In my free ebook on the Western Alchemy text, The Atalanta Fugiens, I reproduce the prints and words of alchemist Michael Maier who ended up describing many of the same cultivation techniques, principles, methods and stages of accomplishment as found in the East. (In my tape set on these prints, I explain each of these diagrams in detail according to a lecture given by Master Nan Huai-chin which we translated. It’s a fascinating topic and I learned more from that lecture series than almost any other that he ever gave because it revealed the long standing indecipherable secrets behind what many of these prints represented).

Yoga, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and the Esoteric school all commonly use the same cultivation or meditation methods, and therefore they report similar results from using these techniques though they couch these results in the words of their own tradition. So this commonality of a Western tradition coming up with the same conclusions as in the East, whether or not due to borrowing of methods or not, once again proves the path is non-denominational, the results are non-denominational.

For today’s post, this is the particular print we’ll be discussing, which refers to a common Esoteric School (form based) cultivation meditation method found across many traditions.

 

 

For instance, one thing you can do, rather than try to spin your chi in your microcosmic or macrocosmic orbits, as is done by Taoists today, is actually recite a mantra on one of the four chakra locations used in cultivation. Spinning your energy cannot open up your central chi channel (sushumna), which is why most schools use breath retention practices to FORCE chi to enter into it. Taoists never even think about that necessity or ponder the predominance of forceful breath retention techniques in the yoga, tantra and esoteric schools which also depend upon breathwork for the rudimentary stages of the cultivation path. Rather, they just blindly try to duplicate what various masters had described happened to them as a result of their cultivation practices, thinking that by trying to duplicate these sensations and chi results, it will also occur to them. The real high stage Taoism never teaches this, but people cling to the descriptions of low level masters and mistakenly think THAT is the way. They don’t even read the descriptions of high stage samadhi attainments and remember that there is no longer any discussion of chi, chakras, or even physical bliss anymore at these stages.

Hmmmm…..

In most cases all you ever end up doing by imaging rotational circulations within the body is circulating dirty chi  and amplifying minor sensations of wind, but never activating the real chi to arise. Who do you know has had their kundalini rise this way, and achieved samadhi? No one.  It is doubtable if this even opens up the front or back chi channels of the body, too, though we know for a fact that emptiness meditation does. Why? Because from the extreme of yin (stillness), yang arises, so in cultivating empty mind, your yang chi will arise and open up the front and back chi channels.

So what can you do if you want to open up the central channel? There are better ways than spinning your chi, which for everyone I’ve ever seen represents a waste of time and an exercise in futility. Yes, people have the hopes of progress from this sort of appealing practice but , No, I’ve never seen anything I can call "success."  And sitting at dinner with my teacher and his hundreds  of Tao school visitors per year, including all the famous qi-gong "masters", I’ve seen A LOT.

It’s funny how what appeals to you may offer no hopes of benefit or progress, and yet we continue to partake?  That seems to be the case with most areas of life, isn’t it? My own teacher, a Esoteric, Tao and Zen master, and considered enlightened by all three schools, just laughs at these people who think spinning their chi is the Way. You cannot help them because they must wake up themselves, and cling to their beliefs just as strongly as a Christian, Jew,  Moslem  or anyone else clings to theirs.

As a meditation technique, Tibetan Buddhism emphasizes the visualization of 4 particular chakras in the body, which incidentally are also recognized by the Hopi Indians, in Sufism, and by countless other cultivation schools  as a means of cultivation. These are not ALL the chakras of the body, just the focus of a particular type of very effective meditation technique.

Now I’ve gone into how to visualize these chakras previously, and the fact you can find the best explanation in Tsong Khapa’s Commentary on the Six Yogas of Naropa, readily available at amazon.com (Glenn Mullin’s translations). What I want to point out is that with mantra practice, when you recite a mantra and visualize it as if it is coming form one of these chakra locations, this will also produce gongfu (kungfu, kung-fu, gong-fu) results. This is one case where you can spin your chi on a chakra location, if you have the correct wisdom, to produce a definite  result. Tao school practitioners, please do the research and then  think deeply about this.

You need a good teacher if you are to do this because trouble can arise due to the chi flows that occur and the obstructions encountered as  the chi channels start opening up. All I am saying is that this is effective at drawing chi to a chakra location, and therefore drawing chi into the central channel becomes possible rather than just through tu-mai or jen-mai when you know what you are doing. When combined with breath retention and visualization techniques, we’ve got a powerful meditation method here, but usually it’s only effective if people are chaste and have already been pracrticing for years so that their chi channels are already supple and partially open to some degree. You also need a clean mind to succeed.

Here’s the kicker. The effectiveness of reciting the Jesus Prayer in the Eastern Orthodox Church is testimony to the fact that this method works even if you just cultivate one chakra alone.  Christian monks recite the Jesus prayer over the region of the heart continuously, it draws chi to the region, this starts to open up the channels (causing pain because they are obstructed unless you’ve been doing emptiness meditation for years prior to this), and then gongfu results.  People see within their bodies, they feel the kundalni heat, etc. etc. etc.

I remember when young that I read a book by someoneon how this was dangerous because it produced heavy sensations in his chest (naturally). He felt he was going to die when the chi entered his heart channels because of this practice, and panicked because he didn’t know what was going on or the principles of the path I keep outlin ing over and over again. Reading this story, when I was 12 years old or so, scared me away from this sort of practice  for years, and all for the worng reason — ignorance. Of course now I understand what went on, and because of that story I want to correct the misconceptions other people have also told me they picked up from reading the very same account.

As I always say, to cultivate the form schools you need wisdom and a good master. Without that, you don’t know what’s going on. The book Tao and Longevity by Nan Huai-chin is the best book in existence on the early gong-fu of the path, so grab it and read it to understand a bit of these things. The free download at the bottom of the Stages Course page also explains TONS more than you’re going to get in  100 books on the topic. I know, because I have those 100 books!

All the informartion on how to visualize the four chakras as a cultivation technique  is something I described previously. With a good master to guide you, or good teachings on emptiness and the importance of letting go of the mind and body, you can attain samadi in this way. But you have to remember to let go of this technique once you achieve the result, and have to forget the view of the body. The problem with most esoteric school practitioners  is that they always cling and hold on to some form or sensation or appearance because they USED THAT to make progress. So be careful and don’t abandon your wisdom on how to cultivate correctly and achieve emptiness from non-clinging.

