Another great book of Home Study for  meditation techniques you can practice is the Vijnana-bhairava, which contains 112 meditation methods. It comes from the non-dual school of Kashmir Shaivism of India.

Just a few of the many translations readily available:

Vijnanabhairava

Doctrine of Recognition

The Yoga of Delight Wonder and Astonishment

This book is like a Rosetta stone of all sorts of meditation methods to help you attain a direct realization of emptiness. Practice the techniques and you’ll experience what ALL religions want you to experience as THE foundational spiritual state. The book explains how and why they work, though of course the descriptions and commentary are couched in the terms of Shaivism. Shaivism is a tantric school of consciousness cultivation in India that developed  with Buddhist and Islamic influences. 

Now here’s the cool thing….

You’ll find many of the same practices used in Shaivism as you will in Esoteric Christianity, Esoteric Buddhism, yoga, Western alchemy, Taoism, Hinduism and so on.

Are the methods FUNDAMENTALLY different?

Only the most perverse form of intellectual dishonesty can make you say YES. For the methods are just various non-sectarian, non-denominational expedient means to help you gain insight into the real meaning of emptiness…

… EXPERIENTIALLY …

…and then explained with the dogmas, teachings, lingo or whatever of that particular religion or path. The dishonest will point to THEIR religion as being different, but they’ll use the same basic techniques which work because of   the same underlying principles.

Progress in spiritual cultivation, you see, is a science. That’s why we call it the science of life, or human being science. This is the highest science and calling, because it leads to the Tao and ultimate freedom int he realm of interdependent origination. But you have to get there to understand that and prove it.

It’s amazing how readily people will recognize a saint in THEIR spiritual tradition, but refuse to recognize the same spiritual phenomenon exhibited by "their" saint when those same phenomena occur  to (are manifested by) cultivation adepts in OTHER traditions. People readily find some way to deny them elsewhere, or non-equate them, or use all sorts of other illegitimate mental tricks to prevent an opening up of wisdom.

Of course it’s easy to see the "why" behind the various denials  – then people would have to admit to the commonality or non-denominationality of the spiritual path. They’d have to admit a lot of things they wouldn’t like.

They’d have to admit that maybe some other paths were right, too,  or at least give up the idea that theirs is the ONLY way …and " Heaven forbid" if that included an entirely different religion! Blasphemy! How could that be possible?

They’d have to admit that there is a commonality to the stages of gong-fu achieved on the spiritual path, and it’s just that some people reach these stages of manifestation, and others don’t  … and that there are indeed various levels of achievement that signify success in spiritual practice.

They’d have to admit to a lot of things they don’t want to admit, including a letting go of wrong ideas.

Remember, all the genuine religions and spiritual paths employ common cultivation principles to cultivate the mind to a state of emptiness, and then with that proficiency of mental purity (discriminative emptiness) comes gong-fu or kung-fu. These are the physical and mental transformations, due to mastery of   chi and shen in conjunction with the mind, that occur on the spiritual path.

So of course, the lowest stages of spiritual transformation - that give rise to the gong-fu and miraculous stories or abilities most commonly equated with saints – are commonly found across traditions. Why? Because the path is a COMMON PATH.  How could it be otherwise? If I’m African and lift weights, my muscles will get bigger. If I’m Chinese and lift weights, my muscles will get bigger. If I’m Russian and take up weight lifting, my muscles will get bigger. If I’m American or Australian and I begin to lift weights, my muscles will get bigger.

And similarly, no matter what my religion, if I cultivate a state of no-thought, emptiness, mental purity, detachment, one-pointedness or however you wish to word it, then I too will achieve the same stages of kung-fu that others do within entirely different traditions if they too cultivate a similar state of EMPTY mind. It’s ridiculous to think otherwise. You’d have to abandon (or bend mightily)  the laws of logic and reason to achieve a denial objective.

Sure you can do thaty — just DENY it and refuse to even think about it. That’s why people never make spiritual progress because that type of ridgidity and fixity of holding on to thoughts is the antithesis, the exact opposite of what you HAVE to cultivate to succeed, namely mental detachment or mental emptiness. Just let go of your thoughts and cultivate to see what is  truly so instead. Why should impartiality scare you?

These stages are common across ALL genuine traditions. All you have to do is cultivate empty mind, via whatever method your chose, and they will occur. You can read about them for free in the 189 page download at Stages of Kung-fu. Use prayer if you want, or visualization practice, or pranyama breathing exercises, or all sorts of other techniques to attain these stages. Wrap them up in your tradition if that makes you feel better when you practice, but USE them you MUST. It’s ridiculous to listen to book worms as spiritual guides if they don’t actually cultivate these states.

Now a case in point is the Catholic priest, Padre Pio. A great little book entitled Padre Pio: A Catholic Priest Who Worked Miracles and Bore the Wounds of Jesus Christ on His Body, by Brother Michael Dimond, details many of the events in the life of this Christian saint that are clearly the non-denominational stages of samadhi attainments. Similar attainments can be found in  the life of the Russian Eastern Orthodox adept, St. Seraphim.

But guess what? These same phenomena are found elsewhere, and it’s because other adepts cultivated similar states of gong-fu.

