Finally, one of the researchers on Gardasil speaks out:

http://thebulletin.us/articles/2009/10/25/top_stories/doc4ae4b76d07e16766677720.txt

In October 2007 — yes, two years ago, I told you to use common sense to figure this out,…and now my common sense view has proved correct despite all the PR and articles and “we’ve got to do something” claimed by Merck and the media. Remember when I wrote:

Gardasil, that Merck vaccine I warned you about several blog posts back, has already been linked to 5 deaths and over 2000  adverse reactions, bringing the “known total” of such problems to an astronomical amount.

This is happening to  little girls, mind you, with no risk of cancer at that age — and they’re still pushing it. Duh? Who’s getting compensated that they pushed this so strongly in spite of the logic against it and who’s not thinking straight? Which legislators should lose office?

Conventional wisdom – You want to risk vaccinating 11-12 year old girls (with practically zero risk of cervical cancer at that age)  with an untested vaccine with no long term studies of effects (such as causing cancer itself, or even the possibility of induced sterility) … and you want to do this when only 4000 people per year (out of 150 million women) die of cervical cancer and this is the initial response rate ?

I also told you about the recession WAY before the government and press did, once again from common  sense. IBM says THINK — don’t buy into the PR you see on TV. For instance, “the recession is over” — nonsense.

Another case — President Obama recently said we were in a state of national emergency for 1000 flu deaths. Now considering that over 25,000 people die per year from the flu, what’s that all about? Frankly, we have normal flu behavior — nothing to strike fear into the hearts of people, unless they don’t THINK.

Here’s what CBS uncovered about the coverup regarding the disaster hoopla  that never came …

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/10/27/Obama-Declares-Swine-Flu-Emergency.aspx

Other points you should think about — the Options Arm mortigage problem and commercial real estate problems are yet to hit next year, so how can you say a recession is over when THAT and the fact that unemployment is rising (and will probably hit 20% in some places by 2011 if those problems aren’t solved) exist … and how can you stimulate jobs if we’ve outsourced both service jobs (phone answerers, customer service, etc.) and MANUFACTURING, which is the basis of national wealth. Sorry, can’t be done. We’re in for a ride.

And do you really think that (1) health care costs will now go down and (2) insurance premiums will decline with the government’s new plan? You really believe that  because of the budget projection the Senators are so proud of? When was the last time a government program came in on budget (NASA, Medicaid, …)? A doctor who makes rounds in a hospital can stop and see you for one minute, mark his name down on the chart, and they’ll bill you $250. You’re never going to stop that behavior because that’s how he makes his money.

Another example: Surgeons have a minimum numbers of surgeries they must do each year in order to keep their license and hospital privileges … all designed to keep the money rolling in. So you might NOT need a knee operation, but there’s a tremendous pressure for a  knee surgeon to find 250 people to operate on to keep those rights even though far less actually need the surgery. That’s how it works.

Go read the Gardasil article again and what I predicted would happen … all 100% true. All from just common sense. Please understand profit motive causes corporations to push things people would not normally do, and yet employees within those organizations will do it because they don’t want to lose their jobs OR they just convince themselves that wrong is right or black is white (note in the article that the Gardasil researcher wanted to sleep at night) … like smoking doesn’t cause cancer, etc.

THINK. Expand that understanding to business, politics, and cultivation. Don’t get cheated. Money now controls so much of public policy so your chances of getting cheated are going to rise if there’s big money to be made by some group which can grab politicians and the airwaves and pro-whatever groups that say “We HAVE to do something.” Sometimes doing nothing is the best something because any other “something” would make things worst. Seems that’s the case with much of our interventionist foreign policy, which is now seeing continuining rises in blowback and backlash, and with the rise of the internet and modern communications in other countries where wrongs can be instantly telegraphed everywhere, we’re in trouble if we don’t change strategies.

 

In the Bible there’s the story of Daniel who was thrown in a fire pit and didn’t even get burned. That type of samadhi is illustrated by the Indian yogi in this video whom fire does not burn:

http://www.indiadivine.org/articles/464/1/The-Fire-Yogi-of-Tanjore/Page1.html

This is not the fire samadhi of Arhats, whereupon they can raise themselves into the air and transform their entire body into fire or water. The Tibetan master Gampopa once demonstrated   to a student his ability to sit in samadhi and turn himself into fire using a different fire samadhi (the equivalent water samadhi is mentioned in the Surangama sutra), and demonstration of mastery of the fire and water elements in terms of the “18 transformations of an Arhat” is something that Elijah of the Bible, Ananda and many other masters have illustrated. 

