Seeker of Wisdom

My Q's (this list isn't the final one I'll be sending, just my own Q ideas): *The intro questions. *What will be the main differences between MCTB and MCTB2? From the section out now, there seems to be a touch more on 'allowing reality to reveal itself' - a bit of Zen influence? *Judging from anecdotes by you and also by Kenneth Folk, there's a bit more openness about attainments in places like Burma. Any comments on this and other cultural differences? *Can you describe the experience of awakening in your system? What are the key features of each of the Four Paths (both the process of working towards each one, and the changes that result when you attain it)? *Anything you'd like to add?

Maybe this part of TDB might belong better under 'general discussion', or 'local meetups' could be made 'meetups and interviews'?

Yeah.

Shamatha, mindfulness of breathing particularly. I can't think of any path where more samadhi wouldn't be helpful, it really is a launchpad into so much more. People not interested in deep cultivation can still massively benefit from a bit of calm and clarity too.

YouTube tip to hear a video on repeat: type 'repeat' in between 'youtube' and '.com'. So here's your video on repeat: http://youtuberepeat.com/watch?v=0Ix9yfoDHJw Should work for any video.

This is the only forum I participate in myself, but dhammawheel and dharmawheel both produce some interesting stuff. If you're at all into the pragmatic/hardcore dharma scene, dharmaoverground has a lot of interesting and open-minded discussion going on - focused very heavily on real-life practice and its results. IMO dhammawheel would suit you best, unless you're into the pragmatic/hardcore scene, in which case you'd want dharmaoverground.

I don't know how Taoists train concentration or visualisation, but I would recommend kasina practice to work on both at once.

Based on one silly video? There are countless other people capable of posting easily debunked videos. Just Google 'John Chang debunked' and see what the skeptics have to say (if you're open-minded enough to consider it). For example, I found this in under a minute:

I've noticed that a good session of either shamatha or vipashyana feels a lot longer than it actually is. There's research on this from here: Increased resolution of attention -> dilated time perception. Has anyone else noticed the same? Or the opposite?

If you're interested in neigong, 'Daoist Nei Gong' by Damo Mitchell is likely a better bet than the first two parts of a closed system from a book written by someone who long ago left said system, backed primarily by rabid denials of the value of other systems and an easily debunked video of someone being an AA battery. Gosh, I hope this doesn't become one of those endless mopai threads...

In theory, full-time practice would be fastest. But most people, me included, need to do other things too. A certain amount of quality practice alternating with normal life is better than some quality practice and a lot of crap practice forced through restlessness and frustration. And if someone becomes awakened out in a mountain cave, then they still have to face the challenge of going back down to the city and handling normal life well.

To paraphrase Gil Fronsdal, Buddhism denies attachment to the world, not the world itself. The idea of dukkha is widely misunderstood, and the role/importance of pleasure in Buddhism barely acknowledged. See here for more detail if you want. Anyway. Songstan, what you're describing sounds like avoidance, not freedom. The problem isn't anything out there, or anything in here, but IMHO the grasping onto it and our sticky ideas about it.

I don't see why deliberately taking in harmful substances, events, people, etc, would be a good idea... I think you do need to face hard times on the path, but that will happen as you face up to and work through the crud you're already carrying (views, habits, emotions, etc) and learn to deal skilfully with what life happens to place in your way. Picking up new harmful stuff doesn't help, you need to acknowledge and process the harm already going on.

Well, Thanissaro says: In other words, asking 'what gets reborn?' is a mistaken question because it's based on an assumption that a thing is what gets reborn. The Buddha saw rebirth instead in terms of a process - mental and physical components causally linked. Imagine fire burning along a rope - the flames are new flames at each point as the fire burns along. Asking 'what part of the flame moves along the rope?' just doesn't make sense. So in the Buddha's terms, this process is expressed as the nidanas of dependent origination. These are repeated often in the suttas, here's one example from the maha-nidana sutta:

That's completely valid from one angle. And fifty thumbs up for the stuff on facing your issues, definitely something I need to do. Great share. The way I see things, though, is that there are many axes of development which different practices/traditions work on. They are connected and influence other a lot, so it isn't like work on one axis has no effect on anything else - but if you want progress along a particular axis, then to some extent you have to do something specific to that axis for a while. So let's say there's an 'emotional maturity' axis, a 'intelligence' axis, a 'virtue' axis, an 'energetics' axis, a 'samadhi' axis, a 'physical health' axis, a 'insight' axis, and so on. Coming from a Buddhist POV, this path's 'three trainings' focuses on three axes. There's virtue (which Daniel Ingram et al teach as actually including emotional maturity and the other stuff helpful for living a good life in the ordinary sense), samadhi, and insight. All three are equally important, but at the same time it is only progress along the 'insight' axis which results in permanent shifts to the mind which Buddhism would consider awakening. Saying that meditation is about emotional maturity is neither right nor wrong IMO, it depends what sort(s) of meditation you're doing and what axes you're hoping to progress along. Kenneth Folk has a really nice hard drive analogy: Looking at the three trainings in terms of the hard drive analogy, I'd say that the training of virtue moves horizontally, the training of insight moves vertically, and the training of samadhi makes it easier to move up or across.

