Jetsun

Thanks for the video cat. I thought Adyashanti looked pretty weird and unremarkable when I first saw him, but then I started to listen to what he was saying and I couldn't disagree with anything he says... ever, and he seems to reply completely spontaneously to any questions put his way and it appears that he is bringing many students into realizations too. He is probably one of the clearest teachers I have found so far on all this stuff.

I think modern psychology has advanced since the psychoanalytical approach, many are still in the dark ages of course but for the most part it now revolves around compassion and including everything that is coming up including things like anger and raw sexuality and isn't a head based exercise any more. If someone with repressed anger reads Buddhist texts telling him that one moment of anger can cause lifetimes in hell I don't see how that helps and will probably make things worse. The success of meditation depends on how you are using it, for many it can just be a way to try to avoid the world. I think Alan Watts might be a good example of what I'm talking about here, he was a great scholar of Eastern Philosophy and seemed to be able to understand it and communicate it better than anyone, yet he was an alcoholic and by many accounts deeply unhappy and not at all at peace, so he could probably have done with some psychotherapy or some sort of other method to help him as there was obviously a disconnect between his words and his being.

The general way repression works is that an emotional or belief is taken out from you, disowned and put into the outside world by your mind, so for example at the moment many people repress their anger and blame Muslims and visa versa, so the problem is no longer inside of you it is someone else causing it, they are the aggressive savages not us. Ken Wilber has written quite a lot about repression and how it relates to meditation, he says that meditation isn't particularly good at digging out your shadow emotions and that modern psychological methods are probably better as that is what they are designed for. There are a lot of examples of meditators and gurus who end up disgracing themselves and becoming perverts because they haven't got to grips with what they are repressing, especially sexually. I actually think enquiry like the technique of Byron Katie might be be better because at the end of the process you have to do a turnaround and turn all of your beliefs and accusations around onto yourself to see if they are equally true as applied to yourself, which can be illuminating. With direct enquiry you can't really hide and life and other people become your mirror to reflect back to you the real reality of what's going on inside of you, whereas in meditation the mind can always hold things back it doesn't want to admit and can hide things when you are alone and not confronted with other people reflecting back to you.

There are tens of thousands of meditation forms, a form for each type of person so you have to find one that works for you, what they all have in common though is that if they work they should lead to the formless state of real meditation or non-meditation where the technique has dropped away and there is just awareness. The most common recommendation I have found in many different traditions is meditation on the breath for many reasons, some of which are that the breath connects all parts of your being so to bring attention to it helps harmonize yourself very quickly, the state of your mind and emotions is always reflected in your breath, the other reason why it is good is because on the outbreath when you open up to universe and on the pause after the inbreath there is a possibility of resting in the stillness of formless non-meditation awareness.

I know he is a very high level Bodhisattva who exemplifies all the qualities that the Buddha set out as a teacher to follow such as indefatigability and universal compassion, he is a master of the highest forms of Tibetan Buddhism so when he is in meditation he is enlightened, I don't know if he is enlightened all of the time though. I wouldn't be surprised if he attained the rainbow body at death though and didn't need the bardo teachings. Although I don't really know what enlightenment is to be honest

Nagarjuna introduced some ways of liberation in the bardo state after death, it is said that this is best time to obtain enlightenment because without a body you have far fewer attachments so it is easier to finally let go of everything. Many Tibetan Buddhists are taught these so if they can't gain enlightenment in their lifetime they have the opportunity after death, I heard the Dalai Lama say he looks forward to this as a challenge for when he dies.

Monasteries do help people conserve and sublimate their sexual energy, but this is done not because women are trying to take their energy but so monks don't get stimulated by the sight of women because if that happens the energy and consciousness goes into the sexual region where it is difficult to get out from, as they are trying to evolve to the higher centres.

Do any Qigong masters talk about draining in this way? There must be thousands of books written by masters who have developed acute sensitivity to energy, but I haven't head any of them mention anything about this sort of draining. In my experience what is most draining is resistance to life, resistance to what is, which is usually caused by the mind telling myself that it should be different than what it is, that it knows best or knows more than God about the way things should be.

Chogyam Trungpa died at age 48 of organ failure and he supposedly attained the rainbow body, Nisaragadatta Maharaj died of throat cancer, Master Nan Huai Chin died of common flu, Ramana Maharshi died of cancer at age 70 and when his devotees asked why he didn't heal himself he said "Why are you so attached to this body? Let it go" and "Where can I go? I am here."

