Jetsun

I did a 5 day fast a few years ago, two days juice two days water then a juice day at the end, the reason being jumping straight into water only isn't good for the body as it is too much of a shock. What I learned is that you start to break down all sorts of toxins and stuff in your body which really makes you smell but you also feel great, but what isn't written about many places is that once all food is gone you start breaking down other substances in your body then those substances have to be released or you may poison your body instead, so you need to make sure you are doing something to really get a sweat on to bring them to the surface of your skin then use a brush to open your pores then shower it away otherwise it can just be reabsorbed into the body. Many people don't do this because they don't have the energy to work up a sweat but it is very important. Also I learned how connected food is to your sex drive as I had almost zero drive at all while fasting, so those looking to retain could benefit from examining their diet

When scriptures talk of fasting they may not only be talking about food, in some cases maybe not at all, rather they may be talking about fasting or denying yourself all sorts of things like fasting from excessive talking, fasting from stimulation, in one tradition I studied they say by far the most important form of fasting is from indulging in negative emotion.

This is normal, you have a nostril breathing cycle which changes about every 40 minutes or so I think, you may do more harm to yourself by trying to "fix" a natural rhythm in your body.

Ayahuasca is far too frightening to be severely abused in a recreational way, and its far too messy, nobody I know enjoys being locked in a state of terror while uncontrollably shitting yourself.

That is a good point daojones, putting up with abuse more often then not isn't a good thing for the other person, usually what they really want is for you to set the boundaries and set what is and isn't acceptable so they can learn that themselves. Putting up with abuse just means nobody learns anything and the cycle continues. I believe most people are craving sanity and are often subconsciously looking for others to show them the way, which is essentially what psychotherapy tries to do as you enter a relationship with a therapist who sets appropriate boundaries no matter what your own behaviour is so you can learn a healthier way to be in the world; if you have never been shown how to do this by another person in a relationship it is very difficult just to learn, so we look to our partners to do this for us and resent then when they don't often failing to realise they are in the same situation looking for similar things from us.

For sure, it is common to have a death experience on it, I thought I was going to die for a few hours when I drunk it, one of the things which calmed me a bit was the thought that people don't die taking it, which is why it is very important to get all the facts an autopsy.

I wonder how much planning or intent was behind the economic crisis, it has given an excuse for many industrial countries to take action to eventually make their economies more competitive so they can compete with countries like China. Plus it may lead to more European integration which wouldn't be tollerated without a crisis, with much of Europe effectively being dictated to by Germany (where have we heard that before?)

If such things "exist" they are more likely a product of the mountain of fear and anger humanity has accumulated taking some sort of form, and if you are "seeing" it then it may be part of your job in this life to help clean it up rather than avoid it seeing as you have been given the sensitivity to perceive it in one way or another.

Unlike many other drugs Ayahuasca isnt taken alone it is always mixed with other compounds so humans can access it, often other more toxic plants are added to the mix to add different effects. Simply looking at the history and what we know of the pharmacology of these substances it is more likely that one of these other plants was added at a toxic dose, this is using reason not emotion because many of the other substances are known to be more toxic. But this was bound to happen at some point as it is big business in Peru so many people are running centres just for the money,.I spoke to a taxi driver when I was in Iquitos and he said that there are very few genuine Shamen operating in these centres they are just people bluffing along for the easy money. The Shaman involved in this case would buy his brew from outside and not supervise his drinkers, which is a recipe for disaster.

I would expect deaths associated with Ayahuasca are more likely to do with people choking in their sleep after being sick or by triggering a pre exsiting condition in the body like a heart condition or aneurysm due to the stress of the experience, or mixing in too much of another toxic compound into the mixture, I would be very surprised if overdosing on it or the plant itself could kill anybody.

The Shaman involved Mancoluto aside from claiming to be descended from Martians by way of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Chavin de Huantar,also claimed to be a "First Level Shaman". He said there were only 5 such skilled people on earth,and that it signified they were: a) possessing of 7 senses including ESP, Telepathy, and Intuition,and b ) pure blooded Martians. Some people are saying it is more likely there is an overdose of another toxic ingredient called Toe in it as the Shaman didn't brew his own brew.

