konchog uma

i have really been loving Bugotak lately - a modern take on traditional Mongolian instrumentation and throat singing http://www.last.fm/music/Bugotak (for 15 free downloads and band info etc)

compassion and realization of suchness/noncontrivance/emptiness is a well known relationship. I don't think anyone who studies the buddha-dharma has a problem with that statement. It is known and accepted that as one's realization grows, so does the natural outgrowth of their compassion for others. My problem was always that vmarco was saying that without emptiness real compassion is impossible. Its as if he is trying to imply that there is his version of compassion, and then everything else is just what Trungpa Rinpoche called idiot compassion (or compassion without skillful means, as illustrated by taomeow's story about the fainting husband). My bone to pick with this dubious definition of compassion was confirmed by my teacher, who said that compassion is possible for people who haven't realized emptiness, and that the only compassion that hinged on that realization was unconditional compassion. I can only assume that thats what Thurman was trying to translate when he chose to use the word "real" and that vmarco, in his seeming need to rant about something that we were all wrong about, picked up on that phrase and turned it into an ongoing diatribe about how his compassion was the result of his being grounded in realization of emptiness (which is completely doubtful) and our compassion was all wrong because we weren't bodhisattvas. That kind of ego posturing is what i, and others were speaking out against. Not the claim that compassion and emptiness are related. They are most certainly related, just not in the way vmarco claims they are. if i saw vmarco rant about this stuff on buddhist forums i would feel differently about him, but of course he would immediately be discredited by those who understand the dharma, and actually have achieved realization. hope that clarifies things.

hands held in the dark or are they your feet instead? you do have long toes

thanks trunk, may your reorganization be for the best!

ooohlala exciting, i was perusing my favorite bookstore the other day and found two first editions: Jolan Chang's "The Tao of Love and Sex" and "The Tao of the Loving Couple: True Liberation Through the Tao" from 1977 and '83

I have been working in my meditation for the last few weeks on not contriving the breath at all. It has been very fruitful, and amazing to me how resting the attention on the breath causes, automatically, the diaphram or belly muscles to contrive in subtle ways. I received this insight from the B Alan Wallace retreat called introduction to dzogchen that i was listening to just recently. In it he says that monks would typically have to go on retreat to figure out how to rest their mind on the breath without contriving it. So i decided to try to be aware of my breath but from the point of view of non-action, and i can corroborate that it is very hard not to try subconsciously to regulate the breath! Especially if you have done a lot of bellows breathing, or reverse breathing, but i suspect, even if you have just done basic mediation on the breath. I have had a modicum of success, nothing to speak of yet, but i have noticed that when i really let my breath go, it gets shallow and more subtle, but that it brings on a state of stillness and relaxation that is very deep. I just don't want to move at all.. like even a tiny muscle twitch would stand out.. my shoulders relax and my arms feel like lead weights, and my eyelids just freeze where they are. Its very interesting.. i just sit there in a state of nondoing, aware. I have found it at times very easy to remain in a state of non-thought (which, from a dzogchen point of view, seems to be just another distraction, but anyway...) and at times i have found that letting go of the control of my breath has caused thoughts to flow very freely... i can't quite say what makes this difference, as such things are complicated in their cause and effect.. could be planets, could be what i ate for breakfast, could be anything... So i am wondering has anyone else tried this? if not you should lol.. it is said to take weeks in retreat to really deprogram the mind from contriving the breath, but wow is it an amazing feeling just to sit in even a *partially* unmanipulated state. I can't claim to be completely uncontrived, but i am going to keep working on this sincerely, as the early fruits have been very sweet, and i am inspired by the idea of uncontrived meditation. Anyway, if you have tried this, do you have anything to share about it? I am curious of others experiences with this sort of "technique"

i hear you. just did a search for "buddhists" and "nits" and found nothing. i apologize to you!