You can also recite the "al ilaha ill-Allah" of   Islam over the region of the heart chakra,  while visualizing  the chakra or something else auspiciously appropriate, to get a similar result. Surprise — yes this works for Islam too. Why not? By the way, this Ah-sound mantra is usually translated incorrectly as "There is no God but Allah," when a more  proper translation is more akin to "There is no divinity if it be not the Divinity."  Why is this particular phrase, seemingly meaningless, the crux of Islamic cultivation? Well just look at the sounds. A hint: most  of the supremely effective mantras int hw world depend on the Ah-sound.  What sounds are this mantra packed with?

Do you see how the cultivation path depends upon common principles, but you have to frame the techniques in something that’s acceptable to the culture you’re dealing with? 

And by the way, Ahmad Ibn `Ata’Allah said, "The realization of al ilaha illa’llah … is one of the states of the heart that can neither be expressed by the tongue nor thought out by the mind." [The Key to Salvation: A Sufi Manual of Invocation, trans. by Mary Ann Koury Danner, (The Islamic Texts Society, Cambridge, 1996), p. 71.] Where have you heard that before? Same old, same old emphasis on attaining "emptiness" or samadhi.

Where have you heard that before? Once again – that is the true, common target of spiritual practice regardless of the religion or tradition. I know you still keep refusing to believe this, but you will find this over and over again from the saints and sages with SPIRITUAL ACCOMPLISHMENT but not from the book readers and academics and intellectuals and so forth  leading their religions or traditions without any gongfu or spiritual accomplishment themselves. Saints and sages with gong-fu (not those elected to such a status without gong-fu, an honor surprising bestowed quite often in many schools) always says the same thing because  it’s the same path, same target, same methods and principles that get you there and same gong-fu you achieve or experience along the way . It’s time for you to believe this and jump on the band wagon of meditation practice rather than just read about it. Time to practice.

Want a  little more? Here’s a 3  minute mini audio lesson on this mantra-visualization technique:

Kukai, the great master of Shingon, which is the Japanese esoteric school, used to recite the following mantra over and over again to help with his memory. Many attribute his great genius to his constant repetition (over a 1,000,000 times every 100 days) of this mantra:

"Namo Âkâsagarbhaya om ârya kamari mauli svâhâ."

Why not try it and see the result? That’s how you work with mantras…approach them with reverence, respect and discipline in application, and the results come.

The meaning of this mantra can roughly be translated as ‘Hail to the Empty Space Treasury," and we have just covered the meditation techniques for the infinite space samadhi (formless absorption) in another blog post in case you missed it.

As to other means for helping the memory as you get older, I could go into lots of nutritional supplements, especially PS (phosphatidyl serine) and PhosChol, but I’m excited about a website I’ve just found offering a variety of anti-aging supplements and pharmaceuticals along these lines. You might find something of use to family members, or yourself, at Anti-Aging Systems. 

Check it out! Anti-Aging Systems. 

 

Usually I talk about meditation techniques to cultivate Form Realm samadhi states. However, there are also absorptions for the Formless Realm that involve cultivating any of the four formless realm samadhi absorptions. These are the samadhi of

1.  Infinite Space
2.  Infinite Consciousness
3.  Nothingness
4.  Neither Thought nor No-thought (the Peak of Cyclic Existence)

The easiest of theser to cultivate is the samadhi of infinite space.

How do you cultivate this?

Zen master Tung-shan achieved this formless samadhi, and poetically wrote of this experiential realm as "far away, separate from me." When Zen master Ling-yuan became enlightened in the famous story of his seeing a peach blossom, this "enlightenment" was actually his accomplishment of finally reaching the samadhi of infinite space due to his cultivation work. Hence his story cannot be considered a true instance of the enlightenment of self-realization, but is simply an indication that he had achieved one of the formless samadhi, namely the samadhi of infinite space.

In the Commentary on the Great Perfection of Wisdom Sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha  taught how we should meditate in order to eventually be able to attain this particular samadhi. Buddha said that anyone who wishes to attain this samadhi should contemplate space within the body, and always contemplate the body as being void like an empty cage or like a receptacle for steam cooking. But most of all, one should let their mind be like space without forming or clinging to a mental image of space; the mind should be like space without having any notions of space.  In this way, using this meditation technique, a person will eventually access the experience of the infinite space visaya.

The Vijnanabhairava Tantra of Kashmir Shaivism also suggests as a meditative practice, "One should cast his gaze on a region in which there are no trees, [while] on [a] mountain, [or] on [a] high defensive wall. His mental state being without any support will then dissolve and the fluctuations of his mind will cease."

The great Tibetan master Tsong Khapa also used to tell his students to imagine their body was like an empty bag because this practice would cultivate their chi and mai, and if you mastered this practice and perfected the resulting emptiness scenario to an extreme, you could also reach the infinite space visaya. But this method is only effective if you cultivate in a special environment, such as a high mountain top, where you can see the vastness of empty space in all directions. 

Interestingly enough, as soon as you reach the state of ching-an, you can start making inroads into this sort of meditation practice.

When you practice the pure form of this type of meditation technique, as the physical body becomes like infinite space then so does all other external form. Thus in imagining empty space, practitioners of the infinite space samadhi can eventually transcend form and eliminate the view of the body.

To successfully practice this transcendental samadhi, many people go into the high mountains or to the open plains to cultivate since a suitable environment is necessary, and in this way they can meditate with an unobstructed view of the sky in all directions. This is yet another means of practice for achieving the emptiness samadhi of infinite space.

Throughout the ages, people have wondered, "Where does life come from? Where does the universe come from?"

Science has developed over the centuries trying to answer just such questions. We keep investigating matter to come up with an answer for something that may have nothing to do with matter. Remember that science is not the only way, or highest way to investigate things as spiritual cultivation has developed a means of obtaining answers as well through direct experience rather than theory and speculation. As countless spiritual schools say, if you attain samadhi or the Tao, you can see backwards in time or forwards in time AEONS, the number of which are a function of your stage of cultivation. Then you can find answers to all sorts of questions like this because our awareness is tied diectly into the fundamental nature of reality, for if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have awareness or life in the first place.

Why can the future be seen? Because via cause and effect and the interlinking, interdependence of phenomena, some things about the far future MUST occur and can be known. They must occur for the interrconnections and karmic returns of cause and effect to take place. That’s why Shakyamuni was able to predict the future Buddhahood of all his students, at which time and for how long their Buddhalands would last, and what they would be like, aeons before this would all happen.

Buddha spoke of what happened in the past as well – karma going back aeons – including how the various galaxies and Buddhalands and even the universe was formed. This is why Buddhism is often called the religion of wisdom because it offers so many explanations. The popular movie THE MATRIX   actually contains  lots of Buddhism in disguise, but the establishment dared not  mention this, despite the movie blaring on TV time and again,   because they worried this revelation, and the fact the philosophy inside the movie struck home with people, would threaten Judeo-Christianity.

