Tibetan_Ice

And if you want to open your third eye, try the 9-1-9-1 pranayama, .. Something you won't find in most Buddhist teachings.. I did the 9-1-9-1 pranayama twice a day, every day for ten minutes each time for 5 years. Once your outer senses shut off, you will see visions. More from Gurudeva.. the lotus of the heart comes from someplace, doesnt it? Let us think about it in this way. Each time you take a breath, you bring yourself a little closer, you turn yourself within just a little bit more and release a little bit of actinic energy emanating from the self-effulgent being residing within your heart. This energy is called life. We say, This is my life. If you stop breathing, the life in your body stops. We have to use willpower to control the breath. When we do control the breath, we begin to have an immense control, and awareness begins to become detached from that which it is aware of. This means that we are consciously conscious of what we are aware ofthat we are aware. We control our individual awareness more than we realize when we practice the regulation and control of breath. For instance, as we breathe, prâ∫âyâmain on nine counts, hold one, out on nine counts, hold onewe find that we begin to become more alert, more alive. Our awareness is more subtle and refined. Wednesday LESSON 59 The Evolution Of Awareness The emanation of the light that wells from within the lotus of the heart is always there, regardless of what you do. You may not be aware of the existence of it, but it does exist. You may not care to realize it, but it still exists. When man does not wish to look for the Self God, it is only because his awareness is busy in other areas of the mind, concerned with desires, and he is on the road to fulfill them. The fulfillment of de- sires causes reactionary conditions within the subconscious mind itself and clouds vision. This causes what is known as the darkness of the mind. When man wishes and desires to find his true Self, his external desires fall in line with basic religious codes for living, and he then is on the path. He is able to realize the essence of each desire on the path of enlightenment, and is able to sense Reality within himself. ¶ A beautiful practice is to try to sit quietly, visualizing within the lotus within the heart a light, a strong light emanating clearly, a light that is always there. This light is radiating at a higher vibration than any form with which you are familiar. Let us say, if you were to have this light in your hand and were able to use it in the external world, each form you turned it upon would disappear under the vibration of the light itself. That is as powerful as the effulgent light emanating from the Self, the Íivaness, which you will see within the lotus of the heart. ¶ The mind, or consciousness, is form with intense vibrations and lesser vibrations, all interrelating. When we are happy and joyous, we are aware of the refined states of consciousness. But when we are not happy or joyous, we are living in the grosser, darker areas of consciousness.

Sad guru is right out to lunch. What a pile of crap.. First off the heart is the source of all, boddhicitta. Secondly, the third eye sees lower and upper, it does see sahasrara. Thirdly, there is no gap as this fake says. For an authentic rendition of the third eye, consult Gurudeva,.. http://www.himalayanacademy.com/media/books/merging-with-siva/merging-with-siva.pdf It is an excellent book. I have read it twice. Stay away from sadguru, he is bad news and has bad karma.

It has been repeated time and time again that there is no creator in Buddhism. http://thetaobums.com/topic/32820-debunking-a-creator/ So why does it say that there is a creator in this book? .???.

In my previous life I was Hindu. In the one before that I was an Irish Farmer. Before that I was a Norwegian lumberjack. I was also an Egyptian water/irrigation engineer, and in another life I have no idea because the world was like after a massive war had occurred and there was not much left of civilization. I didn't live very long in that one. Ornaments of rigpa, nothing more.

I thought Ananda couldn't be enlightened because he was a pandaka.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_homosexuality Buddism seems to be full of contradictions, doesn't it?

Let's see, white apron.. burns on your arms.. Taking orders... Waiter...

http://thetaobums.com/topic/24971-about-me/?p=544544 Saw him in a vision.. Did a search.. I think he is a waiter.. Likes to poke people in the eye...

Spirit sees nothing to criticize The fault is in the blamer Spirit sees nothing to criticize - Rumi

GMP, I think you nailed it. What Deci wrote, in all his intellectualism, is a form of impure zen koan. Yes it belongs somewhere else but not in the Zen forum. There are much more sophisticated masters there with better writing skills. Steve, I would call this poetry: The Intellectual Quest The intellectual quest is exquisite like pearls and coral, But it is not the same as the spiritual quest. The spiritual quest is on another level altogether, Spiritual wine has a subtler taste. The intellect and the senses investigate cause and effect. The spiritual seeker surrenders to the wonder. - Rumi Or this: The Beauty of the Heart The beauty of the heart is the lasting beauty: its lips give to drink of the water of life. Truly it is the water, that which pours, and the one who drinks. All three become one when your talisman is shattered. That oneness you cant know by reasoning. - Rumi, From: Mathnawi II, 716-718

No, I am not a member. Instead I checked out the younge website and the only thing I could sense that was a reason for shunning might be that it is non-sectarian.

