Jetsun

I have had similar thoughts, from my experience Buddhism and Taoist energetics don't help particularly in this situation. The thing is that there may be real reasons to fear suicide and there may be real reasons to feel guilty about it, we just don't know so it is a huge gamble. Personally I am investigating whether shamanism can help and am planning a trip to Peru to drink Ayahuasca which is meant to be the most powerful natural medicine available to man for healing, so if that can't help then I'm not sure what will.

Lui I-Ming says that you can cultivate in towns and cities in the midst of urban lifestyle, he even indicates that those situations are ideal for Taoists, how to do it though is the tricky part. Other teachers like G.I. Gurdjieff and Anthony De Mello say similar things that the pressures of other people create the forces which can refine your character if you know how to use them, which are absent if you live like a hermit in the countryside. This is something I have been trying to figure out for a long time myself as I doubt I will ever have the luxury to live in the countryside and go on long retreats. All the teachers which I mentioned which teach using daily life stress the expansion of awareness and methods of "self observation" in the midst of life so there are teachings and methods to use to cultivate without you needing to be absorbed in nature I think.

You can come to an intellectual realisation of all this stuff but what use is it? after that you need to make everything in your subconscious and your whole body realise it too, which may take daily practice for the rest of your life.

I had one healing session and practised one of the techniques for some time. For my particular problem it didn't bring the healing I was looking for, but my problem was psychological in nature and I have come to realise now that I don't think any healer could take that away from me as there were a lot of issues with secondary gain and identity caught up in it, so on one level I didn't want to let it go and I expect most healers will tell you in those cases there isn't much you can do for the person. But if you want a easy to learn healing qigong and don't have access to a teacher I would still recommend it as I can see how it can help for many issues especially if they are physical in nature. edit: but I do remember it did bring up a lot of pain in a finger I had fractured many years ago, then after a time the pain went away and my finger appears to have returned to a stronger state, so I think it helped heal an old injury.

This matches the method of the healer I mentioned Yap Soon Yeung, but it is not about giving your sickness to the earth (although that might happen, i'm not sure) but it is about flushing towards the earth, which creates a letting go effect. I mention this healer because I went through a period of seeing a lot of healers starting off with the local ones doing body work etc and then travelling nationally to see more "famous" ones who had written books on the subject and had reputations and this guy Yap Soon Yeung was the only one I was really convinced by. I spoke to some people who had been treated by him and one woman had regained movement in a foot which doctors had told her was paralysed, another case helping a couple conceive a child who were told they couldn't, there are many testimonies that he can do more than just the local Reiki healer can do, yet his principles are very simple of flushing downward and letting go. Going further into how he heals he says he goes into the deeper levels of consciousness beyond the "alaya" consciousness where the storehouse and seeds of problems begin: "The deepest core of the alaya consciousness is a kind of luminous transparent light. In the Hua Yen Sutra this is separated from the alaya as the the ninth consciousness Tathagata garbha. In CFQ meditation, during the process of initiating students, I connect the cleansing and radiating effect to this transparent light, so that will continue to radiate, cleansing the first eight levels of consciousness of disease-causing, karmic-forming energies" - 'Energy Medicine in CFQ healing' - Yap Soon-Yeong & Choc Hiew So maybe he is transmuting and purifying sick Qi with pure radiant light and not dumping it anywhere

So when we die all I assume all the sick Qi left in peoples bodies is released into the earth and that pollutes the earth? it's not transformed into anything useful like some sort of subtle manure for something or anything like that?

Surely the sick Qi goes back into the earth in one way or another doesn't it, what is the difference between it being projected outwards or let go of downwards?

I guess you mean this with regards to the method of the healer I mentioned. As far as i'm aware the the giving of your sickness to the earth is not uncommon especially in shamanism, I have seen a whole host of shamanistic healing techniques of giving your sickness into the ground, or into water or rocks. The flushing downward path is also talked about by Bruce Frantzis in some of his books as the healing path. But in that method it isn't about giving your sickness to anything else, it is about letting go of any blocks and tensions which prevent the body from healing itself.

A number of different women have felt taken advantage of by him, you can't dismiss their feelings just because the guru might have some wisdom. If you ask me using Tibetan guru yoga where you are meant to worship the guru like he is the Buddha himself and combining that with sexual tantra techniques in a country like the US is begging for a lawsuit. Any psychologist will tell you that many of the people who go to the guru will be looking for a father figure to heal childhood wounds and when the father figure shows their attentions to another person rejection and anger will rear up and the lawsuits will come piling in. Or maybe he is just plain using these women for his own ends and masking it in all the Buddhist trappings.

I agree with you, even if things begin as consensual between adults he is in a position of authority and often the people who go to gurus in the west are vulnerable and wounded so it can easily be regarded as exploitation to use your position in that way. Chogyam Trungpa perhaps sets a bad example for the others to follow as he was a womaniser but he had disrobed as a monk and was completely open about his relationships, but things won't turn out well if people take him as the example to follow for conduct.

My understanding of Wu Wei is just when you do something in a state of flow, so you continue doing things but they become effortless and the right action is self evident there is no mind weighing up this or that, you take the only practical path open to you to remain in the flow of life. Everyone has moments like this, you even see it in world class sportsmen at times for example Michael Jordan often got in a flow state and others like Zinadine Zidane would enter it at times. Wu Wei isn't doing nothing, just look at nature it is never doing nothing, it is following the way of the Tao always moving always changing and if you follow this flow you enter flow yourself, so it's like being carried downstream there is a doing as you are moving but you aren't really doing it.

Yeah that's the guy It's not projection as such rather he just enters your energy field and focuses on brininging the energy down and letting go of any tension or blocks felt in either your body or his own, there is no firing of qi or storing it rather you move it down which automatically creates a letting go effect and the energy gets replenished automatically. The energy of both healer and patient is flushed downwards by the healer.

