'The Secret' vs. the Buddha (Page 2 of 2)

I have a lot of blockages around my heart area. My dad was an alcoholic growing up, and my family argued constantly everyday. I really loved my family a lot and it hurt me so much. Life had to continue and I realized I had to accept these things and that they were a part of life. This is when I started suppressing my emotions. I now feel very little and it is not good at all. I don't know who I am. I am working hard to open my heart. I figure getting in a loving relationship and focusing as much energy into my heart area will do the trick. I was so self conscious my whole life that I missed out on countless opportunities to open my heart. I'm glad I have awoken to this now. I must agree, ascension definitely lies in the heart. There are of course other things one needs to ascend like awareness , and knowledge, but without a heart, ascension won't work.

I pulled this off of wikipedia.

"Fullfilment feeling and the heart chakra

According to contemporary buddhist teacher Tarthang Tulku, the heart chakra is very important for the feeling of existential fullfilment.

As result of energetic imblance between chakras arises an almost continuous feeling of dissatisfaction. When the heart chakra is agitated, people lose touch with feelings and sensations, and that breeds the sense of dissatisfaction. That leads to looking outside for fullfilment.

When people live in their heads, feelings are secondary, they are interpretations of mental images that are fed back to the individual. When awareness is focused on memories of past experiences and mental verbalizations, the energy flow to the head chakra increases and the energy flow to the heart chakra lessens. Without nurturing feelings of the heart a subtle form of anxiety arises which results in the self reaching out for experience.

When the throat chakra settles and energy is distributed evenly between the head and the heart chakras, one is able to truly contact one's senses and touch real feelings.[9]"

If your living in the mind like I have for a long time, now is the time to attract and create experiences that foster love. Time is ticking.

I am not a buddhist and i also have some doubts about Tibetan practices.
but if we are to take into account recent research, by meditating for long periods, Tibetan Monks and Lamas have profoundly changed the way their brain is working. The research shows that they can take negative and destructive emotions and convert them to positive understanding. New areas of the brain lighting up when they engage their awareness in meditation.
Can you say that?
Or is it too much bother to sit still for years at a time, you prefer to wait till "the new earth comes"?

Let me tell you something-
If there is a new earth coming...if it is different from this one... it will be due to people like these monks who are willing to give up stuff that has zero impact on reality and do what it takes to radically transform themselves and light their mind from the inside.
It will be because people are willing to practice wisdom.

Wisdom is wisdom no matter what method or tradition is the vehicle used to arrive at it.
Any system of belief is only a system... it is "individuals" who arrive at awakening or understanding within themselves, despite the "tradition", not because of it.
Throw out everything that has been used previously? why? because we are in a "new age"?
Because God said so?
That's the oldest "tool" yet...daddy will fix it for us, reasoning like children.

"The old earth" is what we have for the moment,
until we learn why things aren't working we will repeat the same mistakes all over again.
What we need is wisdom gained from experience! not a new set of illusions.
If you survive into "the new earth", you will have been a witness to what went wrong here on the old earth.
You will bring that history and experience with you inside your mind/memory if you are still a physical being.
Apparently you wish to be a physical being otherwise there would be no wish for survival.
If you have no "wish for survival" then you have no problems. You are free.

You want to get rid of ancient wisdom that may have existed for many thousands of years, handed down from teacher to student for millenia? If it's old... out it goes.
Isn't that a little bit arbitrary?
Ok what about language and math? those are old tools.
why not throw them out too?
scientific understanding and rigorous theory and testing...  old old old.
You have to admit that excluding something because it is already established is a bit impossible and ridiculous.
Very little on earth is new.... in fact exactly nothing substantial has changed so far. New products. same old hype.
Men still kill each other and hate because of political, religious and racial differences.
So someone tells you that a new earth is coming maybe 2012 or so and you just accept that because you feel this world is unfair or unjust.

Now we have a new dogma.
Apparently we are to "open our heart chakra" to be whole and begin to feel non-dysfunctional.
That is just another idea added to the on billion ideas we already have.