Padre Pio’s exhibition of biolocation is none other than the simple the achievement of the Taoist yang-shen emanation body, that takes 3 years of devoted practice after the opening up of chi channels that’s found in countless traditions. Nothing secret or mysterious about that there. His flying in the air, as also demonstrated by Milarepa, and Hindu and Taoist adepts, is also a common cultivation phenomena achieved by great kundalini experts. His ability to work without sleep showed that he cultivated shen and samadhi. His instructions on prayer are the same instructions on mindfulness   that we find in all sorts of cultivation schools, especially Buddhism ("You must not become distracted….Go on praying without ceasing."). His 125 degree "fevers" were the result of his chasity in conjunction with the kundalini purification of his body that would happen when the real chi of your body ignities from cultivation practice.

What cultivation practice? Any cultivation practice that involves chasitity and one-pointed concentration. You can turn to the yoga schools, or Kashmir Saivism, for more examples. If you are a Sikh or Sufi and cultivate correctly, you will achieve this, too. The same goes for Tibetan Buddhism and Taoism, which refers to this stage as the arousing of the clumsy fire.

What’s the big deal? It’s not a CHRISTIAN phenomenon or Buddhist phenomenon or Taoist or Hindu phenomenon. It’s a common result of the APPLIED principles of spiritual practice, a common stage of achievement. You can use whatever tradition you want to get there, but remember that the stages of achievement are common stages of achievement.

We could easily pair a Padre Pio with a Muktananda and do quite well…

All these common spiritual phenomena can be found in countless other cultivation adepts, though in different religions.  Open your eyes,  throw out sectarianism, and throw  a little logic into the mix rather than grasp to claims of superiroirty and inferiority in dogmas. Start investigating things and your eyes will open. Start cultivating and you will prove this to yourself.

And Why are these same stages of achievement open to you? Because the results of the path are non-denominational. It’s just that people wrap the practices with different dogma to keep them alive and get people to practice in the first place. There are different minds and different levels of wisdom and merit, and so there are needs for different paths.

You can wrap filet mignon with bacon.

You can coat it with gorgonzola cheese.

You can smother it with a blanket of mushrooms.

You can wrap it with a million different tastes and flavors but it’s still filet mignon underneath. 

The same goes for the methods to cultivate attainment, and the stages of achievement. That’ wrapping with multiple flavors is how masters ensure the continuity of spiritual practice and the survival of traditions.

Start investigating things to realize the non-denominationality of the path…and start using the excellence sof other traditions to shed light on your own, and improve your own practice.

 

Meditation lessons are pretty funny — people charge thousands of dollars for what only takes about 5 minutes of instruction. Nevertheless, I constantly get people asking me to teach them how to meditate. Meditation lessons are the easy part, it’s the principles of practice they need to learn in order to guide themselves correctly.

Finally a solution. Not just one meditation method, but 7 I will teach you. Scratch that. There’s actually more than seven methods on a new CD I’ve created called How to Meditate 7 Different Ways.

Here’s how this 2.5 hour mp3 is different than other meditation lessons. Not only do I teach you HOW to meditate, I will teach you about the stages of the path, the physical jing-chi-shen transformations that occur, the nondenominational principles  of meditation practice that are within all religious schools, what modern science has discovered about meditation, and all sorts of stuff that advanced practitioners write me they’ve never encountered, and finally makes clear a whole bunch of spiritual teachings and results that they’ve wondered about but could never fathom….dreams, astral bodies, chakras, you name it.

I guarantee that the information within How to Meditate 7 Different Ways will filter through the spiritual teaching community and within 2-3 years you’ll hear teachers talking about this stuff and claiming its their own material, they developed it, no one knows it except for them, and so forth. Who cares? That’s the way of evolution, that’s the way it should be, that’s what we NEED to have happen for the good information to replace the  bad. I just want it out there so that people stop being cheated and stop wasting their time on ineffective practices.

It is sad beyond belief how ignorant, naive, or misinformed  people are as to the underlying science of this field. And it is pitiable beyond belief how people waste decades of their life in useless meditation or spiritual techniques that could have them helped them achieve samadhi and kung-fu had they only done things just a teeny, tiny bit different during those practice years… but now the time has been  wasted because they didn’t know the principles of practice and what they were practcie spiritual methods incorrectly.

As I always say, you need both MERIT and WISDOM to come upon and appy the real dharma, the real stuff, the real cultivation  teachigns that will help you. And they are non-denominational, non-sectarian, rely on common, non-artificial principles that make it easy (once you think about it) to spot fakes, abberations, wrong paths, misguided methods and just plain nonsense.

One of the Learning Annex employees said the following (a great compliment) when he heard my How to Meditate lecture  while recording it for the Learning Annex:

"Dude, I’ve been taping these lectures for years and have heard all sorts of teachers. It’s all nonsense that comes out of their mouths – spiritual garbage and wishy washy crap. Dude, so far you’re the only one who KNOWS what you’re talking about. You’re the first one in years who really knows this topic. Finally, this is the real stuff. I want to shake your hand and thank you."

That’s from someone who’s had to sit through dozens and dozens of teachers lecturing on meditation and spiritual topics… and coming to the conclusion that their heads are in the clouds. As my teacher says, it’s VERY hard to come upon the real teachings.

