Jetsun

I think Friday the 13th comes from the day the Catholic Church tried to murder all the Knights Templar as they had become too powerful for their liking, so if you want to see real scary forget the horror movies look into the real life history of the Catholic Church.

A few interesting exercises along this line of thought are if you have a problem or an illness give thanks to the universe/god or whoever for the healing of it before it is healed, this sends the message to your body/mind that everything is ok so it relaxes and the healing will then take place as there is less stress and resistance, or your mind will relax showing your the solution to the problem. "Thy will be done". It is also useful to observe how your mind reacts to such giving thanks Another exercise from Buddhism is to tell yourself that everything is absolutely perfect and exactly where it should be in your life and in the world right now... then again observe the minds reaction We can observe how our minds/ego try to play god and in that process worsen or even create the problem we are trying to fix.

It is the New Age thought that you should focus on the positive because your subconscious only recognises attention so if you focus on fixing a problem all it does is feed it energy as that is where your attention is fixated There is a great deal of truth in this, but it is very easy to fall into the realms of repression and judgement in this line of thinking, which is why it may be better in the long run to just cultivate basic awareness which doesn't get fixated on either negative or positive positions.

It's a complicated issue which i have been struggling with for many years, in many areas of life if you do nothing to improve things then nothing will change, but then even desiring to change anything is sending the message that it is wrong and needs changing/healing/fixing and if you stop sending that message to yourself then it stops being a problem and you are happy.

But what does Christ represent? in most churches and stain glass art etc Christ is depicted at the heart, especially in the Gothic churches which are built as a macrocosm of the human body you find Christ at the heart. You find salvation through the heart or if you believe some masters there is one single sacred fibre of the heart. The kingdom of God is within you, and our bodies are microcosms of the universe so whatever Christ represents in the outside world is also within you.

Yeah the Stanford Prison Experiment is one, The Miligram Experiment is another http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment we like to think that we are strong and independent but when you are in a situation where we perceive someone has authority over us then a lot of that goes out of the window.

I will have to look up the names but there are a number of shocking psychological experiments which show how easiky we are influenced to do things against our will by those who we perceive as having authority. The most obvious example though is that of how Nazi Germany manipulated an entire nation of strong egos to do what they want.

It's a different situation, one of the women in the video was brought to the sangha by her father which was residential, she had little contact with the outside world to escape to while the guru held the power over meals and living situation etc, its essentially like a cult situation in this case rather than one she was willingly walking into. The case of Chogyam Trungpa is more like what you describe, he was an open womanizer with many open relationships, which is different than a closed insular sangha where the guru threatens you with hell if you talk about your experience.

If you watch the video you can see how he manipulated the situation to make it so he held the power and the women felt like they didn't have any, psychologists have shown how easily people are manipulated in this way when they are regressed even strong people, so I don't think in this case people got what they were searching for, although that may be the way people justify abuse using karmic excuses.

Yeah yeah the present moment is great, the question is how to stay in it? Millions of people have read The Power of Now and other similar texts and understand mentally how good it is to be in the moment yet I see no evidence they are any better at staying in it than anyone else.

My first impulse was to say that both parties need to take responsibility with adult sexual relations , but after watching the video it looks like real abuse is going on which surprises me as I met one of his students last year who was a woman who spoke highly of him and she showed signs of real development and compassion. I think it just goes to show that Lamaism is a dead outdated institution of development which will probably be eradicated within a generation or two.

Yes in Shamanism Tobacco is a very powerful plant which is used for protection and many other things, in Ayahuasca ceremonies for example Tobacco is used to protect the drinker and remove any harmful energies to purify a place. But the Tobacco they are using is pure jungle Tobacco Mapacho made straight from the dried leaves of the plant, the commercial cigarettes you buy will not do the same thing at all and are mixed with all sorts of stuff, nullifying any Shamanic benefits. I don't think smoking is meditation but it can provide a shock to break patterns of thought or stress you may be in, like a mini break, so in that sense it could share some similarities with meditation, but you will get much more by actually meditating but I guess at work it looks worse to stop what you are doing close you eyes and stay silent for a few minutes than it does to go smoke.

