Jetsun

I would suggest you approach this enquiry experientially, something still exists if you strip all those things away, nobody can tell you what it is using words though

My suggestion is to stop doing Kunlun, not that Kunlun by itself is bad but it isn't the sort of practice which is likely to be beneficial when you are feeling attacked or paranoid, the exercise will open you up while your defences are trying to keep you closed to keep you safe, so it will create an inner conflict which may drain all your energy.

Apparently it might be a mistranslation, as he has talked about this subject many times before in similar ways http://www.tricycle.com/blog/end-dalai-lama?_ga=1.92078553.25840844.1410454927 But it looks like the Chinese officials believe it as they have come out with this unbelievable statement this morning: “China follows a policy of freedom of religion and belief, and this naturally includes having to respect and protect the ways of passing on Tibetan Buddhism.”

I bet the Chinese still make one of their own just in case

This site is fine. The only suggestion I would make would be for members to take responsibility for themselves and stop projecting all their parental and power issues onto the mods, this is just my general observation over time not directed at anyone in particular.

Reality is whatever is happening, so if its raining its raining, illusion is whatever we lay over the top when we start to believe the thoughts we have about what is, so we start thinking it shouldn't be raining because its summer, or its proof God hates me because he always rains on me, or my day is ruined because I got wet etc etc etc,

At Glastonbury you can really feel it as an energetic spot, its palpable there more than anywhere else I have been, the theory is that it is a cross section of powerful ley lines in the earth which are like the earths meridians which people discovered through dowsing. Its a part time hobby of mine to visit theses power spots, mostly in the UK but have been to some in Egypt and Peru. I don't feel ley lines or do dowsing myself but it makes sense that the earth has meridians like the body does, also that there are energy centers, I believe Mount Kailash is probably one, Glastonbury another and some say Lake Titicaca is one. In India Ramana Maharshi ragarded the holy mountain of Arunachala as an awake being, so one theory is that certain areas of the earth have higher concentration of awareness, one part of your garden could be more awake than another. When you start looking or rather feeling for them you can find them in unexpected places, one time I was sitting in an inner city park in London and began to feel like it was a place of power, I noticed all the trees were incredibly tall and straight and seemed to emit a sort of presence, I could just be imagining things of course but the Chinese say that straight trees indicate good flowing of Qi.

The Osho dynamic meditation is part catharsis like Primal Therapy so it is meant to be draining. It is debatable how useful such methods are though, I tried them for a while but don't do them any more.

Contriving to not apply effort is still a contrivance yes, but if you pursue this avenue with enough honesty in the end you end up at the place of "I don't know", do you know how to quiet the mind? I don't know, do you know how to get beyond thought to the natural state? I don't know, do you know what enlightenment is and how to get there? . Do you even honestly know who you are or what you are doing or why you do it? That place of "I don't know" is ripe with possibility because it is the place where something can enter beyond mind imposed limitations, so it is where Prajna can enter, and it is the place the ego is most scared of so will do all it can to get you away from and fill with knowledge. My tip is rest in that place of not knowing for extend periods of time and see what happens and what emerges.

All our brains are completely conditioned which is why our regular conditioned mind can't enlighten themselves, our ego's want to survive so I don't think it is possible for an ego to conduct activity which will lead to its own destruction, it is more likely to continually fool us and make us run around in circles for thousands of lifetimes. Yet there is that which is unconditioned and always untouched by whatever drama the ego is creating, which is always already present, but the ego does its best to avoid us from noticing it, so the monks probably are not noticing that. Pretty much all of Zen is concerned with noticing that, the Jhanas and other temporary states are not considered important and can be a distraction in that path.

It is only a belief that says that we must cultivate qualities and purify ourselves to attain enlightenment, but do we really know that it is true? The so called direct path is for anyone, it is also a belief that somehow it is only for advanced or special people, a belief which may not be true, it may just be more mind created barriers. I think what I said is very practical, anything you contrive is going to take you away from where you are at and you can only see any sort of truth from being where you are at and standing in your own shoes, rather than trying to be somewhere else or trying to stand in someone elses shoes, pretty much all of life is geared at trying to be somewhere else than where you are so I don't think it helps for spiritual practice to continue this practice.