People can tell when they’ve been cheated AFTER they get the real thing. So, if you want REAL meditation lessons, plus the non-denominational principles of the path that explain why pranayama, vipassana, mantra, sexual cultivation, visualization practice, dream yoga and other methods work

…as well as how the body changes because  of advanced meditation practices, detox supplements to help you on the path, and meditations for cancer, pain and high blood pressure,

…and just basically how to meditate correctly according to the right principles so that you don’t waste your time and make every second count.

…and ALL sorts of other things, then this is the one CD you should get. Only one neede for your entire life. Scrap the books, and just get this:

How to Meditate 7 Different Ways 

One problem with the meditation field today is the sectarian nature of the beast. People grow up in one spiritual tradition and only know the words of that tradition, blinding themselves to the fact that an entirely different tradition or sect recognizes the same meditation-cultivation-spiritual training technique, but uses different words and phrases to describe the principles and outcomes (gong-fu or kung-fu) of that technique.

Sound familiar?

So while Christianity talks about "incendium amoris," yoga talks about "kundalini, " Buddhism talks about the "fire element" of the body, Taoism talks about the "clumsy fire" or "real chi," and so on it goes.

The phenomena of the path, stages of the path and common, non-denominational principles  of the path go unrecognized because of the different terminology pointing to the same thing.

By far, without a doubt, Buddhism offers the clearest explanation of most of the phenomena of the path. If we want to talk about physical change in the body due to meditation, however, it’s best to turn to Taoism. If we just want to focus on chi channels and chakras, we can turn to yoga and the esoteric schools (though all schools mention them in one way or another).  Behavior? Try Confucianism and Christianity. Discipline – Islam. Oneness with nature? Shintoism and Taoism. The multidimensional nature of existence? Buddhism and Hinduism.

Every school has a distinct flair for accenting one or another aspect of the path and rises above the rest in terms of the terminology developed around that aspect. That’s why I urge people to READ the spiritual accounts of saints and sages in various traditions to discover the underlying ONE PATH beneath it all. After all, there is only ONE original nature, fundamental substrate, … and many words and paths that lead to it.

Instead of fighting about the superiority of one religion over another, it is just as Buddha said: "Don’t believe me, or the traditions handed down from ancient times, or sagas or Holy books or anyone. Just cultivate and SEE what happens and prove to yourself that what I’m saying is true." That’s one of the ways Buddhism differs – it’s all about the actual experience of achieving the Tao,   the wisdom of how to do that, and the wisdom of understanding all other cultivation phenomena as well.

If you’re a sheep, you don’t cultivate scratch and just believe what the  "authorities" in your tradition tell you…and by the way, if study made them an "authority" rather than the achievement of actual kung-fu spiritual accomplishment, that’s not authority. That’s just intellectual parroting of what somebody else said without knowing if it’s truly true, and without being able to understand it because you didn’t achieve the stage yourself. Lions cultivate to experience and prove the truth. Once awake, they KNOW from experience, not belief.

Think about it. How many people do you know went through  their life believing in something that was false, and never awoke to  the truth of the matter? Well, consider further….if there’s all these religions out there, they can’t ALL be right, can they? Some of those folks must be wrong, but they’re all clinging to doctrines handed down from some new intellectual innovator. Those schools always say JUST BELIEVE whereas the meditation practitioner says I’m GOING TO PROVE IT AND FIND OUT FOR MYSELF. That one is the hero.

So if you want to learn spiritual truth, PRACTICE MEDITATION. All sorts of traditions have it, use it, champion it. Without it, there’s no way you’ll make progress on the spiritual trail other than collect some merit from doing good deeds, staying away from evil and generally being an okay person. That will help your life and subsequent incarnations get better in the realm of birth and death, because your store or merit went up (which you’ll end up spending the next time around anyway) but you’ll never escape the whole shebang.

Only accomplishment in meditation will help you with that.

Think about how you’re spending your time with religious affairs, and whether they are helping you. Throw belief out the window — your belief is just as valid as the guy in the religion next door, so that’s no good — and rely on personal proof that you achieve from climbing the spiritual path instead.

Replace BELIEF with ACCOMPLISHMENT. There’s nothing you have to believe blindly because truth you can prove via samadhi attainments and other spiritual accomplishments. Then you’ll know.

Somewhere I have a list of Chinese Emperors, and what position or status they had achieved in a past life that gave them enough merit to become the Emperor of China. I sat down with Master Nan and asked him who was this guy, and who was that Emperor. All he would tell me was "heavenly merit," meaning he was previously a heavenly denizen, or "Bodhisattva," or "Asura."

The asuras were always in charge, it seems, when there was lots of killing going on. I remember that only one Emperor was called a "mo-guei," which is the Chinese word for  a demon, and the vast majority of rulers were just people who had done enough good deeds to receive a heavenly rebirth and then later, they still retained  the merit for enjoying the rulership of a country.  They weren’t necessary smart or talented or wise, but simply had accumulated enough good deeds over many lives to finally become a King or Emperor. Bodhisattvas who assumed the leadership helm were rare in this bunch of past Emperors, and if I remember correctly he did identify one Buddha or so.

What I realized from this list is that the country gets the ruler it deserves. Because of the fate or karma of a nation, whoever is to produce that fortune is the one who will attain to the leadeship helm. If the nation is to rise, a nation gets a leader who will make it so. If it is destined to fall, it gets a leader who will make it so.

