Seeker of Wisdom

With samadhi, attachments to sense pleasures are greatly pacified. You can still be subject to attachment to mental pleasures: the bliss, luminosity and non-conceptuality of samadhi. Also, with samadhi there is still attachment to views. Combine the attachment to views and attachment to samadhi, and this explains all the people who experience samadhi and latch onto their own expansive awareness as Self. Samadhi is just the beginning - getting a serviceable mind.

Trance is a state of reduced thought with reduced awareness. The waking state is a state of active thought with moderate awareness. Deep meditation - samadhi, or, even deeper, jhana - is a state of reduced thought with great awareness. Samadhi is a highly refined state, more vivid, calm and non-conceptual than normal waking consciousness. Many people think that they can't develop samadhi because they can't empty their minds and maintain very good focus. They're approaching it from the wrong angle. Distraction and dullness are not failures. They are strong habits which are worn away with practice to gradually subtler forms. A helpful way to think about this is that stilled thought isn't the GOAL, but the natural RESULT of three qualities: relaxation, stability and vividness. If it ever seems that your mind is completely still, focus a bit more closely and you may find a vast amount of cognition too brief or subtle for you to have noticed before. The purpose of cultivating samadhi is to develop a very stable, clear and vivid mind. Such a mind can be used to penetrate beyond concepts to reality as it actually is - to flow with Tao. As for how deep is deep enough, that level of samadhi, access concentration, is when you could easily sit with absolutely no distraction and enormous vividness for at least 4 hours. This is marked by a surge of bliss, physical pliancy and lightness, and feeling like you could count the atoms of your house. Once you've achieved access concentration, there is no need to sit practising samadhi any more. Many masters have warned people to not get attached to samadhi, blocking out the world and normal mental functioning as though thoughts are bad. This stuff is outlined very well by Alan Wallace in The Attention Revolution.

Some scholars think that his presentation of madhyamika slanted towards nihilism. I'm not sure how, if true, that makes him crazy and invalidates everything he ever said; nor do I understand how it could even be possible to talk about madhyamika perfectly given the imperfections of language. Speaking from my (very) limited knowledge of lamrim, I think that, even if Tsongkhapa's view of madhyamika was a pile of rubbish, his practical teachings are still a fine path we can follow to get to the right results, and hence to right view.

It doesn't sound like you've done anything immoral, and I don't think it would be lying or hiding stuff to not tell a girl upfront about your history of masturbation issues, trying gay sex, retaining, then having a few meaningless sexual encounters. That last item is fairly standard these days anyway. You're worried about whether or not to divulge your history at the start because on some level you feel that your history is shameful, and it would be wrong to hide the ugly truth about yourself - but you haven't hurt anyone, you have nothing to be ashamed of. Whatever anyone does or doesn't do sexually is nothing for them to be ashamed of, if it is consensual and nobody is harmed. What you say upfront is "I'm looking for a serious relationship", and of course be open about your history if it does come up. You seem a decent guy, and any girl worth your time would rate you on that, not your past, and will respect your honesty.

When life flows with neither passive acceptance nor conflict, with deliberation and spontaneity functioning in harmony, you are acting from the Tao.

It's your path, but consider - what are you cultivating for, what do you need to do to achieve that, what practices will help you in those areas? Working on chi is all well and good. What about your mind? Don't underestimate the importance of virtue, samadhi concentration and wisdom. They're the three really key things IMHO. I regularly recommended that people read The Attention Revolution by Alan Wallace. It's a great guide to developing samadhi.

All kinds of stuff can happen. If it's not causing problems, best to just carry on. Remember, any experience is just stuff and we're trying to get beyond that, to the ultimate nature of reality.

Drugs are no good for cultivation (apart from very careful rituals for prepared adepts under a proper lineage, perhaps). They open the mind to a different kind of perception, but different doesn't mean clearer. It's an unreliable hodgepodge of nonsense from the subconscious, like in dreams or when any channeler who hasn't seriously properly cultivated for years goes into a trance and starts talking about everyone ascending in 2012. There will be some tidbits from the great processing power of the subconscious - presented as symbols, so you can't even be sure of interpreting them right. And these kinds of insights will generally be about things in your own life/psyche, not liberating realisations - unless you have a lucky epiphany, which is so extremely unlikely that you shouldn't take a drug with any hope of that. The vast majority of it will be subconscious bullshit swirling about, like rehashes of episodes of Bananas in Pyjamas you saw as a little kid or random swirling lights you'll want to try to interpret. And there is of course a serious risk of addiction, and any addiction majorly weakens the will, unsteadies and fogs the mind. The only plus about taking drugs in cultivation is that when some people have weird experiences they get into cultivation.

