Maddie

I want to talk about a topic that I feel does not get much attention within Buddhist discussion (especially Buddhism in the West) and that is spiritual protection from harmful spirits, and other entities, as well as black magic and psychic attack from other human beings. It has been my experience in Buddhism in the West for Buddhism to be approached very skeptically and secularly. Not only has this been my personal experience but try googling the topic and very little useful information comes up as well. I would actually like to be one of these content and happy western Buddhist skeptics but unfortunately personal experience has not allowed this to happen to me. When looking for solutions to this problem on google most hits that come up are from either a Christian perspective or a pagan/wiccan one. I even tried to talk about this to a western monk at a nearby monastery but he just seemed to think I was superstitious. While I don't claim to be any particular sect of Buddhism most of my study and time has been from a Theravada point of view (but not exclusively). What I have found from this tradition so far that has been of some benefit are the Paritta chants, specifically the Rathana and Atanatiya suttas. Playing them on youtube seems to help to a degree, and chanting them myself seems to help even more (in English). I have found some Mahayana sutras and mantras to be helpful occasionally as well. But other than that I have not found much within Buddhism that seems to be helpful. Other things that so far I have found to be helpful from personal experience are not Buddhist but magic herbs and crystals which are basically from indigenous human spiritual practice for most of our evolution from pretty much everywhere in the world. I had tried in the past some Catholic practices (even though I have never been Catholic) and those seemed to be effective as well such as rosaries and attending mass, but couldn't really do it very long after I started reading the rest of what Catholics thought but maybe I was throwing the baby out with the bath water. Other than that I don't really know what else to try, and nothing has seemed to give me a once and for all solution. If anyone has had experience with such things and know of things that are useful, especially from a Buddhist perspective I would love to hear about it. I would also be interested in knowing what so little seems to be said about this topic, especially in western Buddhism?

I am an acupuncturist and practitioner of TCM. I would like to deepen my clinical practice and learn about the Taoist approach to TCM. Does anyone know of any good resources?

In the past in my evangelical Christian days the notion of reading the bible as a practice in and of itself was a pretty big thing as having spiritual efficacy. Later when I left Christianity I didn't think very highly of most things Christian so just sort of dropped this notion. But as after all break ups eventually one gets back on speaking terms with their ex and so I have been re-exploring this type of practice, by reading various sacred texts and scriptures slowly and mindfully and paying attention to any effects they might have energetically. To my surprise they do seem to have an effect on an energetic level. I especially notice things going on in my upper chakras (not really that surprising). The reason I am writing this post is because I wanted to know if other traditions teach that reading and studying the sacred texts and scriptures IS a practice, and if so what the effects are?

Well this time around I have not stopped but in the past I stopped because it got extremely uncomfortable. I think part of that in the past was because I would overdo it.

I'm actually glad I did it with another person because other wise I might have thought I just imagined it, but since we were able to recall the things that we did, the places we went, and the conversations we had out of body that was pretty convincing to me.

Um well yes, but it is going to sound odd, but back when I was in the Army so a long time ago, I was at a house party of one of my friends and I was sitting in one of his living room chairs and I felt like I was floating up to the ceiling. I guess he was just sensitive or something but he looked up and was like "did you know you are floating outside of your body". So later on he told me a good way to make it happen intentionally was to drink an entire bottle of Robitussin DM (I am not recommended one do this). I have no idea how he knew this but one night we sat down in my place and both chugged our Robitussin and in just a few minutes we both floated out of our bodies and went exploring together. Again I have no idea how or why that works, and no idea of how he figured that out.

Yes I agree, I like learning both sides as well. I think it helps with balance.

Ok that is a decent point.

When I was in acupuncture school many if not most of our text books came from China. China is a communist country and as such has made an intentional and systematic approach to removing all things spiritual from its content. There was very little "mystical" content in our text books.

If a book was written by a person and is giving advice, and your teacher is a person giving advice, what is the difference then?

In regards to OBE I have in the past.

I guess that raises another question. What deities are good for Westerners?

I actually do all the above. I will start with visualization but I wait until I actually start feeling something and then that's when things usually start happening.

I thought I would elaborate on my own question a little bit. Since asking that question the other day, for contrast I read the scriptures of a couple other traditions. I don't want to name names but the scriptures of the other traditions have more of a reputation for being more judgmental. What I found was after spending some time reading them I began to feel inexplicably irritable. This happened each day I read them. On the other hand when I read scriptures of a more eastern origin I began to feel peaceful and happy. It was as though the energy of the scriptures affects those reading them, and it seems to go beyond the intellectual understanding of the content.

No not anymore.

