Jetsun

I would be careful with this no thought stuff, I have been reading some books by Nan Huai Chin and he says that various Buddhist masters through history have had correct many mistaken beliefs and practises around no thought, how many people have tried to cultivate it through a means of suppression creating a contrived blank state of mind which is not real dharma practice. In the highest form of Dzogchen thought or no thought makes no difference as they are both equally empty.

It is written in P. D. Ouspensky's "In Search of the Miraculous": "You must understand that every real religion, that is, one that has been created by learned people for a definite aim, consists of two parts. One part teaches what is to be done. This part becomes common knowledge and in the course of time is distorted and departs from the original. The other part teaches how to do what the first part teaches. This part is preserved in secret in special schools and with its help it is always possible to rectify what has been distorted in the first part or to restore what has been forgotten. Out of dozens of monasteries one is a school." (p.38) For the main Abrahamic religions it seems clear that they have two parts, Islam > Sufism, Christianity > Gnosticism, Judaism > Kabbalah, but most of the general public seem not to be aware that they need the second part of the religion to know what is to be done with the first part of the teachings. Historically you can identify where some of these schools exist, for Sufism historically there were known schools in Mesopotamia around in Baghdad, and another in Khurasan which was a province that once included northeastern Iran, Afghanistan, and parts of Central Asia, but with all the turmoil in that region those schools no longer exist publicly at least; the Whirling Dervishes in Turkey were also eradicated. For Christianity it is clear the builders of Chartres Catherdral in France and some of the Gothic monuments in Europe had Gnostic knowledge, but they had to go underground to avoid the Inquisition and it's not clear if they survived in any form. I don't know of any genuine schools of Kabbalah. In Buddhism the split doesn't seem as clear but there were some Tibetan monasteries which produced a lot more enlightened masters than others, for example the Crazy Wisdom lineage all are linked to the Surmang monastery in Eastern Tibet, but with the Chinese invasion all that was lost in public at least and I don't know where there teachings ended up, Dharamshala perhaps or went underground. In Taoism there is talk of schools at Wudang mountain still containing real teachings, but I don't know many details. So does anyone know of where the real schools still exist? or is it all just done in scattered oral teachings now?

How do you not need food? we may not need all the junk and sugar in our diets these days but the need for food is more than just an ego thing. The Buddha only gained enlightenment after he accepted food to nurture his body from a young girl after many years of austerity, his experiments of starving himself and denying himself didn't lead to realisation.

This is true, but doing inner work within daily life is incredibly difficult because to do real inner work means creating a distance and separation between you and what is happening so you have the power not to be swept away by the hypnotism and drama of life, so you need a level of continual witnessing of what is happening but the crucial thing is to remain on the level of seeing but not reacting. Many people think they can do inner work in the market place but if you observe them their lifeforce and identity get taken and absorbed within life very quickly and they fall back into their regular personality patterns very fast. It is almost impossible to remain in non reacting witnessing mode outside of silent meditation for any significant length of time without long training in how to do it. Some schools like some ancient Sufi ones specialised in how to work in the world, they had specific training to do with dividing your attention and remembrance to cultivate the ability to not get hypnotised by life, but most of those schools are now publicly lost.

This saying that you will find your teacher when you are ready is spoken a lot but what if it is false and you have to go out and put in the effort to find your teacher and genuine teachings? you have to get out of the house and go and search and not expect them to appear when you are ready. Perhaps a good teacher will bring you up to the level where you are able to be taught no matter the level you are at and maybe a good teacher can make you into a good student. In the story of Milarepa he had the karma of being a mass murderer yet he managed to find one of the great enlightened teachers Marpa as his teacher by going and searching for them with his own efforts so it may not just be about karma, i'm sure all the masters through history had students of different merit. I have been reading some Master Nan Huai-Chin as recommended earlier in this thread and he confirms that the majority of what people are teaching as spiritual paths now are actually just distortions or fabrications of genuine teachings, most of the qigong, kundalini and energy methods being taught now will not lead out of the desire realm of human consciousness and many will just entrench you further. With the explosion of popularity of spiritual cultivation also comes an explosion of distortion and wrong interpretation of the teachings, so finding the real deal is not as simple as many people seem to assume.

