Jetsun
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Everything posted by Jetsun
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Thinking about this subject a bit more I'm not sure spirit is just pure awareness as it seems to have a character or natural expression depending on what form it manifests from the Tao, for example the spirits of different animals and plants have different characteristics, the monkey for example has a much more playful spirit than a horse, the Cat has a prouder more refined spirit than a dog, there are trees with strong noble spirits like the old tall trees in the forest and then there are trees with more welcoming spirits like fruit trees. Plant medicine largely originated from the idea that you ingest part of the spirit of the plant to strengthen your own so you embody certain spirit qualities depending on the illness, the same with Shamanic power animal work you embody the spirit of the particular animal whose strengths you require at that particular time. So for me spirit seems to have character and qualities depending on what form it is expressed. Human spirit shares some qualities with the monkey in that it is naturally playful but it is more free, potentially anyway when we strip away the conditioning which covers it.
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Exactly what it is I am not sure but you can witness human spirit very easily in young children who live mostly through their spirit which naturally expresses itself through play without any contrivance, that spirit is still within each of us I am absolutely certain of that it just gets covered up. The main description of my own spirit I can come up with is that it is soft and gentle without being weak or powerless, it may be childlike in it's wish to express itself but it's not childish in the sense that it is immature or regressed. Listen to the songs or Icaros that Shamen sing as they are a call to your spirit and to all spirits in the world, connect to the vibe and nature of the songs and you will learn about the nature of spirit as they are usually gentle songs but immensely powerful at the same time.
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The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying has some good advice about what emotions to expect, you may find the biggest problem being other peoples reactions and pain rather than your own. There is a specific practice the Dalai Lama does to practice dying but I am unsure what it is called, I remember him talking about it once saying he is looking forward to the challenge of death because it is a great opportunity to let go of all clinging and attachments once and for all, but before then basic letting go meditation is good preparation.
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I would probably start with repentance or maybe go on a bender to Amsterdam first then repent afterwards.
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I like the way he talks about westerners using more familiar deities as I find even though I am not Christian the image of Christ represents compassion and holyness far better than any Buddhist image simply because that archetype was drilled into my head when I was very young just through the culture I grew up in. I suspect using a familiar image would be far more effective than trying to import something from a different culture, the author Rob Preece talks about this issue quite a lot in one of his books about Buddhist Psychology about how Western Buddhism if it is to be more effective needs it's own familiar deities to replace the traditional Buddhist ones which are alien to the Western mind.
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Monks and Priests have the easiest life on Earth?
Jetsun replied to tulku's topic in General Discussion
Yes I was reading recently about the monks at the Mount Athos monastery who have baffled scientists at their level of health and low levels of cancer in their community. The scientists focus only on the diet rather than the spiritual practice the monks do to try to find the reason for this good health, but I suspect everything they do in that environment contributes. -
No one should be immortal if even one person has to die
Jetsun replied to tulku's topic in General Discussion
Wise words from that well known sage Justin Timberlake. -
Monks and Priests have the easiest life on Earth?
Jetsun replied to tulku's topic in General Discussion
It may be that some monks use the lifestyle as a way of escapism, which may infact retard balanced growth in the long run. For me the point of becoming a monk would be so I could purify myself in retreat in order to be more harmonious and compassionate to others when I re-entered the world, so it's all about being in the world in a better way and not avoiding the world, which is why I don't understand the point of those monks which stay isolated away for most of their lives, what is the point of all that practice if it is of no benefit to others? -
I don't think I have ever met a Christian who has managed to turn their church preaching into actual practice, well they don't seem any more at peace or compassionate than your average atheist anyway, which shows to me that all the intellectual understanding and teachings do nothing without a transformational practice like meditation, which is the problem with mainstream versions of the main religions is that the practical techniques have been lost, or purposefully removed. It may even be that all the preaching and rules and intellectual side without the practical method may even make people more unbalanced and more sick because these people are told they should be compassionate and "good Christians" etc but they aren't given the practical methods to transform their negative emotions and their egos, which leaves people in a mountain of shame and guilt about the difference between the way they actually are and the way their religion tells them they should be, which can turn people into outright hypocrites.
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Essentially we have conflicting parts of ourselves which want different things. Alchemy is about fusing these different parts of your psyche so all of who you are is moving in the same direction rather than pulling in many different directions at once. The person who explains this process best for me is G.I. Gurdjieff and he explains what blocks progress when we try to obtain a goal through the "Law of Octaves", but these concepts are very big areas of study and hard to summarise in a post, many books have been written on this subject of how to develop genuine will.
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I think their "cultural reform" mostly just resulted in them cutting a load of their reality TV shows from prime time tv. Often what looks like religious revival is just tourism driven like at the Shaolin Temple, while in Tibet over ten monks have self immolated themselves this year alone in protest because things have actually got worse
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The most powerful healing form I have found is Shamanic work with Ayahuasca but I can't really recommend it for all people as it is working in methods completely alien to the Western mind, so you would have to really feel ready or called to use it and would have to be done with the appropriate support. There is a woman who used to be on this site who wrote a book about healing of childhood traumas using Bruce Frantzis' Water Method, so that is something which could dissolve traumas and problems for some people. I don't know of any other Taoist methods which have testimonials of healing in this area but I would be really interested if anyone knows of any others. The basic lesson from my experience is that if you weren't listened to as child then you probably won't listen to yourself as an adult, so the solution is to learn how to listen to your real self, listen to your body and your emotions without trying to change them and I have found trying to follow other peoples maps of reality can be a barrier to this process so I generally think you are better off throwing most of them away.