for a while i felt like i had to police what was being passed off as the buddha-dharma, but yes am pretty happy ignoring, seeing as most buddhists here seem to share the opinion that he is misrepresenting it. it irks me, and i have been working with it a lot lately... how stereotypically "buddhist" it is of me, and how i am feeding the whole scenario by giving it my attention. How its clear to everyone whats going on, and i don't need to involve myself in that capacity, how vmarco is completely closed to opinions that don't feed his own ego and so is not actually going to change for anyone pointing out the inconsistencies in his philosophy, and how everything is self-regulating: his actions generate his karma, and thats his problem. My actions don't have to be linked to the mess he creates... and my ego doesn't have to insulted just because someone else says offensive things. All of that and more... its been very eye-opening to see how i react so willingly to the candy that he dangles out there with his polemic and prejudices, with my own variety of same. ick. and i know he likes the attention because he is convinced that he has a liscense on truth and those who disagree with him are just doing it because they are wrong lol Thanks for your encouragement to make TTB a more harmonious place. I'll do my best.

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apologies if im mistaken, and you're welcome.

good reminders, thanks

lets just stay on topic please sorry to "spoil" your fun vmarco but i would rather you not turn another thread into your soapbox for "real compassion this and bodhisattva that" and your unique brand of pseudo-buddhism. put down the polemic and slowly back away from this thread... its for dwai to receive feedback on his writing. anything else (including your neo-dharma rants) is hijacking it. spoiler over and out

me too Seth, i think he works for others.. yknow "Them" whoever they are

i am curious why you use katte instead of just saying embankment? and hotel instead of just saying restaraunt? but this from an american perspective, so not meaning anything except curiosity. i agree the parenthetical content is hard to handle, because it breaks up the flow of the text. When i reach a set of paretheses my mind sort of resets and the flow of the story is broken so that i can assimilate what is in the parentheses. in chap 2 for example you could say that the king was a Vijayanagara king with commas instead. I found a lot of examples where the parentheses were extraneous. i don't know a lot about writing, like others here seem to, but i know what is readable in a fluid way, and i think that it would benefit the story to remove the extraneous parts and smooth the sentences where lengthy explanations are given, like when the traveler is introduced. It sounded scientific and precise, and i thought if it were looser and more casual, the story would read more fluidly then again as someone else pointed out, perhaps its due to particularities of the Indian way of reading/writing, or something else done purposefully for your target audience. i must say i did not feel like your target audience also agree with "show dont tell" and think that an eye to that would improve the writing i like the content, and the simplicity of how it is presented. Its not flowery or adorned with extra words for their own sake, and the character of Bhadramanu is likable. at the end of chap 2, perhaps it would serve the mystery of his accomplishment better to have him say that he would not be sure he could help? i found that strange that a person who claimed to be a stupid wanderer would hear a vague account of supernatural darkness and follow with "i think i can help"... seems perhaps he should keep up his ruse?? well im going to stop there, i started reading chap 3 but since i don't know enough about writing to offer truly helpful advice, i can only hope that my perspective is useful because i am ignorant. Apologies for all the criticism and the sparse complements, its nice to read your work, whether its written for americans or not lol thank you for sharing

seems like a non-sequiter... not sure what tummo and icke have in common. you could start a new thread on tummo, a certain member here was just claiming to be able to teach new things to those who had mastered tummo, and suggesting that a thread on the subject be started. i leave his name out because its irrelevant to this thread, and i encourage all not to derail it.

once again a thread is derailed and vmarco needs to be pointed out some basic learnings it gets old

a month ago you were calling buddhists useless nits now you have no 'i' i wish my progress moved along that fast! in response to the questions of the OP david icke is a fearmonger. Without the human propensity for paranoia and new things to fear and obsess about, he would be penniless. There is proof of some of gvmt conspiracy theory in quotes made my rockefellers and rothschilds etc, but as to lizards from 4th dimension, uhh wheres the proof? i havent seen it. I think he mixes in truth about the power structure with his own alien nonsense, and when people realize that the trilateral commission does exist and that they do conspire to control the economies of nations, they leap to the conclusion that everything icke says is true! dangerous and absurd i think the reptilian brain is the only shred of pseudo-truth to his storys about blood drinking shapeshifters.. that we all have a basal ganglia which Paul MacLean proposed was governer of territory, aggression, dominance, etc as the "reptilain brain" is only maclean's version of the story.. read the wikipedia link it doesn't mention territory aggression dominance any of it.. so i don't think that explains anything except that maclean had a fringe theory that icke picked up on to justify his lizard rants.