The world is insane, we have to do our best to cultivate so we don't get caught up in the mass psychosis, who knows when that madness isn't going to be half the way across the world and on our doorstep instead.

I didn't realise he was that old , the greatest respect to him and what he has done to preserve the teachings for later generations.

Sounds like good progress, I always wondered does Stillness movement go through the various stages of Samadhi described in the Buddhist texts? I understand it has some links to Buddhism, but it seems on the surface at least that it takes a different path through purification of the body to get there rather than mind stages, yet I only have limited experience without initiation so I don't know much.

I can sell you a copy for $500

If the Tao seeks out balance and all ecosystems strive for harmony why isn't the world balanced and in harmony by now? If the answer is that we have free will to go against the natural laws to cause unbalance then why would we have such a will if the best path is always to follow the natural laws? Free will seems pretty pointless if we just have to obey laws otherwise we suffer, seems like a bit of a sick joke.

What use is bending the elements ?

The idea of permanent hell I think goes against the natural laws seeing as everything changes hell will change too and your position within it will change as well. It is more likely this is an idea invented to scare people into being obedient. In Buddhism they talk about hell realms too but there is no permanent hell and you can work your way out of them, plus the concept of hell might be more to do with where your mind is fixated rather than an actual physical place.

I have been looking into and practising Dowsing for a while, it does give you answers very quickly. The implications for it may be endless from divination to healing. This is a good guide http://www.lettertorobin.org/Home.html , also Raymon Grace is a pretty interesting guy who heals using Dowsing for all sorts of things worth looking into if you are interested.

Some great thoughts CT, I am guilty of this too for sure. This is also more or less what Gurdjieff says in his trieste on the problem of mankind, that the main obstacle to man's growth is what he calls "self calming" instead of being with life and learning from its shocks and sufferings we do all we can to numb it and get rid of it.

I think a lot of this stuff is just natural growth, for example it is natural for teenagers to try to fit in to a wider group of friends as they expand their sense if identity away from the family they were brought up in, then when you get a bit older if you are still growing you expand your identity further so it is not defined by the groups of friends you are in so you begin to stand up on your own, isn't it a Chinese saying that when you hit the age of 30 you should start to stand up straight. The only problem is if your maturation process gets arrested at some point so you are still stuck at an earlier stage of development, unfortunately there are a lot of pressures and resistances which try to keep you stuck like advertising.

A comparison between religions hmmmm you could probably write your whole life about this subject, so I will try to summarise my own thoughts in a few words. I think all religions were created to try to create a beneficial belief system in populations of people in order to reduce suffering and conflict,, the difference in religions is just due to the time and location of where it emerged, but because the world changes so much all systems become rapidly outdated and not relevant if they are not flexible so in the end many of them actually do the opposite of what they set out to do. All religions become corrupted, there is even a Buddhist Sutra of how the Buddha's words were being taught incorrectly just one generation after his death, plus in order to even attempt to understand old scriptures you have to try and grasp how the actual consciousness of the people of that age operated in order to understand what they may have been trying to say, so to interepret then literally using modern day consciousness is just ignorance. On the surface most religions seem very different but when you penetrate into their esoteric component they are usually more or less all talking about the same thing.

Depends on how you look at it I guess, on the one hand every single person is doing their best to attain harmony based upon the wisdom they have available to them, if they could see a better path they would take it so in that regard we are exactly where we should be, so there is nothing to worry about. But on the other hand most people I know are out of balance in themselves, in their relationships, in their environment, all of which gets transmitted to the outer system such as relationships between communities and countries and the way the planet is treated.

It's printing more money to pay your debts which devalues your currency, which is one of the main reasons why the economy collapsed in Germany in the 1930's. They are doing it in the UK now to pay off debts on loans