Jetsun

Bodhidharma who supposedly taught some of the most advanced neigong to the monks at the Shaolin Temple had wall gazing as his main practice, the instruction for this advanced technique is to sit down and look at a wall.

The question of what is supposed to be reincarnated is one which I have never really got my head around, I have had it explained that your karmic seeds contain a force or a potential so when you die that force has to go somewhere, so maybe I am bound by my karma wherever that leads. Perhaps that will lead to another life, but I still don't get the issue of population as the world population has increased a lot so where have all these new reincarnating beings come from? It all seems so unanswerable to really hold the firm conviction that my life as it is results from previous life karma. Even people like the Dalai Lama don't have memories of previous lives but he is firm in his conviction that his suffering and that if his people is due to previous karma, I just wonder how he is so convinced.

I think most of our ego contractions, habits, defences, repressed emotions etc are held within and reflected in the blocks and contractions in our body, so to work with opening up the energy channels in the body you will end up coming up against your resistance to change and your ego clinging. But if you work directly with the mind you also come up against your resistance to change and your ego clinging, so as far as I can see with both methods you still come up against the same thing in the end. Although there are many Buddhists who I have heard say that at one point in their training they developed mastery over the energy channels or winds as they call them sometimes they said they mastered it in previous lives so don't need to work on them any more, but I don't think you necessarily have to use elaborate exercises to work on the channels, as far as I understand things like Tummo purify the channels by burning away the blocks and other Tantric exercises work the channels also.

Go meditate in hills of Bhutan, Guru Rimpoche apparently left Akashic records there to be discovered when the time is right

I'm not sure it helps anyone to think of yourself as lower than anyone else, from what I can see most people who think like that end up embittered and downtrodden and those people are usually more potentially dangerous and destructive than the average guy. Each person has the potential for immense power and the mind of a Buddha, so maybe all this lowering yourself is just another trick of those who wish to control you and trick you into thinking you are a sheep when in reality you are more like a lion.

Yeah, also that lady at the end didn't quite get it either "should have said one with the lot".. err no he shouldn't

From the Buddhist perspective clinging onto that energy may be your problem, pushing away the negative states and clinging onto the positive is viewed as the fundamental cause of suffering. One meditation I have been doing is to bring all the lousy rotten feelings in to my heart with the in breath and expand them without trying to escape from them, while with the outbreath letting go of any good positive states and energy and give it to the world, so it's a reversal of the normal state of mind so you cherish the bad in your heart and dedicate the good to others, which is form of Atisha's heart meditation. I'm finding it quite powerful so far and already feeling a reduction in stress and fear.

Dalai Lama doesn't get Australian presenter's joke

I agree changing your fundamental beliefs is an incredibly difficult thing to do, personally I had to have an almost complete mental breakdown to really challenge mine and even when I could see that they were causing me such suffering that my life was in ruins I still didn't want to let them go. So I tend not to believe people when they say they are changing their beliefs unless they are going through some deep suffering or had some sort of shock which has shaken up their perception. I agree it's all about your parents which is why I think Jesus says those strange things in some scriptures of abandoning your parents or hating them, which I don't think is meant lierally rather you have to let go of trying to win their approval or rebelling against them as either way is a form of slavery.

The God Delusion is a pretty bad book but his other scientific books about evolution are actually very good and he presents the evidence pretty well to the general public, he used to work for Oxford university so he is a serious scientist in his field so I wouldn't write off his other works just because of the God Delusion.

That is an amazing documentary, thanks!

How do you know they had moving meditation? maybe they thought it was a waste of time. From my understanding Lao Tzu stresses letting go as a fundamental point, so any method which teaches this is likely to be in line with the way pointed at in the Tao Te Ching

It sounded to me from your first post that you want relief from your suffering, that is what I want too all the powers and mind-blowing experiences come secondary to that

You are fortunate to have friends like that, what I found when I was going through a rough patch was the most powerful thing a person could do for me was just to be present and listen without them giving me advice, I think being able to do that well with no expectations or projections is the pinnacle of being non violent towards other people, I aspire to be able to be that way some day.

