On Eating Meat, beliefs in Karma, and nature of true self.

Best quote on this topic, by Indian mystic Meher Baba:

Question: Is it important to be vegetarian in order to be spiritual?

“What comes out of your mouth is far more important than what goes into it.”

my note: vegetarianism (and reincarnation theory) in HInduism is fairly late development, not mentioned in the early Vedas.

I personally don’t believe its wise to mix diet and religion. You can always take the tantric Buddhist position – which would probably incude the Dalai Lama – that by eating the animal with love and acceptance, you transform its karma, and let it take a ride on your own journey of transformation, possibly taking its essence higher than if it was left uneaten.

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Fajin,
I am beginning to get a more clear picture of you. A serious seeker, one willing to leave no stone unturned, but one who accepts the sometimes rigid structures offered by Mahayan Buddhism. (see my notes under Practice section on true and false self). It also sounds like you have the fervor of a recent convert, but I could be wrong. Saturn returns are very tricky, as we try to find our new earth.

Does your embrace of Mahayana include acceptance of the Chan Buddhist notions of Hell, and the hell-realms that non-believers are karmically cast into? I’ve run into Complete Perfection taoists who accepted these beliefs, and I think it unfortunately ended up driving their practice of alchemy. FEar of going to hell, if they didn’t practice. Hope you don’t fall into that one. Tight kidneys are tough on alchemical process.

I don’t think you really answered Alexander’s clear post on the nature of shadow mind and the danger of suppressing a part of oneself as “false”. And you dance around other questions about the root and the blossom being one – that sounds great, but practically speaking is irrelevant to someone who is physically only experiencing the blossoming of thoughts and feelings here in this plane in this body.

It’s easy to reply that once you are totally enlightened you will be free from any such false self, but that begs the question and put the cart before the horse. Rather than thinking of thoughts and feelings as false karma, I think most people prefer to see them as expression which can be directed in directions that are false or true to an underlying soul.

Again, your sect of Mahayana subscribes to an essential soul theory, but puts it far away in another plane, after one has achieved the tenth level of Bodisattva/Immortal. There is a distant parallel in theory, but the practice and methodology of attaining it are completely different. Unless you become a Chan Buddhisti practicing what is essentially re-packaged Taoist alchemy, which i suspect will end up being your path for at least a while, if your teacher Hu’s website is an indication of his teachings.

I am not sure why you interpret my teachings on Fusion to be Atlantean rather than where I got them, from Mantak Chia’s teacher One Cloud. I dont’ introduce any Atlantean methods until Greatest kan & li.

But the gist of the alchemical approach is to harnass the chi in the negative emotions and thoughts and use its power to cultivate – not to toss emotions and thoughts off as bad karma and as useless obstacles that somehow just “happened” out of the necessity of being a human.

I just find it totally strange that EVERY human being seems to have such “bad” karma as to be forced to have emotions and thoughts.

I think you will get much further by cultivating the original innocent feelings that arise from incarnating into a body, and to cultivate those without the predjudice of fear, which converts those original feelings into reactive feelings.

Does that make “fear” false? Not at all – our first and most basic reflex as an infant is “fear of falling”, i.e. being dropped. Perfectly functional, nothing false about it. What makes it false is allowing that fear to be made chronic or to be manipulated by others for their own ends that do not serve the whole. That is not a pre-natal vs. post-natal distinction as you suggest – it is a distinction that arises within the post-natal.

Smiling to True Fear,
Michael