The leader a nation gets is tied in to the karma of the nation, and the karma of a nation is produced by the actions of the nation and its people. As the Old Testament of the Bible rightly records time and again, to change the fate of a nation, a people must repent of their ill ways and return to what is right and just. I speak of how to change one personal fate in White Fat Cow, but here we are speaking of the fate of a group of people or nation. To change the fate of a nation, the best factor to work on is to uplift the national culture. It’s something I  touch on briefly in Socrates and the Path to Enlightenment.

The secret I-Ching historical prediction books found in the Beijing Palace have accurately predicted the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties hundreds of years ahead of time because of the fixity of the underlying karma. There is a consequence for the activities of a nation — whether famine, war, plague, pestilence or prosperity production — and there is a timing to when that can manifest. That’s why prophets can predict things in the future inthe first place … all because of the existence of  underlying karma.

One of these books, a page shown below, is what I call the "Chinese Nostradamus," and I have often wished it translated to show people that these prediction techniques were far more accurate than the wishy-washy Nostradamus writings of the west. Whoever translates this into English will make a tidy fortune because people will be impressed by its accuracy and want to buy it. Incidently, this book too shows there is no such thing as a Armageddon or nearby end of the world as Rapturists dreamof because it will continue thousands and thousands of years on into the future. So many predictions left to go, and this is just one book of many with an accurate track record of centuries with predictions also going centuries forward.

As an aside, the Holy Books of countless traditions continuously assert the continuity of the world far into the future so the religious fixatation on just one of these books (and anintepretation that may or may not even be acurate) while ignoring the accurate track record of others is indicative of wisdomlessness. To be guided in public policy making because of  one’s or another’s interpretation of these things is also foolishness. Unfortunately, many of our leaders today are actually selecting policies with this idea of Armageddon in the back of their minds to justify policies that would never be justified otherwise.

As one of the lessons of history that Master Nan stresses time and again, a leader who forges policy based on religious views will always weaken the nation…witness Tibet, the Arab nations and so forth. Yes there is cause and effect for what you do in terms of strategy, but don’t attach religious significance to your policy and efforts (other than for the appearance or manufacture of national consent). If policy makers are operating with secret religious ideas in the back of their mind, rather than the pragmatics of real politik and strategic power maneuvering, they are bound to produce errors. This is something we are seeing today on many national fronts. While a leader should actively cultivate themselves according to whatever religious tradition they choose, it is foolishness to bring religous views into decision making that risks the survival or well-being of the nation. If religion becomes the guiding principle behind policy, then the nation always becomes internally weak and open to invasive destruction or manipulation.

That aside, this thousand year old page on the future of China refers to the 1980’s when three children (they weren’t sages by any means) named Lee (Lee Tung Hui of Taiwan, Li Peng of China, and Li Kuan Yew of Singapore) started playing around with money, opening up the Chinese market to economic progress. Resultingly, it also records that the people’s greedy behavior would become animal-like because of the abandonment of ethics in the grab for money and profit. Having lived through it, seems like a good description of this time period to me.

The Bodhisattvas that became rulers of China  typically set the standards and laid the foundations for hundreds of years of peace and prosperity in the nation. Paradoxically, they were the ones most opposed for their reforms, renovations, rectifications and reorderings, but the ones that did the most good. Most opposed … most good done. Most hated and criticized (by the establishment, of course), but most accomplished in turning around the nation for the better.

You see, a Bodhisattva will not assume a leadership role in government  in order to enjoy the staus and position, but only to work. They will only choose to use up their merit in being born as a king  to help prevent a further national decline than what is bound to be, or they will arrive at the bottom of a bad fortune period to help the nation finally transition upwards.

…At the top of yang to prevent a bigger decline than what is due to happen, and at the bottom on a yin period to make sure that yin is transformed into yang and good foundations are laid for the advance.

Sages operate the same way, although they do appear to reiterate and solidify a positive development in culture.

Those with heavenly merit left over who became Chinese rulers typically enjoyed their reigns and promoted a mixture of good and bad policies. Typically, historians loved them because they ruled at a time when everything ran well, which was part of their good fortune enjoyments.

Bodhisattvas never choose to be born  into a time to enjoy things and thus waste or squander their merit, but to work the struggle to change the bad to the good. These guys were born to enjoy the fruits of their past merit accumulations. So of course, people romanticize their lives whereas the hard work, and hence criticism for the changes made that lead to the heavenly lives of glory, are made by the Bodhisattvas.

As to the angry gods or asuras, when these were in power the country was always fighting. Arrogant, egotistical, not too intelligent and mafia-like, you didn’t want to live in the country when it was run by an asura. All they know how to do is insist they are the all knowing king under heaven, that they are heavenly anointed and always correct, that their way is the right way, that THEIR strategy for the national good is correct (and they make sure they profit by it, for sure). They used all sorts of national slogans and righteous sounding words but they were essentially just big Mafia bosses, playing the part of a saint on the ouside but fighting, fighting, fighting… killing, killing, killing. This is the way that asuras know best. 

