I was producing an new mp3 on animals that cultivate — about all sorts of experiences with fox spirits, dragons, mountain ghosts, beavers, turtles, badgers, snakes, and the whole gamut of animals that can and do cultivate. Plenty of people have told me their own experiences over the years with these beings, I’ve had many experiences myself, and it’s just great dinner conversation.

After recording several hours worth of stories and lessons, I realized that begining cultivators would definitely get the wrong impression about this topic because they have no background, no foundation, no high cultural knowledge  or wisdom on how to deal with this sort of information.  They would be misled and misconstrue the cultivation path for just something interesting, entertaining or weird. That couldn’t be further than the truth because cultivation is so ordinary that’s it’s actually boring and uninteresting to  people! Yet the conclusion would most certainly be the opposite.

Nevertheless, I don’t want this work to go entirely to waste and there are lots of lessons to learn, so here’s just a short 15 minute segment of some stories that show what our mp3s are like….this section was just a short segment from the 45 minute section on fox spirits alone and what to do with them in dreams, how to recognize them, how they cultivate and so on.

Fox Spirits

Basically, if you don’t cultivate you’ll never encounter this sort of stuff. You’ll never encounter higher beings or lower beings that ask for your help. If you do cultivate to a sufficiently high level, this is just the tip of the iceburg of what you’ll encounter in the universe and along the cultivation trail. If you cultivate and still don’t encounter this stuff, your cultivation isn’t high enough nor is your chi purified enough. Congratulaions — someone just told you the truth.

Frankly, as pretty much all the Eastern cultivation schools (the ones developed by the independent teachings of samadhi and enlightened masters, not the ones controlled by central authorities desiring offerings and obedience), the whole universe is awash with life bobbing up and down throughtout the Three Realms due to the karma of reincarnation. The only ones who can control it are those who become enlightened.

As soon as you cultivate your chi, open up your chi channels and chakras or develop a yin shen transformation body, you’re on the very start of the path and this knowledge, from direct personal experience, will open up to you. As my teacher says, until then you can’t discuss this stuff with ordinary people except as entertainment because they have no cultivation experience or gongfu and won’t appreciate it. I’ve seen time and again that ordinary people can’t understand such things, except at the most rudimentary levels. So my own teacher rarely bothers discussing them.

Nevertheless, the whole universe is filled with infinite forms of life in infinite worlds, including this world. Just concentrate on the region of your third eye for about an hour a day and after a few months you’ll be able to see the etheric beings in this world mentioned by all sorts of saints and sages but unbeknownst to those who don’t cultivate.  As to other worlds, you can read Buddhist sutras and learn of the beings throughout the cosmos who cultivate, especially in the Form Realm, using movement, smells, consciousness, or other means we cannot fathom. Everyone is cultivating to realize the Tao. When you start to get just a little teeny tinsy bit of experience in this area, you can start to believe this stuff and realize that the Western religions cut people off from this knowledge for purposes of  control.

In the whole universe, you must cultivate merit and non-ego meditation to realize the Tao. Otherwise you keep bobbing up and down in various incarnations that you cannot control, suffering along the way. If you’re reading this you have access to a computer, so this life is probably pretty good, but who can say that about the next life or the next when your stock of bad karma catches up?

It’s so hard, throughout those lives, to come into contact with real cultivation teachings. Just look at this world, a tiny speck amongst an infinite number, and look how many people follow "religious paths"  totally devoid of cultivation practice and knowledge. It’s all around them and yet they are ignorant of the path to liberation that involves meditation techniques applied with diligence.

So go ahead and enjoy this 15 minutes of entertainment. But remember to cultivate afterwards …

I’ve often toyed with creating a CD for martial artists on how to get to the pre-samadhi state of ching-an. I’ll probably do it this month.

Why?

Because martial artists seem to be the people who religiously practice. You need consistent, devoted discipline to succeed in cultivation, and this group seems to have it.

To improve their skill level, most martial artists who practice eventually realize they must go from just wai-gong (external practice) to chi-gong (breathwork practice) to nei-gong (internal martial arts) to Tao-gong (cultivating samadhi and the Tao) practice. The first step is breathwork, and you can hear countless MA masters who said they reached a plateau in their skill level, but finally went to the next level when they turned to breath work. For this I recommend the Hatha Yoga Pradipika pranayama methods, nine-bottled wind practice, and some pranayama techniques taught in just a few monasteries in India.

