konchog uma

great question.. i don't really know. I did 2 metta meditations today, and after one of them, i found i had a lot more energy to do tonglen, and that they were both based on generating loving-kindness. I had never really realized that before. I am a little leery of posting buddhist practices and realizations on this site because when i got here, a lot of people mocked me every time i said buddhism so i just put things in daoist terms for this lot... hahah i actually generated loving-kindness for twinner as a difficult person today cause his post annoyed me so much this morning.

i found this article really interesting!! Ken Johnson's blog can be found here http://www.jaguarwisdom.org/blog/ and the article can be found here (although i quote it almost in its entirety) http://www.jaguarwisdom.org/blog/2009/09/26/the-art-of-dreaming-in-highland-guatemala/. Imix means "dragon" or "crocodile". Cimi means "death". There are 20 such signs in the 260 day calendar that Johnson refers to. You can find your birthday, and what today is, on http://www.mayanmajix.com/TZOLKIN/DT/DT.html _______________________________________________________________________________ According to the Maya, each human being is born with two souls. One of them is known as the uxlab. The Spanish word anima is often used to describe this aspect of soul, since it is identical to what Catholic Christians perceive as the soul. It is invested in the body and in breathing. It remains within the body until the moment of our death. The second aspect of the soul is quite different. In the K’iche’ language, it is called uwach uk’ij, which literally means “the face of his or her day.” In other words, this is the energy template or imprint of the Sacred Calendar day upon which we are born. My uwach uk’ij is Imix; I have an Imix soul because I was born upon that day, and I share a common bond with all others born upon Imix. My best friend was born upon Cimi; she has a Cimi soul and is bonded in soul with all those who share the same uwach uk’ij. Sometimes the Maya use the word nawal to describe this aspect of the soul. The word is borrowed from the Nahuatl word nagual, and it means exactly the same thing. Our day-sign soul is our nagual, our spiritual essence, our archetypal imprint. And this is the soul which dreams. The anima may be vested within the human body, but the nagual is not. It can roam freely through the astral world while we are asleep. Though the “face of one’s day” may be described as a nagual, there are subtle distinctions between the nagual and the uwach uk’ij. While all living things possess a nagual or spiritual essence, only human beings possess the uwach uk’ij or day-sign soul. Though Westerners may ask an astrologer to cast a horoscope for their dog, the Maya would never do so. A dog may have a nagual, but it doesn’t have a day-sign soul. The day-sign soul is one of the things which distinguish human beings from other beings. As we shall see, there is also a third type of soul – one which is innate within some people, but not all. One who is not born with it may cultivate it through shamanic training. When we sleep, our nagual goes wandering. In its travels, it may meet and interact with the wandering naguales of others, whether humans, animals, plants or even minerals. From such interactions are our dreams fashioned and created. Though all dreams contain important messages, those which arise from the ordinary nocturnal activities of the nagual are regarded as “ordinary dreams.” It is said that those which occur in the pre-dawn hours, just before waking, are the most important. Dreams are an important topic of discussion in traditional Mayan communities. Dreams are meant to be shared with others. Unlike some traditional societies, the Maya have no fear of dreams, even though they do regard dreams as omens. One ought to give thanks even for one’s worst nightmares, for these constitute warning signals, alerting us to the fact that we need to take action and change something in our lives which is not serving our purpose. The importance of dreams is demonstrated by the way in which the Maya discuss them. They use a special terminology and syntax which is also used when telling stories or reciting ancient myths, but which is not characteristic of daily speech. In other words, even “ordinary dreams” are myths, and they are described with mythic speech. While “ordinary dreams” have importance, they are not as significant as shamanic or archetypal dreams. These constitute an entirely different category of dreaming, and one which is not necessarily experienced by everyone. There is a third aspect of soul, usually known as coyopa. In common speech, coyopa refers to “sheet lightning” of the type which flickers above mountains and lakes. But this phenomenon of the natural world has its correspondence within the human body; coyopa can also mean “the body lightning” or “the lightning in the blood.” Spiritual seekers who have spent time among the Maya have drawn attention to the close correspondence between the Mayan concept of coyopa and the Sanskrit kundalini. Both are connected with serpent imagery. Yogic texts describe the kundalini as the “serpent power.” Bolts of lightning are regarded by the Maya as “sky serpents.” Some people are born with the coyopa or