Jetsun

That is what Gurdjieff called "objective art", at one point men of knowledge realised that all wisdom gets corrupted and lost through time so they tried to find a way to transmit knowledge through the generations for genuine seekers to find without it being contaminated by mass ignorance, so they built works of art using precise measurements and mathematical proportions but then would on purpose create an error or an inexactitude at a precise point. The general masses of the future population would view the error as a mistake or laziness of the craftsman but the seeker would recognise that is unlikely, so the mistake is there to be pondered and the task is to discover it's secret and esoteric meaning. The Sphynx is objective art as well as many of the European gothic Cathedrals like Chartres in France.

Sorry this is slightly off topic but how long have you been doing Bruce Frantzis Water Method dissolving for? and what benefits have you had? I ask because I am considering taking it up again and it would be good to hear some testimonials from people who have gained some progress from it.

Yes it's the contrived passive aggressive people who smile at you through gritted teeth that cause the more serious problems, at least you know where you stand with an aggressive person who insults you.

Maybe with the help of a plant like Ibogaine or Ayahuasca it could show you very quickly, yet it may just show you another level of delusion

If you are trying to change and wake up just about everyone will try to put you back in your confined box because there you are safer and I especially mean the people who love you like friends and family as well as government and society.

I know you have studied Gurdjieff Vmarco so you must know what he says about the state of the average man, that his intellectual centre is highly developed yet his emotional centre is retarded. Yet just about no-one has the honesty to really see that in themselves as they have an image of themselves as a competent mature adult. Just look at most of the threads on this board, people can intellectualise all day long like experts in the subjects and mentally masturbate yet there is no emotional connection. Look at the threads on feminism which got put in the pit, they revealed a lot of truths as everyone involved in those threads male and female are clearly children on the emotional level yet not many of them have the honesty to admit it or confront that within themselves, if they did do they would probably have a severe case of dark night of the soul, so they do Qi Gong, meditation and "spiritual" practice to avoid seeing that and confronting that, to try to transmute that which they don't like. That's the way I see it anyway.

I would say I am divided, the real part of me which you could call my soul craves and loves honesty, yet my ego loves it's image which can sometimes condradict honesty, especially in social situations. I have studied Buddhism and Dzogchen a bit and it is easy being honest on the cushion on your own but bringing that to daily life is a different matter, there in life practises like self observation from the Gudjieff tradition are more likely to show you the path to honesty in my experience. Yet doing it on your own no matter your practice is difficult, other people are the best way to cut through your own self delusion especially if you have someone like a teacher or therapist whose job it is to do so.

Most people aren't honest, you need someone who isn't afraid to persistently cut through your bullshit mercilessly to show that to you. I used to think that I was honest but it took seeing a psychotherapist to show me that I was delluding myself, I used to do all sorts of meditations, pranayama, Qi Kung, then at the end of the week go into psychotherapy with the intention to be composed like a Buddha talking about the truths and realisations i had discovered, but then inevitably i would leave angry and confused like a little boy week after week. A few years of that and you start to see that you are not honest to yourself most of the time let alone anyone else, and just about noone else is either yet most people are way off even that low level realisation that on the emotional level they are still children.

Religions were originally intended to harmonise humanity with the dao, most of them now do the opposite but I believe that was their original intention. Does humanity need religion to do this? Well I think unlike every other animal or plant on the planet we do become unbalanced for whatever reason and most people do need some sort of teaching or training to bring us back into harmony.

You wouldn't be able to handle what you see in yourself without a developed open heart. That is one thing I have painfully learned from my life when I had an energetic opening when I was a teenager due to an enethogen experience and couldn't handle what I saw in myself as my heart wasn't open enough to embrace it. Any spiritual system worth anything is a journey to the heart, at least at the beginning, without that you will just contract when you try to shine light on the darkness inside of you so you will get nowhere.

So you think an enlightened person is a corpse? Feelings are as natural as the weather and the seasons, the only problem and ego issue is when you cling to them and push them away

How would you know that for sure? are you enlightened?