As to where it all came from, Buddha explains the origins of life in the Surangama sutra, and other sutras and the creation and destruction of galaxies and universe over vast stretches of time. It doesn’t originate from a being called  "God," unless by God you mean the Tao or original nature – which is beyond being and non-being. If you call "God" the Tao then everything matches just fine. But if you think of a person you’re off. Of course, that’s the problem with the Western religions controlled by power structures rather than teachings of sages who come and go.  Ordinary people lack prajna wisdom and thus want a person in charge of everything, but realized sages of all religions investigaet and then say there are lots of gods and beings in all sorts of realms, but no ultimate creator of REALITY. Ask all these levels of Gods, and they cannot find one either.

But still there is an ultimate, fundamental nature of all things that’s beyond existence or non-existence, being or non-being. And if you want to call that God, fantastic. But don’t think of IT as a person. Only low level samadhi masters call it a person in order to teach ignorant, stubborn people and lead them higher. That type of teaching is for the masses, and simply a form of ethical expeidient means. Once you graduate to a higher level of wisdom and maturity, then you’re privy  to the truth, especially through direct experience.

Sages reach the stage of realizing the Tao, and say it is NOT a person, being or life…it is beyond being and non-being, existence and non-existence. That quote you will find everywhere, so the Tao is NOT  a person, being, life, god, etc. The fundamental nature of reality is just so, just so. That’s all you can say. Even saying that is too much. ALL the realized sages and saints with attainments — even Christian, Moslem and Jewish sages – assert this. Not intellectuals and academics but those with the high spiritual attainments of self-realization. But regular people do not and cling to the image of a being creating things, like on the Cistene Chapel wall. That’s just fine too because it keeps them in line.

But is it true? Wrong, wrong, wrong — according to the the very same saints and sages of those traditions! To even think such, and make an image of the divine that way, is a violation of the the Ten Commandments, so QED for that.

So what? What’s the point? Where does the universe and life come from — that’s what I want to know, and even if you say this, how can I prove it?

All you have to do is cultivate to a high stage, without any preconceived notions, and you’ll realize the truth of everything yourself. So don’t believe me, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christianity, Shintoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and so forth. Cultivate and see for yourself. If you say belief is good enough when proof is available from personal experience that can correct belief (belief is not fact, just belief), then you’re just wrong. You have your head in the sand, and are just lazy. "God realization" is what you want, but it doesn’t come from worship, it comes from cultivation. Work is involved to reach the natural state free of the false ego.

Anyway, Shakyamuni Buddha had the right approach, the only truly valid approach when he said "Don’t believe me or anyone else, but cultivate and see and you’ll find out for yourself. In fact you’ll find out X, Y and Z. But don’t believe me. You have to prove it through personal cultivation."

Whatever anyone says is no big deal compared to direct experience. Anyone can realize the Tao IF THEY CULTIVATE, but only if they cultivate. Any being with consciousness. Why? Because they already have the Tao. It’s their foundational state. They need not create something or think something. They need to abandon clinging and mental obstructions to the Tao, and the wisdom nature will still shine with realization. The fact we have consciousness, or awareness wisdom to even begin with is just a function of this original nature; without it, there is just inertness, so we can’t even ask why it exists — it’s just an anthropomorphic happenstance that comes along with the whole shebang.

But  still, that doesn’t answer the question where does the universe comes from? How did it develop? — that’s still the question if there is no creator. Maybe the universe would be different, and awareness would be shining on a totally different universe with different rules and so forth, so how did all THIS STUFF get here and why is it THIS WAY rather than another way? Why are the laws of physics this way rather than some other? It can’t all just be random, can it?

Once again, Buddhism gives the answer. It is empty of true existence. Everything is defined via a relationship with everything else. There are no single objects out there. Whatever seems to exist simply does so because of interdependent relationships. So there is no real thing in itself. Everything must be defined because of everything else, meaning it all rises together.

So here’s the punchline – now scientists have finally come up with the math behind this..and it WORKS!

The German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz ages ago believed that "reality" was built up from things he called monads that  owed their existence solely to their relations with each other. In other words – interdependent origination.  This Buddhist picture has been ignored for centuries because it wasn’t convenient for coming up with models or equations for calculating things, unlike Newton’s mechanics. Newton’s mechanics just looks at a small subset of the entire gamut to make predictions, and this simplification works. Hence it was useful and became popular.

Well, two scientists, Cahill and Klinger, have taken that interdependence idea, and together with Godel’s hypothesis, created a model of the universe that explains many many things – Einsteins’ philosophy, impermancne, randomness, you name it.  I won’t go into the details — here’s the fascinating reading for you:

http://www.mercola.com/2000/feb/27/random_reality.htm

http://www.newscientist.com/features/features.jsp?id=ns22273

 

One word: cool!

I just spent two hours talking to my best friend in China who has built a school where children are taught Chinese culture,  and just completed their first summer camp with excellent results. Children came from Taiwan, Japan and Mainland China for summer camp and to learn all sorts of things about Chinese culture. They were so successful with these skeptical kids that most of them cried at the end when it came time to leave. We discussed many things on the phone, including the facts that Westerners have lost sight of what culture is.

As one individual put it, "Most Westerners have simply been trained to be good consumers; to focus on money, sports cars, beauty, consumer goods."  With that as an emphasis, it’s just another reason that the American culture has become  shallow. It’s not just the youngness of American culture that causes this, but the emphasis.

I’m not saying the US culture is materialistic, I’m saying it’s shallow. Even the majority of people pursuing self-improvement do so only with the objective of making more money in mind. Few will attempt to improve themselves, like Benjamin Franklin, simply for the ideal of self-improvement. A simple thing such as buying tapes on some topic from a company like the Teaching Company (www.teach12.com) is simply foreign to most Americans. That’s one of the things that now hurts American culture.

With consumerism as its focus, backed by an emphasis on debt for financing consumption, we have over the last two or three decades built a house on extremely precarious ground. We have ratcheted up the economy, but not built a strong economic base beneath because the goods we purchase are no longer manufactured HERE. So now the model we once depended upon for development purposes is now outdated, and statesmen need to recognize this to think about the new path to be blazed. Once consumption fostered the growth of our own industries, but now it benefits the growth of other economies. In Taoism this represents a leakage rather than a circular flow of return, and leakage leads to eventual death.

Furthermore, and most importantly, we are not creating a society that will be HEALTHY in the future because of what we are emphasizing today. We aspire, we work, we live to be happy but we are not creating present or future states of  mental peace, happiness,  and contented living either through our workplaces, through our entertainments, or even in our houses of worship. We are creating the seeds for mental illness  and endless, meaningless "distracting distractions" to keep the mind occupied as a form of silencing thoughts and zoning out what’s around us.

