Jetsun

The key to many of these techniques is doing nothing, letting go. If you can do that already then you don't most of them

Hi Seth and Kris, I agree I don't think it is the next turning of the wheel or dharma or anything like that but I am liking the process especially the voice dialogue aspect which seems like quite a good way to bring compassion and awareness to your ego states very quickly. It's a promising process for addressing your wounds and shadow because there is fluidity in moving in and out of these states and they can be looked at within the context of your big heart and big mind so those states are not so overwhelming or troublesome when looked at from an expanded state. There are some videos on YouTube but I think some of it has been taken down as there is some sort of scandal around the Roshi at the moment and quite a lot of criticism going his way from the zen community, which is typical as soon as I get interested in something it looses some of it's credibility, but in this case it can be valuable to separate the teacher from the teaching in my opinion as I think it could be a valuable method for many people. I learned the process from a DVD I downloaded and a book on the subject so there is no need to fork out a fortune to learn the process.

I'm not sure forgiveness is a thing you can do rather it is a process that happens, I don't think it is a choice you can just make, many people get commanded to forgive by their religion but they just bury their anger underneath, they go around saying they forgive through gritted teeth.

I can only speak from my own experience but I tried to get rid of my shadow for many years through spiritual practice like qigong and meditation but it only made things worse and made those energies more demonic and more powerful. I was seeing a Buddhist psychotherapist who basically suggested to me after about 8 years to stop all such methods completely as trying to transmute those energies can just be another way to fight and reject yourself. What I have found is that hate emerges from disowned instinctual energies and it only becomes hate because those energies haven't been allowed, respected and acknowledged by you so the hate becomes larger and starts to sabotage your life because it's trying to get your attention. Once you acknowledge those energies and the messages they have and accept them as part of you then the hate dissipates all by itself because those parts of you have been respected so they are no longer resentful. Shadow work is about integrating the shadow not getting rid of it. This may not be relevant at all to the OP but I just thought I would put it out there.

I'd be wary of trying to get rid of your hate through some technique like meditation or qigong, no doubt those techniques will give you temporary relief but you may just be forcing your shadow and their valuable instinctual energies further down into your subconscious.

No doubt there are some abuses of power in Buddhism and in closed communities there are sometimes individuals who take advantage of positions of power given to them, but I see no evidence there is anything approaching a cover up with parallels to the Catholic church. I would be careful if I were you accusing someone who works tirelessly for the welfare of mankind of such serious things, there is not an abundance of sites talking about this like you suggest and can't find even one person who has come forward to say they personally were sexually abused in this way in a monestary where the Dalai Lama is associated, unlike the Catholic church where there are hundreds of individual case studies and personal witness testimonies.

Those are some pretty scandalous claims there Twinner, I would like to see some reliable sources to back them up. Trying to associate Dalai Lama with covering up sexual abuse would get you banned on some forums for slander without some good sources backing you up. It seems like you have some sort of agenda here.

If Taoism is all about acceptance why do many Taoists spend all their time trying to transform their bodies and transform their Qi? Trying to change something is the opposite of accepting it.

I think an enlightened person is often perceived as a threat to a lot of people because their presence is an affront to the unenlightened ego and seeing as people completely identify with their ego then they can be perceived as a thread to their actual existence. Which is why throughout history enlightened people are often persecuted, killed and crucified.

The perspective I am working with with regards to the self is that we each develop a persona or false personality while we grow up which is a very complex structure which includes hundreds of parts such as the critic, the controller, the joker, the victim, the warrior etc. This whole ego structure was developed to protect the vulnerable open original part of you which is called in various traditions as your essence, or essential self. The development of your persona is absolutely necessary for survival but at some point your persona starts to develop at the expense of your essence, so a crucial step in spiritual progress is to find a way to live more through your essence and to make it more active and your persona more passive, as the persona lives through trying to manipulate reality and lying while your essence perceives reality clearly. This is a step missing in many eastern traditions which try to work directly with merging the self with the non-dual, which may be an appropriate approach with more grounded agrarian people who already live largely through their essence, but things are far more complicated now with far more pressures and complications for most modern people.

Out of boredom I will engage in this. The Dalai Lama has travelled for a large proportion of his life, in that time he has met all sorts of people from all walks of life, he believes all humans want to be happy and avoid suffering therefore deep down we are all the same, so he doesn't discriminate who he meets and who he is compassionate towards, he even said he thought George Bush was a nice man when he met him. Just because he meets someone and is compassionate towards them it doesn't mean that he sympathises or supports their ideas. When he met Heinrich Harrer he was a child of 11 years old and it was before the horrors of Nazism were revealed to the world yet you still try to equate him as being some sort Nazi sympathiser just for knowing one German when he was a child. Do you not see how insane that is? The website you linked criticises him for eating meat, but he has to eat meat because of his constitution, as he once tried to become a vegetarian and it almost killed him. My understanding of the Shugden issue is that in his study the Dalai Lama discovered that there may be harmful consequences for the practitioners who focus on the shugden deity so he recommended against it. There is no dharma police who will arrest you if you continue with shugden, it's completely up to you, he just recommends against it. The Chinese accuse him of all sorts of things yet if you examine what he asks for he doesn't even ask for Tibetan independence, he asks for religious freedom and equality and the stopping of forced migration to dilute the Tibetan population. Some accuse of him of being militant yet where is the violence and terrorist attacks? They accuse him of being a power hungry dictator yet he has given up all his political power and positions.

