doc benway

Yesterday, my bride and I decided to watch a film and were scrolling through cable options. We came across The Sitter (Jonah Hill) and I stopped and suggested it. I'd seen it already, didn't particularly like it, but felt drawn to it. She wasn't interested. A few minutes later I got a call from my son and during our chat, out of nowhere, he asked if I'd ever watched The Sitter...

Sorry to hear it's tougher for the mods. Thanks for all that you do!

There's a perspective from which all the gods and demons, heavens and hells, and the one concerned with them are liberated. It is not the only perspective but lies at the core of Christianity and other traditions. If your intent is sincere and you look inward with patience and honesty, you will find your answers. Transcend the institutional attempts to control your search, they are mostly concerned with political and economic power.

I was reading a sacred text earlier. I rested for a while. Upon returning to the book I felt a deep connection, and held the book to my heart. As I sat in the bright sun, thinking of the page where I paused, I reached for the book and effortlessly opened, to the correct page.

Here's an old thread that might be interesting for you to peruse. http://www.thedaobums.com/topic/16143-bruce-frantzis-bagua-mastery-program/ I'm not advocating or criticizing the program. I'm generally of the mindset that Chinese internal martial arts require direct instruction but there are self-instruction programs out there and Frantzis is a credible instructor. My advice would be that it is more valuable to connect with a good instructor than it is to study any particular discipline. Any of the martial arts can have profound physical, energetic, and spiritual benefit, if taught and trained skillfully.

A good friend gave me a CD he burned covering the Ashtavakra Gita. Here is a link to a translation done by John Richards. And here is a link to a translation by Thomas Byrom. I intend to listen to the CD over the next few days or so and thought I'd start a thread to see if anyone is interested in discussing it.

Such a masterful teacher!

Beautiful Luke!

and constellations peppered with the rush of bats rest into moon wash

realize there is never a time when you are not aligned with Dao breath laugh

I think different people need different things at different points in their lives and on the path. The mind expects and feeds off of complexity, challenge, change, stimulation... It can be difficult to settle into simplicity. For most people, I think there is a need to prepare for simplicity. Certain things need to be worked through and seen through, otherwise they may not appreciate the profound truths that come with a very direct approach. I suspect this is why in a very "simple" practice like Dzogchen, there is traditionally a long period of preparation and a stringent selection process. Fortunately for us in the West, the threat of losing this precious gem has led to much more open access. But it will not take root in everyone.

Spontaneous

Another wonderful coincidence for me was the first time I attended a meditation retreat. I desperately wanted to meet the lama to discuss some powerful experiences I'd had but he wasn't available for a private meeting. It was a 10 day silent retreat and on the 3rd day someone came into the dining room during breakfast and called out my name. They asked me to take a look at another participant who seemed ill. She was terribly sick, spoke minimal English, and was terrified. She was very resistant to going to a doctor or hospital. She didn't trust the US healthcare system (thanks to the movie Sicko!), didn't have money or insurance, etc... I knew she was in really bad shape and convinced her to go to the local hospital. It was over an hour wait for an ambulance. During the wait, the lama stopped in to check on her, said some prayers and blessings for her and left. There was nothing to do but wait and it gave me the opportunity to do something I generally never get to do in my usual work which was to really open my heart to this person - hold her hand, sit with her, put my arm around her, reassure her, rub her back, and simply be there for her while we waited. That by itself changed something in me deeply that has stuck with me ever since. As the ambulance was taking her away she told me how disappointed she was to be missing out on her private meeting with the lama that afternoon. As I walked back to the meditation hall, one of the lama's assistants ran up to me and asked if I still wanted to meet with the lama. I did, of course, and the meeting, albeit brief, was transformative. Very few words were said, or needed, but the way in which the lama received me and connected with me - verbally, physically, and energetically - was exactly what I needed at that moment to put things together. Over the next few hours and days, I was able to see how to move forward in a new direction in my life. After the retreat was over I visited my new friend in the hospital. She was recovering from surgery for what proved to be a life threatening illness but was on the mend. She was absolutely thrilled that her illness provided me the opportunity and answers I'd hoped for. We've been close ever since, thanks to social media. So many wonderful things have grown out of that strange synchronicity. It really blows my mind every time I think about it.

In someDaoist systems there are 3 basic positions of the tip of the tongue (some use 5). The first is just behind the teeth touching the front of the hard palate - often referred to as the wind position. Second is straight up at the apex of the hard palate - referred to as fire position, it tends to dry the mouth. Third is way back where the soft palate meets the hard palate - this is the water position. It is thought to help generate the elixir. It is challenging to reach and maintain with the tongue but that is the area specified in many Daoist systems. In the system I studied, the water position was said to be necessary for the practices of converting jing to qi. With practice you can do it.

Nor do the Buddhas believe in "you"

Nothing more related to Dao than knowing my authentic self, IMO. This is part of my path also. The word 'confronting' is meaningful. We can confront our feelings but we can also simply host them. Being authentic is to acknowledge even those parts of us that we don't approve of. My primary focus is not so much on what is suppressed but on the one who is confronting, suppressing, and hosting.

One objection I have to this message is that it does not acknowledge the value of our relative experience in favor of the absolute. While we may be able to directly experience the self as an illusion, we nonetheless live with it throughout our lives on earth. To deny the relative in favor of the absolute is an error, in my opinion. Both perspectives have equal value and legitimacy. The key IMO is to see and feel the presence of the absolute in the relative. In that way we can let go of aversion and attachment without sacrificing the opportunities life presents.

