Jetsun

Nan Huai Chin (who has been recognised as being as master in a number of different Taoist and Buddhist lineages) suggests that the most important aspect of breathing is recognising the significance of what happens in the gap in-between the breath.

I just watched this programme on the tv how plants emit gasses when one of their leaves are attacked so they warn each other and communicate that a predator is about. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2096302/Prince-Charles-right-plants-really-communicate-another.html#ixzz1locYnPSE I always thought plants were more intelligent than most people give them credit for. I don't think I will look at a cabbage in the same way again.

There are some forums which are completely open and unmoderated, but they attract some very messed up people so I wouldn't recommend spending too much time on them if you want to avoid negative influences.

Thought I would share the story of Yongey Mingur Rinpoche as I found it really interesting. You often hear stories about masters but personally I often find it hard to relate to their lives in a practical way but Yongey Mingur Rinpoche explains how as a child he had severe panic attacks and social anxiety which led to great unhappiness, but after some time suffering he managed to turn things around and started to use the panic as the object of his meditation and made friends with it and since then he hasn't had a panic attack since. At the age of thirteen he began his first three year meditation retreat and after it's completion he was told that he should become the retreat master making him the youngest retreat master in history. Last year instead of going on another three year retreat he decided to just walk out on everything and become a wandering Yogi My link so if you are in India anytime over the next few years visiting any of the pilgrimage sites you might bump into him.

It is pretty brave to become a wandering Yogi in this day and age and shows he is genuine in his devotion as he has enough fame, followers and wealth to live comfortably for the rest of his life. I would find it difficult to leave without my wallet and phone for a few days but apparently he didn't even take his toothbrush with him and just wandered off with trust he will be taken care of.

If you are interested in a more scientific side to practice there are a number of Tibetan Lama's who are working in conjunction with neuroscientists at The Mind and Life Institute http://www.mindandlife.org/ . I have just been reading about Yongey Mingur Rinpoche who has been working a lot with neuroscientists and when they first hooked him up to EEG machines to measure his wellbeing during meditation his scores were so off the charts that the scientists thought the machine was broken

Chartres Cathedral in France is the best example I know of Sacred geometry so it may be a good place to get information. It has Sun and Moon towers (ie Yin and Yang) at the front and Jesus is depicted at it's heart, with the Labyrinth or vortex at the lower dan tien. It is astrologically aligned and aligned with the local ley lines and scientists still can't work out how they made the stain glass so bright. Good thing the inquisition missed this spot off in their attempts to eradicate Western knowledge.

I have been trying to find healing for many years and have tried all sorts of methods, my thinking at the moment is that most of these methods reinforce the mindset that something is wrong which needs fixing which in turn just strengthens the issue, while if you become neutral to it and observe things with a bit of detachment often things just get resolved. I was reading recently about a Tibetan rinpoche who had bad panic attacks and anxiety as a child but through Buddhist psychology and meditation he made friends with his anxiety during a retreat and observed the issues as habits and tendencies of mind which come and go rather than a big problem which needs to be gotten rid of and he hasn't had a panic attack since, now he says he misses his panic attacks as they were a great teacher.

You can't diagnose someones mental health from a few internet posts, that is pure arrogance, many people use the internet to express their shadow side. Just look at half the posts you find underneath Youtube video,s they are dark side, people use the internet to express what they can't in regular life. I'd be surprised if Tulku really means half the stuff he says, if you look at forums like 4Chan Tulku is tame in comparison.

You could probably label most of the trolls on the internet as having a level of psychosis, and there are millions of them. Everyone is on the crazy scale at one point.

I'm not sure labelling someone a Beta male, anti 007 and comparing then to non is going to help their confidence. All such categorisations just inprison a person further in negative mind sets. There are some ideas in this thead in the healing section http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?/topic/23798-releasing-childhood-belief-systems-and-emotional-patterns/ which might be useful , there are some interesting healing methods people have mentioned in there like Matrix energetics , Now healing 101 and the Yuen Method.

According to the Law of Octaves life on earth can devolve as well as evolve, which is evidenced by there being previous cultures which had more advanced spiritual understandings than we have now; examples of this happening are the dark ages in Europe after the great advances of the Greek and Roman times, there have been many times in history where knowledge is lost and things go backwards like what happened after the burning of the Library of Alexandria and regressive ideologies became popular. Maybe it is an assumption to assume things are spiritually evolving and there are some who say that if we don't have enough humans cultivating and linking up the energies of earth and heaven then the earth won't evolve and will die off, which is the the purpose of man on this earth and the reason for our existence, and at the moment things could go either way.

