Jetsun

My view is that there is often a danger in taking a teaching or method from another time or culture and trying to apply it to your current situation as each era and culture has it's own unique blocks and hangups. This is where I agree with Osho in that he saw that most of his western students were hung up and neurotic about sex and anger so trying to normalise that was the first necassary step before they get into silent sitting and older methods. Many of the old meditation methods were created at a time when the majority of people were rural farm workers so they were far more in touch with their bodies and grounded to the earth, they had a lower centre of gravity, whereas now in the intellectual computer age we are far more up in our heads so we need techniques and teachings for our own time to bring us down again and thousand year old teachings may not be as useful in the beginning anyway. This is where some Taoist methods perhaps are relevant because as Bruce Frantzis said in one of his books there are some comparisons between Imperial China and some modern western cultures like where I live in the UK in that both are very emotionally repressed so the techniques to make you more open and spontaneous developed then could be just what many of us need right now.

What I always thought was strange was that I didn't think the first two books were that good, the first being more about drugs and not all that interesting so I couldn't understand all the fuss, but then I read the third book "Journey to Ixtlan" and it blew me away. Perhaps it was just my perception but it seemed to be written in a completely different way than the earlier ones.

I agree it's all connected but different techniques have different intentions, for example something like Vipasanna meditations could lead to some spontaneous healings and insights but you wouldn't recommend it to someone with severe trauma like post traumatic stress. Yeah that's what I have been looking for

Hmmm Ya Mu seemed to suggest to me that it wont heal me from depressions and traumas. I have read the book and seen the dvd and the method appears to me to be more of a spiritual development tool than a fundamental healing one.

Personally I never got the impression that Castaneda presented himself as an impeccable flawless teacher, for a start there is the issue of being the three pronged Nagual which meant he was energetically different or strange and it was never clear what the implications of that were, also there are times when he describes terrifying the "witches" with his rage and instability. So I see no problem with separating the big intent of the work with the life and personality of Castaneda.

53 days is a pretty good achievement if you ask me, perhaps I am just cynical but I expect most people to fail with this sort of thing and loose their dedication after a week or two, so keep going Lojong is a form of Tibetan Buddhist mind training which begins with breathing in other peoples suffering with the in breath then letting go of all suffering with the out breath, this is about as far as I have got but there is a lot contained in that one exercise I think. But right now it is more of an academic study for me as the Dalai Lama's translator and some other Tibetan scholars have started to release some amazing books on the subject which amalgamates a lot of the most important Tibetan texts into one reliable place, the issue is that they are each about 1000 pages so they are a long read, but so far I have found them much easier to read than the more primary Buddhist texts. I will perhaps give your just sitting meditation a go, will report back if anything happens, thanks.

Unfortunately I didn't stick with one practice during this time and experimented with Water Method, Standing, Stillness Movement and Kunlun Nei Gung. But right now I have given them all up as I am not sure I am in the right state to benefit from them. I will continue my reading of Gurdjieff and Buddhist Lojong training and pray for some sort of miracle.

I get confused with all this going with the flow business, there are periods in history when the entire planet goes crazy and starts killing each other so to go with the flow is to participate, for example going with the flow in 1930's Germany meant becoming a fully fledged Nazi, so is going along with all this in line with the Tao the path of least resistance?

The man had some controversy but many of the teachings in the books are legitimate teachings, for example the recapitulation is a very powerful tool which can bring you to awareness of things not many other techniques can. You can get taught the technique properly by a place I know of by a tradition called the "Maker" tradition, which goes to a level not spoken about in the books and from personal experience I know it works. So on the basic level the Shamanism and techniques he speaks about are not bullshit even if he is.

I live in the south of the UK. I tried Yoga but to be honest Yoga feels too aggressive and ungrounding. I have tried some Chi practises but even the ones which move the energy downward grounding don't appear to be helping all that much, they seem to heighten the energies but I don't seem to get any resolution from the resistance, although I haven't done Tai Chi. It sounds a bit sort of glamorous to call it Kundalini, I went to see a clinical psychologist who said it was an anxiety disorder with derealization. I did experience an onslaught on unconscious material which kicked it all off but unfortunately I didn't know anything about letting go or meditative approaches at that time so I resisted it out of fear unfortunately.