As to the regular meditation methods one should practice, I’d include the skeleton method visualization from the bottom up, and the Hakuin soma cream method from the top down. One famous martial artist from China never practiced martial arts at all, but was able to become flexible enough to jump 12 feet from standing positions, could turn his head 180 degrees to look backwards, and even developed superpowers of controlling others’ chi just from the skeleton method alone!

Now what happens if you eventually do this CORRECTLY? Your chi channels start to open up…you’ll feel a coolness run up and down your body, your saliva will become sweet like wine ( a new pituitary hormone will be secreted), and the neatest thing is that your bones seem to disappear. Your body feels like a sack in that you can feel the width of the skin, but everything inside it feels "empty" or gone because those chi channels have opened through. It’s the neatest feeling. Imagine all those "tubes" filled with chi … finally  after so much practice of letting go … and now the body is soft and pliant. Softness and pliancy is the early stage; feeling empty like a sack is higher.

Congratulations — that’s a mini-description of ching-an. Most cultivation schools describe it. Everything from Confucianism, to Western alchemy, yoga schools, Tibetan Buddhism, Taoism, … you name it. It’s non-denominational, for sure. You let go of thoughts, cultivate hard, and you reach this. 

This is the pre-samadhi stage that many religious functionaries finally cultivate  when they can’t reach dhyana. Martial artists who reach this can improve dramatically. Now they’re at the stage of nei-gong, and soon Tao-gong. You still haven’t opened up the central channel, or sushumna (zhong mai), but you’ve opened up the back channel and are working on opening up the front channel fully.

When that happens, you’l experience yet another different type of gongfu. You’ll feel like the chi rolls like a ball down the front of your body when the front chi channel (jen mai) is opening. Rolling is the only word I can use to describe this stage, and the chi feels like it’s in a ball doing the rolling, or dropping. Your stomach will change, too.

When the central channel opens, that only happens if you really, really, really continue to work hard at this stage. WHen the jing-chi finally hits the brain, it seems as if the inside of the skull turns white. Later you’ll experience some of the signs of the central channel opening described by TIbetan Buddhism. For just a flash — maybe a tenth of a second becaus eit’s that quick — you’ll see a ball or disk appear in front of various chakras of the body. It’s only about 2 inches in diameter, and then the image disappears. You can go look up what these stages are in various Esoteric school yoga texts. This is also when you have to be particularly careful about losing your jing, as now you;’ve attracted the attention of yakshas and other beings who want to steal from you. The method of protection? Mantra…. and lots of wisdom as to how to act.

But of course, this is all impossible without first reaching the state of ching-an, called pliancy in Tibet, Springtime in Confucian cultivation, "the washing of the feet" in Christian cultivation, the opening of the left and right chi channels in yoga schools (they talk about left and right nadi/mai instead fo front and back), and so forth. How to do so? DEVOTED cultivation, meditation efforts.

I don’t care about the meditation technique you select to calm your mind and learn detachment as long as it’s virtuous and doesn’t hurt anyone. That’s up to you … I’ve already supplied suggestions according to what has historically worked best and fastest amongst cultivation schools. What I do worry about is that you’ll lose your jing through sexual activities and then have to start all over again. What a bummer, but that’s just the way it is. That’s one of the reasons people would go into retreat in olden times, because in isolation the temptation becomes less.

As to ching-an, it doesn’t take much to get to this stage except practice. The hard part is resisting the sexual desire / extra vitality increases that comes with this stage, because succumbing to a loss of jing will send you back to the starting point all over again. Another problem for martial artists is to resist the tendency to cling to their body and feelings in order to get to this state to begin with.

That’s a lot to deal with…

It only takes the effort of applying  a meditation technique religiously, over time, consistenly, deeply, with discipline. But that’s what martial artists who practice do anyway.

Bones …

There are many things people don’t realize about bones and spiritual cultivation. For instance,

* the bones transform after many years of practice
* you can tell someone’s fortune by feeling their bones … including the fate of their status in life
* by telling if someone’s bones are heavy or light, you can even tell how difficult it is for them to cultivate

The bones, after the interstitial spaces between body parts, are the most difficult parts of the body to transform via spiritual cultivation efforts. In fact, some people have it tougher than others in cultivation because of the density of their bones.

What they inherit as bones is the expression of their genes, of course, and behind that a function of their merit. People say this is due to genes and that is due to genes, but they never ask WHY did you inherit THIS speciifc set of genes in the first place. That’s karma and merit.

