konchog uma

you sound like your cup is already full, like your mind is already made up. you don't sound like someone who is actually interested in other peoples ideas. good luck with your practices.

Indestructible Truth by Acharya Reginald A Ray, an overview of Tibetan Buddhism 108 Discourses on Awakening by Mark Griffin, pretty much what it sounds like Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, an amazing book about how to be genuine in our spiritual practice instead of getting caught in the traps of using it to feed our sense of self.

I don't like that. That sort of posting isn't helpful. Those are couched insults, and we all know what you're talking about. Tibetan Ice posted what he posted because he wants to help people awaken safely. Which is really what the forum of TTB is all about. Whether he is right or wrong is immaterial, he is just voicing his opinion based on considerable experience. Just because he disagrees with you and DNB doesn't make him a douche. Whats douche is posts like that, insulting people in a backhanded way while at the same time refusing to take responsibility for your words with statements like "if youre offended by this you must be a douchebag". Well i'm offended by that, and im not a douchebag, so sort that out. And while youre sorting, please go read the no-insult policy.

im with you joeblast %100 practice like that deepens a need for external stimulus (porn imagery) in spite of attempts to proclaim ones lack of attachment to it. One can accomplish even higher levels of energetic cultivation without watching porn, higher because they depend on nothing but breath and the pervasive universal source of life energy, two things you are guaranteed access to for the duration of your life.

surely there are more reasons than spiritual materialism to see visions. i had a serious entity problem for years, nothing short of demonic possession. At the end of one of my fasts (10 day), i saw a vision of how to kill it. I did what i saw in the vision and i heard the thing breathe a last nasty sigh and presto, i haven't had any problems since. So thats one little example of a vision with broader usefulness than feeding my ego. I've had a fair amount of useful visions, they have really benefited myself and those i love If a person is going to make themselves feel special, they will find some reason to, even because they like to drink beers and watch their favorite sports team, if no other reason presents itself. Even people like those are probably better off with their third eyes open than closed lol

people are part of nature (in spite of the best attempts to divorce themselves from it!) when a person helps a bear, that is nature, that is acting in accord with nature, that is letting nature do its thing. Because they were motivated to help the bear, they did. So in that way it is wu wei. its not like the myth of modern culture which has nature over here and people on the other side, somehow above nature or seperate. no way. So a person can do a doing, and that doing can be wu wei. The naturalness of the doing and the factors like timeliness that taomeow mentioned have more to do with wu wei than whether or not someone is just sitting there watching the moss grow, afraid to take action because it might be somehow seperate from nature... nonsense!

interesting! also, glad you wielded the flyswatter of self control, sometimes nothing needs to be said, things just speak for themself.

yeah thanks steve!

awesome footage, i saw that vid earlier today, much to my delight how did they get in there?

Saraswati advises to start with the ajna chakra because he has a step 2 in mind, and when a person starts getting sensations in their head, they move down to the muladhara and start working up from there. Thats the Bihar yoga approach anyway. I appreciate TIs insights (as usual) but i think that starting with the ajna only works if you have the rest of the map. Without that, you will just focus on the head and focus on the head and eventually you will draw too much energy up into the head and create imbalance. Which, attn to the original poster, does happen. I think a lot of beginners have a lot of misconceptions about opening their 3rd eye, like they are going to visualize white light on their foreheads and all of a sudden one day they will see auras and ghosts and stuff. Well its not like that lol! The full opening of the ajna complex with its attendant 3rd eye center(s) takes time, usually years, and i personally tend to agree with the general advice that its best to let it unfold as part of a balanced sadhana which encompasses the entire energy system. Its a slow unfoldment, and if you spend those years focused intensely on the head, with the selfish intention of seeing energy, you just might be setting yourself up for disaster. I would go a step further and say it might even be impossible to clear all head obstructions without the awakening and rising of kundalini but who knows, anything could be possible. Its certainly a lot easier to start with the lower centers and with balanced sadhana for most beginners. So from me personally, respect to both sides of the coin in this debate, but i would rather err on the side of caution. I see the 3rd eye opening as just great, but usually something that happens in the middle to late stages of a persons awakening. Again anything can happen, all this is just 2 pennies from a bum

i suffer from bursitis from time to time, and i find that turmeric (raw in capsule form) is very effective as an anti-inflammatory. When i feel the onset of it, i take 4 pills and i usually wake up the next day without pain. best

regarding the article by Swami Satyananda Saraswati, here is a link to the entire article http://www.yogamag.net/archives/2005/emay05/sam.shtml thank you SIME

and for prostate health, squeeze the anus and pubococcygeal muscle (the pelvic floor muscle) rhythmically for a few minutes a day to give the prostate a nice internal massage better than your thumb lol and congrats! i hope the benefits of your cultivation deepen and continue to enrich your life edit: agree with oldgreen, raise the energy. the rapist will die if you don't feed him

