Jetsun

Timothy Leary and others tried their best to do it with drugs during the 1960's-70's, as far as I can tell they opened their minds in various ways and saw through some of their own conditioning, but that's about it.

The book is meant to communicate to many different parts of you, for example the purpose of reading the book a second time by reading it out loud to yourself is to communicate it to your "essence", similar to the ways our parents read fairytales to it when we were children. It is a very interesting observation you made that you feel it communicate to your solar plexus, you must be quite grounded in your body already. If you wanted an exclusive psychological approach the works of Maurice Nicoll are better. As for All and Everything it really is meant to be an allegory for all and everything, in that man is a microcosm of the world and the same fundamental laws govern everything. So you can study the world by studying man and you can study man by studying the world. Inside of you there is something which corelates with the moon and the sun, also there are correlatons within your psyche of things like the Great Flood and the Tower of Babel. These are things which have happened on the macrocosmic scale in literal history in one way or another as well as in your own individual psyche, its all interrelated and follows identical patterns reflecting each other.

In regular rebellion you identify yourself as something in opposition to something else, in doing so you define and solidify yourself in a certain position. But the real rebels drop identification altogether, thereby they are not confined to any position and therefore free.

One of the principles he underlines at the start of the book is that you should "always go the whole hog including the postage" I think you can probably get it online for free these days though

All and everything is about all and everything

Depersonalization and spiritually losing yourself are two very different things, depersonalization is a form of dissociation where you become less and less in touch with your body and genuine feelings, the only correlation can be if your suffering gets so bad that you let go and in that you become open to what you really are.

I think the majority of people still have a very mechanistic mindset so they want controllable reliable results from something they try, so I take this drug and it creates this effect on the brain which cures this problem. The problem being that most alternative spiritual healing therapies are more artistic than mechanistic scientific, therefore the results individually and in scientific studies are likely to be unreliable. A person may go to a spiritual healer and the outcome may be that they have made peace with their issue and no longer fight it or resist it, which in itself is often the highest form of healing yet not particularly helpful in scientific statistics. Or a person may go to healer and get healed for something they didn't expect or might help bring about a more healthy holistic attitude to their problem, none of which can really be measured.

I have done a fair bit of investigation into this area myself. From my own perspective spiritual practice is about allowing things to return back into right relationship and connection with the whole, then in that relationship things take on their natural function which is ultimately healthy. To think it is about fixing, improving or changing anything is to bring the regular driven neurotic attitude into the spiritual realm, which is something we all do to one degree or another but ultimately it won't work, but hopefully the spiritual practice will either bring that into consciousness or will fail and the lesson will be learned in the repeated failure to get anywhere with that attitude. I spent years trying to fix myself using both psychological and spiritual methods, but really just allowing things to exist as they are is far more compassionate and healthy, then things change naturally when you stop fighting and resisting them. That is the paradox which the ego doesn't like because it means it's not in control.

You then still have to deal with hundreds of lifetimes of conditioning which still exists within all the cells and various energetic bodies within your system. An active kundalini is just going to bring all of that conditioning more into awareness and intensify any patterns as the energy is going to be bumping up against it all of the time.

In many traditions such as a lot of the Indian ones you connect to divinity by going up out of the top of your head, but in the tradition I am involved with you go inwards behind the heart, I was told either way will connect you to the divine, so certainly going the heart route is valid. But I would say it isn't as much about opening the heart (although that might be part of it), rather its about going behind it or beyond it, apparently there is a veil in that area which keeps the perception of a separate individual "I" intact and once that veil is pierced or seen through the illusion of separation no longer survives. A lot of the work I do involves going in to the heart, but don't stop there, some traditions say there is a portal behind the heart.

"Basic awakening brings a final anti-climatic ending your journey as you knew it. You didn't become omniscient or all powerful, you didn't end up in permanent bliss or free from suffering, and you didn't end up in a merged state of oneness with all creation." Ric Weinman Apparently it is common for such experience to create things like loss of motivation and depression, because all the old meanings and motivations are tied into your old ego identity, but over time apparently something deeper and more true emerges . "..there can be a time gap between the letting go of the old and the emerging of the new. This is similar to what happens when a spouse dies, in that some period of time is needed for acceptance and integration before the person can move on" - Awakening through the veils book

Sometimes when I have received healing my stomach would grumble all the way through, I was told that as well as the relaxation putting your nervous system into parasympathetic mode which helps digestion also the healing helps you digest unprocessed emotions and undigested experiences which makes the stomach react in the same way.

