Jetsun

I think our greatest existential fear is the truth, that we don't really exist, at least not in the way our minds assume we do, and our minds will do anything to deny this.

Basically the forum is screwed, constant errors means that it's not worth visiting or posting much any more. RIP thedaobums.

Basically the forum is screwed, constant errors means that it's not worth visiting or posting much any more. RIP thedaobums.

Do you think our friend pie is attacking the site? I wouldn't put it past him to be honest

Laptop seems to work ok, problem seems to be on mobile, I guess the forum might be old tech so isn't very mobile compatible

Almost every other day these days I get errors when trying to view the forum and posts, it is so frequent now that it isn't really worth visiting the site much any more (which may be a good thing for a few of us, who knows) , but I can't see the forum being able to maintain a longstanding healthy community if it persists. Not blaming anyone or anything, just stating my view on the way I see it here now.

I don't really know, there are a few videos on YouTube about it, the Nazis were heavily into the Occult and were probably seeking some kind of spiritual power, the British had also been so might be concerned what they were up to.

When I lived in Manchester they were openly giving out Jihad leaflets and pamphlets on the streets. Probably not any more as it's illegal, but I'm not sure being wealthy or class has anything to do with it as some of the London bombers from Leeds were relatively wealthy and successful and the attempted terrorism in Glasgow was done by trained doctors. It's known that some Muslim NHS doctors from the UK have gone off to Syria. At least in the UK the terrorists don't fit the stereotype of being poor, badly educated and excluded, infact many were the complete opposite.

When the Nazis sent an expedition to Tibet one of the artifacts they captured and brought back for Hitler was a Buddha statue made out of meteorite http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19735959 Maybe there is something special in the metal

Well done in opening up your heart, most people seem to go the opposite way over time. But in your situation it could be that because you were shut down for a long time now being very open and facing a lot of feelings is a natural part of the process which will even out naturally over time. But if it continues to be an issue one antidote I have heard Adyashanti describe is that energetically you may be open in front of yourself especially in the upper heart areas, but energetically you aren't as open behind and below, so what is happening is all this stuff is entering into you but instead of passing through you and moving out it is getting stuck. So working through lower chakra issues and opening up down there will allow issues of the world to enter, be acknowledged and then released without a trace.

Zen like all traditions goes through periods of stagnation, where very few students are getting anywhere of note and people just repeat teachings mechanically, but then a new master emerges and rejuvinates a lineage by emphasising different aspects of the teaching or doing things in a new ways. That has happened repeatedly through the history of Zen. So in my opinion to find the heart and vital aspect of Zen you need to find a living lineage, one which has a history of realised beings behind it but has been injected with new life force. So whether Zen is alive or not is probably going to vary from lineage to lineage and institution to institution.

I went to one of their art shows once, they treat their leader like a mixture of Christ and Buddha and depict him as such in their art, I found it quite strange

The Carlos Casteneda books made a big impression on me. Also "Meetings with remarkable men" by Gurdjieff.

I can cause a problem if your partner isn't interested in this stuff, at least for the basic reason that for most people only have a certain amount of days off work each year and if you are spending a lot of that going on retreats and spending a lot of your time and money on spiritual pursuits then if your partner isn't into it then you are going to be spending a lot of time apart doing different things. If my partner expected me to spend all my holiday time taking her away on a sunny holiday by the beach then it simply wouldn't work.The way I did it is I kept encouraging my girlfriend to come to some of the events just to see what they are like and in the end they get drawn in.

Well if foreigners run infrastructure such as energy and transport then it clearly is relevant, as it is an erosion of the power of the government to influence key areas of the country they are meant to be governing.

In terms of sovereignty the issue isn't as clear in the modern day, what I see now is the current government basically asset stripping the countries resources, mostly to foreign investors, so infrastructure, post office, energy, trains, land registry, vast swathes of land, and increasingly the health service all being sold off to people who have very little interest in the wellbeing of the country. So it is these investors and corporations who are increasingly gaining power year on year, which is down to our current government policy more than anything the EU is doing to curtail sovereignty. Whether getting out of the EU is going to make any difference to this rise in the power of corporations to control us I don't know, some say it helps curb it, others say that the EU is so dominated by corporate lobbyists that it is just an extension of that power. That is the issue which concerns me the most.

Yeah, the thing is that our being is already being and our awareness is already being aware, so there is nothing we can do except bring our conscious awareness to what is already going on. Which is often when the mind kicks in trying to convince us that we should be doing something or that it should be more complicated.

In the Guardian newspaper today they started an article on the vote by saying that Germany wants Britain to stay because they are often closely allied on a lot of key issues, then later on in the same article say that the French want us to stay as a counter weight to German influence, you can't have it both ways!

I got my voting card today, still don't know which way I will vote, just about every person who talks or writes about it in the press gets so hysterical and dramatic that it's almost impossible to get any decent reliable information about it. It's basically like the Russian tactic of disinformation where you flood all media with so much noise and contradiction that nobody knows what's going on or who is reliable.

It's debatable whether Bodhidharma even existed at all, so I wouldn't call it wise to stake your whole spiritual understanding on what he may or may not have said and done. There are plenty of incredible texts written by Zen masters over the years who explain what they realised and how they did it. The fact that they ignore phenomena and siddhis and other distractions is one of the elements of the Zen path which maintained its purity and allowed it to keep on living and keep on producing realised beings , (with periodic rejuvenation), through the centuries.

They don't repress any energetic aspect their policy is just to let energy work it's way out naturally over time, which there are advantages and disadvantages of doing. It could mean you have energetic issues over many years but then there is no risk of screwing yourself up with incorrect practice. Also there is heart, it can be hard to locate it though as the tradition is often heavily mixed up with repressed aspects of Japanese culture.

Rainbow body is a phenomena unique to Dzogchen as a result of specific practises they teach, so it is no surprise that no Zen masters ever exhibited that phenomena. The misunderstanding I think is in believing that Rainbow body or its equivalent are all that matter and are the only signs of enlightenment.

I see no evidence he did similar practises to you of "merging with divine beings", that looks like conformational bias to me. He talks about his own body being Christ's body yes, but that statement is synonymous of him losing an individual separate identity with his body, not through actively merging with an individuated being named Christ but when his own sense of individuality is renounced then whose body is it? except one part united with the whole in union with Christ, in union with God. So it is an embodied understanding of Christ's words at the last supper when he said that the bread was his body.

I wasn't there so I don't know what Moses saw or didn't see. To be honest I don't think it matters in the slightest if things are inconsistent or if Jesus was real or not, to focus on that misses the point as that doesn't negate the power of the mythology one bit. The power is in how to use and read mythology in an archetypal way, (how mythology was originally intended to be used), what it brings to light within yourself and your own experience when applied to your inner life.

I think Moses always came from a perspective of there being a duality between man and God, whereas Jesus came and said that there is a unity, so Moses teaching is a kind of preliminary still in duality. Mohammed I don't know as much about but in these texts there are different levels all working simultaneously, for example the Bible can be read literally or mystically, both can be true at the same time, similarly with the Koran there were obviously a lot of Sufi Mystics who found union with God through that religion. Jihad for example can mean the war with your own negative tendencies, unfortunately though the vast majority of people in the world now read it literally. You don't need anything new age to make comparison of Christianity to Buddhism though, just read the medieval Christian Mystics.