Saturday, February 27, 2010

The 12 Nidanas

At the heart of the psychology of the Buddha are the "12 Nidanas". There is no exact translation for the word "nidana". It has sometimes been translated as "causal links" or "interdependent originations". The idea of the nidanas is that there are 12 factors that mutually influence each other. This type of causation is behind Jung's idea of synchronicity and behind some ideas in Quantum physics which are moving beyond linear causation. I prefer to think of it as "circular causation" because it is a little bit like nonlinear mutual influence and a little bit linear. Instead of A causes B causes C, there is A causes B causes C causes A. Sometimes each of these causes is part of more than one circle of causation, like A causes B1 causes C1 causes A and A causes B2 causes C2 causes A2. This can explain the "ripple effect" that eventually "everything causes everything". Perhaps nidanas can be defined as "factors in open ended circular causation".

The first nidana is "avidya" which is sometimes translated as ignorance. It is better translated as "unconsciousness" or "unconscious ignorance". The word has the literal meaning of not (a-) seeing (vidya as in "video") something. We are not aware of what we are doing and usually running on habit (vashana) and our habit is driven by craving (tanha or asava).

The second nidana is "samskara" which is sometimes translated as "mental formations". It does not have a good translation into English and represents a fairly developed psychology of the unconscious or subconscious mind (alaya storehouse consciousness). It is an imprint within the subconscious mind which can be activated by sensory experience and turns on "craving, resistance, or apathy". We either want what our senses pick up on and move towards possessing it, do not want what our senses pick up on and move towards resisting it or pushing it out of our experience, or we are apathetic, neutral, or dull about it (unconsciousness).

The third nidana is "vijnana" which is translated as "consciousness". This is, again, a poor translation. Both Hinduism and Buddhism have many different words for mind and consciousness that are more precise than the English terms. As psychology evolves, I think there will be more precise matches possible. This is the activation of a conditioned response, streams of thought and emotion arising from the samskara. It is a conditioned consciousness with a lot of content reacting to the sensory stimulus. This content can have contradictory responses, both wishing to grasp and wishing to resist. The reaction can be intense, mild, or dull.

The fourth nidana is "nama and rupa" which literally means "name and form". The more generalized condition reaction starts crystalizing into a mental interpretation, a level of tension and relaxation, a posture (asana), and a body activity (mudra).

The fifth nidana is "sadayatana" which refers to the six sense gates, the five usual senses of eye, nose, ear, tongue, and skin, and the sixth sense which is the mind. Again, there are more precise terms in Buddhism and Hinduism for "mind" and "consciousness" which gets overused when translating. I call the aspect of mind that gets activated here "the summarizer". It takes all our five sense information and unifies it into a coherent multimedia experience with audio and visual, among others, being completely synchronized. In some disease states, the summarizer is impaired and we experience the five senses not coordinating as well. The summarizer can also be trained to pick up subtle impressions and develop psychic powers. This is because the points that it interfaces with the five senses have something in common with each of the five senses. These interface points can unplug from the organic base and extend in through mental space to tune into other layers of universal activity and operate in a larger subtle sensory field. This usually happens to some extend in meditation training. Almost always people who meditate develop some degree of psychic ability or at least have a few paranormal experiences. This is usually downplayed in meditation training, because when we are young in our experience, we do not know how we are creating our karma and we can unwittingly increase our karma through misuse of our newly found psychic abilities. If we let them grow quietly in our meditation practice, we will eventually know how to use them compassionately to help others. It is also wise to not let other people know how psychic we become through meditation, though eventually people will find out if they hang around us long enough. The reason why is that people will either want us to prove that we are psychic and be skeptical or they will think that we are special and become either afraid or devoted or want to study us or some such thing (none of it helpful, meditators tend to just want to live in peace). Sometimes I hear a question about why advanced meditation masters do not prove the psychic abilities to scientists so that these can be understood better. The answer is that some advanced meditators have occasionally consented to scientific study and some of the results have been interesting. But those scientific studies do not conclusively prove the abilities as much as people would want them to. Advanced stage magicians often fool scientists and stage magic is at such a high level of technology that it can duplicate paranormal phenomena sometimes even better than the actual abilities. The real abilities go through a phase of being as reliable as children who are first learning to walk and who often stumble. The second is thing is that it is not always desirable to have people think you are psychic. In fact, it is rarely desirable. In one blog site, there was a documentary about a Buddhist meditation master who apparently ate little food and drank little water for two years, and even set fire some of his clothes by generating "psychic heat". One person commented and said he must be a fallen angel (a Christian interpretation based on the idea that any miracle must come from a true Christian following Jesus or be demonic and an attempt to seduce people away from the one true religion of Christianity). You get stuff like that when you do occasionally demonstrate a "siddhi". It seems that it can create a lot of fear in people too. So it is better to keep it under raps until it can serve an occasional good purpose, like using telepathy to sense what samskaric thought impression is binding a person and creating a thought remedy to release it.

The sixth nidana is "sparsa" which means "contact". It is where the sense organ comes in contact with a sense object and produces a "sense consciousness". It is a moment when sensory stimuli activates a sensory experience.

The seventh nidana is "vedana" which means "sensation". This is similar to the sensory activation that has just happened, but has moved to a response, to a feeling that it is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. It is an basic interpretation of the experience.

The eighth nidana is "trishna" or "tanha" (pali). This is a craving. The eighth nidana can be a craving to have (leading to clinging) or to not have (leading to resistance). It can also be a kind of neutral craving of dullness or boredom, a kind of delusion (moha). This is like a heavy cloud that numbs us and can be a basic kind of unconsciousness. These are the three poisons of the mind that causes sorrow and obscure our natural enlightened mind. Nirvana is the cessation of the activity of these three poisons and an overcoming, at least temporarily, of the habit force of all the karmas. This nidana is one that Buddha talked much about. In his Fire Sermon, he talked of humans burning with the fire of craving, with the fire of negativity, and with the fire of delusion. The fire was the painful tension sorrow we feel under their grip. Another word that is used for craving is "asava" which literally means "outflow". The word suggests two meanings that are both valid. One is that our energy is flowing out of us and reaching out to pull in what we crave. There is an aggression to this process. Even in seduction, there is an outflowing energy trying to hook something in. It is not merely passive attraction. When one becomes sensitized to energy fields, you can see this energy pouring out of a person, like pouring out the eyes, or becoming tentacles extending out the body to connect with others and with things. There are some people who know how to take in these outflows and feed on them. They can develop a kind of charismatic glow from this energy and attract even more. The second meaning of "outflow" is that these cravings drain us of energy and exhaust us. Energy flows out of us and we lose it, sometimes very rapidly.

The ninth nidana is "upadana". This is attachment. The craving leads us to cling to something, hold on to something, defend and fight for something. Jealousy is trying to fight for, possess, and control a romantic partner. Manipulation revolves around an attachment to a person and attempt to get them to be something for us. Seduction is a kind of passive magnetizing craving that tries to suck someone into our energy field and hold them in our sway. Battles can be fought over attachments. Psychologically, attachments are addictions which need a lot of energy to maintain. The transitoriness of life, its endless change, feels like a threat to all our attachments and all our control dramas. We learn to let go of them and allow life to flow again, then a certain kind of psychological fear ends, anger ends, and sadness eventually ends too.

The tenth nidana is "bhava" which literally means "becoming". It is what the Sufis call "identification". We form our identity around what we are attached to and try to maintain our identity. Fighting certain things that we deem "not self" and defending things we deem "self". Fear of death emerges here as a result of self clinging. This is the most subtle root of our sorrow. This self clinging forms an ego personality around it in the next nidana.

The eleventh nidana is "jati" which literally means "birth". This is the birth of an ego identity. This ego can be different than one which was a moment ago. Every thought with the word "I" that we believe is a root of the ego state. There are many potential egos inside our samskaras. In jati, the ego is a full blown activity, interacts with the world, and plays out a particular karmaic pattern until it is transcended. The Buddha once said, "Unless the teaching of no self is understood, there is no end to sorrow." The no self teaching is an antidote to the activation and birth of a constructed false self.

The twelfth nidana is "jaramarana" which is sickness, old age, and death. The ego formation, being created by causes and conditions is subject to forces which eventually cause it to cease to exist. The ego is created by karma and is destroyed by karma. It gets replaced by other ego formations which undergo the same fate. The ego is empty of solid existence, arises, abides, changes, and passes away. When this happens, we suffer change. We cling to things in an attempt to find permanent security and suffer when what we attach to changes and ends. This nidana is called the "result nidana", the effect of the activity of the other nidanas, but it is also a cause that sets up the new activites of the ego. Once a clinging fails, we try to replace it with a new object of craving that promises to do what the last object failed to do. The whole process is so stressful that it causes our bodies to literally get sick, age, and die. In the Medicine Buddha Sutras, the three poisons of the mind are considered the roots of all diseases, though outer causes can join with inner causes to produce the diseases. Pathogens can invade our bodies and make us sick, but our immune system may not operate as well when emotional stress compromises its functioning. Anger can fragment our pranic flows in our bodies and exhaust our adrenals. Paradoxically, Buddha did conquer aging, disease, and death in his body by completely transcending the ego. He could only die by tonglen and phowa (taking on the karma of others and deliberately ejecting his consciousness from his physical body). This higher process would take some time to explain and is beyond the scope of this post.

In discourse, the Buddha often talked about how the 12 nidanas function from the start of a sensory input in the sixth nidana and how it develops from there. But any nidana can be seen as a starting point for the circular causation. The nidanas operate very rapidly so that there is a feeling of simultaneousness to them. By the time we notice that a samskara has been activated, we are already in pain. It takes a kind of mature intuitive awareness to feel all the links unfold inside us. It takes a fair amount of time being aware of our process to notice all these things happening one after the other and rippling across the mind. For instance, the conditioned consciousness can be a subtle sensory input for more samskaras to be activated until we are overwhelmed and burned out. This is called by the Tibetans "the spreading out of thought". Part of Samatha practice is to "tighten the mind" so that thought somewhat contained. It leads to the practice of "simple attention" or "bare attention" where we do not think or analyze what is happening, but simply look, because of we analyze, we think, and then these thoughts are picked up by our summarizer and become a subtle experience that causes samskaras to activate and our conditioned mind to flow and react to more and more things, until we have a "storm of thoughts and emotions" whirling around inside us. If we "remain with the sensation" and "not do anything", then the whole storm can calm down. We can also learn to use our mind to actively pacify our conditioned consciousness.

