Apech

@spanda Interesting experience, thanks for telling us about it. When I was younger I used to regularly wake suddenly with panic convinced there was a large snake or insect in the bed. There would be paralysis for a moment but then I would leap out of bed and tear the covering off and switch the light on. This as you can imagine displeased my ex somewhat I've had paralysis experiences where there seemed to be a 'thing' sitting on my legs. Stuff like this happened usually in a period when I was having lucid dreams and wotnot. I used to experiment with producing lucid dreaming but gave it up as my normal sleep cycles became disrupted. I think the 'mani' mantra is helpful as is a kind of lighthearted thinking about how everything is empty. I don't think building up the thing with heavily protective spells and prayers would be particularly helpful (I may be wrong of course) because part of the problem is the heaviness of these experiences - they are quite strikingly real in the moment even though one tends to come out of them quite quickly. The slight bruising on your chest is interesting - I don't think I've ever experienced physical wounds from this kind of thing. I'd be interested what other people have to say about that.

Wendigo? I don't know maybe an hour or so.

proof I reincarnated as a dog:

You were Cleopatra!!!!

The funny thing is I have recurring strange little 'visions' which are like memories of being a buddhist monk in Ladakh (or Tibet possibly) - they are sometimes quite vivid and occur when I am reading texts or thinking about certain historical Buddhist figures. Also as a young child I had a distinct recall of having lived alone in a cave meditating. I have no genetic link to the Tibetan region at all and yet I feel connected. I realise you may now call the medical help line and have me locked up as a delusional fantasist ... but don't you think we have deeper links which transcend genetics and location? I am sure for instance that Daoism, Buddhism and so on would have no purchase with Westerners if it was not some kind of karmic linkeage. I am going to report you to Dwai for re-ducation

I think that terrain, flora and fauna are used to shape the local mythos and interpretive narrative which is used by local shamans and so on ... and of course at a subtle level 'entities' e.g. spirits of tree, rocks, lakes, mountains and so on - and of course the earth's field. I get your point about N-S ... but E -W must mean something - perhaps even if it is a human construct. Blood and land eh? Zieg heil!!! You think there was peace before the Indo-Europeans? I think there were fewer people and a lot of space between. But I can see what you are getting at. But it sounds a little like putting the blame for human woe on the shoulders of one set of humans. Which to me is too easy as an answer.

Are you sure you are not there already?

So I'm not really sure what conclusion we reached about the original question as to whether there are subtle body differences between East and West - and if so how much is energetic arising out of the earth's field and how much is cultural. In fact to what degree are the two interdependent. This is confused perhaps by the fact that Westerners (i.e. Europeans) have spread round the globe - I don't like the phrase cultural appropriation but it seems to me that the European mind has swallowed whole some Eastern systems and regurgitated something of its own. Not necessarily invalid but clearly not the original. A lot of Westerners calling themselves Daoist - are probably not Daoist in the true sense of the word. People are maybe 90% emotion and the Western emotional state is different to the Eastern. Western rationality is an emotional state (oddly) although it tends to deny this. I suspect that this has pushed our minds into over focussing on the UDT - hence the obsession with brains and heads and this may have distorted our subtle bodies away from the natural, away from more heart focus. The history of Europe is one of almost continuous war - this might be partly due to the number of countries jam packed together in what is a relatively (compared to Asia or Africa) small corrugated land mass. Ever since the fall of the Western Roman Empire there has been a battle over who is entitled to govern and the right form of government - which saw its culmination in WWI and WWII - and its astounding to think that when France fought Germany it was essentially the Western and Eastern halves of Charlemagne's empire trying to reform (i.e. Frankia and the Holy Roman Empire) - a struggle which persisted in various forms since 9th Century. ?

@Limahong I don't think you are literally an apple tree

Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run There's still time to change the road you're on.

I saw it and came.

yep that's how it all started.

I think that English translations are necessary in order to open up and make these texts accessible to a wide audience in the West - but unfortunately they can be quite misleading. To make them readable the translators usually choose some 'equivalent' English terms which are only vaguely related to the original ideas and so on. I know this from my own studies of Ancient Egypt in that I wasted many years working my way through the academically best translations ... but it wasn't until I went back to the original texts and indeed their contextual placing and going through all the key terms and names and so on, seeing relationships between them, understanding their cultural meaning that I began to get anywhere at all. You don't have to be fluent, or indeed a translator yourself to do this if you have the right resources but in terms of what we are interested in, you do have to be prepared to put in the work and also be a practitioner to stand any chance at all. Triangulation is one possible way to get round this I agree if your personal insight is strong enough this will guide you.

Both probably - although it's quite hard to establish what is what in terms of geography and culture - also language groups.

I'm very happy that this thread has sparked some discussion. I'm particularly, now, interested in the translation of the untranslatable ( @Taomeow thank you) ... but in the sense that it's almost an unachievable task that we all engage in. A lot of what's happened and gone wrong with the interaction East and West has been poor translation, particularly things like the various dharma traditions and also/especially the Chinese traditions of Daoism and so on. In fact I guess you could say that if you leave out the really old stuff - the indigenous South American, Siberian, Australasian and so on - you've got three big cultural spheres of Europe, India and China (including all the cluster nations). What we encounter mostly is the attempts by Europeans to assimilate the Indian and Chinese ways of thinking/ways of being - and getting it wrong (much of the time). That's not to say there's no benefit. It might be that we are witnessing and taking part in a new synthesis - like for instance a Western Daoism. If you consider for instance the impact of the I Ching on the West - it is probably quite major - even more than we ordinarily can see. The problem as I see it with actual translations is that they have major interference from the author and the language (usually English) - but even more so they are not usually serious attempts to perform a translation ... which I note can mean the moving of the bones or relics of a saint from one place to another ... in fact the bones are usually left in place and what is presented is the authors projections. If the bones - the actual truths in the original text - are to be transferred then there must be some deep process which has to take place before we can any confidence in what we are being told.

