sean

My second post was locked as well, despite a rather pleasant conversation occurring and no argument whatsoever. Apparently even so much as asking how the physical and spiritual intersect on RMAX is "flame bait" and "obscene, prejudicial and inflammatory". My God, are we in the dark ages or what?

Scott's responses were definitely a shock to me, but not entirely. I have sensed a degree of fundamentalism from him and his community in the past. I frequent his forum and can't recall ever seeing someone disagree with Scott and him responding with "Hmmm, I never thought of that, good point". Resistance to being in a place of uncertainty. I guess we all have it. And we all have our sore spots and lose our temper. But damn, I haven't seen a knee-jerk reaction this ridiculously over the top since I flipped out on Lozen for calling science bullshit. (Sorry again Lozen ) Anyway, predictably the thread was locked after Scott's last word. I continued pursuing my original questions and received even-tempered responses from other members of his community here: http://www.circularstrengthmag.com/forum/v...p?p=75142#75142 Morale: CST is great for fitness. Then you can start climbing Maslow's hierarchy on your own with other things that you should keep to yourself because you can't prove them in court. Sean

Happy late birthday! I didn't realize yours was so close to mine. Two fire filled Aries. When you get a chance, PM me your address again, I wanted to send you some things. Sean

Thank you everyone! I think this year is going to be a big one for me. Lot's of stuff coming together for me. It feels really strange to be 30 though, it'll probably take me the whole year to get used to this. Thanks again! Sean

Congratulations Hagar! Gorgeous gorgeous news. You will be a great father. And part of a new generation of modern mystics raising children. I love it.

I think most of us are aware of at least the concept of I Am, as in the sense that our true identity is not separate from God ... I Am That. And many of us are probably aware of and relate to the idea of a Mother Nature, Gaia, ... the material world as Spinoza's God substance. The primordial, living, monistic "It". But I'm curious to hear what your thoughts on Thou are? Are we embarrassed these days to discuss Thou? The personal relationship with God that we can speak with directly. What is your sense of this? Does the sheer ignorance of fundamentalism in the world make us too self-conscious to pray? Are we afraid of having our autonomy swallowed up if we allow ourselves to be in a relationship with the Divine? What's up? Sean

Interesting idea. You could emphasize each of the four major paths for a 3 month block and get nicely saturated in each one in a year. FYI, the four major paths are jnana, bhakti, raja and karma. Jnana yoga is the yoga of knowledge. The root "Jna" is actually etymologically the same as "gno" and "kno" as in gnosis and knowledge. Turning the mind to God through proper discernment. Bhakti is devotion. Definitely a big part of what I am trying to hit on here. Raja is the yoga of meditation and subtle body work, which dhyana is a limb of and kundalini yoga would also fall under. Karma yoga is the yoga of right action. Sean

