Search the Community

Ralis has a point. Being a monk does not equal renunciation. Some people become monks just for the easy life. People overestimate the cultivation accomplishments of monks. I've seen enough. There are people who are serious and devoted in monasteries, but you can also find renunciates who are living in society. When adults, who through their experiences and contemplations reach renunciation, enter into monk-hood, you have good candidates, but again - how many children are able to do this? For the former, adults, monasteries can provide a splendid environment, not for renunciation - since it is a mental aspect(you can dream of lavish buffets, sex, drugs... while living in a cave) - but for dedicated cultivation. Mandrake

Whatever you want to use to justify it. But, he didn't lucid dream it, he actually just made it all up, in the sense of like lets say, Harry Potter, but instead of referencing Celtic Lore or whatever, it references American Shamanism.

Chogyam Trungpa was a highly developed master and Bodhisattva, but still was an alcoholic. It didn't stop him from connecting to people during lucid dream states and revealing various super-natural powers of perception, and it didn't stop him from giving initiations into the Vajra path. But, non-the-less... he was an alcoholic which sometimes ended him up in situations that revealed that he was not a Buddha, just a very developed Buddhist. I think Alcoholism is deeply hereditary and physically chemical... like an allergy. I'm not nearly as developed as Chogyam Trungpa, and I am seeing that the choices I've made while being drunk are different from the choices I would make otherwise. Many times, these choices have gotten me into very interesting, and developing of my inner state type of situations. But, as of late, this is just not so, it seems that the time for that is over. The situations that are occurring as of late, are more and more destructive and not nearly as constructive as they used to be. It's also getting in the way of my practice, more and more. So... I think this is a very personal experience and everyone has their process. I appreciate your insight though... as I do agree with the intent of what you are saying, very much so! But, I have to have my own process.

Eggnog beatnik sleeps. Sugar plum queen, dancing in dream. Pinch me! I'm Awake!

Tut, tut, my reader, dont worry yr pretty little head about supreme beings, there is none, your big translator is looking out for u, sleep tight, dream about silver bearded kindly taoists and unicorns and how they dance and prance all together on pretty chinese meadows...all is well...all is well...

Exactly the same thing happened to me ... found my hands in my dream ... very groovy!

The single rarest and most precious ability in today's world is to be normal. It is WAY easier to learn to emit, transmit, transmute, whatever, qi, ki, prana, light, heat, shit... it is easier still to grow big meat armor around your bones and big smartass know-it-all armor around your mind... big big big whatever you need to grow big so as not to feel so small and powerless inside... which is still how you feel after you've added all those big abilities on top of all your other defenses... I don't mean you personally, obviously... ...much MUCH easier... ...than to normalize any of the damaged, destroyed, twisted things in a human being who is chasing something a normal human being wouldn't begin to need. Someone who is not hungry does not dream of an eternal dinner. Someone who was a normal baby having a normal life doesn't dream of being a baby forever -- only those who missed out do. Someone who was loved from the start doesn't grow up to seek compensatory love from the whole world. Someone who truly loves doesn't love the whole world -- only those to whom it matters. Normal is not impressive. Abnormal is. However, if you're after something tremendously challenging, unconditionally rewarding, uniquely hard to find, and largely unavailable to everybody else (which seems to be what the seekers of "something impressive" are all after -- they don't want it if someone else can have it too, they want exclusivity), if you want to hunt down the biggest game in the jungle, go for normal. I'm not kidding. And... oh... one thing to keep in mind... If you can't really get a definition, much less a demonstration, of what "normal" is from someone "super-normal" or "paranormal" or "enlightened" or "on the true path" and so on -- if their power of internalizing/embodying tao, nirvana, kundalini, tortellini, whatever, stops short of being able to internalize and embody normality -- stay as far away from them as possible.

