Jetsun

Perhaps the weight you carry on your shoulders is completely imaginary, maybe your soul is being pinned down by an imaginary force which could be let go of at any moment if you were to sacrifice what you cling to. Each person has to examine what they cling to but the common things we need to sacrifice to recover are self importance and self pity.

The Armenian mystic called G.I. Gurdjieff basically says that we all have multiple personalities for example there is the work you, the home you, the you around your parents, the you around your friends, the inner child part of you, the you which wants to wake up and become enlightened, etc as well as many other parts of you. This is something modern ego state psychologists also recognise now, that multiple personality disorder is actually just an exaggeration of the normal human state. These different parts of you may want different and sometimes contradicting things, for example part of you wants to diet and the other part wants to eat that big bit of chocolate cake, part of you wants to go to school the other part wants to get drunk and party. What Gurdjieff says is that if you want to develop and get enlightened you have to get all these different parts of you onside and headed in the same direction with the same aim, yet most people don't even recognise that they have these different competing parts and take themselves to already be one unity when in reality we are all divided, like the "Legion" mentioned in the gospels. So if you have recognised this division in yourself your awareness is already above most people, so I think what you describe in your first post is pretty much the normal human state, I know I am certainly like that. Many people fail in their spiritual quest because they fail to get enough parts of their being on their side, so they sabotage their own practice often without ever really knowing why.

"Man has no individual I. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small "I"s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, "I". And each time his I is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man's name is legion." ~ G I Gurdjieff "And He (Jesus) asked him (the man), "What is thy name?" And he answered, saying, "My name is Legion: for we are many" - The Gospel of Mark The aim in the Fourth Way teachings is to get all your personality fragments moving in the same direction as everyone has parts of themselves which don't care in the slightest about self development, enlightenment or becoming in harmony with the Tao. Many parts of you may even sabotage any efforts you make, just like the parts of you which sabotage any diets or fitness attempts you make.

Personally I am trying to reconnect to the earth and to let go of all the things which don't serve me any more, I think you have to go back to simple things.

Tulku I'd be careful with despising people for any reason because what would you do if in your inner work you find a part of you which is exactly like the people you despise? what would you do if you find a part of you which wants relationships and children? are you going to try to crush it in the same way that violent brutal dictators try to crush their own people who disagree with them?

I don't know much about the MCO but Bruce Frantzis says brain practises should only be done after many years of personal instruction from a qualified teacher. In terms of mental illness or problems the only account I know of is that of Gopi Krishna who fell into psychosis for many years by focusing on third eye meditations, so personally I wouldn't go anywhere near the head with this stuff without personal instruction.

After studying Buddhism for many years I have come to the conclusion that to get any mental realisations that you might have had to really permeate your entire being and open your heart you need to become so dedicated that you are prepared to go into retreat for many months or even years at a time for the teachings to be fully realised. I get the impression that the Buddhists here have some strong mental understanding yet I doubt it's been deeply realised yet. For example someone like the Dalai Lama can debate about the philosophical intricacies of Nargarjuna as well as anyone but he says he hasn't spent enough time in solitary retreat even though he spends a few months of the year in retreat and has done longer retreats in the past, it's still not enough; while there are people here on this website who think they get it all despite the longest time they have spent in practice was a week long workshop and a few weekends here and there. Personally I have not been able to go on any long retreats so the hundreds of books and sutas I have contemplated have not bloomed into much in my life yet except maybe a generally more compassionate attitude towards a few things.

I guess both goes on but there are a lot of men who seem think that women need defending and protecting and take that attitude to the internet. The weirdest cases I have seen are when playing MMO's like World Of Warcraft and you select a female character and name you get twice the help and messages of thanks from the other players than if you select a male character, I found it pretty creepy when I tried it

It must be incredible Chi Kung for you to never ever get sick, it should make it less likely but even the masters and medicine men get sick sometimes, some of them even get illnesses like cancer. I would expect Chi Kung will help you recover though, meditation might by allowing relaxation although it might be more uncomfortable to meditate when sick

Oh yeah that happens all the time, maybe not so much on this site but on many other forums I go to it's common.

I think it's all down to advertising, the basic message of advertising is that you cant be happy until you buy my product, which then gets translated into that to be happy you have to buy things and consume every day, so people start to feel that they need to consume or they are worthless. I think the London riots showed that it's not a very workable system because not everyone can afford the products they feel they need to be happy so in the end they will just take it.

Then you should have pm'd her rather than make it public, obviously by making it public you wanted other opinions. Obviously you didn't like my perspective, I wonder why?

My perspective on this was that Witch was testing the maturity of your sexuality with her posts on bdsm and you responded with fear by going way over the top in your response.

It's probably a matter of national pride and considering museums like the British museum are full of looted Egyptian heritage i'm not surprised.