The goal of reducing karma through meditation is to remove the samskaras from our subconscious mind. This is done by being present as awareness and learning not to fall into identification with anything and hence not form a "self illusion". Without this identification, the samskara does not reload and dissolves into "emptiness". There is still some "momentum karma" that needs to wind down to zero. For instance, I insult someone and they are angry with me. I may have remorse about the insult and burn away the motivation to do it again, but the person may still be angry with me and retaliate back, arguing with me and causing some sorrow for both of us. If I accept this as karma balancing itself and completing itself, then it can be finished with. I can lovingly allow the person to be angry and finish with what he or she feels that he or she needs to do. It is also possible, sometimes, to have such deep remorse that it sends out a telepathic emanation that allows the other person to release his or her issue with us. Emptying the subconscious mind of the samskaras can be done rapidly through "telepathic link yoga" and even burn away the "seeds" in subtle form, before they get activated by external events. When we go within to dissolve them, they are not merely dormant seeds waiting for sensory quickening. They have a subtle motion and magnetism that is actively pulling experiences toward us and us toward experiences. They feel like a whirling energy that creates a vibration and magnetism around itself. We can feed their energy by indulging in them, by nursing them, by wanting them to happen, by dreaming about how to fulfill them, and by thinking thoughts that inspire us to follow the energy to its fulfillment. For instance, I could have some resentment about how a boss treated me. I could be arguing in my mind with him and subtly rehearsing for my next encounter and programming what will happen. It is "setting up the energy" of the next meeting. I might not be aware of what I am doing with my own mind. It is sometimes easy to predict the future by noticing what a person is daydreaming in his or her thoughts or randomly talking about. Samskaras are accidents waiting to happen with the participants making a thousand choices in thought that lead toward the accident without realizing it. This is the unconscious activity that one notices. When people have an event happen, they yet "victim" even though they were all "karma locked" to meet in the accident and suffer.

The key elements in this nidanic understanding of individual consciousness is that all the contents of our inner world and outer world is in motion, undergoing many changes that are in their turn causing other changes. There is a feeling of a chain reaction going on very rapidly with one state replacing another in succession. Even the body is undergoing vast changes moment to moment, being a single cell in the beginning, becoming a cell colony floating in a female womb, becoming a fetus, undergoing birth, breathing, crawling, growing, walking, talking, listening, and multiplying its cells into full biological adulthood, having accidents, having sex and birthing other bodies, diseases, joys, and accomplishments, and then wearing down, aging, and dying (unless a person chooses a regenerative lifestyle). Transitoriness karma, and interdependence are key elements in the Buddhist view of the world. Karma is how our choice interacts with universal law to produce our experience. The model is very dynamic and very scientific.

The wave pattern of karma is roughly sensory stimuli activates a sensory experience, we react with a sense of that experience being pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral sensation, our conditioning then activates clinging, resistance, or apathy in response to the sensation, and then further evolve a complex response of thoughts, emotions, and impulses to do, we identify with this personality reaction and live out an ego identity, undergo the consequenes in terms of stress and joy, health and illness, regeneration and aging, life and death. The causal nexus or sentient being flowing within its life continuum moves from lifetime to lifetime, carrying the samskaras with it, to form its basic tendancies in each lifetime. These samskaras do not remain the same, but undergo their own changes over time, even though there is a basic sense of repetition and habit within them. Until we learn to live consciously and intentionally, sorrow is usually how they change.

The karmas are stored in the subconscious mind as samskaras, felt as addictive cravings, chronic negativity, and dull apathy. They crystallize into a system of attachments, resistances, and conditioning which is the basis of our personality. Our Buddha nature, radiant awareness, is below the surface of all this, taking in all this experience and living through whatever is happening to us. It is usually asleep as a kind of silent witness to everything. It is unborn, unchanging, and undying, as old as this infinite universe that never had a beginning and will never have an end. The individual sentient being is like a sensory motor nerve junction of an infinite psychophysical organism that is the universe itself, a part of this infinity, but not yet awake to who or what it is, still bound by karma, addiction, attachment, and sorrow, doomed to repetition admidst change, until it wakes up and takes a more active part in the unity. Its main sorrow is to have what it does not want or to want what it does not have. Ending this addictive consciousness and waking up to a deeper identity that does not have to self reference itself through thought, but which can peacefully abide in awareness as awareness. This deeper identity is like a wise child that never becomes a conditioned personality and which can experience the wonder of life moment to moment, and therefore always exists in "nirvana", the highest pleasure, and experience the purpose of life which is celebration itself (survival, healing, growth, and celebration to be precise). To end karma, there is remorse, ethical idealism, letting go of attachments, weakening addictions, and dissolving unconscious conditioning. The blessing energy of a luminious being, already fully awakened, can accelerate this process. This is the purpose of telepathic link yoga.

Monday, February 22, 2010

The Seven Kinds of Karma

I wanted to share more extensively about karma before continuing with the Telepathic Link Yoga essays. The reaon why is that the Telepathic Link Yoga is meant to be an accelerated method for burning away karma by connecting with the blessing energy of a light being. Strictly speaking, there is good, bad, and neutral karma. Good karma are causes for a happy, peaceful, compassionate, wise, and creative life. Bad karma are causes for an unhappy, painful, angry, fearful, and sad life. Neutral karma are causes that are neither. When the phrase "burning away karma" is used it is about eliminating bad karma.

In the earliest teachings of the Buddha, he taught the 12 nidanas, which are the twelve interdependent causes and effects of karma. The chain of causation is circular, rather than linear, it is like A causes B causes C causes A. This means that karma has a repetitive pattern. This also means that causes become effects and effects become causes. Some of the causes are psychological and within an individual sentient being. Some of the causes are physical/external and connect an individual sentient being with larger patterns of causation. Ultimately, everything causes everything else. Inside this field of interdependent causation, the free choice of sentient beings is a significant factor. The chain of causation is not airtight or fatalistic. There is Quantum Uncertainty within the process. Free choice is not entirely conditioned by our past and is not entirely free from past influences either. This understanding allows us to grow rather than merely change. There are four places where we can change our karma. We can make better choices in our present moment (ethical idealism). We can burn away the imprints from our subconscious mind (meditation). We can not identify with no self phenomena and rest in our true nature (meditation). We can "remain with the sensation" and not react to external stimuli (meditation).

The first kind of karma is "obscuring karma". This is related to the mental poison of delusion. This kind of karma blocks us from seeing the truth of something. The most active form of obscuring karma is "projection" where we see what we have denied and repressed projected on some person or event. If we deny our anger, push it into our body, and not feel it anymore, then the whole world will be seen and felt as a place of anger and warfare.

The second kind of karma is "general karma". This is the result of all the lines of karma converging and becoming our general level of life. Humans generally have a certain kind of life condition, certain amount of happiness, sadness, work, love, and lifespan. This reflects the general karma of humankind at any point in time. General karma has changed for humanity over time. Things have gotten generally better with new collective challenges also appearing.

The third kind is "balancing karma". These are usually individual lines of causation, but can also be related to whole groups of people who share the same karmaic process. This karma is simple. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is a balancing process. If we kill someone, then we will tend to attract a murderer in our life. In practice, this kind of karma is not this linear, since other causes can soften this karma or change it. If we sincerely regret what we have done, when can mostly erase this outcome. If we help others and save someone, we can balance the karma without eventually needing to get killed ourselves. New causes enter the stream and can shift how our karma will manifest.

The fourth kind of karma is "habit force". This is similar to the law of momentum. We tend to stay in our habits and our habits produce a certain kind of life pattern. This is also known as conditioning. This is a far deeper karma that many humans realize. We are often completely run by habits and are basically sleep walking through life on autopilot, like programmed robots, and are almost not living at times.

The fifth kind of karma is "like attracts like". This is similar to the law of gravity. This is different from balancing karma in that balancing karma has a polarity of abuser and victim and requires us to keep switching roles. The like attracts like is where people of a similar vibration will find each other and interact with each other. This can sometimes include balancing karma too. It could be as simple as too angry people who secretly want to fight just finding each other and fighting each other.

The sixth kind of karma is "completion karma". These are events processes that are somehow unfinished and need completion, like grieving over the loss of someone in our lives. We sometimes block completion karma from finishing, hold, for instance, tears inside and let the held energy poison our whole life. This is usually because a subtle clinging and resistance holds the energy inside us. Completion karma is sometimes called "lesson karma" because something needs to be learned so that the pattern can finish and end.

The seventh kind of karma is "imprint karma". These are impressions stored in our subconscious mind that attract events to us and us to them. They are like hypnotic implants that make us do things until we are aware of them and release them.

A particular karmaic process can be and usually is a combination of all these karmas. I am sharing these processes here so that thinking about karma expands from the usual linear view that if you do something good, then you get something good, and if you do something bad, then something bad happens to you. While this linear view gives some feeling for how karma works, it is oversimplified to the point where it is not accurate. Just as Newtonian Physics came to similar laws, like the laws of motion (F=MA, inertia, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and gravitation), when a mapping of what happens in the real world, where multiple lines of causation are converging and diverging, mutually influencing each other, and so on, the events that conform to these laws are complex. The law of karma depends on a kind of synchronicity governing macro-events, rather than the movement of objects and the interaction of objects within standard temperature and pressure conditions that make them behave in more predictable ways.

There is one question about whether or not a Buddha is free from the law of karma. Some Dzogchen Buddhist teachers tend to feel that he or she is not free from the law of karma and some other teachers feel that the law of completely transcended when we fully awaken. I like the Zen Buddhist answer that a Buddha is not free from the law of karma and not bound by the law of karma, but is one with the law of karma. At its highest level, the law of karma merely becomes the process of creation. We can create whatever life we want once we are conscious of how it works. I think this is why it is important to not objectify the law of karma into some kind of rewarding and punishing god who watches us with candies and club.

