konchog uma

@ adept : the buddha never advocated forgiveness without punishment of all beings just because they are sentient. @ deci belle : yes human nature is awake. wakefulness is beyond concepts of good and evil, it is just awake! it can be awake and good, or awake and evil! or obscured by some kind of torpor but it is still there, awake... like de_paradise pointed out, humans are inherently good and inherently evil. But the ground of being, the nature of our basic wholeness as human beings is beyond moral distinction. It is like saying 'is a fox good or evil?" they eat chickens so if you like chickens they are evil, and if you dont like chickens they are good. So much conversation about inherent human nature comes down to this.

is spamming TTB against forum rules?

do you guys get paid to advertise for greaterhumanpotential.com? cause your posts are really annoying

whats with all the new users and their link to greaterhumanpotential.com? lol "open your third eye" "law of attraction" "remote viewing" "stress reduction meditation" but then they say red wine is better than meditation? hehehe easier maybe...

i didnt look at the site cause i dont have time right now but be careful practicing energy arts without a teacher!!

hello from Pittsburgh! keep practicing what you know already, and look for opportunities to learn new things from qualified teachers! that is the path in a nutshell lol... best wishes to you and welcome to taobums

many of the buddhas and deities in buddhism live basically forever... after shakyamuni's "death" he continued to manifest as a spirit or sambogakaya emanation.. there is definitely some overlap between buddhism and immortality and to answer your question directly, i dont see any contradiction between longevity as a daoist immortal and enlightenment in the buddhist sense

sorry for the misunderstanding. I was trying to express that those goals are not similar. The daoist goal involves living forever and the tibetan goal involves death. hope i didnt confuse anyone

dobro pozhalovat i dont speak russian btw just wanted to say one thing

99.99% void with some dancing energy waves that create the illusion of solidity "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" a glorified dream that remains as it was yesterday for our benefit (or for some reason beyond comprehension) ultimately, the more you try to intellectualize about reality, the further you are getting away from the essence of that reality. So that is why i meditate.. to cultivate direct experience of things in an unfabricated way great post michael, thanks

as to the question about the tibetans vanishing into light, thats called rainbow body and is different than immortality practices. rainbow body dissolution into light (leaving hair and nails) only happens upon death. In fact its considered the most elevated way to die. Then depending on ones mastery of dream states and the bardo, one can go where they wish to be reborn, so in a sense, there is that aspect of immortality of the soul, but the general tendancy of tibetan buddhists is to look at extreme longevity and immortality practices as a sort of self-clinging, or ego exercise. if you look into it you should find info. Read Chogyal Namkhai Norbu's "The Crystal and the Way of Light" for more info but thats the only firsthand account i can think of. He writes about a guy under house arrest whose progress in the rainbow body death was disturbed by authorities who said that they went into his room but he was tiny like a child, they were kinda freaked out so they went back in a couple days with some more men, but all that was left was hair and nails. CNN writes about several cases of rainbow body he witnessed firsthand, some were people related to him, very good book, highly recommended

yeah i quit both because of my practice and for other reasons, but i think that the best thing for a serious practitioner is to be stimulant and drug free, to the most refined degree that they can. Being on a natural cycle (not up and down in the case of caffeine, or nic-fitting in the case of nicotine) is the best for ones natural flow of energy and for ones meditative state. Most drugs are dependance-forming to some degree, and that is just no bueno mi amigos... furthermore i think there are two kinds of drugs, which i will call intoxicants and entheogens. Intoxicants, like cannabis, alcohol, all the hard drugs, etc just make you feel "high". They might have interesting effects on ones energy, as you could imagine, but they mostly, as mentioned, cause dependance. The entheogens on the other hand, like peyote, psilocybin, DMT, iboga, etc seem to be conscious entities or to act as catalysts to put one in touch with conscious entities that will guide and assist and heal and cleanse the practitioner. These tend to not be habit forming, although they are best taken under the auspices of a practiced healer or shaman who can lead ceremony. Im not going to get into it except to say that taking them recreationally is disrespectful and indulgent and you will never get the benefits that sacramental use brings IMO. ultimately the 8 circuits of consciousness theory, mckennas research into entheogen based shamanism, and other debutante excuses for taking drugs are for the most used to justify indulgent and dangerous behavior in the name of "healing" or "exploration". all 8 circuits are accessable to the sober yogi or meditator, most shamanism doesnt involve entheogens at all, and warns against the harms that can come to the reckless pracitioner (don juan told carlos that he only was using power plants with him because he was too stupid and blocked to walk the normal path, and warned against the deleterious effect that they have on ones energy body to boot). the buddha classified intoxicants down there with killing, lying, stealing, and sexual misconduct... that pretty much says it all from a cultivation standpoint. In my opinion, unless you are taking entheogens in a sacred way, you are engaging in psychedelic masturbation, and not on much better footing than someone using intoxicants. so thats my 2 cents. haha

