Apech

So when you have had a cold or flu you heal up instantly?

I think to a certain extent we have strayed from the original topic - which was are two person energy practices safe and spiritually useful. Which in itself is a double question because maybe they could be spiritually useful but not safe - or the other way round. In the end I voted 'no' so I could see the results - but I accept they could be safe and useful but on the other hand they could be not. It all depends on who is doing what with whom. CT is perfectly right to point out that vajrayana works within consecrated spaces and mandalas which are purified - and on a simple level people find benefit from finding a quiet place to meditate and so on (although there are those of us who seek out crowded spaces to do the same as a kind of test ). I can't think of a spiritual system that doesn't do this in some way or another - I mean - why build a cathedral when you can sit in a bus station? All sacred spaces are models of the cosmos as understood - in other words they are places where the cosmic order is mirrored - hence sacred geometry, mandalas, pyramids, temples, sacred groves, stone circles etc. etc. Then you have guardians of those spaces. For instance St. Michael with his sword. In vajrayana there are Dharmapalas such as Mahakala and so on. These are known as wrathful deities - although their wrath is more the active side of compassion. They are not protecting egos. They are protecting dharma which is a word which can be read on many levels. The teachings, the way as a path, truth, reality - or at an energy level the mandala itself as a mirror of the inherent structure of the cosmos. They do this by taking negative, violent, slothful, disharmonious energy and breaking it down through emptiness and converting it into nectar (positive spiritual forces) - thus making the bad energy available for 'good' if you see what I mean. Although we all have Buddha-nature and thus are inherently pure beyond elaboration - it is also true that human beings carry a lot of disharmonious energy - mostly through ignorance but also sometimes through bad intent. In life we choose intimacy with those we love and not just anyone we meet - although you might do this as a spiritual exercise, certainly it has some risk of identification with those disharmonious or violent unresolved energies and karmic influence of others. This is why healing is a slow and careful process because there are inertias - why people need time to adjust. Of course if you are karmically 'ripe' you can make a leap from an ordinary state to a deeper one - but on the other hand to try to induce this in someone who is not really ready could mean that after a brief ecstatic experience they fall back into even worse shit than before (subjectively). Just some thoughts.

Can someone on the YES side explain to me why anyone who votes NO has to be characterised as: - frightened - suffering from traumatic bad experiences - clinging on with unnecessary caution where does all this talking down to other people come from? especially as you seem to think there are no boundaries - presumably everyone is free to do what they want?????

the multiple deaths might be a clue.

--- Moderation message --- Guys, guys, guys, Please can we remember to avoid ad hominem attacks and name calling. It's against the rules here and could result in suspension or even banning. Hot topics are good, nothing wrong with disagreeing, nothing wrong with critiquing ideas - but please don't attack the other person for posting them. After all if everyone agreed all the time we'd have little to talk about. Thanks. --- The End ---

that's probably another thread (possibly)

Practice vajrayana of course.

