manitou

Does anyone see any value in this? I think our body talks to us. It tells us not only what's wrong physically, but more importantly, what's wrong psychically. I need to use a recent example of something that happened to my foot. I got a painful bump under the big toe of my left foot. Then, around the same time, another painful area developed under the same foot, unrelated. My first thought, as it usually is, is "Why am I manifesting this?" I started playing with the words....under foot. under foot. Aah! Underfoot! And then....under toe, under toe.....Aah! undertow! Was I manifesting something in my life that worked as an 'undertow' that was trying to pull me under in some way? There are several possible areas here in my life for me to examine to see if this is the case. When I came to the realization to focus on several things in my life having to do with an undertow, both painful areas were resolved. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

Thank you, my darling. But I'm rather glad you left my bovine appearance out of your post.

My dear Rainbow Vein - you've actually seen me in person. Did I give off the impression of a brilliantly colored tuber? although that's how I feel most of the time. actually, you may be right on target.....

Me too, girlfriend. How are we supposed to look?

My feeling is that what makes our healing abilities better and better is PRACTICE doing it. No one has confidence when they first start doing it. As someone said above, you've got to be willing to look like a goose. And people will assume you're crazy, so the ego thing really needs to be cut loose at the time of a healing. I think maybe it was Buckminster Fuller who repeatedly said that we have to repeatedly 'prove' things to ourselves for us to really internalize them. The way we 'prove' the fact that energy REALLY DOES flow out of our hands, is to just start doing it. Do it on the cat. Do it on the dog. Do it on a friend. When you start to get someone saying 'Wow! I feel better!', you'll start to prove to yourself that you're not 'just pretending'. Not to get all Christian or anything, but I do remember when the Nazarene said that it took the attitude or mind of a child to grasp what he was doing. Pretending? Isn't that what kids do? Could it be as simple as pretending, but without the sense of pretense? To do it with 100% confidence? Maybe that's the ultimate threshhold.

Hi TI - my meditation for 30 years was the same one - I never liked guided meditations. It was the same each time - watching a small vortex in the middle of my mind spinning around and around, finally until one day it was no longer there. Please know that I was brought up to be the most left brained person in the world - I always got a sense that this 'vortex' thingy was drilling through something, like rock. I don't know where I 'learned' about this meditation, I just did it. The result of this constant drilling, one day, was that I no longer feel that I'm 'getting through something'; rather, it now feels like my awareness is like a four-fold stereo receiver that receives input from all directions, if that makes any sense. The awareness is unlimited by anything. Yes, my mundane memory may have suffered from this. But what has emerged, along with the kundalinii activity, is the ability to see in 3 dimensions that I was unable to before. I am able to see in triangles in my mind's eye that show me the dynamics of what I'm looking at. I am a seer. I'm also capable of recognizing thoughs as they arise in my mind and if they are less than kind, I can immediately turn them around. I think the type of meditation I did for so long gave me a certain control over my thoughts. My mom has dementia, I am probably following in her footsteps. although I'm not buying into that too much. I am now telling myself several times a day 'how EXCELLENT my memory is.' The Mary Baker Eddy influence. Thank you for your concern, TI. Your point is well taken, but my personal opinion is that the benefits outweigh the detriment. Besides, life is kinda nice lived One Day at a Time.

Interesting you say that - I seem to feel the same. I spent 30 years meditating regularly and now I don't do it regularly, only when I feel like truly being alone and enjoying it. When so many years of meditation have gone by, it's now possible to blank the mind at will, whether one is engaged in activity or not. Or sometimes I wonder if my inheritance of dementia, early stages, doesn't make it a little easier to void the mind. Seems like you have a nice holistic approach to your own healing.

I can pick up things with my feet.

Very nice, Sanzon. Thank you for your helpful insights. What a wonderful thread this has been. Back to the compassion thing for a minute? There was a young man, quite disabled, who recently did a YouTube video, who was advocating for the fact that without his two fathers adopting him, he and his sister were virtually unadoptable, according to him. He was terribly grateful for the fact that his two gay fathers had adopted and raised him, and was offering up his testimony maybe for purposes of a pending supreme court decision. Did anyone happen to see this fellow? I think his name was Daniel (I'd find it on the internet, but I'm so bad at things like that I'd probably crash the entire TTB site if I tried). I haven't heard a story that poignant in a long time and the compassion welled up inside me so strongly it felt like it came together into a sharp point in my heart. I suspect that any time I have to generate compassion, remembering this fellow would make it easier to transfer the feelings to the one you're working with. It was powerful. It makes me feel good to know that the great ones, the Dalai Lama's, also have to 'generate' this feeling on occasion as well.

Just seems like one in ten is a bit on the high side.

