Jetsun

I have had similar thoughts about being more passive or yin as a man makes you inferior, I thought this was reflected in the animal kingdom in that the dominant males got all the females which is true for some species, but then I studied some of the apes genetically closest to man and it's not so clear cut. In some species the less dominant males would actually get more sex as they were more playful and while the dominant males would go off and fight and tire themselves out the less dominant ones would have their way with the females. Also with the Bonobo apes the females were actually the dominant ones and would choose their sex partners often on the basis of compassion and affection ahead of dominance, while the dominant ones would often be killed by rivals. Where humans lie in all this I'm not sure.

In the Fourth way teachings they focus a lot on training your will, they say that many people begin with the aim to get enlightened yet they can't even perform small tasks with any sort of will so you first need to develop it by doing small things with consciousness and building up from there. The basic idea in those teachings is that the average man has so many intentions and wills all competing and flowing in opposite directions that he barely has any will at all to do anything or to achieve any small aim let alone get enlightened, so first of all he needs to realise the state he is in and then get his energy flowing in the direction which helps or at least doesn't hinder the aim he has set for himself. It all starts with setting very small aims for yourself and using what will you have to try to achieve them, then building from there.

I have been trying to understand the Buddhist view of after death but things don't seem to properly make sense to me. If we are never born and all that we are is a result of continual causes and conditions then there is no death as such or we are continually being born and dying each moment, but then what is is that is reincarnated? I have heard people say it is your karma which is reincarnated but what is it that keeps your karma together to take form in a newly born body rather than being scattered for instance in a different number of bodies if there is no soul or self?

I think that the fact that we don't really know what is going to happen gives us an urgency or motivation in our life to make the most of our time and fulfil our potential while we can

I read the Tao te Ching a few years ago and thought I understood some of it and did question whether the translation meant that everything was conveyed as intended, but then I read it again recently after practising some Taoist Water Method meditation and Qigong methods which focus on letting go and I realised I understood almost nothing before and so many more passages came alive through what I had learned through practice. Then I thought that maybe with ten years more practice I will realise that I really understand nothing now and then if your understanding of it comes only through personal practice rather than from the words themselves then there is almost no point in the words, except to admire them as art or as a motivation. I could be a fool though, maybe studying the words themselves are a form of practice which I am yet to realise or maybe they subconsciously assist your meditation practice. I guess I will just keep studying.

Any emotional trauma can block up your channels, whether it's an extreme event like witnessing a natural disaster or being dumped by your girlfriend it can cause you to contract your energy at any time in your life.

Then the question is how to not do, I think I have only met a couple of people who are really good at doing nothing

Taoism to me is just the natural way of things so she probably does respect it already, or if she doesn't she will suffer as a result which will teach her to as a natural process.

I went to see a lot of healers over a period of time and by far the most impressive energy healer I have found is a Malaysian called Yap Soon Yeung who has developed his own system of self care called Cosmic Freedom Qigong or CFQ as it's more commonly known.

In the Toltec you purify the Tonal through Recapitulation, while you work on the Nagual through dream work I think until both sides are ready to merge, how you then merge i'm not sure, I have only heard of analogies like jumping into the abyss

I just didn't see what weights had to do with anything, the difference between Qigong and weights is huge as Qigong works all sorts of areas like improving your sensitivity to your body, healing and working your emotions, whereas weights appears to be more on the vanity side of exercise, which is fine but I don't see the connection to spiritual development. I remember he said something about weights improving your ability to sit for long lengths of time in meditation but in my experience things like Yoga and Pilates are far superior for this as they work your core in a more balanced natural way. A Qigong healing book I once read said that a lot of people who did weights were just damaging and unbalancing their bodies through unnatural restrictive exercises and when they got into Qigong they had to spend years healing their previous strains.

My thinking was that the main issue of the ego is control of our reality and it's main internal agent is repression, and it appears to me the only way to maintain repression is to keep permanent tensions in the body stopping the information which contradicts the ego's wish for reality which is stored in our body coming into consciousness. Without tensions in the body maybe all that we are would come into our consciousness as what would stop it?

One way to decide whether there is real knowledge in the books is to try out some of the techniques. The Recapitulation is a main method talked about especially in Taishar Abelar's book which is quite easy to learn, but if you are seriously interested you can get a class here http://www.shamanscave.com/ which goes into the technique into a much deeper level than you find in Castandeda books, with teachings about how to recpitulate body parts, recapitulate rooms and places, your energy body, your senses etc and even how to recpaitulate bones even of dead people

I think ego also exists physically as muscular contraction of the body and tension and releasing those tensions is another way to discover it's groundlessness

When I first got into spiritual self development I saw Wilber was offering a revolutionary, integral system of self development which combines the best of modern science with the best of ancient knowledge which you can buy in a neat package for a few hundred $. I got all excited as I thought this was exactly what I was looking for and the hefty price would be worth it for something so revolutionary, but when I examined the detail of the method it was basically saying you have to combine weight training with Buddhist meditation and that's it, that's his system which he charges a lot of money for, pump iron and meditate, thankfully I downloaded it all from bittorrent for free so I got out of it exactly what I payed for

The Dalai Lama sits for 3-4 hours every morning in meditation and has 3 month retreats some years, it's quite scary he says this isn't enough, I doubt I will ever be able to meditate for half that length of time, although I suspect he is just being humble when he says he has special mind worth looking at.