The focus on materialism is not laying the groundwork for a happy society either, only monetary returns for some unknown party. The byproduct? Ever increasing stress levels and pressure  in the call for more " national productivity." Since the baton of  accelerating economic  progress has now been passed to other developed economies rather than our own,  we are even now financing our own decay. As things speed up even further, the destructive ABSENCE of these factors becomes more apparent. 

Forecast? Our quality of life will go down as the years go on. If you already have more demands on your time and more mental stress, if you are working more hours or two of you need to work to finance a single household, it’s already happened. Your income security will become even more precarious in the future as more and more outsourcing occurs, and as the costs of goods and services produced elsewhere plummets  yet becomes deliverable through the internet or because of cheap shipping. And we haven’t even entered an economic downturn yet!

As I always tell people, free trade is a very good idea as long as people are employed and have the money to be able to afford those items; if  because of free trade unemployment skyrockets and no replacement jobs are in sight, you must rethink the system as it only functions within certain bands or limits. I’ll repeat — free trade is not as important as high employment for a nation; without employment there is no money to buy whatever free trade has to offer. This is  what the economic models always miss because they only operate within non-extreme bands and we’ve entered the extreme zones. Just look at the countless countries with impoverished citizens throughout the world to see the truth of what I’m talking about. Or, read  Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests, by Ralph Gomory and William Baumol, to see the math behind  what I’ve mentioned in words, but which will become apparent to the economists only years AFTER a disaster has happened.

With one good economic downturn, even consumerism and the debt pyramid will finally be hit …especially with jobs having been outsourced and manufacturing seemingly no longer existent in the country. This is the real THREAT to the US, not "terrorism." Ten billion dollars a MONTH is spent on some country over THERE rather than the government focusing on THIS? My head shakes. This is the real risk.

A quick reading of John Taylor Gatto reveals that the US education system is designed to  encourage consumerism and produce unquestioning, conforming  workers for the government and corporate conglomerates. Naysayers, objectors, are ridiculed and persecuted, just as they have always been under religious regimes.  You’re supposed to agree with everything said by the establishment, which is often wrong.

This is not a good path for creating the future. Applauding diversity and different thinking, and encouraging every flower to blossom is a better path. The education system has been successfully designed to produce standardized citizenry, not leaders and great men who can take us forward to the next century with independent thinking and innovative solutions. This approach has to be rethought now, because we cannot afford to produce a nation of conformists for the coming challenges ahead.

Even schooling today fails in its classical three functions or objectives to:

1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best.

Check into John Taylor Gatto if you can to learn more about this, and the tie in to cultivation. Many of his writings are on the internet for free and readily available.  As Gatto points out, our schools produce "pretty near-perfect customers and employees, people without an inner life, dependent upon purchases and stranger approval in order to feel OK." The antithesis of the results of spiritual cultivation, we produce people "without any real projects of their own, without principles" who must watch TV to occupy themselves.

I like one of Gatto’s quotes where he says:

"Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we’re upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don’t bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it."
[Source: http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm]

Obviously, this must now change because the world has changed. Consumerism to power the economy is not even affordable anymore in the coming future. We need a new economic paradigm and educational system  so that the US maintains world preeminence and its own economic robustness. The focus of education must be on the individual to make a difference, to make a contribution as was emphasized in ancient Rome and in ancient Greece. The economic paradigm must encourage the creative destruction cycles of Shumpeter, including an attack on old capital bases for the new activity required to push the economy forwad.

If the focus is on producing fodder for business, even then the educational system is no longer designed to produce the two functions Peter Drucker identified as most necessary for business: innovation (invention) creation and marketing inventiveness. So just from the economics standpoint, the old design, the old paradigm no longer is appropriate.

The importing of cheap workers for service based industries is no solution either for buttressing an economy, as that has failed again and again in many countries once a minor or major recession hits down the road. Unification with poorer economies only dilutes the strength of the stronger, particularly when the cultures cannot be assimilated in a way which promotes the highest ideals and ethics of the two rather than the lowest common denominator of the two. The immigration of highly educated individuals who can serve our need for inventiveness and innovation has been cut in years in preference for I don’t know what… certainly not something that will catapult the country forward despite what intellectuals, academics and Eurocrats may think.

A big problem is that the US educational system, Gatto points out, was designed based on the Prussian system, which in turn was designed with the following objectives in mind — to produce:

1. Obedient soldiers to the army 
2. Obedient workers to the mines 
3. Well subordinated civil servants to government 
4. Well subordinated clerks to industry
5. Citizens who thought alike about major issues.

What we need are not more people who are of this mold. That paradigm is outdated, and immigration or education based on that paradigm will fail over the next decades. We need to teach different skills or behavioral patterns for the coming challenges ahead, especially the following skills identified by Harvard as necessary for the new world of men:

1) The ability to define problems without a guide.
2) The ability to ask hard questions which challenge prevailing assumptions.
3) The ability to work in teams without guidance.
4) The ability to work absolutely alone.
5) The ability to persuade others that your course is the right one.
6) The ability to discuss issues and techniques in public with an eye to reaching decisions about policy.
7) The ability to conceptualize and reorganize information into new patterns.
The ability to pull what you need quickly from masses of irrelevant data.
9) The ability to think inductively, deductively, and dialectically.
10) The ability to attack problems heuristically.

If you are sick or in a health crises no one can solve, you need a doctor whose independent thinking can help you get well. When companies are in financial difficulty and need a turn around, the current type of programmed education will not produce leaders who can do much other than cut costs by firing more people, contributing to the  problem. When the country gets into political difficulties, the current type of programmed education will not produce leaders who can solve the problems. If we are in a crisis and need scientists to help us, this type of education will not produce the next generation of leaders who will think outside the box to come up with the solution that conformists could never dream of. This type of education system would not even accept the breakthrough thinking that would solve the problems either. We also need less lawyers, who are typically trained to take any side of an affair and thus abandon their moral center as to what is right or wrong  in the idea that all complaints are valid and worth restitution.  On and on I could go….culture is slipping.

Independent thinking, the hallmark of  America, is where the breakthroughs are made, and yet we teach less and less independent thinking and more and more conformity. We actually need to train people to be heroes, not robots that do not think or challenge or agree with everything the leader says. In American colonial times, each man was supposed to THINK and have his own opinion. Actually, literacy rates back then were much higher than they are now! How far we’ve veered from these circumstances today, and I see the developing nations recognizing this and taking the steps NOW to remedy the situation and become the next supercycle stars. When I read the story of Richard Feynman’s father, and how he instilled in his son the love of science and inquisitiveness, I can understand why he later became a Nobel Prize Winner and fear we will see less and less of this.