Also, they never realize that genes aren’t your density – it’s what you wash over your genes and expose them to that determines what and how they express. In other words, behavior determines fortune.

To explain the relationship between your bones and cultivation  would take a lot of time and frankly, most people wouldn’t understand the topic at all, as smart as they might be, unless they already had achieved a degree of gongfu where their chi channels had opened up from meditation efforts. No gongfu, no understanding.

Best way to do this? Breathing methods combined  with the skeleton visualization method, or even Esoteric chakra visualizations as espoused by Tibetan Buddhism, Hopi Indians, and Persian cultivators as well as western alchemists. And mantra for the merit or help to succeed in the process too.

 

 

> 80% of books bought on Amazon.com are gifts, meaning most of the books bought there go unread

> 30% of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives after graduation

80 percent of American families did not buy/read a book last year at all

70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years

Most of this reading is reading someone’s conceptual thoughts about junk, or entertainment reading that gives no self-improvement. There is a place for that, for sure, but the immensity of the reading that leads to nothing vs. the reading that leads to something is astounding. Staggering.

As to TV viewing, Americans spend an average of 4 hours/daily in front of the TV and 3 hours listening to the radio…

And you wonder why no one succeeds in cultivation. They haven’t even heard of the path, let alone investigated it.

 

 

Most cultivators who are successful that I know have large libraries. Most rich people whom I know have large libraries – of self-improvement books.

If you wanrt to cultivate, you HAVE TO READ. All the best materials to familiarize yourself with the path are in books and inaccesible any other way. The Bible alone is not enough as it lacks the tremendous content of cultivation knowledge you need to succeed on the path. The Stage of Study and Wisdom accumulation absolutely requires you to know what the path is, whow to cultivate it, what are the stages, what is gong-fu to be expected, what are deviations and so forth. You can only find this information if you read widely.

Now I’ve come across some statistics that should give you concern. This is of vital strategic, national interest — not what people NORMALLY think is a strategic issue:

Next month I hope to complete another project that’s taken well over a decade to produce — a Chinese fortune prediction program, based on the numerology of the ICHING, that tells your fortune for the year.

Every year people ask me to compute this for them as it is so accurate telling them the gist of the year — marriage, money, sickness, promotion, whatever. If you have a lawsuit, it even tells you the sounds in the name of the lawyer that will help you, or the days where you can make money, or whether the woman is the right one to marry.

You’ll have to wait to hear more. The algorithm is done, but we’re working on the formatting and editing the translations. We used multiple translators over the years — I’m guessing it cost past $10,000 to get the two Iching books translated and edited for this. They are special Iching numerology books that don’t appear in English, and are usually combined with Tzu (Zi) Wei astologoy, but this is totally a numerological forecast. And accurate it is.

Normally a Vedic astrologer will charge people $200-250 for a 3 year reading, but we’ll be able to print out out 5 year, 10 year, 20 year, 30 year and 60 year year readings! It will be nice to spy on the fortunes of Presidents, Actors and Actresses and Sports stars in the news and to see that what they are going through is all in their fortune.

Coming soon … a project I swore I’d do.  .

I just found a site listing all sorts of Mahayana sutra translations that are not available in print — including the Nirvana Sutra! It took me over a dozen years of searching to get just a photocopy of the English translation of that sutra produced in Japan. You can find it at:

Nirvana Sutra pdf

The big find was also the Usnisa Vijaya Dharani, which you can recite every day to help the hungry ghosts, your parents, and yourself … preventing everyone from falling into lower realms upon death. A dharani is a ritual speech as opposed to a pure mantra – and for more details you can read  Japanese Shingon (Esoteric School) Master Kukai and his writings.

I won’t tell you about the two supernatural things that happened when I chanted this dharani (mantra) for the first time  just to "try it out," so-to-speak, but all I can say is that I’m satisfied as to the truth of the stories. Don’t worry about getting the Sanskrit pronounciation right. Just do your best. Try it and see what happens and then if satisfied continue the practice. Read the sutra for the details of its benefit:

The dharani:

 Source: http://www.geocities.com/usnisa_vijaya/web/eng/english.htm

Another Usnisa Dharani story…with this version of the mantra: "Om Amrita Teja Vate Svaha."