You don't understand what Satanism actually is. LaVeyan Satanism has nothing whatsoever to do with hell, evil, ritual sacrifice, worship of an evil being called Satan, or anything like that. You're confusing a minority of crazy cults with a philosophy that is basically just about opposing hypocritical religious fundamentalists and their perception of people as sinful fallen beings. Satanists like the blogger in the OP are really just humanists who object to the repression of natural desires and try to work with them instead. Minus the atheism, that's fairly Taoist. Some of her points about similarities between Buddhism, Taoism and Satanism are really quite reasonable.

We cultivators are dealing with the habits of a very long time. From one perspective, the whole path is simply removing all the constrictions and stains in our minds. We have been misusing our Buddha-nature for playing the role of a deluded sentient being, and there are a lot of masks to peel off. Take strength knowing that you can always take a mask off, but no mask can ever remove your face. As for why the paralysis happens, I wouldn't worry about that either. Sleep paralysis is fairly common and harmless, I've had it occasionally. It may just a little glitch in the mechanism that keeps your muscles unresponsive during dreams (imagine if we acted them out), or maybe it has something to do with your need for control.

How could your practice be inviting evil in if you are focusing on virtuous things? These kinds of experiences are crud that was already lodged in your mind being released. The demons and ghosts you are seeing in dreams are just symbols of the negative qualities in your own subconscious. As they pass up into the conscious mind you notice them and worry about it, but then they disappear, having been purified. Someone who doesn't cultivate never goes through this stuff because they just carry their crud and never fix it. I don't know about you, but I'd rather deal with it, be a bit uncomfortable while it is being purified, then be free of it for good.

It's worth knowing that the vast majority of Satanists are not evil people who worship the devil and sacrifice children - that's just the media jumping aboard the hysterical Christian bandwagon. Satanism is really more of an individualistic atheist's philosophy which developed as a reaction to perceived hypocrisy and suppression of natural instincts such as lust in Christianity, and uses the word 'Satan' purely to piss off fundamentalists. I'm definitely not a Satanist myself, as I am not an atheist and find the Satanist 'do what's natural' an extreme just as stupid as the fundamentalist Christian 'suppress everything, God wants you to be asexual'. I just wanted to point out that most people's opinions on Satanism are skewed by the media portrayal as evil devil worshippers and jumping to conclusions because it has the word 'Satan' in it.

I hope that the Muslims who come across this thread understand that the majority of Buddhists have no problem with the majority of Muslims.

You mean, 'Some Muslims want to call any differing point of view as "Satanic", ban books and implement sharia law.'

Again, this is misinterpreting anatta as nihilism. There is no solid fundamental self, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a bundle of processes which in conventional terms can be referred to as 'me', and which can be developed. Also this is still misunderstanding Buddha-nature as something which is there now, like a nugget of gold buried underground. Instead it is more like gold in ore - the gold isn't there now, but all you have to do to unveil it is remove obscuration. That's a subtle but very important distinction. It isn't a present reality (except for Buddhas) or a potential, it is more like a flux. Personally, it seems to me that Anadi has reached something, but due to a fear of losing conceptual reference points he is generating loads of simplistic false views from intellectual interpretations of the qualia as they are really experienced.

The ability to effortlessly maintain perfect focus for 4 hours is a sign that you've achieved shamatha, indicating mental stability. That stability is the actual goal of shamatha. Sitting in perfect focus for hours doesn't do anything in itself, someone who has achieved shamatha should then switch to vipashyana to take advantage of their mental stability. There isn't a strict linear development in vipashyana, the order of realisations depends on the individual.

Read The Attention Revolution by Alan Wallace for a very clear guide to proper shamatha practice, which is a meaningful practice which leads to meaningful results... unlike trying to talk to spirits, fussing over chakras and other New Age fluff. When you achieve access concentration from the practice of shamatha, meaning your mind is cleared of eons of crud and you have conscious access to the subconscious and, far more importantly, the substrate consciousness, it will be easy for you to talk to nonhuman entities, recall past lives, and much more stuff like that - if for some reason you want to do flashy crap. Also, your chakras will automatically clear and activate to the max with no effort on your part, to a far higher degree than is even possible from moving around energy - as the roots of the blocks and imbalances are in your mind, they can only be removed through mental training such as shamatha.

Edit: missed relevant part of OP, silly me. Carry on...