Gatto also says,

"It’s high time we looked backwards to regain an educational philosophy that works. One I like particularly well has been a favorite of the ruling classes of Europe for thousands of years. I use as much of it as I can manage in my own teaching, as much, that is, as I can get away with given the present institution of compulsory schooling. I think it works just as well for poor children as for rich ones.

"At the core of this elite system of education is the belief that self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. Everywhere in this system, at every age, you will find arrangements to place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem is fraught with great risks, such as the problem of galloping a horse or making it jump, but that, of course, is a problem successfully solved by thousands of elite children before the age of ten. Can you imagine anyone who had mastered such a challenge ever lacking confidence in his ability to do anything? Sometimes the problem is the problem of mastering solitude, as Thoreau did at Walden Pond, or Einstein did in the Swiss customs house."
{Source: http://www.naturalchild.com/guest/john_gatto.html]

This type of training is what enables a Ben Franklin (one of my heroes) to become apprenticed to a printer at age 9, and Edison to publish a broadsheet at age 12. Yes, at a young age people ARE capable of responsibility. In ancient times, including China, India,  Greece and Rome,  women married in their teens and were able to take care of a household. Today with "advanced education," we  think even less of people’s capabilities.

It is not conformity, but inquisitiveness we need. It is training on how to become friendly  with failure, how to make decisions that stay authentic to the self, choices not based on receiving another’s approval (conformity), and so forth. We need to teach children not to chase money, power or status, but contribution…and a contribution that focuses on meaning rather than money. I could go into this a lot because I’m often invited to speak on educational matters. Actually, this type of training is based on self-introspection, or cultivation of cessation-observation practice. In my book on Socrates, I detail how this is of primary benefit to a nation. It produces better citizens, and more breakthroughs. One need only read about the observational methods of Viktor Schauberger, or Goethe, to see how cultivating this presence of mind creates genius.

One obvious thing that’s missing in our educational system  … people  have not been trained to look for character in people. They don’t read Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Romans, as I always recommend. For some reason, liberals seem to hate the idea of teaching character and virtue and thus hate Plutarch’s Lives. So now the common folk doesn’t even recognize such a simple truth that if a politician has earned a nickname before running for national office, that nickname, in all likelihood, will explain some of the major   characteristics of their time  in office.

Examples?

"Tricky Dicky" – Richard Nixon  
"Teflon Ron" – Ronald Reagan
"Slick Willie" – Bill Clinton (get out of anything)
George Bush – he wasn’t known for being a genius before he entered office

These nicknames carried through and expressed themselves when these men attained power, so with that in mind, think of the next batch of Presidential candidates and you’ll know what is in store. Just understanding this is so simple, and yet Americans are ignorant. How much more so we are ignorant about history, innovative thinking, and strategic moves for the future. Most don’t know that Zbignew Brzezinski wrote (The Grand Chessboard) that to be the leader of the world, America needed to control the thin strip of land in the Mideast that contained 70% of the world’s oil (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, etc.) and that controlling that region would require a reason for our presence there, along with the establishment of permanent military bases.

In my Kuan Tzu book, I mentioned that politicians need to understand real politick and world strategy, but they also need a form of training that instills in them a higher sense of ethics rather than simply service to money, and doing things for more wealth. That will make the world a better place, not the schemes currently in play. Access to oil, for instance, can be made via David Neeleman’s (JetBlue CEO) coal to oil plans which would not only provide jobs, but solve an entire host of other problems including unemployment AND financial profits for the banks and financial institutions. It’s a perfect Monetarist-Keynesian approach as I’ve lined out in my book on Kuan Tzu. 

I have a draft of a book I’ve been writing on How to Guide a Country to Prosperity, and in it I reference the sages and their advice on such matters and how to really lead a country to prosperity. As I visit the countries of the world and view the abundance of economic poverty, I realize that the solutions championed by the international Banks and Institutions, Think Tanks and "establishment" are not the ones that work. Groupthink once again — PhDs employed galore to promote an idealistic, imaginary solution  that never even touches reality. This is why for years I have promoted micro banking, and organizations such as www.kiva.org  well before Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank  won the Nobel Prize for their efforts to create economic and social development from below. Imagine that…it took a Nobel Prize, rather than the obviousness of the effectiveness of the approach, to make it fashionable or permissible to talk about his solution which touches the real BEHAVIORAL aspect of the matter. Prior to this, PhDs would not even touch this supremely EFFECTIVE approach to ending poverty. Such is the approach of the academic institutions, think tanks, foundations and other groups that are stuck in the conformist, establishment mindset.

Another big problem in education today is educating people towards careers. Because of our sickness, children are selecting career paths solely on the basis of the imaginary (projected) money streams they will bring. What a remedy for disaster. The sage Confucius, in particular, once said this relevant quote,

"Wealth and high position are what men desire but unless they can be obtained in the correct way, I will not dwell in them. Poverty and low position are what men dislike but if they are obtained by following the correct way, do not avoid them. If the True Gentlemen abandons benevolence, how will he be able to make a name for himself? The True Gentleman does not act contrary to benevolence even for the short time it takes to eat a meal. He must hold to this when in favorable circumstances as well as in times of difficulty. …
The True Gentleman thinks of virtue, the inferior man thinks of land [wealth]. The True Gentleman thinks of the law [acting contrary to ethics], the inferior man thinks of profit."

In Mencius, there is an even more relevant passage on profit, which applies to the focus of corporations, banks, aid institutions and governments,  which starts out with a conversation between Mencius and the King Hui of Liang, who said,

‘Sir, … You have come all this distance, thinking nothing of a thousand li. You must surely have some way of profiting my state?’
 ’Your majesty,’ answered Mencius, ‘What is the point of mentioning the word "profit"? All that matters is that there should be benevolence and rightness. If Your Majesty says, "How can I profit my state?" and the Counselors say, "How can I profit my family?" and the Gentlemen and Commoners say, "How can I profit my person?" then those above and those below will be trying to profit at the expense of one another and the state will be imperiled. When regicide is committed in a state of ten thousand chariots, it is certain to be by a vassal with a thousand chariots, and when it is committed in a state of a thousand chariots, it is certain to be by a vassal with a hundred chariots. A share of a thousand in ten thousand or a hundred in a thousand is by no means insignificant, yet if profit is put before rightness, there is no satisfaction short of total usurpation. No benevolent man ever abandons his parents, and no dutiful man ever puts his prince last. Perhaps you will now endorse what I have said, "All that matters is that there should be benevolence and rightness. What is the point of mentioning the word ‘profit’?"’ 
[Mencius, Volume One, transl. by D. C. Lau, (The Chinese University Press, Hong Kong, 1984), p. 3. ]

There is also a famous history book from China, Records of the Grand Historian, by Szuma Chien (to be matched with the Western histories of Thucydicles and Herodotus, and The Muqaddimah for Arab history by Ibn Khaldun) which summarizes the real crux of the matter.

