Jetsun

Nice post The Way Is Virtue, I agree with you. After reading some of the classic Taoist texts and texts like the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Medicine it seems to me that once upon a time "the ancients" maybe thousands of years ago had a complete system or body of knowledge and it seems to me that mostly what is passed down to us are fragments and at times distortions of that knowledge and it up to us to try to put together the puzzle to try to work out what are genuine teachings and what isn't. Then in modern times you add in the money factor as people realise there is money to be made from this knowledge then people will distort it even more even if it harms people if it results in a profit, which makes figuring all this out even more difficult. Perhaps there are still oral lineages which contain the whole system or whole body of knowledge out there but they are hard to find, someone like Wan Liping might be an example yet I would have to meet him in person and study with before I draw too many conclusions.

Yeah I agree, your responsibility are your own boundaries and self respect, anything else to do with teaching other people or trying to mould them into your own vision of what you think they should be like is likely to only breed resentment in the long run. I think a lot of the pua and nlp psychology type stuff so popular these days may even be anti Taoist as it's all about contriving reality to suit your needs while Taoism to me is all about giving up human contrivance and allowing things to work themselves out naturally.

Perhaps you were using your spiritual practice as a way of avoiding your fears, which is something I am guilty of myself. If so your spiritual practice may be a tool of repression rather than liberation.

I do more or less agree but in some circumstances it can be a mistake to over glamorise Shamanism, i'm not saying that is going on in this thread but it seems to be quite common for many Westerners to go to an Amazonian Shaman not find the moral holy spiritual man they were expecting. In my own research before I went to Peru I found many stories of Shaman taking advantage of nieve trusting Westerners, one story I read one Shaman managed to get one trusting young American to buy his entire healing compound and tricked him to sign over all the deeds to the land worth thousands of dollars; another Shaman would half way through his healing sessions tell the patient he was working on that he had discovered an illness in one their family members and would ask for extra payment to heal it remotely, so effectively emotionally blackmailing them into paying twice. Some would even purposely cause illness in people so they would have to pay the Shaman to get it healed. The town of Iquitos in Peru is probably the Ayahuasca Shamanism capital of the world with healing centres around every corner, but when you dig into the undercurrent of what is really going on there between all the Shaman there is a massive undercurrent of jealously, competition and hostility between many of them, which can extend to direct attacks. If you read about many of the more "famous" Shaman they nearly all talk about having to defend themselves from many attacks from rivals who send what they call "magic darts" at each other in the spirit realm,. Many of them spend a lot of time in spiritual warfare with each other and are not above many of the petty base emotional states. One account of a Ayahuasquero apprentiship I read the writer said that at a point in your training you are tempted with extreme power and promises of wealth etc from the spirits and many people fail this test and end up using the power and knowledge they gain in that realm for their own personal benefit and egotistical aims. One taxi driver I spoke to in Iquitos said that you only really find the real genuine powerful Shaman deep within the rainforest these days as so many within the towns have been corrupted by money and power, so there is nothing to say that if you walk the path of a Shaman you will come out as a particularly compassionate or morally balanced person as the power you are dealing with is so tempting you can fall off the right path very easily.

For me mediation experiences seem to be of a different taste or realm than the Shamanic, maybe I'm just not experienced enough but meditation experiences are more likely to result in feelings of bliss or oneness while ayahuasca and Shamanism leads you to directly interact with beings in the spiritual realm. I'm not going to pass judgement over which experiences are more important but they seem different to me. I know some Tibetan Buddhists talk about such direct interaction with spiritual beings but that is considered very advanced in meditation I think, I don't know how common it is to have such direct experiences even at advanced stages, I don't hear it talked about much in Buddhism, but the Shamanic and meditation experiences seem different to me.

I was watching this programme on the BBC called "Buddha in Suburbia" which is about the journey of Lelung Rinpoche as he tries to gather the lost teachings of his lineage. They showed him meeting many high Lama's one of whom said that he should go back to the West and show his powers in order to spread the Dharma, but he came out of the meeting saying that he didn't have any special powers to show, then they interviewed Robert Thurman who said that many of the Buddhist masters start off early in life not that impressive and without any powers for many years and it is only later on in life beyond middle age when the practice really blooms into something wonderful. So it made me think maybe all the practice you do early in life is sowing seeds which will only blossom after many years, perhaps you could practice for tens of years or over half your life with little obvious surface benefit for it all to come to fruition later on and was wondering is this the normal state of affairs for Buddhist masters? does anyone know of any genuine young masters? According to Thurman even the Dalai Lama was like that in that early on in his life he didn't show many signs of powers but then something bloomed in his later years.