Quite clearly im not saying all monks are like that, that is simply an embellishment you have created with your imagination. You go and try kill your ego and report back to us how you get on.

I don't think all schools are real, well they are only schools in the same way life in general is in that they teach you from your mistakes, but I would imagine it is clear to most of the people here that in Taoism expecially there are all sorts of frauds and people only teaching minor fragments of a larger system. If you believe stories about "the ancients" they once had a far more complete knowledge of which acupuncture, qigong and energy work etc was just a part of it, but people now are treating that one fragment as a complete system in itself, but what if in some places the complete teaching remains which have complete teachings on the psyche, the energy body, astrology, healing, meditation, sacred architecture, divination, dream body, physical health, etc all together. All the different teachings can compliment each other for a complete education. A zen monk may say all that is unnecessary and all you have to do is sit, but it is clear that certain groups and societies through history had a more complete knowledge than we have now, for example the Egyptians who built the pyramids and Luxor temple had a high knowledge about many aspects of life which now may be lost, and people like Wang Liping had a fat more complete spiritual education than just sitting.

Nice post, all the PUA stuff is probably as far removed from a Taoist approach as you can possibly get, it's all about contriving your image, control and manipulation.

This is true you don't necessarily need these schools, yet it increases your chances of realisation and development if you find one, life is short so it is better to find a group of people who have a track record of achievement in this area if you don't want to waste a lot of it making mistakes and wrong turns which could be avoided with the right instruction.

Apparently many people have gone in search for the Sarmoung Brotherhood but it has never been found, or they found it but decided to keep it a secret, other esoteric writers have mentioned a school called The Great White Brotherhood which preserves a lot of the genuine teachings which could be the same thing as the Sarmoung, but it is hard to determine fact from fiction. It would be interesting to know what of the Essenes are left all I can really find is more academic accounts of them. [ The Internet has spread a lot of information and practises worldwide making so much of this stuff far more accessable than it has ever been before but to me it all seems fragmented and if is hard to determine the legitimate between the ones who are using this just for their own money or egoic needs.

What I know (which probably isn't that much) is that the Essenes placed a lot of emphasis on spiritual community and hard manual work, it was said they would work 12+ hours a day without tiring, but they wouldn't work mechanically like normal people they would work using methods of self attention to expand their consciousness while doing chores which fed them energy rather than tiring them out.

Maybe not the whole world but people like Chairman Mao did a pretty good job of destroying parts of it to try to rebuild it, there were many other individuals with the power to destroy civilisations like Ceasar and Ghenghis Khan. If you study history this process of destruction seems to happen anyway, there have been many great civilisations which get pretty much eradicated over time so it seems to be a natural process, hopefully the collapse of our current world will be less violent but I wouldn't like to be the one responsible for it.

You can battle the ego in your mind and punish yourself for egotism, but more than likely all you achieve is forcing its drives into the dark of your subconscious where they fester and find ways to reemerge with extra fury without your conscious control, which is why many religious people like Catholic priests commit atrocious crimes as they don't know how to fight the spiritual fight, as it's not fought in the same way as normal battles. Believing you have the power to destroy your ego is just another form of egotism.

If you battle your ego aggressively your ego will just dig in harder, trust me I have tried. The ego is a survival mechanism and like all defence mechanisms when faced with a threat and violence they just contract and become stronger, but if you love and accept your ego it can recognise that the heart is a better ruler.

It's like all peak or extreme experiences by themselves they most probably won't dramatically change you, everyone has to do long regular spiritual practice imo, but they open your mind up to other possibilities. Ayahuasca is probably the fastest way to get in touch with other worlds and good training in death or how to die, which is why it's called the "vine of death", so it depends what you are after and what you need, personally I found it to be dramatically faster in purification than meditation but a hell of a lot more terrifying so I doubt I would do it again.