Thanks to a reader (that’s you Rene), you can hear the Sanskrit audio pronounciation of this at:

http://www.lioncity.net/buddhism/lofiversion/index.php/t9990.html, specifically ftp://ftp.buda.idv.tw/music/ZSZ01.mp3.

Also, an English translation of a sutra about the Zhunti (Cundi / Zhuenti) mantra!

This sutra lists the mantra as

NAMO SAPTANAM SAMYAKSAMBUDDHA KOTINAM. TADYATHA: OM, CALE, CULE, CUNDI SVAHA. 

Because of transliteration (and absense of some Sanskrit sounds in the Chnese language), the Chinese usually pronounce it as:

NAMO SADONAH SAMYA SAMPUDOH  JEETZUNAH DAZATOH: OM, ZHRLEE, ZHULEE, ZHUNTI, SOHA.

I was coming back from a trip and during a 5 hour airport delay, struck up a conversation with a psychologist-psychiatrist husband and wife team. Both were from South America, and were coming back from a trip on Mayan archaeology.

The psychologist wife confided in me, "I believe that more and more people are becoming crazy in society. I can actually see it. It seems the sane ones are the ones coming to me for office visits, and the number of insane, and mentally ill people around them is increasing."

"Why?", I asked…."Stress, change too quickly, responsibilities, pace of life, consumerism, pressure, what?"

All of the above was her response.

And you know, my Zen master told me the same thing. A few things he always predicted:

One – 50 years ago he said the US would only be the "numero uno" country and respected world leader for 50 nore years, and that time is over now. After that, he said, it would lose its preeminence.  He correctly predicted the decline of Taiwan, WHEN IT WAS AT ITS PEAK, andno one believed him in that either. And when he predicted he’d build a railroad in CHina and put it on the stock market, when China was still COmmunist and lacking any sort of capital markets, people just laughed. NAturally, he did it.
Second – marriage would all but disappear by the end of this century, and that’s happening already. 
Third, the Chinese language would become world spoken and you would be considered second class if you didn’t speak it. With the rise of China, and his prediction of 180 years of upwards fortune, that seems right. 
And fourth – not cancer, but mental illness would become like a plague for this century. People would avoid others because of the fea rof mental illness.

Already you can see it. After having visited South America and returned to the US, it’s easy to see how the pressure to make a living in a competitive market, with capitalism leading to job losses, outsourcing, and so forth, and the focus on debt-consumerism and ever speeding up pace of society is leading to stresses never seen before and mental illness. It isn’t seen as mental illness because people still function, but their mind is definitely unbalanced, or  "off".

Example: Sub-cultures are springing up around the X-box and Playstation where adults escape society and the world and care only about virtual reality, as just one instance. I’m not talking about good old fashioned fun and play but fanatical, extreme, mental deviations that constitute an illness.

It’s happening slowly. The health or wellness of a country cannot be measured in terms of productivity or GNP increases anymore. It must be measured in terms of life quality, including free time, and  life enjoyment. The French have something there.  South Americans do, too.The Chinese have learned how to mix the social with business to create some release valves, too, and make the pace more bearable.

Think about it. More productivity only means more devices/equipment/processes that only lead  to more demands on you and your personal time.

Examples:

A word processer? You lose your secretary. A computer? Book your own tickets… The result? More stress, more demands for speed, a decline in the  quality of life, a crazy mind and no time to rest. And globalism is accelerating that even more, making the stresses unbearable. Is it cheaper to do it over there in that country? Then let’s get rid of these jobs here….

The end result — more types of mental illness, more stress, more panic, more depression  – the walking functional mentally ill. I’m not talking about Parkinsons, Alzheimers or conditions like that, which will certainly increase (another fallacy there — live longer by extending your life and you still have quality life). I’m talking about mental illnesses, dream state living, the 5 errant perspectives of Buddhism, depression and so forth.

Buddhism is a cure with its teachings  on detachment. So is Shintoism with its teaching son simplicyt and natural living. Meditation is key.

The cure — wisdom, meditation, cleaner living, simpler living. You can do a lot bydetoxing your body for one thing, as those extra chemical burdens that build up aren’t helping matters. And meditation, for sure. That goes without saying. And not being exposed or falling in for all sorts of society group-think craziness issues. But to go into those would take forever.

It seems inescapable, but you can do some things.

How?

