Jetsun

Thanks this is something for me to contemplate.

Thanks for all the replies, it may sound like a bit of a basic question yet I generally don't find a lot of people tackling it directly, or only talking about it cryptically. It makes sense that consciousness itself could be the force which unites yin and yang as it is possible to have both yin and yang forces in your awareness at the same time which can prevent one from dominating your awareness, I know that they are both only exist in relationship with one another but in your own conscious awareness without some sort of training usually one dominates over the other and claims your awareness. I am trying to work out how the lower Dan Tian relates to this. I don't do any Tai Ji myself but I do self awareness and observation exercises and I have discovered that the left side of my body feels more emotional and fluid and the right stronger or more assertive, yet there doesn't seem to be much harmonisation between the two sides of my body and sometimes it even feels like they are at war with each other, so I do think harmonisation is needed and it is something which is described in European Alchemy quite a lot as a necessary stage in development, you unite the sun and moon or king and queen to create an inner hermaphrodite.

What tools and strategy are you going to use to fight this war? It can't be fought in the ordinary way or you just end up with repressing your lust which just strengthens it in the long run and leads to internal conflict as those energies are now in the dark of your subconscious where they fester and get twisted and perverted. So you need to keep your lust in the light of your consciousness without letting it dominate you, so this war requires a specific attitude and approach based on wisdom rather than aggression.

Seems like quite a harsh attitude to have, I think your progress will be slower if you take a similar attitude to this stuff as you would to say train for a marathon, its not all about driving yourself through infact this stuff should make your attitude softer towards yourself if you are a really driven person. If you take a neurotic driven attitude to meditation it could just make you worse, but it all depends on the individual. There is a Zen story about this which goes something like a monk asks his master how long it will take him to get enlightened if he meditated for three hours a day and the master replied "ten years", then the student asked how long it would take if he meditated for twelve hours a day and the master replied "50 years".

I don't know, I think Freud was so much in his own head that he never went below the drama of the war of the mind.

In psychoanalytic terms peace means strengthening the ego so it has power over the id and superego, which is useful and necessary but I don't think that leads to any sort of deep peace, most psychologists don't seem to have found it anyway. In Fourth Way psychology they say that mans mind isn't just three parts but rather hundreds of parts all of which are striving to be heard and competing to be king, you could spend your whole life trying to satisfy them all but the only thing which can unify all the parts is your heart, so peace will only be found by withdrawing your identity from your mind into your heart as it is the force of identity which fuels the neverending competition in the mind.

I'm no instructor but in the beginning I made my legs vibrate a bit on purpose with my own will, then the vibration took over by itself without me doing it. Take it easy though it can be powerful.

You can get the basic Kunlun/Yigong method from Jenny Lambs dvd

I have read books by body psychotherapists who believed they could diagnose a persons mental issues from their body and posture alone, your body reflects your psychology so for example if you are under a great deal of stress you might have "the world on your shoulders" so the energetic stress is accumulating in your shoulders. But I doubt you can control this stuff consciously with your own intent although you might be able to let psychological content go which then changes your body or make some changes with hypnosis.

The aim to save all beings is the path of the Boddhisattva and what is required is compassion for unlimited amount of sentient beings and not to rest until they are all free of suffering, but the crux is if there are unlimited sentient beings saving them all is impossible because they are unlimited and suffering is inevitable so you can't prevent it, but you try anyway and see where that paradox leads you.

Or turn the wheel in the opposite direction

Some say that in the West we once had a complete genuine knowledge and teaching but we lost it. Many people have tried to resurrect Celtic Druidry but it but it is impossible to say that it is the real deal. But the work of John O'Donohue is really good which we talked about here http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?/topic/22128-wisdom-from-the-celtic-world/page__p__316330__hl__celtic%20__fromsearch__1entry316330 It is hard to find a genuine working path with Celtic druidry though but it is an interesting area to study.