As to the ability to live  a super long life that Shakyamuni Buddha described, and also to keep living without eating  (inedia), this yogi demonstrates these principles:

http://www.indiadivine.org/articles/451/1/Rare-Footage-of-250-Year-Old-Devraha-Baba-in-Vrindavan/Page1.html

By setting his hut above the ground he doesn’t have to deal with people too much or get to close to them physically, something I mention that many masters choose. Inedia is an ability seen in saints of many taditions, including Christianity, because the saint can survive on chi alone due to his stage of cultivation.

To retain a long life this way, Taoism explains that he cannot eat but must keep his intestines clean, and Shakyamuni Buddha in the Surangama sutra explained that there were 10 ways you could accomplish this feat. Shakyamuni even asked four of his students to remain in the world using a particular  technique that is different from this type of dhyana.

On this past eleseminar, I mentioned that the 12 labors of Hercules were descriptions of stages of cultivation, something I go over with my Stages students. Here are some of the labors and what they correspond to:

1. Killing the Nemean Lion and then wearing its skin -  this means getting a hold of the yang chi of the body. In India, masters sometimes sit on the skins of tigers/lions (animals that represent yang) to show they’ve harnessed their yang chi.

2. The Lernean Hydra – the Greeks say that the hydra whose head cut off sprouts yet more means endless desires. Actually, when the yang chi starts clearing the chi channels, the dirty chi is pushed out over and over again like logs ejected from a hole one after another. it reminds you of a snake or insect  or worms coming out of a hole in series … it goes on for days and doesn’t stop until all the channels are empty, an inner chi body deflates and falls away like a robe, and then another inner chi body within it that was trapped rises into the air and dissapears. This stage  (higher than Hercules at this pint) is mentioned in the Bible in the Song of Songs.

Anyway, the ejection of dirty chi out of the channels in worm-like sections one after another is an apt description for the hydra (if you’ve experienced it, you’ll know). In the Journey to the West, a similar but quite different phenomenon is represented by Wu Kong who chops off his head and a new one always forms.

3. Catching the Hind of Ceryneia (a female red deer) – as I explain in my Atalanta Fugiens tape course, red is the color of rising yang chi, female stands for yin, and deer or sheep/ram   stand for yang chi while horses always stand for chi. The deer had golden horns (crown chakra) and hooves of brass metal (meaning the bottom of the feet are hard to open in cultivation). This is the stage of jing to chi cutivation that took Hercules one year to complete. Now that he has harnessed his yang chi and used it to open up his chi channels, it  takes him a year to transform the yin chi into yang chi of his body.

4. The Erymanthian boar – when the yang chi is rising, all sorts of bad behaviors come out linked to unpurified yang chi streams. Anger, irritation, violent tendencies etc. just come up and you almost can’t control them. Man is half animal and this is the animal nature of yang chi that starts getting transformed but is initially wild, coarse and unpurified like a boar. That’s why Hercules kills the centaurs (half human-half animal) over some wine (when men lose control) at this stage, meaning he purifies his base nature. He finally captures the boar by driving it into snow (purifying it).

Anger is one of the big problems at this stage — the Chinese medicine Lung Tan Xie Gan pill helps calm the liver at this stage when you’re irritated. When the throat chakra opens, you also have a tendency to violent thought behavior that needs to be purified because of the Devadatta chi route rushing upwards. The story of poison in Shiva’s throat illustrate this problem.

5. Augean stables – the course of two rivers are diverted to clean the stables located in-between them. The stables, filled with horse manure (horses always represent chi in almost all such stories, such as in Journey to the West wherein the Tang monk riding the horse meant he was cultivating his breath), represent the sushumna central channel. The two rivers diverted to clean the stables, filled with dirt, are naturally the left and right chi channels. As Tibetan Buddhism emphasize in some of its tantric techniques, you want to push their chi into the central channel to clear it out and open it. 9-bottled wind practice helps prepare for this.