If you read the Pali suttas they are full of people paying homage to the Buddha and we never see the Buddha saying "oh no don't do that"

Sure. So I learned the inner smile/healing sounds from Mantak Chia's book. It was presented as a warm up to the main point of the book. So I did it and was surprised to experience all sorts of suppressed emotions from way back in my past. I began to remember things that I had totally forgotten about from when I was a very young child, though mostly negative stuff. Even though one is meant to do a few repetitions in each organ, what I began to notice from the practice sort of led to it becoming my main practice for a few years. For example the Kidneys are said to be related to the emotion of fear. When I would do the inner smile/healing sound for the Kidneys, I began to not only remember childhood trauma that I had totally forgotten but actually feel the feeling that I had experienced as a child when it happened. Or if I did it for the Liver old long forgotten anger related issues would be remembered and the feeling that I felt as I experienced them as a child would reemerge. So what was the real world effect of this? Well as I had just mentioned I had experienced some trauma as a child, an abusive environment which unsurprisingly (as I was to see from the practice) led me to being married to a very controlling and abusive person. After I had started doing this practice for a while her treatment of me no longer seemed "normal" but instead it seemed toxic. This eventually led to me leaving her. I had been with her for eight years to that point and a little after a year of doing the inner smile/healing sounds I left her. The example of getting out of a bad marriage might be my most extreme example but to me what was most interesting was the insights into myself that I saw from going deep into each organ. I was see latent mental patterns and emotions that were operating under the surface that had been influencing me without me even being aware. In addition to this there were other physical health benefits. At this point my vision had begun to get a little blurry and after having done a modified version of the Liver inner smile/healing sound my vision improved. I know this is a brief summary but hopefully it encompasses some of my experiences with this practice.

I thought I would start a thread for people to share their actual experiences and observations first hand from their practice. I'm less interested in theory is this thread and more interested in what practitioners actually experienced. I guess I'll start. I used to think that I began my practice into cultivation around 2008 when I began to get interested in qigong as a way of making me better at karate (which it did). With further reflection though I have come to realize that my cultivation practice began earlier than that when I was still very active in the church. So I think I will start there. When I was in church I made it a practice to very regularly pray and study the scriptures. Sometimes I would spend an hour during prayer just "listening" or several hours contemplating one line of scripture. I didn't realize it at the time but I think looking back I had some moments of lesser Samadhi while doing these practices, and either developed some minor siddhis or at least witnessed some miraculous events that one might attribute to angels/devas/saints. From an energetic point of view I think at the time I was increasing qi at the upper dan tien or third eye or perhaps crown chakra as I got to a point where I began to perceive light above my head when I would spend time in quiet prayer in the dark. Other things I noticed was that I seemed to become skilled in manifesting as often the things I "prayed" for would happen very quickly. This of course was not the case when I first began praying. It seemed that it took several years of daily prayer practice to get to that point. I also had several instances where I was miraculously protected from harm by what I assume were angels/devas that I had connected with in my prayer time. Looking back my silent listening time in prayer now seems very much like sitting meditation. Fast forwarding a few years after becoming disillusioned with the church and leaving it I found myself picking up my martial arts practice from my childhood in karate. In the process of wanting to get better at karate I discovered qigong as a means to be more effective at martial arts. At first that was my only motive for exploring qigong but as I began to study it more I realized that was a lot more to it than just improving ones' marital arts. One practice that I really began to find interesting was working with the five elements/organs. As I began to work with the organs and elements I would unlock totally forgotten about and repressed emotions and memories. After this began to happen patterns that I had been stuck in for quiet some time began to unravel and change spontaneously. While qigong had its uses I eventually found that while