Jetsun

You just slide the blocks along a muddy track then make a ramp out of wood and earth then put a load of mud on it and slide the blocks up it with a load of slave labour.

There was a great deal of controversy for a while about how the ancient Egyptians could have shifted such large blocks of stone into place in such a short time, many experts came and said it was almost impossible without modern industrial equipment and cranes, but then someone mentioned that if you get enough mud and enough water you can push the huge heavy blocks very easily, infact it only takes a few men to push the blocks with the aid of mud and water, so with thousands of slaves it was probably a lot easier than many of the "experts" first thought. Sometimes the solutions to these mysteries are very simple.

If you really are saying what you saying out of compassion you should reflect on the best way to communicate and connect with the peole you are trying to help, because as soon as you throw insults such as subhuman losers around I can guarantee just about everyone will switch off and ignore everything you say. Throwing insults at people basically means you haven't yet realised that everyone on the planet is doing the best they can to try to be happy and avoid suffering from the level of wisdom they are currently at

If you can see clearly that us city dwelling losers who indulge in our senses only harm ourselves and each other through our wrong views and confused minds then why do you not have compassion for our needless suffering? Is your heart made of granite? Or does it give you a sense of superiority to look down on such people and get off on our suffering?

The parents relationship with the child is full of wants, needs and conditions towards the child, so is it really unconditional? I have no doubt most parents would die for their children but they also completely mess them up and harm them in most cases. Love from an enlightened or somewhat realised person is different as there is no expectations or wants involved so their love is completely liberating, there are no catches or conditions so it is free.

I think it's possible to get into negative cycles where you experience more negative than positive emotions. Because our egos interfere and block the natural cycle of emotions things don't necessarily balance out. Maybe it all gets balanced out in lives but personally I doubt that.

I think if you start letting go of who you think you are then your feminine nature will be uncovered naturally, as well as your masculine, you won't have much say in the matter whether you realise it or not it will emerge from the vacuum left when you let go of your self images. From my perspective the music is the interplay between masculine and feminine, so even if you are only interested in the masculine nature of form when you take it to the extreme it reverts back to the feminine anyway. Also the points of dark and light within the Tao symbol shows that there is no such thing as pure Yin or pure Yang so i'm not even sure it is possible to be only interested in the masculine nature of things as it always has a feminine point within it's centre and reverts back to the feminine anyway, so it's not something you can avoid on the path even if you want to.

Personally I am finding the Medicine Wheel teachings of the native American's very helpful at the moment where many other maps of reality haven't led anywhere, it has really helped me see where different aspect of the path are in relation to each other and which areas of my life I need to work on. How pure the teachings are now is hard to say, they came from the native Americans and supposedly from the Mayans before them, but the teachers I am studying say its origins don't particularly matter as all that really matters is whether it "grows corn" or whether it works or not.

I just think it is much easier to talk about Buddhism than Taosim as Buddhism is much clearer and organised while what remains of Taoism is very fractured and hard to make sense of. For example I read a lot of Taoist texts and thought I was getting a grasp of it but then I read Liu-I-Ming and he basically says what most people practice and understand as Taoism is worthless and a waste of time, so then things became confused again. It would be good if there was a re-emergence of genuine clear Taoist paths which bring lightness and humour to balance some of the dour Buddhist paths and life rejecting teachings of some Buddhist masters, but i'm not sure where such teachings will emerge from.

My psycho explanation is that people often get irritated by other people when they see them express a trait they dislike within themselves. On forums quite often I find my self irritated by the way a particular person posts or how they express themselves, but when I really investigate it without completely blaming the other person for my own emotional reaction I find that they are just triggering something I dislike within myself, as few other people on the board have the same reaction, so really the issue is within me and not so much with the other person. I wouldn't call this a rule set in stone as sometimes people are just dicks and it is about them and not about me, so seeing the reality of the situation can be difficult but even then I doubt everyone takes offence or takes offence on the same level, so why are you offended and the other person isn't?. Basically imo everyone is insane to a certain degree.

Those people who get agitated by Vmarco's posts should examine within themselves what buttons he is pushing within you to get you worked up, because whatever buttons he is pushing they are not being pushed in me in the slightest, so his offence is no universal phenomenon like some of you seem to be claiming.

He yeah, the world is upside down, to get on the right path you need to do the opposite of what your ego wants but also the opposite of what everyone in society and your family and friends say you should do, which is kinda lonely.

Your own power has been turned in on itself, i'm certain the universe would rather you reclaimed your own power and got it moving in the right healthy direction far more than you killing yourself as it would help bring things back towards harmony, while the ripple from your suicide would just keep the patterns of disharmony going long after your death.