It seems like creating the Buddhist section has scared off all the Buddhists, maybe they were just here to tell the Taoists how wrong they were about stuff or maybe they just left naturally with time but there doesn't seem to be much Buddhist commentary any more about things which is a shame, although many people complained about it before so maybe it is only me who misses it I only had an issue with Immortal4lifes creationist agenda which seemed to be based on some sort of misguided mission to correct the world with bad agenda based science, the other threads are quite interesting, as long as he doesn't bring all the toxic PUA stuff in here.

I have no problem with engaging in intellectual debate but that film is so over dramatic and emotionally charged to try to make people fearful about the situation that it is hardly a reliable source to use, it's emotional tone feels more like propaganda to me, they even call Michael Ruppert a prophet like he can see our terrible future as concrete fact, but the reality is that he is fixated on the worst possible outcome and he doesn't know it as fact at all. He presents one outcome which hasn't come true yet and to get fearful and stressed about a future which is yet to happen is to create unnecessary suffering for yourself, that is one of the basic lessons of meditation our mind projects fears to the future which may not become real and that process just makes our current moment more stressful and difficult. You can call that burying your head in the sand if you like but I accept the collapse of our current world situation as a possibility but it's not something I'm going to get emotionally charged about until it actually happens or I will just live in fear my whole life as there is always a potential catastrophe around the corner, before it was nuclear power, communism, terrorism etc just watch the news there are a thousand things to get scared about and if you approach it without a level of detachment it it will make you crazy. The system wants you afraid of the future because then you are controllable and predictable so I think you are better off relaxing about the situation and have faith that things will be fine.

Yes I watched it a while ago, the man they interviewed for the film is obviously very psychologically unstable, can you not see that? he breaks down crying a few times and if you know about projection it's common to project your inner state onto the world. He says the collapse started with the banking crisis but so far the world economy is still ticking over, there is still time for it collapse mind you but it hasn't happened yet. The decline in normal petroleum may be offset by other forms like Shale Petroleum which they are discovering stores of all the time. I'm not sure what Ayahuasca has to do with this unless it is some form of unnecessary personal dig at me for not swallowing the film and agreeing with it 100%

The main purpose of the power plants is to heal you and bring you to balance on all levels, the fundamental job of the Shaman is that of a healer and the primary thing that Shamen get taught when they interact with these spirit beings is how to heal people and not to become some holy religious leader or spiritual messenger. This sort of healing is not something meditation will achieve easily or it may take years to achieve what the power plant could do in one night, so to demonise the whole area of power plants as karmically bad is ridiculous in my view, it's like saying the doctor or psychologist is bad for helping you with your problems. I do agree you are unlikely to be enlightened by taking them but they may shift your perception enough to put you on the right path, this is the purpose they served in the Castaneda books as Don Juan realised that Carlos had potential but his perception was too rigidly fixed in one place by lifes conditionings for normal methods to break through so his training began with power plants just as an introduction to loosen his perceptio, or assemblage point as they call it.

The bloke in that film is just projecting his own mental and psychological collapse onto the outside world.

In Europe the more advanced industrialised nations populations have stagnated which is why many of them are encouraging immigration, "The total population of the continent of Europe (including Russia and other non-EU countries) already peaked around the year 2000 and as of 2004 is falling" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline This is also the case in countries like Japan and Singapore who are now paying families to have children, so it seems like when a country advances to a certain level it's population growth slows down and then even starts to decline, so maybe this over population problem you are scared about will never happen because as countries like China, India and Brazil advance economically there is every reason to believe that their populations will stagnate.

What I understand just from reading little bits in books and on the web is that the origins of Tai Chi are surrounded in legend and not much is confirmed, some think it could be inspired by Buddhism or Confucianism or a mix of it all.