One friend said that he did not like the law of karma because it encourages a tendency to blame others for how bad their lives are. We can be uncompassionate to others, which is not really healthy karmaically, since what we condemn we usually attract into our lives. But the law of karma should ideally make us humble. It means that we accept that every painful event that happens to us was at least partially caused by us. We can also be happy with the law of karma, because it means that evil is ultimately stupid and backfires on itself, and can therefore never fully take over the world. It also means that eventually we can master the law to such and extent that we can make our lives immune to further sorrow and learn how to teach others to do the same. The main enemy is not "conscious evil" which does not really exist, but unconscious ignorance which can make poor choices and cause sorrow for ourselves and others. When we understand karma, too, we understand an interconnectedness, that what we give we also receive. If we condemn someone for creating a painful life, then we have not yet fully realized how we might be doing the same and how easy it is to fall into unwholesome patterns and live them out. We are all learning how to live happy, creative, loving, purposeful, and wise lives and we can all learn from each other. The purpose of stating the law of karma is not to assign blame and let people wallow in their pain, but to show how we are unconsciously creating our lives all the time with our thoughts and choices and therefore show how we can master our lives by mastering our minds.

When the third eye fully opens, we can see the karmaic patterns behind the lives of everyone we tune into. It is opening up to a field of causation and seeing the lines of cause and effect that are being created by people and converging to form the events of human life. There are karmaic lessons that can be learned to change the outcomes that are destined to happen, if the person chooses differently than before. Karma is a kind of circular causation, where the same wars actually happen until the unconscious hatred is recognized and released. Some people are having the same argument with each other, lifetime after lifetime, attracting "special hate relationships" that are very familiar to them. If you look carefully at some people, you can see the ease and depth of their argument shows that they have practiced their angry words to the point where the whole dance is well timed and choreographed. It can reveal things started in past lives. The whole relationship is not merely "good" or "bad". It is a pattern with both happiness and pain. It becomes a general karma that the participants live out that forms one of the ten worlds.

The main point of the law of karma is that there is order behind what happens to us in life and the order responds moment to moment to our thoughts, emotions, and choices to form the events that unfold for us. We are normally not aware of what we are doing and how our choices are making our lives. This is living unconsciously, acting out our conditioning, and reaping the appropriate results. Because we are interconnected, one person meditating and evolving can help raise the people around him or her, sending ripples of causation that uplifts and awakens those around him or her. There is an interaction between individual and collective karma behind how this works. Some Buddhist Masters, like Padmasambhava, evolve so rapidly that they move beyond collective human history and only appear to others who are moving outside this collective pattern, at the edges where someone is breaking through "mass consciousness gravity" by meditating to "escape velocity".

Sunday, February 21, 2010

The Okinawa Diet

I wanted to share two books that I have been studying lately concerning diet. They are THE OKINAWA DIET PLAN and THE OKINAWA PROGRAM. The books are complimentary. The former goes into more theory about what was discovered in a 25 year study of the longest lived culture in documentable history. The diet is a near vegetarian one and can easily be made into a total vegetarian one. I hope some time to go into more detail about the diet and what we can learn and integrate from their example, but right now I want to make some observations and share some from my own experience. In my own journey, I did, in the last few years, gain some excess weight and have the intention of reducing this down to a more sustainable ideal weight. The increase in weight had to do with struggling with a severe ligament tear and not being able to be as active as I used to. I also find, in an immortalist life pattern, that the older we get the more efficiently we burn calories. We need less food to survive and thrive. At some point we need to change our dietary habits to match this increased efficiency. We also live at a calmer and slower pace. Younger people sometimes waste a lot of energy by comparison, overdoing what is needed. This is okay. They have energy to spare and are meant to have this surplus to learn about how to use their energy. In a sense we go from aerobic workouts to Chi Kung over time, where we can feel more energy after we are done, rather than pleasantly exhausted. Different life phases require different things from us. We have yet to have enough people to fully map out an immortalist series of rites of passage, but it will eventually happen.

One of the key ideas behind the Okinawa Diet is that we tend to eat the same amount of food each day regardless of caloric density. If we eat food with too much caloric density, then we will still not feel full until we eat the same amount and we will overeat the amount of calories we need and we will increase our fat and gain weight. Our bodies will kick into defense mode after a while and try to burn off this extra fat. Beyond a certain point the body does not want to store a reserve of energy for emergencies, especially in a time period in human history where many humans rarely go even one day without food. One problem with our food is food is usually less calorie dense because it has a lot of water in it and most processed food removes the water and thereby makes the food more calorie dense. The classic is the much over rated snack bar which has hardly any water and is "packed with nutrients". You can stuff yourself with water infused salads and find gaining weight very hard. You can overindulge just a little with dry calorie dense snacks and gain weight very easily.

Not surprisingly, some of the very best foods to eat are soups. Water is infused with nutrients, the cooking makes the nutrients easier to digest, and you will feel full without having eaten as many calories. Think about eating a bowl of soup and a salad, having some tea, and maybe a small side dish of some kind protein (edamame or a slice of marinated tofu), and you will have a pretty ideal meal. It seems wise to stay away from too much grain and perhaps do without grains for a while if you are weight loss focused. Bean dishes can take their place and they are high in protein.

Having mentioned protein, the Okinawa Diet is not a high protein diet. The various high protein diets around can help to temporarily lose weight by inducing a artificial ketosis, but they are not sustainable in the long run. Sooner or later we need a way of eating that can naturally regulate our weight without strain while giving us all the nutrition that we need. Our carnivore and chemical oriented society does not distinguish between animal and plant protein. This is an important omission, because plant proteins are more usable and you need less plant protein to sustain yourself than animal protein. It seems that a bean has more usable protein that the same amount of protein coming from urine soaked decaying animal muscle tissue (animals die twice, the first is organ death and the second is cell death, when an animal is killed, the organs have ceased to function, but the cells are still secreting substances that are meant to be removed through urination, eventually the cells choke to death in their own fluids). Some nutritionists are big on eating "complete proteins" but the truth is that we do not need proteins, but amino acids. All the proteins are broken down into amino acids and then rebuilt into whole proteins. As long as we eat enough variety we are getting enough. Plant proteins are already partly broken down into amino acids, because they are not built up into the same dense units as in animals. Carnivores have double the stomach acid and half the intestinal length for a reason. The acid has to be strong enough to break down muscle tissue, which is very tough, and then exit it from the body before it putrefies too much. We also need less protein as we mature, because we have already finished building an adult body. Plants are do not decay like animals and sometimes the veggie food is so fresh that it can be replanted and still grow. Plants do not go through organ death, at least not in the same way.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Money As Emptiness

The Buddhist teaching about emptiness is that all phenomena, including material objects, bodies, sensations, emotions, thoughts, and attention are essentially not graspable, have no solid existence, no intrinsic essence, arise interdependently with everything else, are subject of causation, are constantly changing, and are unable to produce lasting happiness. The analysis of the Abhidharma has the goal of reaching an intuitive understanding of the emptiness of phenomena so that we have the deepest reason to totally let go of all clinging and become from sorrow. The mantric formula of the Heart Sutra is: "Let go, let go, really let go, totally let go, awake, rejoice." This formula can be considered a summary of Buddhism as well as an outline of the entire process of transformation into eternal peace that it offers. This formula is, in itself, something that needs to be intuitively understood to the point where we deeply let go. In other words, intuitive wisdom and letting go are interdependent. The more that we intuitively understand reality, the more we let go and entrust ourselves to reality. Paradoxically, the law of karma, the assertion that there is a stable order to all existence and links all causes and effects together in some wise, compassionate, and creative way, is behind our intuitive realization that we can trust life to take care of us and thereby release all our clinging, negativity, and delusion, and be totally free and totally happy.

The principle of emptiness was a key idea in the Mahayana Revolution in Buddhism. Nagarjuna said that he received it from the Dakini Tara in Dreamtime. He was taught this principle in a series of dreams. This paradoxical concept is somewhat hard even for Buddhists to understand. Even to genuinely understand it even a little amounts to getting a small enlightenment. In a real sense, every Zen koan is about understanding emptiness. When Hakuin systematized Rinzai Zen practice to 100 koans that you studied and solved one at a time, he felt that having 100 small enlightenments allowed one to develop one deep and mature enlightenment.

Emptiness has, as one of its characteristics, the intuitive knowing that everything is conceptually nongraspable. This realization of emptiness therefore always comes in an event/realization which releases a mental bind which frees us from sorrow. This is the key to understanding the Heart Sutra verse that goes, "The Bodhisattva of Compassion, from the depths of intuitive wisdom, saw the emptiness of all the five skandhas, and completely cut through the bonds that caused him sorrow." In this example, the Bodhisattva of Compassion (Avalochiteshvara) is a model for the kind of realization that we are meant to have. As a model, he is behind the cultivation of Bodhicitta (enlightened attitude) in Tibetan Buddhism where we learn to have a selfless loving attitude towards everyone. This same cultivation of Bodhicitta is behind the Beattitudes of Jesus and many of the phrases in the Sermon on the Mount, many of the phrases are similar to many Mahayana Buddist phrases concerning altruistic compassion.

While emptiness may be a lofty idea that is literally impossible to mentally grasp without some intuitive wisdom, it is also within the range of human experience. The shortest version of the Heart Sutra is the bija mantra (seed syllable), "Ah." This bija mantra is often uttered when people have a flash of intuitive insight and go "Aha!". The bija mantra is, therefore, a natural mantra that people often spontaneously utter when they understand something directly and fully. The key thing that makes "realizing emptiness" important is that it applies to everything without exception and therefore can release us from every sorrow. Paradoxically, the Buddhists teach that there is even "the emptiness of emptiness". What this means is that even emptiness cannot be conceptually grasped and there is no thing that can be called emptiness that can be grasped, and that there is no thing that can be called anything else that can be grasped. Emptiness is a simple universal negation concerning the graspability of anything at all, but behind this simple universal negation is what the Zen Buddhists call, "the great affirmation". This is the waking up from the mental trance of sorrow and rejoicing in life. As a realization it is both about the nature of external reality and the nature of the conceptual mind. When people even start to understand emptiness, it sometimes produces a feeling of vertigo, because the mind is used trying to grasp and wants to grasp something in order to feel secure. This very attempt to grasp to feel secure is what causes fear. This is why intuitive wisdom ends all fear and all the pain caused by fear. Because it is resolves all fear, the thing that fear wants to do the most is grasp emptiness. This is why there is a verse in the Heart Sutra, the center verse or key verse, that goes, "The Bodhisattva or Dakini clings to nothing at all, NOT EVEN WISDOM." Intuitive wisdom is not a thing that can be grasped. This is why Buddha negated the "realization of atman" behind Hinduism. The whole Hindu teaching of atman is an attempt by the mind to objectify and grasp our true nature. The Buddha, to be very fair, also negated the whole Buddhist path, and said that there was no Four Noble Truths and no Eightfold Path, so that these, too, would not be objectified and grasped on to. Because there is no such path, grasping on to the Eightfold Path is a delusion and therefore one of the three poisons of the mind that needs to be released. The teaching of emptiness is really the most subtle medicine to the most subtle and core grasping there is. It wipes out the last trace of sorrow from the human mind. It teaches us to not even try to conceptually grasp the medicine itself. It teaches us to release the subtle stranglehold of the thinking mind itself. When this is done, then the thinking function is something we can use without being caught in its grip. It is supremely useful, even more so than before, because its limit is recognized and transcended. We are not caught in the fabrications of the mind that result from trying to grasp the ungraspable.