Dawei, It’s true that ‘because of this arising , that arises’ is a way of understanding dependent origination – it is actually a very deep teaching which the Buddha himself said to Ananda – don’t say you understand it – you don’t. So it’s a bit like the Quantum Theory of Buddhism except it is not ontological and neither process or nature – but its easy to see why you might think it is either. As a detailed teaching it is taught as a chain which starts with ‘ignorance’ - the word for this is avidya (the ‘a’ is privative and thus it means not-knowing), the opposite is vidya which means ‘knowing’ or ‘seeing’ as in English when you say ‘I see’ meaning ‘I understand’. This word vidya translates into Tibetan as ‘rigpa’ which also means knowing and gives a clue as to what kind of knowing is refered to i.e. Knowing the nature of reality (or the natural mind). So to be vidya is to be awakened and to be avidya to be ‘asleep’. On the the basis of this ignorance the eleven other levels of pile up leading eventually to the ‘suffering of old age and death’ which means basically mortality or even ‘entropy’ if you prefer. So essentially what dependent origination is describing is how our ignorance of the nature of things causes the build up of the samaric world view and the experiences of it we have. The second phase after ignorance is called samskara which means volitional or mental formations – you can take this to mean patterns of imprints in the mind-substance (citta) which are born of activity and become habitual. So around our original ignorance we build up patterns of behaviour based on our misundertanding of who and what we are. These are also called karmas and you can see that action based in ignorance generates karma while action = buddha-activity based on awakened mind does not – it is said to be natural like rain falling. Emergent from thiese karmas are consciousness (vijnana ) which really means the subject/object division, name/form, six sense bases, contact, feeling, craving, clinging, becoming, birth, aging and death. If we look at the OP’s quoted text: it is because the ignorant cling to names, signs and ideas; as their minds move along these channels they feed on multiplicities of objects and fall into the notion of and ego-soul and what belongs to it; they make discriminations of good and bad among appearances and cling to the agreeable. As they thus cling there is a reversion to ignorance, and karma born of greed, anger and folly, is accumulated. As the accumulation of karma goes on they become imprisioned in a cocoon of discrimination and are thenceforth unable to free themselves from the round of birth and death. So you can see from the bolded words – ignorance, name and form, samskaras, consciousness, feelings, clinging, karmas, birth and death. So the text is really a riff based on dependent origination. The idea is that you can break this chain and the key point for doing this is craving. So if we can stop ‘wanting’ and practice non-attachment then the whole thing collapses back to it’s root and avidya becomes vidya and no more suffering. Another perhaps more direct approach is to work on resting in the natural state and directly convert avidya to vidya. What frustrates and confuses many people is that here Buddhism offers no ontological solution to ‘what is’. It directs our attention to the consequences of our ignorance without providing an explanation of what actually ‘is’ - unlike Advaita Vedanta which offers ‘brahman’ or perhaps KS which offers Shiva and so on. Buddhism is content to say that the awakened state is ineffable and beyond concept - and that’s that. So if we were to say is it a non-dual field of consciousness or energy – Buddhism might just say ‘that’s a concept so no, while its not wrong it’s not right either’ better to address your ignorance and it’s consequences than build castles in the air

Merge in this brother and sisters ... ... not the hand obviously.

call a shovel a spade

two for the price of one

I was once told that the original meaning of 'fear of God' meant shaking in the presence of the divine - just as the ancient Brahmin priests were said to do - and that the word 'fear' was related to the word 'fire'. I've never been able to verify this but its a interesting thought.

With greatest respect that is (possibly not intentionally) a bit twisty. It does not follow that someone who does not want to do this energy sharing work is experiencing fear. Would you say I look both ways before crossing the road means I live in fear of traffic? Or is it just sense? Non duality doesn't mean that we are all one - or even that we are all included in One or some such. Non-self does not mean that we don't have selves in the ordinary sense - but just that an independent, permanent essence/soul/atman doesn't exist. I think you should just accept that some people choose or want to do this kind of thing and others don't - and as I said above as long as I have the choice then I am happy to let others do what they want - with the final proviso of course that if I thought harm was occurring or likely to occur I might feel moved to step in as appropriate.

Now we know why yes/no style polls at DBs are a waste of time

or less

win

(1st Chapter) It is dependent origination - although it doesn't explicitly say so. By the way why did you miss out the first paragraph???

Nothing you can do is necessarily 'safe' and whether its useful depends on what use you make of it - if any. I wouldn't approach any practice assuming that by doing it I am taking no risk whatsoever - just in the same way as I wouldn't follow any teacher or teachings without thoroughly examining them for a long period of time and testing them. To do anything else is naive. I would say that powerful practices have inherently more risk - but this is not a reason to not do them but it is a reason to treat them with ultimate respect. Anything involving any level of intimacy with another being carries with it a set of communication dangers - mostly about miscommunication - just as having a lover does the same. So care for yourself and also care for the other being is important. Clarity about what you are doing and why is the key. Having said all this - my basic position is that people are free to do what they want (save it not harm others) and I would just ask to not be impacted by whatever they are doing unless i freely choose to get involved. I can't tick the poll cos none of the boxes say this

Ok thanks that makes sense. Emptiness of self refers to the absence of svabhava (self-being ?) in all phenomena - which of course can be applied to your own sense of self. In Vajrayana there is the diamond or vajra body sometimes called light body. I can't recall any merging of chakras - but of course you might consider them to be projections as in the colours of rainbow as distinct to sun light - but there may be such a teaching that I'm not aware of.

Could you define 'unified field' so that question could be answered - are we back to the 'one mind' thing? Also any more about the collapsing the chakras into one or however it is explained would be of interest. Thanks.

rag

Soros' towel

@9th Thanks that's a good summary of the grammarian and yoga derivation. But it doesn't really explain what tantra is as a practice.