Harmonious Emptiness, that is just about the most explanatory translation I've ever read on that chapter. it seems quite good. Marbles, if I wasn't a little girl I'd be an old lady. I think there's something to HE's comments about not being perceived as a threat, if we can keep our head and put out something other than fear to the creature (like love). That's more of what I was referring to - the Kissing the Bear thing was a tad over the top, perhaps....

Well hello, Mr. MH - I interpret that a different way. I think the sage, when harm appears to be upon him, will revert to the mindset of all phenomena being illusory and that is where his protection will be. Somehow, there is something inside me that Knows this. Yes, the recklessness (or lack of it) thing is very human and the logical answer. I'm just not convinced that's what it's saying. I think it's actually something spookier than not being reckless. Stephen Mitchell has a really nice way of putting the first part of this, having to do with living and dying: The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings (this right here is worth the price of admission!) He knows that he is going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to; no illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body. He doesn't think about his actions; they flow from the core of his being. He holds nothing back from life; therefore he is ready for death, as a man is ready for sleep after a good day's work. I think he doesn't think about his actions because if he is in a state of Oneness he knows all things are as they should be, therefore he sees no need to change or fix the dynamics. The needed action will come to him and he will see it and do it accordingly, according to the natural flow of the moment. Love or compassion will be at the bottom of his movements. So Marbles.....if you see a headline one day that says 'Ohio Woman Shredded to Death While Trying to Kiss Black Bear', just know that your interpretation was right, mine was wrong.....but what the heck, I gave it my all. I went out trying.....

This is the part you're talking about? Those who leave the womb at birth and those who enter their source at death, of these; three out of ten celebrate life, three out of ten celebrate death, and three out of ten simply go from life to death. What is the reason for this? Because they are afraid of dying, therefore they can not live. I have heard that those who celebrate life walk safely among the wild animals. When they go into battle, they remain unharmed. The animals find no place to attack them and the weapons are unable to harm them. Why? Because they can find no place for death in them. That is an interesting translation. If three out of 10 leave the womb at birth and celebrate life, what do the other 7 do? Do you think this can be an allusion to the bardos? That perhaps 3 out of ten (of livers) and 3 out of ten (of diers) both enter into life and death without hesitation, with abandonment? Is this the formula? (If so, I'd say it's a little generous, because it doesn't seem to me that 3 out of 10 celebrate life at all. Are the other 7 treading water through life? This is possible, I suppose. and the 3 out of 10 that go straight from life to death..this would assume no bardos? I don't know - what do you think? In the Yutang translation, he dwells on he organs of life and death as being 13 (in ch. 50) and he claims that these 13 organs also send man to his death. Then he says 'how is it so?'...Because of the intense activity of multiplying life. Hard to reconcile these two translations, but I love trying to find the lowest common denominator. So the 3 out of 10 that celebrate life are the ones who are unmolested by wild animals, etc. Mu guess is that to celebrate life, one must be in total awareness. I sometimes wonder, when I walk in the woods and one of these days I'm going to come face to face with a big hairy bear.....will I be able to hold my ground and stand 'in awareness of Who I Am', or am I going to run screaming down the trail like a little girl? I hope it would be the former. Could you go a little deeper into your thoughts on this? I'm looking for a different translation to help us triangulate but not seeing it on my desk right now - I'll find it later.

LOL - yes, the non-judgmental stroll in the park. I understand the mindset, I think. No judgment of the condition as to its goodness or badness. Energy just is, and as I interpret it our body is talking to us with our maladies anyway. That thing inside us sure knows how to act out.

Spotless, your words have an awfully nice resonance to them....

Be Here Now.

Joe and I just got back from breakfast at one of the local greasers. We always grab a different book off our bookshelf every morning, open it arbitrarily, and just find something to discuss over breakfast, of a spiritual nature. This morning he grabbed The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche. No thought about it in his head at all. After placing our order, I arbitrarily opened the book and landed on page 200. and started reading out loud to him: Compassion: Considering yourself the Same as Others: One powerful way to evoke compassion is to think of others as exactly the same as you. "After all," the Dalai Lama explains, "all human beings are the same - made of human flesh, bones, and blood. We all want happiness and want to avoid suffering. Further, we have an equal right to be happy. In other words, it is important to realize our sameness as human beings......."If you consider others just the same as yourself, it will help you to to open up your relationships and give them a new and richer meaning" Then he continues later: Compassion: Exchanging Yourself for Others: when someone is suffering and you find yourself at a loss to know how to help, put yourself unflinchingly in his or her place. Imagine as vividly as possible what you would be going through if you were suffering the same pain."....."When you exchange yourself for others in this way, you are directly transferring your cherishing from its usual object, yourself, to other beings. So exchanging yourself for others is a very powerful way of loosening the hold on you of the self-cherishing and the self-grasping of ego, and so of releasing the heart of your compassion" His next paragraph: Using a Friend to Generate Compassion: Another moving technique for arousing compassion for a person who is suffering is to imagine one of your dearest friends, or someone you really love, in that person's place. Imagine your brother or daughter or parent or best friend (I guess this fellow wasn't married. Or actually, maybe he was, lol) in he same kind of painful situation. Quite naturally your heart will open, and compassion will awaken in you. .....Now take this compassion released in your heart and transfer it to the person who needs your help. So it's pretty much agreed that compassion (or love) is the oil that lubricates the healing machine. Synchronicity was with us, I would say.

