Jetsun

I think originally most religions and their customs and rituals were all designed to help harmonise the development of people with the world as they matured, so originally they were in a sense Taoist in that they aimed at the harmonious development of mankind, but they have now been corrupted and fragmented and much of their original intention and wisdom is lost.

Thanks Blasto that made clear a lot of stuff for me, I especially like this part: As completely negating the self is something I see quite a fair few fair Buddhists and new age people get into, but it is a trap I think one which I fell into for some time and can lead you to nihilism.

Yeah I think there are more potential medical complications with hyperventilation type methods plus there is always the risk when you flood the conscious mind with the unconscious with powerful breathing techniques you can bring up stuff that the person isn't ready to deal with. I have done a similar technique called Sudarshan Kriya which is a similar sort of controlled hyperventilation, it didn't help me but I think it does have the potential to help with some traumas, there is medical evidence which shows it helps symptoms, i'm not sure about curing hardcore PTSD though.

What sort of shamanic good things do you do?

Well it's not the answer to everything, if someone is threatening you or your family then looking within for answers won't help, if you are hungry and your politicians are ruining the place you live then looking within won't help most people. So yes it's contextual, but the key I think is to work out what you can have power over and what you don't because the only option when you are powerless over something is to make peace with it by looking within and letting go.

For that price of over $300 I would expect the DVDs to be gold plated, there is no excuse for poor quality if you are going to charge that much

I say "very likely" because I don't like to talk in absolutes but the thinking is that you only hate what you see in other people what you hate in yourself, so you will only have an extreme irrational emotional reaction to someone else if they trigger some disowned unconscious part of you. For example there are people on TV who I cant stand yet my friends really like them, I don't like them because they remind me of parts of myself I dislike, so my reaction is all to do with me and nothing to do with the person on tv. But if you remain unconscious of this process then you will always blame the other person for your reaction, they will always be the problem and when the problem is outside of you there is nothing you can do about it, you remain in the trap of blaming other people for all the wrong you see in the world and all your problems. I think if you integrate your shadow then you will loose the majority of your negative judgements about other people, so you will see them more clearly for who they are without it being filtered through a lense of your own projections, whether it is possible to see them without any sort of filter at all i'm not sure

All severe traumas trigger the fight, flight or freeze response from the reptilian brain which is a survival mechanism to make you react instantly to threat before you can even think about it. With such a response a great deal of energy is made available to the psoas to enable you to run away, or if you can't run or fight you will freeze like a rabbit in headlights then the psoas will contract making you curl up into a ball for protection. Trauma is essentially an event in your life which hasn't been fully processed or discharged yet, so the memory still contains a charge, so it makes sense whenever a trauma is reactivated in a person that the psoas will either be energised or will contract all over again. If your psoas is permanently contracted it probably means that your nervous system is in freeze mode so you are 'playing dead' as an emergency way of dealing with overwhelming stress from a threat.

I guess it's impossible to see another person for who they really are until we have seen ourselves in our totality, otherwise we will project onto them according to our own perceptions, but then on the other hand they can also be our greatest teachers about ourselves because they can show us our shadow disowned parts of ourselves. For shadow work other people are crucial, much of that shadow stuff cannot be dealt with very easily on the meditation cushion or in retreat because we lie to ourselves too easily. Essentially whenever you get a strong emotional reaction to other people it is very likely some of your shadow has been triggered, so the emotional reaction you get can be a trigger to take notice and examine your own judgements towards that person as whatever you are rejecting in the other person will also be something you reject in yourself. So in this respect the more annoying the person and difficult the situation the better. There is a story if I can remember it correctly about a Russian man who lived with Gurdjieff in their teaching house or ashram in Paris after the Second World War. This man by all accounts was the most annoying, lazy, irritable, petty person in the community and nobody could understand why he was there as he wasn't interested in working or learning anything and made many other peoples life there far more difficult. One day some sort of incident happened and the man got so angry he stormed off promising never to return, while all the others rejoiced and celebrated that their source of irritation had gone. As soon as Gurdjieff heard about this he got up an immediately went to find the man in Paris to beg him to come back and it turned out Gurdjieff was paying him a salary to live with them and offered him double to return. The negative manifestations of other people can cause a friction inside of you and that friction can provide the alchemical fire with which your inner impurities are revealed, then by sealing the alchemical container which is your body/mind by using the right sort of inner attention like steve f talks about you can transform your impurities into gold.