The way of truth includes everything that we are... MIND BODY+HEART... BEING and NON-BEING
sorry that it cannot be reduced to a 2 week course
ascension is an idea too.... all human ideas

Just being here is not an idea but have you tried it?
or is that too simple?

You will figure this out with your head.
That is what has caused this imbalance in the first place
To enjoy this miracle of life and all the beauty that is inside and outside
thinking must stop
stop trying to find anything but what is here right now.
belief is a red herring and produces violence and suffering , logic is too cold and makes us isolated,
just being a heart is an idea too and you will love them as they make you dig your own grave and tell you to get in it like in Darfur?

conscious suffering is what meditation... or just plain paying attention to "what is", is!
not avoiding suffering is exactly what brings it to an end
you turn around and face it...you say ok do your worst....look death (Which is an idea mostly, like everything else we believe in)
in the eye squarely.
It is not easy
it may be simple but it takes effort to get to faster than light speed.
once you are aware of what you are not...a human...an animal...a brain or a heart.
Then you can effortlessly ride the cushion of awareness that is your birthright
don't give up.... nobody said it would be easy
but it's not necessarily hard either. It is what it is

Lono... do you have a specific example or do you just want to argue ?

That the spirit leaves an established religion is usually true
in most case in a fairly short period of time now.
That we turn to communication and more direct methods
is why we are here but that does not mean
everything established is rubbish
Tibetan practice may still have some validity
who are we to say it doesn't?
too easy to say that it does not.

what are you refering to in concrete terms?

what are you looking for that you find missing in something "old"
and please tell me what is new?

feedbaxlow wrote:

I am not waiting for 2012, I did not say throw out ancient wisdom, I said nothing about the heart chakra; you are inferring all of those things in your vent, which I would say to you, what nerve was touched in you?
Monks practicing to change their brain patterns is one thing, yes, prolonged meditation, chanting and so forth does do that, and by the way I have practiced meditation, and I am not "New Age," if you'd bothered to read my post with an open mind you would have inferred that instead of your knee-jerk reactionary rant.
Much of what I spoke of was the institution of Buddhism and Buddhist practice, which I can assure you that I have seen first hand, and in action. I have come to the conclusion that some of these practices do not enhance my body/mind connection and I am in a stage of my life where I believe that they adversely affected my brain chemistry. Also, I have seen too much hollowness and immorality being justified in the name of Buddhism being practiced by Western practitioners, and I have first-hand involvement in a North American Buddhist cult. I have seen the shadow of Buddhism, and I also know some of the darker history of it and the monasteries and so forth, and I have seen people going gaga over it and lamas and so forth, so I think that I can say that it is just as much a fantasy to idealize it as ridiculous new age fantasies about being rescued by the Ascension and all of that. The main thing, IMO, right now, is for people trying to spiritually evolve in this dense materialistic world is to survive with hope that we can all emerge into a better more spiritualized world. I have been to Nepal, the poorest country in the world, and many of the people are deeply spiritual who practice Buddhism and Hinduism, but the duality of materialism is as thick as anywhere else. Rich Asian businesspeople pay monks to do pujas and prayers for them and all of that, supporting the monasteries, and then do whatever they like in terms of exploiting the poor, driving their enemies into the ground, adultery, etc. etc., so don't hold up Buddhism to me as any ideal. Yes, monasteries hold a space in concentration for non-aggression and give comfort to the people with rituals and prayers, but so does the Catholic workers organizations, liberation theology and all of that. You will find good people trying to do good in any field of endeavor, and power-brokers using people in any area. I don't idolize monks because they have achieved changes in brain entrainment, many monks are sent by their familiies to be monks as a kind of tithe, or some lamas have families and pass the family career down to their sons. In general Buddhist nuns are not treated very well and are worked into the ground with none of the privileges of monks, lamas and rinpoches.
That is my two cents, feedbaxlow, and you can take it any way you want to-lala