If that happens, the central channel opens and it’s like Jacob’s dream in the Bible of angels ascending and descending from a ladder (when was the last time you saw angels needing a ladder?) – the central channel chi goes upwards, connected to the tu-mai/jen-mai circulation from front to back, and the left and right channel chi dribbles jing-chi downwards. It’s a complete plumbing system. The root chakra sends a pipe of chi up to the top of the head, and from there it heads downwards back to the root chakra. In the center of the body, the sushumna points upwards and connects with the other two channels, but the overflow of chi needs an escape route, and that’s the left and right channel. The other two “petals” of the root chakra lead to the bottom fo the feet.

6. Stymphian birds – Birds represent thoughts, so Hercules driving away their incessant presence and chatter means he finally reaches a stage of emptiness after all his channels clear. How did he do this? He used clappers made by the divine God of the Forge, Hephaistos, meaning the dan tian pumping of hsi or kundalini.

You see, these stories  always show the same stages of cultivation though represent them  differently in different schools.

7. Cretan Bull – I mentioned this before — two protrusions open up on the two sides of the head, like horns, and dirty chi is ejected from them. In Chinese cultivation, this is a stage called dragon bones or in Tibetan Buddhism, a stage of Yamantaka cultivation. The bull, being strong and male, is yang chi, of course. So Hercules is harnessing stronger yang chi now that he has some stage of emptiness and the central channel is open. Now the head chakras can start to open, especailly the ones in the back and front of the head as well. As the yang chi gets stronger and proceeds to the flesh, we get the following…

8. Horses of Diomedes – these flesh eating horses means the Big Knife Wind of Maitreya, a stage where the chi starts opening up the flesh of the bodoy. It’s very painful, extremely uncomfortable, very painful. The flesh of the body feels as if it’s being cut up by the chi opening the channels. The degree of pain depends on the robustness of your vitality. For instance, there are three degrees of kundalini — great, intermediate, small.

and so on it goes….

The Belt of Hippolyte – the subsidiary channels open, changing from yin chi to yang chi

The Cattle of Geryon – now the yang chi travels everywhere — all over the circulation of chi channels opened up …

etc.

Kudos to Nigel Thompson for this report on his 9-bottled wind progress and his gift of a scheduling form (see thelink) so that you can keep track of your practice. Normally people can hold their breath for about 40 seconds at the start and then extend from there, watching the second hand of a clock trying to hold it longer each time while reamining as relaxed as possible. Any muscle tightening defeats the entire practice. If the chi channels are being crimped, how can the chi go through them?

Remember, this is just part of an entire set of preparatory practices, or intensified practices to help prepare you to attain samadhi. The real practice is mind practice via vipassana (cessation-watching/witnessing) or surrender/letting go to reach emptines (ie. done in Christianity or Papaji’s method or Buddhism) or inquiry such as “who am I” … (popularized in Zen, Ramana Maharshi’s favorite, Nisargadatta, etc.). Nigel’s report and the link to his great gift:

Nigel (from Hong Kong) here.  As always thank you very much for your cogent,
practical, no-nonsense, down-to-earth yet comprehensive and cutting-edge
teaching.  The talk this morning (it was morning for me), was, once again,
extremely helpful.  I really appreciate your approach.

I’m writing because I have developed a simple practice log for 365 days of
9-Bottled Wind Breathing practice.  I thought I would send it to you in case
you know anyone else who might benefit from it.

It’s a simple, compact format that I have been finding useful for recording
and keeping track of my times.  I input each of my nine breaths and then do
a strike through on the day and date once the practice is completed.

I’m attaching it to this e-mail.  Hope it’s useful to somebody.

One interesting thing about the nine bottled-wind breathing: I can feel the
effects of it going on in my body for hours afterwards.