Loved the books myself. I read them when they were first published and re-read all of them a few years ago. It was an interesting experience - while reading through one of the books that talked a lot about dreaming, I realized one day that I would have a completely lucid dream that very night. Sure enough, became lucid in my dream and spent the time traveling around and doing a bunch of fun stuff. Haven't had a lucid dream since.

Hi brother! I have had the same problem as you and I am a strong beliver in the karmatic laws, you seem to be to. that is why I am going to tell you what worked for me and wich mindset was the most effective. first of all I noticed that I needed help with this task and there was something I had not learned simply because I never was interested in money, that does not mean I did not get what I needed when I needed it. I am typing this from my brand new Mac book pro i7 that costs a smal fortune. I have not earned a single cent for the past 2 years. I am very greatful for the information I have learned and the state of mind that I have accuired. a state of mind where there is no differance between a million dollars and a single cent, called total abundance. but this does not mean it is easy to earn 1 dollar, it is harder to earn one dollar if you hate what you are doing but a lot easier to earn a million if you love what you do and it keeps you in a good mood or "vibration" it creates a kind of momentum. I think you are looking for an answer like this. this is my second or third post on this forum and the last one I wrote a year ago or so and somehow i stumbled upon this post... Im here for a reason today. but first you must understand the true principles of karma and the laws of attraction (this is something you cincerly ask for), build up chi etc and live by the golden rule, they say you dont find books, they find you. in the stories of king Solomon (wheltiest man on earth) he asked for the wisdom of the heart so he could rule his nation. wich heart and who he asked is up to you to decide. you must start to meditate on money and create your own world from the inside out, some wants to be billionaires some want to be industrial workers, do what resonates in your heart and you will never have to work a single day in your life. what resonates in your heart is the harder thing to find, and it takes time and meditation, and do not be discouraged because its a tough line of work with competition etc you live here to enjoy life, if you really want it you will get it whitout a doubt, just dont loose faith. the second you loose faith you loose faith in karma and karma gives you exacly what you ask for do you understand? and you will lose more faith and you will end up exacly where you are again. they once asked Micheal jackson in an interview why he tought no one belived in "god" anymore he said it is because you cannot se "god" we most often belive only in what we see, karma requires patience and self control. I said once if you sleep and dream and you notice that you are dreaming. you could wish for a ferrari and it would manifest instantly! but when you wake up the physical world is active and it would be imposible to manifest a car into your world without breaking a few physical laws. a law cannot be broken OR ignored. when you wake up you DO NOT TURN OF YOUR MIND you turn on the physical world. you could lie to me and say you have no desire whatsoever for money and I would belive you but we all want to live good lifes and money is an important part of it. you could manifest the most beautiful life but you are to lazy... honestly I was to and from time to time I slip back to my bad behaviours. YOU MUST GROW LIKE A TREE like a seed you have planted in your heart never stop growing become a man and be like water let an abundance of love welth and health flow trough your experience on this beautiful planet of ours. be a filantropist and build schools and hospitals. give back to the world and the world will pay you with 100% accuracy. A friend of mine once asked me of money and said then let me gamble and win money. I said you can fool yourself but not the universe. Be of assitance to mother earth and mother earth will be of assitance to you.find your true calling in life and be what you always have dreamt to be and be as rich as you were intended to be. The universe is and has always been perfect and there is nothing you can do about it. just as there is gravity there is karma... ask einstein! the first book that will find you is Napoleon hills - law of succes in 16 lessons. now its all about dedication and how much you want it and a game of disciplin and habits. and the first quote for making money will come from steve jobs. "connect the dots" God bless you and I hope that the stars will stand in line for you and guide you trough your life just as they have been guiding me all my life, find the tao in a beautiful world. Thank you. EDIT: I forgot to mention that now I am reaping what I have sown for the past year, and I am a very happy man with a great future in one of the most if not the most challenging lines of work. I work with major labels (universal, Sony etc) and I am a man of great value. my father said to me that working in the music buissness is like lottery all my life. I proved him wrong... and I cant even play an instrument! I am still waiting and praying for the day I am nr one on billboard. we must always grow. Thank you for all your blessings and prayers.