After visiting the pyramids myself I doubt there is any conspiracy going on, generally the tour guides, police and people in charge are so corrupt that I doubt they could keep any secrets. If someone wasn't allowed to continue excavations it's probably down to them not greasing the right palms or enough palms down the chain of influence. When I was there I found a few extra notes in the hand of your guide will get you in almost anywhere, I was allowed into many tombs which were closed to the public and new archaeological sites not opened yet and there are still many excavations going on around the pyramids today, every year there are new discoveries.

Well PTSD is a state where your mind and nervous system has become completely overwhelmed and the energy of the trauma gets stuck in a loop so when a person gets triggered they get thrown back into the trauma full on, so even if you want to face your fear you can't do so because whenever you go anywhere near the trauma in any way your body goes into full fight or flight mode. Some of the most hardened war veterans who have faced their fear of death head on in battle many times get PTSD so it's not just a matter of looking death in the eye and accepting it, you need a method to release the energy of the trauma which is stuck in your body.

I don't think saying that sort of thing to a person with PTSD will help at all to be honest, often PTSD is a body based phenomena where the trauma is stuck in your nervous system so sometimes even if you want to face up to it you can't because your nervous system is in a complete overdrive fight or flight state, so be told to just face up to death may just be adding shame to an already distressed person.

I thought I might have PTSD for some time and looked into many of the treatments available. The gist of what I came to understand is that you need to build up your support and resources in as many areas of your life as possible then try to confront the trauma. So for support grounding is useful so doing things like connecting with nature, putting your bare feet and hands on the earth regularly, eat root vegetables, have methods to express your feelings like art and dance and talk to people. Animals help to ground too especially horses and dolphins, I saw a film recently about a boy in Israel who had severe PTSD from an assault and he was helped enormously by "Dolphin Therapy" which involved him swimming with and connecting with dolphins every day as a way to gently reconnect him with the world. To confront the feelings EMDR therapy has a proven record of treating PTSD, I think it one of the main methods to treat combat vets these days, it would involve seeing a therapist but only short term. I would get the DVD of Bercelli's work too although the exercises are easy it's pretty useful to reassure you that you are doing it correctly. As for Taoist Methods there is a woman called Sf Jane who cured her own PTSD with Bruce Frantzis "Water Method" dissolving meditation and she wrote a book about her experiences, she used to come to this site a while ago so you could look up her posts in the search bar, also I think she has a website talking about it. Apart from that I wouldn't go too heavy into some things like breathing methods and regular meditations as they may just un-ground and destabilise things further as will some forms of Qigong so only do grounding methods of Qigong and Tai Chi.

I think the reason why the sangha or spiritual community is considered one of the jewels is so your new way of being which could be at odds with regular society can become "normal" within that group, so you join a tribe where it is normal to be in line with the Tao. Doing it on your own in society without a sangha means your up against all sorts of powerful pressures which may contradict your aim.

My understanding of all that is that nothing much will happen anyway rather this whole period is a more subtle period of transformation on many levels which seems to driven by the spread of information on the Internet. People like to imagine some sort of dramatic extreme events coming to pass while they miss the transformations already occurring in front of their eyes.

I think it was Jung who said something like "it's not a sign of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" . Most of the prophets and enlightened people tended to be rebels and went against the grain, so I think it's difficult to just be a normal guy and achieve the Tao without coming into conflict with society somewhat because so much within society is about doing the exact opposite of what you need to do to harmonise yourself.

I think it is helpful to differentiate it from compassion because Bodhicitta is indiscriminate and has different aspects in that it is more like an attitude, prayer or commitment to serve all beings ahead of yourself. My understanding is that it's development is the fastest route to enlightenment as it is the direct antidote to self clinging and self absorbtion. I expect people say that Bodhicitta alone isn't enough because you need to combine it with wisdom or emptiness, for example there are many Christians who have bucketfulls of Bodhicitta but not many will achieve full enlightenment as their system doesn't include much penetrating wisdom into the true nature of the self.

The Qigong aspect isn't bad but it basically is a cult, maybe not on the Jim Jones scale but some things aren't right. I went to a Falun Gong art exhibition a few weeks ago and the way they venerate Li Hongzi is scary, there were numerous paintings depicting him in Christ and Buddha poses and him directing the heavens looking down on us like they think he is a god. When you get into their mythology they basically treat their leader like some sort of supreme being rather than the normal man that he is and believe that he holds the keys to heaven. So I wouldn't buy into that side of things if I were you.

There are different forms of love, there is possessive restricted love and there is indiscriminate free love without conditions. The first can trap you I agree but the second is liberating.

I see a Transpersonal councillor who is trained in Buddhist psychotherapy, there is a good centre here in the UK which teaches it which they call "Core Process Psychotherapy". I think it's good because there are many issues and areas of growth in modern western life which Buddhism alone is not very well equipped to deal with. But coming back to the op over intellectualisation is often seen as the problem in this system so intellectualising and rationalising your emotions is likely to drive you more insane than help you. That was the problem with pschoanalysis and the reason why it failed to help many people was because it was too head based and intellectual, which led to a more human centred heart based approach to therapy.