Seeker of Wisdom

No, it's koans.

If someone is consistently troublesome, it's wise to avoid them. But we can still understand that this is due to causes and conditions and not the entirety of who they are, rather than them being inherently awful. Judging a person's BEHAVIOUR may be necessary, and doesn't imply judging THEM.

Mahayana and Vajrayana are fundamentally based on 8FP, just approaching it in deeper ways, and not mentioning it so directly because it's automatically subsumed. In Mahayana, Right Intention is bodhichitta and Right View is madhyamika. The rest are basically the same. In Vajrayana, Right View is the View, samaya includes vows relating to Right Speech/Act/Livelihood, the last three ultimately become uncontrived resting in the View. So the 8FP becomes the View, Meditation and Way of Life, essentially. Right Intention is still bodhichitta. Are Vajrayana students not supposed to have Right View? If you don't need to have some form of Right Act, can you go around stabbing people for giggles? Think about what you're saying, it makes no sense.

Yeah, but words are useful when teaching, and a subtle concept can be useful as an arrow to knock down a gross one, leaving only the open sky, free of both of them. No-self is an antidote to the idea of self. Cured of the poison, discard the antidote as dead weight! 'My teaching is a raft to reach the other shore, ultimately to be left behind'.

Not knowing truth is what causes us to grasp. So letting go is only possible to a limited, shallow extent if it doesn't flow out of wisdom. Dukkha is caused by grasping, grasping is caused by delusion. So the path is designed to destroy delusion. Believing in self means we grasp on to things as 'I' and 'mine', so we identify with stuff. This means we grasp onto a reified dichotomy of 'me - important' and 'not me - less important'. With full realisation of emptiness comes letting go of samsara, achieving nirvana as an arhat. The next steps involve realising the non-duality of samsara and nirvana, and having bodhichitta, resulting in Buddhahood - transcending all extremes.

You're massively misunderstanding the teachings on Buddha-nature. It needs to be understood in the wider context of madhyamika, or it is reified, which is the mistake you've made. We have Buddha-nature in the sense of the obscurations being removable, and them causing the enlightened qualities to be skewed into deluded qualities. That doesn't mean we are Buddhas with the qualities of Buddhas! If Buddha-nature is liquid water, the obscurations are like cold weather which causes the water to harden into ice. The ice is itself still water, and only has to be removed from the cold to manifest liquid qualities... but you wouldn't give someone who's thirsty a glass of solid ice. Yes, the conceptual mind is incapable of comprehending this. But hopefully my analogy has made things a bit clearer.

Actually, that sounds like one of the methods used in Buddhism - resting the mind in its natural state. This entails watching all mental events without aversion, attachment, or trying to control what happens, while paying no attention to sensory experiences. That's a shamatha practice, just like focusing on the breath or a visualised image. Only, the focus is more of a byproduct of allowing the mind to settle than actively trying to focus. But even mindfulness of breathing should never be forceful, and distractions are released rather than repressed. You're misunderstanding what is meant by emptiness. It's not a 'thing' as such, like 'here's emptiness', 'I am experiencing emptiness', like some massive void. Emptiness refers to how all things have no inherent essence, they only exist and manifest properties in interdependent origination. A table has no table-ness, it only exists as a result of carpentry and cause of other things. If you realise emptiness, you will know it 100%. Resting the mind in its natural state is more for shamatha than vipashyana, but you can get insights welling up as the mind clears. Well done! But this isn't no-self. Again, it's not a 'thing' to find or experience. Like emptiness, it's simply a truth which you can realise. No-self refers to there being no absolute essence or centre to a person. We have a belief that 'I am this', 'I have that', 'I do this'. But actually a person is a bundle of processes. Take seeing an apple. It's the eye that receives the image, visual consciousness that forms a mental picture, conception that thinks 'that's an apple'... But we believe 'I am seeing this apple' as though we are some kind of core which owns all those processes. The truth is that 'we' are only mental and physical processes working interdependently, with no self behind them all. --- I don't think that your experience was jhana. Jhana is a really advanced state of utter focus, with all the jhana factors highly developed. It's possible to experience jhana a little bit before actually having access concentration, but it doesn't sound from your description like your mind inverted into the substrate consciousness, which is a main feature of access concentration and the jhanas. This is just one of the many experiences that can come up as the mind and body clears out the crud. However, you are definitely doing very well. Keep going. Don't try to change, cause or avoid any particular thoughts, emotions, desires or other experiences that come up in this practice. Let those clouds pass through the sky of your awareness. If you want to learn more about shamatha and the jhanas, I recommend http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Attention-Revolution-Unlocking-Focused/dp/0861712765/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1391533088&sr=8-2&keywords=attention

Bump.