One day at vajracakra.. When the true essence of the forum appeared.. My way or the highway...

Yes, do not cultivate the space between thoughts. Actually, there is no space between thoughts, there are only thousands of other thoughts down deeper that you just aren't seeing. When you leave thoughts alone, they rise and then dissolve. A good way to start the process is by creating a thought yourself and then focus on the clarity of the thought, or the location of the thought. You look directly at the thought without getting sucked into the content of the thought. The thought dissolves on its own. Then you stay there, at that location, at that fixation and watch other thoughts come, display and dissolve. Gradually, more and more thoughts appear and dissolve. It goes faster. Smaller, finer thoughts appear. Hundreds of them.. After 10 or so minutes of doing that, the visions start to appear, more towards the brow area in the head. You do the same thing for those visions. The visions dissolve into rainbow lights, or small multicolored streams of particles.. You keep dissolving the visions. More and more visions appear and at first, they too move so fast that it makes your head spin. But after many days of practice, they slow down. Then, some of the visions look so real and crisp that it is hard to distinguish them between normal reality. Slowly, you start to understand that reality is just like all of those visions. Then, one day, your reality comes apart and you realize that there are just perceptions of 3D appearances with a bunch of white light in between.. Oh and as thoughts and visions dissolve, it produces heat and ecstasy. And turning the attention away from the thought and back towards the watcher, as Jax suggests in his book and in his retreat video is NOT dissolving thoughts. It is only running away.

It's a battle of words. Us and Them And after all we're only ordinary men Me, and you God only knows it's not what we would choose to do Forward he cried from the rear and the front rank died And the General sat, as the lines on the map moved from side to side Black and Blue And who knows which is which and who is who Up and Down And in the end it's only round and round and round Haven't you heard it's a battle of words the poster bearer cried Listen son, said the man with the gun There's room for you inside Down and Out It can't be helped but there's a lot of it about With, without And who'll deny that's what the fightings all about Get out of the way, it's a busy day And I've got things on my mind For want of the price of tea and a slice The old man died

Dear self declared enlightened, narcissistic, deceptive person, who trolls the Buddhist forum and quotes Taoist nonsensical passages... Since you take delight in insulting me (and other members of this forum) with your allusions to splashing fishy, the hookless hook and the stinking fish fry (in the topic you so aptly dragged into the main Taoist forum where you hoped to get more Taoist support), I can only assume that you are trolling once again, you master baiter you. http://thetaobums.com/topic/34644-clairvoyance-vs-immediate-knowledge/?p=544077 "Oh a new batch of mettlesome self-annointed dharma-slingers battling their wits out yawn." http://thetaobums.com/topic/34644-clairvoyance-vs-immediate-knowledge/?p=543894 " And the further afield this fish goes the longer it trails its own line, until you have a real whopper stinking in a fry-pan to suit." I wonder why TTB puts up with your insults, your circular rhetoric and hasn't blessed us with absence of your presence...

To penetrate the nimitta is to master the nimitta, which not only involves realizing the cause but merging with the nimitta, by penetrating the center. The nimitta is the doorway. You go inside it or it envelops you. You merge with it. Inside the first jhana is the second jhana. Again you go inside, you push through or are drawn inside. It is not as you have stated, that part about the smaller moments of light. The mind does not move in jhana, therefore there is no realization or conceptual analysis after the first jhana. This is just what you learned from Daniel Ingram. The cause of nimittas is the five senses falling away through stillness of body and one pointed concentration, which as it becomes more refined becomes more and more effortless. As the breath slows, the nimittas becomes brighter. I have come to realize that practicing non grasping and no aversion, or by just remaining in the natural state, that nimittas and visions of forms appear all by themselves. I have Shaila Catherine's other book too. And yes, entering the nimitta and experiencing the jhanas is part of the path that Buddha used to gain enlightenment, he says so himself in the quote in the OP. If you want to believe otherwise, so be it. I really don't care.

Thanks Steve, that looks like a good book. I've preordered this one and can hardly wait.. http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Seeing-Perfection-Visionary-Renaissance/dp/0199982910/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390705825&sr=8-1&keywords=Naked+seeing

I am reading this now... http://www.amazon.com/The-Main-Dzogchen-Practices-Transmission/dp/B0076WSCJQ It actually has a practice in it to make you correct and clarify the view.

