Jetsun

Have you ever received an initiation? There may a reason why he is doing mass initiations, ie their entire culture is falling apart and it is important to get their wisdom out there while they can before it is lost, I don't think his his main motivation is money, for example this year he did the youth day in Manchester for free and as a result they lost money in total.

The only book which has had a strange affect on me is 'Words of my Perfect Teacher' by Patrul Rinpoche, just reading the first page almost brought me to tears. It could be that I was just moody or emotional at the time but I don't think so as thinking about it now brings back similar sensations. It might not be only due to the book though as I had received a form of reception or non official initiation of Bodhicitta from a Buddhist monk in person previously which may have connected me to the lineage somehow, so maybe without that the book would have not have had similar impact.

Yeah I kind of went off on one sorry, but what I was trying to say is that when you really examine what reality is things become very blurred and it is very difficult to say anything about it with any sort of confidence.

But even in the case of something like schizophrenia the reality and meaning of that condition is largely culturally bound, in places like Nigeria and India it is viewed through a different reality lense and if you examine the public World Health Organisation statistics peoples recovery rates are two or three times the rate and speed in those countries compared to places like the US and the UK. In our countries you are told you are sick and told you are mentally ill so you suffer for a long time, but in other countries you are respected as going through a spiritual crisis or shamanic initiation so you recover a lot quicker. So what is the reality of schizophrenia?

My understanding of what the Buddha said is that we spend all our lives running around chasing happiness, but if we stop chasing and just see the truth you obtain your long sought after happiness just by ceasing the search for it and seeing what is. So if you do some practice like inner smile or anything with the intention to make you happy you are just continuing on the hamster wheel of chasing what is already within you. Which is also a principle which can also be explained in some forms of modern psychology in that if you do a practice or do anything to try make yourself happy you are sending the message to your subconscious that you are unhappy just in the doing , so stop striving for it and you stop telling your subconscious that anything is wrong and you stop creating your own unhappiness and your default state can emerge. So our minds are searching for a solution but can't see that our searching is what is causing the problem to exist in the first place, so no wonder we never find a solution and never find peace! I haven't mastered is myself though, everytime i have a glimpse of what I'm really doing I see that I have got back on the hamster wheel without even realising it.

I don't know, I'm still trying to work out what reality is. If you have an experience which feels real and has meaning is that just as real as a daily life experience? I had an experience of interacting with a "spirit" when taking Ayahuasca which felt just as vivid, real and meaningful as an interaction with another human, the scientist may tell me it was a hallucination but if it influences my life and has meaning then maybe it is just as real as anything else. People argue constantly about whether Jesus exited, but even if he did or not he has had more influence on the world than almost any human, so even if he didn't exist in the beginning he does now for all intents and purposed as he has been created by the collective consciousness, so if he actually lived isn't really very important. But the problem is that paranoid schizophrenics also believe their mind hallucinations as being real, which is obviously not a good thing.

I don't think people have a lot of choice in all this unless they have done an enormous amount of spiritual work to clear out all the triggers and seeds from their mindstream. If you have anger inside of you and you see anger out in the world then it will easily trigger your own anger, you have no conscious choice about whether it arises or not it is basic cause and affect; how you react when it arises is something which can be changed through spiritual practice but it's not really a choice over whether it exists or not, as that is just an egoic view that you have control over everything that happens to you.

I mean to read these some time too, but the Dalai Lama has just released a book this week about this which I might read first "When the Dalai Lama was forced to go into exile in 1959, he could take only a few items with him. Among these cherished belongings was his copy of Tsong-kha-pa's classic text The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment. This text distills all of the essential points of Tibetan Buddhism, clearly unfolding the entire Buddhist path to enlightenment. In 2008, celebrating the long-awaited completion of the English-language translation of The Great Treatise, the Dalai Lama gave a historic six-day teaching at Lehigh University to explain the meaning of this classic text and to underscore its importance. It is the longest teaching that he has ever given to Westerners on just one text, and Westerners have never before had the opportunity to receive such a complete teaching that encompasses the totality of the Buddhist path from the Dalai Lama. From Here to Enlightenment makes the teachings from this momentous event available for a wider audience." http://www.shambhala...o Enlightenment

Good luck, and remember what Churchill said "if you end up going through hell, keep going!", but seeing as you are doing a Buddhist retreat I should also say if you end up in heaven instead, keep going!