'Crazy' as in 'crazy wisdom' - completely sane, but with high realisation that means they can use skilful means to help people according to their needs, with behaviour that seems crazy, nonsensical or outrageous to the majority of people, who can't understand their rationale.

The above. Also, if you live in an urban area, don't try to be extra nice and release them in a field, since they probably won't know how to survive there.

It's also a mainstream Buddhist view that experience occurs in the mind. Of course the eye doesn't see. However, there are still actually objects out there, and perception of them is contingent on light entering the eye, so it doesn't mean that only mind exists or that awareness is an absolute.

Yes, these kinds of arguments on the internet have only ever been productive helpful chats, staying directly on topic with no needless insults and leading to everyone happily agreeing on something in the end after the digital version of a handshake and hilarious memes aplenty.

Someone with a good understanding of what their goals are, what paths lead to those goals, and what practices match those paths can select methods from different traditions according to the strengths of those traditions. Mixing conflicting views, though, leads to confusion and poor results. You can't get far working from a Madhyamika view one minute and a Samkya view the next. Either there is an ontological absolute, or there isn't. It's fine to use shamatha methods from both Buddhism and Raja Yoga because they're complementary, but when it comes to the end goals and insight, they conflict. I think there should be a clear commitment to one system, and others can be used as 'catalysts' to shore up the primary system. In my practice, I am a Buddhist with an emphasis on shamatha, but I use some things from Taoism and yoga to help with the chi side of cultivation, and accept good teachings on virtue wherever they come from.

If you are awareness, do you cease to exist in deep sleep? If you aren't awareness, how are you different from a rock? If you are both awareness and other thing/s, that makes you an aggregation. So is self in the parts, or the parts in self - what is the relationship between a thing and its parts? If you are not awareness or something else, how, then, do you have experiences? It's very easy to assume that something must be a substantial self, because we assume the existence of such a thing so deeply. Don't mistake experience for belief.

I found this. I haven't listened to any of them yet, but I would expect anything from him to be worth sharing. Enjoy. https://archive.org/details/FourApplicationsOfMindfulnessRetreat2013

Find as many arguments as you can for the LOA being wrong as you can, and remind yourself of them regularly. Also, try to allow negative thoughts. Perhaps write stories of awful scenarios, elaborate situations of family illness, natural disaster, etc. Watch the film 'The Number 23' too.

The wise one straightens the unsteady mind, so difficult to guard and hard to restrain, just as a fletcher straightens an arrow's shaft. There's always a little more depth to find. To my mind this isn't just saying 'do shamatha although it's hard', but also gives a very important key to doing it. Consider how a fletcher would straighten an arrow shaft - gently removing tiny slivers. In that light the reference to the mind being 'difficult to guard and hard to restrain' takes on another significance - don't guard or restrain forcefully, but respond skilfully. Perhaps 'straightening' refers not only to samadhi, but also means 'straighten in a virtuous and wise direction', in which case this is about all the three trainings, and their synergy.

I also want to add that mantra is a good thing - I use it myself - but recite mantras consciously, understanding what they mean, and use time-tested mantras such as in Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism and so on. Reciting them laxly, allowing them to lose crispness of sound, as in AYP and TM, is relaxing but the high road to torpor. It's just repeating something until your mind tunes out. Reciting them consciously, with the meaning in mind, is a good way to set up rhythmic healthy chi flow and instil the positive idea expressed by the mantra in your mind. But if you want access concentration - that profound clarity, vividness and stability - that is not what mantra is for. Practice shamatha for that. Chanting a mantra involves deliberately using the surface mind, creating an oscillating thought, so don't use mantra as a shamatha practice. They are both great, but don't mix them up as they do different things.

