East-West mind difference

[Jetsun]

So what would a heart-based practice look like? Or is it just getting into your body? I've always thought that becoming aware in your body is a grounding practice. Or would it be to become aware of your emotions? Funny thing is, Christianity is all about opening the heart

 

I think just getting in your body and breath is a heart based practice if done with a soft welcoming attitude, many of your feelings have been cast out of the light of your awareness and live in isolation a lot of the time so just giving them attention is a compassionate act; but your mind and ego is likely to resist this as the feelings you find there could be threatening to your self image, so there needs to be a bit of distance and mindfulness so you can observe the minds reaction without being dominated by it while you feel your body.

 

The Goenka type Vipassana retreats sound quite good for this as you spend the first few days building up your skill of mindfulness of the mind, then once that is established you spend the rest of the time with mindfulness on the body.

 

The method Tsoknyi Rinpoche is teaching his Western students is 'Lungjam' and gentle Vase breathing, which is to scan the body until you find what he calls "misplaced lung" which is usually a buzzy kind of feeling then slowly and compassionately bring that feeling down using your breath to below the navel, he says that most of the problems of the screwed up subtle body of Westerners are due to misplaced Lung in the body, the home of Lung is meant to be below the navel but it gets stuck in various parts of the body and by connecting your mind to it and bringing it to your lower navel and using Vase breathing it brings your lung to its proper home and then gets purified in the central channel. Many of the Taoist practices using the lower Dan Tien probably do the same thing.

 

Christianity is meant to be about opening the heart but I think one of the reason why people are stuck in their heads is because of the shame Christianity has put on many of the emotions, if you are shamed of your sexuality and forbidden to feel things like anger because you are told that you have to be forgiving and loving all the time you create a image of yourself in that mould using your imagination, so entering the body could be very threatening to many Christians to see the truth of what they are really feeling.

Edited November 24, 2012 by Jetsun

[de_paradise]

So what would a heart-based practice look like? Or is it just getting into your body? I've always thought that becoming aware in your body is a grounding practice. Or would it be to become aware of your emotions? Funny thing is, Christianity is all about opening the heart

 

One easy practise is Guanyin mantra, of universal compassion: Om mani padme hum. You don't mindlessly repeat the mantra, but distract your conscious mind with the mantra repetition, while your consciousness plumbs your emotions and heart, and you attempt to generate/isolate/sustain feelings of compassion, love, gratitute. You can point the feelings toward Guanyin, or you can point the feelings toward the whole world, or you can imagine yourself as a monk within an assembly of other monks all chanting "Om mani padme hum", or imagine yourself as Guanyin, or some form of energetic emination of Guanyin, who feels compassion, love, healing towards others.

 

This is one of my main practices. As you keep going along generating these emotional states, they naturally become evolved (not just mundane emotional states),become more energetic or spirit related, kind of a doorway into a relatively enlightened state. From that vista, it becomes apparent that what stops one from reaching a longer lasting enlightened state is the relative impurity of the body. So that's where these other energetic practises can take a supporting role, (qigong, yoga, neigong) because they help open the body's channels up. But already the path has been set by this physical emotional type of evolution previously.

 

There are other Tantric deities and beings and Buddhas etc. with different attributes, and I would use more or less the same basic formula, with slightly different thoughts and emotions. You could think of it as emotional retraining. Eventually though different, it all kind of converges. There is alot of room to play around, get distracted, and re-center. This is working through your "stuff" in a positive pro-active way.

Edited November 24, 2012 by de_paradise

[manitou]

I've recently become immersed in the Freemasonry line of thought,as described by Manly Hall in his Lost Keys to Freemasonry book. I am astounded - I didn't think there was anything Western that could parallel the Eastern teachings. But growing up in the West in this lifetime, this mindset actually clicked to my Western mind in a way that was just a little deeper and a more perfect fit than even the TTC has. I highly recommend this reading to anyone who embraces the I Am consciousness and realizes who we really are. It gets real interesting at the 33rd degree at a highly metaphysical level.

[raimonio]

Christianity is meant to be about opening the heart but I think one of the reason why people are stuck in their heads is because of the shame Christianity has put on many of the emotions, if you are shamed of your sexuality and forbidden to feel things like anger because you are told that you have to be forgiving and loving all the time you create a image of yourself in that mould using your imagination, so entering the body could be very threatening to many Christians to see the truth of what they are really feeling.

 

Yes I agree, Christianity has failed in many ways. But there are people who have been able to practice it as it should've been and for them it is a massive heart-opener. My grandmom being one, she is like the best person on the planet, but also sees herself in a very healthy manner, no guilt and so on.

 

I've started to do the Buddhist Metta prayer and it has been great, now I feel like my practice is whole. Been contemplating on Christianity aswell, for some reason I am feeling drawn to it Never gonna stop being a Daoist Buddhist though.

[Harmonious Emptiness]

I'm forgetting which hexagram it was now, but in Liu I MIng's commentary on the I Ching, he said something you would have though came from Freud:

 

(paraphrased)

"when someone is internally chaotic, they try to create order externally. When someone is internally peaceful (centered, aligned) they can move easily through the chaos without loosing their internal alignment."

 

I'm thinking maybe the suppression of sexual urge without proper practice to transform led to a lot of internal chaos that was expressed by trying to force order on others. This was often done by shaming the person to accept their inferiority and do what they're told, while there were few role models of tranquility speaking up over this chaotic clamor.

 

The belief that the natural self was wrong, rather than peaceful, created somewhat of a culture searching for the ground above their heads rather than under their feet, and wisdom from logic rather than from a state of knowing. Not believing that a person could naturally gravitate to virtue, they ran from themselves and then had to fall on an external organization of "rights and wrongs."

 

The East I think had a major advantage in not having these barriers to self-knowledge.

 

That said, the West did create a number of useful things in their search for order. Luckily, we all finally now have access to the innovations of both cultures and have started to try and figure out how to use them appropriately together.