How many hundreds of thousands of monks have tried that path and not reached enlightenment. Any method which tries to create a state is a conditioned contrivance and takes you away from where you are at, so as far as I can see it is a way to avoid enlightenment rather than gain it.

Sorry this is very long but I think it is worth it In the year 2000 the scientist Paul Ekman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman attended the Mind and Life conference with the Dalai Lama, Ekman is considered the world expert on facial expressions and a very highly respected scientist, but there was controversy as he was an extreme skeptic and saw no value in religion or Buddhism at all. Alan Wallace was very reluctant to even invite him in the first place because of the level of his skepticism and he was known to all his colleagues to have an extreme temper so was worried he would be disruptive influence, but Ekman decided to attend as his daughter Eve wanted a chance to meet the Dalai Lama. On the third day of the conference, as the scientists and observers left the cramped conference hall for a tea break, Ekman saw his chance.. Instead of joining his colleagues, Ekman steered his nervous daughter forward to the Dalai Lama, who alone among the eighty-some people in the conference, seemed not to need any breaks. ...Father and daughter sat down in the armchairs on either side of the Tibetan. "This is my daughter", Ekman said to the Dalai Lama. "And she is my spiritual leader. She is the reason I came to this meeting and i'm very grateful for that. Ekman explained that Eve had spent some time living in a Tibetan refugee camp in Nepal when she was fifteen years old, and that because of that experience she was very concerned about the welfare of exiled Tibetans. He said she wanted to ask him a personal question. The Dalai Lama beamed at Eve. He reached over and held Ekman's hand while he waited. " I want to know why we get angriest at those we are in love with" Eve said. The Dalai Lama pondered the question for a moment then told her that we tend to expect too much from the people who are close to us. We develop unrealistic expectations and project nonexistent qualities onto them. He told her a more pragmatic approach is simply to accept their flaws. This would lessen potential disappointment and reduce anger For the duration of this short exchange, the Dalai Lama inexplicably held on to Ekman's hand "I never said another word after introducing Eve, but I had two unusual experiences", Ekman shared some years later with the Dalai Lama. "One was that during the entire ten minutes I was filled with physical warmth. It was not a metaphor ; it was real warmth. I had a very strong physical sensation for which I do not have an English word - it comes closest to warmth but there was no heat. It felt very, very good, very embracing. You were only holding my hand. It was like nothing I had ever felt before or after" "The other unusual experience I had was almost a hallucination" Ekman continued "We were in the conference room and there were other people waiting for their chance to talk to you. I had this visual impression that Eve and I and you were encapsulated. Looking out into the room was like looking at the world through the wrong end of binoculars. Although people were quite close, maybe four feet away, it appeared to me as if they were hundreds of feet away" "Sometimes you actually experience that kind of vision - distant vision" the Dalai Lama replied "As a scientist, I do not know how to explain it. But that does not mean it is not susceptible to scientific explanation. I just do not know where to start." After this event the irritation and boredom that Ekman had been experiencing at having to attend the conference was gone. At the end of the conference the Dalai Lama said "Is this going to be just for nice conversation or is anything going to happen?" challenging the scientists to turn their words into actual work into how meditation etc affects the mind. Ekman said he felt that the Dalai Lama was talking to him and asking him to take up the challenge and to many people's surprise Ekman the most skeptical and resistant scientist of them all decided to begin a pilot study. That change of attitude was not the only impact of that moment though, intense bouts of anger had been a regular feature of Ekman's life up to that point, he was regularly beaten by his father when growing up and was well know to have an extreme violent temper as a consequence, but when he went to meet his wife after the conference she said she barely recognised him, that he was so mellow that he was not the man she married and didn't have one moment of anger their whole remaining time in India. He had experienced a lifetime of struggle with anger up to that point including seeing psychologists at times but none of it helped, but that moment was a turning point. Years later after the incident Ekman said "I do get angry still. But not very often. Much less often than in the previous seven decades. I still have to work on it a little. But before Dharamsala, in a typical year, i'd had a hundred angry episodes that I regretted. Now I may have five or six" The transformation was so great that he sought out the Dalai Lama at every opportunity to try to get an explanation, he finally got the Dalai Lama to say a few words on what happened: "Something mysterious happened. Okay. Is is good. But these things are not connected to science. Scientists would not have much to say about these strange things. They are my business. They are not for you scientists" All quotes from chap 4 of the book "The Wisdom of Compassion Stories of Remarkable Encounters and Timeless Insights" - Victor Chan and the Dalai Lama