As was mentioned in another thread its hard, in my opinion, to find an outlet for kundalini energy. That is to say that especially in the beginning, its pretty high voltage and hard to channel constructively for many people. I think thats the point of yoga and meditation surrounding K, to open up the body and the channels so it doesn't run away with the practitioner, because it definitely has a mind of its own. I put this post in the General forum because kundalini isn't limited to vedic thought or vedanta, and a lot of the uses people put it to are more universal, like healing and energy work, or just applying ones enhanced intuition to whatever practice they are engaged in. Its also applicable to magical work, Crowley wrote pretty extensively on the importance of awakening the K and its significance as a magical source of power, not sure which book tho. A lot of people who have near death experiences come back with awakened kundalini, and find it hard to integrate into their daily lives.. but they find themselves in 5 or 10 years in a position to use their gift for healing... there was a great Coast to Coast AM with George Noory last year about just that, if any of you are subscribers and can dig in the archives.. (it wasn't about K per se but about NDE). Even a lot of people who awaken their energies via shaktipat or some more stabilized way of working with it have some trouble with "the sizzle" as my ninja teacher calls it.. its just powerful. So thats a little of what i was talking about which i was asked to clarify in that other thread. Has anyone else found their own energies hard to make sense of or flush with their daily lives? I hope some more experienced bums can say something helpful if they are moved to... we have the benefit of some really awesome practitioners here who have a lot of K experience so thanks, and there you go -K-

for you non-homophobic daoists mind you

simple jack, thank you for your input. I do not claim to have understood him correctly. He says there is a reality that we need to pay attention to. We were talking about emptiness and luminosity and it was quite some time ago so i am not sure that what i am saying is accurate either.

thanks for your contributions to the sanity of TaoBums apech! what are you going to do with all your free time now??

I came across the Art of Memory via the writings of John Crowley (who is of course the best author in the world ever, but thats another discussion) in Little, Big and Aegypt, and research into Giordano Bruno, a defrocked dominican friar, astronomer, philosopher, artist, and mathematician. He was burned at the stake for disagreeing with the catholic church, and one of the things he realized and wrote about (aside from the fact that the sun is just a star and the heavens are full of millions of them and that there is probably other intelligent life in the universe) was the Art of Memory. As the wiki page i linked above indicates, there are many techniques which have been called "art of memory". I have worked with creating an elaborate visualization of a "memory mansion" with a room for each aspect of what i want to remember. I can place objects in the rooms to stand for certain things or remind me of them, and i can revisit those things via the visualization. When i first learned of it, i thought "what a bothersome nuisance" but after working with it i have had some amazing experiences. Like my shrine room (in the east wing lol)... the statues there and i have had some really excellent conversations, which is not the point of the art of memory, but seemingly a side effect. But in many ways the point of the art is that things will spontaneously arise in the mind's memory mansion which will allow the inhabitant insight and greater and greater access to memory. Have any of you bums worked with this? Heard of it? Read those pages and have some thoughts? I would love to hear them... blessings

oh yeah im in as long as it has a cool name like The Magnificent Juggernaut Space Pirate Club or The Fraternity of Triumphant Slow Lorises (sorry ladies) or The Order of Golden Berserkers

yes i think to deepen my own understanding. Maybe teach, maybe author.. like i said, no idea where that would take me, totally surfing the bliss wave on that one...

exactly seth

hi rainbowvein i am actually at a point in my life where my energies have started to settle down and really stabilize, and i am looking for just that project. Because i am disabled due to a nasty incident with a fast car, i have been looking into assistance for schooling. I actually sat through 5 hours of neurology tests today because they want to know if i will need any help in the classroom as a result of the head trauma. I passed most of the tests with flying colors btw! and the state payed for it all, whew! Anyway my personal passion at present is buddhism, and i am considering doing my undergrad at community college and then looking at UC Berkeley or maybe Harvard or Chicago school of divinity to do a doctorate program in buddhist studies. Talk about following my bliss! i have no idea what i want to do with that degree whatsoever! hahaha my interest test results said that i am a 79% match to be happy as a librarian. It didn't mention buddhism lol. But that is all how i feel today, and maybe in a week i will feel different. maybe when i get to school i will feel differently, or be exposed to something really cool that i end up liking as a career path. Who can say. hahah funny to put it in terms of what i am most passionate about, since passions are discouraged in dharmic thought lol

sure K! i talked to Eva Wong about kundalini earlier this month Grandmaster P, she was completely familiar with it, and knew it as 'yang chi' and said it can be ignited by qigong. in my understanding kundalini is a kind of 'qi'.. its its own kind tho, its not normal qi. If i knew more about tcm and the names for kinds of qi i could be more helpful but i am shaky on that. For a good read, check out William Bodri's Little Book of Hercules.

good stuff everyone only one stupid response out of 14, and i think it was meant sincerely anyway! im glad to see such an outpouring of good advice. Mike 134, i would advise to be honest with your girlfriend in the event of having sexual difficulties. Tell her you awakened your kundalini recently. Tell her its playing havoc with your energies cause thats what it does at first. Tell her you really like her and "its not her". If she freaks out cause youre talking about energy, find a girl who can handle those realities. Plenty of those out there. Sorry youre having difficulties, been through some of the same myself. It sucks. But it has the potential to bring you closer together, and to educate her about something she may not be familiar with. Who knows, maybe she's familiar with the idea through yoga.. maybe through direct experience. Don't be afraid to lay the truth on the table and be ready for what comes next. Its for the best in the long run! best

sure K people might have a lot to say on the subject.. im not sure i do, but i'll start another thread