Turn off TV. Read. De-stress. Meditate by detaching from thoughts, your body, and impulses or emotions or forces that would impel you. Support your environment so that what you see around you is pristine nature, which allows you to breathe and relax even more. Spend quality time with the family, slow quality time where you talk. Get off the consumerism bandwagon. STops believing authroities who don’t have a clue and don’t have YOUR best interests at heart — tat’s one caus efor depression.

The real cure for this is CULTURE. Not superficial buy this an be entertained or distracted, but deep, slow C U L T U R E. That’s what I’m devoted to helping develop.

More later…

One of my high tech friends, who I greatly respect, caught Lyme disease. Not just ordinary Lyme disease, "super Lyme" with an 8 inch tick bite circle. His doctor said he beleives he caught all eight strains of the disease!

In the course of trying out all sorts of cures, he was introduced to the Vibe machine, an EXPENSIVE piece of equipment that puts out an electromagnetic field that supposedly helps with healing. He rented the device for a few days and exposed himself to the EMF and sure enough, his symptoms abated.

He looked at the device, and being an electrical engineer who used to build satellite magnetics and power systems for RCA, realized that it was just a Tesla Coil with tubes of noble gases on top. They were just extra flashy bells and whistles that weren’t needed, in is opinion, and acted simply as an antenna discharge. Forget all that stuff about noble gas radiations, he mused…

So off he went to ebay where he found JM Labs and Teslacoil.net which produce the SSTC-3.7, what he considered a cheap $600 equivalent to the VIBE. Presto! After exposing himself for 10 seconds a day (the machine won’t run for a long time or the power transistors will burn out) then sure enough, his Lyme suymptoms disappear for a week.

Every time!

So my friend is discussing his finding with the owner of a gigantic Tesla coil demonstration unit that is so big that it fits only in the back of a pickup truck. This buddy drives around to schools and uses it to demonstrate Tesla coils, his expertise. His friend listened quietly  and then said, "I have Lyme. I never noticed it but you’re right. After I turn on this deivce and expose myself during a school demonstration, my symptoms disappear for about a week as well."

Interesting….

Not a cure, but for $600, worth a try to those who are suffering and have the money to investigate. I’d love one of those units just for fun.

You’d never hear this story from the medical establishment, that’s for sure. As my friend David Getoff says, "Be skeptical but open to try new things. Open, but skeptical. That’s how breakthroughs are made."

Hope that helps….

People often ask me how to get rich. The answer: perform  lots of merit in your past life,   and you’ll be rich in this life.

What?

To be born rich without work, like a Paris Hilton, means that you performed lots of acts of charity and merit in past lives, and the karmic fortune or return for those acts finally appears in this life. That’s why you’re born especially blessed– it’s all cause and effect, and nothing more.  Or those karmic returns  can be spread out over several lives (whatever is necessary to make all karmic debts or imbalances repaid), but it’s all past karma nonetheless. No one can say you don’t deserve it; people can only criticize what you do with it.

So that’s why Paris Hiltonis rich, blond, thin, good looking. A little wiffy in the head, but these are the karmic results of many lives of merit. Mother Theresa, who passed away the same week as Princess Diana, will be reborn quite well off as well. Why? She perfromed great acts of hard work, sacrifice, virtue and merit on behalf of others.

Here’s the problem though. Two problems, that is: 

(1) If you’re rich and dumb, you drop. 

(2) If you squander your chance to perform even more acts of charity during a lifetime of wealth and riches, you basically burn up your merit and squander your wealth.

Guess which case poor dear Paris is in?

As my teacher always says, be careful who you teach merit making to. Don’t teach merit making to the really dumb or stupid or unwise because they’ll blindly/ignorantly sacrifice themselves doing good deeds ("let me become a missionary in Africa for Jesus") and then be reborn rich and powerful, but still without wisdom. Then, with great resources at hand, they’ll create all sorts of trouble in society due to their lack of wisdom. Witness powerful and high up government officials who are as dumb as molasses, but their safe position is the merit of past lives’ work for others.

That’s case 1. It’s easy to be reborn rich, but hard to be reborn with wisdom as it takes many lives of cultivation and study.

Case 2 — Now you’re rich but your life is one of conspicious consumption and enjoyment, and hardly anything goes towards merit making. You’re just burning up your stock of merit, that’s all. Next life won’t be so well. What a stupid fool — you finally have a chance to relieve the suffering sof others, and now you squander that opportunity and use up your accumulated stock of merit in one go. You should be reinvesting it so that next life you have even greater opportunities to do good and sponsor the wise, talented and capable who can help.