All the threads he starts are on the same subject so all he needs is one thread instead of creating new threads week in week out on the same issue. Which is basically just a technique of Goebells like propaganda to keep repeating the same message over and over in subtle different ways trying to get one fundamental point across.

One of the reasons why some atheists are forceful at the moment is because something like close to 40% of Americans believe in the literal interpretation of the bible that the earth is only a few thousand years old, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/20/40-of-americans-still-bel_n_799078.html which is a very frightening statistic for an educated nation, and then there are powerful rich interest groups which want to maintain and promote such ignorance, so if anyone is doing the balancing it is people like Dawkins not you.

I'm not sure why you think people on this site of all places need you to provide our balance for us, Dawkins has his own forum I think although I guess they will be far less polite about your agenda than most are on here.

Depends on the sort of trauma you are working with, EMDR works quite well if you have precise events to work with. Peter Levine's Somatic experiencing is similar shaking but without focus on the legs, although I never got it to work. Bruce Frantzis Water Method can allow you to let go of trauma. I know a form of Qigong called CFQ qigong was used to help tsunami victims recover from trauma. I always thought holotropic breathwork was for birth trauma, it's probably less safe than tre because it uses breath. But most traumas will have an impact on the tensions throughout your body so you don't necessarily have to work with the area it's stored in order to connect with it. All severe life or death type traumas will be connected to the psoas in some way no matter where in your body it is stored in order to energise flight in the fight or flight response brought up by the trauma.

Kum Nye for me, gives you a nice physical and subtle body massage, can make you feel great

I'm starting to understand why people like Dawkins and Hitchens take such an aggressive approach, I appreciate then more now I see what they are up against. There is an element of truth in the premise that things are over materialistic, but a regression back to old dogmatic religious views is obviously not the solution so I doubt these ID propagandists will ever get anywhere.

If you are angry then that anger exists as a bodily sensation so it is a fact, all your "shoulds" are just mind fabrications trying to manipulate reality, you wont get rid of that anger just by telling yourself that it shouldn't exist according to your ego's criteria of what your reality should be at that moment, all that does is create more stress.

In that higher consciousness you have no preferences, there is no good or bad, right or wrong, everything is united and whole. Take that consciousness into the market place full time and you probably wouldn't survive a week, you need dualistic ego to survive.

Are you going to Dharamsala?

Best spell caster of the year 2010 do they have a judging panel with Simon Cowell?

I first heard of this process Big Mind a few years ago but was initially put off because Ken Wilber described it with what I thought was completely over the top praise saying it was the next turning of the wheel of the Dharma and the most important Buddhist method created for hundreds of years etc, but I wish I had cast my prejudices aside earlier as I tried it recently and was quite surprised at how well it worked and how profoundly easy it is. It's a Zen method but it basically it starts as a form of Voice Dialogue therapy, which is like a sort of psychological enquiry method where you get asked to talk to different parts of your psyche such as the protector, the controller, the skeptic, desire, the wounded part, inner child etc, which in itself can bring a lot of insight and compassion to your ego. But then he goes on to ask to talk to the non seeking mind, the way, then your big mind and then your big heart, complete heart-mind, then the master. What was surprising was that just by asking to speak to these part of you in that way could enable you to access them without any effort or striving and by working with the ego parts before hand you actually get permission from the controlling ego parts to go there rather than struggling with them for hours on end. Just by asking in this way you can access your limitless mind and limitless heart, but what was also interesting is that they divided your heart into Yin compassion and Yang compassion and you could really feel the difference in them, I haven't heard of anyone dividing the heart that way before but it made a lot of sense in the experience. So I was wondering if anyone else has tried this process Big Mind Big heart and what they think of it? I don't think it is the next turning of the wheel of the Dharma but it's an interesting experience and I recommend people try it if they can.