symptoms to monitor that can come and go: pain in knee, pressure-headache, chi block, burnout (and resulting effects along the road to slow recovery), insomnia, various mild injuries from exceeding physical demands on body structure (wrists, fingers, back, knees) the rest are not due to the practice itself, but more to the devotion/commitment aspect. the best analogy I can come up with is raising a wild animal in a domestic setting, having a mutual attraction, being one with it and apart from it, primal power that creates and heals as much as it destroys and harms. incidentally this agrees with a totem animal dream incubation experiment.

Sorry adept i did not see your post there. man totally agree with that and it seems like none of these people notice that. i kind of started thinking that most zombies see life as a game. They are a seperate entity, a player in the game. There are winners and losers here and its best to be a winner. If you dont think about yourself first then the other players will take advantage of you. The more things you acquire or the higher the score the more powerful a player you are. But life is not a game, life is more of a dream

Unless you are naturally gifted dream work takes time and effort. IMO many dreams are 'junk' dreams, misc regurgitations of days events and various fears and wishes. Recurring dreams go beyond that, showing aspects the subconscious wants us to examine. Dream work goes very deep as you gain lucidity. Personally I don't buy into the whole are we may be butterflys dreaming we're men dictum. A great modern teacher is Robert Bruce, he's done lots of research and has quite a bit of free material available.. Here is a link to an interview http://www.theartofastralprojection.com/blog/interview-with-robert-bruce and http://www.astraldynamics.com/home/ Michael

Go to see the movie "Inception" a few times and maybe you will leave with a hint of the reality of the dream world.

Hello everyone!, I'm sure you've all heard it before but I haven't seen it yet on here... Dreams are a form of Shared Consciousness. When we dream... where is it that these events happen? Is what we perceive in a dream, only taking place in our minds? If in fact we all are existing within a Holographically complete universe.... then each one of us is only the smallest of parts of the whole. Holographically, meaning that even the smallest part of the larger item contains all of the information that is contained with the much larger whole. No matter how small the piece is... no information is missing. And everything that is, and ever will be of the whole, also exists inside of us, at all times... We are just not able to normally access it in the conscious state of mind, but when sleeping, or in very deep meditation.... we attain this level of consciousness and are able to do all manner of things. So... Dreaming is a shared state of consciousness with the universal unknown. When people have prophetic dreams, they are merely accessing this information, which is all and everything happening at once. There is no time, there is no separation, there is only information, knowledge and experience to be shared, which these people do and then bring the information back to the conscious level. Peace!

I'm mostly agnostic to the magic paradigm. More open minded since I've been hanging out on the bums and reading some of the works of Rawn Clark and other Hermetics. If its real, its a difficult skill needing much discipline and talent. Still there are internal magics, within the body, dream work etc. that can be obtained through steady work. They may open the door to other things. My thinking about spirits run along the same line, most being various internal voices..but somethings that bump in the night, really are bumping. The world may be stranger then what we know, yet real life is chop wood, carry water. Michael

