Maddie

We can only manifest what we have the merit or good karma for. Manifesting it's like shopping. The goal is your shopping list. The karma is your money. If you desire to manifest something and you have the merit it will happen. If you don't have the merit it won't. That's why it seems to work for some people and not others.

Then try feeling your aversion to all of this. It seems to bother you that you get caught up in your thoughts when you try to observe them. Just pay attention to this annoyance.

I was unaware of that verse, but really like it!

Maybe about a year ago I was reading a sutta about dependent origination and I came across the part that said "becoming". Now in the context of the sutta was basically saying this is the point that you enter a new womb to acquire a new body for a new life, but I guess the word had a profound impact on me out of context. Being very general there seem to be two kinds of practices. The first time is to "become" more. To gain super powers, to gain qi, to gain something. The second is to "become" less by letting go of more and more. This was the method the Buddha taught, this is the method of "neti neti". This is the method that I generally practice. What path do you follow, and why?

Actually what you are describing sounds very familiar. When I began I was drawn to Taoist stuff like qigong and had no interest in things like mantras at all, in fact I sort of rolled my eyes at them. I guess that was because having come out of fundamentalist Christianity it seemed too much like prayer to me and I was at the time put off by all things church related due to many bad experiences. Now though I would say mantras are probably my main practice, aside from studying texts and contemplation.

When I find interesting about the heart and diamond sutra's usage in Asia is the way their chanted for magical and spiritual efficacy simply by virtue of the power of the scripture itself. I don't really understand this but at the same time I find the concept fascinating.

Another fun little tid-bit is its common in Asia to recite the Heart Sutra to clear and area of ghosts, and to improve one's karma.

True yin/yang did not originate from Taoism, but are a central theme in it. Much like karma, Samsara, and liberation didn't originate with Buddhism, but play a central role in Buddhism.

I can't say as much about the Taoist concepts as I am less familiar with them, but in regards to impermanence from the Taoist point of view if one looks at the model of yin/yang it can be seen that yin and yang are always in flux each becoming the other and always in motions which to me seems to illustrate well impermanence.

Obviously there are many types of ways to cultivate and practice which makes sense since there are many different and various types of personalities and situations. What I would like to know is what are your favorite and preferred methods of practice and why? I'm fairly certain that some of the most common ones here are Qigong, and meditation, as well as yoga, and mantra. I'd be interested in hearing about some of the less well discussed methods as well. Does anyone do recitation of texts or scriptures as a practice? ( This is one I don't really understand well as a practice but would like to try to make sense of it better. Reading and study? Maybe devotion to an altar or deity? I suppose there are a lot of options out there. What are your preferred methods and why?

The Diamond sutra is about emptiness. Nothing is substantial. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is ultimately satisfying.

I find personally that mindfulness is one of the most useful and miserable practices there is.

What I found is that doing so makes them more of what ever they are. Thus having said that in the past when I did this sort of things, things could often get quite dramatic. If they are a little crazy, they become a lot crazy.

I guess that would mean what you define as "real". Part of me thinks its interesting on one hand. Another part of my brain does not understand how hunks of rock and gas in space affect our lives here on Earth?

https://youtu.be/TgbIhdvviBU

I suppose there's a lot that could be said about trolls and trolling on internet forms but there's something I noticed about the energy aspect of trolls. They are almost always younger beta males. They typically also lose a lot of jing through excessive solo ejaculation. Because this loss of kidney water essence doesn't leave much leftover to nourish liver wood in the five Element cycle of generation they unconsciously seek to compensate the deficiency through energy vampireism. Anger is the emotion of the liver and wood qi. Therefore they do things to upset other people and once the person is upset with them and directs the wood anger qi at them they are making up for the lack of kidney water qi in their livers. Since they are taking in a dirty type of qi and absorbing the anger qi of another person into their liver wood as opposed to the cooling calming kidney water qi of their own system they become continually more angry and thus the cycle becomes very difficult to stop.

I'm not lost I'm right here... hee hee :-). I do love a good Beatles reference. We are because we were before, and we will be in the future because we are.

Yes Hallucinogens do target the mind. In TCM the heart houses the mind. So if we are talking about Hallucinogens we are going to look at the heart/mind. If we are talking about schedule one drugs we are going to look at the kidney/zhi/jing. Hope that clarifies things.

The Buddha would say you become now because of past conditioning when you became before. Simply you're here now out of habit. You're here because before you were there.

Schedule one is the hard stuff like meth, crack, morphine, heroin, the stuff that makes you feel really good but is really bad for you. Hallucinogens would affect the Heart Xin more.

No, mostly the schedule one type stuff, hard stuff.

I didn't say this was the reason to read it. Basically in a nut shell the heart sutra lists the five skandhas and explains how and why each one of them is not substantial, is not self. The conclusion it seems to reach is that once you understand this, you understand everything you need to know.

In some of the practices and meditations that Mantak Chia teaches you're supposed to channel energy from the big Dipper and the North Star. I guess my analytical and amateur astronomically literate brain always had a problem with that realizing that it's just an arrangement of stars that appear to form a Dipper shape from the Earth but there's not really some Dipper thing out there on a two-dimensional Black felt board.

The Buddha said not to believe what someone says based on their reputation but if what they say makes sense.

If I understand correctly today there's the Star of Bethlehem where Jupiter and Saturn are aligned and it's the solstice what does this all mean?