Bobby Seale

The academics tend to use the term ‘tantra’ to refer to the texts. This has some limitations because there are texts with tantric content which are not called tantras and not all tantra contain the same elements. Practitioners would probably say its not the texts but the form of practice which differentiate tantra from other Mahayana methods. So it is probably useful to look at the main features of tantric practice in Buddhism to see what tantra actually means. In ‘Buddhist Thought’ by Paul Williams (and others) he gives the following characteristics of Buddhist Tantra practice. Use of mantras. Visualization and identification with the ‘deity’ Mandalas Sadhanas I’m not sure if this is a complete list but it will do. Tsong-khapa said that Tantra meant specifically identification with a Buddha or Bodhisattva (the deity) – but not all the texts include this so the broader set of practices is better. Mantras The Vajrayana is sometimes called the Mantrayana and so the use of mantras is central. Mantras in Vedic tradition are based on the idea that Sanskrit is not an ordinary language but in fact the very sounds which are the vibrational power that makes the universe. And so this language is divine in and of itself. The utterance of mantras in particular is to evoke the creational divine powers. In Buddhism this idea does not exist. In fact the Buddha was not keen that Sanskrit be used at all for Dharma as it was part of this Vedic view which he rejected. However Buddhadharma does use both mantra to convey the activity of Buddhas and so on and also the idea of ‘seed syllables’ which generate the buddha image. So how does this work? In Buddhism the stress is on the ‘empowerment’ (abhisheka) which the teacher gives to the pupil. So in the initiation ceremony the lama evokes the specific deity/meditation object and communicates this to the student together with the mantra – which the student should repeat in the same form as given – which is fortunate given the Tibetan tendency to distort the original Sanskrit e.g. Benza or even Pancha for Vajra and so on. Having received the empowerment the student can then practice on their own – which explains in part the reliance in Buddha-tantra on the relationship with the guru who is the treasury of the oral instructions. Mantras are thought of as ‘effective’ that means they have the power to bring about change and have a kind of magical effect beyond ordinary words. Visualization and identification with the deity Like the use of Mantras this is central. But again there are variations from the Hindu/Vedic view. In Buddhism the meditation deity is an aspect of Buddha nature and the purpose of deity worship is specifically to actualize buddha-nature in yourself. So for instance the compassion or wisdom which emerges naturally from the awakened mind can be a focus in the form of Chenrezig or Manjushri. Modern readers have to be careful not to confuse this with thinking the deities are ‘imaginary’ although imagination is used to evoke them. To say for instance they are aspects of ‘mind’ is not the same as saying they are ‘all in the mind’. In fact it would be true to say that relative what we usually think of being our selves they are more real, being pure emanations of reality ‘as it is’. But the key here is to understand that in reality you are the deity and thus imagining this is helpful and empowering. But like everything their nature is ‘empty’ and so having self identified you have the power to dissolve everything back to emptiness just as they have. In Mahayana you develop compassion (and the six perfections of course) in Vajrayana you assume your compassionate nature through the yidam (meditation deity). Mandalas Most deities do not appear in isolation, they have a context, or realm or circle. In this are various attendant deities and other symbols. In some cases these are Hindu gods like Rudra or Indra which are placed subordinate to the central ‘Buddha’. Some writers say this is modelled on the Medieval Indian Royal Court. The king in the middle and his courtiers around him, his domain is his chakra or ‘circle' and his court is the mandala. In fact sometimes a palace is visualized with gateways and so on, usually aligned to the compass points. This may well be the case as this period is the origin of the iconography. The best way to understand it, I think, is that as everything arises through dependent origination, when you evoke one power then the ripple of cause and effect induces other related powers to arise. Nothing exists independently. It also has the value of setting in place the meditation deity. Sadhanas These are the way in which deity practice is performed. They have various stages, a preparation stage, a development stage when the visualization is practiced – followed by mantra recitation – the completion stage where the deity is dissolved back into emptiness – usually followed by statements of intent to continue the practice and so on. Different traditions handle these slightly differently but essentially they are the same. The more elaborate and group Sadhanas can be called ‘pujas’. It might seem like a detail but even having had the empowerment, the form of practice is important because it seals the ‘energy’ in the right form and sets it within the ‘view’ - that is the dharmic view of the nature of reality – it grounds the deity in the person of the student and in their life. Note: written more or less off the top of my head - so any errors - sorry 'bout that