Yeah that's kineseology not really anything to do with acupuncture, I've had it before and it was strange how different things made my body weaker but I'm unsure how it works but it's used more to determine food sensitivity and allergy than anything else I think

For me the main opposing parts of me were what they might call essence or inner child parts of me, for I had neglected those feelings for a long time and drowned them out with alcohol, pushed them away by focusing on work and entertainment or put them on hold by feeding myself stimulants like sugar and coffee. So then when it came to the inner work of opening up with meditation and qigong I was trying to force myself open without paying any attention to the part of me which is scared and terrified of being made to feel vulnerable. I can't say I am an expert on this as i'm still struggling with this myself but I think he steps to overcoming this problem are first to become really aware of what is going on. In the Fourth Way system this involves many months of what they call self observation where you practice stepping outside of yourself as a neutral observer trying to separate you from what you are observing in yourself in daily life. There are other ways with things like Voice Dialogue therapy which I think is quite good and other forms of psychotherapy, but essentially I think what's needed is to investigate your feelings and find out what your opposition parts want and need, why they are scared or angry and then once you give them the attention they have been craving and make them feel safe and re-assured then they will get on your side.

Apparently he got twelve holes in one at the new golf course in North Korea but getting reliable information about there is difficult, much in the western media depict it as some sort of hell hole but one article I read recently said that no-one there really wants all the western things like cars and mobile phones because they have never had any of it so they don't know any different, plus many people get reliable heath care and housing so maybe it's not so bad. With regards to history I did a history degree and when I did my dissertation I more or less had my conclusion in my head from the beginning then found the evidence to fit it, which is also how many of the history books are written, especially with many revisionist historians as you can gather evidence to make a convincing argument for almost any conclusion about history if you are determined enough.

This is an interesting thread on free will http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?/topic/18642-should-you-believe-in-free-will/ which seems to suggest we do have a degree of free will from a scientific perspective

This situation happens all the time from what I can see, people are always trying to teach and instruct other people who they see as needing their help, or doing it "out of compassion". The most powerful teaching I ever had was when I met someone who didn't want to teach me anything, he didn't project anything onto me or expect anything from me, it was quite liberating as just about every other person I met in my entire life either projected something or expected something from me in some sort of subtle way or another.

It sounds like he is trying to teach you

In the fourth way they say that there is a part of you which wants to wake up and get enlightened and there is a part of you which is outright opposed to it, so the main struggle is to get this opposing part of you onside and headed in the same direction, the question becomes how to do this. Many people try to force this part of you along through willpower, which is infact a form of violence towards that part so it just grows in opposition and you get nowhere, so then the other option is to bargain and sooth that part of you to show it compassion so in the very least it wont interfere with your efforts. But the reality of it is that most people never even become aware of that opposing part or what it is, they never gain enough awareness to understand why it is sabotaging their efforts towards enlightenment and undermining their meditation and cultivation, so they never even get in a position to attempt to get the opposing part onside headed in the direction of enlightenment then wonder why they fail to get anywhere.

I think Gurdjieff said that all efforts towards self observation and self remembering are never wasted, but that doesn't include all efforts as some efforts may have nothing to do with or even oppose self remembering. The way I see it is that the road towards enlightenment is one of subtraction, so you are continually cutting away what is not you in order to find out what you are, so all methods of letting go are never wasted as you have let go of one extra thing which is not you, so you have dropped an identification. So theoretically it could be possible for us to see that we are enlightened already in any moment just by dropping all that we are not and seeing what is left, so for some people no effort or years of practice is necessary as they can let go completely of everything in a single moment, but for most of us we need to slowly let go of our identifications one by one over many years.

Meditation can leave you ungrounded so he could try doing a closing, just doing something simple like finishing by focusing on the dan tien for a few minutes then brushing down your body with your hands moving any stuck energy and coming back to the body.

In the beginning was the word.. or in the beginning was a sound or vibration, some say the sound of Om or Aum is the primordial vibration and everything is formed from Om, so maybe understanding the vibration of Om is the key to enlightenment

"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