I think a lot of times people find a master and think "oh this is my ticket to enlightenment" but that master can't lead them past a certain point, and even getting to that point takes yeeears so its disappointing. and some people are just born with their kundalini awake or their mind open or whatever you want to look at it as, and they can just sit for years and attain liberation, they don't really need a master. but those 2nd people are *very* rare, and a good teacher always helps IMO. I tend to think that personal cultivation is enough until you reach a point when you will just magnetically attract a master whether you are looking for one consciously or not. what kind of master are you looking for? you mentioned enlightenment, are you looking for a meditation master? because Mark Griffin can take a student a long way just with his online stuff, streaming intensives, distance shaktipat via web streaming, and podcasts/mp3s of his dharma talks and lectures. You can check him out at www.hardlight.org

here is all i am offered up to the spirits chod in the graveyard

that is beautiful im glad youre posting again

wonderful movie! glad to see it streaming

oh the lengths to which it will go to do just that are ridiculous! LOL truly absurd the fear is a good sign tho

no insight into what your experiences represent, but welcome to the wild world of meditation. Your mind seems pretty open so im sure you'll have lots of neat experiences. There is a saying in meditation "neti neti" which means basically "its not this, its not that" and its a reminder that the point of meditation is not the attendant phenomena which meditators experience. Its a way of saying don't get caught up in the scenery, the ride isn't over yet, so just let things come up and pass by without getting lost in them. i always found it helpful when faced with waves of light, talking candles, breathing walls, lightheadedness and stars, etc whatever arises let it pass as to the smoke tho, its neat how everything seems alive sometimes. However that could have been a "drala" in tibetan terminology, a coincidence, a demon (really), who knows.. it could be fairies, i have no idea but my point is until you know, use logic and caution and don't get caught up in something extraordinary happening that carries you away from reason and rationality. lol! not to be a jerk and shut down your wonder or inquisitiveness, thats not my intention at all! But a little lucidity never hurt a psychonaut yknow best to you

Lately i was talking to an herbalist friend of mine, someone who has helped me and my g/f out immensely, and she and i got into the topic of how much misinfo there is about sex in general and how males really weren't widely educated about energy, loss of jing, and a plethora of other topics that men in general are ignorant of. I told her a little about my practice of retention and sublimation, and gave her some advice for a patient in his later years who wondered if once a week was a good ejaculation frequency to conserve life energy. (i said it was, but for the record the daoists advised once every two weeks at least, at his age once a month) She said she didn't know enough about it and wished she did, and then asked me to give a seminar at her herb shop about mens sexual health, cultivation, and that sort of thing. I declined for a number of reasons that i dont think are relevant here. In short, i think i can do more good for her patients by providing her with a paper on the basics of men's sexual health, something that she can distribute as needed, not a one time talk by someone with no credentials (beyond a list of satisfied lovers lol). So does anyone have any feedback or advice on what i should or shouldn't cover, and why? I am kind of in need of some advice since I don't really feel qualified to teach, in spite of my experience with the subject. Should I get into retention and energy cultivation? I want to! People should know about that stuff. But i think its important to address prostrate health and the importance of sublimation via the MCO and other techniques, if one is going to retain for a significant period of time. So this info is gonna be like one page long, maybe double sided if it has to be, but i am trying to keep it minimal so it can be handed out and read easily. I want to definitely cover the life energy-semen connection, the importance of ejaculation frequency regulation, the benefits of making love without ejaculation, and mayyyybe some more esoteric topics. I also want to give a reading list, so if any of you have good additions to that, i would really appreciate it. Mine so far is The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity by Daniel Reid Taoist Secrets of Love: Cultivating Male Sexual Energy by Mantak Chia The Tao of Love and Sex by Jolan Chang I know its a vague and open ended question, but to give more clarity, i am wondering what (for the broad range of men who might approach her with questions about mens sexual health) would be appropriate/important to address (and not to address). Just subject matter. I am thinking its best to keep it to a minimum (compared to the vast wealth of knowledge contained in the body of daoist mens sexual practices) but i also want to introduce the subject of retention and sublimation. Oh well i guess i'll just wait for some responses to see where this conversation goes.. thanks in advance for your help!