Ok it's not your thing, that is fine, without you personally meeting anyone from the system it is pretty hard for me to prove that he got results except by pointing you in the direction of the work of his students such as Jeanne De Salzmann, you can read her book "The Reality of Being" http://www.scribd.com/doc/99356205/Jeanne-de-Salzmann-The-Reality-of-Being-OCR where it is clear that she got results from Gurdjieff's system, but you don't seem to want to look at any other books. The Zen master Roshi Kobori said that she was "the most remarkable woman I have ever met" and the author Ravi Ravindra who studied with J. Krishnamurti said that in many ways she was the more advanced of the two, if that is worth anything at all. I can try to summarise the system, yet others have tried to do so and written lengthy volumes so whatever I write wont suffice. But essentially because we are all individuals with individual blockages and backgrounds all inner work is risky until we do a thorough self observation of ourselves, there are all sort of people who do incorrect breathing exercises and energy practices which do more harm than good you get them on this board all of the time so the first thing is to observe yourself, and a number of individual exercises are given to do this including stepping outside of ourselves in different situations in life to try to observe ourselves as impartially as possible in the middle of life. Then when you observe yourself enough over a long period of time you see how fragmented and disjointed you are as an individual you are in a position to receive genuine help and for other things to come in from the outside, then there are other exercises given to "remember yourself" which is an exercise where you observe all three centres of yourself at once, if you can achieve this then you can enter flow or unity. There are many other exercises given such as sensing different areas of the body while saying "I AM" so you can sense where in your body your sense of "I" is located, which are written about in Gurdjieff's third book and in Jeanne De Salzmann's book. There are many other areas of work such as hard physical work, music, enneagram work and many sacred dances all while observing yourself with the aim to transform within yourself what he describes as the "Chief feature" of your personality. When you work on yourself in the correct way and observe yourself your blockages become transformed and you begin to transmute your sexual energy naturally which creates a coating around your astral body which has the capacity to survive death and also as you are dissolving your personality structures you gain siddhi powers such as telepathy (as documented in Ouspensky's book "In Search of the Miraculous"). Really I can't do the system any sort of justice here so if you are interested you are better off reading about it on the web or in many of the hundreds of books written about it.

I'm not sure if you see the irony between this post and what you said earlier about the ADHD generation wanting everything instantly on a plate served up for them without hard work. But if it isn't your cup of tea that is fair enough, it isn't many other people's either. But I wouldn't call it gobbledygook, it is often regarded as one of the top 100 most influential books ever written http://en.wikipedia....ks_Ever_Written But I do think you would enjoy the book Meetings With Remarkable Men as if you are interested in genuine sincere seekers, you wont find one more determined to find the truth than Gurdjieff as he was prepared to risk everything to try to gain access to to all the secret and hidden teachings, which resulted in him being shot and imprisoned a few times and contracting a number of diseases and dealing with all sorts of hardships in his quest for truth going to places cut off from outsiders like Sufi, Temples, Christian Monasteries and Tibet when foreigners were still not allowed in; most modern seekers give up if they have to take a bus too far. You don't need to buy the books most of them are available for free now as they are quite old http://www.scribd.co...-Remarkable-Men

He calls the astral body "Kesjan" body because he knows many words people use are already loaded with innacurate meanings so in many cases he uses his own words for things. The system is somewhat hidden though on purpose because Gurdjieff realises that people only usually treasure things if they work hard to earn them. It's a very hard book to begin with though, you may get more out of reading his second book Meetings with Remarkable Men first, that is what I would recommend especially if you are only interested in serious seekers.

Gurdjieff's book Beelzebubs Tales to his Grandson contains an answer to nearly every question that I have ever read on this board, including an answer to your quest about being reborn and immortality. He says that if you cultivate correctly you refine your energy which creates a coating of your astral body which then has the capability to survive death, the process to do this is described scientifically using the Law of Three, the Law of Ocatves and the table of hydrogens. He didn't just teach regular development he brought back an entire science of cultivation, but he recognised that many of the old teachings are not very applicable any more to the modern busy scientifically minded person with the crust of ego we now have, so like all the great historical masters he adapted the teachings to the current situation and population. But none of what Gurdjieff teaches was invented by him, it is all old ancient knowledge from many different traditions which may well have been lost to the world forever if it was not for his extraordinary determination to seek out genuine knowledge and genuine masters. Siddhi tricks like lighting up boxes and escaping reincarnation were not as important to him as reducing the amount of suffering in the world as he lived during the two World Wars so one of his main ambitions was to find and root out the cause of such wars and destroy psychopathy which surrounds them.