They rendered destruction on countless fronts and produced a tremendous level of bad karma for their nation that would one day have to be paid. You cannot escape karmic consequences; you may be on the top today but when the situation turns, your enemies will seize that chance to get even. So create policy carefully in order not to offend. When you are designing policies and strategies with wisdom, you must take this long view into mind. Just insisting you are right, bullying others and pounding your fists on the table are wonderful theatrics, but they do not insure the safe and sound future of a nation which is in one’s care as a leader. That is what national leaders are charged with protecting. Woe to the ancients when asuras assumed power.

Asuras reborn into power are the men who destroyed countries. They were lovers of brute force but most of all and worse of all, promoters of inelegant , ineffect and misguided strategy. That is the "sin" or worse "crime" of bad leadership — they were not smart enough or qualified enough to choose the right strategies for national peace, prosperity, predominance and pre-eminance. Had they followed the teachings  of Kuan Tzu, which is the leadership style most appropriate for today, they could have gone down in history as  benefactors. Instead, today people still curse their names even though during their reigns, these kings would hear nothing against them. It’s easy to shut up the opposition when you are king because there are all sorts of reasons you can invent — and who can challenge YOU as you’re the king and the rules are yours — to silence the wisdom that goes  against the angy will.

What’s interesting is that Master Nan also always said…some 50 years ago … that the US only had 50 years of good fortune left being the leader of the world. Of course the US would not disappear, but would fall in importance over time to become a nation like Great Britain — important, but only of secondary status. I have often written about and lectured about the world supremacy cycles, and what it takes to get on top and stay on top, and this "prediction" is not so far fetched.

As a famous saying goes, "God has not granted the boon of perpetuity to any state or nation." Another famous book: "Empires waxed and waned, states cleave asunder and coalesce." You see,  changes in ranks of supremacy happen all the time. They can happen in this very lifetime of yours if your leaders promote short sighted policies out of ignorance. They happen in terms of a nation’s educational preparedness of its citizen, its health care rankings, GNP and all sorts of other factors. How easy it is to lose the leadership helm of the world if one practices foolish polices meant to help, but destroy. It’s all a lack of strategic wisdom, which is why I wrote my book on Kuan Tzu, the strategic mastermind forerunner of Sun Tzu.

To see how this happens, there’s a great video by Hans Rosling on how things have already changed in the developing world. These are changes that have happened and you will continue to see such transitions in YOUR LIFETIME:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4237353244338529080

 

 

Thinking it through, for the loss of US position and prestige to happen, of course, the US would in some way (whether elected or not elected) have to inherit the type of leadership that would produce that sort of result. And it would have to start promulgating policies that  alienate the world and weaken its leadership position, all designed, however, with the view to actually promoting the US…or so the ignorant would think.

Just because one has a position of power and predominance or pre-eminance, do not think that means you are not following ignorant ways. Groupthink has destroyed many corporations grown arrogant, and it is only in studying the principles of history, governing and real politik achieved through Taoist type activities that one can remain in control while seemingly doing nothing, alienating no one, and welcomed by all.  It is just  a lack of leadership wisdom when rulers chose poor policies over good ones, which is why I tell people to study Kuan Tzu once again to make these matters clear. Asuras at the helm arrogantly chose to fight and destroy. How much more elegant, effective and admirable are the invisible policies of Bodhisattvas at the helm.

In Chinese history, there are plenty of stories and films of  stupid emperors being surrounded by their one or  two favorite eunuchs, closing their ears to the sound advice of wise advisors and the commonsense pleas of the nation. History portrays them as stupid and self-absorbed, listening to no one else other than yes-men manipulators out for their on power and profit. History protrays these Chinese rulers, though some Roman Emperors have been painted similarly, as blinded by ignorance, self-confidence and by taking the fact that they were King as meaning more than it did.

Self-deception. Ignorant self-deception. Even the excuses they used to continue following their failed policies were ignorant  self-deception. Asuras are like this – they just insist they are right and try to grab from others rather than create good fortune.

If someone offered honest but contrary advice to what the favored eunuchs were saying, Chinese history shows that off would go their heads, or quick would come the dismissals, jail cells, financial ruin and attacks on the do-gooder’s reputation….including attacks on their families. So nothing could be done while the nation continued to sink and an asura was in charge. A common means of discrediting honest officials and citizens would be to say they were part of a plot to overthrow the emperor or empire. That’s the sort of thing you expect when a country is headed for ruin. It was an excuse that assumed many forms and was used to kill all sorts of good citizens.

I don’t want to go into the strategies my own nation should follow to secure the necessary oil, transportation routes and economic assets for its continued prosperity or ascendancy. That’s far too complex for a blog, and these strategies should only be revealed in closed door sessions anyway … and to lions rather than sheep because openly discussing them dilutes  their power in the sense of a Poker player tipping his hand and thus weakening his position.

What I want to say is that the rules and principles for bringing a nation to a state of prosperity, and then ascendancy, and then pre-eminance, can be found in Kuan Tzu’s writings rather than Sun Tzu or the writings of any other sage, including Lao Tzu. If you wish to become the leader of a country, or corporation or organization, and learn how to manage it and its citizens, then Kuan Tzu’s methods are the ones appropriate for today’s world of monetary, military and economic policies. Sun Tzu was merely an intelligent tactician…brilliant but just intelligent. Kuan Tzu, his forerunner, was a supreme wisdom uber-strategist whose policies united nations without friction and conquered nations without fighting.