Hi! What I meant by 'torpor' is the mental factor of zoning out. An equivalent event for listening to a radio would be the radio tuning out into static. This is like a trance state. I think that the AYP methods generate this mental factor, and mistake it for 'inner stillness' because it is peaceful and quiet (actually there are still thoughts going on, but you aren't noticing them). True meditation should involve stable focus with vivid attention. The difference between AYP torpor and a quiet mind with vivid attention is something you have to experience to see just how misguided AYP is. Torpor can also be called laxity, sloth or dullness. By 'overload' I mean overdoing a practice, especially a misguided practice, such that it harms you. This can take the form of 'kundalini syndrome', and many cases can be found by browsing the AYP forums. A more robust form of practice IMHO is 'shamatha' meditation, which is well covered by the Buddhist tradition but is also a key part of Raja Yoga and others. Don't think you have to subscribe to Buddhism to develop your mind, it's nonsectarian. The principle of shamatha is to train the mind to be relaxed, focused and vivid. This makes the mind truly clear and quiet. The end goal of shamatha is access concentration, when there is no distraction or torpor, and the mind can be focused at will on anything with extreme precision. A level of consciousness deeper than the mind, the 'substrate consciousness' can then be accessed, which has been described as "bliss like the warmth of a fire, luminosity like the dawn, non-conceptuality like an ocean unmoved by waves". The significance of this is that once you have access concentration, any insights you get through other practices such as 'vipashyana' penetrate through to the substrate consciousness, and, as the substrate consciousness is the root of the mind, therefore are permanent. So if you want to realise the nature of self, you could theoretically do vipashyana now and realise the nature of self, but it would be more difficult to do with a cloudy mind, and the realisation would be temporary and incomplete. Access concentration makes it far far easier to have profound realisations, and stamps them in forever. Detailed clear instructions and explanation are here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Attention-Revolution-Unlocking-Focused-v-ution/dp/0861712765/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1390140535&sr=1-1&keywords=the+attention+revolution Here's helpful free audio recordings from a shamatha retreat with guided meditations: https://archive.org/details/ShamathaRetreatWithAlanWallace2012 I said a lot there, and you'll probably have further questions. Feel free to send me a PM, and good luck finding a better path.

The first 13 recordings are mainly about shamatha, with comments on science and materialism. If you are also familiar with Alan's teaching on shamatha, and want to get to the main topic of the retreat, you may want to skip those a bit as he's said it before elsewhere. If you aren't familiar with Alan, skip nothing as it's all interesting and well taught.

An animal can have delusions, craving and malice just as a human. The ideas of things having substantial intrinsic nature isolated from other things and things being the one and only reliable source of happiness, exists in animals on an intuitive level. The difference is that humans have more developed mental faculties, so we can put our delusions into philosophical terminology if we wish, consciously recognise and question them, and can also cultivate in ways that undermine our delusion and unveil our Buddha-nature, which is no more developed in a human than an animal.

A mind free of fetters is not necessarily also a mind lacking thought (thoughts aren't a problem, delusion, malice, and clinging are), and any kind of mind is very different from a blank unconscious nothingness.

Under, binaural beats aren't a very good way to go about meditating, and forcefully blocking out thought isn't correct either. Binaural beats are an undeveloped technology, nothing is really known about the effects, and if they were a reliable way to induce altered states safely that would still be missing the point of meditation. A cool experience is just an experience, meditation is for making the mind more healthy and pliant all the time. Meditation isn't about stopping thought, either. It's about increasing relaxation, stability and vividness. That will reduce thought as a side-effect because of more stable focus, but a meditation master could think about things actually more effectively than a normal person. By forcefully blocking thought and using binaural beats, you may have inadvertently clung to 'coarse laxity' - basically, zoned out so much you dulled your mind. You need to keep your mind active, think about things as much as you can and get grounded with some kind of exercise. Also get The Attention Revolution by Alan Wallace so you understand meditation. Practising it correctly could also help you fix this, but be gentle.

Try to figure out why you fear others judging you. Probe deeply into it and look from multiple perspectives. Investigate as far as possible. Consider events in your past - they/it may not even be something you remember or consider important as an adult, because to a young child a minor event can be very upsetting.

I'm more inclined to think that social anxiety is blocking your throat chakra than a block in your throat chakra is causing social anxiety. You need to examine what goes in your mind at these times to see what the fear is and why it is there. Then, you can question and overcome the underlying wrong cognition.