For a beginner I would recommend the Tao of Pooh book, I read it recently expecting it to be rubbish after years of reading many of the classic complicated texts and I thought it was great. The foundation texts of it all are Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, after that everything starts to become very complicated in my view, many people will recommend you do exercises and energy techniques claiming them to be Taoist but it is unclear how many of them really are, but there is no harm in experimenting in most of them (except the Mantak Chia sexual stuff which will mess you up), it is even unclear if Tai Chi is Taoist in orgin although most people seem to agree that Bagua Zhang circle walking was practised by Taoist monks. The basic Qigong I started with was that taught by Dr Yang Jwing-Ming, he explains things well enough, Bruce Frantzis too writes well and has a lot of good material.

If you watch a young child they are happy one minute sad the next, they can scream all day long without tiring, so these emotions don't have to be draining. I think the reason why we start to find emotions so draining when we get older is because we start to reject some emotional states and cling on to others, so the main energy drain is from our ego trying to hold onto positive states and reject negative states, our ego battles reality which is exhausting and an impossible fight, while young children and the sage just go with the flow, there is no right or wrong state to be in, so there is no fight and their energy is maintained.

I'm not sure that is true, most people find that if they moderately exercise that they have more energy rather than less, if you have an active life you will have more energy than if you are sedentary. The Fourth Way teachings talk about energy expenditure a lot, we waste a lot of energy on negative emotion but they propose that most of us actually enjoy being negative and take delight in indulging in negativity, just go to a coffee shop and all you hear are people complaining and being negative all the time. They have exercises to work on this in that system to plug up your energy leakages.

I have just spent the previous two weeks in retreat in the rainforest in Peru with a Shaman doing a dieta with Ayahuasca and coming home I realise that there is almost no-one I can talk to about this sort of thing without them looking at me like I am completely crazy, but I thought you folks here might be open minded enough to be interested in my experience. I went to Peru looking for healing on the psychological and soul level having tried most of the Taoist healing techniques often mentioned on this site as well as most of the regular standard Western approaches to healing without much success, so Ayahuasca was almost like a last resort for me. I wont go into too much detail about everything or I will be here all day but the way the healing is approached is that you have to go on a strict diet of no sugar, fat, meat, spices, alcohol, very bland food and especially no salt, then isolate yourself in a cabin in the rainforest in order to open you up and bring down your defences so you can build a relationship and understanding with the spirit of the plant and learn from the nature of the rainforest itself. The Shaman also prescribed me another plant called Ajo Sacha which I had to drink a litre of a day to cleanse myself and try to connect to. When it came to the Ayahuasca ceremonies I understand everyones experience is going to be unique depending on where they are at in themselves but my experience is that somehow the Ayahuasca taps into your original spirit like the spirit you had when you were a child or your true original nature, then the Shaman starts to channel pure energy into the space through songs which they call Icaro's, the songs themselves seem to be almost magical when you are in that space. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US_P5nTj_9o&feature=related The Shaman are taught the songs by the spirit of the plant itself almost like a calling to the Ayahuasca in the sick persons body like a snake charmer rousing the snake through music, when I experienced this I felt my original spirit maybe for the first time in ten years but I also saw a lot of the darkness and ego which covers it up. This is where the healing begins as seeing that darkness for what it is in such a pure space makes means you simply can't deny it or make excuses for it so your body immediately starts to release and purge it in any way possible, so for me that began as weeping and then moved on to throwing up and finally to crapping it out. You literally start to throw up and crap out all that is dead and not useful on all levels of your being just like the merciless way the rainforest destroys and recycles all that is dead within it, at one point I saw a vision of some old beliefs collapsing into ash which I immediately had to purge out of my body, it just eliminates all that is already dead within you. As a healer Ayahuasca is very tough, one thing I learned pretty fast is that all the previous attempts to heal myself were done from a place where I wanted the healing done on my own terms, while with Ayahuasca it is on it's terms or you will suffer a great deal more. I tried to struggle and control the process as first which brought me to a very dark place and I ended up in a state where I felt the only way I could survive and get through the situation without going completely insane was to let go of my ego's attempt to control and plunge into the rabbit hole head first, which was a pretty terrifying prospect. As a teacher it forces you to face your fears head on, whatever you are most afraid of it is likely you will be forced to look at it straight in the eye and it showed me that this is the only practical way to live your life, when I was at a very dark point in my journey I tried praying to Jesus for help and tried to invoke the compassion of all the Buddha's and all that stuff but none of it helped in any way whatsoever, infact all of that was just another way of trying to control things to avoid looking at my fears head on. The Shaman also plays a very crucial role in the process through protection and by helping to extract some of the darkness through techniques like sucking it out of the top of your head and spitting it out. There is a whole other side of the experience where you get a fast track to direct perception of the spirit world, before I went despite all the esoteric stuff I had done I had never fully believed all that stuff but now well I don't know what to believe, I had one or two experiences with spirits which I am still trying to make sense of, but as it was healing I was there for that is what I am focusing on. I can't honestly say now that I am back that it has been a miracle cure to all of my problems, but it seems like the glue which held a lot of it together has been weakened and I see things far more clearly now, I may well go back to continue to build my relationship with the medicine if I can pluck up my courage once more. That's not to say that Ayahuasca can't be a miracle cure for some people, it works on such a deep level that I see how it could cure almost any problem with enough time and with the skill of an experienced Shaman, but it also worries me a bit how powerful these Shaman can become through mastery on such a deep level if they had the wrong intentions, an Ayahuasquero is the last person on earth I would like to make my enemy. Thanks to anyone who has read all this I didn't mean to write quite so much, I welcome any comments.