lightning soul fully activated; other people either develop it or have it awakened through powerful spiritual experiences. Some people never experience it at all. But those whose coyopa is awakened dream differently than other people. Here again, the Sacred Calendar is of importance. Half of the day-signs contain “natural” coyopa; those born upon such days are born with the “body lightning” already awakened, and thus have a greater capacity to experience archetypal dreams. These day-signs are: Akbal, Chicchan, Cimi, Manik, Lamat, Eb, Ben, Ix, Men and Caban. Other people may experience an awakening of the coyopa due to unusual spiritual experiences or because of formal shamanic training. If the coyopa is awake, the gods themselves may contact us directly through our dreams, using the coyopa energy as a communicative medium between their world and ours. The gods may give us messages – or at least, they try to. The Maya believe that dreams are tricky things, always trying to outwit us by making such messages difficult to remember or decipher. Many people, in our own Western society, have reported dreams wherein a “wise old man” or “wise old woman” appears to us and gives us a powerful message. In most cases, the actual words of that message are lost to us, unremembered. The Maya believe that this is part and parcel of the Art of Dreaming. We must learn to dream with clarity and lucidity, so that the messages imparted to us by the gods will remain in our memory and be accessible to our conscious minds after we awake. To take action against the dream’s inherent longing for forgetfulness is a struggle. An archetypal dreamer is a spiritual warrior. In order to learn how to remember our archetypal dreams and therefore make use of them, the guidance of a shamanic teacher is often necessary. Anyone who undertakes the path of becoming a Mayan priestess or priest will of course have such a teacher, a “road guide.” Part of the training for such a sacred office consists of the awakening of the coyopa or lightning soul. Therefore the shamanic teacher or road guide is also an expert dream interpreter, one who can guide the student in learning how to access the archetypal dreams in which the gods speak to us through the awakened body lightning. The road guide uses dreams as an important tool in the training of Calendar diviners and Mayan priests. It is interesting to note that Mayan dream interpretation is highly individuated. Mayan shamans do not interpret according to a set list of symbols of the type which might be found in any “gypsy witch dream book” here in the United States. Dream symbolism is, by and large, unique to the individual dreamer and her or his outlook on life. There are a few commonly accepted symbols, however. For example, a Mayan priest’s vara or “sacred bundle” which contains her or his divining seeds, crystals, and other ritual objects is regarded as the initiate’s “spiritual spouse.” Therefore, if a mysterious man appears in a woman’s dream, or a mysterious woman in a man’s dream, it is usually said that the shaman-in-training has been visited by her or his “spiritual spouse,” the spirit of the sacred bundle which will someday become the shaman’s true and eternal partner. Those familiar with Jungian dream analysis will not fail to note the similarities between this Mayan concept and the Jungian doctrine of anima and animus. If a dream remains “incomplete,” in the sense that the words of the god are not remembered by the dreamer, or the recollection of the dream seems tentative and without a clear message, the road guide may ask the apprentice shaman to re-create the dream by entering back into it and finishing it. This is, of course, a technique closely related to what we might call “lucid dreaming,” in the sense that the dreamer is an active participant rather than a passive one. Here again, the Sacred Calendar is of great importance. Let us say that such an “incomplete” archetypal dream or divine communication took place on 4 Chuen. The next recurrence of a Chuen day will take place twenty days later; this will be 11 Chuen. During those twenty days, the novice shaman may meditate upon the dream and its meaning in preparation to attempting to re-enter the dream and bring it to a conclusion. The attempt to re-enter the dream will take place on 11 Chuen. It is clear, from the above, that archetypal dreams may be sought out. To use the Western term, they may be “incubated.” While Mayan dream incubation is not as complex or ritualistic as the classical dream incubation once practiced in the Greek temples of Asklepios, there are techniques for inducing archetypal dreams. I shall conclude with one of them. Drink a glass of warm water mixed with a tablespoon of lemon juice. Do this about an hour after dinner in order to give yourself time to digest first, as well as giving yourself time to make a few trips to the bathroom before retiring. While falling asleep, practice deep and regular breathing. Clear your mind of all thoughts and worries relating to the day just past, the day ahead, or mundane life in general. Instead, imagine the wings of a bird, moving slowly and rhythmically, the wings of the nagual carrying you into the dream world. Let the serene motion of the nagual’s flight guide you to the magic of an archetypal dream.