Hi Snowmonki, do you still practice any of the Bruce Frantzis stuff now alongside SM?

There are master's who used to drink and party, people like Drukpa Kunley would teach the Dharma through songs and poetry while drunk and he is still considered a saint today in some parts of the world, Chogyam Trungpa was renowned for his partying (although Alcohol killed him so he's probably not the best example). Gurdjieff used to say that there was always a part of you which isn't drunk no matter how much you drink and he would use alcohol to bring out hidden parts of peoples psyche and help to make people conscious, so like most things alcohol and partying can be used if you have a skillful enough master. Some dogmatic Buddhists would probably get a lot out of letting go and partying for a while.

Your conclusions pretty much match my own, the modern mans sense of gravity is too high up in the head probably due largely to our modern lifestyles and culture, in previous cultures people would do a lot more physical work like farm work and just basic things like collecting water and building things with our hands which naturally brought people down to the earth a bit more, but that is no longer the case. So the question is whether the spiritual techniques designed for those more grounded people are useful or even applicable for modern people, certainly the first thing most of us need to do is to come down to our bodies somehow. This is what Gurdjieff realised when teaching his students, he went to Tibet and learned a lot of advanced meditation techniques but he found that they were not suited for many of his western students because they were too cut off from their bodies so he would prescribe body sensing exercises as preperation with "I Am" sensing so people could sense where their sense of "I" is usually located in their body and bring it down, he would say that most of us have greatly advanced mind development now but our emotional development is stuck usually at about 15 years old or younger so all work needs to begin with coming back to your body and emotions and away from the head otherwise you develop in an unbalanced way .

The White Skeleton meditation which Bill Bodri and Nan Huai Chin teach is quite good, it involves visualising loosing all of your skin and flesh, then feeling your skeleton and visualising it bright white, then visualising your skeleton crumbling away in the wind. It is a good meditation to remind you that at some point you are not going to exist and my experience with this is that instead of it being depressing or scary it is actually very liberating, in the light of your non existence all your stresses and worries and ego battles are completely irrelevant so you might as well just let it all go as it not important in the long run.

I have been reading about the Kebzeh Sufis of the Caucasus mountains who are renowned for their longevity and low rates of disease and they say the same thing that we eat too much, in order for our bodies to properly eliminate toxins it needs uninterrupted time to do so without snacks or coffee , so we should only be having a few meals a day and if we have a lot of meat only one meal a day, they would consider the regular grazing diet as the most harmful one going.

Perhaps it is, but as long as people believe otherwise there will be problems and imbalance at least in human relationships with each other and the planet. Freud would agree that all spirituality is escapism and people like Chogyam Trungpa wrote books on it as it is a common occurance. At the moment my personal thinking is that real spiritual growth may have to involve suffering of some sort and willingly suffering or consciously suffering isn't escapism if it is the right sort of suffering, so it all depends on what sort of spiritual pursuits you are engaged in.

Unless there was something you were here to do which you didn't get round to because you were too busy with your own dream

If you want to go celibate you need to understand the relationship with diet, to not overly arouse a frustrated sexuality you need to only eat very bland food, no sugar, nothing rich at all, no sauces or spices just really boring bland food. Also you need to know exactly how to transmute the energy, Gurdjieff writes in his books about the results of monks who practised celibacy without the proper knowledge, they would either become fat like pigs or lean and cruel hearted due to the misuse of sexual energy in the body.

I wouldn't believe everything you read about this, some people have made a lot of money through Ayahuasca tourism so there are people trying to do the same with Iboga and take some of their crowd. Essentially Ayahuasca will eventually show you your inner essence so it is about inner exploration as well, it's not all about going on a crazy trip.

Good luck, the Bruce Parry episode on Iboga is really good if anyone is interested From my own experience with Ayahuasca the most harmful blocks for the process are your own expectations and attitudes so you are better off going into it with as much an open mind and few expectations as possible to get the most out of it.

The principle of non resistance?

Thanks that is interesting

A child will take their friends ice cream from them and make them cry without worrying about it, children are wonderful because they are still natural but I don't know many of them who are Saints.