Jetsun

I am sure the more experienced practitioners will give advice but I think that sort of meditation is safe as long as all the noting is done softly without aggression. Do you ever use the breath or have any other sort of anchor? perhaps it could help so any strong forces or fears are brought back into context of the present moment more easily, from my own experience without an anchor I can get pulled away and overwhelmed/over-identified by some of the stronger forces in my mind which makes the practice destructive.

What sort of meditation are you doing?

I haven't tried it. There is most probably no harm in experimenting with those sorts of things it's just if you turn it into a practice which lasts months which could potentially cause problems in my opinion. Even if some method you create yourself gets good results in the beginning there is nothing to say in the long term there won't be negative consequences. In most of the healing qigong I have looked at there has been an emphasis on a downward flushing of energy towards the earth, while a focus on the head would most probably exacerbate many existing blockages and make you less grounded as most people in our age are already too much up in their head. Bruce Frantzis warns that working with your brain is a very advanced practice only to be done after many years of clearing and under the guidance of an experienced master. I guess as a genuine seeker you shouldn't swallow everything a master says and experiment and find things out for yourself, but also it's worth taking into account the warnings of those people who have already mapped the way and may have made mistakes and suffered so you don't have to suffer in the same way.

I always interpreted the term hungry Ghost as a reference to a human state, for example those sorts of people who are never satisfied and keep needing more and more of everything. I never thought it was meant literally.

From the perspective of most of the healing Qigong methods I have studied I think pulsing in the brain would more likely drive you insane than get you enlightened. Evidence is hard to get because it is very difficult to pin point exactly the cause of any problem but I have read many accounts of incorrect Qigong causing peoples hair to fall out as well as many bad psychological symptoms. Why try to create your own when masters spent hundreds of years working out the best methods?

There was a lot of fuss for a long time about how they could move such large blocks of stone around to make the pyramids without advanced cranes, then someone pointed out that if you get a load of mud and water and make a mud slide you can push those heavy blocks of stone quite easily even up a ramp. The perplexing thing though is how they moved the size of stone which they made the Sphynx out of because even today's industrial cranes would have trouble lifting a block that heavy.

I think those sorts of extreme practises also are distortions of legitimate practices, for example fasting can be used to break the attachment people have to food as food is tied up to all sorts of powerful emotions and survival anxieties dating back to when you were a child and you were dependent on your mother. Food is also often used as a method of control by your parents and is often deeply tied into some very powerful conditionings, so fasting if done in the right way can be a way of making these things conscious and let go of, that's if you approach it with the right method and intent. Most of this knowledge has been completely lost from Christianity unfortunately and people just do the practises without any sort of consciousness.

I think it may be an issue about level of practice, in my experience anyway Taoist methods like the Water Method generally aim first of all to bring a person to balance before they move onto the higher spiritual goals, so they start out with you realising the emptiness of small things like the emptiness of the energy pattern which is putting you in a bad mood or the emptiness of the pain in your back, which liberates your energy and improves your health and gives you a stable grounding to work from. Once you experience the emptiness of small things you can then work on realising the emptiness of big things without being sabotaged by things you haven't dealt with in your foundations. Whereas many Buddhist practices jump straight into trying to realise the emptiness of the big one, the ego, which may be the right approach for naturally balanced, simple, healthy people, unfortunately I don't see many of those around in our modern society.

The issue with intent is something I was struggling with when doing the Water Method for some time as it did appear the intent to dissolve something could come from a ego desire, but before you declare so many conclusions without any personal experience I would recommend trying it as it is different from Shamatha and in my opinion it brings you to a relative state of emptiness very quickly even though it begins with an intent. You dissolve with your attention but the differerence is that the focus is a systematic scanning of blockages rather than just observing what arises. There are merits to both methods, my observation is the systematic method forces you to confront patterns and blockages you could be subconsciously trying to avoid when in the pure witnessing method and is more likely to help you confront shadow mind material, because by systematically going through your body it leaves no place for anywhere to hide or any place not integrated. The focus is on letting go rather than compassion but the compassion naturally arises when you reduce the tensions which restrict your heart. I don't think dissolving is about trying to get rid of anything from an ego controlling motive rather it is to direct your mind to discover the inherent emptiness of the things you dissolve

Yes I'm pretty sure all our societies will collapse and our achievements will be lost just like every other advanced society that has ever existed. It seems to be the nature of things that there is involution as well as evolution. It makes you wonder what's the point of it all.

My view on power has changed a lot, I think it is very important that people realise their own personal power and liberate their energy so that they have the strength to break their conditioning and raise their level of being, you think about all the forces social and planetary which try to keep you asleep you will need enormous power to break free from that, so there is a healthy approach to gaining power. But also the destructive side of wishing to gain power which I think is far more common even with a lot of spiritual practitioners is that people seek it in order to avoid being made to feel powerless, which is infact a rejection of reality and a cause of far more suffering. So I guess it's all about motivation.

If that is what you are made to feel then rejecting that only causes you more suffering. I don't mean that you should walk around letting anyone do what they want to you, you should do what you can to avoid those things, but if someone puts a gun in your face you are powerless, or you get some terrible disease you are powerless, or when you get old and senile you may be powerless, the issue then is what to do with those feelings. If you haven't ever been able to make peace with being made to feel that way and spent your whole life dedicated to never being made to feel that way ever again(like many people who have suffered unjust abuse or bad childhoods do) then you will suffer terribly when it happens to you. In the face of death you may be just as powerless as when you were born and all those powers you spent your life trying to master wont help you... and you could die today

I expect people seek power in order to run away from feeling weak, helpless and well powerless. But I suspect you gain far more power by accepting or rather not trying to run away from those sorts of feelings, so you gain more power by embracing powerlessness, because then you have nothing to fear or waste energy fighting against.