Perhaps Focusing appears like popular new age psychology but I think it tackles working with emotional states quite well. Often the issue with troublesome emotional issues is that you get completely identified with them so you say "I am anxious" or "I am depressed" so the whole of your identity and all the energy that entails is taken up by it. So to counter that some people try to use mindfulness or witnessing of states so you can look at it and say it's not me, but it is common for people to try use this as a form of dissociation so they get nowhere. Focusing uses the middle ground in that you expand your awareness to say that it exists but it is not all of you, so you are not completely identified with it but also not dissociating from it. The language you use is very important to set the emotional tone to allow compassion to come in.

Yes this is the approach I have had to learn the hard way, by changing your way of looking at things by saying "something inside of me is scared" or angry it widens your identity so what you are dealing with is less overwhelming which allows space for more compassion. When it comes to Buddhism I think there is sometimes a misunderstanding around the word ego as the western mind has been influenced to view it in a different way than what is intended in Buddhist texts, my favourite master Gurdjieff realised the complication this would cause and instead completely made up his own word for it to avoid old associations interfering with understanding. But I think it is a wrong view to say Buddhism is completely against ego as such, I have heard the Dalai Lama talk about "good ego" on a few occasions.

Thanks to the op for posting the vid, western spirituality is an area I am very intreseted in and I think it is important to resurrect it as there is much in Eastern spirituality but much of it is prepared in a way to suit the psyche of the people of the country the teaching originates in and is perhaps not so much suited to the level of many in the west. I have heard that what is needed is an approach which is an amalgamation of the energy of the west with the wisdom of the east to create a more appropriate teaching for our time, which is something I agree with. From my reading it appears traditional western mystics appear to stress hard work, activity and worldliness more than the eastern mystics, perhaps this is the natural way in the west was more yang and the east more yin and what is needed is a balancing of the two.

Bridges is big into Buddhism in real life, he says he's no expert but when pressed he seems to know a lot about Tibetan Lojong mind training, perhaps he's more accomplished than he's letting on Was it the original Tron you went to see or the sequel ?

Thanks for posting this Strawdog it's a really interesting exchange This is certainly my experience in life that by strengthening the superego through harsh morality you actually create what you are trying to avoid. What I have learned is that the only power that the superego has is repression and if all your hard work, discipline and morality serves is to strengthen the repression of the Id then you are on the fast road to suffering and blindness because all repression does is put things in darkness it never actually gets rid of things, it simply makes you unconscious of them and subsequently they come out in far more destructive and perverse ways than they should have, thus creating the monster you were trying to avoid. I'm not sure I agree with you there, I don't think the Taoist is advocating anarchy he is saying he has faith in the natural goodness of people if they are allowed to develop and live naturally so there is no need for harsh morality, rather the morality comes as advice in that you are free to do whatever you like but if you do things like kill and steal you are more likely to suffer therefore it is wise for you not to do so. I think you have to take into context who the Taoist is talking to as im sure he wouldn't say disciple and hard work is bad if the motivation behind it is becoming more in line with the Tao, but if your motivation behind your disciplined morality is because you feel that you "should" do it or that you have to out of a sense of guilt then it is no good for you and will bring you more out of line of the Tao, which will infact in the end make you less moral.

Maybe the legion in the bible is actually a metaphor for mans internal state, the "evil" legion serves is the power of identification which keeps man in the dark about who he is, Jesus brings light to the mans consciousness which unifies his "I's" and fuses his consciousness

I saw a documentary about this, they did interviews with the teachers and went along to workshops looking for proof by asking the teachers to identify what was in a closed box and other tests, they failed them all and became quite angry and tried to stop the filming. Seemed like a complete scam which takes advantage of a lot of vulnerable people, many of the people at the workshops were disabled and some said they were made to feel guilty or blamed when they couldn't master the techniques.

Yeah as people have mentioned grounding is very important, I remember reading in I think it was the 'Spiritual Emergency' book by Stanislav Grof that during a meditation retreat one of the members started having distressing experiences so they halted all his meditation immediately and started him on a programme of physical work, walking and running in order to ground his energy before he returned to meditation. Other grounding things which help are walking barefoot on the earth and eating root vegetables like carrots, potatoes, yams etc