Songtsan

One could certainly find other healthier herbal means for anxiety, such as Kava Kava - also, mood stabilizers come in many forms, including amino acids and nutritional supplements. Do you want any info on that?

I have had thoughts these last few years that just before I die, I will find some neurosurgeon willing to operate on my brain and sever the afferent nerves to all my sense organs so that I can experience what it is like to have no external sensory perceptions for some months so that I could explore in detail the boundaries of perception.

Yet seemingly intangible...

Hmmm...it's definitely all in the brain, yet the fact that someone can be staring at the back of your head and you can feel it says something - as if there is more than just a one way energy stream.. but anyways, are you saying that one can 'see' with senses other than the eyes - sort of like in far-seeing?

There are no rules! Do what you like - experience as you will....be free! Things will just happen as they will, no trying needed - stuff still gets done. Yep

Maybe let's explore just straight tactile senses...let's say that my eyes are closed...it's dark...I am not even focusing on sight or the little sparkly flecks one sees with closed eyes....no sound....no smell or taste, just body sensations. I sense my finger tip. What then?

Thats what I was hoping it meant...I am good so far... This is great, because I am not sure I am understanding and that means there is something important for me to know. When you say that I should become aware of where I am looking from, do you mean visually or the feeling of the energy there? I can feel my eyes on a somatic level, and see little micro-filaments, eyelashes and white blood cells swirling around, but I cannot see my eyes themselves..so my awareness as far as the fact that I am looking from them is basically a sense of tactile/somatic sensation and misc. mind-stuff that says 'this is me seeing,' etc... I am still not convinced I am looking from my eyes to something, as if some energy is going out (is it? If so please tell me how!!! ) - I think my eyes are receiving photons and and the information is being sent back to 'me,' the perceiver spot - The seer being like a receiver/antenna... This is where I am having even more trouble, although I am just trying this as I am writing...(assuming this isn't an internal minds eye/visual thing you are talking about) Can you actually look from the nose, for example? Do I focus on the feeling of the tip of my nose and link it to the spot? If I am looking at the spot, there are two noses in view due to stereoscopic effects. I am assuming that you mean that I keep the gaze focused on the spot but will my awareness to focus on certain areas. Is it like putting all ones focus on the tip of the nose and trying to extend energy outwards as if seeing visually from there? So the gaze remains fixed and unmoving (for this exercise at least)? I know that all the stuff I see is still part of my mind, yet I can't seem to free myself from my conventional perspective of me being in the head... please more details! I will keep trying, but I am confused at this point. Thank you!

I see what you are talking about to some extent - friendships are more superficial here when you compare them to 'real-life' friendships - people tend to be a little rougher to others here and things are 'thinner' so-to-speak. However, I realized long ago that internet friendships are just plain different than real-life friendships, so to compare them is like comparing apples and oranges....one should not put them in the same category...and furthermore, as we are on a website forum that is largely self-cultivation oriented, people can be even more critical...I think it's good actually...I like when people educate me. My advice to myself is to stop comparing/labeling/judging things and get what good things I can out of something - there is something of value in everything. I bet you are also NOT sorry that you made this post at the same time that your are sorry that you made it - you just have to polarize to that place! haha

yeah, there is that feeling of anything can happen...I bet it is better in the warmer months...I heard about a guy who used to walk around with a backpack which had a hammock that you could just tie up to different tree limbs - he would go to big cities and just climb trees at night and put his hammock up - that always sounded fun to me...