Part of the understanding of emptiness is that it applies to everything, including money. The Madhyamika Buddhist texts apply the understanding of emptiness to the nature of reality. I find that in American capitalist culture that it might be wise to choose something that hits closer to home: Money. American culture prides itself on being pragmatic, down to Earth, and practical, rather than being lofty spiritual and philosophical beings like the early Hindus and Buddhists. We have people who get excited in this culture when on Super Bowl Sunday that smash their brains against each other in a game called Football, rather than use these brains to move into the deepest nature of ultimate reality and complete a vast biological evolution that took millions of years to form the brain as we know it. Apparently when a pragmatic culture like America talks about "using your brains" it is more as a battering ram than as a wetware biocomputer that still is superior to any hardware microchip driven computer (no punt intended). Strangely enough, the contestants in this Football game are rewarded with little pieces of paper called "money" to the tune of "millions of dollars". This is what makes them feel like they are doing something very practical, more practical than farming for food that is absolutely necessary for human biological survival at this stage of our evolution. So it might be good to go into what money is and see why accumulating all these little pieces of paper is so important, especially when money is mutating into an electromagnetic imprint on a hard drive in a bank vault and guarded by magical verbal incantations involving threats and penalties which are in turn enforced with uniformed beings with guns who have the power to lock people up in jails. This means that money does not have any substantial or intrinsic existence, it cannot literally be grasped, it only has meaning when it is arising interdependently within our social interactions with each other which in turn only has meaning as our society also arises as part of biological reality on this planet which also in turn has meaning as it arises as part of galactic and cosmic reality. Money has, for the most part, ceased to be identical with actual pieces of paper. It also used to be anchored to the "gold standard" and had a legally voted correspondence with a certain amount of gold. Yet it was not the amount of paper in the money that gave it a correspondence with the amount of gold, it was the little ink numbers that were printed on the paper that determined how much gold you could get by exchanging it. If your piece of paper had "20" written on it, you could get more gold than someone who only had "1" written on it, but less than someone who had "1,000,000" written on it. Money started out as gold certificates that were made by goldsmiths. People found that they were easier to carry around and exchange than lugging around blocks of gold. Goldsmiths found that people were just leaving the gold in the vault and decided to issue a certain amount of gold certificates as "loans" to people, since the certificates themselves were being used more than gold coins. Very often, the loan was paid off "with interest" meaning that a person rewarded the loaning person with some extra gold or something of value. In a sense, money started to take on a life of its own from these "counterfeit gold certificates". In terms of Right Speech, these certificates were not part of kind and truthful communication. They did not have the gold behind them that the certificate said that it did. Because the community or sangha dependents on a harmony that depends on kind and truthful words, these fake gold certificates undermined the necessary faith in an agreed upon system of transaction that allows us to exchange good and services with each other, to lovingly support each other, to heal each other, to take care of the needs of each other. Money started to take a curious life of its own. It began to be loved for its own sake. One New Testament verse wisely points out, "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil."

There are people who would like to go back to the gold standard, because gold is a "real value" as opposed to an arbitrary value. The gold standard tries to put a limit on a government about what it can do with literally "making money". When the government is unhinged from needing to stockpile a certain amount of gold for each unit of paper value, then it can simply produce as many dollars as it wants. Apparently one of the early kings of France, who saw the power of controlling money, made money as the product of goldsmiths into money as the product of a government. This king caused the first inflation by producing so much money that it diluted the value of all the previous units. It is a bit of a double standard that if a regular citizen produces money that it is illegal counterfieting and if a government does it then it is legal. It reminds me of a bumper sticker that says, "Do not steal, the government does not like competition." But money as we know it, really starts as a product of the government. Money originally arose to simplify bartering. Everyone would exchange for something that was of common value to all concerned. This way you did not have to keep on making one trade after another to finally get the product that you wanted. You could simply trade what you had for money and then trade money for what you wanted. You would only have two transactions rather than a large number of transactions. This meant that money arose to produce more harmony and more efficient social coordination of resources. People found that by "storing money" that they could "retire" and live off of the money that "they saved". This is also when money took on a life of its own. Money had a better shelf life than seeds which would eventually spoil and decay if saved for too long.

Unhinged from the gold standard, the money became the patented product of a government. This is what all the money of the planet has in common. Each currency is tied to a different government, has different policies regulating it, and these policies can change by the decisions of that government, the kinds of checks and balances that function in this government, the kinds of elections or succession of rulership that happens in this government, and what the people of that country are willing to tolerate before trying to overthrow that government. A currency is usually considered stable and reliable if the government behind it is stable and reliable. The value of the currency is partful due to its stability and reliability, and partly due to "what you can buy" with your money. This is, in its turn, dependent on what the country produces in terms of products and services. This is also related to the faith of the people in their money, their willingness to use money as a means to make transactions with each other. Value, too, is a relative thing. Some of what is valuable is related to biological survival needs and some of what is valuable is related to the kinds of pleasures we are willing to buy in the form of music and movies. Some of these pleasures are related to addictions and some are related to what makes us grow and thrive. Life becomes more worth living if there is high art, beautiful ecological landscapes, and technology. What humans value is dependent on what kind of dharma is behind their life, what they choose to live and find a purpose in. Behind capitalist "supply and demand" are all these fluctuations of the mind in terms of "volitional impulses", unconscious and automatic choices based on transitory thoughts, emotions, and sensations. There is some stability in all this, which means that the changes are relatively slow, though it is speeding up because transactions are being streamlined by electronic transfers, and a vaster system of checks and balances to govern these electronic transfers. What humans are finding valuable is related to product choices that have some logic to them, though human thoughts and emotions, what humans are willing to spend and why, does change in response to "news" which in turn is an abstraction and description of very complex multicause events unfolding on this planet. There are competing news stations which are also governed by a strange kind of supply and demand. There are different versions of the news depending on which political parties try to successfully or unsucessfully control the "media" and vote with "money" by investments and divestments. News that does not take into account the "stock holders" who own the company may disappear. News that is too delusional to be useful may also disappear because it becomes useless for investors who will look for their news on other stations. News that is too realistic and presents facts that expose some illegal activity of some powerful group may also be terminated by the powerful group. You end up seeing a vast "field of karma" where people are making choices and the choices are getting reflected back by life. Although there are many sources of seeming control and seeming power in this process, no sentient being, no ego is really in control. It is interesting, because many economically powerful beings seem to still age and die, many of them earlier than the current scientifically expected lifespan if you are living well according to certain factors. The reason why is, again, the dharma, greedy cravings, angry cynical negativity, and egoic delusions about what is worth having are the causes of sorrow, and money can symbolize all of them and feel worth getting in massive amounts. The Buddhist idea of creating wealth is connected with "giving" (dana parmita), rather than "taking" (greedy nonparmita). When we give things of value, then the law of karma reflects these back to us. When we take things from others and leave them worse off than before (aka harming them), then the law of karma reflects these back to us. Egos are always secretly struggling against each other (this is what hell is), rather than lovingly supporting each other (which is what heaven is). Conspiracy theories and conspiracies trying to control others is the natural thinking and activity of egos. Fortunately the ego is empty of substantial existence and is really a construct and "not self" that we can release and find tremendous joy. The ego is a kind of hypnosis we can wake up from and be truly free, feeling the oneness of life, and relaxing into this oneness.

Money is in some sense very abstract and exists, like the Madhyamika Buddhist philosophers said, by "mental imputation". In other words, piece of paper becomes money through a magical process. We write things on a piece of paper, make it into an elaborate art, with really fine inks and special templates, special fiber, now imbedded with special imprints that make it harder and harder for amateur criminal citizens to copy without getting caught. I find it ironic that this culture laughs at images of Wiccans springling herbs into a vat and mumbling incantations to make a spell, when the elaboration of activities, some involving vats as well (with wood pulp from trees mashed into generic plant fiber and mixed with hemp), with thousands of little political incantations that involve arguments, debates, deals of all kinds, bribes from special interest groups, and so on is seen to be "more scientific" (!). It is obvious to anyone who has studied "objective magic" that a pretty vast spell is producing an essentially illusory product that only exists in the minds of all the users of the product. There is even the conjuring up of "protective dieties" in the form of police and military in uniform so that the process cannot be coopted by amateur magicians, though sometimes it is subverted by "black magicians" with rituals almost as elaborate.

Like a lot of corporations, the government locks people into its product and make sure that it cannot be replaced by another product. This is because, right on the product, its says, "Suitable for all debts, public and private." This incantation is enforced. People must take our money as satisfaction for debt according to some increasingly abstract idea of what a fair settlement is. Other things, like store coupons, have a more limited "magical range" and are only useful in reference to a store or chain of stores. Rather than link their value to gold, they link their value to the items in their store. The products and services that are assigned a monetary value are also increasingly abstract and even involve complex mental operations and assumptions that not everyone can even understand any more and sometimes not easily. Like "insurance" which at first seems to be a guarantee of support when a disaster happens, but may or may not in actual practice, because the actual enforcement requires that the government decide, on the basis of reading the incantation that we "bought" whether or not the spell covers the disaster and requires the release of "money" to solve it and whether the money will be enough to neutralize the disaster in some way. Money, again, has a strange life of its own when taken as a thing emerging in a field of interaction, and becomes an "investment" which can "earn more money" through "interest" though money can also go up and down in value with trends recorded in news.