You might be interested in reading the work of Peter Levine, he has written a book called "Waking the Tiger" about that exact process of releasing trauma through spontaneous trembling. He says that if you observe wild animals they always shake and tremble after they survive a chase to shake off the stress and trauma which is why animals don't usually get PTSD, but humans have forgotten how to do this natural healing process.

That is a pretty hilarious site thanks for the link, I see they are connecting Oprah Winfrey with Nazism too You should watch the film Seven Years in Tibet where Brad Pitt plays Heinrich Harrer, it's pretty good.

Daniel Ingram has made a good map from Buddhist perspective http://www.interactivebuddha.com/Nanas%20and%20jhanas%20tablep1.pdf You can get his book free from his website http://www.interactivebuddha.com/mctb.shtml

So what are you accusing him of? because the Dalai Lama was only just born when the Nazi's were in power and was three years old probably still shitting in his nappy when the Nazi's made an excursion into Tibet.

From my experience my personality is something which covers up and protects something more vulnerable and tender inside of me, something which existed before my personality was created.

The Dalai Lama has given up his political status and the Tibetans in exile elected a new Prime Minister a few days ago http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/world/asia/28tibet.html?_r=2&ref=world I always thought the Chinese propaganda about the Dalai Lama was so ridiculous that noone took it seriously

In my opinion you may benefit from looking at a Jungian or western mythological perspective to the self a bit, investigate the process of 'individuation' and finding your 'true self'. I think it is easy for some people who are focussed on eastern spirituality to get caught up in denying the self or denying the needs of the self and trying to transform the self before you have even got to know and accepted it; this is a trap I fell in. The heroes journey described in many myths isn't about changing you or merging with the universe it's about rediscovering the real part of you and embracing all that you are and getting to know and love as much of this as you can: No need to drop eastern spirituality just get the best of both worlds.

Transmuting your energies can lead you to gold but repressing them is the fast track road to hell on earth, you need to be completely honest with yourself why you are doing what you do, if you haven't fully embraced your sexuality and instinctual energies first then it is being done from a place of rejection. If you are doing it to try to get rid of your sexuality because you don't like it then it will only lead you to great suffering. The same meditation can be used by one person for their development but by different person it can just be used as another way of self rejection depending on where you are at. A person can do high level spiritual exercises for fifty years and get nowhere if it's being done out of a place of self repression and rejection. The vast majority of people need to first completely honour and accept themselves before they even think about transmuting their instinctual energies

Kum Nye is probably the best method I have found for addressing this, with armoured areas of your body the natural pulsation of expansion and contraction of the nervous system has been arrested so the postures of Kum Nye give a physical and subtle massage to those areas reintroducing the natural pulsation of expansion and contraction, but it is done slowly without force which allows the release of feelings underneath the tension. With the massage and release comes great pleasure, to your nervous system it's like a release from a long prison sentence.

I agree, to completely deny the self is to stray into nihilism which is an extreme and an extreme is not the middle way therefore it's not Buddhism. Most of the teachings point out what is not self but that is always in relation to what is self.

Sounds too good to be true. To undo your social conditioning is no easy feat, I sometimes wonder if a person may have to suffer a great deal before they are prepared to give it up. I heard a zen master say recently that some people would rather die than give up their defences and expose themselves so I'm sceptical you can achieve that much in seven days, but I hope it works.

The Fourth Way has been presented in a way for the Western mind and there are teachings within that I don't find anywhere in Eastern spirituality. I have not met any masters of this system myself but the lineage recently released a book called "The Reality of Being" by Jeanne De Salzmann who was Gurdjieff's successor which is a collection of teachings from her notebooks which I regard as one of the highest level esoteric books I have ever read and it is clear to me that she was a highly conscious if not a completely realised master, yet most people have never even heard of her. I think there are western systems which are alive and which work you just need to look in the right places.

I guess the world is in a permanent state of madness to a degree but once in a while it goes completely insane and everyone starts to kill each other, officially people say that it is to do with economic crashes and political insecurity but I have also heard that it is caused by astrological changes and the tension between the planets intensifying which causes an eruption of primal energy and fear on the earth. This increase in tension and the resultant mass psychosis has happened throughout history so is likely to happen again at some point, which is why we have no time to waste in making ourselves conscious so we don't get caught up in it, and if enough people have worked their consciousness to a high enough level in the population then perhaps the insanity can be reduced on a larger scale through their influence.