Practice

Not sure I fully understand your post allinone, my apologies. One point seems to be the importance of combining dream practice with foundational spiritual practices. I agree with that. Dream practice is a 24 hour cycle and incorporates morning, daytime, evening, and sleep components. In addition, it is meant to be one part of a more comprehensive tantric spiritual practice. You mention that "you require only the lucid dream xp itself not what you do there in or "meditate in dream." I do not agree fully with this point. As Ilya mentioned, the lucid dream experience can be very unstable and it is only through practicing with the lucidity that we can stabilize the practice, make it more predictable, and learn how to effectively manipulate the dream environment. We can learn to change things, make the larger, smaller, multiply things, visit places, seek teachings, and so forth. For the dream practitioner this is all very worthwhile and requires a lot of patience and practice.

Most people who practice run in to that obstacle. The realization that "I am dreaming" leads to excitement which destabilizes the realization and we either wake up or find ourselves in another dream. Since we have to sleep every night, there's nothing to lose by continuing the practice! These practices are far from useless but they do take an enormous amount of patience and dedication, especially for those of us not living in monastic circumstances. I think it also helps a great deal to have transmission from a lineage master.

One of my main practices is exactly this - feeling space. We work with it in several ways - feeling stillness in the body, hearing silence in the speech and sound, feeling spaciousness in the mind and heart. Working with dream and sleep also relate to this - being lucid in dream and changing the dream gives rise to more freedom for change in waking life where things generally feel so solid there is less confidence in the ability to change. Experience of awareness in dreamless sleep gives another level of depth to the experience of "feeling space." The result is to ultimately be more focused on the observer than the observed and in turn to be focused on the inseparability of the observer/observed experience. The implications relate to the very existence of the observer and the observer/observed duality that we accept as reality. I read a wonderful quote recently by Anthony Demello - Silence is not the absence of sound, it is the absence of self.

Hi qicat, I'm happy to share some thoughts. Our minds generate everything we see, everything we think, everything we are, in their interaction with surrounding conditions. If I pay attention, I notice all sorts of thoughts, images, impression, and internal dialogues arising throughout the day. Even how we interpret and experience things we assume are 'outside' ourselves - sights, sounds, smells, tastes... It's all a reflection of our mind. Where does this all come from? Our experience, desires, aversions, memories, unresolved conflict, and so forth. Same thing for dreams - they are just that same activity of the mind occurring during sleep. Everything we encounter, everything that affects us, will play out in our dreams. Meditation and qigong both open us to a deeper connection to ourselves - repressed and suppressed emotion and memories will come up as our practice deepens and strengthens. My Daoist meditation master said one of the benefits of practicing meditation is that it allows us to face and work through this stuff while we are young and healthy. He said that eventually everyone must face it all and most people face it without training or preparation when they are frail, sick, and close to death. He used to attribute the extremely high rate of suicide in the elderly to this part, in part. So I would suggest that it is normal to dream and it is expected that your dreams will reflect your daily life. Adding meditation and qigong to your life will potentially lead to richer, more intense dreams, and it is likely that you will face deeper and potentially more disturbing things that you've hidden away. Over time, if your daily life becomes more well-adjusted, more peaceful, more at ease through these practices, your dreams will as well. I practice yogas of dream and sleep. In dream yoga, we train ourselves to recognize we are dreaming in the dream and to take control of the dreamscape. In learning to be in control in our dreams, we can similarly be in control of, and make changes in, our waking lives, often in ways we would not have thought possible. Sleep yoga focuses more on examining and experiencing the process of transition between waking and sleep. It usually passes in an instant, in ignorance, with no memory, and yet as we learn to observe the transition it is seen to be a gradual, multi-layered, and fascinating process of dissolution of the self. It is thought to be somewhat similar to the dissolution experienced at the time of death. With practice, we can ride our awareness right into sleep and rest in the experience of perfect clarity and awareness in deep sleep, in the absence of dreams. This is thought to be very similar to the first Bardo encountered in death (there are several). Recognizing this in sleep can make us more likely to recognize our true face in death which is said to be a door to liberation from the cycles of samsara. Edited to add a few words about energy - One explanation from the Tibetan tradition is that the genesis of a dream is a combination of a subtle "wind" (Tibetans use the word wind, subtle movement of energy, to describe what others call prana or qi) interacting with an energy center or chakra. Since we carry our emotional life in our chakra system, the chakra that is stimulated will determine the nature of the dream. In practicing dream yoga, one method is to focus on specific chakras and generate visualizations in that chakra as we fall asleep. This allows us to influence the type of dream we are likely to have (this is divided into categories like peaceful, wrathful, and powerful). So as our energetic life changes through qigong, naturally our dreams will reflect this.

I have a close friend whose son was very ill and on a waiting list for a liver and kidney transplant for a long time. The son and I connected over our interests in music, in particular, a band called Queens of the Stone Age. I had this feeling that I wanted to somehow get the band to do something nice for the kid but didn't know how. I sent a few messages to the band online with no response and simply resigned myself to generate the intention of connecting with the band without knowing how it would happen. Soon after, I found myself working with someone I'd never previously met and we were asked what music we'd like to listen to on Pandora while we worked. I suggested Queens of the Stone Age. He immediately responded to this and shared that he grew up with their drummer. I asked if they were still close and explained my desire to help my friends son, also a drummer. He shot a text message to the drummer. 3 weeks later a huge drumhead signed by the entire band shows up at my friends house with a suggestion that they may be in touch the next time the pass through our area on tour! Soon after that, the boy's spot came up on the transplant list. His surgery was smooth and successful and he's doing great. He's even back to playing the drums.