Ok, I'm not sure so I'm going to ask. From your post, it seems you have enjoyed the solitude with no humans around you at all, which I did not think was possible. Just like in that movie "Cast Away", where Tom Hanks washes up on an island and talks to a ball all day. He lives on that island, not knowing why, having an urge to survive, often more suicidal thought then not. He gets moments of hope where you can see the 0.0001% happiness arising only to fade away when the hope is lost again. So I am sceptical! Are you more often happy then not, while being in solitude? Or rather "neutral" and dull and just going trough the routines without much emotion. It seems more like a survival urge that keeps you going when real solitude is around, which is kind of your inner core anyway. I always dream that I am in a prison cell, I get alot of excersize but I'm cut of from nature. Every human being needs to fight for one day in the deep well, just to get a glimps of daylight for 1 minute. I thought I would get happy if I saw it again, but I did not. Then I sat there in my prison cell, close my eyes and decide to do nothing at all untill I die. I don't understand how one can be happy in such a situation. It does not seem that happiness comes from within! It is just that good inner mechanics are more likely to cause outer environments to match your happiness. So, basicly, maybe happiness does come from outside? A happy man in a city has alot more going for him then a not so often happy man in the city. But a happy man in the wilds has less going for him then the not so happy city guy. It seems that the environment is irrelevant to ones happiness, yes. But when there is so much excess around you that you become confused, it can be exactly the environment that prevents you from becoming happy and living an unnatural life. It is because we don't take the relativity of our environment into account that we live an unnatural life. A city guy should be rich, have alot of girlfriends, many friends, good business to be happy. A man living in the wild should have a group of people he can trust on, people to hear stories from, magicians to create shows, wise men to lead the people, etc. Finding security and prosperity, there are luxeries for people in the wild as well. It still seems that desires are the one thing that has driven humanity and shall always be the core engine of their journey.

BTW, in case we cross paths in a dream again, my dream body often looks a lot like this:

Oh, a little more like Nietzsche, eh? I saw you in a dream and you looked more like this:

Be careful with dreams, because they can conform frighteningly well to your expectations. If you think that in a dream you'll be able to speak with God, with a higher power, have siddhis, be king of the world, then guess what? You will be. But when you wake up (or maybe even years later), you'll realize you weren't doing anything but (literally) living in your dreams, conversing with a mental construct of your own making, who just spit out the answers you wanted to hear, with absolutely no relevance to any other type of reality. If you think you really do have prophetic dreams, then you need to work on developing that to a degree where you can figure out if they are even reliably prophetic. If you had a dream where you were eating a turkey sandwich, then two days later you eat a turkey sandwich, well, to me that means absolutely nothing. I think (and dream) of things all the time that don't happen, and then I think (and dream) of things all the time that do happen. Does that mean I'm prophetic? Or does it just mean that my mind covers enough mental territory to cover all the bases? In order to prevent self delusion, I think one needs to investigate and develop these phenomena until you can really be sure that what you have is, in fact, a form of precognition. And that comes WAY before figuring stuff like pyrokinesis.

Your question is extremely vague, but let me say this: Anything is possible in dreams because from what i've read and experienced we create dreams through our own mental bouncing from thought to thought. Just because you projected fire from your finger-tips in a dream does not mean you are destined to do so in the future. -Are day to day mental meanderings often show in our dreams, if your thinking about siddhis all day then guess what will probably show up in your dreams?! -Also i'll dare say that focusing on Siddhis or enlightenment is often a distraction and just a product of the ego. -You talked about being Lord of your Dreams. Although i have never had a lucid dream it is my understanding that once you develop a degree of mental acuity and stillness you can create your own dreams with your thoughts through lucid dreaming. -For more info on the nature of dreams and interpreting them Bruce Vance's book Dreamscape is a good reference. http://www.amazon.com/Dreamscape-Voyage-Alternate-Reality-Quest/dp/0835606481/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1 -My 2 cents, peace.

So um i was thinking that um if one were to hold a yoga pose for 3 dream hours that is time in a dream would one then master it in that context of the dream? Could one emass siddhis in the dream world? so that one becomes the lord of dreams in there dreams? These question came about because like a couple of years ago i had a dream where i was able to do pyrokinesis. I thought this was one of my prophetic dreams in that i would be able to do it in real life. but as of yet i cant. So i got to thinking what if it was not ment to be in real life but in the dream world. Anyone ever talk with god or a high level being that would be able to answer questions about the universe? cause i have some questions about aliens and the ancient peoples of the world and such. Plus there is always the argument that dreams are real and that this world if the dream.