Well: From http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140115172246.htm The idea that blood type is a significant factor in diet seems to be wrong, or at best just an idea someone had with nothing to back it up. There are a whole load of factors that influence how a person ought to be eating and living, so a 'blood type A should..., B should..., O should...' approach probably doesn't work. Always an interesting exercise to Google 'X debunked' and see what comes up. I guess instead you could try looking at your family history. That might tell you what you're likely to be susceptible to, so you can go from there.

I simply don't see where this is coming from, DB. Karma is not disempowering - quite the opposite. What you are doing here is taking the Christian framework of shame/guilt and judgement which you used to follow and applying it to Buddhism, where it just doesn't apply. In Buddhism there is no 'sin' and no judge. Karma means that the quality of your intentions and actions conditions your present and future experience. What this means is that you have a great deal of power over your experience, you are empowered to send yourself in a positive or negative direction. It also means that you don't have to care about rules other people have laid down, because you see for yourself what is skillful. And a consequence of that is that shame/guilt is worthless, because if you made a mistake it was simply a lack of skill which you've now learnt from, rather than sinfully breaking a rigid law. And this is disempowering, huh? Try flipping your perspective out of the Christian framework a bit. Try to see how empowering this is:

Bump.

According to wikipedia, "Bodhisattvas on this level cultivate the perfection of samadhi. They develop strong powers of meditative stabilization and overcome tendencies toward distraction. They achieve mental one-pointedness and they perfect calm abiding. They also fully penetrate the meanings of the four noble truths and the two truths (conventional truths and ultimate truths) and perceive all phenomena as empty, transient and prone to suffering." I.e., I think you were on the right track with this:

Hypothetically, teenagers interested in jhana wouldn't be a bad thing. Any who really run with it would end up more balanced and healthy people, and some of those would get interested in awakening. In the suttas there is a story of a man who was going to leave the path. The Buddha told him that if he practised hard, in his next life he would have the *company* of hot female devas. So he buckled down and later achieved arhatship... Losing interest in the devas. Buddha may not have described jhana with the word 'orgasm', but he sure went out of his way to make it sound pleasant. 'Suffusing the body with rapture and joy born of withdrawal like cool water suffusing a sponge', and all that. Is this pleasure seeking?

I fail to see why not wearing robes and living in a monastery would cause a person to lose arhatship. That would be very flimsy arhatship! Renunciation is a matter of the mind, whether there is attachment - it is possible to own things without attachment. Monasticism is just a set of customs which people who are super into this can find helpful. Considering the texts were ultimately written by monastics centuries after the Buddha, I think it isn't hard to figure out where this particular piece of doctrine came from.

Ingram reproaches the bullshit and dogma which has built up in Buddhism, which obscures the straightforward techniques and results which lie at its heart. He criticises the religion, not the liberation technology... which Buddhism has in spades. I still feel the methodology of AYP has limits in where it can go, and an above average risk of overload. For all the same reasons as in the OP. However, in the two years since I started this thread and developed as a person and a cultivater, I've lost interest in trying to convince others. If anyone says they find AYP helpful, that is their path and may they enjoy all the fruits it has to offer for them.

The traditional view is that these things can be experienced, that someone not ready to be interested in awakening may seek to avoid hells and become a deva in heavens as a provisional goal, but that awakening is superior to any form of rebirth. Personally I'm just doing the stuff that leads to being a more decent, developed and awakened person. Other people can and do spend their lives debating the above.

He defined 'the All' in his teaching as 'what is touched, etc, and cognised'. In other words, he was only interested in experience, physical and mental, not metaphysical thinking about it. Questions like 'are there real objective things out there or not' would be dismissed as pointless speculation, for example, because such thinking strays from the reality of simple 'experience happens'. Where this fits onto anatta is that the Buddha was not proposing clinging to the idea 'there is no self' as yet another idea about identity. It's just a pointer opposing holding views of self. He was saying we should take a look at experience, and see that nowhere in this is a place on which to hang any sense of identity whatsoever. And just let that clear seeing be, without wrapping another conceptual view around it. If there is something truly changeless which cannot be experienced as changeless, it doesn't matter because all experience would still be impermanent.

I wrote a fair amount of AYP criticism when I first joined here, which you can find by searching if you want. Though if someone finds it helpful, I won't bother them about it. These days my practice is largely Theravada Buddhism - shamatha as taught by Alan Wallace in 'The Attention Revolution' (though his standards are far too high, the methods themselves are tip-top), and vipashyana as taught by Daniel Ingram in 'MCTB'. Occasional practice from 'Daoist Nei Gong' by Damo Mitchell.