I didn't know that I thought it was more secretive, I guess the Eastern Orthodox Church doesn't have to tow the line to the Vatican which allows genuine religion to remain active in some places. It would be interesting to study the benefit such Christian practises have to see if they compare to things like Qigong and Buddhist methods, I know scientists have done some studies on the monks of Mount Athos and they found that the monks had great levels of health and almost no cancer, but they put it down to diet rather than the purification exercises they do. There are some similarities to Taoist methods in some of their practises so I wonder if it all originates from the same source, for example some of the monks were nicknamed "navel gazers" which suggests they do some meditation method with the dan tien, plus some of the prayer postures look a bit like Zhan Zhuang but they usually repeat a mantra like "lord have mercy" while doing them.

I wonder if being enlightened is just as simple as living from your heart, it is the mind which creates dualism and imagination of the mind creates the false sense of identity, while the heart unifies all, so the tyrant needs to be overthrown and the rightful king needs to take its place.

Gurdjieff wrote in his first book from his observations on the human psyche that if you get two communities of people and one of them are vegetarian and the other are meat eaters the meat eaters will always end up dominating the vegetarians. For his own students he didn't recommend either way but what he would do was challenge peoples habits and beliefs around this issue, so if a vegetarian came to him he would make them eat meat and meat eaters should become vegetarians for a while in order to challenge any fixed conceptions and give them a shock which creates better conditions for self awareness, because the most important thing spiritually is to break free from the grooves and fixed patterns you are in.

Yeah I have been researching recently about branches of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the practises of the Desert Fathers like Hesychasm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychasm which has similarities to Buddhism where the monks enter solitude and do a number of psychosomatic exercises such as repeating Christian mantras like the Jesus Prayer while maintaining "watchfulness", with the aim of bringing your mind out of your senses into your heart, which can result with an experience of "uncreated light" which they identify with the holy spirit. The text which explains a lot of this approach is the Philokalia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philokalia . Although this form of inner Christianity which can lead to real inner development isn't lost as it has been preserved in Mount Athos for hundreds of years it isn't that publicly well known.

I have heard people say this before, but this is based on the assumption that the emotional energy remains in the dead flesh, perhaps all such energy and imprints leave soon after the animal dies.

I will add though that the biggest block to the Shamanic process and connecting to the environment in a deeper way is salt, meat isn't the problem it is salt in Amazonian shamanism.

I was vegetarian for a few years when I was younger but not any more, I think my diet suffered during those years. Buddha seemed to recommend being vegetarian but many Tibetans like the Dalai Lama can't live without meat because of their constitution and they seem to do ok spiritually, I was reading recently that for some Buddhist Tantra you need meat in your diet to help build the tantric drops in your body, so in that situation meat helps you evolve spiritually. Pork seems to be a problem in many religions and when I was in Peru last year I found out that apparently pork completely blocks the shamanic process, if you eat pork then drink Ayahuasca either nothing will happen or you will be ill so I think they may be something deeper to the banning of pork from religion other than it being unclean, it seems to block the access to other worlds so none of the Shaman eat it, other meats seem to be ok though.

I think there is a difference between sitting meditation and things like mindfullness and DBT for mental health, generally speaking sitting meditation is not recommended if you have mental health issues because it can be ungrounding and can stir things up too quickly, whereas mindfullness and DBT etc does not have the same risks. Meditation isn't always the magic pill many people think it is, a lot depends on the method and approach, for example I have seen evidence that some Buddhists meditations can make conditions like PTSD worse. The woman who wrote the www.posessingme.com blog did cure many of her psychological problems using sitting meditation but she admits that doing it that way can make your problems worse in the short term, as you process things they can get really intense and you can become a lot more unstable before you let the problems go, which can be very difficult to deal with without wider care. She also used a Taoist method which has more focus on the body.

The Water Method by BK frantzis and CFQ Qigong by Yap Soon Yeong are both downward flow practises

Even if meditation causes you to have a breakdown it may not necessarily be a bad thing as the breakdown will force you to confront all that which is inside of you, which gives the platform for potentially better health and stability if it can be dealt with properly, so it can create what is called an acceleration of the ripening of your karma which means that you deal with all your junk a lot faster, if you can get through to the other side ok. Once upon a time if this happened to someone they would be cared for in a monastery and given the appropriate space and support, but unfortunately these days there is no understanding of such processes and these issues are viewed as "problems" or "illness" to be got rid of and medicated aggressively, whereas many people who are supported through crises without being alienated often end up on the other side much more open hearted than they were before.