And so I wrote the only book available today on how to become the leader of a nation, and how to make your state, or corporation, or country or organization into a superpower, and how to become THE pre-eminent individual in the land even when you cannot obtain the top position.

Kuan Tzu! 

What most people who desire to be spiritual, and who therefore follow some religion or spiritual path to that end, don’t commonly know is that every GENUINE spiritual path, if it is to be able to take you to the farthest ends possible on the spiritual scale, can typically be divided into five stages.

The first of these stages is called the Stage of Wisdom and Virtue Accumulation, namely a stage of studying religious scriptures to obtain guidance and  wisdom for how to cultivate to enlightenment , including various  injunctions to cut off evil ways and bad behavior and replace them with acts of charity, goodness and kindness. Going to Church, practicing ceremonies, pilgrimage, ordinary prayer, being good and shunning evil — these are all just the first foundational stage of the spiritual path.

This is where 99% of people are in the world. Why not more? No one teaches them what the true path is, and how to cultivate it. So they’re just stuck doing ordinary religious activities which do create for them blessings and merit. If they are good people, they die and go to a minor heaven and when that merit is used up, down they come again for another rebirth. Up and down beings bob through countless lives caught in the interdependent net of reincarnation. How to escape this net of birth and death? Only via enlightenment, but they’re not even taught how to get there. Rare it is to even come upon the teachings that will lead your your own self-liberation.

The next stage is the Stage of Added Effort, also called the stage of Intensified Practice, Extra Endeavor, or Preparatory Yoga. This is where you practice cultivation and meditation techniques that purify the mind and transform your physical body. This is where people develop samadhi and spiritual powers, where their chi (prana) enters into their chi channels because their kundalini awakens, where seminal energy (generative force) transforms into chi and then shen, where they cultivate co-emergent emptiness and bliss. The target of this stage is to prepare the body and mind for enlightenment to win self-realization, and liberation.

Of the religions invented over the last 200 years which people commonly call into doubt, they are all lacking this stage of cultivation practice which leads to genuine spiritual stages (samadhi attainments) and the higher spiritual heavens. From this fact alone, their worth… other than another method of moral provisioning and virtue cultivation… is adequately called into question.

If you want to climb the ranks of samadhi and reach the spiritual stages achieved by past prophets, gurus, masters, adepts, immortals, true men, initiates, enlightened ones, Arhats, sages and saints and so forth, then this is the stage where you must situate yourself. If you have no such idea that this is even how things stand, you better get worried and get started on your cultivation. Going to Church or temple alone just isn’t going to cut it — you’ve done that for millions of lives and you’re still revolving around in  the wheeel of reincarnation. It’s rare to come upon true enlightenment teachings, so don’t lose your chance to cultivate before your next transition (wherein you may lose your access to this information once again, as to have access to the teachings and path that wins you ultimate realization requires great merit).

In this stage you once again practice good deeds and virtuous behavior, but the big emphasis is on spiritual practice, namely meditation practice to let go of discriminative thought. This is called stilling the mind, finding peace, cultivating emptiness, not this not this (neti neti), abandoning self-talk, detaching from the view of the body and all sorts of other titles but in essence, this is a stage of intensified meditative practice. There are so many meditation methods to choose from that you use what whatever virtuous method works. Many schools and religions have proven techniques such as mantra, pranayama, mindfulness, cessation-contemplation, imaginary cognition, yoga, visualization and so forth that can win you samadhi. If you cultivate with disciplined regularity and the right way, you will make progress. If not, you don’t. It’s as simple as that. You cannot say that the path and these higher stages do not exist because YOU haven’t attained them. By their absence, you can only say youhave failed to achieve them yet….

The next stage is the actual Stage of initial Enlightenment, self-realization or seeing the Tao. This is the "clear light "stage of Tibetan Buddhism, the stage of no-ego in Christianity, the stage where shen transform into emptiness in Taoism, the Zen stage of "10,000  miles of clear (empty) sky without a cloud (thoughts)."   It’s not a stage of full enlightenment, but just partial enlightenment or initial awakening. You abandon all thoughts that you previously clung to defining you as an ego, and are now one with the Tao, one with God, one with Buddhanature, one with the original nature, one with the essence of all things. Call it God, Allah, Brahman, Buddhanature, original face, fundamental nature – different words point tot he same moon.

At his stage one becomes what Buddhism calls an Arhat or Lohan. As the first Zen master to China, Bodhidharma, said, of the many that reach this stage few actually cultivate it. In truth, few reach it at all today. In Buddha’s time, 500 Arhats even walked out of his Lotus Sutra lecture  because they didn’t want to hear of a stage past this initial enlightenment and cultivate further  to Complete and Perfect Enlightenment.

Cultivating further, the next step of the path is the job of purifying any errant obstructions and residual habit energies that still exist as obstructional pollutions standing in the way of perfect and complete enlightenment (the Fifth stage of the path). You’ve awakened to the emptiness of the self, or recognition that the self is non-existent and just a thought stream you can abandon. However, now that you’ve realized the emptiness of the self, you still have to prove the emptiness of phenomena. Where did all these phenomena come from?