A post about this Buddha at the Gas Pump thing in general: So, this Anadi guy... he makes some good points about 'opening' implying 'to something external', there being few sincere seekers, and humanity being at a low stage of development. But his ideas about annatman and the self are way off. A complete misunderstanding of no-self. No-self doesn't say that we do not exist! Realising no-self doesn't imply dissolution into nothing or into something else, because nothing is being lost. It's just realising our real nature. If you take away someone's form, sensations, conceptions, volitions and consciousness, no aspect of them is still there. There is no soul separate from these things. So, 'self' at this point in my train of logic is a bundle of 5 aggregates. What is the relation between 'me' and my components? I am not any one of them in isolation - form alone is just a corpse, consciousness needs stuff to be aware of so it exists in any meaningful sense, and sensation/conception/volition need consciousness to be aware of them because otherwise they aren't rendered into subjective experience. So, no one of these aggregates is 'me'. At this point in my logic, I am something composed of a bunch of parts. However, this doesn't make sense either. If I am composed of parts, there is no 'me' separate from the parts. Nor can we say that I am in the parts, or that the parts are in me. 'Seeker of Tao' is a useful label so isn't quite wrong, but it isn't really right either as it's just an interpretation of what really is there - aggregates. So, what no-self states is that there is no independent essence of a person that is still them, regardless of the state of their aggregates. If you die and are reborn, that is not the same person. Saying that there is a 'self' or 'soul' is akin to saying that, if you demolish house X and use the bricks to build a tower, the tower is house X. It is a continuity of some aspects of house X from the previous materials. That house existed, but calling it 'house X' was just labelling applied for the sake of understanding, not a real fact - 'house X' was just a word for bricks placed to produce particular features. This is a misunderstanding of Buddha-nature. He is reifying enlightenment. Since the unenlightened state can be ended by the enlightened state and not vice versa, enlightenment can be considered to be the removal of temporary stains from our innately enlightened nature. This doesn't mean we actually have enlightenment somewhere inside now to uncover - it is a very nuanced flux.

Hi, TI. Based on your summary of his positions, it seems he's really misunderstood and oversimplified some aspects of the Buddhist view. I will make a detailed response when I have time to see his interview.

If you can love one specific person absolutely, no matter what, you would have to feel this unconditional love towards everyone, since the features of the person make no difference. If I have unconditional love for only one person, I must be feeling this towards them - rather than someone or everyone else - for a reason, even if it's just because we are related. So you see, unconditional love for only one person is a paradox. True unconditional love isn't based on any circumstances or features, so applies to all sentient beings. Even loving all humans regardless of their behaviour, a very noble and saintly trait, is conditional on species.

Unconditional love to all beings is possible, if you practice stuff like the 4 immeasurables, though it will only persist effortlessly with access concentration as a basis of strong mental stability. Romantic love is inherently conditional, there is some feature making you love that specific person.

I get what you're saying, and I agree that the process isn't strictly linear. However, sudden flashes of gnosis aren't things we can make happen, that surrender can't happen through intent, so we have to provisionally follow a path until the opening occurs. If we haven't had a sudden opening, we should be doing something to progress rather than waiting and hoping for one. I think that we follow the gradual to get to the sudden, and those who seem to have randomly jumped to the sudden probably did so from the fruition of prior gradual practice.

It's great that people do have these openings, some without much or any practice. But I'm cautious about the way the word 'Awakening' is thrown around to label any experience of higher consciousness. It's impossible to confuse being awake with being asleep, but just as most of society has no idea that they are asleep and could be awake (so you can be asleep and think you are awake), it is easy for someone who has had experiences or reached a particular state to confuse their attainment for full awakening - not knowing that awakening is higher. An awake person is not one who had a particular experience, and now looks back on that experience. They may remember what they learned in their gnosis, but it has become a matter of knowledge. Correct knowledge is different from liberating insight/perception. So, full awakening is a continual gnosis, not a memory of a peak experience of gnosis. Also, even continual gnosis isn't being awake if it is only one layer on the way to full liberation. Someone who fully gnows that all beings are fundamentally enlightened isn't awake if they don't gnow emptiness, and certainly if they haven't realised Tao, which is the heart of the matter. One area of confusion for many these days is reifying consciousness as the ultimate - idealism, which, like materialism, can't explain the interaction between mind and body.

Trying to be completely open and unfixated can just be a subtler kind of closed fixation - aversion to being closed and fixated. The issue is whether you are having to try. It's necessary to peel off layers with gradual practice, the trying and fixation slips away of its own accord to sudden full release. Otherwise, it's a catch-22 situation in which you are fixating on not fixating.