Jetsun

This kid says some interesting stuff, I have been watching a few of his videos and he often goes into some sort of Kundalini bliss type state half way through, if you skip to 55 minutes in this video you can see an example of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS1fL4bDV_s This video and has a bit more background and a bit of a debate about the whole dedicated intense practice vs just realising the primordial awareness. I find his explanations quite clear and lucid.

She doesn't play the role of guru, not in the traditional sense anyway. She touches your head for a few seconds then you look in her eyes, that's it! There is certainly a limit to what this can achieve in your life, such a brief thirty second experience won't completely change all your deeply fixed patterns and habits built up over a lifetime, but certain particular individuals do have the power to help.

That is the whole dynamic the meditation works through, trying to get anywhere to get any result. The point of that particular meditation is to realise the consciousness or presence which already isn't trying to do anything and rest in that consciousness naturally, so it isn't even something that you decide to do, you are looking to find what is already present, already happening, already what you are. It requiring serious effort and serious discipline to gain breakthroughs may just be a belief, a belief which may be a barrier to realisation. Maybe there is a presence within you which is already at peace, already not striving to achieve and if you abide there all the delusions fall away naturally. But meditation isn't the only method in that path, there is also self inquiry, so there is doing in this path and it isn't like as some neo-vedantan's who say to do anything is useless. Koans are usually realised when the intense concentration is given up and you let go, not by the concentration itself and different Zen traditions teach in different ways. Usually in Zen the intense concentration and discipline is meant to bring you to a point of exhaustion and giving up so you let go and it is through the letting go that the realisations happen. I am not arguing against concentration methods rather trying to add some clarity to the method Adyashanti teaches as thelearner said that was the basis of what he was practising. If you want to practice concentration etc that is fine, but I think it is false to say we NEED to do those things and see no evidence that it is some sort of requirement for a stable progress, I personally only did them for a short time and don't feel the need any more, and if you listen to Adyashanti's many recordings from his retreats they do question and answer sessions from participants and it is clear that many are attaining realisations and breakthroughs from his method without going the whole one pointed focus route first. His talks on his website are full of dozens,maybe hundreds of people getting realisations through his teachings, some of them in a very short space of time like days or weeks, whereas I read about a guy on Tricicyle magazine the other day who had meditated for over 40 years and had no breakthroughs yet.

The purpose of Adyashanti's meditation is to stop ALL manipulation of your experience. Which is why he doesn't prescribe a best way to sit or breathe or do because then you have some ideal you are striving for which takes you away from just allowing. You allow everything to be as it is and you allow everything that is impermanent to be impermanent. You stop thinking and assuming you know what you should be experiencing. Do you really know what you should be experiencing in this moment right now? If not then a "bad" meditation may be just as useful as a "good" one. What is ego except the part which thinks it knows best and tries to manipulate things into the way it thinks should be. When that part is relaxed all sorts of things can happen, but they happen out of control of manipulation which is why it can be scary or difficult. This way isn't something he cooked up, its from a long Zen lineage and makes a lot of sense when put into practice.

There is a bit of a risk of you going to war with yourself if you are directly trying to counter where your energy goes, so it might be better to just carry on getting angry etc but do it with awareness, so feel the anger as energy and sensation, which may make it worse but the key is to be aware enough to see any stories or beliefs you are adding to that pure sensation, then it will pass if the mind doesn't follow through with its beliefs around that sensation. Meditating on impermanence may help in this regard. Without being dominated by the stories and beliefs we have around things like anger and fear you can even enjoy them. So it can be helpful to examine what meaning you attach to these situations and question if those meanings are really true, even a bit of doubt can be liberating. But if you wanted to directly counter the energy to bring it down there is an exercise called flying cloud hands which sinks energy, or look at some of what Bruce Frantzis teaches much of that is about bringing it down, or massaging your feet can ground. Visualizations could help in the moment, so just visualizing a cooling waterfall or something like that may help steady things a bit. Adyashanti says that one visualization he came up with when he was trying to bring his energy down was to imagine stroking a horse, which may sound bizarre but whatever works works.

Ayahuasca is used more for healing rather than spiritual development, those who do use it legitimately for spiritual development use it to commune with the other plants in the rain forest and to contact spirits to gain information to heal, in other words you need a traditional shamanistic lifestyle of living in the rain forest in solitary and having a particular diet to progress. The shamanistic path generally isn't chosen by people themselves they are forced onto it and it is often considered a sort of curse rather than a good thing as it would mean you are outcast from society to a certain extent. So I wouldn't advise taking Ayahuasca outside of the traditional environment, those who try to use it recreationally for fun really don't know what they are getting themselves in for because there is a strong chance you will spend the night being sick while simultaneously shitting yourself all while being utterly convinced that you are going to die! Which isn't my idea of fun. It is called the "vine of death" for a reason.