This stage is the Fourth stage of practice, the Stage of True Cultivation Practice, that begins when you actually do decide to cultivate further upon awakening to non-ego. Of this stage  Master Kuei-shan once said to his enlightened student Yang Shan, "All that’s important is that your eye is correct (that you have enlightenment). I won’t talk about your practice (you have to guide yourself)." This stage is hard to explain — I’ll leave the effort to my CDs and Measuring Meditation.

 If you really continue cultivating, eventually you can reach the Fifth stage of the path, the Stage of No More Learning, Complete Enlightenment, Buddhahood. Buddhahood doesn’t mean you become a being that looks like a statue of the Buddha. It just means you achieve perfect union with the Supreme. Call it what you will; in Buddhism supreme enlightenment to the fundamental substrate of all things is called Buddhahood. Don’t get misled by names.

So does your religion have a stage of meditative practice? Does it have saints and sages who’ve achieved some stage of samadhi attainment? What is the method they teach that will help you achieve samadhi and the Tao, and what is the principle it relies on?

If these things are missing, better get worried BIG TIME because all the genuine paths have this. Just reading some scripture and falling for the words "BELIEVE" aren’t going to do anything for you, especially if you are faced with the fact that people in coutnless OTHER traditions, other than your own, are achieving these high stages and enlightenment.

If your school is lacking, it’s your job to fill things in…either openly or privately (quietly). Most people lack the merit to even come upon this knowledge which can win them freedom and liberation. That’s why most people are in the dark, clinging to their own little religion and fighting wars and arguments that are meaningless when the non-denominational path is in front of them. People just lack the merit.

The spiritual path is non-denominational. There are just different paths that have developed over time because of the differing merit stores, karma and propensities of various people, races, times and cultures. But it’s all the same path, it’s just described differently and wrapped with different doctrine and dogma to keep the path alive. Additionally, most people don’t cultivate to the end point of the path, and not cultivating far enough, thus there are also differences in the ultimate excellence of the teachings available to various groups. That’s just the way it is…if four doctors leave medical school at different times, the medical lnowledge they can provide to people will differ. That’s why I always emphasize that you understand the PRINCIPLES of cultivation science. That’s what should guide you.

All the saints and sages cultivate common methods, based on similar scientific principles, to reach the same stages of samadhi and dhyana. Whether they can achieve enlightenment rather than just samadhi is a big issue and then, whether they can go further is even a bigger issue.  As to which stage of samadhi they reach, that’s an issue too with many schools becoming polluted because of the wrong teachings of low level samadhi masters. Frankly, most westerm religions are missing individuals who cultivated to the highest stages  of the path. Most of them didn’t even know the principles of the path, but it’s all for you at MeditationExpert.com. No matter what your religion, go there and you’ll find the basics of cuiltivation science.

The principles of cultivation. The stages of kung-fu. The methods of practice. The habitual errors of the path.

Want to llearn more? I have an entire CD on the 5 Non-denominational Stages of the Spiritual Path.

 

One of the biggest lessons I learned when studying feng shui came from a 70 year old practitioner who told me, "Bill, there’s all these books out there with feng shui formulas. But these methods all come from common ancestors and one of the grandaddy books in this tradition says – on the very first page - that when you enter a place and feel the chi, then throw all those formulas out. You just go with your ability to detect the chi, and go from there. That what the rules TRY to capture, but of course if you can feel or sense the chi, that’s what you deal with."

So much for all these feng shui rules. The REAL thing to do is meditate, open up your chi channels, and then you’ll be able to feel chi and work feng shui. Yesthe formulas work, but this is where you should place your emphasis for as an esoteric art, feng shui’s job is to lift you up for the better, and so it’s actually pointing to the need for meditation.

Another big lesson I learned is that most places have remarkably unremakable feng shui, and so it doesn’t really matter for the common man (in most instances)…. Which is to be expected when you think about it.

And for the common man, fortune is almost always more improtant than feng shui, so doing good deeds and acts of merit, being taught good morals and behavior and how to act properly, wisely, skillfully and effectively .. and learning meditation are once again ways to improve your fortune. Work on these first, because the results of improvements in habits THIS WAY carry over to subsequent lives, whereas feng shui is just the environment you’re in now.

Are there chi flows from mountains that can make people rich, or produce artists and generals? Are there supernatural beings that give off chi large enough to affect and area?  Can you use the feng shui knowledge of chi for rainmaking and changing the weather in a region? Yep, yep and more yep. You can find out more withe the new mp3 CD Feng Shui Secrets

My Master always told that the way in which Buddhism differs from the other religions in the world is because of its emphasis on wisdom — the prajna transcendental wisdom of seeing the Tao, and the wisdom of understanding regular worldly and universal phenomena. The wisdom that   is able to understand Tao, realize Tao, cultivate the self, release one from the bondage of birth and death and leap over the mundane.  This is not common intelligence.  It is the wisdom which is the root and origin of the body of Tao.  Hence, Buddhism discusses not just the cultivation path in all its various aspects, but goes into all sorts of worldly and supernormal phenomena that are not commented upon by other religions. If you want a great framework for things, you must turn to Buddhism.