One interesting thing about the current "money crisis" is that the value of houses is going down in "price" which means that our money should be getting more valuable in the sense that our dollars should be able to purchase more stuff per a unit. If I have a "million dollars" then I can buy more houses than before. Yet this reduction in the value of houses is causing a crisis because people cannot pay their "mortgage" (talk about magic! -- mortgage is French for "death pledge") and cannot make "ends meet" (income at least equalling expenses). This not making ends meet has to do with all these little money price numbers being assigned to all kinds of products and services so that some people cannot "afford to live" and "go unemployed" or some disaster. The strange thing is that our current level of industrial, agricultural, and technological production can be very high and usually is. We are getting wealthier in that, for instance, I can buy a small netbook computer that is superior to any technology 50 years ago of any size and better than the computers that helped to land a craft on the moon and I can buy it for "chump change". I do not want to belittle the economic crisis, but wish to shift perspective about it and perhaps in this altered perspective other solutions may arise. I would say that things like how we treat the environment do matter, though usually efforts to heal the environment focus on pushing policies through government economic control systems and magical spells called "house bills" being run through elected officials who have learned to give the right kind of speeches to mobilize votes for them to get in office (or at least to reprogram the voting computers to make it appear so). I think this is why it seems, to me, that egos hate the "law of karma" because it is something that this delusional construct that thinks it is real cannot control and which governs all of reality. Egos believe that life is unfair and want to win in this unfair world by cheating and the law of karma says that it is impossible, in the long run, to cheat. But it takes a deep intuitive wisdom that can see every single process as connected to every other process within a unified field (the holy grail of Quantum Physics) to see this big enough a picture (thinking outside every box including thinking itself) to get all this and realize it. Paradoxically, the government is also empty of substantial reality too, being dependent on causes and conditons which arise within a field of interactions between everything and everything else. The actual members of the government constantly change, vote on new things, get bribed or not bribed by different lobbies, cheat in new ways, sometimes get caught immediately and sometimes not, always suffer karmaically eventually (and immediately if you know how to look) though few people in this culture believe in such things or trace the karmaic effects to relative completion (the chain of cause and effect tends to ripple almost forever until friction dissipates it completely). Part of the economic crisis has to do with a culture that did make wealth plundering other cultures with having better ships and guns than other cultures for a short while and consumed 90 percent of the world resources. Now other cultures are empowering themselves economically and freeing themselves from this grip in a kind of globalization process where the wealth will be distributed more evenly. Because we have also shared our best manufacturing methods and they are being used, there will be more wealth for everyone, but also that wealth as a concentration of power will be more diffused. There are millions of subprocesses that are involved in this larger view and seeing everything "from emptiness" actually can see "billions upon billions of processes" interacting in the field. The human mind tends to simplify and represent these processes in terms of abstractions that are ultimately delusional no matter how accurate they may seem to be and no matter scientifically fine tuned they become. The reason why is because the human mind is not really equiped to represent reality as it is. Awareness is, because awareness can simply see reality as it is moment to moment and stay with it. Any abstraction of the mind gets isolated from this feeling of an interactive field and gets analyzed separately. There is a kind of "logic of unity" that gets missed in the process of abstraction, with the analytical mind creating the isolated sense of self called the ego, which feels isolated and abandoned by life when this abandonment never really happened, we are always inside the field and are a part of the field. Even all those conspiracies "real" or "delusional" are ultimately devoid of substantial existence, subject to cause and effect, constantly changing its membership as tribes shift their alliances and form new teams to struggle with each other, and the members change their opinions constantly and are not the same for moment to moment. Some shift parties, join different causes and special interest groups, sometimes win and sometimes lose. Or some technological shift makes the black oil seem less valuable than it was (it was considered a worthless toxic goo until we learned to harness it as a fuel through a very complex magical purification ritual) compared to other forms of energy conversion.

My question is when a person does get "emptiness" and "thinks in terms of emptiness", then how does this shift change their life, how do they live, what do they do, and how to they see/relate to this total ever changing pattern of events. What I feel is that they see the entire equation is trustworthy and they relax into the flow, spontaneously adapting to the changes in real time and without strain (because our brain emerges within this field and is meant to adapt to the field as part of the field). It is a different mode of thinking that the primate ego "us versus them thinking" tends to frame all issues in terms of a power struggle with other tribes/conspiracies/factions and is essentially fear based and paranoid, angry and combative, and delusional in terms of feeling separate and threatened by the total process that is always unfolding in the now. There is a kind of surrender to life and trust in life that appears in consciousness when we let go and go beyond the artificial isolated sense of self.

Curiously, it seems that there is an actual brainwave frequency associated with this of 7.83 hz, the Schumann resonance frequency (which may be shifting now, though since we are moving to some galactic energy shift around 12/23/2010), which is the magnetic pulsation of the Earth. The Buddha would sometimes say about some of the events that happened in his life that "the Earth is my witness". After about 10 years of medtitation, Kamiya found that Zen Masters had cultivated a "rhythmic theta train". This is a coherent wave pattern oscillating at a certain frequency in the theta band, associated with dreaming sleep, the awakening of paranormal abilities (telepathy), and other states like hands on sending of healing energy. It seems that when there is an enlightenment experience, the brain shifts its magnetic pulsation to harmonize with the Earth and lives in communion with the Earth.

If I were going to give some advice about how to approach money from this perspective. I would recommend that people not go into debt. There might be some exceptions to this that might be worth doing, but they should be very few. I would like to offer the idea that perhaps we could live without going into debt at all, have a small amount of savings as a kind of buffer to draw from when some emergencies come, and not plan to get locked into a house debt or an education debt. I think that we can envision another way of dwelling and learning that does not involve going into debt. The internet itself has become perhaps the most amazing encyclopedia that humans have created. One could design a learning process through studying web sites, ordering books online, and interacting with experts from all over the world. It may be possible to even visit some of the experts and dialogue with them one on one, perhaps even auditing their classes or just hiring them as a tutor for a certain number of hours to go over some key lessons. We could design a kind of in life education that can even superior to a school education and then find work where we can get life credit for what we have learned. In the computer world, many classes are behind the "cutting edge" of where things are being invented and learned, and a very large number of people are learning on their own and keeping up on their own.

In terms of ownership, this may be a more complex process. One choice is just to rent and find something affordable. This seems simple and could work for many people for their whole lives. It is possible to own a mobile home or RV, make an informal deal with someone to live on their land, find a way to co-own some land with a group of people, or move to a country where land is more affordable. I think that the housing market collapsing can actually be a good thing, because it means that a certain system of debt economy is no longer going to work as well as it did before. It is only a crisis if we are locked into a certain pattern. If we remain loose and natural, trust in life, and flow with life, then something else will take its place. The Buddha emphasized "transitoriness", "nonsubstantiality", "nonsatisfyingness", and "interdependence" as the four marks of existence. I found "nonsatisfyingness" an interesting one. What it means that anything that we cling to and hold on to for happiness, security, and peace is not going to satisfy this need. There is no investment that is going to work this way. The constant change of life will make all those things feel less secure. Yet we can simply flow with life and find peace.

The fifth branch of the Eightfold Path is "right livelihood". The Buddha shared that we are meant to be generous with each other, serve each other in love, trade products that truly help make our lives better, be honest and fair with each other, and not earn our livelihood through scams or stealing, not work for a place that exploits workers or kills animals, or makes death dealing weopons that will be used in a military invasion. It is also wise to find the "middle" way, not spending money in an indulgent and excessive way or being so strict with our finances that we feel deprived and impoverished or hoard our money so that our energies to do flow and support others. Our ideal investment is into our service to others and taking care of our real needs. If I gain money by some stock market investment, it is taxed at least 25 percent. If I gain money by putting in insulation into a home and not spending it, this money is not taxed at all and the investment continues to save money for a very long time. It may also be a good exercise to think that if the money system collapsed what would be of value that you could trade with.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Anthem to Intuitive Wisdom

understanding the literal teachings of the Buddha
feeling the truth of the four noble truths
feeling the truth of the path with eight branches
feeling the truth of twelve interdependent causes of sorrow
an intuitive wisdom arises

seeing how all thoughts, emotions, sensations, and forms
are always changing, never substantial, never isolated,
not capable of giving lasting peace,
and always interconnected with everything else all the time
an intuitive wisdom arises
to let things change without clinging or resistance
to let things simply and unfold within their natural change
and finding peace in the moment by resting in the flow

seeing how all thoughts, emotions, sensations, and forms
arise from empty centerless luminosity
and return back to empty centerless luminosity
and always abide in empty centerless luminosity
seeing nothing as graspable,
everything like trying to hold water in a fist
relaxing into this nongraspability
knowing nothing needs to be grasped
or needs to be done
resting in not doing
and yet doing when it feels right
without strain and without attachment to results
simply being spontaneous and free

nothing to grasp
nothing to resist
nothing to identify with
nothing even to conceptualize
no rules to follow
nothing to rebel against
nothing to think
simply being loose, natural, and free
simply flowing in this wisdom
we are at peace

this wisdom is
beyond analytical thought
and directly sees into
the process of sorrow
seeing its root clinging,
its root resistance,
and its root delusion,
cutting through at the root
and even seeing the root
is empty, transitory, and centerless
all sorrow immediately ends

this wisdom is
the natural flow of consciousness
clinging to nothing
resisting nothing
identifying with nothing
not getting caught in any words
not getting entangled within desires
not getting attached to any possessions
not clinging or resisting any beliefs
not needing to define itself through concepts
always remaining beyond and above thoughts
yet able to use thoughts and metaphors
to share its understanding with others

within openness and generosity
intuitive wisdom inspires us
to be open and vulnerable
to be generous with material gifts
with help when needed
and with curious energy flowing
and supporting the evolution
of those around us

within patience, endurance,
and humility,
intuitive wisdom claims nothing,
does not know anything
through conceptual grasping,
but can patiently listen to others,
be present for them,
hearing them into existence,
and merging with them
exploring with them
releasing the ego clinging
that binds them
to the wheel of sorrow

within energy and devotion
intuitive wisdom stays fully present,
being alert, vital, and clear,
cutting through the knots of thought
smoothly and directly,
by seeing them as empty of problems
waking from the fantasies
of their dilemas
and claiming a freedom
never really lost

within dedication, ethical idealism,
and discipline,
intuitive wisdom effortlessly
adapts to each moment
responding authentically,
sincerely, without strategic calculation,
within trustful simplicity,
being compassionate, concerned,
and sympathetic to those around
giving what the situation needs

within meditation practice
intuitive wisdom rests in itself
letting thoughts flow
letting emotions flow
letting impulses to do flow
letting body states flow
letting attention flow
all returning back to its source
and dissolving in its radiant ocean
feeling peace, contentment, and love
radiate effortlessly towards all

from the luminous empty silence
from which thoughts, emotions,
sensation, actions, attention,
and bodies arise from, abide, change,
and pass away,
a mantra arises from silence
to return sentient beings
back to silence:

let go, let go,
really let go,
totally let go,

gently chanting the mantra
trusting it is deeply understood
without straining to know
not clinging to anything
not even clinging to its wisdom
not even clinging
to the path with eight branches
or the four noble truths
we naturally transcend all our pain
cut through every kind of pain
and awaken to a life without pain
rejoicing in life