Today was the first time that I held my breath for 3 minutes.  And I can
still feel the effects 12 hours later.  Sort of soft squishy feeling around
the center of my chest.  Sometimes I feel a joyful, pleasurable endorphin
kind of sensation 1 or 2 hours later.  During practice I feel sensations in
my upper legs, head, and lower back. … Usually, by about 1:45
seconds my lungs begin to make an expansion-contraction movement of
attempted breathing.   Apart from this I am relatively relaxed, but there is
usually that movement, almost involuntary though sometimes I can relax and
stop it for a while.  I can usually push on for another 40 seconds or so
after that movement begins.  Is that okay? [Answer: yep -- that's how you expand it and lung capacity by about 30%]

The Daily Schedule Practice Sheet

 

All religions have warts. Over time, we tend to paste a veneer of sugar coated lovey dovey on top of the injustices in the world done by religion, especially when it is our own denomination.

Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism — in each of these religions (and others, of course)  barbaric acts  have been committed  and injustices performed and maintained in the name of that religion … especially when religion combines with politics and activities/laws/customs that maintain  the social order in a certain way that keeps a particular elite in society entrenched in money and power.

Tibetan Buddhism is no different. We romanticize the past, and tend to ignore the realities of what  really went on when it comes to religious matters in the past. An example from an article I long ago wanted to post just so you know what the real world is like:

http://www.swans.com/library/art9/mparen01.html

A good article — read carefully and decide for yourself. We have a saying that “measurement ends argument” but when the true numbers and statistics say something other than the orthodox religious line, people are submissively silent:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1

After all, no one wants to lose their job or be accused of being a radical or whatnot for pointing out the facts, even if the facts consistently tell a different story than what the money-wants and mission-seekers desire.

You must be a “true believer” to be invited to participate or stay in the game, so everyone stays silent even if there is dissent. When someone objects — such as the sane informed man who says “this war is not in our interest and will bankrupt us as well as decrease our security, let’s stay out of it” — they’re marginalized as much as possible, even if later they are proved right. You get no points for being a sage and speaking truth, only ridicule … especially if you are going against big money interests.

That’s how the world works. You should know that.

I always get a kick out of all these people who think Dec. 21, 2012 will be any different than any other day. Nothing will happen at all.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20091011/D9B8P09O0.html

The Chinese calendar, which has cycles too, simply starts a new cycle when it reaches a point where the cycles within it line up. Does it mean anything? No.

What you should worry about is the next wave of Option Arms mortgages set to reset next year and stay high into 2011. The recession over? That’s pep talk to drive up consumer confidence.  You can read about the “options arms” problem — which they are keeping quiet to keep up the confidence — if you just do a google search on it. That’s what’s going to hit because it’s bigger than the sub-prime problem and on top of that is the commercial real estate problem. Mums the word from Washington on all these. THIS is serious. Mayan calendar — get your head on the ground.

To see how serious the Options Arms problem is, the famous Credit Swiss chart of this problem can be seen below:

www.butthenwhat.com/?p=3205

The gist of a LONG TERM economic recovery comes down to this — new jobs, but from manufacturing, not services. But manufacturing has been outsourced and is not likely to come back to the US. You can talk all you want about the service sector taking up the slack but economies aren’t built that way. In the history of the past 500 years, countries got rich by switching from raw material -agricultural-commodity production (including timber, mining, fishing, etc.) to manufacturing, and they protected manufacturing through tariffs, quotas, subsidies, etc. to get it started. You did not get rich by losing your manufacturing industry. Every country that did that became poor.

Read that again — historically, if you lose your manufacturing sector, you become POOR. And that means the US ….

If you gain manufacturing in your country, real wages go up and poverty decreases. If you lose it the country goes into poverty. It’s almost a rule. The reason is simple:

Agricultural/commodity production is characterized by diminishing returns — as you produce more, your margins go down over time. Plus, being commodities your sales  compete against everyone else on pure price, which tends to drive down the price and margins. You can only make it up in volume, but volume makes you even more subject to diminishing returns. So as one economist put it, by basing your country on commodity production, you produce yourself into poverty over time as mines get depleted, fisheries are fished out, timber gets cut down, agricultural land  loses fertility or requires increasingly expensive inputs, etc. The next extra unit of production always costs more than the previous ones. You produce yourself into poverty as you deplete your resources.

For manufacturing, however, as volume grows your margins increase –  manufacturing is characterized by increasing returns to scale. So the 100,000th handheld calculator or mobile phone costs much less to build then the first. And if it’s an innovative product, sales grow, too. Multiply (increasing sales volume) times (increasing margins) brings WEALTH. That’s the rule. That’s the way countries got rich.