In Buddhism we have chakras, skandhas, levels of consciousness, superpowers, the various heavens and the beings within them, kung-fu (gong-fu), how to cultivate, stages of cultivation, reincarnation and karma, different types of emptiness, how to change your fortune and behavior, the makeup of galaxies, the microscopic world, hygiene, ethical behavior and merit making, … all sorts of things are discussed in Buddhism that appear nowhere else. Shakyamuni Buddha, unlike other religious teachers, always said: Don’t believe me or books of old or ancient stories but TEST and PROVE everything I say. So it’s a cultivation school of proof.

Other schools, especially invented by intellectuals, want you to just BELIEVE without cultivating anything. So off you go, wasting your human life, following the thought patterns that some unenlightened individual simply preferred for whatever psychological reasons. "You don’t have to cultivate," "All you have to do is believe," "Only we are saved," "__is supreme" are all sorts of useless notions that waste your precious opportunity to cultivate as a human being.

Now if you want to discuss physical transformations of the human body, while Buddhism discusses these through the avenue of the "five elements", Taoism discusses them via the mechanism of jing, chi and shen transformations, as well as chi channels and elixir fields. Taoism, because its emphasis was on prolonging the life of the human body, has categorized these changes and transformations quite nicely so if you’re interested in THAT sort of thing, you should look at Taoism. If you use Esoteric Buddhism or the yoga schools, you only end up discussing chi channels and chakras and that’s about it.

If we’re talking about human behavior, the best schools to turn to are Christianity, with its emphasis on charity, and Confucianism. Yes, Confucianism. On and on I could go — just pick from the best for whatever purpose you need — but the whole purpose of this blog post was to talk about wsidom. Wisdom and understanding.

Where do you get wisdom and understanding today? In schools? On TV? Hardly likely. What is promoted to the public is usually boiled down, politically correct messages that don’t teach you HOW TO THINK, or how to understand what’s really  going on in the world. It used to be that I would have to buy all sorts of special books and magazines and newsletters to really know what’s going on in the world, but today the internet has made that easier.

And there’s one place to go to obtain a higher degree of WISDOM and UNDERSTANDING about what’s really going on inthe world. WHere? Google video. In particular, the last section ont he page of google video that let’s you see educational videos.

Go to google right now and above the search box you’ll see the selections Web, Images, Video, News, … Hit the VIDEO button. Ont his page, you’ll see lots of vdeos available for watching. Later I’m sure google will charge but right now it’s free, so make use of it. WHere to go? The last section called EDUCATION.

Just spend some time watching the various videos on 911, UFOs, and other documentaries that you’ll never see on TV. This will exercise your wisdom muscles. As I always say, beopen but skeptical, skeptical but open and exercsie your wisdom muscles as you watch the "forbidden topics" that the mainstream never wants you to know about.

That’s wisdom!

In researching White Fat Cow, I came upon many very neat esoteric sciences, including astrocartography. A modern invention, astrocartography computes areas int he world where various influences or environments — money, love, wealth, career success — are likely to happen. Most people do it incorrectly, but one man I respect for readings is Julian Lee.

Another neat astrocartography graph I just found is found at http://www.alphee.com/air_reading/astro_map/astro_mapping.htm and takes several days to produce (usually 3 days). It’s done by computing 3000 relocated natal charts, in conjunction with neural network algorithms, to find "hot spots" for various influence potentials you’re seeking to experience in life.

While Julian can search the world and tell you which spots will produce beneficial results of what type  for how long, and can tell you everything about how you will experience life in a new location (highly recommend before you move or are about to relocate to a new job or area…after all, before you’re ready to buy a $300K house in a new area, wouldn’t you want to know a little bit more?), this chart can give you the static potential of an area. Obviously you’d want to get the static chart, and then probe for more info based on Julian’s readings.

That’s one way to combine the results of esoteric sciences.

The FDA has finally proposed that antidepressant medication manufacturers should update their  product labels with information about increased risks of suicidal thinking and behavior in young adults. 

The big secret that the press has avoided, especially with the tragedy at Virginia Tech, is that the MAJORITY of student suicides and shootings over the last few years can be linked to antidepressant usage. I’m pissed at this fact because I’ve known this for years — lots of radio shows and books have been written about this connection — and yet the press keeps skirting around the issue. It makes me wonder whether lobbying and advertising dollars are warping people’s judgements.

In other words, the students did not shoot others because they were depressed. Rather, various books  and countless other evidence have been amassed linking the use of antidepressants to the generation of various emotions (dehumanizing of human beings, etc.) that have actually led to the shootings! So once again the press is fixating on the wrong issues. Not gun control, or the status of mental health screening in the US, but the use of antidepressants seems to be the common killer.

My own teacher constantly said that mental health will be the Big problem of this century. Not cancer, he sadi, but mental health problems will become an epidemic. So once again, we have to start looking for causes and cures. As to causes, we could cite many contributing factors — increased stresses of life, increase in thinking demands, the increase in fantasy promotions via the TV or internet, poisons in our environment, whatever. Everything contributes so who can say there is a singular cause of this trend?

As to the cure, well one part of the equation should definitely include meditation, because it is THE cure for mental health problems. Think about it. If you learn to let go of thoughts, and in particular the thoughts that bother you or propel you to do things you shouldn’t, you become mentally purified. Well guess what does that?

Meditation.