Jetsun

Times are different, it isn't easy to just go off and dedicate your life to cultivation like it once was. I was just reading about a guy who was just about to go into a traditional Buddhist three year retreat and had a freak out about his life how he was giving up a good career and some of the best years of his life to sit and do nothing, but the reality is on the Buddhist path at least there has to be a giving up of mundane life and renunciation of trying to attain happiness or fulfilment through it, so if you want to attain meditative realisations to match the conceptual understandings you have gained you will most probably have to do a number of long retreats in your life,or at least one three year retreat to get to the depth in your meditation. Those who say otherwise haven't studied the lives of previous masters, there are exceptions but the majority of masters go on long retreats sometimes 10-15 years or more. But that is the Buddhist path, there are other paths, the Fourth Way for example is meant to be conducted in mundane life and around people as your fuel, which is what attracted it to me because I have always known it will be very difficult for me to take many years out of my life to go into retreat so I was looking for another way and it is meant to be possible to walk it while satisfying your duties as a householder. And according to Liu I Ming there are Taoist paths which can be walked within cities and within normal mundane life. But another method someone else mentioned is to develop your dreaming ability and become highly developed in dream Yoga, then including waking meditation time you could be practising over ten hours a day while still going to work, which is probably more than many people in retreat practice.

Does it become clear when you do s-m what your true self/purpose is so you can align towards it? as I don't know at the moment how to go about aligning myself in this way, I try to listen to my dreams and any messages I can pick up but there is no clarity.

Thanks for your comments, so if the fire is not appropriate at that time your body will reduce it and deal with it, that is reassuring. What were the other pieces of your healing puzzle if you don't mind me asking?

I download the majority for free, generally not new ones or ones ones by authors who need the money as there is a moral issue.

Can s-m help resolve inner conflicts and help integrate yourself? I was considering doing the distance class but i'm a bit worried that if you add a load of extra energy to conflicted body you might just be adding extra energy to a place which needs calm more than extra energy. I was reading Wong Kiew Kit recently say that there are even dangers to doing Zhan Zhuang if you add a load of extra energy to a nervous system which isn't prepared for it, it can cause damage, and I get the impression s-m introduces a lot more energy than Zhan Zhuang.

The Dalai Lama endorses Tsongkhapa more strongly than almost anyone else, one if his most recent public books was about him and when he left Tibet the only text he took with him was Tsongkhapa.

Maybe taking your shirt off is the real key to cultivation i'm going to try it right now That sort of thinking is probably how many of the things you get in religion come from, give it a few years and they will be persecuting people in the name of the Dharma for wearing shirts.

There are thousands of groups these days and although I haven't been to any myself I spoke to someone who is part of the official Gurdjieff foundation about this subject and he said that they generally aren't run like that any more, they are run as equal groups with a coordinator rather than with a guru or master who insults peoples ego's.You might get given demeaning work on a retreat like cleaning the toilets and you will probably get more honest straight talk than you get in real life, but unlike normal life you are meant to see where things are coming from in yourself and look in the mirror first before blaming things from coming from the outside world or needing to attack other people for "causing" something to arise in you.

If a master can use an insult in such a way that the student can see that he is insulting their false persona rather than their entire being then it is useful. For example Gurdjieff would often call his students pieces of shit and other things, but it wasn't just thrown at them in anger with harmful intent, rather it was done in a situation where the student signed up for the whole deal and was practising self observation so in that situation the insult is a potential gift so that the student can observe in himself what part of him gets angry and flares up in defence and which parts remain calm and detached, so it can bring defensive patterns into consciousness if worked with properly which are very difficult to observe with detachment in day to day life. Yet few masters have the skill to do this, most of the time insults just cause harm as it just provokes people into painful places without much chance for any growth of consciousness.

I have heard it described differently in different places. I think there might be a trick in the wording though as there are unlimited sentient beings then helping them all is not possible as they are unlimited so by it's nature it is a never ending impossible task.. unless you gain an unlimited heart not bound by conventional restrictions ie if you attain Buddhahood.

They are a bit crazy, they worship their leader like he is a Buddha or a Jesus and say only he and no-one else holds they keys to heaven at the time of judgement. Their leader isn't stupid he mixed ingredients from Christianity, Buddhism and Taoism to make his cult and now people worship him like a god. I went to one of their art exhibitions recently, it scared me

Bruce Frantzis says in one of his books that a simple way to bring energy down from the head from too much mind activity is just to rub your hands together and bring down your hands from the top of your head, over your face and neck to your body, so effectively smoothing the energy down or gently massaging it down.