Right Where You Are Sitting Now

This essay is a simple preliminary exercise to Telepathic Link Yoga. I wanted to start shifting into practice from this point on, but will still occasionally add some discussion of relevant theory. The essay is entitled "Right Where You Are Sitting Now" because this preliminary exercise can be done while you are reading these words. Gurdjieff, a Sufi teacher, taught the basics of this kind of meditation and used his whole system around it. He called the method "self remembering". The Buddha actually devoted a whole sutra on the same method, but described it in different terms. The key is, no matter what you do, you do what you are doing and also NOTICE, what you are doing. You are reading these words. Now add noticing that you are reading these words. This should produce a small but important shift in consciousness. In the teachings of Jesus, he taught that people who do what they are doing without noticing what they are doing were "asleep". This idea is key to why, on the cross, he said, "Abwoon, forgive them, because they do not know what they are doing." The kind of knowing what we are doing that Jesus meant was quite literal. Most people do a kind of sleep walking through life, not really noticing what they are doing. There are some circumstances where there is more noticing, like when we are about to do some public speaking, but generally we are sleep walking. Again, there is a liturgy that Saint Paul mentions in his epistles that goes:

Awake, O Sleeper,
And Rise from the Dead,
And the Light of Christ
Shall Shine on You.

This liturgical verse is what Gurdjieff would call "sounding the doh note". This is the stating of the dominant theme of a ritual. It is an alchemical transformation formula. Even though it may sound simple and poetic, it is an important summary and does not waste words. The first phrase is calling the sleeper to awaken. By reading these words and noticing you are reading these words, you will have partially awakened. When you awaken a little, you will feel like a "walking dead". In Buddhism, you feel like you are a drunken monkey with your thoughts taking you all over the place. In the beginning, it does not seem possible to silence the mind. If we are intending to silence the mind and the mind cannot be silenced, then it has a will of its own. This means that the mind is running us, rather than us running our own mind. This mind is running on vashana, habit force. Even though we set the mind in motion, some kind of karmaic momentum is behind it, and no one is really in control. It is as if the pilot is dead. We can lift ourselves up from this death. Then the light of Christ will shine on us. This is Divine Grace in Christianity, Baraka in Sufism, or Blessing Energy in Buddhism. The liturgy (the word "liturgy" means "the work of the people") is a scientific alchemical formula designed to produce a reliable result. Two of the steps are something we must do and the last step is done by the Divine or Life itself. The third step requires a subtle effort or choice on our part, which represents three things we need to do for ourselves, and that is to open up to the Divine. The loving energy at the heart of the universe is completely nonviolent and cannot force its will on anyone. Even though it wants to heal us of every painful condition instantly it can only work with our step by step permission. It cannot even impose goodness on someone.

To deepen this self remembering, I would like for you to continue to read these words and notice that you are reading these words. Then gently place part of your attention on your thoughts and feelings. Keep part of your attention on these words. You may wish to "shuttle" back and forth to get a better feel of this dual attention. Part of esoteric science is that you can place attention on at least four different things simultaneously. In the beginning, it might feel like a minor strain and so shuttling may make this feel easier. When you shuttle, you touch, for instance, these words with your eyes by looking at them, and then you focus attention inside your skull and notice how it feels inside there, and then you focus back on the words. Go back and forth about seven times.

You might notice an energy, a kind of tingling sensation, in the brain, as you do this. This is what Gurdjieff called "doh 48". There is some correspondence between this tingling energy sensation and conventional chemistry (up to a point). This chemical will actually change the brain and activate a higher functioning, activating what Gurdjieff called "the higher intellectual center" (telepathy) and "the higher emotional center" (the radiator and receiver of unconditional love). This "doh 48" is related to the pituitary and pineal gland (the third eye chakra) and relates in part to our hormonal chemistry. It is good to practice right diet to support its proper growth. Of course, a little bit of "doh 48" will produce a small change, but we will need more than this to cause the next mutation in our species.

Next place another part of your attention on your breathing. We are not going to do anything special other than to add conscious awareness. This will actually change the breathing a lot but indirectly. A certain rhythm of breathing will take the tingling sensation in the brain and make it pulse. So you are looking at these words, looking at the breathing, and feeling "doh 48" pulse with the exhale. You can continue by just dropping these words and going along with the breathing and the pulsation in the brain. It is important to not introduce strain or too much efforting. We are used to associating effort and tensing our muscles with each other. Part of meditation is to have pure intention produce results without tensing our muscles. It gets beyond the "animal self" a little. If you do not feel the tingling sensation in the brain, then simply notice the breathing and notice what your eyes are seeing, shuttling back and forth, or feeling them simultaneously. When enough "doh 48" fills the brain, then you should feel a tingling sensation there. Sometimes there is a sensitivity issue to overcome. Sometimes a medication might block the sensitivity. This is partly why in Tibetan Buddhism a lama usually presides over a practice empowerment. This is to make sure that some subtle blocks are removed and the intended results happen. It could be that a remedial method is given first, like a more dynamic breathing to super oxygenate the system, some cleansing herbs, or processing an emotional trauma that caused us to shutdown our sensitivity. If someone wants some help with this, I will by happy to support this kind of activation on a one on one basis. It may require a big life change, if a suppressive habit must be released. It is also possible to "power through" by doing enough of this exercise so that you break through into the right sensitivity. If you need to do this, then take care. If you find your stress level rising, please seek help. The Taoists have a saying that I do believe, "If you find it is hard, then you are doing it wrong." There should be some gentleness and ease in the process. There are some tough parts to this process when we awaken to stored traumas in our subconscious mind. But even these can be learned to be moved through with grace and ease. Jesus also said, "My yoga is easy and my burden is light." (The word "yoga" is literally the word "yoke" in Sanskrit and is the same word that Jesus used when translated into the Greek. Both yoga and yoke have the meaning of practice and of union. The yoke is put on an animal to make them put a carriage (practice). Animals are yoked together and therefore are united.) It is important that the "yoga" is easy and light. This gentleness is needed to enter into and heal our deepest pains.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Right Speech

I wanted to share something about "right speech" which is the third precept of the Eightfold Path. My wish to share about this is for several reasons. One is that I would like this blog to have dialogues within the spirit of right speech and have set up moderation for this purpose. The reason why is that I have noticed that many blog sites sometimes degenerate quickly into exchanges that have intense name calling, sweeping judgments, wishing people to burn in eternal hell forever, and the use of words that I am not going to repeat here. I find it interesting that I have seen government ads about a new kind of verbal abuse that is now common on the internet and a wish to encourage parents to teach their children not to engage in it. Many sites are taking steps to minimize this abuse. It seems that being anonymous makes some people feel free to share more harsh speech with others. It seems, too, that talking about religion stirs up some very strong emotions in people and inspires some people to viciously condemn others. Some of these ventings may even have some therapeutic value, in the sense that sometimes feeling intensely angry at an oppressive authority that once made one feel unnecessarily guilty can be a useful transitional emotion. But I would say that if one stays stuck in that anger, then the healing has not been full and complete.

Two is that right speech dovetails with the intention to live forever in a healthy physical body and is part of the buddhadharma. The Buddha must have felt it was very important, because he is rarely redundant about his essential teachings. Yet the fourth precept about right behavior has "not to lie, but to speak kind and truthful words". So right speech is one of the eight basic precepts of the Buddhist path and then it is also one of the five subprecepts of right behavior. The goal of the "path with eight branches" (another way to translate the essential buddhadharma) is to end sorrow. The third, fourth, and fifth precepts are about not creating any more karma to have to neutralize. Behind all three of them is this thought, "Because I am choosing to completely end all sorrow in my own life, I vow not to inflict unnecessary sorrow upon others." The word "unnecessary" is added, because sometimes no matter what we do people will sometimes suffer. It is either because they have set up an expectation around us that we cannot fulfill and/or because we represent something to them that brings up an issue no matter what we do. But if we have choice, then we have responsibility to use this choice to minimize sorrow in the lives of others. I spent much of my early dharma training in this lifetime learning to not be a cause of harm towards other, to learn how to be completely harmless, and to be not part of the problems that plague this planet. It is actually a harder mission than it first appears and it took me a long time to feel I became "mostly harmless", barring some of the karmaic lessons that naturally arise between friends, family, strangers, and lovers that it seems that we must move through.

The word translated as "right" in right speech is "samyak" which has the energy feeling of "wholesome, balanced, and aligned with truth". This is the natural speech of our Buddha nature when we are liberated. It can be kind, truthful, and respectful. Shingon Buddhism later expanded the five precepts into ten precepts. The two lists are really the same, but the ten precept list merely elaborated the five precepts into more detail so that it could be more easily and completely understood. The expanded list talks about the need to not exaggerate or put spin on something to bend the truth out of shape, the need to not use harsh, slanderous, or extreme language to add sting to what is said, the need to speak only what we know from personal experience and to not claim anything with our words that we have not really known from our experience, and the need to not gossip or to not use words that promote division and conflict among people. In a sense, harsh words violate the sense of the subprecept that goes, "Not to kill, but to cherish all life". We can kill with our words. If a person is choosing to grow, help himself or herself, and has cultivated a small measure of compassionate motivation to be a better person and to be kinder to others, if we speak in a way that kills this motivation in them, then we have violated the precept about not killing. There is literal killing and there is subtle killing. If we talk in such a way that a person wants to commit suicide, then we have killed his or her life motivation. Although there are a lot of seeming rules to right speech, there is an intuitive feeling behind the rules that has a unified felt sense about what it means. Nor is this teaching alien from other religions, many wise spiritual teachers have taught right speech, some even with the same level of detail that the Buddha delved into. The Sufis add two other practices, one to never defend our selves with our words and two to only answer any question a person has with just enough words to give a good answer and no more. The idea is to let people draw what they need by their own questions. In the Epistle of Saint James, chapter 3, there is a discourse on the power of the tongue to totally ruin our spiritual life, cause our bodies to be ill, and even burn with the fires of hell. In another passage, Saint James talks about how we can praise god with the tongue and yet condemn other humans who are made in the image of god. I find it interesting that Saint James talks about not condemning people who are not Christians, because all humans have a divine nature.