Strange group though, there is a Falun Dafa art axhibition in my town which I went and they dipict their leader in many classic Christ and Buddha poses, its quite scary

I need more of this, but I always feel guilty that I should be doing something productive. But I guess you can get playfulness in many places even serious situations, for example I often watch Prime ministers questions in parliament and that descends into a big playful joke at times with both sides jeering at each other and laughing and shouting at each other like school children, and these are the people who are meant to be running the country.

How does he explain the fact that people have different experiences of the afterlife though?

Spiritual literature has its uses but I think you have to know its limitations, most of the great masters wouldn't write down their teaching themselves for a reason because everyone is unique and requires individual instruction for their own lives, which is why you can find many Buddhists sutras which contradict as the Buddha would give individual advice using skillful means. So if you take some spiritual literature too seriously you might end up trying to take another persons medicine for your own situation and as they say one man's medicine is another man's poison. In Buddhism they say it is very important to realise which sutras are talking relative truth and which are talking about ultimate truth, which can be applied to all religion and spiritual material, as some paths might be made up completely from relative truth so to you they might be completely worthless or even harmful to your life. Then you have to question your ability to actually perceive whether something is talking about the ultimate or relative.

I noticed the gaps in the way he talks too, I thought he might be doing that as a sort of teaching like in meditation when you have gaps in your thoughts and gaps in your breath is when things really start happening. But it is right to question what's going on as it can be used as a hypnotic technique to interrupt normal flows in interraction, in some NLP techniques you intentionally do that by creating a gap in your speech or by doing things like widening your eyes, if you study people like the illusionist Derren Brown he does it all the time as you can add a hypnotic script to the subconscious that way, most people don't notice what's going on and are amazed when they say or do the exact thing he wants them to do; I don't think that is going on here as the pauses are too regular and obvious but its useful to be wary of these things, especially when it comes to gurus.

If you have a lot of spare time you can do a search here, but you are probably better off getting Max Christensen aka Lama Thunderbolt's latest book

Yeah everything you experienced is normal, those sort of movements are expected, I would be careful with it though as it is powerful . Pity other people have trademarked it or you could copy most of the other qigong teachers in the market and make up some obscure story about it being passed down by Lao Tzu or someone through secret all the way to you and sell it for a lot of money.

So you just stumbled upon the Kunlun method :suspicious: are you sure you haven't learned it before but forgot about it ?

Depends how you use them, it's possible to cultivate feeling good and bliss to try to avoid your own suffering and if that is the case all you are really doing is cultivating further delusion.

There are many different ways of dealing with demons, Christian priests call upon a higher power with faith, in Buddhist practice of Chod they use unlimited compassion to pacify them, then there are other stories like that of Padmasambharva who used wrathful means at times to deal with the demons of Tibet, or the other option is to use the method of the patron saint of Bhutan Drugkpa Kunley who used his magical penis to exorcise them.. the choice is yours.

I always thought I saw reality more clearly when I was stoned, but I doubt that was really the case as it made me so apathetic and lazy, but it does show you a thing or two taking a mind altering drug about the different possibilities of your perception, but unlike meditation it doesn't change anything long term.

If you can't do that particular form of Taoist meditation in the environment you are in then just do a different form of meditation you can do. There are plenty of forms of effective meditation, for example you could observe the breath going in and out of your body.

I wouldn't call it evil, I think we use intelligence to justify and excuse things to try to avoid uncomfortable feelings because we want to be happy and avoid suffering. Obviously it doesn't work though.

I agree with what you say here but in my experience the quality of the attention required is actually quite subtle; if what you observe is too close you are too attached but if its too far away it can lead to aversion. If you observe something in yourself if you say it is "you" then you are lost in it but if you say it isn't "you" it can lead to dissociation. Maintaining your awareness and observation in the middle way in all things is not easy, or isn't easy for me anyway, Its like walking on a tightrope.

Consider the psychology of wearing a tie, it wraps around your neck constricting your breathing reminiscent of a slave collar which sends submissive messages to your brain to obey or the noose will be pulled tight. Yet culturally we have been brainwashed to view it as a sign of respect

You can buy it on kindle for cheap, if you don't have one I think there are free reader apps you can download for your laptop or phone.