From my own experience what's more important is to look at what blocks the energy and stops it from discharging rather than any fireworks or great sensations. I don't know if what I experienced is Kundalini but after a frightening drug experience I had survival energies flowing in my body which I could feel trying to discharge, but the blocks in my system prevented it from flowing properly, so the real value in my opinion is that it highlights your blocks more intensely which you have to learn to let go of otherwise you live your life in an anxiety fuelled hell realm. Is there a difference between Kundalini and trauma induced survival energies? I don't know if what I experienced was Kundalini but when I went to see a Cranio Sacral Therapist she sped up my nervous system for a while and all I could feel were violent rushes of energy which would make my body jerk, but infact made me feel like a complete psychological wreck rather than any sort of good spiritual state.

I loved reading the Castaneda books, thanks for the quote.

If you have a desire for something it is pretty hard to be satisfied or happy until that desire gets met, some desires you will never get rid of like the desire for food but most of the others can supposedly be dropped, so to be happy you have to either satisfy all your desires or drop them completely.

I know there has been a lot of threads on this in the past and I have searched through many of them including one which was about sixty pages long for a proper discussion of the method, but unfortunately almost every other post in the threads has been deleted or edited for some strange reason by the people discussing it and they are full of drama and paranoia rather than any decent discussion of the actual practice, also it appears like it is now impossible to register on the official Kunlun forums so discussion there is impossible to get answers to questions. So out of curiosity I tried the technique for a while and I do have to admit it is powerful but what id like to know is are many of the people who began the practice years ago still practising it and why? How do you think it actually frees you from your patterns and cleanses you? can it unite the fragmented parts of yourself and how does it do this? From my own experience it appears to create a deep relaxation on the instinctual level and because it begins with a relaxation lower down in your body that creates a downward "water" flow, but my concerns is that so much of the change which seems to happen due to this method appears to be unconscious, what I mean is that in more normal meditation methods you consciously witness your patterns unfold and experience much of the change consciously, whereas with this method so much appears to be done without awareness, you can even listen to music while doing it. For example when I did the method for a few days I would get some strong physical reactions and some pleasant feelings but then all the psychological stuff appears to only unravel only in my sleep and in my dreams rather than consciously in my practice. After doing this method I would sleep for many more hours (sometimes making me late for work) and almost always wake up at 3-4am in the morning for a while, which suggests that there is much stirring up of psychological stuff but on a deep unconscious level. I guess what im asking is whether this is normal for things to work themselves out this way which sort of feels like a cleansing without much of your conscious awareness involved? perhaps there is a stage when your awareness connects with what is being stirred up in your subconscious? Hopefully this thread will focus more on the method rather than the fuss around the guru or criticisms talked about in other threads.

Yeah it was in Meetings With Remarkable Men, I don't remember the exact quote but he said something like you need to know every part of your machine before you try to change any of the more sensitive screws as you may produce unwanted changes to the tempo of your body through breathing methods without awareness of what you are really doing. But he also said a lot of things in his books for a reason, often to make you question everything rather than being literal so in this case I am not sure. Personally I would never do any forced breathing method without direct instruction from a master you implicitly trust to know what's good for you. But this is why Kunlun level 1 attracted me as it perhaps it works on the same instinctual level as breathing but your body does what is needed spontaneously rather than forcing anything through breathing, so you correct those screws which need fixing and leave those ones which don't, although the higher levels of Kunlun involve breath retention they are not so appealing.

Yeah im pretty sure Orb was being sarcastic but I see where he and you are coming from because I had similar thoughts when I first read all that about Kunlun, it did all seem ridiculous and absurd and I probably would never have tried it if it wasn't for some people on this site who appeared sane and highly recommended it, so I did try it and it was a pretty unique experience in that no other practice has affected the content of my sleep so much and it was in trying to understand this result why I made this post. I wont believe all the claims until I have experienced them myself but I think it is true that different methods work on different areas with different results, some perhaps are more dramatic than others. From the Fourth Way perspective Gurdjieff says that man has different centres such as the mental, emotional and instinctual, and different methods try to work on the different centres but very few have the ability to really work well on the instinctual centre and he said something like if you change the instinctual centre you change everything in a man. Breathing methods and some Qigong try to do this but many can be forced and artificial so they may not create the desired result or may create wrong result, whereas Kunlun seems to revert back to the innate intelligence of the body to do it's work rather than anything imposed so it appears natural. Jenny Lamb says in that Youtube interview something like some of the spontaneous healing Qigong moves she does in her level 1 she could never have consciously created herself or been given to her as they were the perfect expression of her bodies energy at that specific time and those expressions taught her a great deal about herself. Im not trying to say it is superior or anything as I have no experience of that, rather im just pondering about how it possibly works and where and how it is creating change. Gurdjieff also taught that no-one can get anywhere without a great deal of conscious labour and suffering so I try to keep that in mind and would never expect a super boost to liberation with bliss all the way.