I was raised Catholic and so all I knew when I was growing up was 2nd person relationship with God. I prayed and my family and community prayed so my first spiritual experiences were in this 2nd person context. One of the first things that struck me about Eastern wisdom when I began studying it was God as 1st person. I was blown away. God is inside of myself, not an anthropomorphized man in the clouds. Christians were stupid, creating a duality by projecting their fantasies onto an image that comforts them. This is what I thought. And I noticed how resistant most Christians I talked to were to the idea of the ultimate, true identity of Self as God. Later I came across various systems theories, Taoism, Spinoza ... God in 3rd person as the harmonious balance of everything and nothing. 2nd person looked even stupider now. I couldn't believe people prayed. What a fantasy. Buddhists are scientists. Christians are so lost in metaphors. Now I am starting to come full circle. I've noticed that many of the mystics I am drawn to the most, while having a deep experience and understanding of nonduality, still manage to preserve a sacred "other" to pour out poetry and song to. To Love. And it's not in a way that is creating duality. It's in a way that holds all three perspectives. It's from a 1st person nondual perspective that we can say, I Am God worshipping mySelf. And from a 3rd person perspective, we can see that we are an interdependent hologram in God's Mind. And also from the 2nd person, we can, mysteriously and actually (not metaphorically) relate with God even as God and inside God. Each of the three perspectives has a valid critique of the others. Because they are only perspectives they are limited. The ability to hold and fluidly move through all three is a fuller kind of enlightenment IMO than rejecting one because of it's shortcomings. I'm really seeing what Buber means ... I'm really thinking that it's only when we deeply respect and commune in 2nd person that we begin to treat "others" as holy. Think about it. If we are only hanging out in 1st person I Amness, than other people you relate with are not really real, they are just illusions dancing on the surface of Consciousness. Hopefully that perception also extends backward enough to include yourself or you are in big trouble, but either way, from this perspective, it's all just a dream. In 3rd person everything is objectifed. Maybe everything is a big energy field folding on itself, reflecting itself. You notice the alchemy of your chi field and another coming together and effecting themselves, the environment. But it's only in 2nd person that God can be seen as a mysterious "other". God as so free from duality, that God can move in and through duality unscathed. I think this is realy when we can see manifestation as a celebration of form instead of a dream or a mistaken perception. Maybe you think I am overthinking this one. It's simpler than this, Sean, stop thinking so much. But I am describing perspectives that already exist, not inventing filters. 1st, 2nd, 3rd person are really basic features of consciousness and it would make sense for perceptual blind spots to arise from avoiding one, strongly favoring another, etc. My concern though is how to have a 2nd person relationship with God that is not part of the problem. That is not in danger of becoming part of an ethnocentric, fundamentalist mindset. I mean, we've gotten pretty heated in even just this community disagreeing on merely theoretical considerations of emptiness vs. subtle body work, etc. ... imagine how much is added to the fire when people are communicating with God in different styles, using different names, feeling like they are being told things that they then interpret in their own tradition ... and they start trying to discuss these things with very few higher intellectual tools or distinctions. Sadly that's how wars start. Sean

Beautiful. Beautiful! Yet Spinoza had a pretty deep I-It relationship with God, as did many of the Taoists ... and the Eastern mystics have powerful I-I relationships with God, although God is often not named as such. Funny, these are the exact problems I was thinking arise in avoiding I-Thou when I wrote my post. I-It is God as a force that can be used; alchemy. I-I is treating the self experience as a doorway to God; meditation. Both essential and also in extremes probably lead to manipulativeness and arrogance respectively. I-Thou is divine as real living being that we can speak with, love and worship through devotion, prayer, bhakti, guru. I feel like this is a huge neglected piece for us modern mystics. I think we see how it can lead to fanatacism, fundamentalism, "my" God vs. "your" God kind of shit ... but maybe we are throwing personal God out with the bathwater. (?) Lozen, when you pray, do you talk to God in 2nd person? Cam, outside of the terminology, I'm more interested in your style of communication. Do you ever relate to this Great Mystery as a Being that you can commune with? Instead of just as a quality of enlightenment, or a truth of the universe. Neimad, how you feel if you thought that, hypothetically, God could hear you? You. Would it scare you to think that right now you could speak directly to God? Just curious. Sean

No, still not reading. I'm loosely aware that this is one of Buber's big areas of dialogue, but I've yet to read him actually. Please share what you've gotten out of him though, and any other ideas you have.

Plato, please edit your posts in this thread and remove all personal insults asap. I'm pretty sure you are aware of the insult policy here. We all strive to constructively criticize viewpoints without disrespecting the person and you are an adult capable of doing the same. I agree that Li Jiong doesn't deserve preemptive criticism for charging for his labors, although I can see how self promotion in someone's 2nd post throws up legitimate flags. Also, I'm thinking the Taoist significance of the number 81 was considered in this pricing decision, is that a correct assumption Li? Magicians are always selling things for symbolic prices not directly related to literal cost, ie: $93 tarot decks. Just my two cents. Seriously though, Plato, clean up your posts and chill on the drama. I don't have time for this. Sean

I'm back. I still can't read a whole lot. Only fiction, emails and non-article forum posts. This is turning out to be a powerful exercise.

