Jetsun

Thanks I will look into him. I have been interested in the Druid side of the Celtic world for a while, some people believe they once had a knowledge comparable with Eastern paths like Taoism but most of it has been lost as it was mostly orally recorded. When Julius Caesar came to conquer Britain he remarked that the Druids had complete knowledge of the seasons and astrology in his official records, but unfortunately he did quite a good job at eradicating it all. I would love to find an existing working Celtic path of spirituality as it would feel more native to me than the Chinese paths do.

From what I have seen from the Tea Party it absolutely astonishes me that they get votes from anyone who isn't a complete lunatic. How a party like that can gain any sort of prominence in politics in a decently educated country baffles me, would you really want people like that in charge of nuclear weapons . But I am an outsider so maybe there are things I don't get about that whole situation.

I think what you say is true more or less, especially if you have a strong emotional reaction to the way someone else is, more than likely you are coming into contact with a repressed part of yourself which you don't want to experience. When you try to become honest with yourself and observe yourself you will see all sorts of things in yourself you don't like then the challenge is to try to bring compassion to them as well as try to eliminate them if they are too destructive. It's a tough task, most people don't have the courage to even begin this process as it is too threatening to their ego.

So you think the Tea Party have better ideas about politics than Lao Tzu

If you can maintain awareness of how your ego causes you and others suffering that can give you the motivation to maintain practice, and if that practice leads to you becoming more compassionate in the world then something good has come out of the suffering you may have caused.

That's not true in Egypt, the previous regime was American backed and it is a real problem now for the US that the people have stood up because the Muslim Brotherhood are likely to gain power on an anti Israeli platform, which is why the US trained and funded Egyptian army are delaying the elections as much as possible so they can try to ensure someone else favourable can take power.

Christianity used to have this knowledge which many of the cathedral builders used when designing buildings like the Chartres Cathedral in France, where they use sacred geometry, the use of light in stain glass and harmonics to induce a greater receptivity to higher states, but unfortunately this knowledge has been lost to most Christian groups. In the Fourth Way system they called this "objective art" http://objectiveart01.tripod.com/

I'm going to be doing some pretty basic sensing of the body meditations to try to integrate myself more emotionally, while continue to search for a Taoist/any other teacher who really understands healing on a deep level.

I wonder if you are doing charitable works out of a place of guilt and fear or for self interest like many Christians do are you just making that neurosis grow and spread? True charity is to give with no regard for the consequences for yourself, but to be in that place takes a huge amount of inner work in my view otherwise your charity will be motivated by sick or egoic reasons which just perpetuates and traps you in the circle of your madness.

If "Opening the Dragon Gate" is real and not fiction then he must be an amazing teacher, yet perhaps the whole of that book is not meant literally as some of it does seem over the top. He talks about some amazing feats in the book which he should be able to replicate with new students, things like being able to make entire groups of new students to spontaneously move with his own power. Others say he can stop the rain. Can anyone testify to such feats?

All children like to pretend they are adults, young girls like to play as mothers and you often see young boys imitating their fathers by doing things like pretending to read the paper, but they live essentially through their being and realise that imitation is a game. The only difference with adults is that they start to believe this pretend game of imitation is actually who they are, they start to believe in that image as a serious thing which needs defending but really it is only a form of imagination. So to become like a child again would mean to see this imagination for what it is and to let go of it as your identity to live through your essential being once more, which is quite a simple place of being centred in your heart rather than the head where you cry when you are sad and smile when you are happy.

It seems to me like Lao Tzu is getting a bit of hard time, many forms of meditation are no good and most of the Qigong masters are motivated by money and aren't legit high level masters, so he isn't saying anything particularly controversial imo.

Weird, I was just reading your articles for what I thought was the first time until I read the comments and realised that I left a comment on it in 2009!

I think you have some legitimate criticisms Medhavi, but if people take the teaching as purely intellectual that is an example of incorrect development, I think what happened after Gurdjieff died is a good example of what happens to all religions and schools when the master dies in that each teacher goes off and emphasises one part of the knowledge to the detriment of the whole system then the teachings become corrupted, I think this has happened to nearly all systems including Buddhism and Taoist, infact Gurdjieff precisely describes the laws by which this process works how all systems become corrupted. But not all of the schools are intellectual for example Madame De Salzmann emphasises work with the body ahead of intellectual ideas for most people. You work with the ideas to work on your mind, then you work with music, dances and body exercises to work on the emotional and physical centres, while self observation in daily life helps to harmonise all three. Many of the ideas are made purposely hard to grasp so you have to work to understand them because people only appreciate things they have to pay for and to put off the insincere seekers, I have not read Drews blog but many of the ideas I have not found anywhere else, things like the law of octaves are very important to understand why certain things work out they way they do and why people so often fail at their spiritual practice, effectively many of the ideas are laws of the Tao yet I have never found them in any Chinese Taoist book. The system appeals to me because I do agree with Gurdjieff that most of the eastern schools at least the Buddhist type ones are designed for a monks lifestyle which is not appropriate for me, perhaps Taoist approaches don't need to have such a monk approach bur I am still searching for what I would call a complete uncorrupted Taoist approach, Drew has said he more or less lives like a monk and you need many hours of full lotus every day to progress which is not possible for many modern people.

