Jetsun

Where do I send my cheque to make sure I get saved?

Thanks for your story Seth Ananda, very interesting, when you say shaking do you mean a specific type like kunlun spontaneous shaking or just random shaking of your body to music or in a tribal way like Bradford Keeney talks about?

Yes I had the same impression as you, although the Kunlun book by Max is useful I personally prefer the way Jenny Lamb teaches the technique as she emphasises awareness ahead of bliss and opening the heart instead of the third eye. Some of the concerns I had about the technique were answered on her Q&A section of her website

You used to be able to buy the Kunlun instruction book from Amazon but last I looked it was out of print in English but I think they still sell it in some other languages, French I think. Jenny Lamb also teaches the technique and demonstrates it in her Qigong for health dvd. Kunlun is a powerful technique though and traditionally I don't think it was recommended for beginners but it depends on the individual, but I wouldn't mix it with many other energy methods, meditation is fine but not energetic fire methods My understanding is that the Water path is the downward flow of energy which is considered by many as the healing path as it moves energy into the earth so it is the safer path to take with moving energy as it is grounding, while the fire is more dramatic but more unstable. I wouldn't do a fire method without a teacher personally. Bruce Frantzis talks about these issues in some of his books like "Opening the energy gates of your body" which is a good book

Whoever fights against monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. -Nietzsche The malignant male and female demons who create a myriad of troubles and obstructions seem to be real before one has reached enlightenment. But when one realises their true nature, they become protectors, and through their help and assistance one attains numerous accomplishments. -Milarepa With a loving mind cherish more than a child the hostile gods and demons of apparent existence, and tenderly surround yourself with them. -Machig Labdron Take a demon to be a demon and it'll harm you; Know a demon's in your mind and you'll be free of it -Milarepa

If you look at the wars and violence in the world I think religions have a point that we need to be saved or helped, I don't think most religions have the capacity to do this in their current form and actually make things worse but I appreciate their original intention. What do we need to be saved from? speaking for myself I can see the same violence, ego and destruction in my own mind that I see out in the world causing misery.

I got the book too and am about half way through, I agree with what you say about the title, if it wasn't for what people said on here I don't think I would ever have even considered it, but it is a pity that it has been presented this way because it has some great information for working with energetic boundaries. There are many people I know who could really benefit from the information in this book especially those who are oversensitive or have inappropriate boundaries around people who take on other peoples feelings as their own. I'll have to wait and see if the exercises make a difference long term but it feels like an important area to work with.

This is an area I am trying to make sense of because as far as I can see Taoism is almost entirely body based while Buddhism stresses working with mind or thought training as well so this difference is quite an important distinction if you want to choose the right way to progress. John Blofeld says in one of his books that in his extensive travels around China the majority of people he met who were considered enlightened were Buddhists and only a few Taoist which suggests that working with mind training may be important, while Taoists appear to have a better grasp on health promotion and strengthening practises. So for me at the moment a combination of the two approaches seems right to me.

Just about every lineage I read about these days supposedly comes from some ancient teaching which survived the revolution in secret, it's hard to tell how reliable all these stories are though as I'm sure every lineage would love to have some glorious history and tale behind the teachings.

The way I am trying to work with this is to try to welcome the discomfort from being open, trying to welcome the fear and the hurt and the anger. I think it is the fear and the trying to avoid these states which makes you weak as you spend a huge amount of energy worrying about them and trying to avoid them, but when you embrace them and welcome them then all that energy is freed up and there is no strong fear. I'm yet to really master this but it is an attempt at reversing my attitude to life. But what I have also learned is that you need to feel you have the ability to assert your boundaries if you are going to open up, as when you are open other people will be able to hurt you whenever they like, so you have to be prepared to really feel that hurt but you will also have to feel like you have the power to push them away and say no to them when they do so without too much guilt. So in essence I think you need a confidence or trust in your anger or yang to serve you to assert yourself, but in a calm and forceful way rather than an explosive violent way. I spent a long time of my life being quite open without feeling like I had the ability to say no and push people away when they hurt me without huge amounts of guilt, which ended up building a huge amount of resentment and many problems.

I'm pretty sure I would get banned if I just posted V every time, I don't see the difference of doing a post and then deleting it five minutes later, it's just another form of trolling. There is nothing mystical about doing that, it is just annoying to see it in threads you are interested in.

Yes I think that is where the real growth comes from, when you see most the things you hated and despised out in the world are actually in you. This thread needs more of this sort of approach if you ask me, so many posts are about other people or a whole sex being manipulative or egotistical etc etc whereas you only get a very strong emotional reaction to these things when you haven't deal with these issues within yourself, as when you see you are just like them you start to have a bit more compassion.