the practice might have been useful I had a lot of questions that just practicing qigong wasn't going to answer. This eventually led me to become more interested in Buddhism as the Buddha seemed to have something to say about almost everything, and not only that the answers seemed to make sense to me, or at least more than other explanations. I began to do two general categories of practices, meditation and mantra. The primary mantra that I did at the beginning was the Zhunti mantra. I found this mantra to be very powerful, even too powerful which is why I eventually stopped it. I would have all sorts of side effects from this mantra which included frequent urination, agitated emotions, and lots of "bad luck". On the other hand it did help me achieve a particular goal I had after doing it a lot for about a year. The other practice of mindfulness meditation also seemed to have many side effects. These also included emotional agitation and very often I would find several of my arm meridians spontaneously purging themselves of gunk. My Large Intestine meridian seemed to be especially effected and I would have these weird fluid filled bumps on my index finger, thumb (Lung meridian which is paired with the Large Intestine) and pinky side of my palm (Heart/Pericardium). I would often find myself spontaneously getting short of breath and having palpitations and strong emotional releases (again Lung and Heart) so I assumed that these meridians had a lot of clearing out to do. So I assumed the qi in the middle dan tien became very active during this process. Currently I find myself focusing more on devotion to certain Buddha's and bodhisattvas at the moment and this seems to be working well for me and I find myself having less unpleasant side effects. So what does this all mean? Knowing what I know now but didn't know then here is my best attempt at an analysis of what happened at the time. Since my first real attempt at any sort of systematic spiritual pursuit was Christianity which consisted of prayer and scripture study as well as the obvious elements of devotion I believe this began me on a top down cultivation approach. All the devotion and prayer seemed to have affected my upper dan tien and chakras the most for obvious reasons as the upper dan tien houses the Shen, the crown chakra relates to spirituality and transcendence, and the third eye to things beyond ordinary perception, all of which Christianity is about. The effect this had was to make me "top heavy". My head was in the clouds all the time and it was hard to relate to the ordinary physical world. Also if you were to look at me then I did not look healthy. I looked pale, and pasty and out of shape (which was on of the things that lead me to take up karate again). This was the result of developing the upper dan tien with out the lower ones first. I didn't look that healthy (lower dan tien) and I had a lot of suppressed/repressed emotions (middle dan tien). After leaving Christianity and eventually getting into qigong, even though I had initially been drawn to qigong to improve my martial arts I quickly began to notice how many repressed emotions I had while working with the organs/elements and began to fixate on that. This began a process of intense emotional releases and realizations about myself, but it was very difficult and uncomfortable. Once I transitioned to a more Buddhist approach I was still primarily interested in stabilizing my emotions and having the same reactions. This now seems to be more of a middle dan tien approach as it was primarily emotional. It was during this time that I also became very sensitive to the emotions and even thoughts of other people which leads me to believe that a lot of that has to do with the middle dan tien area more than the upper. Eventually I got tired of the emotional upheaval that this approach produced and in the last year or so gave that up as my primary practice and recently just simply began to work out and do yoga asana, so basically a much more physical approach, so the realm of the lower dan tien. This is probably the best I have felt for a long time and I look healthier as well. It's probably too soon to say a whole lot but I do not seem to be having the problems I had with the other approaches. So I guess the moral of the story is start at the bottom and work your way up as opposed to the other way around. Thought I would make a list of major practice experience insights: 1. Zhunti mantra: very strong! did accomplish some of the goals I had wanted to achieve but at a very high price. Had sever physical and mental/emotional side effects as well as intense "bad luck" when doing it. Some side effects I have experienced and a few people I know that also tried the mantra include, frequent urination (I believe this is a result of the pre-natal jing or karma in the kidneys being purged). Strong emotional reactions. Had one friend state they had to constantly defecate as well. Sting of bad luck happening. Increased psychic awareness.