Satya I think that is one of the most important questions any of us can ask in this area. As I understand it the soul still has an element of ego within it therefore it is ultimately in the end an unsatisfactory existence to have your identity limited to that container, so you may be able to do Taoist immortal practices to exist there after death for a time yet the impulse is always going to be to move beyond that limitation eventually, so why not go for the ultimate liberation right now. Also if it has an element of ego within it then ultimately it isn't true, it requires a degree of denial and resistance towards to universe to maintain it and will therefore still be subjected to extra suffering. The awakening path leads to a place of no limitation and to merge with all existence, which is a place of complete perfect freedom which is already immortal, it is the place of harmony with existence and living in truth, yet it is a non personal shared place of ultimate freedom which involves giving up all concepts of personal achievement and identity which is why people put it off and go for personal individual glory, the ego will do what it can to survive even beyond death even though its death will bring about everything we yearn for.

It seems we had the same thought at exactly the same time

Maybe put a sticky saying that this isn't Dharma Wheel Although it's got much better since a year ago, at that time if anyone posted anything which wasn't exactly in line with a select few Dharma Wheel trained posters they would get immediately attacked and shot down. So it is improving.

What I said isn't an abstract philosophical concept, it is a simple invitation to enquire into what is really true. What is really true about the nature of your identity, and the only way to pursue that enquiry is to look without assuming you already know and to not turn away when you see something which condtradics your existing conditioned beliefs.

Perhaps what you are fighting to keep alive doesn't even exist in any substantial way, that is basically what many of the spiritual traditions say, that what you think you are is based on a tangle of false thoughts and unexamined assumptions. Examine that which you are fighting for with enough honesty and willingness and you might not be so keen to keep it alive. There are parasitic worms which are know to take over the bodies of bugs like caterpillars which then somehow trick the caterpillars into defending the eggs and life of the worms even at the cost of their own lives, they will do anything to fight for the parasites survival to the detriment of their own true autonomy.

If you ask for what your heart really desires it cant go very wrong in the long run, even though it may cause suffering to obtain that.

Refinement, healing, enlightenment is always trying to work its way through us, the issue is that we resist it.

Non dual awakening means the beginning of the pure flow of life to flow through your body without it being filtered or distorted by the thinking and beliefs of the mind, for the physical body and energy channels this means the voltage and intensity of what is flowing through is upped massively as it is pure spirit which is now moving through the body, so there always is an energetic component to awakening. There are those who had non dual awakenings without any energy work at all and experienced many years of painful and difficult physical adjustment, Adyashanti is one who did it that way and when he was adjusting there were periods of intense difficulties, he talks about times when he was curled up on the floor in the Emergency room in fetal position the pain was so bad and the strongest pain killers didn't help very much. Even Ramana Maharshi had difficult times while his body adjusted. It is possible that the right sort of Qigong or energy work to prepare the body for that change would have helped the adjustment period. Although my opinion is that energy work will achieve nothing in itself except prepare the body for something else to come in and flow through you . Jean Klein says something similar, he says that energy work won't lead to awakening yet he teaches a form of energetic Kashmiri Yoga which helps to open up and prepare the body. The energy work is just preparation and helps the process, it wont lead to the awakening or enlightenment by itself.

Sounds very interesting, although I would have to know rough prices before I could commit

If you read the Magus of Java yourself you can see that what most of the people have repeated here over the years is at best selective reading. A cursory glance at the book I found that Chang says that all souls end up going up to God eventually and when that happens nobody knows what will happen, the immortality Mo Pai promises only lasts a select number of years (in John Chang's masters case 15 years) and after that they don't know what happens, the period after death is just extra time to work off karma. So in reality all paths go exactly the same place as Mo Pai, up to God, which is why Chang remains a Christian despite his power.

I have heard good things about Daniel Odier http://www.danielodier.com/english/thePath.php

It is worth questioning everything, not just new teachings but old ones, just because something has been repeated by masters and highly regarded books for generations doesn't mean it is relevant any more to our generation or relevant to your particular path. Personally I have found some new age teaching useful , some it is genuine but fragmented and only holds part of the picture, while there are some teachings and lineages which many would regard as new age that I found found to be the most profound and powerful stuff out there.