lala,
Well, of course that all rings true.
Thanks for taking the time to get down to cases and specifics.
I do appreciate that. i too have seen the distortions that have happened to Buddhism in the west and the damage that power structures and hierachies can do in any discipline or organization.
Mostly what got my interest was:
The statement about "old tools, old earth, old ways" not being applicable in the "new earth".
lala didn't try to defend it except to point out the obvious problems with any organized practice over time.
i've heard the "old ways" meme before and wanted to explore it.
The principles behind all these disciplines are pretty much different ways of reaching/teaching the same truth.
The thread that all share is opening the mind (or heart if you like) and testing what is said by the sages or teachers for oneself... to see if it is true or not. They mostly vary in emphasis and ways of daily expression and practice.
A standard disclaimer about "old" or "new" is misleading because the laws of the universe operate outside the limits of time.
It is we rather, after much suffering here, that may now have a chance to come more fully alignment with those laws.
It is not the earth or time that is changing but we ourselves as a group that make up the prevailing consciousness on the planet that is changing.
That we must define for ourselves what meaning there is to our experience here has no more importance now than it ever has.
Buddhas and timeless balance/perfection has always existed on some level.
However the dynamics on earth may be different due to the numbers involved and various things that we are not really able to fully comprehend yet.
What probably "got me" about it is that it sounds like an assumption that we can reject the principles behind ancient paths... and have to find a way to "reinvent the wheel" for it to be valid.

this is a such a common idea that it hardly merits more comment here. The meme has probably fully saturated everyone here.

I don't mind what anybody thinks *Lono*, or have any prescribed ideas or techniques.
Ironically, the truth is always fresh and new, precisely because it cannot be contained in forms. Any teacher worth their salt in any tradition (or freethinker) knows that. But if there are blank statements made that don't ring true, i will certainly want to explore them more to see what can be seen in them.

feedbaxlow wrote:

Well yes, it is all grist for the mill; I think what I found the most not working for me was the old energy of these practices. But I also question whether it is the truth, isn't the dharma just an old meme too? How can we know unless we seek to go beyond what has been handed down for thousands of years? To me, the truth part of it lies in the teaching that energy is real and is the basis for all form. I believe in the individual soul, which most Eastern practices on the more sophisticated levels, do not. For instance, in some Tibetan Buddhist teachings they say the unpurified astral energy shoots through the top of the head and fragments at the time of death and the other stuff returns to source, then again they believe in the wheel of time and or reincarnation and high lamas (like the Dalai) lama returning as the same person over and over again. Then there are the more popular religious teaching for the masses which emphasize devotion and precepts and all of that. Zen Buddhism is different because it strives for a strong center (hara) and uncluttered thinking, it doesn't have all of the pomp and ritual of the other. Mostly rituals involve tapping into the collective unconscious that originated with the particular sect, so I have decided I do not want to connect with that particular set of memes. Someone stated on another thread that old rituals and devotions are not appropriate for modern people, and I believe that this is true. It is possible to meditate and not tap into a religious meme, and that is where I want to go with my own meditation. It is hard to stay awake in this culture and not be lulled into a hypnoid trance by one thing or another, including religious trances, pop culture trances, alternative culture trances, mainstream, etc. etc. So, for me the exploration of truth is to stay awake and not be lulled into anything, but to see it as clearly as I can and act from my own center.-lala

This rings true to me.  The story told to the rabble is "equal opportunity" but I've seen that if one does a bit better than expected (I've also done worse than expected in other cases) one gets into very difficult situations.

I think these religions or spiritual practices have value and the place to be is on the bottom, or in the middle, as a learner who is more or less anonymous to the top level heirarchy.  At the top, they use the practice to attract "customers" to their "business".  I've seen the same thing in Yan Xin Qigong which I was involved with in the early '90s: power games, money for the top guy, and "advanced" methods that don't smell quite right.

I read one or two Buddhist sutras and they were very nice.  That's where the value is.  As Jesus Christ said, pray in  your closet.  Doing it in the public organization is very likely to be corrupted.