im honored to hear that, and i love "studying" in quotes lol i have always left the course of my life largely up to what the world provides me, in other words, if my "personal power" or "karmic magnetism" were to attract in my life a teacher of that sort, i would happily study and perhaps teach one day. But i am not actively looking for such an opportunity now. i was born with neptune in the 10th house (of career) and have always been advised to be an artist. You can see a small portfolio if you go to the link on my page here on TTB however i also happen to be born with venus in libra in the 7th house (of partnership) so finding a partner to 'study dao' with has always just fallen into my lap. not that i am limiting myself to what my natal chart forecasts for my life... that is not good astrology, but as a rough guideline, i think it works oh well there i go derailing my own thread for astrology's sake.. blah blabahlabhalla

great question! i also look at things as a "one and zero" model. One one hand, when pushed to the extremes of the limits of knowledge or experience, we tend to fall back on a self, or on god. The doctrine of anatman is the only way to train the mind to rest in its own formless essence, free of concepts, which, as divine as they might be, are an obstacle to true and total liberation. but on the other hand, there seems to be a spiritual intelligence "out there", as if life had a design, intentions, and a mind of its own. As much as some party-line buddhists want to say that there is no causal power, the true idea of god transcends the limited framework of "creator deity" or "causal power". The idea of god is just this: oneness! That there is a dimension of oneness in which the limitations, exclusions, and dualities of the ordinary world are merged into a singularity. This pops up in buddhism in the idea of non-duality, dissolution of subject and object into the pure experience itself, without "experiencer" or "experienced", a state called a god state in shaiva. Buddhism just looks at is as a natural state, without the prop of deity. In my experience, there is a divine consciousness in the universe. Thinking of it in terms of god or goddess or even "transcendental" is silly. Transcending what? there is no second thing. All concepts are dualistic, and it is beyond all dualism. But just like the cells of your body are alive and reproduce, interact, and heal themselves in order to maintain "you", i believe all living things in the universe act on their own and in unison to express the dance of deity, the indescribably oneness beyond idea. so i don't think that the buddha was not aware of the existance of divine realms of being. He had his experience with gods and goddesses while he was meditating, and he never said "there are no gods" or "there is no god" to my knowledge. I think he formulated the doctrine of anatman because there is a yet more liberating truth to be experienced by the seeker than even union with god, and that is the complete extinguishing of the self-construct (even the god part of it) into the bliss/awareness of non-self, non-deity. So i think there is a kind of ecstacy that comes from union with god, realizing the self as divine, and there is also a kind of bliss that comes from recognizing the total emptiness of phenomena and the lack of fundamental reality, or the voidness, inherent to any so-called reality. But in my experience they act in tandem: they aren't really mutually exclusive. And at the higher levels of most of the mystical deity paths (kaballah, shaiva, sufism, for example) they teach the emptiness of god and creation. like the name of Ain Soph Aur, which i have seen translated as "limitless light in the void"... when you get to the most sublime levels of god, there is always the void closeby! hope you get some interesting answers, im sure there are a lot of opinions out there! cool post

i dunno right now. I am a little leery of introducing subject matter that might be dangerous if misunderstood. I think for most men who just want to get a handle on why they are fatigued or maybe become better lovers, the emphasis should be on foundational info, but i don't feel comfortable outlining much by way of practices. I am not a teacher, and i know better than to try to be one. I haven't even read half the books that are now on my list, i just happen to have a fair amount of experience in the real world, and success in retaining and sublimating energy. So i think the best and most genuine thing i can do for my friend's patients is to keep it very basic. I think i will mention the techniques that they are bound to find if they read those books in a cautionary way, so i have changed my position since posting the OP. I think it would be great if everyone knew about retention and cultivation, but i don't feel qualified to pass out info that might be to someone's detriment. I feel a sense of responsibility for what i am going to say in this page (or two) so i am going to stick with what i know. maybe in a couple weeks when the text of the page is ironed out, i will post it on this thread for you all to critique! hahaha that should be fun thanks for your suggestion, i think its a good one, and if the info i want to present takes more than one page, i could do two. But i am not going to try to instruct a bunch of strangers that i am not going to meet in sexual practices or retention thats what books are for! lol I think at most i might outline metta meditation for opening the heart, and mention in some detail muscular and mental control, ejaculation frequency, and maybe some other more basic points, but direct them to books for the details.

i would love to know more about female practices. i have only read a couple books, sorry! i wish i were qualified, have to admit being a man i never looked deeply into female cultivation. i think my herbalist friend has a firm grasp on female cultivation, cause thats one of the ways in which she has helped my girlfriend .. i think i am putting this together for her because she never really learned things from the male perspective.

actually sereneblue IS awesome, which you would probably figure out if you could engage her in respectful conversation. when the chip on your shoulder gets too heavy, why dont you put it down and come hang out with the rest of us. Til then...