Being arrested for various things, going into the psychiatric hospital, staying at a homeless shelter for a few days then getting kicked out for arguing with the night guard because i couldn't sleep and was manic and insomniac and needed to get out of the bunk bed...standing in line at the department of social services for food stamps and housing assistance, being stripped searched multiple times where they have you bend over and show that you don't have anything shoved up your keister....my life is a posterboard for being humbled...I discovered long ago that having an ego is a terrible thing...my life is like a bizarre movie sometimes...but it strengthens one in many ways...you can only be humbled so much before many of your fears have been realized over and over again and you realize that life goes on....

oh yeah - could also be due to pressure on glutes when sitting - maybe find way to duplicate that pressure when keeping hip in neutral position - to see if it is pressure or angle of hip flexion

I am no expert (caveat), but the fact that the tingling happens when you sit says something - sitting position involves flexed (contracted) hip flexors (rectis femoris and iliopsoas) and stretched hip extensors (notably glutes and hamstrings). I am guessing it is due to a compression of nerves from some muscle group or single muscle...If you were to stand on one leg and have the other leg bent in a 90 degree angle, perhaps rested on a chair or something, would only the bent leg start tingling? A chiropractor or kinesiologist might be useful if they can determine any excessive muscle imbalance in those areas...

Can individual 'souls' combine to form into one?

I would like to learn bagua and qigong and MCO, but where do I turn? So much conflicting information out there.....

Do you dis/agree with the (Vedic?) statement that "Awareness, that which one is aware of, and the processes of awareness are all one and the same?" Can you define 'karmic energy?' I have a definition in my head: the energy that action/reaction/cause/effect processes produces in the process known as a person... When you say 'not going along with creation,' would you say that you mean that in a karmic sense, such as if a situation would result in a normal person becoming involved in action/reaction processes that would simply result in more 'suffering' or 'nonenlightenment situations?' I don't know that anything is ever bound truly - just the appearance of being bound, due to participating in karmic games and attachment processes...

I still like that my purpose is to find a purpose, but I must be sure to save such explorations and contemplations as side projects...seems that if one were all knowledgeable for a few minutes (lets just pretend its possible), one could then divine ones ultimate purposes, write them down - trust that they are true. So given all the conflicting information as to what is possible out there/in here, it is no wonder that people are confused about purpose - they don't know which people really know anything worth believing in. So secondary, related purpose is to learn ever truer knowledge - through various means...Taoist, Scientific, Buddhist, and otherwise....even if such knowledge is to eventually be dropped, which it seems it should be. When all the 'looking' in too many places results in distracted attention - a thicket of thorns, etc. then it behooves me to keep discipline and keep the searching on a back burner and actually apply myself to a streamlined method...

Trying to think what on the physical plane could cause sudden abdominal bloating - water, air, slowed digestion, inflammation of various organs... how to know? cause is energetic apparently, so cure should be in that realm...if excess energy came to enteric nervous system, LDT or who knows what in that area, then trick would be to remove energy to other places...best thing I can think of now is NOT to focus on that area at all - or else focus downwards to try to send it into MCO. If it is Shakti, well not much to do then - shakti goes where it wants

Yeah, I realize that my understanding of soul is limited, so the question is flawed... I was thinking mostly of that operational center - the spot that perceives, and that has will - so the sender/receiver of conscious mind... I was thinking that no matter the death of body, etheric layers, etc. there will always be an awareness of something somewhere - so that awareness was central to that 'self' which reincarnates.. its probably very difficult to know without direct experience, so perhaps my time is better spent contemplating elsewhere

This whole thinking mind is like a virtual reality version of the 'true' reality that is incoming every second, full of labels, categorizations, etc. Even though we are also perceiving internal mind, AKA thinking mind, at the same time that we are perceiving external reality, can these be separated for conversations sake into 'real' and 'not real' on a temporary basis? Would complete reality knowledge also include the perceptions of this internal mind, or would this true knowing through 'seeing' as you describe entail the complete non-perception and essential extinction of this internal mind? Or, can one see the internal, judgmental mind without being attached or seeing through its filters, so that it to becomes part of true, complete seeing with extcinction of self? If so, would this then be considered seeing from a different stance? Some stance outside of time and dualisms? Is labeled mind considered 'create' and the 'uncreate' all that is directly percieved but unborn? I am confused about 'phenomena' being considered created..I thought they were just part of endless causal chains?

I have read of the same exact stomach swelling thing you describe with a woman who had an uncontrolled kundalini awakening...unfortunately I cant recall what happened with her..