buddhists in monasteries debate all the time.

lots of heat in the MDT is not a good thing. Please be careful. I recommend Dr Yang Jwing Ming's book Qigong Meditation: Embryonic Breathing, and i recommend finding a teacher. The bodies spiritual and energetic circuitry is a delicate matrix, and you can do harm to yourself even though you mean well and you think the cosmos is guiding you. There are some teachers who will skype with you if you can't find a teacher in your area. You can network with them via this forum if you like. Just start a post and you'll probably get multiple recommendations. heres Dr YJM's book on amazon

SereneBlue, I'm glad to inspire, and hope your path leads you to wonderful awakenings of your own! 3bob, Quite so yes... though I feel more able to chop and carry now.

the benefit of focusing on the LDT depends on what you want to accomplish, or the intent that accompanies your focus. both points are used in embryonic breathing, as is taught by Yang Jwing Ming. the essence of them can be brought to the middle dan tien like drops, and intermingled in order to fuse yin and yang within the body. But both of those require guidance and proper instruction in order to be successful. I don't bring it up because theres a lot you can do with it now, just because its the yang pair to the yin point you are exploring. I find that being aware of both at once is very powerful. And finding the center of your LDT is just a really cool feeling and a good self-awareness exercise.

Interesting observations. Thank you. I'm glad we can find something we agree on. Its mildly annoying to be so mildly annoyed by buddhists. Its kinda constant xabir. I want to like buddhists, but they annoy me! mildly, mind you. Its all the philosophical construct.. i mean how can anyone possibly see through that stuff or walk upright while carrying all that around?? That being said, buddhists, like everyone else, are more than welcome to disagree with me, and in my deep heart i am not even annoyed in the least. I have always been a free thinking and a non-conformist, so naturally, how on earth would i fit into a religious orthodoxy?! but i digress. yes i like the eightfold path, it has led me to a lot of liberation, and perhaps if i continue on it, it will lead to even more!

does anyone else here pay attention to the tzolkin? tomorrow, feb 11th, starts a period of 10 "portal days" during which the veil between worlds (spirit and temporal) is lifted and energies are intensified. "tzolkin" is a western word, sort of a translation of mayan for "day count" or something.. the q'iche mayans call it the chol q'ij or "organization of time". Its a 260 day calendar which lies at the center of the web of all the calendars the Maya use, tying them all together. In short, it measures spiritual time. They use other calendars to measure temporal time, like a solar calendar, and a venus calendar, etc. But the tzolkin measures the cyclical flow of spiritual energies. The Maya say it came from the cosmic Maya to their ancient terrestrial ancestors. If you look into it, almost Every tribe of native american people keeps a 260 day calendar which is their own tribal interpretation of the chol q'ij. They don't keep all the mayan calendars, but they all keep a version of the 260 day calendar. i use it every day to align with the energies of the day, its very powerful.. if you're just learning about it for the first time, look out for the "dreamspell"... its a reinterpretation of the tzolkin by jose arguelles, and its not respected by the Mayan daykeepers. jose took it to wandering wolf (the grand mayan elder) and the council of daykeepers, and wandering wolf said "don't do that, thats confusing!" and he did it anyway, released it to the public, and unfortunately the hippies and new age crystal weirdos love it. So if you look up your birthday in the dreamspell it might be different than the authentic mayan 260 day calendar. So as wandering wolf said, "don't do that". i'll include some of my study notes from a variety of different mayan and indigenous sources, (which is more than i have ever seen in one place on the internet) for anyone who is interested. Between these notes and www.mayanmajix.com's daily tzolkin (the link in the OP) anyone can get a pretty good grasp on the mayan idea of sacred time. blessings 260 day calendar.txt

