Maddie

I can't really contemplate any topic of banking and corporations with out wondering who's really running the world lol.

My minor at the University of Alaska was geography and I was fortunate in that with Alaska being in the arctic a LOT of climate change research was going on up there. The data is overwhelming that the climate change we are currently experiencing is due to human beings. Yes there have been cycles in the past BUT this current trend does not fit with any of the past cycles. On the other hand this is the first time that several hundred million years of stored carbon dioxide has been released in huge quantities in just the matter of a couple centuries.

I like Bach flower remedies

Yea I think what you said is just brilliant lol. You know I was meditating and thought about this more. I still use the five element approach a lot when it comes to helping patients, but have noticed this general inclination towards Vipassana and Samatha practice lately, as opposed to the five element practice that I used to do so often when I started. What I also found interesting was the common thread between what you said about narrowing things down in Taoist cosmology and a common denominator between Buddhist and Taoist thought and practice. So working with the five elements is a bit more form based, as you focus on that element/organ in your body. I guess this would be more equivalent to some of the form based Tantra practices of Tibetan or esoteric Buddhism. This practice seemed to be quite effective at the time with helping me to deal with thoughts and feelings as they arose, at least for a while. The thing I would notice though while doing this practice was at a point I felt like I plateaued and felt like I had dealt with most of the long term stuff on this level and that now I wasn't getting very far like I used to. The results started to seem short lived and temporary. So looking for an explanation I began to gravitate towards Vipassana and Samatha practice. Now to me the Buddhist Vipassana and Samatha practice seem to me like Taoist yin and yang. Samatha being more still would be yin, while Vipassana being more active would be yang. So now instead of a five element level things seem to have gone to a level of dualism. This also seems to reflect my experience during practice as well. In the past with a more five element based practice I would deal with the various emotions that arose from the five elements such as anger, fear, worry, sadness, and excitement. Now doing a more yin/yang practice my experience is more like an awareness of craving vs aversion or to put it another way craving vs anti-craving (another term for aversion). A polarity of opposites, yin and yang. Also insightful is the realization that the various emotions that the five elements give rise to are simply various manifestations of yin and yang, craving and aversion. Thus in the cosmological sense its an insight into how yin and yang gave rise to the five elements. It also seems to go to a way deeper level than the five element practice formerly did, and I suppose this is due to the fact that since yin and yang give rise to the five elements they would be on a deeper level. For example formerly if I felt anger the way I would go about dealing with it would be to meditate on the liver/wood element. Now if I feel anger and I do Vipassana I see that "anger" comes about because either a desire I have is not being fulfilled or an aversion that I have is being fulfilled. So that's the dualistic explanation. Of course then if you wanted to see how that further progressed to play out at the next level of the five elements then you could see how if you have a particular desire for example your liver/wood element would make a plan to meet that desire as that is the function of the wood element. Then if something comes along and interferes with your plan now you feel anger or frustration which is the emotion of the wood element. But if you can go to the level of yin and yang first before it manifests at the five element level and lessen desire in the first place then it never gets to the five element level. Now this part is conjecture since I have not gotten there yet, but I suppose that beyond yin and yang the level of wuji or as the Buddhists would say emptiness/stillness is the next step. If you are at wuji or emptiness then there is not even a duality of aversion and desire. Then further after wuji is Tao and I guess at that point your a Buddha or Taoist immortal. Ok but one step at a time haha.

Soy is also a very yin food, though my professor cautions women against eating too much soy or specifically tofu because the high amounts of estrogen (yin) will increase a woman's chances of breast cancer. (over abundance of yin=imbalance leads to disease?)

you can take her motivational class to be excited about showering :-)

My ex-wife is from Siberia where there is a lot of Shamanism. She is a super devout Christian so when she tells this story its in a negative context but interesting nevertheless. So she was telling me once upon a time in Siberia that she knew of and/or saw this one native Siberian Shaman woman turn into an animal of some sort, and then her brother who was also there confirmed that he saw it too. Pretty weird stuff, but as Siberia is so vast there are large portions of it that not too much westernization has affected the local natives. Apparently their cousins on our side of the Bering Straight in Alaska have similar stories of such happenings, that I heard of when I lived there.

I've noticed after meditating a lot one day my urge to investigate and study the next day is much greater.

Interesting. You know as I was reading that it made me wonder something. If someone became a stream-enterer in their past life or a couple lives ago, how would they know it this time around? I also recon that the more monk-ish you live the further you'll go? Also if you meditate a lot and you feel it do something, is it common to feel very tired the next day?

Hmmm interesting. Yea that website might have not been the best but I did about 5 hours of Vipassana and Samatha yesterday and I feel .... um .... "different" today, like my mind is blown and I have all these questions lol.

So then is it more like no-self is the clinging to a false idea of self?

Ah that's wise advice. I felt myself settling down as I read it haha. That website did have me confused lol.