In Buddhism, there is a practice called "unifying behavior, speech, and thought" where we learn to be consistently kind on all these levels. Thoughts are considered very powerful causes for karma and I think highly underestimated by lots of people. Speech is in some sense even more powerful than thought, because it is thought combined with our choice, faith, and energy. In the process of voicing our thoughts, we are choosing which thoughts to give more energy to, and therefore these thoughts are more powerful. It is curious that Jesus says, "If you have the faith of a mustard seed, you can SAY to this mountain, 'Be cast into the sea,' and it shall be done [capitalization emphasis mine]." There is a passage in a book, LIGHT ON THE PATH, that goes, "Only when your words cease to have the power to harm will they have the power to heal." In the Hadith, a Moslem collection of writings that is not part of the Koran, there is a story of Jesus going to a town where they are cursing at him. Jesus sends a blessing to those people and even does a hand mudra to focus his blessing. The apostle Peter is angry with the town for cursing his beloved teacher and says to Jesus, "Do you not want to call down fire from the heavens to smite them?" Jesus says to Peter, "I can only give what I have in my purse." In other words, Jesus only had blessing coins in his purse (subconscious mind). He did not have any cursing coins to give out.

I can testify that if you practice right speech long time, purifying the tongue, that something wonderful does happen. The words you speak then do have the power to heal, to invoke a sacred healing energy into a space, and to calm down the mind. The Buddha was known for his "golden words". He talked about only sharing words that were nourishing, uplifting, and promoting of harmony among people. Harmony among people was very important to the Buddha. In Mahayana Buddhism, the five worst karmaic acts are (1) killing a father, (2) killing a mother, (3) killing a saint, (4) killing a Buddha, and (5) destroying the harmony of the sangha (Buddhist community). I find it interesting that destroying communal harmony is counted as being on par with four different kinds of murder.

What I have found interesting about the teachings of the Buddha is that they often create a lessening of sorrow and a deepening of peace just by hearing them or even just sharing them with others. I think this is because there is a loving intention behind them. It was the wish of the Buddha to find out the cause and end of sorrow for the sake of all sentient beings. There is no agenda to force one to become a Buddhist. In remember when the director of the movie, "The Little Buddha," met a Buddhist monk, and wanted to ask a question. He said, "I am not a Buddhist, but I would like to ask you a question." The monk looked a little puzzled and said, "It does not matter if you are a Buddhist, we are human beings, we suffer, lets explore how to end sorrow together." Buddha actually taught his disciples to not convert people to his religion. It is about the deeper meaning of, "Not to steal, but to take only what is freely given." To put pressure on someone and try to make someone do something he or she does not want to do is considered stealing in Buddhism. You share the dharma and if people feel an arising of faith within them and feel inspired to join the sangha, then it is their unpressured choice to do this. There was a case where several zealous monks convinced a person to leave his aging parents to join the sangha. The two parents were dependent on their son for their survival. They came to talk with the Buddha, who was actually a little horrified that these zealous monks had put so much pressure for this son to become a Buddhist. He said that if the son had given into their pressure, then the loss of the parents of their support from their son would be their karma. But if the son freely chose to join of his own accord, then the loss of the parents of his support would be his karmaic issue alone. He also did not want people to join the monastic order until such responsibilities were peacefully completed. They could instead become a lay practitioner, do their householder duties, and later join the monastic order when those duties were complete. In modern times, it seems that society takes care of the elderly in a different way with socialized medicine and social security. A lot of Buddhist lamas still feel that the young, if possible, should take care of their parents in their later years as a kind of gratitude for having been raised by them. This is not always realistic or necessary, but perhaps this should still be deeply considered.

My feeling is that it is possible to disagree and dialogue with people in an atmosphere of mutual respect, kindness, and honesty, and keep the sense of right speech alive. I have had my first instance of a submission that I feel did not conform to right speech. I have been happy that previous submissions were by people who naturally express right speech and do not need to ever worry about whether or not their submissions will be deleted. It is not a question of what religion a person belongs to, whether or not a person is a theist, atheist, agnostic, or gnostic, whether or not a person is Buddhist, Taoist, Sufi, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Bahai, or Native American in their spiritual or philosophical orientation. I think it is possible to be tolerant, respectful, and compassionate with each other when engaged in dialogue. This seems easier with some religious orientations than others. I wonder if it is possible for someone who believes that everyone who does not believe the same way as he or she does will not only burn in eternal torment forever, but also deserves such an infinite torment for an infinite duration for all the sins that they have done. Taken literally and in all cases, this seems to exaggerate and violate any sense of just proportion, especially with small children who have had barely any time to do more than fight over some toys (I question this kind of view more in another blog and look at it from different angles), especially when the belief system does not even include other lifetimes to sin in. One sensitive evangelical writer named Paul Tournier felt this dilema and decided to enter into compassionate and respectful dialogue anyway when engaged with other religious viewpoints.

To deduce and respond to some of the points made in the submission in question. I am not interested in conversion of Buddhists to Christianity or Christians to Buddhism. I feel that conversion to a religious club is a little too superficial to be relevant. I do not believe joining the "right religion" will save one. What matters is living a wise, compassionate, and creative life. I do consider myself to be a Buddhist, to have taken the triple refuge, and have committed to the Eightfold path. I have practiced meditation daily for over 25 years now. I spent time in Christianity during my college life, studied the Bible, and still feel Jesus to be a friend and guide. I do not believe that Evangelical Christianity is the only way and wonder if the overemphasis on accepting Jesus Christ as personal lord and savior may neglect other important elements of his wise teachings. When a rich man asked what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus focused on loving God with a whole heart and loving our neighbors as we would ourselves. He could have asked this man to accept him as personal lord and savior, but he focuses on love instead. He talks of loving enemies and loving unconditionally. He gives a metaphor of the love of God being like the sun that shines on both the evil and the good and like the rain that pours on the righteous and the unrighteous. He asks that people be perfect like God in this way (Matthew) or people be merciful like God in this way (Luke). The same Aramiac word can be translated as merciful or perfect and two different biblical authors chose different Greek words to translate it. There is a mature love defined in those words that Jesus wants people to emulate and live. It reminds me of the altruistic compassion of the Buddha and is a common spiritual ground worth naming. This love, too, is something that even an atheist could agree with and find valuable to live. I also feel that Jesus was an enlightened being and am concerned that many Christians do not aim to become enlightened, but settle for a born again experience or a reservation in heaven after they die. I do feel that certain Christian mystics, like Meister Eckhart, Saint Julian of Norwich, Evelyn Underhill, Nicholas of Cusa, and Saint John of the Cross were deeply enlightened. I also feel that beyond enlightenment is physical immortality and light translation, and that we should not even stop at enlightenment. I also feel that it is a higher ethical ideal to include animals within our compassion, rather than only love our own species and consider Christianity to have a moral weakness for not encouraging people to be vegetarian or vegan. I feel the strength of Buddhism is its emphasis on meditation practice, which I consider a scientific method to become fully enlightened. This emphasis on meditation practice and direct realization, rather than settling for belief, is its healthy core. The Christian mystics seem to have created a parallel practice with contemplative prayer and made this central to their process. I do not believe that the Bible is the literal divinely dictated word for word message of an anthropomorphic god and do believe that there are errors and contradictions in the Bible, as well as many passages written by fallable humans who were inspired by something sacred. I do think there is enough accurate history about Jesus to get a sense of what he taught in general and to get a sense of the level of enlightenment that he spoke from and demonstrated. I feel that the life of Jesus is understandable to a Buddhist and in light of Buddhism. And that he is an example of an enlightened being who translated what he discovered into the theistic language of his culture, even though the enlightenment he attained was ultimately nonverbal, direct, and beyond beliefs. This is roughly where I stand about certain things and most of this can be deduced from the previous blogs.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Telepathic Link Yoga 1

In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a practice called "Guru Yoga". This is a ritual where you link with a higher being like Padmasambhava or Tara. The ritual is often used to empower mantras for practice. The ritual makes mantras more effective by laying in some energetic circuitry into the aura, by creating clear understanding, and by focusing clear intention. When this ritual is done, then merely chanting the mantra activates the energetic circuitry and produces results more rapidly. I prefer the name "telepathic link yoga" instead of "guru yoga," because Amritayana Buddhism is more democratic and nonauthoriterean than other spiritual traditions. While the blessing energy, wisdom energy, and mature compassion of a higher being is very valuable to the spiritual path, the higher beings are seen as friends and guides who have worthwhile help, instructions, and advice to give us, rather than authorities to be obeyed. In terms of our culture, they are more like good psychotherapists and energy healers, rather than rulers to be obeyed. While many traditional spiritual seekers have taken beings like Padmasambhava and Jesus as spiritual authorities to be obeyed, my feeling is that those higher beings only chose with work within an authoritarian framework because is what those seekers were used to. From their own viewpoint, being an authority was not really necessary. In the Gospel according to Saint John, Jesus is reported to have said to his disciples, "No longer do I call you slaves; for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from my father I have made known to you (John 15:15)." The passage contrasts following out of obedience, not really knowing why, with following from understanding and also as equals to Jesus. The Sufis have sometimes given Jesus the title of "elder brother" to symbolize this. He is older, wiser, and more mature on the evolutionary path than we are, but not really different from us. We do not have a master to slave relationship with him or all the other enlightened beings, but have a relationship of friends who are on the same journey. The precepts still need to be kept, but we accept them not because we must obey them, but because we agree with their ethical idealism from our own conscience. In other words, we do not obey them because a spiritual authority tells us to. A spiritual guide gives us the precepts because they are aligned with the dharma, with nature, and with what truly works, and because of this they will help guide us.

Linking with a higher being can be a powerful evolutionary accelerator for a lot of reasons that would be hard to explain. My feeling is that we are presently homo sapiens and are mutating into homo telepathicus. The shift is as profound as the shift from primates to humans. The ability of humans to communicate through speech and through writing, to build tools, and to form rules was an important evolutionary step. Just as humans evolved beyond primates through evolving complex conceptual communication to transmit knowledge from generation to generation, homo telepathicus will learn through sharing pure thoughts within a kind of group mind. Telepathically linking with one higher being is a mental yoga that will allow one to join a collective mind where we will be learning from each other more deeply, intimately, and rapidly. Compared to homo sapiens symbol communication, there is less room for error because we do not have to encode our understanding in symbols and decode what another says back into understanding. The encoding and decoding process is one step removed from direct transmission. Much human sorrow has to do with misunderstanding each other, not knowing how to listen to each other, and not knowing how and what to share with each other.