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For me personally the chakra map of problems did exactly the same as the psychological map, absolutely nothing, I could rant about this subject all day as it is a subject close to my heart yet I shouldn't apply my own experience to everyone else. This area of healing is still a place of frustration for me because when I tried to heal my own wounds all I found were explanations and theories without any practical solutions, you could fill an entire library with psychological literature explaining peoples problems and you would be lucky to find one person who presents a solution in all those mountains of text. Many of those published "experts" infact made people more sick. CBT is presented as a solution by those people who are completely stuck in their head, without realising that being so head based is a sickness in itself. The Chakra model I see as little different, you try to address a Chakra individually then you get told that the different chakras are connected and some you have to heal together and it gets more and more complicated and no two peope agree on the way it should be done or agree on a workable method to heal chakras. The Chinese organ theory tries to be more practical yet it seems inadequate and too simplified to deal with some problems, for example you can't dismiss the problems you may have from abuse as exclusively a kidney or liver problem as much as the abusers would probably like you to, you will be going into denial territory if that's all you focus on. All the approaches and theories which try to approach healing on this level seem inadequate to me.
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I read every day about how you can deal with your problems using the Chakra map of reality, but when I ask what practical methods this leads to I usually draw a blank or something useless like Reiki. So your problems are root chakra based, ok now what? it's basically the same as a psychoanalyst saying your problems are from your childhood, it's interesting information but doesn't actually help you except to vaguely point in a general direction of what needs healing. There are all these different maps which analyse and diagnose people but very few of these maps actually provide any practical solutions for these sorts of problems as far as I can see.
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Article: Before and After - Portraits from Dathun
Jetsun replied to konchog uma's topic in Buddhist Discussion
Wow such huge differences, it's not always clear to me in all of them that they look healthier just very different from before and after. It would be interesting to do a comparison of how they change in a month normally without meditation. -
Sequential Energy Center Activation, Balancing, & Dimensional Expansion
Jetsun replied to Ya Mu's topic in General Discussion
888 -
Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman talks at Occupy Wall street
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Reading Lui I-Ming changed a lot of things for me too and I am still studying and trying to understand his works, the worrying thing though is that he stresses that it is almost impossible to get anywhere without a genuine teacher and he lived in a period of time in China where Taoism was relatively prosperous and he still couldn't find a genuine teacher until near the end of his life despite searching consistently, so where does that leave us now in our era now that many Taoist teachers have been purged? It makes me think that at during this era in time we might be more likely to find genuine high level teachers within Buddhism, yet I think I do prefer the Taoist approach in many ways so the search continues.
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When you aren't protected properly when you are vulnerable then personality fragments can become dissociated and become frozen in space and time as a way to protect yourself, it's a perfectly understandable sane reaction to cope in some situations. I think this happens to many people to different degrees.
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Does Chi Kung compliment all martial arts?
Jetsun replied to Unseen_Abilities's topic in General Discussion
I was just reading about one teacher who learned a form of spiritual Bagua which doesn't compliment martial arts at all because the basic stance of the martial arts is one of defence where you tuck in your body and vital organs, whereas with this particular Bagua teaching it was all about exposing yourself and daring to expose your body and expose your emotions, so maybe at a advanced level genuine spiritual Qigong wont compliment aggressive martial arts. -
About the only thing I have in the way of Chinese music is the Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon Soundtrack but it is really good, I think it got voted as one of the best film soundtracks ever recently in some poll I saw
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If I don't exist in the first place, does it even matter if I extinguish myself?
Jetsun replied to tulku's topic in General Discussion
If you really don't exist then you can't extinguish yourself as there is no you to extinguish so your original proposition is a contradiction. -
If I don't exist in the first place, does it even matter if I extinguish myself?
Jetsun replied to tulku's topic in General Discussion
If you don't exist how did you type this post? I think I have seen one form of hell when my mind got stuck in a negative loop and I couldn't see any way out, yet things changed so I don't think there is such thing as eternal hell, you can always get out if you end up there, so in that sense hell is a fraud as the main mind construct which freezes you is the fear that it is permanent and you are stuck there, yet if you can see that even hell is impermanent then it looses it's power. -
It is true that most of us live largely from the survival part of our brain a lot of the time, the ego is a survival based mechanism created so you can survive in your environment when growing up, but one of the main points of spiritual approaches is so you can move beyond that into a more stable secure way of being. For whatever reason this development doesn't seem to come naturally rather we have to work for it ourselves, in a way we have to help evolution. Brain scans of Buddhist monks show that their practice shrinks the parts of the brain associated with stress and enlarges those parts associated with compassion, so yeah most of us live from the reptile brain but we can move beyond that but only by our own efforts it's not just going to fall in our laps, unfortunately most people don't see this so the majority of people will spend their lives in survival mode rather than working to evolve beyond it.
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Yeah but he does his comb over so well you can barely tell on the front of his book lol and he has nice skin To be honest with the amount of bald Qigong masters around I wouldn't be surprised if baldness is a symptom of incorrect practice