I think it is always trying to affirm its existence in any way it can

I think most of the people here who are advising against trying to use drugs for self development have a lot experience with them, we aren't just saying "drugs are bad m'kay", we are saying we have tried to use them and they didn't help. It's passing on personal experience rather than pushing the blind fear based message many anti drug campaigners try to ram down peoples throats.

Some of the Tantric texts talk about Tummo like the Havjara tantra, I don't know if it is absolutely necessary, but it is one way to purify the energies.

There were all the psychonauts in the 1960's and 70's like Timothy Leary who thought they could achieve profound spiritual development with psychedelics, where are they now, are they advanced spiritual teachers? As far as I know they achieved very little except deluding themselves. It would be good if we can learn from their mistakes. I remember the years I used to smoke weed I thought that I got some profound perspectives on reality, but looking back all I was doing was deluding myself and wasting my time, using the drug as just another way to try avoid or improve reality.

Sounds good, I know that the lineage is meant to be a mix but such an approach I have not found in any Buddhist sutra I have ever read, meditating exclusively on the lower dan tien and raising the soul seem to be Taoist practices to me, what is the Buddhist element?

The thing about Buddhism is that its number one priority is liberation from samsara, in the light of many lives of circular continuous suffering then liberation is far more important than healing any problems you have in this life, which is why the majority are not concerned with using Qi or powers to heal and some even neglect their health in pursuit of liberation, some may even view such powers obtained through practice as potential blocks to enlightenment or hooks to keep you stuck.

Different Buddhist traditions have different methods for example the Kalachakra Tantra you use the channels and points in the body, but the main purpose isn't to gain health it is to attain Samadhi and discover the ground of your being. From what I can see though it is possible to go directly to the ground of your being directly without using the body, for example in Zen the body is almost completely neglected but it seems like it can cause health problems, for example the Zen master Hakuin destroyed his health so badly by obsessing with koans and mind meditation that it almost killed him and he had to go seek out a Taoist to cure his "meditation sickness" which would bring the energy down into his body away from his head. So although you can obtain realization only with the mind it seems to be risky to ignore the body, also interestingly Hakuin only gained enlightenment when his practice was balanced with the Taoist body meditation.

I wouldn't do too many different forms at the same time, as it might be difficult to tell which ones are of most benefit and you might undo the positive work of one with another and come to the conclusion that both are useless. Tummo is an advanced meditation so its not recommended to do that until you have mastered the more basic stages of mind training and mindfulness.

If you are a young healthy active male who is also celibate you are going to have a lot very powerful sexual energy trying to find its way towards release, this is the fundamental drive of the universe you are dealing with which is always seeking to fulfil its purpose, so how do you know it is not your own sexual energy trying to attach to the females rather than them trying to take your energy?

People here have their own interpretations about energy exchange, but one of the most experienced energy healers I have been studying recently says: "You can't pick up other peoples stuff; the only stuff you can have is your own... as common as these beliefs are, they have no validity whatsoever. Here is an example of the experiences that give rise to these myths: lets say I am doing a healing session with someone who is grieving. If I have a lot of suppressed or unresolved grief within myself, then becoming aware of the receivers grief may trigger and bring to the surface my own. At the end of the session, I may feel sad and think that I have picked up the other persons grief, but this is a misconception; the only grief I have - or can ever experience - is my own" So its worth reconsidering how these other people are taking your energy or bringing you into their level, personally I think it is far more likely they are just triggering your own issues within yourself, they aren't actually doing anything to you at all. As long as you believe it is the other people doing these things to you you will always be blind and unconscious to the real trigger and issue.

I think your higher self or soul is attracted to events which make you grow, which can often result in suffering which the ego tends to resist and reject so they seem like accidents when they were actually engineered for your higher good. There are probably still just random accidents also, I dunno, yet people are good at getting the best out of them if they want to.

Thanks for the recommendation. I have been reading the Dalai Lama's commentary on Longchepa's "Finding Comfort and Ease in Meditation on the Great Perfection" the last few days which is a really good book. I know it is always said that you need to have a master to point out Rigpa to you but Longchepa provides many methods towards realising it and have been wondering how possible it is to recognise it without a master, could the pointing out from a book be enough for some people I wonder?

I think the main loss the ego can suffer is the loss of the belief that it is special, or rather that you are more special or better than others.

I quite like the aggressive atheists, there is a huge amount of ignorance in traditional religion so at least the atheists get people to question some of their fundamental beliefs and for that to happen you might need to be a bit assertive, one of the functions that anger can serve is to destroy that which is false. If your own personal spirituality can't stand up steady in the face of such attacks then its probably not very solid and if that is the case it can't be very firmly rooted in reality.

Nah