I think you've put your finger on it here. I do think the current mindset of the bible-belt christians (at least the ones around here) is fear of death. More specifically, I think it's fear of fire, if you really break it down. Their fear is burning. In hell. Forever. Ouch.

Please don't stop now. I've got bated breath over here. Or at least that's what someone told me. Also, do you see a difference between allowing the energy to run from several inches away, or just placing your hands on the person? I've been trying it both ways. and Spotless? Your response didn't seem to come through?

Being a bit on the cerebral side as opposed to the physical side, I guess this is why Mary Baker Eddy's thoughts-on-steroids approach to illness being caused by 'erroneous thinking' appeals to me as much as it does. It truly makes sense, at a theoretical level - matter, at it's smallest component, is illusory; then theoretically we should be able to handle this illusion by corrective thinking. Pyth, I truly loved the video about the young man whose life had been turned around from that horrible epileptic world he lived in by the unconditional love of his healer. And it seems that she tapped into exactly what I talked about in the above paragraph; to turn around his error thinking. although it took a while, her staying on top of the situation for a lengthy period of time got him to fully realize that he had the power to either invite the epilepsy into his body (his "house", as he envisioned it) or to make it stay away. I believe this goes to what we mentioned before. We must TRULY REALIZE what we really are and how powerful our thoughts are. Apparently the repetition of that young man telling himself he was healthy and there was nothing wrong with him was sufficient to get him to REALIZE. Belief is one thing. That is of the brain. Realization is another thing, not predominantly of the brain. It is that sudden flush of awareness, the Aha!, or the Oh, Yeah! that surprises us from the inside; when we finally internalize and make ours what we have taken into the brain previously. It's like reading something heady from a year ago, and then finally having an experience that drives it home, makes it real to you. When invited to try a healing on someone, one of the first things I do is try and determine what the person's present circumstances ARE, not what they say they are. If they say their life is just fine (and besides, what does that have to do with my physical problem??), then I do find it important to look at their surroundings and what they have created for themselves. Is their home a mess? Is their car a mess, or their personal hygiene less than desirable? This tells us something too - it tells us that they are not impeccable within themselves, and sometimes a dynamic can be seen from examining their situation from a distance (perhaps their family dynamic into which they play). Once the circumstance can be seen clearly (this must be done by someone who has seen themselves to the bone and isn't distorted by their own inner clutter) then this situation can be easily used for one point of the triangulation. At least that's been my experience, and it is this triangulation that can be used to find the 'historic instigator' that set them upon this path, this tendency. This of course is added to their own oral history and take on the situation. But it usually takes a set of 'outside eyes' to really see the dynamic; they are usually too caught up in it,. Once this causation can be found, the erroneous thinking can be re-imprinted to the opposite direction or otherwise worked with.

I still think we're barking up the same tree. Unconditional love is the undercurrent, and this undercurrent is available to every single one of us. As I have a loving heart, and you do too, the call of 'spirit' is heard many times throughout the day and my heart responds to it, as do my actions. There is no longer a human being (or animal) which is off-limits for our compassion, once we realize that we are all One and that person is just the other half of us. The man-made emotions, often generated by ego, are not part of this process at all.

