Jetsun

Yeah I found that strange, they sell skin whitening cream in chemists in many parts of Asia as people want really white skin, whereas half the people who live around me spend every week getting a fake tan trying to look orange. It's a strange world.

There is clearly a progression with Jesus' teachings, the old testament was based on an eye for an eye which means it is based in the lower chakras, whereas Jesus taught forgiveness which is a heart chakra teaching, so there is clearly an obvious progression to a higher level for humanity with his coming.

The Dalai Lama disagrees, in the latest book I read of his he points out that just about all the major figures of Tibetan Buddhism taught the eightfold path before the higher practices and explains the logic behind it, even Longchenpa taught the eightfold path to students before Dzogchen.

Plenty of people have gained a lot of benefit from Goenka retreats which is why they grew so quickly and became so popular. For example Tim Parks who is an extreme atheist skeptic wrote a book called "Teach us to Sit Still" about curing his health problems with Vipassana retreat after Western medical science couldn't help him The theory side is usually pretty light and the whole point is to find out for yourself if what they say in the theory is true, so to criticise it for being subjective and unempirical is stupid because the whole point is for it to be a subjective investigation into yourself. He might have a few valid criticisms though, for example it isn't always wise to just push on if someone is having a psychotic episode, sometimes these places do need a broader psychological understanding as the process is likely to bring up a lot of our issues and karma. But what might also happen is that people will turn against the technique when it starts to work, if it starts to show that your ego is illusory that can be threatening and scary so people might then get angry and turn against it when it actually starts doing the job its designed to do

Man is genetically programmed to be a social animal, people fear often with survival levels of dread that they might get ejected from their social group or tribe if they step out of line or behave outside of the collective reality of what is acceptable. If you practice a genuine spiritual practice then you are going to change, you might even go a bit crazy in the eyes of regular social norms, so if you have a Sangha that sort of change is likely to be accepted and understood, but if you don't you may come up against resistance which can become a drag or even activate genetically programmed survival instincts which will block your progress altogether.

That is true but his motivation for trying to find enlightenment was through being exposed to the regular sufferings in this world like death and sickness and trying to find a way out of it. When he gave up trying to find a way out of it he gained enlightenment, which is why many Buddhists talk about the "wisdom of no escape". When he started teaching he started talking about dukkha which is suffering caused by resisting change ie not fully accepting your life, trying to change reality, trying to get out of it. Life is dukkha when you live in the imagination of a separate self as you often have to resist the flow of life with your mind in order to maintain the illusion of seperateness.

I suspect Jesus came from a different tradition something originating from the Egyptian Priests or Essenes, although if you read the Gnostic Gospels some of them do sound quite Taoist, the Gospel of Philip talks about going beyond dualities and trancending pairs of opposites to find reality.

My take on it is that the Buddha did all he could to get out of suffering and tried to change it and remove it, but all the methods failed so eventually he got exhausted so he sat down an accepted everything as it is and stopped trying to change anything or run away from anything and when he did that he gained enlightenment. Many Buddhists and probably most of the people here are doing the same process, they do a load of techniques, have a load of meditation experiences and mess around with energy, but in the end they will get exhausted with trying to modify reality and give up, let go and accept and then wake up.

In 1975 twenty people created an eco village in northern Italy called Damanhur, the intent was to create a community for the preservation of wisdom to benefit human kind as it was recognised that periodically humanity loses its wisdom, so they started doing research into many areas such energetic principles, spiritual sciences and energy self sustainability. Also at that time they started digging an underground temple in secret. In 1992 a disgruntled former member tried to blackmail the group saying that he would tell the authorities of their temple which was illegal as they didn't have planning permission; the group didn't give into the blackmail so the authorities were informed and a judge turned up at the community saying he would destroy the community if they didn't show him their temple, so they relented knowing it could be the end of their experiment. The judge entered and emerged from the temple some time later in tears saying it was one of the most extraordinary things he had ever seen, the small group had made the largest underground temple structure known to man with some of the most amazing artwork you will ever see inside dedicated to the spirituality of man The Catholic Church immediately tried their best to get the temple destroyed but fortunately the Italian government resisted and now many who visit say it is the 8th wonder of the world and one of the most amazing places they have ever been, yet most people have never even heard of it Each room represents a different aspect of man You can see a tour of the Temple to Humankind here http://www.thetemples.org/tour/

Depends what you mean by insight, in the usual spiritual connotation it won't necessarily lead to insight, but within your own psychology it might lead to psychological insight. For example I heard about someone who went on a Goenka Vipassana retreat and they had many important personal psychological insights and hundreds of sensations and releases of blockages in their body, but the master of the retreat wasn't the slightest bit interested in any of this, what he said was that it is far more important to notice that it is all of the same nature in that it rises and it passes without you doing anything, it is impermanent and whether it is some incredible bliss or depressing horror it is of the same taste and nature. That is the spiritual insight, in that context anyway. Although the clearer the mind and body the easier it is to inquire into the nature of things and perceive things clearly so any opening of channels can only help make it more likely that insight will arise later on.