its possible to practice withholding orgasm all the way until you can have internal orgasms, and still be able to, if desired, ejaculate. They aren't mutually exclusive. And the genital area, the pelvic floor, the PC muscle, none of those tighten up by the practice of withholding. The process tends to shift from a muscular one to an energetic one at a point in most people's progress, and become somewhat automatic at a point after that, but it doesn't really ossify or tighten anything.

i was listening to gil fronsdal give a nice talk on right speech today, and vmarco's ideal of insulting a person's ego to wake them up came to mind. I wanted to post this, because according to gil, shakyamuni gave clarification on what was right speech twice in his teachings. the first time he said that right speech was not lying, not using divisive speech, not using harsh speech, and not chattering idly. the second time he said that right speech could be measured by asking these questions before we communicate: is what we are going to say true? is it timely? it is beneficial? does it contribute to greater harmony? is it kind? i found that to be helpful, and i hope you all do too. especially vmarco it would be nice to hear something that contributed to greater harmony, or something kind... yknow just for buddhas sake also ran across this today: "When we talk about compassion, we talk in terms of being kind. But compassion is not so much being kind; it is being creative to wake a person up." -chogyam trungpa rinpoche (bolding mine) so i think being creative, not destructive, is the key to really being able to awaken beings and effect positive change in the world, which is the bodhisattva's ideal.

from where do you get that definition of shamanism? as i have learned, shamanism is a lifestyle, not a belief system, and it has as much to do with opening the ordinary state of one's consciousness up to being able to interact with the invisible world as it has to do with altering one's state to do so. most shamans i have seen employ altered states, but for things like deep healing, or soul retrieval, etc. They are in touch with the spiritual world without altering their state. sorry to split hairs, just curious if you pulled that definition from somewhere, or if it was your invention...

impossible to say without clairvoyance... it sounds like sending energy towards your head did something but who knows haha thats kundalini for you keep playing around with your energies, in five or ten years you'll think youre the true shit and you'll wonder what you ever complained about lol btw those spasms are clearing out your channels so you can have experiences like that. 1 billion Indians would be grateful for them and you complain all over this forum every chance you get... lol only in america

i dont think its a link itself. i would guess that its the process by which the links evolve into the next

according to the buddha, it was intention that directed the karmic force of the action. most of those teachings are first turning and as such will be found in the pali cannon. i think its funny that he quoted the buddha in a correct and appropriate way, but you disagree, not because you refute the assertion, but because you don't like theravada. At least you admit your bias... but thats about all i can say for that approach. i will give an example. suppose you buy someone who is hungry some food out of good intentions, but they choke on the food and have to go to the hospital, running up a horrible bill they can't afford, and being injured on top of that. the intention to help was goodwill, but the effect was very negative. according to the view of effect being primary, the person who fed the hungry would lose merit and acquire a karmic stain because someone else choked and they enabled it. according to the buddha and the idea of intention being primary cause, the person would accumulate merit because they acted with positive intentions in spite of the karma which the recipient of the virtue carried, which would cause them to choke and suffer. just something to think about. intentions and effects often differ for many reasons, most of which are out of the control of the person with the intentions.

i haven't achieved jhana so have nothing to offer from personal opinion. I understand what you're saying about consciousness with signs/characteristics. True it doesn't rest in thoughts or non-thought... in a state of non-conceptual realization one can have thoughts, they just aren't seen as real, followed, or if one is practicing shine or shamatha, they don't take ones attention from the breath as they are dissolved as they arise... that has been my experience of it anyway, and accords with the teachings. Yes vipashyana and most methods at all, until up to realization of mahamudra non-meditation and atiyoga are contrived, or conceptual. Not sure why you bring jhanas up btw. I assume its not in direct response to anything i said.

i wouldn't pretend to practice the inner yogas without a teacher. except maybe phowa, and even then, for more than just mundane visualizations you'll need some great luck. im doing ngondro, and intend to take tantric vows when im done, and then maybe i'll learn the inner yogas, and even THEN i wouldnt discuss them in a thread on the internet.