There are good methods of two kinds: 1. Ornamental. 2. Healing. Ornamental methods are employed by the healthy people to achieve an effect for effect's sake, basically for fun and for the joy of life and not for any ulterior purpose, such as for health or for enlightenment. Healing methods are employed by the sick people to illuminate the nature of their sickness. Once the sick person understands one's own sickness, one can get better. All sicknesses are caused by ignorance of some sort. Thus a good healing method produces an experience that directly challenges an ignorant presupposition. For example, let's say for the sake of discussion that a person has an ignorant presupposition that says, "Reality is something different from dreams." What's a good method to heal such ignorance? Well, a good method is to teach the person to lucid dream. Then inside the lucid dream the person can see first-hand how the dreams are identical to reality in every conceivable way. Once the ignorant presupposition has been cured, the method is no longer necessary. At least, the method is no longer necessary in its healing capacity. It may still be useful in an ornamental capacity. There is also a third kind of a method, which is a bad kind: 3. Stagnating method. The purpose of the stagnating method is to maintain the status quo without challenging any presupposition while carrying on a pretense of working for a higher purpose. So the pretense of a higher purpose disqualifies the method from category 1. And the fact that the method doesn't challenge any presupposition eliminates it from category 2 as well. Such a method is a waste of time. What say you?

Hi Rainbow Vein, Thanks for the response. Ya I can't wait till I get my chance to go to my first workshop. Where was the workshop that you went to? Are you doing Michael's 500 hour certification program? Ya I always new that there was higher healing out there way beyond what Acupuncture can do, and I am just THRILLED because I truly believe michael is THE GUY who can get me to that higher level of healing and allow me reach my dream of becoming a perfect healer. I will see, but I am still really considering receiving a TCM to give me a solid foundation of the points, herbs and other aspects that make up TCM; and I want the credibility that comes along with being a certified professional "healer". I Still would like to ask Michael, the question: That after I learn his Taoist Medicine, would there ever be an instance where I would incorporate TCM or does is Taoist Medicine trump all aspects of TCM. It just maybe seems to me that his Taoist method, although extremely effective, may specilize in certain areas while lack in others, while TCM as far as I know can be applied to all kinds of ailments. Basically would TCM prove to be at least somewhat beneficial to me as a healer, or would there be no need for it as Taoist medicine is all superior to it, and learning TCM would only act to confuse me and make the process of learning the Taoist medicine THAT much harder?

I know! I know! I know!!!! For many years that was a dream of mine but the dream never became a reality. Now my travelling days are over because I have established myself a life so that it would be impossible for me to go travelling again. However, I did go to "Splendid China" a few times when it was in Orlando, Florida. They employed Chinese nationals who came to the states on worker's visas. I met one lovely lady, a dancer in a Chinese opera presentation. I so regret not having persued a closer relationship with her. She was so nice to talk with. But still, we can still see the world simply by looking out our window. I still do that.

they can turn your friends into enemies, they can turn enemies into friends they can bring nations together and cause them to war how important are words to you? how much value do we place in them? surely words are priceless! as our language grows how do we insure it keeps in good health? have we not inherited the language of our ancestors? and the shortcomings of the past? what eloquence we need to even speak about words the word is the body of the idea, and the idea is the soul of the word the world of ideas surpasses the world of words our understanding of thought requires a refinement of language if our speech is our breath and breath is life then to break our word is to damage life I shall endeavor to speak words that are both relatively and absolutely true the art of poetry is more important than the laws which govern us many set out on a journey that leads them further away from their goal words are half what is said and half what is heard fact and fiction are but two modes of storytelling the speech of metaphor is the only way we can hope to praise that which gives us our breath the movement of colour and sound is the vocabulary of nature being within nature every sound we hear or dream can be appreciated as music and so harmony is in our instincts beauty is our gift and love is our currency the success of words will bring our worlds into harmony and the failure we will not speak of silence these words are nourishing to some and deadly to others when that silence replaces the truth, the silence is a lie I will endeavor to speak truth