In fact, the countries over the past fifty years that thumbed their noses at the misleading economic advice of the world bank, IMF and so forth to choose the well demonstrated road of tariffs and protections (India, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc.) are now rich whereas those that listened to “increase your commodity production, etc.” (Ecuador, etc.) are poor and will remain that way until they change strategies. You have to protect your flourishing industries before you allow free trade in, otherwise it will kill them off and the high paying jobs (and ripple effect) they foster.

It’s as simple as that.

Commodity Production:

Decreasing Margins * Increasing[???] Volume (subject to price competition)

Industrial Production:

Increasing Margins * Increasing Volume = Growing Wealth

Guess which builds wealth? You can see it from the formulas. The service sector only thrives if manufacturing is there to demand-pull its services. Otherwise, no jobs. And the financial services industry CANNOT pull the slack without a higher value added manufacturing sector. Never could, never will. That’s an intellectual fallacy, just as it’s an intellectual fallacy to believe in communism … something that suckered in many intellectuals.

If people are encouraged to purchase things within an economy based on DEBT then the economic decline can be tempered until the debt burden is too much. History also shows that’s a  terrible way to design an economy, and such a structure gets readily destroyed after a severe downturn which ALWAYS happens due to the banking system and too much debt. Go check countless stock market crashes all the way to the 1700’s and you’ll find a problem being too much debt. Never let the bankers control the economy. To make more money they increase debt to a load that cannot be repaid and then a recession or depression comes. It’s almost always debt, and the same pattern was repeated this time around by giving loans to people who could not afford it, and selling them off because you didn’t want to keep them. It wasn’t a failure of capitalism, but a failure of regulation.

So President Obama wants to stimulate jobs? What jobs? Manufacturing is gone – the jobs that count. Outsourced jobs will never come back because they are cheaper elsewhere and they’ve already been switched over, so why would they come back? Construction jobs are not a long term solution … and to construct what that will increase incomes? Like wars, we spend money but get no financial remuneration in return…you spend and spend and spend but get nothing back but just become poorer. 

The only long run solution is to craft policies to restore manufacturing once again because that creates wealth and jobs.

Over the next two years, as the economy hurts more and more, that’s what I’m worried about. Long run sustainability of the economy. Let’s not go into all the issues. Just forget all these 2012 notions. In 2012 we will still be bearing the brunt of an economic downturn because of multiple problems hitting us from all sides — a “perfect storm.”

And US hegemony-supremacy? We’ve put an end to our #1 spot, and it has nothing to do with the spirit of the American people. China is now the manufacturing center of the world, or becoming it — not the US. The US has a shrinking middle class that drives consumption, whereas it’s growing in China, Russia, India and Brazil. Those are first time buyer markets whereas ours is a replacement market for most items, or a market that only grows based on home construction. We’re overextended in debt; China and India are not.

Furthermore,  other countries want to drop the dollar as the reserve currency. We are engaged in trillion dollar wars and uncountable money pumping (which has paid for those wars, but countries won’t allow that free pass any more if they drop the dollar standard) that will turn into serious inflation within five years … make no mistake about it. The Fed will be able to  handle this coming inflation with as much expertise as they’ve shown in predicting a recession, which means near zero capability. If you trust the government for your investment advice, you are bound to go bankrupt.

Go search on the history of Rome and you’ll find many parallels, including the inability to pay for wars on so many fronts (especially when they bring in no tribute). You’re darn right Obama better re-examine our role in Afghanistan, a region no Empire has successfully been able to handle in centuries — including the Russians and England more recently. The conflux of all these things taken together — the perfect storm –   is what you should worry about this generation– not some date in the Mayan calendar. Only if Congress starts crafting policies that foster the return of manufacturing at home and the return of jobs to US shores (a stimulus package will not do that at all — pray tell me how it will) can we even begin to dream of our Clinton-peak in world predominance.

The last part of the Surangama Sutra mantra is the key heart of the mantra, and the mantra people recite to help get over sexual desire:

 

e na li

pi she ti

pi la ba she la

two li

pan two pan two ni

ba she la bang ni pan

hu syin du lu yung pan

swo pe he [soha]