Pyth, I don't doubt for a moment the wonderful healings of qigong. Thanks for the video, the ones I watched were wonderful. The wonderful thing about our forum are the very many paths that have been followed but which all seem to pool within the same truths. Seems like I've been a gleaner for a long time. If it's a truth, it's true to all, not just some paths. Seems like the deeper and deeper one goes within any individual path, it should all end up in the same pool of truth. This has been my experience as a gleaner. I love the fact that so often I end up on threads with really great minds; after all, we could not understand each other if our minds were not all One. People come and people go for various reasons on TTB's; I have come and gone for various reasons. But it always seems to come back to the place where there are so very few places where people who think like I do, congregate. At least here in the midwest. Love to you all. It occurred to Joe and I tonight at the local Mexican restaurant, that the ultimate healing mindset must be one in which the I Am mindset is completely Known. Or as another would say, Gnown. We are still at the point where we are somewhat surprised when something actually works. We are still somewhat incredulous that this 'baloney', as I would have called it in my prior police career, actually works. I do envy those who are the masters of qigong on this site, and I sometimes wish that I had taken that opportunity to really deeply study and be committed to that type of discipline. Truth is, that type of discipline is not in me. But an old metaphysical lady I am. And the incredulous thing to me is how we are all sitting at the top of our own individual lodgepoles and actually talking to each other. Because truth is truth. It doesn't matter from whece it comes. I recall that in the Castaneda series, don Juan told Carlos that when these types of phenomena, whether it be a vision, a healing, anything like that out of the ordinary - the trick is to not indulge in it. To walk away in the moment and go onto the next moment. To walk away the seeming miracle, large or small, we have just been a part of. This is what we were discussing tonight. And all of a sudden this comes back to me in a new way. It's about Practice. The more we Practice doing this quantum touch, this qigong or whatever discipline has named it, the stronger it will get. This goes directly to the I Am consciousness. Are we truly a part of the One? Do we believe with every fiber of being that we are, indeed, The One? That we indeed are gods, in the end, who have the power to effect the change we desire? This sounds like the presence of ego but it is not. It is the absence of ego. It is realizing self for what self is. What we are all a part of, and it is the degree of our GNOWING of it (realization of it from the inside) Then there is no need for the individual 'self' this illusory being, to 'try' to heal anyone. It becomes instead a way of triangulation of thought and energy merely directed at the object of our attention by intent and removal of self. Somebody better stop me.

Wonderful advice, thank you! The further I get into this, as you mention, the more we realize that it is the person themselves who are doing the healing for themselves; perhaps the most we can do is 'set the stage' for their mental healing journey. It reminds me of when the woman touched the hem of Jesus' garment and he told her that it was her strong faith that had healed her. I think this might be the trick for us - to keep the mental state of the healee at the forefront; just as the woman in my earlier post 'drew the energy' up her own legs and into her breast. It's not us doing it. That's where ego must certainly be set aside. There's the blockage. I've not noticed a depletion of energy, but as I'm talking about this, something just came to mind. My husband Joe (shamanic type) 'walked someone across' the other day; our buddy died. Now, as I read your post, I remember that Joe was totally wiped out for a day or two after he did this. I don't know the first thing about this, but I suggested that perhaps his energy body accompanied Mo's energy body across the abyss and that Joe had to pay a bit of a physical price for this. Does this make any sense to you?

Void = Tao, for me. Just a place where nothing arises in my mind, the meditative state. To add the 'I Am' to it is to open the heart. and yes, it is unconditional and giving at the same time - I think we're on the same page. I seem to be developing the impersonal aspect you speak of, although I don't think of it as an indifference). It's an indifference in that we have control over whether we wish to respond in some emotional way, or whether the purpose is better served by staying out of the emotional. In the TTC somewhere it talks about this.....to understand something, see it without emotion. To understand it from another viewpoint, immerse yourself in it, emotions and all. I'm so glad that there is a choice. There was a little stallion living across the highway from us and we loved him, we would play with him daily. About 6 months ago he suddenly died of colic. I lost my horse in California from colic - it was devastating to me because I was totally entrenched in the emotions. Although I had strong feelings for this little stallion across the highway, I shed not a tear because I consciously elevated to the place where all matter is One, time was an illusion, and so was death. It was the only way I could prevent an emotional breakdown for this horse; I just didn't want to go through that again. I wasn't indifferent about the horse; rather, I just viewed the death from a transcendent platform. I actually like the word 'impersonal' when it comes to our relationship with the dynamic we're always trying to describe but can never quite find the words for. There's a book called 'The Impersonal Life' which changed my life completely - it convinced me of the impersonality of any sort of a life-force (call it God or whatever) that doesn't care who we are, whether we pray to it or not, whether we celebrate its birthday every December or not; it favors no one and no one is exempt from its laws. Certainly it has no name. No one can claim it. It doesn't 'care' for us individually, other than the fact that we are all made of it and we can choose or not choose to align ourselves with the dynamic. But I don't see it as lack of love at all - the rain falls equally upon all. That goes for love too. It's up to us.

I was just rereading this thread and happened on this. Welcome. That word alone connotates an open heart. I wonder if that is what the iconic art of Jesus means when it shows a hole in his chest to show his heart. I've also seen this in Chinese restaurants? Lao Tzu? Also, VMarco, when you say later that faith-based advocacy is not compassion I couldn't agree with you more. I've seen the Christian ladies around here in the bible-belt hold open food pantries for the people in the streets - and then giggle and spray air deodorizer around the room after a ripe one walks out - giggling as they do it, within the view of other homeless people. They're in it to make themselves feel holier-than-thou. with this group at least, they are clueless.