It is hard to accurately gauge the level of someone and their system, there are energy masters in India who can do energy transmissions and high level healings but later get exposed as abusive and morally corrupt and get exposed as paedophiles etc which Gurdjieff would call an example of unbalanced development. So you may be able to become a high level healer and energy master and remain screwed up in other ways like your emotional maturity, which is why in the fourth way they stress the importance of work on all centres at once to try to avoid this. You see examples of this unbalanced development on this site with those who only focus on mind development and talk to each other endlessly like robots without heart connection. As for Madame De Salzmann's level generally in her system there is not a lot of qi projection or healing but that is not the be all and end all of spirituality, the Zen master Roshi Kobori said that she was "the most remarkable woman I have ever met" because she studied a method of develoment of every part of her being, apparently she was still climbing mountains when she was in her 90s.

I was reading something about traditional societies that the "scapegoat" would play a valuable role as a target or container for negative energy for people within the community to project onto until they were mature enough to deal with it, that person was subconsciously chosen as the scapegoat because they had the inner strength and spiritual wisdom to sublimate those energies so they do no harm, so even though they were mocked and shunned by society they played a crucial role in stability and healing. The traditional shaman played that role and other cultures had similar roles such as the "sin eater" in ancient Britain, the problem now is that people are still scapegoated but they are not valued or trained how to heal the energies they are forced to contain so they become ill and neurotic.

Gurdjieff produced another energy master in Madamme De Salzmann, if you read the book written from her notes called "The reality of being" it is clear to me she was very advanced, there may also be others we don't know about. I will read your blog about this fulllotus once I am back from work, I doubt Gurdjieff would be overall against sitting in full lotus all day but he would call it what it is which is "the way of the monk" which is a legitimate way but it is NOT the method he taught, as he thought the monks way of life is not suitable for most people so he taught methods of development to be used in normal work life which he thought was a faster method. He didn't even teach any meditation, in the eastern sense of the word anyway because sitting meditation isn't ideal for developing your "essence" if it is immature and undeveloped, no doubt he could sit in full lotus because he had worked through most of his tensions but I don't recall him stressing or even mentioning the full lotus once in all of his writings. There is a second edition of his book Beelzebubs Tales but you can still buy the first edition which was published while he was still alive which I assume he approved of as there is an entire chapter written about the dangers of revision within it so he wouldn't have allowed it's release in a revised state.

Gurdjieff taught dances of constant movement to open up the emotional centre, as soon as you mastered one stance or movement you were forced to move onto another one so you were never in stasis so your practice didn't become robotic sleep. If he was your master he would probably get you out of full lotus as the first thing he did so you don't rely on it as a crux or a place of stability to fall asleep in. In essence he would never prescribe one technique like full lotus for too long to anyone as any technique can become mechanical and send you back to sleep once mastered and it gets ingrained within you as a habit.

I like the beginning of that film and the Psychologist Gabor Mate is really wise in my opinion, the work he has done with Ayahuasca and addictions is really interesting and very important. Although i'm not sure they have all the answers to many of the problems they highlight, I wasn't very impressed or convinced by the Venus Project stuff they talk about.

I'm not sure that is really possible for you to process another's emotion, the way I see it is that if you are in contact with someone who is angry they will trigger or vibrate your own anger in your body, so really they are just triggering your own issues rather than passing onto you theirs. People often try to trigger you into things like anger as a way to try to be rid of their own, I think this is one of the reasons behind internet trolling, but people never become less angry by triggering other people, in the short term they might get a fix but long term their anger will just grow. But I agree that to temporarily soothe another persons emotion may do them no favours in the long run, although perhaps it may be possible for a very advanced practitioner to root out the seed of anothers issue with enough time, one case of this I heard was of an intellectual academic who didn't believe in Buddhism or do any spiritual practice but stayed with the Dalai Lama and his monks for a month to write a book and he said that all his life he had resentment and anger toward his parents, but by the end of his stay with the Tibetans he said his anger had completely gone without him doing anything, so I assume the monks had taken on his karma as their own or the power of their Bodhicitta was so strong to allow him to let it go. But such cases are rare examples I think most other people who try to do this just end up crossing boundaries and cause problems.

I tried that, but the 'Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha' have to be some of the most boring repetitive scripture ever written, god knows what the Long Length Discourses are like.

The problem is how can you be sure the energy you perceive coming from other people isn't just your own disowned energy coming back at you? One thing I learned from my own struggles is that the basic mechanism or way projection works is that if you disown or repress an energy you become blind to it in yourself and place it out in the world, so if you are sexually repressed you will see perverts everywhere, if your anger is repressed you will see angry destructive people out in the world everywhere, the common way this works now is that the repressed Christian countries project all their aggressive energies onto Muslims and are blind to it in themselves. Repression and denial can be so strong that you can be absolutely certain that the issue is with the other person and nothing to do with you, so if you are open enough to the idea that you suffer from delusion and may not always see reality clearly then how can you be certain the energy you experience behind someone elses post isn't your own projection? maybe you are just as guilty of the perv attacks as the people you perceive them coming from, or more guilty.

I often sense anger behind peoples posts, especially on spiritual forums where people seem to think that anger is somehow wrong or shows a lower state so they put a smiley face or give some blessing in response while their words vibrate with anger.

Iboga is meant to be great for addictions because it somehow makes you see your life from other peoples perspective, but in a more traditional setting it is meant to be used in rebirth rituals and for the person to be welcomed by the village back into society once you are reborn, which is an important part of the healing process in my opinion, which is something you miss out on out of the traditional setting.