konchog uma

for me they spin both ways at once, and you can tell them to spin one way or the other (counter clockwise or clockwise) faster if you like. They rotate around the axis of sushumna in the spinal column and as i get higher in the body, i visualize them spinning faster. I use phi ratio spins to sync them up with each other. (root 8 counterclockwise, 5 clockwise... sacral 13 ccw, 8 cw... up to the sahasrara at the crown which spins 144 times ccw and 89 times cw) I don't actually count those rotations, just tell them to vibrate at that speed, so each one is spinning at the rate of the one above and below it. It generates a tremendous amount of power as they "synergize" and harmonize. there are as many different ways to visualize chakras as there are mystics.. they all work. lotuses, vortices, wheels, mandalas, elemental, with or without deities living within them, etc. I advise you to keep experimenting and be open to change! see what works best for you.. blessings

sanskrit/hindi it means "i bow to you" with the implication that that which is being bowed to is the higher self or buddha nature or the inner good in someone. I don't know how modern those implications are, literally it just means i bow to you

glad youre back i agree with Harmonious Emptiness, nothing really "insane" about your experience and feelings. Thats hard stuff, it would challenge anyone. i feel qualified to speak about insanity (i struggled with my sanity after a really powerful near death experience, and later experienced a demonic possession). I don't think you're insane. Some processes of healing are just uncomfortable. Many blessings, i hope northern california is a wonderful healing environment for you edit: i re-read you simply said struggling with sanity, not insane. well i will leave what i wrote cause it still applies..

Martin Prechtel writes about his apprenticeship under a Mayan shaman in Long Life, Honey in the Heart. It is a powerful and beautiful book. His other books are good too, all basically about Mayan shamanism

from the samsara thread: thank you 3bob, i have always been attracted to shiva and lately to shaivism, but since (a profound and powerful) shivaratri, i have been drawn to learn and practice more. I am still a baby in my learning, but i have started with lakshmanjoo's "vijnana bhairava" and "kashmir shaivism: a secret supreme". I have also read john hughes "self realization in kashmir shaivism" and been reading a good bit about kundalini lately, which seems inseparable from the concept of shiva/shakti, so have been absorbing info from other sources too. Any recommendations for reading on the teachings of nataraja? i should read the upanishads, its been years since i looked at them. i think i will do that, thanks. for what its worth, i've also been working with the "deepen your practice" and other material from mark griffin, and with the mantras SoHam & Om Namah Shivaya (a little bit of Sauh and Shivoham too, but i don't know enough about their practice to really "get into" them yet). I live in Pittsburgh, PA, but i don't think there are any shaiva centers or temples, or teachers, here, so i am mostly working from literature and the oral recordings of mark griffin. so any advice for study or growth that anyone has would be really appreciated. I feel like i have gotten back in touch with divinity in my life, and it has been really beyond words to describe the effect(s) of that. Thanks in advance for any help that any of you are inclined to give

thank you both although i couldn't immeditately find any books by adi shankaracharya i will keep looking there were some eBooks but they were for kindle or nook i forget which. im sure theres a proggie to convert them to PDF but i haven't looked into that

all these posts are the same. duality, evil, sex sex sex, demons, you're going to hell. *yawn* you can't create a world anyway, so why fantasize? better to just accept the world the way it is than get lost in delusions about destroying it to create an asexual new one. although in the case that all that sperm youre saving backs up to your brain and causes you the godlike powers you lust after, and you actually DO get to create another world, and it doesn't have sex or desire, please just leave me dead. thanks. til then i will just marvel at how many responses tulku gets to these posts. this thread will have 150 posts in a week and nobody will be any the better off for it lol

i can't get specific about it due to my own ignorance, but i believe that awareness underlies consciousness, and can be said to be the more primordial of the two. they are like a yin yang pair with awareness being yin, the witness, and consciousness being yang, that which apprehends and has ideas about. beyond that, i am not sure there is much difference between the definitions as i learned them throughout the various states you asked about. Same across the board. Best wishes and blessings on your practice!