I will try find what Adyashanti said exactly but from memory he said something like there is a knot like a fist of primal rage right in the gut, and below that is where you find true emptiness

Yeah I think Adyashanti is very grounded and does normal stuff, changing his name is a bit odd to me but I guess each to their own, apparently his real name is Simon which probably doesn't have the same effect. I heard there is quite a lot of scandal in the Zen community in America, I read that Genpo Merzel who invented the "Big mind" zen was sleeping around with his students recently, but I doubt you will find much of that sort of thing around Adyashanti because he seems a bit sort of boring or uncharismatic that it wouldn't suit him. Unfortunately I don't think there is a Zen tradition in the UK that I am aware of but Adyashanti is coming to the UK for the first time this year and doing a retreat which I have signed up for. Tony Parsons is good, I went to see him in person a few weeks ago and it is true that being in person is completely different than a video, if you just relax and become still you can really feel and sense where he is coming from and your own consciousness gets entrained to him, and for me that simplicity and ease and stillness even lasted for a few days afterwards, unfortunately it wasn't permanent, but that's the way it goes

As far as i'm concerned "thy will be done" = "wu wei", and Jesus seemed to master the whole "thy will be done" stuff so he gets a pass in my book.

The pauses I think are actually a form of what they call "pointing out instruction", it is an invitation for you to experience kinesthetically where he is speaking from. Of course it is more powerful in person where there can be a more direct entrainment of consciousness, so on a video it might seem a bit strange. But practically all he is saying most of the time is pointing to those gaps either directly or indirectly, so many people may get more out of paying attention to the gaps rather than any words he speaks.

I have heard Adyashanti talk about love quite a lot yet he doesn't confine enlightenment by it, because if you tell someone that it is about love then they create concepts around enlightenment to do with what they already understand love is, so by doing so he has given them an extra conceptual barrier to understanding, whereas the bigger spiritual love isn't much to do with what most people understand as love. As I understand it what most people call love arises within enlightenment, so cant define it and if enlightenment is defined by anything it isn't really free and therefore not really any sort of enlightenment rather its just a nicer prison. These Zen guys are destroyers not creators or supporters of peoples concepts, which is probably why some people have an aversion to them, because on a certain level they are dangerous. But not dangerous in the physical sense, I read that story you posted before about him giving someone shaktipat and I think it must be false because I have heard a lot of talks from his retreats and know someone who has been on a few and he doesn't ever do any shaktipat or any sort of energy work or transmission at all, not in the direct sense anyway like in hindu type shaktipat, so I don't know where that rumour could have come from. But he does talk about opening the heart as a crucial part of awakening, yet he says that to be really awake and embodied in it it is required for you to be awake on the levels of head, heart and gut. In Zen a lot of it is about being awake on the level of gut because that is where some of the most primal attachments to a separate self are located and where the true emptiness is found.

As far as i'm aware nobody here makes any profit from this site apart from the owner, so any accusations in that regard are unfounded. Personally I found the interviews with Bruce Frantzis and Chunyi Lin very useful and interesting, I think they were popular too because they even got pirated onto warez sites like the occult.bz and were downloaded many times, so I would like to see more of them.

All Adyashanti usually says is that it is useless to fight in your mind against the way things are, I don't often hear him say much about the way things are or that anything is “immovable and unchangeable” so i'm not sure what he referring to there? If a Buddhist monk is going to get killed by a sword and completely accepts it then he is going to have a much smoother death and probably rebirth, whereas if he fights what already is his mind will create all sorts of stressful thoughts such as how unfair it is that he has been killed and how he doesn't deserve it because he has done so many good deeds in his life etc then that non acceptance and resistance might drive him to the hell realms before he gets reborn, or at least cause him a lot of pointless suffering during his death. If you listen to Adyashanti a bit more he often explains that he doesn't mean that nothing should be done to help others and help the homeless etc, but that drive or motivation to do so is much more healthy if it comes from a place of spontaneity or freedom rather than from a conditioned belief about the way you think things should be. What I think Adyashanti is repeatedly trying to show in his teachings is that basically what the ego is is resistance to what already is, for example many people are still resisting things which happened when they were young children let alone resisting what is happening to them now in the moment.

That cup doesn't look empty to me

Apparently Turmeric can counter flouride toxicity http://www.activistpost.com/2014/04/the-spice-that-prevents-fluoride-from.html#more

Also the people you live with start looking at you a bit funny when you start sleeping plugged into the electricity. I would mail it to you but seeing as it is also a used bed sheet its probably not such a nice present I might test my wiring and try give it another go, I could be converted to the the grounded Yin Qi theory after all

Yeah but according to the instructions and all the books and stuff written about it it should just connected you to the earth aspect of the plug, which should be the same as having a long cord attached to the ground, but either it doesn't work or the wiring is screwed in my house. Thinking about it if my wiring is screwed its probably pretty dangerous and I should get it looked at.

It was something like this http://www.groundology.co.uk/earthing/grounding-sheets which is a cotton sheet which has conductive silver fibres woven into it. You do connect it to the electrical outlet but the points on the plug with the electrical charge are just rubber and not connected to the sheet which is meant to be only connected to the earth part of the socket.

It's just a joke, but you are right.. that sort of thing doesn't float my boat But in all seriousness a while ago I bought a grounding sheet I could sleep on and use for meditation, I used it for some time but personally found it greatly disturbed my sleep and amplified any issues around electricity, so it seemed to do the complete opposite of what it is meant to. I ended up giving it up and things have worked much better without it.