The way of the fakir is one valid route to development but it is a pretty unbalanced and haphazard one and to say it is the only way means ignoring all the other people who have developed in other paths. You talk in what psychologists call black and white thinking Tulku, things are the only way or they are not a way at all, its not very healthy and often leads to extremism in one form or another.

I was reading about this Sutra just now in a Nan Huai Chin book, he says it is one of the most important and useful Sutras you can find, you can find free copies online but I wonder what the best translation is?

If your going to do fasting you need complete knowledge of what you are doing or you will make yourself more sick. I did a 6 day no food fast last year and did a lot of research and what is important if you want to get the most out of is is that you need to sweat every day through exercise or steam room to remove the toxins from your body or you just pollute your body more, because after your body has broken down all the food in your body it starts to break down all the other fats and muscle contents which releases an enormous amount of toxins which need to be released, so you need to sweat and also brush your skin with a brush cleaning the pores then shower every day to remove the toxins on your skin or they get re-absorbed into your body. Also if you do fast expect to smell really really bad so you don't have to worry about women they won't go anywhere near you. edit: you should only fast if you have been checked by a doctor and if you are in good health, also it shouldn't be done out of masochism

At one point in time people used architecture to study and teach the divine

There is no one path which suits everyone, there are hundreds of thousands of meditation techniques because we are all individual so you just have to find what works for you, whether that is one simple technique or a succession of stages its down to where you are personally on your journey.

I would forget about mco and either do nothing or do some sort of downward flow qigong like the Water Method.

That is only true when watching Ron Jeremy porn as you will get so disgusted at the thought that he could be your next father that you will do anything to achieve liberation from rebirth.

Englishness just like every single thing when you break it down far enough doesn't exist, so it is hard to define exactly as this one thing, especially as things vary a lot from region to region and like everything else it is always changing. But I guess it can be defined by certain psychology which is influenced by all sorts of things from the entire history of the country and the landscape itself; the mentality of a people is very much influenced by its weather, its plants and animals, its food and drink, beer, it's religious history. Recently I have been feeling closer to my country by connecting to the land, by going on Pilgrimages to all the amazing ancient sacred sites many of which are Celtic and Pagan and earlier where you can still connect to the spirit of the place. If you believe in Shamanism we have spirits unique to our land, at one point White Horses were carved all over our hills which some believe is out mother spirit. People seem to be ashamed of having pride in England these days because nationalism has been hijacked by the far right and hooligans, today is our national day St George's day and you hardly hear anything about it, people tend to celebrate St Patrick's day more which is strange, but I think there are many things here which are worth appreciating.

I have some pride in being English but not in a competitive way, I think difference and individuality is good and should be celebrated, I much prefer it when I go abroad that people are confident in their own culture and value it rather than apologise for it. You can have pride but in a mature way where you value its positives without the need to be in competition with anyone else or see it as superior, I value my own nationality but I don't see it as any better than the French or German or anyone else (except the Aussies because they are just a down grade version of us )

Doing a load of meditation and Qigong etc can just make you more unbalanced as an individual, Ken Wilber talks about this issue quite a lot how meditation isn't aimed to deal with your shadow psychological issues so to assume just because someone has spent years meditating and doing Qigong and calls themselves a Taoist or Buddhist it doesn't mean they have managed to bring any peace or balance to the more conflicted parts of their psyche, they may just be burying their issues deeper and deeper with their practice. Also there is always the danger with this stuff that it just creates another layer of ego but this time a spiritual or religious ego, which in many ways is far more ugly and distorted than the one that was produced out of your childhood.

Thanks it's always nice to have a good video to watch at work instead of actually working, she sounds like a good teacher dedicated to truth ahead of dogma. I can't find part three though maybe it's not uploaded yet.

"Words of my Perfect Teacher" by Patrul Rinpoche http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Teacher-Revised-Edition-Literature/dp/1570624127 is highly regarded, it probably goes into a bit more depth than many other introductions though so it depends how much detail you want