Another example: Thousands of actors compete for the same roles in movies and on stage. Why this guy or girl wins the role rather than that one? Because in past lives they performed for free, or as offerings for others, and so forth. They can be great, great actors or singers because of many lives of acting performances and training, but without that voluntary offering they may not be as popular as someone else….or even make money at their craft. 

Skill levels do not necessarily equate with popularity, or income levels. It’s all a function of merit.

As my teacher explained, a Michael Jackson probably made offerings of music and song over countless lives. His skills become great, but those offerings are what produced his popularity. Everything is tied together.

Want to understand how to change your fortune? See White Fat Cow.

 

One of the reasons the white skeleton meditation works is because it teaches you to detach from your body. Buddhist monks in India used to practice this meditation method in cemetaries and charnal grounds – surrounded by rotting corpses all around them, so that they became better at learning how to detach from the body and surmount the sexual desire that arises from this practice due to all the chi coming up.

Still attached to you body? This google video of an autopsy may help you learn detachment:

Autopsy Video

I’ve just been reading The Monks of Mount Athos by M. Basil Pennington, which is about the Greek Eastern Orthodox Christian monks and their practices on Mount Athos.

In reading this book, once again the non-denominational nature of the path is made clear … including in the Greek Orthodox Eastern Church of Christianity. Yes, even Christianity talks about emptiness, inner silence, poverty of thoughts, humbleness (no self), annihilation of thoughts as THE WAY. They say it is the way to God, or the way to Christ, but it is basically the way to samadhi and then the Tao. That’s why ALL genuine religions and spiritual paths espouse this, but each wraps this with its own peculiar religious garbs and coloring.

Of course these Greek Orthodox monks don’t know that, but see all things through the eyes of Christianity, and yet everything they say speaks of the same practice methods and common stages of the cultivation path:

Examples:

"Keep your mind free from colors, images and form; beware of the imagination in prayer"
– Saint Gregory of Sinai

"So as not to fall into illusion while practicing inner prayer, do not permit yourself any concepts, images or visions."
– Saint Nil Sorski

"The aim of every monk and the perfection of his heart tends to continual and unbroken perseverance in prayer — an immovable tranquility of mind–lasting an continuous calmness"
– Saint John Cassian

Thoughts are enemies who are bodyless and invisible, malicious and clever at harming us, skillful, nimble, and practiced in warfare… A person whose mind is caught in thoughts is distant from Jesus; a person with a silent mind is with him."
– Hesychius of Jerusalem

[The Monks of mount Athos, M. Basil Pennington, Skylight Paths Publishing, Woodstock: Vermont, 2003, quotes from pages throughout].

 

I love that one quote — "A person whose mind is caught in thoughts is distant from Jesus". Do you see how it’s done? The path is to cultivate no mind, emptiness, silence, absence of discriminative thoughts, etc while retaining awareness. But you phrase the target in terms of Christ, Allah, Brahman, Jehovah or whomever you wish to choose.

Get over your clinging to sects and denominations and religions. The TRUE path is all about cultivating empty mind, or however you wish to word it. That’s the state closest to"God."

Here are the stages of the path when you do that, which explains almost all forms of spiritual gongfu at the lowest stages of the path recorded of Christian saints.

Cultivate emptiness and then your chi comes  up and your chi channels open. When that happens you get gongfu. If you continue with detachment from thoughts and detaching from the sensations of the body and physical transformations occurring from y our progress, you attain samadhi. If you attain stability of empty mind through prolonged cultivation of samadhi …. and then abandon clinging to that …you can attain the Tao.

If you keep working hard once you get the Tao and don’t retrogress, you can climb the Bodhisattva bhumis and fathom the nature  of the cosmos. If you tread the path completely you attain full enlightenment, called Buddhahood.

Ponder it. Ponder the path. Every religion – it’s all the same thing but wrapped in different words of that particular creed. How could the end result be different? How could the stages of the path be different? If a Jewish man lifts weights his muscles will get stronger and bigger. If a Christian does so the same will happen. If a Muslim does so the same will happen. If a Chinese Taoist does so the same will happen. If a Malaysian Buddhist does so the same will happen. If a Hopi Indian or Eskimo or Japanese Shintoist does so the same will happen.

The same in cultivating empty mind. Whoever cultivates it will reach the same levels of attainment. They are nondenominational stages of the path.