short and sweet [Excerpt from the Abhinavagupta’s Paramarthasara (The Essence of the Highest Reality.] transcript: http://swamilakshmanjoo.blogspot.com/2011/01/starting-point-of-journey-is-ending.html

http://twistedsifter.com/2010/08/dalton-ghetti-miniature-pencil-art/ for example...

no thats not a typo http://laughingsquid.com/airplane-lavatory-self-portraits-in-the-flemish-style/

Well i think its more of a western misunderstanding based on the Bardo Thodol that "the bardo" is the realm beyond death. In the timespace beyond the death of the physical body, the dreamlike space must be called something, but its just that that isn't the totality of the definition of "bardo". So its not like a secret teaching or anything really mysterious, just one of those tibetan concepts that kind of had a skewed import into western thinking. My teacher taught it to allay confusion about the concept, not because we were "ready" for some far-out new way of thinking lol In other words, the realms after death are referenced as bardo, but they aren't the only bardo, so saying "the bardo" is a little misleading. I don't think tibetan has or commonly uses articles of speech like "the" so it was translated into english as "the" bardo but the exclusivity of "the", being that it is the one and only of its kind, is not part of the concept to the native tibetan mind. Perhaps it would have been more correct to say "a bardo", but in tibetan its just "bardo" so theres a language barrier to grasping it as a westerner inherent in using articles to label words versus writing and speaking in a more stripped down way, like tibetan does.

amen

stop masturbating

bardo is tibetan for "transitional state" everywhere you go is a bardo. realms and worlds are bardos. Every time you incarnate its the afterlife, and the before-life, and the life-life of right now, which is the deeper meaning of bardo (as explained by my rinpoche). so you are definitely in the bardo right now and didn't realize it "regard all dharmas as dreams"

hahahaha thats the truth in a nutshell source material for how to develop real compassion make enemies and irritate people

wow, thanks! that was truly great

hehehe thats an old version of the piece it has since come to my attention that "snuck" is not a word, and "slipped" works a lot better

i dunno, if the soul as karmic storehouse survives death to experience rebirth, where is the beginning or end of that experience? I don't know for sure, but i suspect that after thousands of lifetimes, there is some sort of reabsorbtion into the All again.. so even though the soul survives to experience its karmic fruition, at some point it can become free of the cycle of birth and death and become.. well... destroyed in the absorbing flame of the Great Spirit. In my mind it might lose its individuality only to, after a period of time, become born an ignorant noobie soul again. But like i said, i have no idea. Just musings. sorry to steal your thunder... i'll let you say it next time lol the chakras are a great model for linear progression in that way, but i suspect that reality itself is still unreasonable and non-linear.. thats only the human construct that tries so so so hard to make sense.

"dear god, WTF love michael" seriously though, that explanation is kinda neat, but it doesn't pan out if you look at reality as being beginningless and endless. i dont recommend trying to answer the question Why about anything relating to reality. You will only create some kind of logical something and then delude yourself that that is the answer, that is how it works. Reality is not logical. This is an entirely mysterious and unreasonable force we are dealing with LOL so i say lets treat it as such

thanks for your perspective jetsun. I have similar suspicions. Interestingly the word "ego" is used differently by buddhists than by psychologists so its hard to know what people are talking about when they say the ego. a quote of the definition of the Freudian ego: i have been absorbed in trance states where my sense of identity (also commonly referred to as "ego") was destroyed, but i wouldn't want to walk down the street in one of those states! I think the freudian ego is a valuable tool for survival, and i also think that as we shed the layers of the conditioned self, often called "ego" especially by buddhists, we avail ourselves to the mechanism of the Big Mind or the True Self or the wotnot and that is also a valuable tool for survival. It is in my esteem far more valuable than the conditioned self, and since they seem to be mutually exclusive, that is the only sense in which "destroying the ego" makes any sort of sense to me. Its still a gross misnomer. the "ego" means different things to different people. As freud used it, its a part of the psyche that i don't think anyone would actually want to be without! Not even buddhists! hehehe

Yeah, thanks for the reminder, i think you're right. I'm gonna put him on ignore.

but at least i make sense

-nevermind