Well, there are so many conginitive dissonant ideas in your post, that I may be once again just wasting my time talking to you. First off, Buddha learned how to make the light and visions of form remain by, as you say "by analyzing his experience". That is very clearly stated in the passage. and so on.. Secondly, the light I am talking about is the nimitta. Just because you state that it is not, does not mean that it is not. How would you know anyways? Can you get inside my head and realize the experiences that I have had? I am very familiar with Nimittas, learning sign, counterpart sign. I have achieved some jhanas through consistent practice and learning. I have read the Vissudhimagga. That link you quoted for learning about nimittas is just a piece of crap, written by a non-practitioner who has poor understanding of the factors and events. Radical interpretations of what Buddha really meant don't interest me. Just do the practices. It will all become clear. There should be a rule: " you have to practices for a few years before attempting to become a scholar". Especially prone to error are scholars who rely on translations of Tibetan texts into English and then try to establish their outrageous claims based on the English language. I'm not interested in "the great jhana debate". I have my experiences to rely on, Nor am I interested in Daniel Ingram's teachings, or his emphasis on the dark night or noting. To penetrate the light is not to realize the cause of the light. To penetrate the light means to actually submerge in the light (the moon, the sun, the very bright light.. etc). Once you realize that the cause of seeing the light, that which precipitates the lowering of veils, is 'continuous attention/awareness' and you work on that for a while, you come to realize that that is the procedure to establish the good solid nimitta (counterpart sign). Vispassana is a practice, it is not a cause (as you stated). You do not 'directly see vispassana', you see something. You see the light with great clarity. It is not seeing with the eyes, it is seeing with third-eye sight or from the very clear clean crisp space which lies above, near the crown in the center of the head. Since you have accepted "having a teacher" as a necessity, I would say to you the following: Don't depend on a teacher. A teacher (unless they're enlightened or have developed their psychic powers) won't be able to realize your experiences nor advise you accordingly to your karma, level of intelligence or personal inclinations. It is you who has to understand the teachings, the experiences, the methods. You have to get there under your own steam, not on the coat tails of a teacher. Did Buddha have a teacher sitting there under the ficus tree when he got enlightened, or when he sat under the apple tree in the orchard when he was a child? There are very few developed teachers, teachers with abilities. There are not enough to go around. Don't rely on teachers, you could wait many eons. Better yet, develope your third eye and you will find many teachers (incompetent and adept) in the astral planes. Your best teacher is your own heart and your own experiences. If you don't understand the topic, subject or have a propensity to let radical Buddhist interpretors steal your understanding, that is fine with me. But you really shouldn't push it on the rest of us. In the meantime, I recommend reading: "Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond" - Ajahn Brahm "Focused and Fearless" - Shaila Catherine "The Attention Revolution" - Alan Wallace "Wonders of the Natural Mind" - Tenzin Wangyal

Well, I have to say... In one of these threads, somebody said that the Olds never completed the thogal visions. Now, I am inclined to believe that it might be true. I just finished reviewing Wonders of the Natural Mind by Tenzin Wangyal, specifically his recount of his 49 day dark retreat. In it, TenZin recounts the visions that he saw, even has pictures of the visions in his book. The symbols, the thogal visions of circles appeared after week one! Tenzin says that after the second week "the first forms starting to resemble concrete reality started to appear." Here is one example... Because the Olds never drew any concrete pictures similar to the ones Tenzin Wangyal describes after the second week of his dark retreat, one has to conclude that the Olds didn't even get past the equivalent of one weeks' worth of dark retreat. So, there you go. More from Wonders of the natural mind..