Thanks for the replies they are all very helpful. What you say about Jenny Lamb is quite interesting, it is quite hard to find any of her teachings publicly available but I found this recent interview with her which I thought was pretty good she seems to emphasise awareness a lot in her teachings which feels right to me and also says things like forget about powers and third eye stuff and focus on wisdom and compassion. I dont really want to get into comparing gurus in competition as each has their legitimate style but was wondering if anyone is a student of Jenny and knows if there is any difference between the way she teaches the basic Kunlun level 1 exercise compared to Max? She doesn't have a book out does she? If Max published a new book I would be very interested in that too as I live in England so seeing a teacher is not likely right now so I have to try make the most of what information I can.

No I don't think it's Karma, people have used Karma theory in this way in many Asian countries for a long time as a form of mind control as the vast majority of the wealth in many Asian countries is controlled by a very small percentage of the population so to stop them rising up in revolutionary arms and changing the situation they told the people it was their Karma why it was like this. It's another form of mind control hypnotising the masses to keep them placid and asleep.

Did someone else apply this law to the sense of self before Gotama Buddha? I don't suppose it matters really, all that matters is whether it's true or not

Yeah I have some mental understanding of dependent origination/ emptiness bascially from reading books on the subject but unfortunately I have no real practical experience of it and I do wonder if this is possible or likely without long retreats of many months or years?. Some people say this is the way of the monk and sometimes I wonder if you really do need to become a monk for a long period of time for your practice to blossom, do you think can a part time practitioner of only an hour or so a day while living a normal life can get there with this path?

From my own experience all I can say is that if you are using Qigong to try to get away from something inside of you or escape from something like insecurity or fear it will do no good. I don't know if this is the case for you or not but it just sounded familiar

The problem I have is maintaining right view in a moment to moment basis throughout my life, I have been looking at the teachings analytically and testing their truth in some basic practice but it doesn't stop me being hypnotised by life 99% of the day and loosing right view the majority of the time, unfortunately.

I think Qigong which goes on about storing Qi is BS, surely what you want is free flowing Qi letting go of any points of stagnation so it can come and go naturally, not gathering it all and storing it in your body like its a treasure to be preserved and protected

I think almost everyone is stuck in victim mentality in a way in that we are stuck repeating patterns from the past whether we realise it or not. The issue with people who are being abused and things like that is that their repeating patterns are more destructive and problematic and also more obvious, but really they are in the same traps as everyone else just they suffer more for them. But on the flip side because those patterns are more obvious and harmful there is sometimes more desire and urgency to break free of them, whereas those people who don't suffer so much may never have the desire to try to get free of their patterns.

I had a lot of thought along these lines, my conclusion was that many of the sutras were given to specific people at a specific time for a specific purpose which is why so much of it is contradictory, so if you were to meet the Buddha now he may say things to you not said in any sutra as every situation is unique and many of the other teachings would be not much use to you. The basic truths will never change but the most suitable methods to arrive at those truths might change from age to age or place to place. This disheartened me first of all but then I met a Buddhist who clearly knew or had been able to apply the teachings to his life as he was so open hearted and clear while also being strong and brave enough to be open to the sufferings of the world without being bogged down or depressed, and when I studied what he knew it was clear that he had complete faith in other Buddhist masters as enlightened beings such as Nargarjuna, Atisha and Shantideva just as much as the Buddha, so I guess what I'm saying is that when you meet someone who radiates the teachings in their presence you gain great confidence in the teachings of the Buddha and also the other masters and the issue of how accurate the first teachings are becomes less important as you have witnessed yourself their benefit.