plus one mokona! philosophy only goes so far, you can't theorize or think your way to liberation!! And buddhism seems to be a fertile soil for the mind that these practitioners are trying to cleanse to become overly active. RyanO, im an agnostic buddhist too, as i'm sure my posts have made abundantly clear in the past. Perhaps all views are wrong views, because they are contrived constructs. There is only the experience you are having, there is no view about it.. all view occurs secondarily (or tertiarily of one has not realized oneness and emptiness). I suppose that they are necessary for a while, so in that sense, i take right view to be that one should transcend views in favor of actual direct experience of the moment, grounded in actual realization, not philosophy and intellect.

pretty cool! i think its what happens when we lose consciousness, you were just conscious of it. But i'm not sure of course, thats just my gut feeling

he's right, it really doesn't feel like anything. Its pure yin, or the yin within the yang of the UDT, so its just receptive. In the body its the black dot of the yin yang symbol. In the belly you can feel a point that feels like a starburst just erupting in all directions continuously, and that is the center of gravity, the exact (i mean exact) middle of the LDT. Its yang within yin, so it feels like something for sure, like a perpetual little explosion, except slow, like you were watching a perpetual explosion in slow motion.. hard to describe. It took me a while to find it but when i did i was like "oh. Thats it." But the upper one really is only known by its effects, it has no feeling to me.

my pleasure, i feel blessed to be able to. wow. Are they the lives of people close to one? the lotus was like 5 feet around and below me, and so i am not sure it relates directly with the heart lotus, but i appreciated the text you shared. I was the light and sort of got lost a little bit in the light but at the same time i could see perfectly, but only when i looked at something. Like when i looked down at my leg it was clothed in robes of light and when i looked beneath me i saw a lotus but the rest was just a sort of wash of light when i wasn't focused on it. It thought it might have been my astral body too, or some subtle body. I don't really know how many of those people have, hindu says 4 egyptian says 10 etc.. I don't really know what i was, it seemed very subtle but i think it was more than my mind. Hard to say for sure.. i don't pretend to know

its a trickster.. i asked it "are you me" and it said "hahah who are you?" and in the sense that I am That i think it is an aspect of true self, higher self, or cosmic self. But thats a very expanded use of the word self, and i have to say, it really feels like something else. I guess its sort of both, depending on my own ability to expand my own definition of self

well a lot of the intensity of the energy as it moves in and through my chakras causes a feeling of fullness, so that the slightest movement cracks a vertebrae. Like if i was trying to do a shaking exercise and target a blockage or pain, i might shake and shake and shake and still have that sore dull nasty pain in my heart center, but as it floods with the brilliant kundalini, it takes one deep breath or a slight change of posture and POP right where i needed to release! At other times it causes me to spontaneously shake or jolt or shudder as it clears the way.. and sometimes the blockages just melt without so much as a goodbye just gone. So i feel like a lot of the pain in my heart that i have tried unsuccessfully before now to remove has been lifted and shaken away. Its also brought about an intensity in my head, an awareness of blockages.. some stuff in there that i didn't really know i even had to deal with before this. I feel like my energetic intensity has increased and whether i shake the blockages off, or sit still, and use subtle technique to release the psychic and energetic tensions, i have more energy to do it with, or that the energy i had before is somehow more intensified; qualitatively different if not quantitatively so. For those reasons i am able to zero in on some habitual tensions and old wounds that i have never properly been able to heal