Just because they didn't employ the official scientific method per se does not mean that science wasn't happening. The whole history of mankind is one of conjecture, hypothesis, theory, etc. being updated constantly...they once thought that the world was flat, then they thought it was a sphere, now they know it as an oblong spheroid...Often-times, the science was going on in the laboratory of the human body - people experimenting with poisons, ways to heal over millenia - how do you think that the South American Indians knew to mix the vine of the souls with the various DMT containing plants available to them? Experimenting - experimenting is science, in whatever form.

unless it's Acid Jazz! The best kind of jazz... Is this the same as the 'all is mind' school in Buddhism? I agree with all is mind school...and I also believe that all is perception - that perception is exactly that. Nothing stands alone or is separate - everything in linked, unoriginated cause/effect chains from endless/beginningless suchness . All awareness perception is 100% a part of these uncreate patterns, endlessly shifting, and in its absolute reality having no demarcations of conceptual nature. How can we ever know anything outside of perception? Whatever we think about those things which we cannot perceive, it is only supposition and approximation. Can our will operate outside the realms of the perceivable in a way which is useful? Isn't mind exactly all that we perceive - and by mind in this case I mean the highest kind... I have studied about 50x as much Buddhist material as I have Taoist material - a situation I aim to remedy. What I was doing was aping the belief that worldly pursuits as opposed to pursuits for virtue and eventual enlightenment of the fullest sort, which the Buddha was assuming was out of range for most people in this lifetime, were not worth my time. I fully intend to savor that which I perceive naturally as part of my path, I simply don't intend to be attached to things which waste my time. I definitely am pretty much in agreement with you as far as my own self importance not mattering. I am well addicted to the enlightening path and happy about it. I think I understand 'not employing thinking mind' well enough for now - as I can get to such a level that, for example, I can listen to people speak English, and not understand a word of what they say, but instead hear it in such a manner that it seems a new, mysterious and intoxicating 'sound' (without any mental label of being sound or language). No labels, no relative comparisons, no memory of past, no thoughts of future, no idea of a self seeing, etc...just purely absorbed into perception...probably just a few subconscious mutterings going on that I am a 'me' having a perceptive experience.....aiming for no dualistic thinking. I think what is going on here with me is like that story of the monk telling his abbot that watching the breath is boring. I am just not there yet. I am thinking that there must be something more - so therefore I haven't succeeded well enough with my quest, regardless of how well I have in theory. Any perception of a thinking me, who is not enjoying, or succeeding is the 'self' just not 'there' yet... I think half the effort of learning is coming to understand the definitions used for words given to the listener. I imagine my own definitions for many key words such as mind, Taomind, create/uncreate, etc. are not in line with those individuals whose explanations I am given. I will respond more later when the time is right.

There is a place for 'scientific skepticism' even in the face of supposed 'masters' - Buddha himself stated this. Having read of old school Taoists efforts to obtain immortality through imbibing things such as lead, mercury, cinnabar, etc. it is plain to see that blindly following others opinions because they state that 'they know' can be counterproductive. In the end we must all be our own science labs and 'find by doing' for something which can only be experienced and not conceptually imitated in the minds virtual reality space.

You have made statements that I have found useful in the past....knowledge is transitory - do not be attached to being right or wrong, as everything can be right and wrong all the time.

I am not concerned at all with temporal or temporary gains for myself, although i would certainly like to leave good things behind my inevitable transition into the great mystery of 'death' I am looking at my current corporeal existence as a chance to make an investment into future existences, whatever they may be. I admit that I am still very confused/ignorant of what I should be 'doing' 'recondite' is a perfect word for this subject I am trying to look/see each moment and find that which is of value beyond mere entertainment..trying to find that special magical extra something of worth.. while I know that techniques, etc. are conceptual and limited, does anyone have any literal explanations of what I should do? Trying to hit it from all angles - from conventional to transcendent.. as always, thank you Deci Belle for these explanations which give me the opportunity to expand my 'self' or that, gain wisdom or open new doors. and thanks to all posters for your time/energy...every little bit helps