I've been consumed the last several weeks with finding, or at least clarifying my life's purpose. Pretty dramatic I know. It all started when I read How to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes by Steve Pavlina. Well, it didn't work very well for me. I set aside blocks and blocks of uninterrupted hours and poured out pages and pages and pages of ideas. Emotions came up, yet still no tears. Yet it awoke this primal tension in me that I believe I've carried around since early childhood. Feeling like I have a lot to contribute, and I have all this intensity and tons of interests but not knowing what the fuck my deepest calling is. I really have a millions interests too and am constantly juggling projects, books, art, classes, websites, therapies, etc, etc. But I don't feel like I am ever going to master any of them because I am so busy multi-tasking and juggling that my attention rarely persists to a subject's depths as much as I'd like. David Deida talks about how this is particularly painful for those of us with male essences. Whereas the feminine essence can feel deeply fulfilled by loving and feeling loved by family, community and so on, for the masculine essenced person, all the love in the world is not enough to fill the void left by an unclear purpose. This could explain an aspect of why many men drown themselves in their career pursuits at the expense of their love life; they are still seeking this purpose. Purposefulness is the masculine perserverance to deeply penetrate something linearly and then empty oneself through it to become free. Whereas the femine essence is to open up to and be filled up by an expansion of love so as to ultimately become love. So I paid for this career test over at LiveCareer ... pretty cool. My top results were Performing Arts, Art, Medical and Health Care, Social Services, Funeral Services, Renewable Resource Technology, Architectural Technology, Drafting and Design, Science and Engineering, Communication Arts, Library Science, Agriculture and Animal Science, Social Science. Pretty varied list. And of course all of them seem interesting. Which is the right one? Which is the closest to my deepest, personal values and makes the best use of my natural talents? Which one would inspire me to commit to push through the painful challenges of another 4-6 years of school and a bunch of debt to succeed? Last week I found this cool Life Purpose coach named Jay Earley in my area and checked out his free e-book. I think I might give him a call if I don't figure all this out myself. He seems to have really broken the process down in his decades of hands on work and research. He references a bunch of books in that e-book, so I looked them all up on amazon.com. One of the books he highly recommends is Wishcraft by Barbara Sher. Turns out she has a brand new book called Refuse to Choose that ships in March. The main idea seems to be that there are some people who she calls "scanners" whose life purpose is to perpetually juggle and dabble and synthesize. "Sher tells Scanners that theirs is a unique ability, not a liability. She also states that they must do everything they love, not zero in on one pursuit at the expense of all others." Interesting concept, I'm thinking I'll pre-order it. Then today I stumbled across the following story on Eric Maisel's blog (great creativity coach whose book Fearless Creating I checked out last year.) I was feeling particularly sensitive today and it tapped into some sore spots and brought up some tears (which is curiously rare for me): "Magdalene, a dancer, came to the oasis. 'I have too many interests, too many talents,' she said. She had on the bluest dress, which made her eyes look wild and fierce. "First, I dance. But I also have a painter's eye. And I love to write. I've been keeping journals for years and years and have thirty fat journals filled with my thoughts. I do collages, digital photography, raku. I write songs. I want to put this all together into something, I want to figure out how to concentrate on one thing, because--" She hesitated. 'The fact of the matter is, I never complete anything. I start all these incredible projects but then something else starts to interest me more and I begin on it. That's what's been happening," she ended, trailing off as if her thoughts had failed her.'" Read the rest here Looks like I got some self-worth/esteem work ahead of me because I think deep down inside, despite all the spiritual books and practices I work with, and as much as I really do want to find my true will, I really do still have this dark belief in my core, that ultimately there is no point to doing anything because, basically we are all just fighting a losing battle with suffering, illness, old age, loss and inevitably death. Who am I to think I matter? That I have or deserve to find a meaningful purpose much less live it when there is all this pain and tragedy in the world? Or that anything I create could be worth anything anyway? Crap like that. But enough about me, what about you? Do you know or have an idea about what your true purpose is? How do you feel about your level of clarity on your calling in life? Sean