I decided to back way up and get down to the basics. It seems like there are so many techniques that sometimes its hard to know what exactly Daoism is and what the goal of Daoism is. Additionally when I got started on the path I think I had a tendency to equate Qigong with Daoism and I learned some pretty subpar Qigong which I'm sure confused the whole issue and resulted to me looking to Buddhism for answers. This still begs the question of what Daoism is, what is the goal in Daoism, and what the techniques are for practicing it. I think for now I'll leave this question fairly open ended and let people fill in the blanks which I'm sure will raise more questions to round things out with.

Lately both my daughter and myself I started doing this mantra again and we both had very similar side effects such as backs and necks cracking and being sore weird water blisters on our fingers and being really tired.

I suppose any replies to this will be mainly a matter of opinion but I was wondering if anyone feels that religious texts have any energy and power in and of themself? Like does having a copy on your table at energy to the room or does just reading it generate merit or have energy?

I've seen this channel and he seems to be well educated but he also gives me the impression of thinking that he knows a lot more than anybody else does.

I very hesitantly open the Jing topic again, but defiantly NOT to get in the gory graphic details of how to supposedly retain it, work with it, and define it as precious bodily fluids and what not which is why this belongs in the general discussion as opposed to the Grotto areas. I feel that there is a lot of confusion, misunderstanding, and frustration regarding this topic which could be alleviated with some rather simple clarification. So to begin with I'll put this out there immediately Jing is NOT semen or sperm. Jing is not a physical substance. Jing or essence is an energetic substance. Granted of the various energetic substances it is one of the grossest and most dense but it is still energetic. It isn't my goal to just repeat what the texts books say about Jing. Anyone can do that with a simple google search. What I want to do is combine what the text books teach with what I have observed in practice as a TCM practitioner and personally as a cultivator. So what IS Jing. Jing might be compared to what Plato meant as the ideal form, or the essence of something. As with a lot of terms in TCM a one to one literal translation or correspondence into Western vernacular is difficult. So I will attempt to give several examples of various manifestations of how Jing expresses itself in the world. Being that Jing is also known as essence and essence is defined by Webster as: "the basic nature of a thing; the quality or qualities that make a things what it is". Being that it is the fundamental nature of a thing, then when it comes to human beings for example there are several ways this can translate and some ways in which there is no real adequate translation. One of the first and most basic areas in the domain of Jing are genetics which more specifically relates to the "pre-natal" Jing, or the Jing that one inherits from their parents. Someone with a large amount of Jing generally has a healthy constitution and tends towards the intelligent side. On the other hand those with congenital deformities, defects, and a generally weak constitution are said to have less or deficient Jing. It is this basic relation to the genetic code and the more animalistic side of the physical body which makes celibacy difficult, it is the nature of Jing to not want to conserve itself. The animalistic programing of our genetics, of our Jing is to perpetuate the species above almost everything else other than raw immediate physical survival. Since it is in the nature of Jing to reproduce this is why the issue of celibacy is difficult. It goes against the code of and in Jing. We are literally accumulating more of the stuff that drives us to consume Jing. Transcending this urge and pattern is in the domain of Shen not Jing which brings us to the catch 22 of conserving enough Jing for enough time to build Shen to the level of breaking the cycle, but until then it is not an easy thing to do. In so much as it has a relation to genetics then naturally it has a link to the areas of genetics that pertain to the perpetuation of the species, i.e. reproduction and all things related. This is where its connection to sperm enters the picture. Jing is used to create sperm, but is no more the sperm or the semen than the factory that makes the car is the car. The Jing would more accurately correspond so the design schematics for the car than the car itself. If then Jing is not sperm then why is there the connection between semen retention and Jing conservation? I'm going to assume that this association arose from a misunderstanding of the activities that actually do increase Jing consumption which do have an association with semen, which is PLEASURE. It is not the creation of semen that consumes Jing at an accelerated rate, but the use of Jing in the orgasmic experience. It is when there is an orgasm that Jing is consumed at an accelerated rate. This is not just limited to orgasm of course. The accelerated consumption of Jing is facilitated by various activities that are associated with highly pleasurable states that involve the body, such as hard core drug use. This is why heroin and meth addicts age at a rapidly accelerated rate. From a TCM perspective the drugs in and of themselves don't create the please of the high as much as the Jing release. Also things that artificially temporarily boost energy when energy is otherwise expended consume Jing at an accelerated rate such as lots of caffeine or energy drinks. Granted Jing is used at a lesser rate all the time in the process of living and when ones Jing supply gets lower aging sets in and when it is consumed entirely death occurs. This being the case if one were to use techniques where orgasm is achieved but semen is retained there is no Jing conservation in this as the orgasmic process IS what consumes the Jing at an accelerated rate. On the other hand Jing conservation does have its uses for sure. Since Jing is the grossest of the three treasures of Jing, Qi, and Shen it provides a foundation and starting place to increase and develop the others. This is why we eat food. We consume the Jing of the food we eat and our digestive systems extract the food Jing. When it is combined with the air Jing from our Lungs in the San Jiao (triple burner) then the combined food and air Jing are refined into Qi. So simply eating and drinking are one of the basic methods to convert Jing into Qi. As long as the qi supply is fairly plentiful less of our pre-natal Jing is required to be converted into Qi and thus it is conserved. So if you want to conserve your Jing, eat well, breath fresh air, get lots of rest, you know all the stuff your doctor and mother tell you to do. What then is the story behind semen retention, celibacy, and Jing conversion? Is it all just bunk or is there any truth behind it all? It does have a place, and this is why so many of the major cultivation movements have celibacy as a requirement. When one is no longer consuming Jing at an accelerated rate through activities like orgasm then it has a chance to accumulate to the point where the body can use it for other purposes and the excess can be utilized to be converted into qi. What then is the advantage of having more qi then? Once the qi has increased it begins to flow through the channels in larger amounts which has the effects of opening blockages and accumulating in greater quantity. When the qi reaches a sufficient quantity it then can be converted into Shen. I have glossed over some of the details in this part of the process, but that was beyond the scope of the topic being written about. To summarize, semen is not Jing. Retaining semen while reaching orgasm with not conserve Jing. Jing is conserved by avoiding Jing consuming activities that are often associated with elevated levels of physical pleasure. Once Jing is retained qi increases. Once qi increases Shen increases.

Very interesting. Do you know in what way the Mahayana consider the Hinayana texts to be inferior? Like is there something specific about them that is considered to be "less"?

Do you know why they ignore them? I mean they have copies of the Pali cannon, so why is it largely ignored by the Mahayana?