Just wanted to say that i have had a very easy time of it and that the last week has been full of completely amazing experiences, insights, bliss, and breaking through my blockages once and for all.. amazing. And i continue to learn things that reassure me that it is actually kundalini, cause i only half believed it at first. Like i wondered why it only made a tiny little line of light between each chakra, why my whole spinal column didn't light up, and i thought i was doing something wrong until mark griffin said that the sushumna is only a thousandth of a hair thin. I was listening to his podcasts, and making more sense of things. I had one headache from getting up too early from sitting, without letting the light go back to sleep. And once, with my eyes closed, i experienced 100% of myself as completely brilliant white light, like a person made out of light.. i even had glowing robes like astral robes or something. I started to see a flower that i was sitting in, a huge lotus... and then the darkness started to creep from my head and heart outwards and the visualization was slowly lost. I think i maintained it for what seemed like 5 or 10 seconds.. it wasn't even 76000 nadis (or if it was it was all of them at once), it was my entire body, or energy body, or something. Today i had my first meditation that didN'T involve kundalini in a week. I actually felt wonderful about that, and it assures me that it won't go away. That stuff talks to me, like it answers some of my questions, and it tells me things.. completely amazing. It won't tell me what it is tho... i'm like "are you qi or shen or anything i know" and it says "something else". It just laughs when i ask what... i think it wants me to keep studying and learning about it. I have never been into bliss before now, but this bliss helps me out a lot. Maybe i have never experienced the real bliss before, just had little rushes from sensory deprivation and stillness.. who can say. Well just wanted to say thank you again to everyone who helped me, and let you know that my blockages are being dissolved every time i sit, mostly gently, sometimes forcefully, but always lovingly. And i am assured that i have nothing to fear, that its the expression of cosmic love and grace. I feel very blessed, to have such an awakening, and to have friends like you guys and girls who can help with advice.. it means a lot

i use the MMM sound to vibrate the brain, down through the corpus calosum<sp> and as i stop MMMing, the last place that stops vibrating is the spot youre talking about, by any name. i do shen cultivation, but i haven't directed the shen to the seat of spirit in the head. I just let it radiate outward from the point i focus on it originally, which can be either the middle dantian or the yellow court at the solar plexus. I actually get more sensational results at the MDT but do it at the yellow court because the heart is really sensitive and its just one less thing to worry about, bringing my qi to an area that near my heart. Anyway, do be careful with energy and focus of attention in the head. Wasn't it you who said you had too much of it and should you be cycling it down with the microcosmic orbit? I replied, but i forget who posted it! oops

go tenzin wangyal! i love him. TCotSL makes me cry i'm watching:

probably the lack of nerve cells and CNS i think plants get sad but i don't think they feel pain in the same way as animals

awesome intro, right on about power vs wisdom welcome

thats lovely, thanks for posting! i also think its more accurate to say that i am illusory than to say that i don't exist at all. Same goes for everything, its dreamlike and holographic at best, but its very misleading to people to think that it isn't there.. lends itself to abnormalities like escapism and nihilism. But i have said as much already, and this could go round and round ad nauseum so i'll leave it alone

didn't get a chance to watch it but i thought i'd link it

sure bro, glad to help i don't practice out of TAaI, i am one of those people who, on my grumpy days, feels that that book should never have been published. On my normal days, i just feel that one can't possibly learn immortality techniques from a book. I'm sure some of it is interesting, but on the recommendation of one of my teachers, i don't do any of those meditations.. i have read it tho, but its been a while

oh i never kindled a fire or created a vapor to do microcosmic orbit... sounds like neidan i just circulated the energies but using intention and visualiation, til i read Damo Mitchell's Daoist Neikung and started just turning the dantian to do it

oh okay.. see its so confusing, everyone means something different when they talk about macrocosmic orbit i learned it as an extension of microcosmic orbit, so it incorporates all that, and then expands it to include the earth energies first, and then heavenly ones, much like the field longchempa mentions. yeah the heavenly breaths expand and don't return in a linear way, for me its like the cosmos truly has no center or edges, and every point is the center of an infinite expanse of space which just, if you keep going in any given direction, comes right back to where you are, so its like a hyperspatial physics mindwarp .. Contemplating the vastness of space is a way of expaning awareness, and one of the most powerful experiences of my life was feeling the metta of the universe, so i personally totally associate the two..