"As the Grand Historian was reading Mencius, he unconsciously put the book down and sighed when he came to the place where King Hui of Liang asked Mencius, ‘How will you profit my country?’ The historian said, ‘Ah, profit is truly the beginning of disorder. That is why Confucius seldom spoke of profit, always shoring up the source.’ The source is the beginning. Whether it is found among the upper classes or the lower classes, the degeneracy of lust for profit is basically the same. When those in public office profit unfairly, then the law is disordered. When those in the private sector profit by deception, then business is disordered. When business is disorderly, people are contentious and dissatisfied; when law is disorderly, the citizenry is resentful and disobedient. This is how people get to be so rebellious and belligerent that they don’t care if they die. Is this not a demonstration of how, ‘Profit is truly the beginning of disorder’? The sages and saints were deeply cautious and aloof from profit, giving honor and precedence to humanity and justice. But in later times there were still those who deceived each other in hopes of profit; what limit is there to those who destroy morality and ruin education? How much the more serious is the problem when the path of adventurous profiteering is publicly espoused and pursued; under these conditions, how could we hope for the world’s morals and customs to be upright, and not be thin and weak?"
[The Story of Chinese Zen, by Nan Huai-Chin, (Charles E. Tuttle Company, Vermont, 1985), p. 205-206. ]

Today the world is run predominantly according to a profit focus (except in a few countries such as Bhutan), but this will in time produce more and more moral deterioration if education is not altered in the ways that create more  independent thinkers who can economically survive and free more people from becoming slaves of this system. The early Taoists repeatedly warned of this, and the fact that fulfilling desires leads to more desires. World leaders, as I point out in Kuan Tzu, have a responsibility  to realize this and start promoting trends that benefit all mankind rather than just blindly pursuing destructive paths, such as the profit motive, that by themselves will destroy a nation after time takes them to an extreme.

 

Whatever happens to you is due to karma. In other words, good or bad — you’ve earned it, merited it.

So when someone wrongs you, you are reaping what you’ve sown from the causes of past lives. Not necessarily from the causes of this life, but from the agglomeration of past life causes. Perhaps you’ve wronged that person specifically in a past life, or perhaps they are just the innocent instrument of your karmic return.

You cannot complain — karma is perfectly fair. Cheat on your spouse in a past life and it will happen to you. Steal from others and it will happen to you. And so on for a thousand, a million, a billion types  of situations…ALL OF THEM. SHow prejudice to a certain peope, religion or race and in the future, you will be born into a situation where you receive that hatred or prejudice. You might even be born into the very group you so despise (go read Edgar Cayce to see how often this happend).

Sometimes what occurs to you will be an accident, which is a way of discharging karma when you committed an act innocently (perhaps accidentally without even knowing it) in the past. Still the karma must come back, but in a form such as  this. Many people who undergo operations are experiencing karma in a form where the blame cannot be attributed, as one such example of recompense.

The process of recompense is complicated….As my teacher said, not even the most gigantic supercomputer could be programmed up with all the rules. Tit for tat, sometimes endless cycles are birthed into being that keep playing themselves out over and over again. The rpoblem is, how to interrup thte process, how to escape it, how to change it for the better.

So what about forgiveness? If you hit me I’ll get angry. I’ll want to get even. Then I’ll want to hit you. Then you’ll want to hit me in return after I do it. The situation will escalate. Back and forth we’ll keep striking each other – maybe even life after life like creating a family blood feud which never ends. Even if we stop hitting each other, the thoughts of hatred are still there prompting the desire to get even and start the whole process up again. How do you get rid of the smoldering flame?

Because of the mental involvement of hate, this cycle can get locked in a  loop and go back and forth for countless lives. Churches talk about forgiveness but I say pooh-pooh to what I usually hear them say. Forgiveness means, "I accept what happens and will not prolong this cycle. I will not retaliate. I call an end to it. The buck stops here. I will not react in response. Furthemore, I will NOT think thoughts of getting even in any way, or strengthen such thoughts in any manner. I will pluck out the seed thought energy of this conflict, too. Let the karmic cycle be done. I will transform my reaction and therby transform the karma."

That’s forgiveness. To just say "I  forgive you" is baloney, meaningless. To break the cycle of tit for tat is what it really means. It means accepting the final blows at this level. Accepting karma, dealing with it peacefully, but skillfully with wisdom. Someone has to accept suffering without responding and getting their final licks in. The karmic dance for this mutual hurt cycle stops now.

That’s true forgiveness.

I’ve long known that Chinese feng shui practitioners burn a special type of orange peels when they want to clear a house of ghosts, ghouls or other nasty inhabitants that have come to make it their own denizen. Seems there’s something about the smell they don’t like. Of course, we’re talking about INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH space clearing here.

Now scientists have found that mosquitoes hate burning orange peels, too. Researchers dried orange peels in an oven for 3 days (the Chinese also dry them out extensively) at 140 degrees heat. Then they crushed the peels into a powder. Next they placed this powder in a sealed room with mosquitoes, and ignited it with a hot coal (just as you would with powdered incense).

One hour later, 60% of the mosquitoes were dead.

After two hours…70%.

Three hours later — still it was working.

Sounds like a deodorant commercial, doesn’t it?

There is actually a Buddhist mantra you can say to chase insects away so that you don’t have to kill them. I keep trying to get a copy to test it and see what it does but can’t find one. My teacher says he has a formula for an incense that drives wild animals away when you’re cultivating in the wild, and I have a mantra for requesting help from the Dragon King of a country who is responsible for rain, but I don’t have this chase-away-insects mantra. I’m told it has a lot of sounds like "dee-dee-dee" in it that insects don’t like, or something like that.

Usually there’s a science to these things; one master I know had a mantra for preventing death from poisonous snake bite, and when a friend suffered a heart attack he reasoned that the mantra worked by preventing blood clots, so used it to help his friend. Smart! That’s the type of thinking you need for cultivation matters. When you enter the road of meditation…and make progress…you’ll start encountering ALL sorts of things. You need to turn to logical thinking and science to explain what you’re seeing or experiencing. Of course, if you are lucky you have a  good teacher, or books that explain these things. Typically the best information sources will be India or China, not Russia or Greece for these things.