The issue with meds is that many companies try to market them as a cure for psychiatric problems and for a long time many within the psychiatric community thought they could be a cure but it's slowly being realised that they aren't because they treat the symptom of a persons problems rather than get to the root. Treating the symptom can sometimes even prevent you getting to the cause so in some circumstances meds can actually prevent a cure. But also in some circumstances meds help a person get stabilised so they can function better in society which can enable them to make other choices and get their emotional needs met which can lead to a recovery. Whether Taoists methods and oriental medicine are a better option is something I looked into myself for a long time and in my opinion for a lot of people they wont help, although for some they will help as part of a holistic treatment by creating enough relaxation and grounding for the nervous system to let go of stress, but most of those methods are meant for healing on a different level and by using such methods you can stimulate powerful energies within the unbalanced person which can lead to overwhelm and making things worse. Certainly meditation based methods and anything head based can just make things worse. During my own period of bad mental health I would try such methods and stimulate all those energies within my body then afterwards I could barely leave the house or even speak to my own family because of feelings of overwhelm. In a normal healthy person when they encounter strong energies and emotions they can usually remain detached enough and remain in the witness enough for them to be processed and let go, but with a mentally ill person that is very difficult. SF jane said she basically had to be prepared for her symptoms to get much worse before they got better as she worked through the heavy stuff, which is risky and not possible for a lot of people.

I don't think emotional maturity is cultural based, it's more about becoming free from your childhood patterns and conflicts, many people even in the spiritual area as adult are still motivated by trying to get something they weren't given as children by their mother and father, which is often why people worship and become gurus. Most of the people on this board who seek siddhi powers are still playing unresolved power games left over from their childhood. This thread "Spiritual Maturity" http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?/topic/18274-spiritual-maturity/ says some good things on the subject and Bruce Frantzis teacher Liu often stresses the need to become emotionally mature: "Even upon reaching the advanced stage of eighty, many human beings still live out the neuroses of their childhood. They still relive things that occurred to them when they were children or young adults. They never go beyond the basic programmed conditioning wired inside them from youth. During the first level of Taoist water method meditation, people spend a long time learning to become what Taoists call "mature human beings", meaning individuals who can assume responsibility for themselves, who do not avoid consequences by ascribing their own motivations to others"

Yes I agree it is absurd considering that it consists of a sort of group therapy session and the teaching is not complicated, I would never pay anything like that.

Yes with DID (as with most other psychological problems) it is an exaggeration of what people consider normal state of being, so all people have multiple personalities within them yet there is fluidity and not too much conflict between the different parts of your psyche and no severe dissociation between the parts so you are not considered ill, but even the average "healthy" person isn't unified most of the time. Within the Big mind or Voice Dialogue process you converse with some of the main parts and what you discover is that there is a part of you which they call the controller/protector which is doing it's best to try to unify you, be in control and protect your vulnerability, but also when you move into non dual parts at the end you discover another part which they call the "master" which is similar to what you describe of a part being calm and collected, sitting in the background aware of everything that's going on. So we all have that wise master within us right now we just aren't aware of it most of the time and live through our stressed controller/protector part instead. I think the Sufi Poem by Attar 'Conference of the Birds' talks about this , how the different birds representing the different parts of the psyche don't have a real leader so they go in search of a mythical bird to make their king. I have learned it more through books and a torrent dvd but there is some content on Genpo Roshi's website http://bigmind.org/teachings/ The area of voice dialogue is what im a bit more interested in that moment, there is some info here http://delos-inc.com/reading-stone.htm

Ken Wilber talks about this issue quite well describing the different stages of development and if someone transcends a stage of their development without integrating all that is contained at that level then that which wasn't integrated will remain unconscious and can re-emerge at a later stage in your life, sabotaging you and bringing you back to that earlier stage of development. It seems like it is possible to have high level realisations and become a great meditator and still be screwed at an early stage of emotional development, most meditation and cultivation methods dont deal with that early shadow material very well, certainly there are a lot of gurus who get caught up in scandals and sexual misconduct of some sort. The whole guru relationship can just be a re-enactment of the child parent power struggles so it is important that a teacher has resolved these issues or they will try to find resolution from their students which just leads to scandal and abuse of power. So in summary no I don't think spiritual development means psychological maturity, it can help though and make it more likely.