It is true barely anyone cares about your suffering, most people are completely wrapped up in their own concerns, but it doesn't have to be like that always in the future so it is our responsibility now to try to do something about it for the future generations. This is the main challenge for humanity now in my view, you have to work to become mature, loving and compassionate when love isn't being given back to you and when no-one is showing you how to do it and when you can expect few rewards for your efforts, but you do it anyway. So it is an incredibly difficult challenge you can either face or reject and remain angry at the state of the world until you die having just repeated old patterns your whole life, or you can try to break them.

Or use his own words

Gazing is a technique used by Shaman for maybe thousands of years to expand perception, if it comes naturally to you maybe that is a path you should look at.

On a wider scale the monetary system may be uniting the world far more effectively than anything else ever has, for example it's counter productive for there to be large wars now between the major powers, like China and the US can't have a war without both sides being crippled and European countries can't really kill each other any more. There may be many downsides and imbalances but if if prevents the sorts of wars which decimated the world in previous centuries then it has it's up side as I'm sure the amount of suicides it may cause is incomparable to the casualites of world wars. We just have to hope the system doesn't completely collapse.

The past is a mind game but it is an incredibly powerful mind game which has enormous pressures on how you experience the now, unless at some point you heal those things which try to drag you back into the past you will always have a hard time in the present moment. Which is why in many Shamanistic paths they don't just say focus on the now like someone like Ekhart Tolle and some Buddhists do, rather they say the now is one point on the wheel of life and you need to do practices at other points on the wheel to get it all moving smoothly, like erasing personal history and healing your past in order to really live and appreciate the present moment.

I don't think you can kill the ego, you can see the unnecessary suffering and stress it causes you to believe in it too tightly though and then decide to relax your grasping at it. Maybe you mean the same thing but killing implies violence and any sort of violence is counterproductive.

Connecting with life and connecting with other people are brain stem needs cemented deep in the primitive part of the human brain reinforced over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. In tribal society being ostracised meant death and that anxiety of being cut off still lives within us, most of us get fearful just from falling out with our group of friends so going off and isolating yourself is no easy feat. In my view most people need many years of training in letting go and detaching within society before they try to tackle letting go of their deepest primative needs and fears head on by going on a long isolated retreat, otherwise you may just be overwhelmed by what you are up against. Let go of the small things first.

I would trust your own observations and experiments in this area, I expect you will find that trying to interrupt the thoughts and mindstream will just make things worse and stress you out, any sort of effort to control is counter productive. Notice your attitude towards yourself when you loose the ability to observe and how that attitude helps or hinders you, what gets better practical results being harsh with yourself when failing to observe or being gentle, if your attitude toward yourself when you fail to meditate improves just a bit then that is a good achievement imo.

Ha, yeah the problem with any state sponsored news it will always be influenced from above no matter how free they try to make it. For example here the BBC is generally pretty good and there are a number of laws trying to safeguard it's impartiallity but it's still controlled from above, for example with the riots last week the first few days I watched some of them live but on the last day there was an amost total media blackout and the only live footage being shown was on a Sikh tv channel called Sangat tv. Al Jazeera may have it's own agendas on some issues, I know at one point the US authorities thought they had terrorist connections and put someone associated with it in guantanamo bay, but I dont buy that because the tyrant leaders in the Middle East hate it more than anyone else because it reports on how corrupt they are, Gadaffi even specifically targets their journalists and tries to kill them above all others. So I see no evidence of any particular pro Muslim anti Western slant which some people have accused them of.

Al Jazeera isn't too bad, it seems to be disliked by almost every government in the west and middle east so it must be doing something right... unless you want reliable news about Qatar that is.

Yes unfortunately many of the spiritual teachings we have to go by were meant for a more agrarian psyche which is far more naturally balanced with the earth and balanced within the body through the day to day physical work with the land. So it's not easy to apply those teachings from the past which were meant for that specific population to the disconnected people of the modern industrialised era. Maybe we need a new messiah and dharma for our troubled times.

I think the first step for most people is to balance yourself between heaven and earth, a lot of people in this day and age are far too centred in their head and mental thinking and need to be brought down to their body and heart, at this point you are still under the influence of heaven and earth but you are no longer conflicted as much between them so then you have the platform for transfofmation. The basic process then is to gradually let go of your attachments and identifications until you become a person in the world not but of the world, you are fully involved in everything which happens with your body, mind and emotions yet you are also outside of it with no attachment. The mistake I see a lot of people do from my pov is that they try to jump directly into letting go of the world before they have balanced themselves properly within it.