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March 14, 2005 at 1:34 pm #3391singing oceanParticipant
Greetings,
I was present at Huashan, in China in 2002 and in a nearby cave when the so-called incident of losing jing to fox spirits happened.
1) I did NOT encounter any fox spirits, I was not violated, and I took full responsibility for my own spiritual inexperience (at the time) for trying to absorb higher level energy from meditation caves that had been used for over 1000 years. After losing the jing, it did not really bother me and I was able to go on with my meditations.
2) Even if there were fox spirits, don’t you suppose that if they need to feed off human jing to survive, they might be lower astral beasts, and not advanced beings?
3) from my current experience, early heaven is FORMLESS, and I have never seen any beings there other than pure consciousness. If you are often visited by beings with form, do you think that they are high spiritual beings?
4) Have you ever tried going into a christian church and tried to convert or convince them that they should all be buddhists? Good luck! When someone who claims to be spiritual feels the need to impose or argue that their view is better than another, maybe they are not satisfied with their own practice, otherwise they would leave others alone. Either that or it is just an intellectual powertrip to see who can make a better semantic argument. This reminds me of Israel/palestine conflict, or bettter yet, the protestants and catholics in Ireland, or maybe even america vs. the middle east. Any spirituality there?
5) I do not remember you talking about buddhism when you were at Huashan which was three years ago. so maybe you have had three years experience in your buddhist practice? How many years did Buddha sit under the Bodhi Tree? And how many years experience do you have in daoist alchemy to be able to criticize it?
6) The diamond sutra (Vajracchedika Prajnaparamita), of which I have a copy (translated by Thich Nhat Hanh from the Pali) was originally written in PALI, does master Nan read sanskrit or pali? or only classical Chinese from which the original was translated into? you might want to remember that Gautama Buddha came from India.
7) the practice of the diamond sutra is concerned with mental observation, and there are some very useful things in there. It is actually similar to the “bright Heart practice” that Chen Yu Ming described as a prerequisite for daoist monks to learn before being admitted to the monastery.
“all composed things are like a dream,
a phantom, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.
that is how to meditate on them,
that is how to observe them.” chap.32 (diamond sutra)But what about the non-composed things? like the formless states? and how do we integrate the physical and non-physical?
I don’t know enough about buddhism to argue about it, but may read a few texts here and there if I ever feel the need to. right now I don’t.
In elementary schools, when kids are being self centered and obnoxious, and the teacher asks them to be quiet, the teacher is right 99% of the time, because they are looking towards the cooperation and benefit of the whole group.
“Subhuti, if someone were to offer an immeasurable quantity of the seven treasures to fill the worlds as infinite as space as an act of generosity, the happiness resulting from that virtuous act would not equal the happiness resulting from a son or a daughter of a good family who gives rise to the awakened mind and reads, recites, accepts, and puts into practice this sutra, and explains it to others, even if only a gatha of four lines. In what spirit is this explanation given? Without being caught up in the signs, just according to things as they are, WITHOUT AGITATION…”
-Gautama Buddha, diamond sutraProverbs:
“a man of violence will come to a violent end”
-Lao Zi“Teach people as best you can, if they do not listen, let adversity teach them”
-Ethiopian ProverbHave a great day!
March 14, 2005 at 2:46 pm #3392thelernerParticipantno txt 🙂
Peas
Michael
i thought it was insightful
March 14, 2005 at 6:51 pm #3394Michael WinnKeymasterSinging Ocean,
I love the name you’ve chosen. The Ocean of chi is always singing to us,
if we listen. You raise a lot of excellent points in your post which I am fully in agreement with.Particularly true: the need to convince others to switch paths reveals an innate insecurity on the spiritual level. Like Shining Arrow has already posted, it is irrelevant to me what Path people proclaim they have taken – all that is important is that they are getting completion at the soul level. The names people use to describe themselves don’t survive the transition to other planes.
Plato is not going to respond to you, even though you were his roommate in China, because he already has heard from so many people who had positive life changing experiences in the caves that he can no longer blame his fox experience on the cave itself. However, I think he is still mad at his former teacher (me), feeling that I should have better prepared him for the cave.
This last trip 2004 I sat in his cave for a meditation before finalizing which students would stay in it. I had no knowledge of Plato’s problem, he never confided it to me. But I want to say that the chi in the cave was so powerful that I myself had concerns about the students ability to handle it. One woman who stayed in the cave (with the young man whose story I already posted) did leave a day early, saying she was full, but it was a very positive experience.
But inexperience can protect a meditator from absorbing the high frequencies present. Plato was undoubtedly opened up to these higher frequencies by his work with internal alchemy, even though he was not yet mature enough with the practice to ground them.
So I do not think he should feel any shame or blame for being over powered by it, and perhaps temporarily losing his center. His experience with the fox spirits has undoubtedly accelerated his path and his finding a personal solution for his very common male problem – wrestling with a suppressed inner female.
But Plato’s struggle is Everyman’s struggle. We need to trust the wisdom of the Tao that everyone is getting the lesson that they are best able to receive at each moment. Plato can rest assured that I am not interested in suppressing his experience, and recognize his virtue in sharing it. I will make sure future meditators in the caves are aware of his experience.
I am in the process of developing a non-secretive, open approach to Taoist spiritual science. But it is an experiment to share these powerful tools via audio tapes. It necessarily means there is not the same supervision as happened in the past, with one-to=one transmission. Ideally, the tapes would be followed up by live retreat time, and serve as prepatory material.
The live retreats are far more powerful, both from the group chi field and from the large amount of chi kung practiced between meditations that is not on tape. If Plato had had more live practice, I think he would have had a different experience in the cave. Or a single private session to release the blockage at the jing level would have speeded his process.
So I hold the space for him to release all blame for his experience.
Experience just is.May the Five Tones of hte Tao sing within Us,
MichaelMarch 15, 2005 at 9:48 am #3396voiceParticipantHi,
I think Michael said that you live in Western Canada. I grew up out there and am visiting my sister in Vancouver this summer.
If you are out west, and if you are interested in getting together, please drop me an email: clarsen3 at cogeco.ca
Chris
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