hunger for a politics that's idealistic but without illusions, a politics that dares to suggest real solutions to our biggest problems but doesn't lose touch with the often harsh facts on the ground. There is a hunger for a politics that expresses us as we really are -- practical and visionary, mature and imaginative, sensible and creative, all at once. Our politics today doesn't express either our practical, grounded side or our visionary, creative side. It is all about the short term, not the long term. It is all about blaming others for our problems, not about turning our problems into opportunities by addressing them in the forthright, imaginative ways you know we can.

SeanD, if your teachers truly have the intention to share genuine wisdom openly with the world at large, why are their systems closed? Why are their methods kept secret? This is why I lost my patience with Dr. Emoto's work, as intriguing as I initially found it. When I was watching "What the Bleep?" and the water crystals scene came on, I was so filled with amazement at the implications! I immediately paused the DVD and went to my computer and spent the next four hours googling for any information on how these tests were conducted. Eventually I realized it was a futile search and gave up. He has not released his methods. He just publishes new books with pretty pictures and New Age hand holding and goes on book tours. So no one with academic credentials can verify or duplicate his results. That is how real science works as I'm sure you know. Until Dr. Emoto details his approach and publishes in peer reviewed journals I will continue thinking he is a fraud. It's one thing to teach methods of personal, existential inquiry into the nature of reality and consciousness. This is outside the realm of what external science can measure. But making specific claims about material reality, such as "I have altered the molecular properties of water with my energy field" is very much within the domain of science. And having a claim like this validated, I agree with you, would have profound implications, much like you've described. And it's for these exact reasons, the enormously positive impact that the scientific validation of these miracles would have on public consciousness, that I become highly skeptical and even angry at teachers who make powerful claims that would radically alter human paradigms for the good, but then cannot even bother to take a single week out of their exhausting Tai Chi in the park schedule to bring their skills to the light of scientific scrutiny. WTF?! To return to a positive note, again, it's refreshing to hear that your teacher is at least sharing the results of his work with the scientific community. The problem of course is that, for the outside skeptic, validating unique properties of this water sent in to a lab won't mean shit because the act of transformation of the water by the healer himself was not done in a controlled environment. Sean

I really like this idea of letting music and even teacher's voices vibrate my drinking water. That is so cool.

Via The Independent To scientists, he is the world's happiest man. His level of mind control is astonishing and the upbeat impulses in his brain are off the scale. Now Matthieu Ricard, 60, a French academic-turned-Buddhist monk, is to share his secrets to make the world a happier place. The trick, he reckons, is to put some effort into it. In essence, happiness is a "skill" to be learned. His advice could not be more timely as tomorrow Britain will reach what, according to a scientific formula, is the most miserable day of the year. Tattered new year resolutions, the faded buzz of Christmas, debt, a lack of motivation and the winter weather conspire to create a peak of misery and gloom. But studies have shown that the mind can rise above it all to increase almost everyone's happiness. Mr Ricard, who is the French interpreter for Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, took part in trials to show that brain training in the form of meditation can cause an overwhelming change in levels of happiness. MRI scans showed that he and other long-term meditators - who had completed more than 10,000 hours each - experienced a huge level of "positive emotions" in the left pre-frontal cortex of the brain, which is associated with happiness. The right-hand side, which handles negative thoughts, is suppressed. Read the rest

Hey, if you send me the pic to [email protected], I will resize and upload for you. Nice post SeanD, this is very interesting news. Please keep us posted if you hear more from the professor's investigation of this water. Sean

LOL. They are generated based on how many posts you have. I made up a list of titles in about 3 minutes, they are pretty silly. If you can think of a creative hierarchical list of titles that users get as they make more and more posts please do.

Interesting. In a strange way this reminds me of a class one of my Taoist teachers, Liu Ming, held called "The Wolf Speaks". There is a writeup and an mp3 of it on here somewhere. "Fear is the very thing that you do not want to be free from. If the fear comes to an end, you will drop dead physically. Clinical death will take place." -- U.G. Krishnamurti Thanks for the post. I had not been exposed to much short of a few quotes from U.G. Krishnamurti before. Sean

Nice post. IMO - Now, like Here and Tao are just common ways realized teachers point to what is. Stillness and Motion, Emptiness and Form, yin and yang -- all imagined separation is in a dynamic relationship that can be recognized and felt and yet the mind can never grasp and make sense of. In order to communicate the recognition of Tao, which itself is a questionable idea, teachers look for deep and subtle words to point to That which is beyond duality (and also is duality). Stillness, Oneness, Emptiness - these are more masculine ways of pointing so they are more common since there have been more men AFAIK who have produced overt teachings of a spiritual path. It's not really the words though. The mind can warp any description. Hou Tian can just as easily be held statically in the mind as Xian Tian. Recognition may come easier to some via pointers such as God, Love, Infinite Flow ... even Chaos (Hun-Tun) ... even no words, a physical gesture, a single flower held up. Sean

I think Super Mario Brothers 2 is my favorite game. You can play it for free on your PC with an emulator like fceu and download the Super Mario Brothers 2 ROM here. God I love this game.

Dangit. Not available outside of UK.

F9F4S3SazUU

13-18.

Hey, welcome. I like your name a lot.