Already considered

I don't know much about Karma, but what I have learned mostly though the study of trauma psychology is that when you have the energy of a trauma in your body it is constantly trying to work it's way free, so those people who have had a shock or trauma are more likely to be involved in another one as they try to resolve what is inside of them, so they subconsciously try to recreate the initial event again in order to resolve it. So when I saw that he had been in seven car accidents in seven years I thought it was a classic case of a traumatic imprint trying to resolve itself, but the issue being is that his meditation is designed to defuse such imprints safely without them being played out physically in the world, so something wasn't adding up. Yet like others have said there could be many reasons I am not aware of which can cause such things. Also I guess it is a bit unfair of me to judge his appearance compared to many others like monks because it is obvious that he has had a very full life with many accidents, illnesses and problematic childhood as well as done a lot of fighting and had a lot of women,whereas a monk sits around meditating all the time and is taken care of with little stress or bother, so he is bound to look more rough round the edges despite being as master of things which are meant to perfect your health.

I know a healer who never advertises at all, he isn't even on the internet or phone book and all his clients go to him by word of mouth and he makes a living out of it, so everything just comes to him without effort. I have come across plenty of people who do well doing what they love, I wouldn't take on other peoples limitations and belief systems around this, just make your own

I'm reading "Mind in Comfort and Ease" by the Dalai Lama, which is a book of the Dalai Lama's teachings on Dzogchen and "A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life" by Santideva, translated by Alan Wallace, I have read previous versions but I prefer this one already as it is presented in a much more straightforward way and has both the Sanskrit and Tibetan interpretations where appropriate.

In Kunlun/Yigong they say to meditate on a skin or insulation sheet to stop you earthing the energy, whereas in Mo Pai doing that will prevent you absorbing Yin Qi so it will prevent you making any progress. So I don't know what is best, I guess it depends on your method.

Contrivance comes from the ego, it is pretty difficult to overcome the tyranny of the ego doing a method driven by the ego itself as it by nature wants to survive and won't do something leading to its own destruction, so unless your contrived method leads to non-contrivance and your meditation leads to non-meditation it won't get you anywhere except maybe give you some minor health benefits. Which is why people like Liu I Ming say all contrived methods such as forcing the breath are useless for obtaining the Tao.

I haven't heard him talk that much in his books about deeper causal reasons, most of his Water Method material is more focused on trying to give people basic sanity, which I found quite refreshing. I have heard that he has a deeper spiritual teaching which he hasn't made public yet, but I don't know if he will release it except to advanced students.

It could be that he says you don't necessarily need to know what caused the issue in you because he says many of the blockages we have may come from pre verbal experiences, even in the womb, so they may be too primal to work out with your mind what they are or mean. But just being present to your blockages will bring understanding naturally without any required analysis, what dissolving the energy does is takes away the fuel to the story your mind has made up around the event, so for example if you were on a torture table your mind may have all sorts of beliefs revolving around that experience, like you deserved it, or you didn't deserve it, or you can't recover from it, or your life is ruined, etc etc etc but if you dissolve the energy fuelling these tapes and witness them as beliefs rather than facts then you can see the event of you being on the torture table in a more realistic way, it wont take away your consciousness of what happened it will just make you see what happened more clearly and realistically so you can then move on.

Could be, but whenever I see things like this in sevens the alarm bells start ringing. Passing through the seven gates or tests or defeating the seven demons seems to be the passage through the chakras in nearly all paths.

I do really like his Water Method meditation, I think it is a really powerful technique and his books are some of the best books I have read in this field, he talks about healing and meditation in important areas which I have found very few teachers talk about. But there are a few contradictions in that I would personally expect so see him a bit softer if his methods go beyond what most others do, I see some Buddhist masters and they seem much happier and open hearted than he comes across. And his method is meant to clear any traumatic imprints from his system but he says in his autobiography that he had seven automobile accidents in seven years which suggests that either he is really unlucky or some sort of karmic imprint is trying to work its way out of him, or something is going wrong anyway.

I don't remember exactly as it was about ten years ago, but he wasn't particularly interested in convincing me that his work is any better than what is already out there. I think I tried his methods for a while and can't remember much about them, I think they are pretty harmless to try.

Ah I read that book a while ago, it isn't up to much. I sent the author an e-mail asking why I should do his made up meditation rather than one which had been around for thousands of years, he was kind enough to reply and honest enough to say that there was no advantage to doing his. So I would conclude he is just another guy trying to cash in.

Max and Jenny teach the same technique in the beginning, Max added other techniques on after to so he can put a TM on it but the beginning spontaneous adjustment/Kunlun is the main practice and is the same with both teachers. I don't know about KYMQ but I wouldn't pay that for a dvd either especially as I have heard that the production is very poor.