How would someone know if they became a stream enterer? So I was reading this website http://www.no-self.com/ and it blew my mind away and helped me to realize that there is no "YOU/ME". Totally blew my mind, and yet was fascinating. Though as fascinating as it was and I realized that all desire and suffering comes from this false notion of think of myself as a separate self, I realize that I still feel the pull and effect and workings of this false separate self that I came to realize does not really exist. So why is that?

Found this to be interesting I've noticed that for what ever reason it seems like the deeper insight I get into the "no-self" I have a corresponding emotional protest from my subconscious. weird. Also found this fascinating http://www.no-self.com/

haha, I was just getting ready to say something about that. Yea the whole idea behind acupuncture is that channels do get blocked up, that the qi does stagnate, and that they way that an acupuncture needle works is by unblocking the qi along the course of the meridian. Its interesting cause in the clinic I'll have a patient that has absolutely no understanding of the theory what so ever, and frequently once I put a needle in they will say "oh I feel that going all the way down to my ______ ". The interesting thing is, is that with out knowing it they just described the course of that particular meridian that I had just needled.

Yea if you think about it there are a lot of similarities. Both talk about reaching stillness, lessening desire, going with in. Buddhists call the ultimate goal obtaining Nirvana, Taoists call it obtaining the Tao. In the end whats the real difference?

I don't know why, but I love that!!

I was reading the original post and found it very interesting. So yesterday what started off as doing a Vipassana session to deal with desire led to the contemplation of what self really is or isn't. This happened several times yesterday and this morning when I originally did meditation to look into desire, craving, and stuff like that. Each time it eventually kept coming back to "but what is this self"? I also read that when Seth got to this point things got very intense for a while, and that also seems to be how my day feels today. So I'm trying to sort this out, but since I'm in the midst of it, its a little confusing.

I guess the answer to not be affected by anything is to not cling to it, but rather to let it go. :-)

Welcome :-)

I started off with mostly Taoist practices. Then I gave the Buddhist approach a try. But I am in TCM school which is primarily built on a Taoist foundation so it gives me a good opportunity to compare and contrast the similarities and differences between the two. These are some of the things I've noticed from a personal experience point of view. So I began with the Taoist approach which focuses a lot on the five elements, yin and yang, the organs and meridians, qi and all those Taoist sort of things. So for example I would do a heart meditation using the healing sound and the inner smile. I would gain insight into what was in my heart/shen/mind and alternate between reaching a degree of stillness in the practice alternating with becoming aware of unpleasant feelings, thoughts and tendencies. Then I began to consider the Buddhist approach. They do not focus so much on form in the Taoist sense. You don't work on all those aspects that I listed above. Their approach is more "abstract" as you focus on what is in the mind, and what is the mind but with out all the "form" aspects. So in doing this I'd also reach a degree of stillness as well as becoming aware of the less than pleasant things with in the mind. So I don't claim to be an expert and perhaps someone does have a very good explanation for this, but what I'm wondering is if by using these two different techniques yet achieving similar results and sensations what is the real difference?

From a TCM point of view likes or aversions to certain elements can be explained sometimes by and excess of deficiency of an element or pathogen with in the body. People with too much internal heat don't want more heat. If you have a wind invasion get inside you, you will tend to have an aversion to wind. People with Spleen qi deficiency tend to crave sweets. Now I've never heard of this particular example so I have a couple of seemingly contradictory theories but perhaps you can help narrow it down (like I said I've not heard of this one before) A. Excess dampness. Dampness makes the body feel sluggish and heavy, and the tongue tends to have a thick and greasy coat. Perhaps like with the other examples you have too much dampness and your body does not want more. B. Excess dryness. This is also a pathogenic factor in TCM and as dryness does not like moisture perhaps that is the primary motivating factor. This one you can tell by if your skin tends to be dry and flaky and if the tongue is pretty dry. I'd be interested to hear back on this one as I've not run into this before.

Ok so a couple Vipassana sessions later I think I got a little insight into the weird feeling. Just Samatha uncovering more layers of the subconscious. One of the biggies is desire, and/or aversion (which is just anti-desire). So I looked into this desire more but what I eventually got to that stumped me was not the desire but the desierer. With observation the desire settled down, and I was just left with the aspect of me (or what I call me) that does the desiring. The vague sense I got was that it was not really me, but this layer of wrong thinking (so yea I thought of the 8 fold path) that was covering up the real "me". This of course led me to then ponder what this thing I call "me" is, so I just looked at that for a while, but didn't have any major breakthroughs in that regard, So I'm still a bit stumped about that one.

Oh yea as far as an acupuncture patient is concerned HIPAA is very strict about their privacy. We have to have a refresher lecture each year at school lol. You can not mention the patients name AND what they are being treated for together to anyone that the patient has not given disclosure to. HIPAA stands for "Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act" just in case anyone was interested in another government acronym lol