You can also use radionics/psionic equipment (do a google search for Hieronymus and his corn borer experiments) to chase away insects from a property, and from all the accounts I heard, boy does it work.

You can be like Rudolf Steiner and burn them, and homeopathetize (potentize) the ashes of the insects to be sprayed on a property to drive them away.  He successfully did that with rabbits to rid an estate of their presence.

I once made a study of all these methods because I thought it was a fascinating topic. But after you smell burnt orange peels, you’ll see that that is probably the strongest memory you’ll have of all these techniques.

 

Simple…the chi is starting to go through your chi channels, and there’s a bit of friction going on. Nothing special, unusual, or serious. Nothing to be concerned about. Nothing special to you in the whole world. Nothing that hasn’t happened to thousands of other people.

No, it’s not the devil shaking you. No, it’s not a demon. No, it’s nothing supernatural.

Boy have I heard all sorts of crazy explanations like that — even coming from monks!

Sometimes, of course, you could just be releasing pent-up nervous energy. In that case, let go, let it come out and relax. Don’t encourage or discourage it but let it express itself and then die down. Maybe you just needed a break for it to come out (in repressive societies/regimes/situations people sometimes need a release valve for their stress, and exert themselves in extra movements to effect that release).

People have a tendency to turn everything from cultivation into something mystical, mysterious or supernatural. Don’t — that could not be further fromthe truth. The reactions you experience from meditation – heat, cold, shaking, vibrations, etc. - all have scientific explanations. Don’t reach  for the abnormal or superstitious. In spiritual cultivation, you cultivate wisdom and levelheadnedness.

To learn about all  the reactions people can experience from advanced meditation efforts and their explanations, I’ve never found a better book than Tao and Longevity, by Wen Kuan  Chu and Nan Huai Chin.

When Jesus, a Jew, said "the Father and I are One," the people got ready to stone him. "Blasphemy" they cried for his daring to utter such words.

Jesus was simply announcing his enlightenment, but ultimately in the end he was killed for his teachings.

The Moslem al-Hallaj also said he was God and the people killed him, too, in a most horrible fashion. Interestingly enough, al-Hallaj said, "I am the Truth" while Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life."

For your own edification, I want you to read what Rumi said explaining of al-Hallaj’s words because they tell you what initial enlightenment is from the Moslem point of view. You’ll see it is exactly as I have said, and if you want to match it with Buddhism to prove the commonality of the path and its stages and conclusions once again, just pick up a copy of the Diamond Sutra (you can read it in 10 minutes):

"This is what is signified by the words Ana ‘l-Haqq "I am God." People imagine that it is a presumptuous claim, whereas it is really a presumptuous claim to say Ana ‘l ‘abd "I am the slave of God"; and Ana ‘l-Haqq "I am God" is an expression of great humility. The man who says Ana ‘l ‘abd, "I am the slave of God," affirms two existences, his own and God’s, but he that says Ana ‘l-Haqq, "I am God," has made himself non-existent and has given himself up and "I am God," i.e., "I am naught, He is all": there is no being but God’s. " [Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn, (Continuum Publishing Company, New York, 1996), p. 19.]

Abu Yazid Bistami, who practiced an Islamic bhakti cultivation method similar to those of Indian Hinduism, wherein he took God as a lover, also attained the experience where his self seemed to vanish and he began to identify himself only with God:

"I gazed upon [al-Lah] with the eye of truth and said to Him: "Who is this?" He said, "This is neither I nor other than I. There is no God but I." Then he changed me out of my identity into His Selfhood. … Then I communed with Him with the tongue of His Face, saying, "How fares it with me with Thee?" He said, "I am through Thee; there is no god but Thou." [A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Karen Armstrong, (Ballantine Books, New York, 1993), p. 226.]

The Christian saint Catherine of Genoa reached a point in her cultivation where she began to say, "My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my God Himself,"

Putting aside the fact that many masters who reach the Tao and then teach publicly are killed (Jesus, al-Hallaj, the Tibetan Milarepa, the Indian Zen master Bodhidharma, etc.), and putting aside the higher and lower stages of spiritual accomplishment or realization amongst these people already mentioned, … what exactly is this breakthrough stage of cultivation that these people are reaching? Is it legitimate that they can claim they and God are one, or that they are God? How can that be – what does it refer to?

What is this stage of identification, how do they reach it, and how does it fit into the overall religious path we’re supposed to be following in life?

These cultivators achieved spiritual liberation. They realized the Tao. They achieved self-realization. They realized enlightenment.

They achieved EXACTLY what organized religion wants us to achieve, but doesn’t tell you because they don’t understand it.

In letting go of thoughts and mastering no-thought (the absence of thought), these individuals were able to discard all their thoughts, including those of the "small ego" of self-identification we always have rolling around in our heads as a sort of subterranean undercurrent, to realize the fundamental substrate of ALL Being that is described as empty and formless because it cannot be described as any thing.

Now imagine — you have no thoughts, you reach this fundamental substrate of everything, there are no thoughts of being a self a self anymore and yet primordial awareness from this substrate remains…presto, you ARE that substrate.

What EXACTLY does this entail though? How do you get there?

Please explain it to me, as this is the stage all people are supposed to reach through their religious efforts, and through the cultivation of meditation techniques. If your religion doesn’t tell you this, I want you to know they are definitely misleading you, but you’re going to have to study to prove that for yourself.

In the universe there are many stages of spiritual attainment that still belong to the phenomenological realm, even though we might be referring to very purified, rarefied or high spiritual realms that no longer involve matter. These stages are typically measured or identified by samadhi attainments — degrees of mental purity that mark the beings in those realms.

These samadhi attainments are NOT enlightenment because there is still the vestige of the ego left over with these beings as they use consciousness. As Buddha said, "You can cultivate all the samadhi this very instant and still not achieve awakening." You cultivate samadhi as a way to purify your mind and prepare it for awakening, but even the samadhi are false thoughts and not the Tao or underlying substrate itself.

In initial enlightenment, one breaks free from all mental attainments including even the thoughts of being an ego, a being, a personality and life. One breaks free of these thoughts because they are only thoughts — search for your ego and you cannot find it. Why? It’s just a thought. So in cultivating samadhi, there is initially a false thought doer….a bundle of thoughts that make you think there is a doer. Afterwards these thoughts disappear and you see clearly for what they are. Now you can let go of the self-reflexive, seemingly inherent underlying, always present-because-of-attachment-though-false idea that you someone or some thing to finally achieve awakening.

What do you realize? The original nature, God, Truth, foundational being, emptiness, nothingness, Suchness, Buddhanature, Allah, Brahman. You don’t attain or obtain anything because you were always THAT to begin with. You just realize it, that’ s all. You EXPERIENTIALLY realize or prove it.