Yeah I own some of Wilber's books which helped me a lot at one point and have read his magazine a few times, he talks about some interesting very important things especially around the issue of meditation not dealing with psychological shadow issues, but in the end I just got sick of his ego getting in the way of all the good stuff. If you dig around a bit you will find Wilber talks about his own greatness and the importance of his work far louder than anyone else does, but why the need for self inflation? he even released some pictures of himself with his top off it is good to have high self esteem and all that but id just be concerned that an over inflated ego can blind you in many ways and personally it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I have heard many rumours about the lost years of Jesus, there is a legend that he came to England and studied with the Druids at Glastonbury Tor, most of the information about the Druids has been lost but when Julius Ceasar came to England he remarked that the Druids had a complete understanding of nature and the seasons and the stars far above anything the Romans had so there is reason to believe they were men of real knowledge. Also I have heard that at that time Buddhism had spread as far as Afghanistan and much of the literature and ideas would have spread down the trade routes so he wouldn't have even had to travel as far as India to be exposed to eastern Mysticism. What is clear though is that many traditions like to claim Jesus as their own, there is barely a religious group in the workd which doesn't suggest some sort of connection with Jesus in some way or another.

Ken Wilber does say some really interesting things about where psychology and spirituality fit in but when you examine his spiritual philosophy closely he believes in some form of evolution in enlightenment, but the only other people who seem to go along with this view is Andrew Cohen and a guru they initially endorsed as evidence of this Ali Da (or Da Free John or whatever he named himself). Ali Da was known to say that he had reached a higher level than Jesus Christ and other masters like the Buddha while Ken and Andrew seemed to go along with it and agree with him for a while in a nice circle jerk, until a lot of abuse by Ali Da came out in the press as he set himself up as a self proclaimed god in a paranoid isolated ashram, so they tried to distance themselves from him a bit, but they seem to have kept this belief that the masters in the future will be more enlightened than the ones in the past despite the Guru they endorsed turning out to be a "fuck up" (Wilbers words)

I think what Gurdjieff essentially teaches is the same thing as the Buddha, I think some of his criticisms of Buddhism were stated with the direct purpose to get you to question deeply and sincerely everything and not to become fixed or rest on anything or dogmatic about any position. But it is natural for Buddhism to have become corrupted just like everything else, the example Gurdjieff gives is that he found monasteries where people were locked up in small cells alone for almost their entire lives to meditate and to him this felt completely unnatural and against human nature as well as against the original teachings of "saint Buddha" as he calls him.

He was a seeker who penetrated into many hidden esoteric teachings and documents and he talks about how men of real knowledge knew their teachings would be corrupted so they create what is called a legominism which is a piece of work or art with a lawful inexactitude contained within it which indicates the hidden important teaching within something so real seekers will have the possibility of finding the real meaning behind it. Also there are some methods which I have heard of like accessing ancient thought streams, contacting dead masters and accessing previous lives to give you information, but I have no experience of this myself. I guess you can't ever know for sure if what Gurdjieff says about Christianity is true but if you apply fourth way teachings and understanding to reading the Bible it opens a whole new world which feels more real and genuine than most traditional interpretations.

If you read Gurdjieff he says that the original Christianity was one of the best paths to enlightenment that ever existed on the planet and he studied Buddhism in Tibet for some time too. Unfortunately most of what's left are scraps or distortions, for example each child was given a guru to tutor them spiritually which is where the term "God father" comes from, which is now lost from the tradition. Also the purpose of saying grace before meals was to serve as a reminder to eat with self awareness so that you consciously assimilate your food which naturally develops an attitude of gratitude. Unfortunately most of the actual methods to develop have been lost.

Has anyone ever actually met a Taoist who lived to abnormal old age?

I don't think it will ever cease with Wilber, who on earth calls themselves an 'intellectual samurai'? and if you read his website it's hard to read an article without suffering him talking up his own brilliance

I do agree with you that on the surface goal oriented practice can just lead to more stress and less peace but on the other hand it is possible that a goal oriented practice can lead to that peaceful state as a natural consequence. For example with the Water Method you start the practice with specific intent so immeditely there is less peace than just witnessing becase you are actively trying to make things happen, but then when you find a blockage and internally dissolve it you can end up at a state of relative emptiness very quickly with no inent or stress. For example in my own limited practice I started sensing around my head and quickly found the energy of anger which increased my stress, but then I started inner dissolving it by observing the energy below the anger, then the energy below that then the energy below that until I got to a stage which is completely empty of any cause and there is peace and in that instant that whole energy structure and block with anger at its surface collapses or implodes as it's root is found to be empty and that part of your nervous system immediately relaxes while you experience a few moments of peace. So in a way even though it begins with intent it ends up at the same place of no intent and no identification as other more natural meditation do.

With the Water Method there is a systematic downward scanning which creates the downward flow towards the earth, while correct me if I'm wrong but I thought in Buddhist methods it's more of a case of dealing with what comes up. As well as having an intention to dissolve this is a big difference in practice in my opinion.

I think working towards enlightenment will only ever be the occupation of the minority because it's all about suffering and the majority of people will do whatever they can to avoid that. I would like things to get better and perhaps I'm over pessimistic but I expect most people will always choose the blue pill over the red.

I credit Tony Soprano for making it more attractive to men