It is an interesting point though in that we all have our masks and our defences and yet they are so easily seen through by other people and they barely even work when you are confronted by someone sensitive, yet we do all sorts of things to try to keep these barriers up. But what I have discovered is that is is easy to see through other peoples barriers but seeing through your own is far more difficult, it's easy to see it in other people but can you see it in yourself?

Everyone has defences and nobody wants other people to see beyond those defences as it is terrifying to be completely open and bare, so that sort of confrontation would obviously be perceived as intrusive and inappropriate by a new person, probably aggressive too, it's the same for men and women.

It's funny how this post has had no replies while all the ones about enlarging your penis etc have about five pages so quickly From my own experience the strongest love I have experienced is still probably from my parents, but it does feel conditional a lot of the time in that when I don't meet their expectations with something it seems to dry up, much of that may be my interpretation but I can't help but feel that it is not a complete love as it doesn't feel free, often it feels suffocating and repressive. A different less regular experience of love I experienced was when I met the Dalai Lama in that I could feel the compassion from him immediately but what made it different is that it came with absolutely no conditions or projections, whereas with most other people there is often some sort of subtle agenda going on often unconscious where if they give you their love they expect something in return. Whereas with the Dalai Lama it was clear he wanted and expected absolutely nothing from me, so I was utterly free in the experience, so it was a love with no conditions which is a liberating experience. In terms of how it's helped me in my meditations it has shown me that when you empty there is a free detached love underneath which is transformative to other people without you contriving it to do anything, which is more a motivating factor to practice than anything else as I am not at the stage where I can radiate it yet.

On the body level it is hard to distinguish between a game and real life when you are totally absorbed, I played a mmo for about a year and got pretty addicted and there were times when I was "fighting for my life" that I would get real adrenaline rushes and get rage when I was defeated. But I agree with the above posters the developers actually purposely hook you in, the developers of Warcraft have perfected the techniques and all the other mmo makers have learned from them. But it's not all bad, when you are part of a guild you do get to meet and socialise with a lot of different people from different countries and I think the social aspect of the game is the thing which keeps a lot of these games going. For some people it is some of the main socialising they get, for example one person I played with was a full time carer for his mother so he couldn't go out much so the game provided a good outlet for social interaction.

Within Buddhism they say the fastest way to enlightenment is through becoming a bodhisattva, and any religion can put you on that path so whatever does that for you is the best, all the distinctions of non duality and god are of less importance than becoming a bodhisattva because that path will lead to the truth about all that anyway.

Great post, I have been trying to learn how to deal with my inner parent or critic for a long time, at times it feels more like an extreme dictator than a part of me which is looking out for my best interests.

I thought I had PTSD for a while and did a lot of research into the area, it is a horrifying state to be in so you have my sympathy for living with it so long manitou. I'm guessing you have looked into all the treatments as I did, there is some evidence that EMDR therapy can cure some cases but I always thought that some form of Qigong could help with it as it appears to be caused by an unresolved charge of energy in the nervous system so I thought a decent Qigong would be able to flush it away or relax your nervous system enough for you to process it, but finding the appropriate method seems difficult. When searching I found a Malaysian healer called Yap Soon Yeong who teaches a form called CFQ Qigong which they used to treat people with shock and trauma after the Tsunami in 2004 and he appears to have some success treating traumas with his system, although it didn't fully work for me which was when I realised I don't have PTSD in any normal sense. S F Jane also cleared PTSD symptoms from her body using BK Frantzis methods of healing, so some of these Qigong healing methods may work in some cases. It would be interesting to see what BK Frantzis says about this subject.

So how do you deal with fear? People here seem to be suggesting that to deal with fear you need to rely on logic and only pay attention to your logical mind, but isn't that just repression?

I'd be careful about the source of beef you eat, some countries have far laxer laws about the pumping of beef with hormones, I'm not sure if the law has changed recently but when I read the book "Fast food nation" about ten years ago they were talking about how it's common in the USA to artificially add a load of hormones to their cattle which then appears up in most fast food. It can't be natural or healthy if you ask me.

Not sure if the music is enlightened but the video is about enlightenment I think. One of the most powerful music videos I have ever seen

I often wonder if the quest for immortality is all about an unwillingness to face up to your own death which is the root of fear, so it is an attempt to deny reality and avoid fear rather than face up to it. But then they say there is a sort of paradox that when you do embrace your own death and fully accept it you realise you are immortal.

In the book "Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson" Gurdjieff talks a little bit about retention and says that what he encountered in communities where they practice retention but have lost the esoteric knowledge how to transform the energy like Christian Trappist monestaries that the energy can have an involutionary influence on a person, so what he commonly witnessed was that the monks would either get fat and chubby like a pig, or lean build with a mean cruel psyche.

No for me at the time it was too much, if you have some sort of contraction or defence you don't want to let go of then that sort of powerful method will just twist you up. So I see why it was kept secret. Although I plan to take it up again once I work through a few things.