If you are following Adyashanti's method I would re-read his book "True meditation" or if you don't have it read the relevant sections of his free book http://www.adyashanti.org/library/The_Way_of_Liberation_Ebook.pdf , his method is good you basically just allow everything to be as it is, but if you can get some sort of personal instruction it is better because you get shown to include the perfect stillness which surrounds all of your experience in your meditation, while the beginner often ignores it even though it is right under your nose and fixates on something

I'm not a fan of that sort of terminology, in your case its probably more useful to think about bringing compassion towards what you are dealing with rather than purifying which suggests there is something wrong within you which needs to be gotten rid of. But some sort of enquiry or meditative method may help you see that the ideas and thoughts you have around what you are dealing with don't have to be taken so seriously.

I think the majority of teachings are intellectually contrived, but it is possible to use intellectual contrivances to lead to the uncontrived or at least clear the way a bit. There is a saying in Zen that you can use an arrow to shoot another arrow out of the air mid flight, so you can use a contrived thought or teaching to knock out another existing contrived idea cancelling it out, leaving just the ground. Tsongkhapa is of no real concern of mine, I don't plan to study him again any time soon.

In my experience I am going along with and in alignment with personal stories and tapes from my mind which are no longer relevant to the current situation, so its like trying to navigate a new situation with old programming which is long outdated. Which is more or less how I and just about everybody else operates the vast majority of the time (* Except the man with the gold plated shirt, he has it sorted)

Don't believe them in what sense?

Ok I will, but until then I will just assume you take Malcolm's words as gospel without question, because that is the way it currently appears.

That is good advice, but you still haven't explained how Vedanta refutes dependent origination or emptiness, which is the essential point behind the arguments you posted. Saying I should read up isn't as useful as explaining why that is the case, if you even can?

I consider personal experience more important than reading up, and I have a teacher.. of sorts. Vedanta brings you directly to the non-conceptual, whatever raft you use to bring you there you have to let it get to the other side. All that is conceptual is contained within the non-conceptual, so Vedanta doesn't refute any raft.

Does it? i'm not so sure that it does

If the intellect is made a servant rather than the master then the information about how to make a choice is going to come from a wiser place than the mind, most probably the heart.

What do you hope to achieve through practicing it ?

Sounds like you are worrying too much and overthinking things. I wouldn't bother telling anyone your personal history unless its a professional, many people have sexual issues and intimacy hangups and messy sexual history, welcome to the human race at this time you are hardly alone. Everyone is working through their issues which usually bloom in our personal relationships so you can't expect to get it all clean and perfect from the start unless you are a karma free being like a saint. But there is no need to hang it all around your neck like a weight of guilt bringing you down.

I think you have to up your game a bit if your going to be our own forum petty tyrant, I am disappointed to say I am yet to receive any abusive pm's from you

About dealing with difficult people Gurdjieff used to say that the most valuable suffering for your own development you can ever endure is to bear with the unpleasant manifestations of other people. In his own teaching house he used to pay this really unpleasant guy to stay there because if you are skillful you can use unpleasant emotions and difficult situations as a reminding factor to be conscious, whereas if everything is nice and pleasant you can easily fall into stupor. They say something similar in Tibetan Buddhism to treat the unpleasant person as the most precious jewell, like you have found a diamond in the rough. The ego sees everything back to front, for your spiritual development the annoying, challenging person is far more useful to you than someone who agrees with you.

I like the post, but its a bit mind centric imo in that is is of equal value to be aware of emotions, sensations and the gaps. One might get the impression that its all about observing the thinking intellect and it may lead to it being too top heavy and dissociated from the body, especially as we are generally so cerebro centric already in our society. If there is a groundedness in the body then the internal dialogue has less force to take your identity.

I only have minor tastes but my understanding is that what many call Samadhi bliss is the highest form of personal experience, but beyond that is the impersonal experience. Within the impersonal everything arises which is like a form of love in that everything just is and is part of the one.

One of the points Tibetan Ice made in the OP was "Other things that Anadi said that hit me hard is that spiritual leaders who initiate and teach thousands of people (internet transmissions?) are practically useless and that the only effective means of evolving spiritually with the help of teacher is in small personal groups, or one-on-one." Which was why I said what I did about the critical importance of the personal relationship with the Guru in Vajrayana.

What I am saying is quite simple, people now are trying to practice Vajrayana without guru devotion and a personal connection with the guru and it is debatable whether it works without it. So far I see little evidence that it does.

You can argue that the way the Vajrayana teachings are being taught by many teachers today is a corruption, or at least a big experiment, in that traditionally in Tibet they were based around guru sadhana and guru devotion and without that it is difficult for you to get the level of renunciation and devotion for the teachings to sink into the heart. It is debatable whether seeing your teacher very periodically or over the internet is enough to create the personal connection. So I don't know whether Lamaism without the intimate connection to the Lama can succeed except by rare exceptional individuals.