Ok. I'm back. Great posts! "Philosophy creates dualities." "Cart before the horse." Hmm... In my opinion dualties are usually already the reality before the philosophy. Philosophy just addresses them head-on and brings them to the surface. So the seeming overcomplexity of a philosopher is just that their demons are no longer hiding ... much like the neuroticism of someone going through a rocky kundalini awakening. Admittedly, a good chunk of modern, academic philosophy has lost track of it's transcendent potential. Combined with Western seekers's fascination with, and often misreadings of concepts like "no mind", philosophy is thrown out with the bathwater along with thinking along with ego. But beliefs, thinking and ego are just objects of the Self like body, emotion, food, community .. and are not destroyed by enlightenment, just recognized for what they are. I think philosophical inquiry and contemplative study should be treated like any spiritual practice. One that can be overdone, underdone, done poorly and even done wrongly. In the philosophy behind the various branches of Yogic practice, it's said that not all temperaments are suited for the extremities of certain limbs. Some people might find their Way mostly by raising bhakti through song and devotion and helping others without a strong need to pursue and purify an intellectual branch. I believe a good method of philosophical inquiry can bring some painful shit to the foreground. All these terrible contradictions in our thought, speech, emotion and behavior are brought to light, yet we still often feel powerless to change them. These are dark nights like any genuine path. I physically feel when I am overdoing intellectual practice, or worse, indulging in pseudo-intellectualism in a sloppy or compulsive way in which it hardly could be called a practice anymore. From a radically non-dual position, often espoused by teachers in the guru "talking schools" of Advaita Vedanta and Dzogchen, philosophy is shown to be mostly bullshit, and so is practice ... we don't need any of it, we are already Perfect right this moment. Yet for some mysterious reason we find ourselves in a state of forgetfullness where we don't think, feel or act from this awareness. We are deeply convinced in the very tissues of our bodies that we are a separate being, that our story is mostly accurate, that what we think is basically true, that progress is possible, that there is something that can be attained, etc. This is the dilemna we are in. It sucks in a lot of ways, it really does just suck. But the sooner we can be present with the painful paradoxes that we are living in, some of which are bound to be intellectual, the sooner we can work to find a path to freedom. IMO we are all always proposing and promoting a philosophy. By every choice and non-choice we make, the values and beliefs our decisions spring from, who we befriend, what we say, even our aesthetic choices of clothing. The most common philosophy I see in people I talk to in America is actually an anti-philosophy. Across the board from "average Joe's", post-modern academics, businessmen, artists, new agers to fundamentalist Christians there is this common thread of disinterest in thinking clearly and rationally weeding out contradictions and inconsistencies of thoughts, beliefs and actions. Unfortunately I don't think the transrational is found by avoiding the difficulties of moving through the rational. "The main transformative task in the world today is helping people to get to the "rational" level of consciousness; most folks are still mired in mythic-membership belief systems (like old-style religion) and are thus not capable of reaching agreements to solve things like the ecological crisis." via Stephen Dinan In closing I have to disagree with a linear power-love-wisdom trajectory. I think we need to dynamically cultivate all three simultaneously. If you have a good teacher that you trust who is holding the intellectual structures of a wisdom tradition for you, nourishing you with that wisdom over time and in tune with your development ... than IMO you are in an ideal place where you can relax your mind a bit and not worry so much. Still, I think there is valuable work to be done in discovering a post-post-modern, philosophy that is aware of it's ridiculously immense limitations yet serves as a live map of very real territory. Honestly I don't think many teachers are doing this work, as legitimate as they may be in other areas. It's a tall, messy order not unlike vowing to save all sentient beings. Asking big questions and not settling on little answers, even when the painful limitations of the grasping mind and false self seem unbearable. Sean

Hey, I'm curious what everyone thinks about the difference between Therapy and Spiritual Practice? Are they different? Are they similar? Do they intersect? Are their ultimate aims aligned? Thanks, Sean

Came across this today. Via Ken Wilber's Spectrum Psychology by Stanislav Grof, M.D. "According to psychoanalysis and ego psychology, psychogenic disorders can be adequately understood in terms of postnatal biographical events and related psychodynamic processes. Different psychopathological syndromes are explained as resulting from problems in specific stages of postnatal libidinal development and from the difficulties in the evolution of the ego and of the object relationships. Psychoses thus allegedly have their origin in early infancy while neurotic or psychosomatic disorders are anchored in later childhood. ... In experiential psychotherapies using [non-ordinary states of consciousness] NOSC, people working on various forms of depression, psychoneuroses, and psychosomatic disorders typically discover that these disorders have a multilevel dynamic structure, In addition to their connections with traumatic events in infancy and childhood, as expected by traditional academic thinking, these disorders have important roots in the perinatal domain and also beyond that in the transpersonal realm (Grof 1985). Therapeutic work on psychoneuroses and psychosomatic disorders, guided not by the therapist but by the spontaneous healing mechanisms activated by NOSC, will thus typically take the clients beyond postnatal biography to the perinatal and transpersonal domains. Under these circumstances, the therapeutic process does not follow a linear trajectory. If it is not restricted by the strait-jacket of the therapist's professional convictions, it will freely move between the biographical, perinatal, and transpersonal levels, often even within the same session. For this reason, effective work with emotional and psychosomatic disorders requires a therapist who uses a framework that is open to all the bands of the spectrum. The idea of breaking the therapeutic process into stages during which he or she is seen by different therapists, each of whom is a specialist in fulcrum-specific treatment modality, is thus highly unrealistic. In addition, since both the perinatal and transpersonal experiences have the quality that C. G. Jung called "numinosity," it is impossible to draw a clear line between therapy and spiritual evolution. With an open approach, the process that initially began as "therapy" will often automatically change into a spiritual and philosophical quest."