This really is the heart of the matter.

I don't know about you but having once enjoyed Cleary's translations I now find him a bit lacking in depth.

@Yueya You know a lot more about Jung than I do. But he does seem to be a gateway for people in the West who are searching to find some kind of spiritual certainties. I find the term 'unconscious' a bit unhelpful as it sounds a little like something without consciousness - while actually it probably means the opposite. I suppose that the term arose because he was speaking of those things of which we are not usually conscious. I think its very important to recognise that our conscious minds are maybe 1 - 10% of what is actually going on. With regard to the magic, gods, spirits business - of course it is only in recent history that the West was not similarly engaged in such things. Since the enlightenment and the rise of science they have been squashed out - erased from our account of reality - mainly I believe to remove our unease at the unknowable immensity in which we have our existence. I think it is a mistake to think Eastern systems specifically target such things as a being unreal or empty - to the extent that they have done so has been just to please Westerners. For instance to say they are 'empty' as per Buddhism is not to categorise them any differently to anything else which appears to exist independently. So to say a God is sunya is just saying it is like everything else. And because of this following the god will not lead to liberation ... but this is not the same as a modern atheist would say 'God does not exist'. Where i do perhaps think there is a role in specifically Western thought and religion ... it is that of monotheism and specifically the Biblical sort (which is different to henotheism, monolatry and so on). As far as I see it monotheism is a concealed dualism - which through the tradition of Western Judeo-Christian culture leads inevitably to the harsh objectivism of science. Whereas dharmic and Daoist traditions don't do this.

Dear Everyone, Thanks to everyone who's contributed - all very interesting. Just a few points/queries: 1 ) yes western psychology may be different to Eastern - in fact it obviously is - but this could just be due to an accumulation of sanskaras or karmic patterns - or even parasitic entities in the subtle body - in other words we have a different veil through which to view the world ... but the question remains ... are there any fundamental different features of the subtle body West - East (or North to South for that matter). 2 ) I think that it is legitimate to distinguish between the north - south polarity ... as this is based on fixed points (and East West). The North/South poles on earth which are physically locatable points and astronomical north and south which are (more or less by discounting precession) also fixed points. While East and West only has meaning through rotation - left and right hand spin (?) - which can lead to some strange anomalies eg. we think of China as East but it is actually West of the USA. 3 ) Words like orient for East and 'origin' are related ... so we tend to regard the East as where things arise and the West where things disappear - I wonder if there is something here about 'leaning in' to the originating energy (the source) or leaning in to it's most overt manifestation. Which way are we spinning this? 4 ) Rationality - rationalism - is an attempt by humans to get security by fixing the world. This has had a tremendous effect during the globalisation of mankind since the late 18th century. The western scholars have made demands on say, Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism and the response has been to produce west-friendly versions stripped of their magic to avoid the harsh critique of academia. (Just as a side note, thanks to @dwai I recently read a large chunk of Wendy Doniger's 'Hindus an alternative history' - I didn't finish it because its quite long and I got bored so skipped ahead to the chapter on the Raj. I didn't like her writing style as she jumps about and cuts up sentences with asides in brackets but she did say some interesting things. She mentioned Edward Said's 'Orientalism' which I also tried to read - but I'm not keen on post-modernism or the general idea of decolonising history which I think is ridiculous. But he did make the reasonable point that 'the West' does/did have a weird half romantic/half racist view of the East. But I concluded after a little reading that as a practitioner my concerns lie elsewhere).

That's interesting - could you develop that idea a bit more?

The more I think about it, the more I see that subtle body and subtle realm 'phenomena' make continuous impact upon us. Part of the problem with the modern (mostly western) view is that it denies this and attributes everything to the objective and physical. There's a kind of weight in this western view which is very hard to get away from. I think scientific dogmatism piggy backs on this ... which is a problem not because the western view is invalid but because it is incomplete (because apart from anything else it cannot account for the subtle or the causal levels of existence). An instance of this would be the failure of western thinkers to understand that rationalism is an emotional position. They pretend it is dry logic but actually it is (highly) emotive - which is why when challenged by alternative views it gets so spikey and aggressive. The reason, I think, it is emotive is because rational/scientific people have pushed their subtle bodies into a distorted pattern where energy is forced into the head (upper dt ??) to extent that it shuts down their capacity to feel subtle energy movements. I think the answer may be that energy is supposed to cycle - that it may go to a phase of maximum condensation which we experience as physical reality but that it then it must cycle back to the most subtle and so on. Trying to fix it, or to fix reality is just our insecurity. Thoughts?

Fair enuf

Well I did suggest you post your questions on the open forum but I fear that if you are unwilling to do so you won't get any help.

Thanks I hadn't seen that. 'the sun always rises in the east' ... I could be a smart ass and say no it doesn't it just appears to

Do you think this is cultural or something deeper?