In meditation practice, it is very common for psychic abilities to awaken and develop in individuals. This is because the emergence of these abilities is part of our next evolution, just as speech, writing, and tool use are part of homo sapiens. Telepathic humanity will be empathic and compassionate in a different way than homo sapiens. An isolated sense of self will no longer be the reference point for forming an identity. In a real sense, the ego consciousness of homo sapiens is based on a kind of self symbolization process that is not part of homo telepathicus. A being who has made the shift, feels identity directly as a radiant energy field that they are resting in. I like to call this, "abiding in awareness as awareness". When Buddha talked about the idea of no self, it was an antidote to this self symbolization process inside homo sapiens. The very effort to symbolize our identity through a series of concepts is different than feeling awareness and resting in awareness as awareness. It is not that the Buddha could not give a symbol to represent who we truly were. He did not want people to settle for this self representation. Latching on to any symbol, however philosophically and psychologically accurate it might be, is not the same as resting in awareness beyond all thoughts, emotions, sensations, impulses, and bodies. When we are able to abide in awareness as awareness, beyond the need to symbolize ourselves to ourselves, and beyond attaching our sense of identity to any symbol, then we have shifted our consciousness and are operating differently in life. Paradoxically, once we are free from the hypnosis of conceptual thinking, then the thinking function operates differently and telepathy begins to develop.

When we link telepathically with a higher being, then the very relationship itself accelerates a kind of growth in us. This is akin to how we would grow in playing a game like Chess by merely playing against good players who challenge us and inspire us, except that the relationship is supportive rather than adversarial. Learning to trust someone, be open to his or her blessing, and be guided by someone develops a lot of abilities within us. The Sufi principle of learning on this level is called "rind" which roughly translates as "osmosis". We absorb something through exposure to the energy and spontaneously learn something through this interaction.

The first preliminary is to embrace "ethical idealism" (sila parmita). You commit to living a compassionate and ethical life. You want to learn to be harmless to others. You want to not cause them pain. There is a verse in the Buddhist teachings, "Because we wish to end sorrow completely in our own lives, we vow to not inflict sorrow upon others." There are several gates where sorrow enters our lives that we need to close. These are the gate of sensation, the gate of unconsciousness, and the gate of actions. The gate of sensation we watch, because the samskaras, the stored tendencies accumulated from many lifetimes get activated by sense impressions. If I have an alcoholic samskara, the smell of alcohol may activate a craving to get drunk. The key is to "remain with the sensation" and let it arise, abide, change, and pass away without acting on the impulse. Then this samskara fades away and ends. The second gate to watch is the actions that we do. If we keep our actions ethical, then we do not create any more adverse karma to work through and can concentrate on the accumulation that we have already made. The last gate is unconsciousness, where wedo not notice what we are doing with our mind and how we are creating karma on this level. If we bring our mind into silence or immerse our mind in a mantra, then this root can be cut down. This is the deepest way of burning away our karma, but it needs the support of our commitment to ethical idealism. We can also soften our adverse karma by doing simple good deeds. Later on we can open up to the blessing energy of the Buddhas and burn karma directly. Part of this is feeling purifying remorse for unkind actions done in the past and resolving to live a compassionate life from now on. We can visualize sending love as light to everyone we meet and everyone we know. Jesus and other enlightened beings recommended that we "love our enemies" and send love as light to them especially. It is our hatred of people we have labeled enemies that keeps us locked in the most painful karmas. We can be chemically addicted to feeling hatred towards others, to the adrenaline rush, and not realize what this is doing to us and our life condition. Unfortunately, the American political realm has encouraged people to become hateful of other political factions and is teaching people to generate adverse karmas. We can insist on ethical idealism from those we choose to represent us, insist that the parties play fair when discussing issues and competing for votes. It is about moving beyond winning and losing, about going beyond cheating to win, about going beyond using malicious speech to win, and just focusing on living dharma, trusting that the long term process of staying aligned with dharma will heal even politics. I trust that the law of karma does operate and balance the total political equation of this planet. I do find it interesting how many people do not believe such a law is operating below the surface and balancing the equation, how many believe that evil beings are getting away with something, and can get away with something. Eventually bad karma does get exhausted and good karma fully ripens into the life that we want to live. If we are focused, then this process can happen faster. Voltaire talked about "tending your own garden". He meant this on two levels, one being literal and the other being that you take care to uproot the unwholesome karmaic seeds that have already been planted and water the wholesome karmaic seeds so that they can flourish. This can be done anywhere, under any government, and even in the worse of circumstances.

The first level of telepathic link yoga is a kind of immersion in the energy and example of a higher being. Some people do this accidentally when they immerse themselves in the writings of a favorite author and eventually feel the life and thoughts of the author behind the words. Some people who have studied a religious sutra sometimes have a vision where they are sitting near the original teacher and hearing the original discourse that inspired the sutra. It is a kind of time travel experience that can sometimes pick up on some of the things that were shared that did not survive the writing down process. There is something called "living time" where these events can still be joined and felt.

The second level of telepathic link yoga is to visualize the higher being in a bubble of white light above the crown chakra, the soft spot at the top of the head, and visualizing a beam of white light enter this soft spot, move down the spine, and energize all the chakras along the way. This is an alignment with the higher being. There are different visualizations which are possible to do this, but they have the same basic essence. The higher being is asked to enter our visualization and enliven it. There is a coordination of the visualization, intention, and breathing that makes this process work. If there is a lama or spiritual guide walking us through the process, he or she sometimes visualizes with us and makes the link stronger, sometimes filling in the missing elements of the process that we might not be able yet to do for ourselves. This is why in Tibetan Buddhism they usually wish that we get initiated by a qualified lama who is part of a practice lineage associated with the higher being who is being linked with.

It is important that the visualization linking process works right, because it is designed to empower a karma burning mantra. By chanting the mantra associated with the higher being, we invoke the energy and presence of this being, and he or she sends his or her blessing energy into us so that we can burn more karma more quickly. The mantra activates the visualization that we have done. It is like the visualization lays in new energetic circuitry inside our energy field and it gets activated with each mantric repetition. We are meant to chant the mantra for at least 21 days in a row for at least 42 minutes in a row per a day. We are meant especially to repeat the mantra for the next three days or get another telepathic link empowerment. If we skip a day after the three days, then we have to start the count to 21 days over again from zero, until we do 21 days in a row.

If we have enough time, then it is recommended to repeat the mantra 111,111 times to burn enough karma away to establish us on the spiritual path. This number really refers to 100,000 repetitions, but part of Tibetan Buddhist psychology is that we lapse in our chanting about 10 percent of the time by losing attention and intention, not making each repetition count fully. So they found that we need to repeat that 10 percent more consciously (which means that 10 percent of the remaining 10 percent will also have a lapse and so on). During this initiation period, the mantra gathers enough power so that we will have flashes of past lifetime memories appear on our visionary horizon. We may feel intense repressed emotions surface and sometimes intense remorse for harmful actions we did to others in past lifetimes. We are meant to fully feel the remorse, resolve to live differently, and then let it go.

When we notice that we are repeating the mantra even in our dreams, then the mantra has penetrated into the unconscious and can start directly cleansing the samskaras found there. It is possible to have many paranormal events happen when the mantra has penetrated to this level. It is important to stay on track when we have reached this threshold and not get distracted by the new abilities that start to surface then. It is important, too, that we maintain our ethical idealism and not be tempted to abuse the new powers. If we do, we can build up even more karma to work through. Karmaic actions done with the new found force of psychic powers can hurt us many times more than mundane karmaic actions. We can totally mess up our lives if we abuse them. Ideally, we are getting even more sensitive to the ethical precepts on a more subtle level. For instance, "Not to steal, but to take only what is freely given." If we put pressure on a person to buy something from us and he or she gives in to our pressure, then we have stolen from him or her. Or, "Not to kill, but to cherish all life." We can, through harsh and condemning words, kill an altruistic motivation inside someone that may have helped them to become liberated later on. The cherishing of all life in this precept extends itself beyond merely being kind to our own species and goes toward all animals. It even extends to being kind and supportive of our ecosystem and not wasting the resources of the planet. We will notice more subtle levels of precept violations and purify our minds more deeply when we explore on those levels. As we do so, the new abilities will grow and flourish inside us and allow us to help more people in more ways. But if we use the abilities for something negative and merely selfish, at the expense of others, then the abilities can become twisted inside, attract a lot of painful karmaic experiences, and cause much sorrow for others. It will also shut down our telepathic contact with the higher being. It is not because they are abandoning us, but because we will not want to hear about what we are doing. Telepathy and the development of conscience evolve together, and if we shut down hearing one we will shutdown hearing the other.

The above is a general outline of the telepathic link yoga. I would like to do another essay on showing how to link with one higher being in particular. It is possible to link with any being through this yoga. It is highly recommended that the being chosen be a fully enlightened being, because if the being still has some strong karmas to work through then we may get affected by those karmas or the being might not be able to guide us beyond the grip of the karmas that he or she might not have transcended in his or her own life. You can rely on the beings that have been traditionally honored in a meditative religion or you can feel the enlightened essence of a higher being directly. We want to link only with a high being who inspires you to be more kind, loving, sensitive, and at peace. Some spiritual teachers express "tough love" to the point where they might not notice their urge to dominate others, get egotistically attached to having a following, or to feel superior to others. Tough love should be used rarely and only when absolutely necessary. Ideally, it is intense medicine that works very fast and, once done, then the natural more gentle methods are used. There are deeper transmissions of energy, wisdom, and support that can only be given in absolute gentleness and must wait until the receiver freely opens up to them without the slightest pressure to do so. The receiver must willingly drop a kind of defensive shell from himself or herself in order to open up to them. They need to want those gifts without greed, status ambition, or power lust infecting their motivation or at least be willing to have those things purified from their energy field first. Many teachers seem to be playing with gross or subtle karmas and would not be ideal beings to link with in this yoga. It has to feel right, even more so than choosing a romantic partner.