There is a Malaysian energy healer I studied for some time called Yap Soon Yeung who says that when he first started energy healing the toll on his body became so great his hair started to fall out and he became so weak that he was close to death, but in his weakened state he had a vision which showed him that the way he was healing was wrong and showed him the way to heal while strengthening his body rather than weakening it. The key in his method involves the downward flushing of energy and releasing it towards the earth, so he would connect with the energy field of the person and enter a meditative state while flushing all the energy downwards and this method meant he could heal all day without fatigue or ill health. I had a healing from him once and it was powerful. So I guess whether you are depleted depends on the method

As far as I'm aware it is only the Falun Dafa cultivators who say that segregation exists in other dimensions, I have not heard a Taoist, Shaman or Buddhist say such things about which suggests to me that it is bs.

I have been trying to face up to my own suffering and investigate the causes of it and I have come to the realisation that it would be so much smoother and easier if I had the firm belief in karmic rebirth, that I deserve to be in the state that I am in and where I am at in life due to past misdeeds, so there is a sort of cosmic justice. But from my own life experience and from seeing myself and my younger brother grow up my view is that young children come in as more or less blank slates and then get made to suffer almost randomly in the world when they are completely innocent and did nothing to bring it on themselves and the problem I am having is that it it just feels so unjust which inevitably leads to anger and bitterness towards the world. It would be nice to believe in karmic rebirth but I have no memory of previous lives and so far have seen nothing to utterly convince me of it so I suspect it might be another comfort blanket belief to shield people from the harsh reality of the randomness of suffering. So I guess I am asking how do you not get bogged down in anger and bitterness about it because without the belief in karmic rebirth it just seems so senseless that random innocent people are made to suffer more than others?

I can't quote very well on my phone but in reply to goldisheavy my knowledge from psychology is that when a baby is born it has no concept of itself or other, it perceives everything as unity so it doesn't understand someone looking at them any better than anything else. Then the instinctual drives for food and comfort etc kick in which begins the process of separating itself and relating to objects which satisfy the anxiety caused by instinctual needs. So it's mind only learns it's relationship to other things once it's born and as it's born in unity nothing has any meaning until needs kick in which need to be satisfied. I see no reason why all meanings and relations can't be learned after the arising of the mind in the womb and not before. It may get more meaning from the presence of their mother than another person but that could be because it associates the mother with the nurtuance of the womb. But I do wonder what are all the causes in differences in the natural predilections of people, I remember going to Jerusalem when I was very young and I was completely fascinated by it and couldn't get enough while both my brothers just wanted to go watch tv, so something must account for these differences more than just genetics and environment I think.

I think I am probably way out of my depth in this aspect of the conversation but I don't see why the causes and conditions which create mind can't form when the human body forms and then change form when the body dies. All I really know from my own practice is that many of the causes for troublesome emotional states and seeds of traumas etc reside in the tensions and cellular memory of the body so it stands to reason that when you leave the body all of that will become conscious or transformed during the death process as it relies on tensions within the body to exist.

But didn't the Buddha also say don't blindly believe in what I say but find out if what I say is true yourself, so if you have no memories of past lives yourself where is the justification for the belief? From what I can see it's not common to have past life memories in living masters today, i have never met anyone who can say for sure that they have past life memories, the Dalai Lama doesnt remember past lives and one high Lama I asked said he sometimes had trouble remembering what he did last week let alone in previous lives. Personally I once did a shamanic journey and experienced something which I felt was from another time but it could have been anything from a though tape, some sort of pre verbal impression or just imagination, I can't say for sure it is a past life.

Perhaps you don't have to be a monk but from my understanding long retreats often years at a time are encouraged as a way to gain significant realisations to bring back into daily life. Is doing an hour or two meditation a day with a week or two retreat in a year enough to really gain a deep realisation? are there many masters who didn't do such long retreats before cementing their wisdom ? most of the stories I have read of Buddhist masters usually involve long periods of seclusion in meditation.

Coming back to what is the best religion this is a view of G.I. Gurdjieff who studied with many masters from many traditions and spent much time in Tibet studying with high Lama's: "Gurdjieff says that the Christian religion in its early days was perhaps the best of all forms of organised religion so far invented; that the founders of what became the Catholic Church, who introduced the ritual and liturgy, understood the principles of the effect on the senses and the emotions, of colours through stained glass, of the music, of the pressure of the volume of air, of the lines and form of the architecture: they understood and used all this for the good of the worshippers. The effects were consciously and mathematically calculated." - 'Teachings of Gurdjieff: A Pupil's Journal' C.S. Nott Of course now the Christian religion has been corrupted and nearly all of it's wisdom has been lost but small secretive groups of initiates kept the real esoteric knowledge alive who knew how to use architecture, light, sound and atmosphere as conscious objective art to put people into receptive states to open to the spiritual. Examples of these groups are the builders who built some of the Gothic cathedral's during the European 'dark ages' Gurdjieff had great respect for Tibetan Buddhism but regarded it as the way of a monk, so you had to take a monk's attitude and spend much of your life in retreat to get the most of out it, while with the teachings which he believed formed the original Christianity (originating from Egypt before Christ) are meant to be conducted in the midst of life and not in retreat, so therefore is the best for the masses who practically can't commit to a monks life.

Wan Liping talks about the Bermuda Triangle in "Opening the Dragon Gate" he says that in the human body you can find 'death meridians' which don't lead to normal places in the body but their end point is a point where if you manipulate it in the wrong way can cause health problems or even death, and because the human body is a microcosm of the earth the planet must also have death meridians and death points and the Bermuda Triangle is likely to be one of these death points. There are likely to be other death points around the globe too