Great post Lozen. This is one for the printer. And that is really sweet of you to give your friends herbal foot baths.

Awesome synchronicity Trunk! I did quite a bit of research on chanting, toning and Tuvan last week. Since then I've been playing around with toning OM and sometimes AHHHH while doing CMR. I was also checking out Tibetan Master Chants (and a couple other discs on that site) and Online Tuvan singing lessons. Weird how we were both independently exploring eye movement work around the same time and then moved right on to toning simultaneously.

I am so on this! It's funny, I moved through the same sequence as you, from cereal to shakes, then I did oatmeal and eggs for awhile, then yogurt and muesli and now I think the time for Congee has arrived. Great tip Turbo! Time to break out the crockpot. Sean

Allan, I don't sense a harshness from your posts at all.. you seem very warm-hearted and your insights are totally cool, completely even-tempered and most welcomed. I've been meaning to respond more in this thread I've just been super busy moving to a new place. That is a cool tip with the skipping sections of books you are not digging at the time. The one trick I picked up recently is really similar, basically I just skim my eyes over the pages, going at whatever pace my interest level creates ... so there could be a block of pages that I just skim really rapidly and haphazardly, picking up the information I want and then there are pages that really catches my eye, something interesting and I slow down and chew on it ... and everything in between. Catch you later Sean

Contemplative study and debate has played a central role in the maturation of literally every single spiritual path. Taoists are no different and have written volumes and volumes and volumes of meticulously argued, deeply intellectual philosophy. Philosophy, the pursuit of wisdom, was at one time almost universally considered inseparable from genuine spiritual practice. Contemplatives to this day are often still required to read and memorize enormous quanities of spiritual material. Saturating the manifest mind with fingers pointing to the Truth. Learning the rules before they think they have transcended a need for them. Through contemplative study and debate, intellectually sound worldviews are discovered which in turn shape cultures, religions, spiritual attitudes and the "common sense" of generations to come. Just think of any great spiritual person and I guarantee you they were also a great philosopher. I think one of the problems is that spiritual philosophy has been a fish out of water for several decades. One of the reason for this is that it simply didn't anticipate the sharp, globally informed, relativistic intellectual structures of the critical, post-modern philosophies. So lately, spirituality bridging modern culture has mostly stuck to meditating, having private mystical experiences and quietly drawing a line in the sand between spirit and thought. We lash out at or ignore philosophical inquiry, or prematurely buy "new physics" attempts whole hog and just go back to sleep. But it's going to take more than that to forge the intellectual structures required to hold and sustain spiritual wisdom culturally. It's one thing to bliss out on your cushion and walk around the part with a smile on your face. It's another to penetrate and transform the dense dense structures involved in the way we do business, talk to each other, the way our government operates, environmental and foreign policies, etc., etc. There are three major Tan Tiens; Power, Love, Wisdom. Cultivating Power involves some hard work in learning to protect yourself, developing self-esteem, etc. Cultivating Love requires hard work in learning to think of others, put others before ourselves, etc. I hope we haven't gotten so new age we forget Wisdom which involves much hard work in thinking, analysis and debate. And obviously all of this requires hard work in balancing overactive/underactive centers. Allan, it's funny though, I have similar symptoms as how you described yourself in the past. I burn my head out all the time, and I probably do think way too much. It's good that my acupuncturist has me doing standing meditations these days and she has told me to stop reading 12 books at once so we'll see how that goes. Sean

Honestly, I don't know jack about FlowFit yet. Haven't had a chance to check it out at all. I'm kind of up to my ears in material at this point ... I've only just recently even started integrating Prasara flows into my daily practice. But from just a quick glance it looks like FlowFit is more in the direction of giving you a conditioning workout, whereas IntuFlow is more geared toward recovering mobility and active rest.