Hi Steve, Since I like pointing out inconsistencies, I thought I'd point out that there is a descrepency between your statement of "Whether or not you like the "aiming at the space between thoughts" idea, I find this to be an eloquent description of the natural state" and your response of not being able to describe the natural state. For, if you cannot describe the natural state, then how can say that something is an eloquent description of it? LOL. Not a big deal.. Excellent book, by the way. The only way I can make sense of 'aiming at space between thoughts" idea is this. There are three components to the puzzle: awareness, the subject and the object. When the subject no longer has an object to focus on (the object has disappeared), then the subject disappears leaving behind that which is aware of no subject or object. In my experience, this is the wide open space which seems to be endless, aware and always there. So, aiming at the space between thoughts may be part of a preliminary step, but if one grasps at the 'lack of thought' or open space in the gap between thoughts, there is still a subject. It is only upon relinquishing of the subject that the third party (awareness) becomes known. So, although these are probably good instructions, they should be taken in context of the rest .. There is a danger there that the practitioner/reader may interpret 'lack of thought' as the natural state. The gap between thoughts presents only a momentary opportunity so long as the subject does not get a chance to cling or grasp. For, if "lack of thoughts" and "natural state" were mutually inclusive, the text would not go on to say the following: If my understanding of the previous quote is correct, the sentence "while looking directly into the fresh awareness of the observer" is the equivalent of my 3 parts of awareness/subject/object, that is, the third party awareness is looking directly at the fresh awareness of the subject. For, when a myriad of phenomenon appear, the subject also appears. Therefore, since I don't like the gap analogy, I would say this: fixate on a thought until it dissolves. Notice that the subject also dissolves when there is no more motion, grasping or conceptual clinging. Remain there. Or, while the subject is grasping at thoughts, notice that there is something watching the subject as it grasps at the object.. I guess I'm just emphasizing that it is possible to be in the natural state while a plethora of thoughts/visions/movements are occuring, and that if a plethora of thoughts/visions/movements are occuring, according to that text, it is a sign that one can be in the natural state.

Hi Steve , Are you speaking from experience here? Can you describe the natural state? Is it a clear luminous dark open space or is it filled with white light?

Human life is not rare at all. That's just what they say to motivate you. There are billions/infinite universes and countless beings. And although it seems like this life is short, once you realize that you've had many lifetimes or even realize the true nature of reality, the concept of you living a life dissolves away. Trial and error. It's a real teacher. The other day I tried three hours of breath meditation, for two days in a row, in three separate sittings each day. For the first session I put heavy emphasis on the out breath and letting go. For the second and third sessions, I put emphasis on loving the breath from the heart. I saw no nimittas during the sessions, but on the first night I was so relaxed and energized that when I went to bed I could not sleep. I didn't mind all that much because I didn't have to work the next day. So I laid in bed and noticed that my mind was very bright and even. Not allot happening. Then I turned over on my left side and enjoyed the cool sheets as my foot went sliding forward. Then I noticed that there was much light near my forehead so I moved my attention upwards towards the brow. I saw the most beautiful nimitta that I have seen in while. It looked just like the moon. Pearly white, perfectly round and it was shining just like a full moon. I was awestruck and not well prepared for it... I got to look at it for only a few seconds before it disappeared. Too much grasping.. However, the experience taught me that the proper breathing meditations during the day will help precipitate a calm at night, and when the mind is calm, the choice nimittas appear. (Really, I know all this stuff from before, from prior experiences, and I'm just bringing this up to emphasize the blessings of trial and error.) On another note, a few days later, I was in the elevator at work and I had the strangest experience. I sort of swooned or experienced a "shift" while looking at the elevator wall and doors. The scene looked like it was a disjoint perception surrounded by white light. How can I explain? There was only a square slice of the scene in front which resembled a 3d picture. Above and below, to each side, there was only space filled with white light. When my perception moved, another squarish scene appeared and it was also surrounded by white light. At that point I realized that normal reality consists of 3d slices of perception which the mind then splices together to form an imaginary consistency complete with a linear time line. But in truth, it is not the case. I had the feeling or knowledge that I could slip into the space between the scenes, that I could just pick a scene, grasp at it with the mind, and that that would become the normal reality. I also realized that that is how the mystics transport themselves from one place to another, by just grasping the scene that they want to be in. It is quite astounding that I would have this realization while going down in an elevator, but the experience has given me a new understanding of reality, how it appears to be comprised of 3d slices of appearances which the mind stitches together to create the illusion of continuity. The whole effect lasted only a few minutes. It was really interesting. It really changed my understanding because I thought there would be empty dark space in between the slices, but now I know that there are bright white streams of light, like luminous threads, out of which the appearances appear. I'm now inclined to believe that we don't truly exist, not in the conventional sense...reality is just the perception or vision or sensual conglomerate that "something" is grasping at at the time. Now I'm curious to know if anyone else has had a similar experience.. Or has even written about it... Thanks for listening...

A doctor of what? Skepticism? Just read your other post where you say It appears you don't trust much of anything and do not have sufficient experiences to bolster your trust. Yet you have the audacity to tell me to trust you based on the idea that you are a doctor? I hope you resolve your mental imprisonment, if not in this eon, perhaps in the next. ::

Just for the halibut, is this you? ~~~~ MOD WARNING / NOTICE ~~~~ Removed attempt to reveal someone's personal information without consent of the person. This was not reported by a member, but rather a mod. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~