Thanks, Is there any energetic component which could shake up the system and cause problems if you have blockages?

Is is worth getting the transmission if you aren't a sworn Buddhist?

There might be dead spiritual masters you can contact I suppose, but them being contactable isn't proof they have conquered rebirth, rather they have maintained their identity in their subtle body after their physical body has died so they can continue cultivating, but when the energy of that runs out they will go back into the mixer of being reborn. Gurjieff talks about this in his system, how you can cultivate what he calls a subtle "Kesjan body" which can survive death, and lineages have ceremonies using things like the masters blood to recontact him after he is dead if they need to, but he explains that even though it extends your life to a long degree that some say you are immortal but in reality the energy of that subtle body will die too as all things are subject to disintegration in the end. The supposedly special thing about the Buddha was that he was classed as a non returner so unlike some of the other masters you can't contact him any more, and why Buddhists aren't concerned with doing things like creating a subtle body to survive death as it is of the same nature of disintegration and death as everything else and could be just another form of clinging.

Seeing if someone has results from their practice is simple, but seeing if they have conquered rebirth is a different matter, it would be pretty hard to tell for sure until they die, and then there is nobody to ask

I get the impression that you require different evidence of real results than I do. I have met Buddhists who exhibited signs of real results yet it is not something easily measured through science, but I completely trust my own personal experience, judgement and intuition around it. I have also met people who follow what you would probably call New Age paths have extraordinary results. Also it is true that I have met Buddhists who have achieved nothing except a new funny name and an extra mask to wear with their new robes and met New Agers who are straight out deluded con artists. I believe there are living working lineages and teachers within these traditions and outside of any tradition which get results. But whether they lead to the result of the end of rebirth is difficult to determine for obvious reasons.

A certain part of the mind wants a logical linear path as then the path is straightforward, safe and knowable, but there may be other parts of your being screaming out trying to direct you towards teachings, teachers, situations which are of immense benefit to you, but we generally don't listen to them because we are conditioned to only rely and trust on that one part of our mind in our culture from an early age. In many different paths and traditions they describe an aspect of your being which is far more wise than your logical conscious mind will ever be, they call it the superconscious, the Nagual, the Aumakua, the higher consciousness etc which works beyond the confines of the regular mind. Just as an experiment try and rely on intuition and instinct to direct your path instead of logic for a few months and see what you find, have a leap of faith.

One guy at my work was always real nice to customers and even started helping an old lady by bringing her shopping to her at home, she ended up leaving him £20,000 when she died.

I would just be careful that your conscious awareness doesn't drown in what comes up from your subconscious, so it might be useful to ground yourself in the constant in all experience which is the stillness or the gaps which all the mind content arises in, otherwise you might experience a flood.

You wake up out of the mind conceptions of who you are, the shocking thing is that it isn't "you" who wakes up so "you" get absolutely nothing out of it.

Interesting post, I agree we are all insane because we live in our minds, I have a little experience of going over the edge and it does certainly highlight a few things. I would be cautious though in not indulging in it as the ego is a tricky thing, it might tell you the story that the indulgence is for investigative or noble reasons but it might just be yet another game of control, another way to try affirm its existence in the face of non existence. It might not, just thought I would mention it.

Cultivation which leads to the realization of how useless it all is maybe

Adyashanti would say that the majority of that is just what he calls "cleaning up the prison" while breaking free of it is something different, the irony being that the worse your prison the stronger the longing to break free from it. So you may not need most of that stuff, and he is a qualified Buddhist teacher so has gone through a lot of it. The stages of meditation experiences etc are just the highest forms of personal experience, whereas waking up is about the impersonal.

He realised that he didn't even exist in the first place as independent of everything else, so there was no birth or death to be concerned about.

My understanding is that attainment of the Rainbow Body does this, many Tibetan Buddhists have achieved this in the last 200 years

Ramana Maharshi descibes the energetic changes that can happen just by enquiring and waking up to who you are, then there are others like Sri Nisrigatta Maharaj, even living teachers like Adyashanti talk about huge energetic changes going on without focusing on Qi or energy at all, all he did was meditate on what is true and enquire into who he was and all the channels and centres changed, he said it caused him a lot of pain and discomfort for many years.