I think Gopi Krishna got kundalini psychosis from only working with his upper chakra so problems with kundalini don't necessarily come from working with lower chakras

If the centre of gravity of your being is in your head you are too top heavy and too distant from your lower centres so it is ungrounding, but if it is in your heart it is balanced as there are three energy centres below and three energy centres above it so you are balanced between heaven and earth. So I think if you want to get anywhere you need to centre yourself in your heart.

This is a topic of great interest to me too and yesterday I did a Shamanic tree ceremony from the medicine wheel teachings(coincidence this topic comes up now?). The ceremony involves placing four stones around the tree in the four cardinal directions then making an offering to the tree to pay your respects and ask for its help, then with your back to the tree you move around the tree asking particular questions depending on the direction you face then wait to see what answers come up. It was the first time I did it and I was surprised by the insight I got from it and I will be doing it again. Here in the UK there used to be a great mystical Druid tradition to do with the power of the trees but unfortunately most of the tradition is lost, but what I discovered in my research is that out of all the trees the Yew tree was considered the most sacred and powerful ally (as well as being the oldest with some thousands of years old) and the Druids would worship these trees and circles of them would be considered very holy, far more holy and powerful than famous stone circle sites like Stonehenge. I also found out that many Churches are built with Yew trees in their courtyard and considering it is a rare tree this is no coincidence. I understand there is a tree Qigong taught on the Stillness Movement workshop and would be interested to hear about peoples experiences with that.

This is all set up intentionally so he can practice his forbearance, that much is obvious, whether he would admit it or even realise it consciously is another matter. It's the common FD way which you see all the time, they intentionally provoke criticism then sit back and thank their criticisers for helping them practice, but I doubt such contrivance and manipulation can really benefit you when you set the situation up yourself.

It seems to me that half of what Li Hongzi says comes directly from his heart and the other half comes directly from his backside. Just my two cents, no truth offered whatsoever.

My understanding of the function of tradition and lineage is that you first transfer your attachments from your family and society to the lineage and if the lineage has many masters this gives you faith in doing so otherwise it is just a massive leap in the dark. But then a good lineage will in the end cut you off from all attachments including the tradition itself, so it's like a gradual training process of letting go and cutting away until there is nothing to grasp and nowhere to rest your head. If the lineage doesn't do that last step then it is worthless imo and may just be some guys getting kicks from having people look up to them.

You can develop all the wisdom in the world around no self etc but unless it is combined with equal development of compassion it is unbalanced and pretty much worthless, the basic message of the Buddha is one of wisdom and compassion, they support each other but one does not obviously follow another and if you only develop wisdom with inquiry into no self without training in compassion then you just develop lopsided. There have been Nazis and serial killers in the past who had wisdom so on it's own it can just lead you to hell.

What form of Chi Kung helped you do that if you don't mind me asking?

My understanding of dreams is that it is largely about emotional processing of events from your waking life, so young children dream intensely because their brains are making sense of all the impressions they have taken in throughout their day. But I think some young children may take in a lot of impressions which really have nothing to do with their lives because children are so open energetically, so they may absorb the impression of another persons trauma for example and later that night have a nightmare while processing it. An example of what I mean is that there have been studies of children of Holocaust survivors who would draw pictures of death camps and suffering even though their parents had never talked about their experiences to them, so somehow the child non-verbally takes in the experience of the Holocaust into themselves just from being open around their parents even though their parents had done all they could to shield them from those horrors. Which goes to show that you need to energetically release your own traumas and anxieties or they may be passed on even if you make a conscious effort not to harm anyone, there may be traumas passed down in families energetically for generations maybe even hundreds of years until someone does the work to heal them. So personally I doubt a dream itself could harm you unless you are attacked by a Shaman in some way, but you may have picked up upon some traumatic impressions from your environment or family which then manifested in your dreams.

So you have this realised as a permanent state? it's not just something you experience during meditation and for about five or ten minutes after every meditation session?

What you describe sounds exactly like what Bradford Keeney describes in his books about shaking medicine and the shaking healers of Africa.

It appears to me that the Shaman who live in tribal societies are far better at helping people deal with demons than any Christian I have ever seen

There are many plants and drugs which can heal but you need to do them with a shaman or at least a therapist in the right set and setting with the correct ceremony for them to really work.