What are the beings? I think even if you interact with them and you learn things from them you question whether they are just hallucinations or not, then the other question is whether many of the fairy tales that you heard growing up are actually talking about a real aspect of reality, but if you genuinely start to ask these questions then it shows your perception has been loosened from the rigid consensus reality which may be the most important thing even if you have no answers. I agree with a lot of what Hancock says, although it is quite common for people to see Jesus on ayahuasca, but if you really want to know the answers the best way would be to go and talk to the spirits yourself and ask them what they are.

Some Buddhists say that the deepest intention behind every single thing that we ever do in life is from the intention to be happy and avoid suffering, so it is a compassionate intention even if the resulting action or thinking lacks wisdom and causes more suffering and unhappiness the original intention is positive, so if you look at people from this level you can't condem people or judge anything they do as ultimately good or bad rather if negative consequences arise they just lack wisdom.

I'm not so sure, in everything we do we can act in accordance with the Tao or not, for example Chuang Tzu in one off his chapters talks about a butcher who never blunts his knife because he cuts his meat along the natural line or gaps in the meat, that is butchery in line with the Tao, if the butcher just chopped anywhere that is butchery out of accord with the Tao because he is using unnecessary effort and friction, that is not just mind perception of the consequences it is direct action not in harmony with the Tao.

I think the earth is a self regulating organism, if humans become overpopulated I expect some forces will come into play which will regulate their number. In my experience when humans interfere too much with natural processes it causes more problems than it solves, so maybe we shouldn't worry too much about it.

That's a bowl not a fish, unless you are making some point about everything originating from one spirit, yet that concept doesn't tell you much about the way the Tao expresses itself.

Contemplating death is one of the most important things you can do and seeing dead bodies may help, in some Buddhist Chod you go and meditate with rotting dead bodies as they decompose, yet on most other forums I go to if you posted dead bodies without spoilering them with a "not work safe" of NWS spoiler you would get banned because most people at work don't want those images on their record when their IT department sees what you are looking at out of context, so it is pretty inappropriate to post those images in a thread like this without warning.

There is a story or illustration G.I. Gurdjieff tells in his book "Beelzebubs Tales to his Grandson" about this subject : Imagine now that you are tucking yourself up to go to bed after a hard day, you are all warm and snug ready to go to sleep and a mouse jumps out from under the covers and runs over your body, if you really imagine this I bet it would spark fear in you for some even terror, but yet if you really think about the fact you could die any moment there is no fear on the same level, is this not strange? the most timid and fearful of all the creatures on the planet makes you afraid but thinking of your own death doesn't. Why is this so? One of the main jobs or delusions that the ego creates is to buffer you from the reality of death of every thing and everyone around you, so one of the main antidotes is to actively contemplate and meditate on it, just don't get fixated or it could make you depressed.