Ouspensky was a scholar but Gurdjieff certainly wasn't, he passed on real development and teachings to others like Mm De Salzmann who many describe in similar terms as Eastern masters, if you study their books and meet someone who has been involved in a genuine lineage of the work it is clear it is vastly more than just mental knowledge. But Gurdjieff would probably agree with many of your comments, only .01% will get anywhere and he explains exactly why this is the case, but I am not aware of John Chang producing many disciples or being able to transmit his teachings so I don't know if he is any better example of a master, although I don't know that much about him except a few videos which wow people.

The Fourth Way taught by Gurdjieff has groups in most major cities in the world including Eastern ones, there are now probably over a hundred books written by students who have benefitted and developed their consciousness through it. There are quite a few working Western traditions they are just more secretive than many Eastern ones, you just have to dig a bit to find them. You will also find that most Taoist lineages are a mish mash of all sorts of teachings, nearly all of them have been heavily influenced by Buddhism for example, but such mish mashing isn't always such a bad thing.

I thought the Lords Prayer was just a regular hymn until I read Meister Eckharts commentary on it in a strange book called "The recapitulation of the Lords Prayer" which blew my mind. Also this might be of interest: " The Lord's Prayer, he said, always referring to it as "your Lord's Prayer," was designed "as a devotional breathing exercise to be chanted on a single even breath." The same was true of other ancient prayers composed in the East in the distant past. Subtle advantages of far-reaching value, he said, are derived from the vibrations caused by correct incantation, polarized mentally by the words of the prayers. To intone them as they were intended to be intoned equal attention must be devoted to the three elements: the breath, the sound, and the words. In the modern religion of the West, which has degenerated into hopeless institutional formalism, the words are mistaken for the whole thing. "I have been in many churches in England and America," said my mysterious host, "and always heard the congregation mumble the Lord's Prayer all together in a scrambled grunt as if the mere muttered repetition of the formula were all that is required." http://www.gurdjieff-legacy.org/40articles/ozay.htm

Have you read any of Bruce Frantzis books on the Water Method meditation SereneBlue? he talks about going into dissociated dream like states and explains what they are and how to deal with them, he is the only person I have found who discusses such things in any sort of satisfactory way as it happens to me too.

I thought the Shugden venerate Tsongkhapa as well as the lineage of the Dalai Lama? Both claim to protect his teachings I think

I have only heard good things about him from advanced practitioners who I trust, infact some say that he is one of the very few people who really gets it and without him Tibetan Buddhism would have crumbled a long time ago.

Repression happens when emotions emerge which threaten your sense of self and your attachment to the image you have of yourself, it is difficult to deal with but if you are taking the path of meditation then the advice is when such emotions emerge just witness them so you don't express them and you don't repress them either, so they are not too close but they are also not to far away. Over time if you are enquiring into who you really are your sense of self should expand and become more fluid so there will be less need to repress anything.

You could look up things like Quantum entrainment and Matrix Energetics. The guy who made Matrix Energetics says that you don't need to do years of meditation etc because all the other people in the past have done it so all you have to do is tap into the morphic field created by them to gain all the benefit. The guy who made Quantum Entrainment was a Vedanta student who found a way to quickly tap into big mind very easily without years of meditation or self enquiry.

To escape fear and anxiety... it's not really working though.

I didn't mean what I said to be fuzzy, I just thought LeonBasins perspective of Buddhism was a bit bleak so thought I'd mention other perspectives such as the Lojong and Shantideva "All happiness comes from cherishing others, all misfortune from cherishing yourself" The goal is to be more mindful and present like you say but there are different means to get there, these other teachings can be very skillful by showing you how to take any adverse circumstances on the path to aid you. For example he could use his loneliness for fuel for the Atisha meditation on "giving and taking" , so when you feel lonely you imagine your dearest loved ones in the same lonely isolated situation and it will awaken your compassion, then imagine all the other sentient beings in the same lonely place until the compassion is as intense as possible and then imagine willingly taking all of that suffering into your own heart so it ripens on you, then imagine giving away all your blessings, postive karma, good health etc to those beings so they become happy and awakened. If you are mindful to how your mind reacts against this giving and taking it can show you where it is fixated and clinging to things. So with this sort of approach you are not going out actually trying to save all sentient beings in a lovely dovey way, you are using adverse circumstances such as loneliness and other people for your own mind training and to awaken your own unlimited compassion.