Naikan Naikan is a Japanese word which means "inside looking" or "introspection." A more poetic translation is "seeing oneself with the mind's eye." It is a structured method of self- reflection that helps us to understand ourselves, our relationships and the fundamental nature of human existence. Naikan was developed by Yoshimoto Ishin (1916-1988), a devout Buddhist of the Jodo Shinshu sect in Japan. His strong religious spirit led him to practice mishirabe, an arduous and difficult method of meditation. Wishing to make such introspection available to others, he developed Naikan as a method that could be more widely practiced. Naikan broadens our view of reality. It's as if, standing on top of a mountain, we shift from a zoom lens to a wide-angle lens. Now we can appreciate the broader panorama - our former perspective still included, but accompanied by much that had been hidden. And that which was hidden makes the view extraordinary. The Three Questions Naikan reflection is based on three questions: - What have I received from ..........? - What have I given to ..........? - What troubles and difficulties have I caused ..........? These questions provide a foundation for reflecting on relationships with others such as parents, friends, teachers, siblings, work associates, children, and partners. We can reflect on ourselves in relation to pets, or even objects which serve us such as cars and pianos. In each case, we search for a more realistic view of our conduct and of the give and take which has occurred in the relationship. In examining our relationship with another we begin by looking at what we have received from that person. My wife made me fresh squeezed orange juice this morning. A colleague sent me a calligraphy pen. A man at the motor vehicle office gave me an application for renewal of my driver's license. These are all simple, clear descriptions of reality. The other person's attitude or motivation does not change the fact that I benefited from his or her effort. Often we take such things for granted. We hurry through our day giving little attention to all the "little" things we are receiving. But are these things really "little?" It only seems so because we are being supported and our attention is elsewhere. But when we run out of gas or lose our glasses, these little things grab our attention and suddenly we realize their true importance. As we list what we receive from another person we are grounded in the simple reality of how we have been supported and cared for. In many cases we may be surprised at the length or importance of such a list and a deeper sense of gratitude and appreciation may be naturally stimulated. Without a conscious shift of attention to the myriad ways in which the world supports us, we risk our attention being trapped by only problems and obstacles, leaving us to linger in suffering and self-pity. Next we take a look at the other side of the equation. What have I given to the other person? Yoshimoto was a businessman. Each month he would send out statements to his customers and receive similar statements from suppliers. Here are products that were sent and the amount of money received. We receive a similar statement from the bank regarding our checking account. This tells us, to the penny, what our balance is. If we take the efforts of others for granted, we live as if we were "entitled" to such efforts. If we resent it when people do not fulfill our expectations, we live as if we deserve whatever we want. As we reflect on our relationships, one by one, we begin to see the reality of our life. What is more appropriate - to go through life with the mission of collecting what is owed us, or to go through life trying to repay our debt to others? Even if you think you know the answer, it is not the same as discovering the answer. The third and final question is the most difficult of all. Mostly we are aware of how other people cause us inconvenience or difficulty. Perhaps somebody cuts us off in traffic, or maybe the person in front of us at the post office has a lot of packages and we are kept waiting. We notice such incidents with great proficiency. But when we are the source of the trouble or inconvenience, we often don't notice it at all. Or if we do, we think, "it was an accident" or "I didn't mean it", or perhaps we simply dismiss it as "not such a big deal." But this question is truly important. Yoshimoto suggested that when we reflect on ourselves, we spend at least 60% of the time considering how we have caused others trouble. His words are echoed by the lives of Franklin, Schweitzer and St. Augustine. If we are not willing to see and accept those events in which we have been the source of others' suffering, than we cannot truly know ourselves or the grace by which we live. Go to source: Naikan Therapy

Awwwe man, I was so excited at first because I thought you were going to say that you then take this beautiful creation and give it to, like, a stranger or something. I could see how destroying it could have some value, but what about flipping open the yellow pages and putting your finger on a random person and then packing up this awesome gift you made and mailing it to them anonymously? Damn though, what a cool concept mbanu. External tonglen. Thanks for posting that. Sean