This initial stage of enlightenment where you pierce through the veil of the "false ego" is called various things by various cultivation schools. In Tibetan Buddhism it is called "realizing the clear light" because the mind is open and empty of discriminative thoughts or mental obstructions. So it is like a "clear light" existing everywhere because there are no things obstructing it, including thoughts.Meditate enough and anyone can achieve this. WHy? because it’s already there, just covered over because of attachements to thoughts that screen it.

The Zen masters, being a bit more poetic, describe it in naturalistic terms with phrases such as "10,000 miles of clear sky." The skies are "clear" or "empty" of clouds because there are no thoughts anymore, even the thoughts of being an ego. Finally all the obstructions are gone and one is unified with the original nature — "God’s face" if we use the terminology of other schools.

Taoism says that shen (spirit) transforms into emptiness. There’s no doer anymore, so there’s no more effort. Only a doer can make an effort.

Buddhism also describes in a technical way it as "breaking through the seventh consciousness," often called the ego consciousness. You can look it up on the web for more details. If you want a cultivation school that explains what this means best and gives you the clearest guidance for getting to this stage, then I suggest you turn to Buddhism. Buddhism also describes this as breaking through  the conception skandha. And it also gives multiple other ways of describing how to attain this, how to go beyond, and al the gongfu or mental scenarios along the way.

Now is this type of spiritual realization really possible? Just read to find out. Read countless cultivation texts from countless traditions from all sorts of countries, races, religions and time periods and you’ll find that this is what it’s all about. Read the materials by saints and sages of various traditons with atainment, not by the intellectual scholars.

Thousands of methods will get you to enlightenment, but you have to practice. Scholars and intellectuals think; sages and saints achieve something because they practice meditation or other spiritual efforts that lead to the calming, emptying, quieting of their mind.

I’ve told you how to do this many times. I’ve told you the principles, too, so you don’t go astray and waste your time in your meditation practice. I’ve told you that you have to set a schedule and work hard. Talk is useless. Study is useless except to get your bearings. Practice is perfect. Practice  is what does it.

If you read "Nothing Ever Happened," by the Hindu Master Papaji, you’ll definitely see that he, too, reached a very high stage of enlightenment and described this absence of ego as well. But perhaps a description closer to our own abilities of understanding comes from "Collision With the Infinite," by Suzanne Segal.

After years of meditation efforts she reached this initial stage of realization and yet didn’t know it, but actually became afraid. Buddhism teaches that people who realize emptiness typically respond in one of two reactions based on their backgrounds — fear or joy. Her reaction was fear for lack of a good teacher and proper teachings. It caused her to waste lots of time in her own cultivation efforts.

Fear is the most typical response for those who bump into emptiness. That’s why teachings on realizing the  clear light at the time of death, such as found in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, are useless to most people. If they haven’t practiced, at  the time of death they will be scared (frightened) and will not be able to realize the clear light / emptiness / stage of non-ego. Nevertheless, you cannot criticize such practices. You need to understand them, and recognize who is likely to be able to use them successfully. Unfortunately, people like to  turn to the esoteric because it’s interesting, even though it offers them little in terms of the chance of success at liberation or escape. That’s a pity  when more reasonable, and higher success rate practices abound. But I have lectured on this previously….

Despite her fear, nevertheless Suzanne Segal  wrote in modern English exactly what she was going through, and from these words you can tell that she had achieved an initial degree of awakening. Remember, upon initial enlightenment there is still a deepening required before one can achieve perfect and complete enlightenment, and this progression can be divided into ten great stations called bhumis. So initial enlightenment must be considered partial enlightenment, or enlightenment with a remainder.

Segal wrote:

The disappearance of the witness meant the disappearance of the last vestiges of the experience of personal identity. The witness had at least held a location for a "me," albeit a distant one. In the dissolution of the witness, there was literally no more experience of a "me" at all. The experience of personal identity switched off and was never to appear again.

The personal self was gone, yet there was a body and a mind that still existed empty of anyone who occupied them. The experience of living without a persona identity, without an experience of being somebody, an "I" or a "me," is exceedingly difficult to describe, but it is absolutely unmistakable. It can’t be confused with having a bad day or coming down with the flu or feeling upset or angry or spaced out. When the personal self disappears, there is no one inside who can be located as being you. The body is only an outline, empty of everything of which it had previously felt so full. [Collision With the Infinite, Suzanne Segal, Blue Dove Press, California, 1998: pp. 54-55.]

I could continue to write about this over and over again but I have already in the articles on the MeditationExpert.com site. Remember, THIS is your target. If you turn to the articles on breaking through the skandhas, you’ll see how deep this information is and how lucky you are to have it. If you want poof-poof meditation teachings, go elsewhere. If you want the real stuff, dig in.

I just wanted you to know what this was all about and once again show you the non-denominationality of the path. Christians achieve it, Jews achieve it, Moslems achieve it, Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, and so forth all attain the Tao. But they all practice, they all meditate. That’s how you do it.

Pity the Talmud scholars reading books all day who achieve nothing but a head full of ideas, which incidentally are gone the next life when they are born into another race and religion. Pity the Christians who memorize the Bible but lack the road of meditation techniques and meditation efforts which will take them to the state Christ achieved. Pity the Moslem zealots who are killing others in jihad rather than working to conquer their own minds instead. Pity the Taoists who are spinning their energy channels all day long thinking this is the road to the Tao. Pity the…well, you get the picture. Another wasted life….

Good people. Virtuous people. Devoted people. Well meaning people. However, ignorant people lacking the prajna wisdom of the Tao. What is this prajna transcendental wisdom?

Prajna wisdom indicates that which 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.  The "so-called" original, or primal, wisdom is merely a name.  To use contemporary understanding, it’s that which goes above and beyond average intelligence and common wisdom, that which can understand the essence and origin of life, the original nature.  This cannot be the result of cognition.  Rather, it’s the great wisdom achieved through complete engagement in the cultivation of one’s body and mind.  It is this level of wisdom which is prajna.  The word wisdom, which we commonly use, cannot express the full extent of the meaning of the word prajna.  Therefore, it is not translated.

MeditationExpert.com is not a guru site. We are publishers whose only goal is to introduce you to the cultivation path from all sorts of  cultivation schools, and introduce to you the prajna for understanding the non-sectarian, non-denominational nature of that path. It is very difficult to come upon true cultivation teachings. Nevertheless, just knowing the path and beingintroduced to it because of enough merit is not enough — the efforts you must make for awakening must be made by the self and so are all up to you.

Use our site to help with your  efforts. That’s all we can do – offer.