Simon V.

Coagulated lightning house parties, serving electric beer; write your own ticket for admission.

I had a dream on the verge of Bush’s first election that was very negative. I am philosophical about this, in the sense that warmongering is nothing new; and there have always been the enclaves of practicioners who stubbornly sweated it out, who indeed took advantage of the situation to spur them to even greater efforts.

Carl Jung was of the…[Read more]

: )

This list has a long history of people stepping into more sober and/or lighthearted dialogues with crass attacks; I jumped to the conclusion, not being familiar with you, that it was one of those, which it seemed to be apart from the laughtrack at the bottom. I also considered, after laying into you, that it might be someone immitating you, which…[Read more]

: )
Ahem, well then… Here, let me help you put your arm back on that bleeding stump…

But y’know, there has been a lot of ‘joking’ on this website which has precluded more civil forms of discourse, which joking at this point I have very little patience for. Still, I haven’t been keeping tabs on things and so haven’t been paying the…[Read more]

Actually my meditation background began at the age of nine in Zen and the martial arts, and has continued from there as a lifetime of hard study and practice. I have used drugs and do indeed consider them an unsatisfactory shortcut that is no substitute for discipline. Instead of curtailing the innocent banter of others out of hand, I suggest…[Read more]

Well, you are the back door yourself–your own intimate sense of presence is an escape hatch, a smiling inner sun oasis. All the rest is fun and games with meditative arts. But I bet you have your own answer to the back door question, and I’m just shining a flashlight into a fire. : )

Simon

Birth shock. Dropping the birth bomb (of peace! happiness! and having fun!).
Sometimes I’m tempted to think dreams are my real guru, but probably they’re just an intermediary between me and the deepest, grooviest guru of them all, and I’m always wary of deceiving myself. Still, they are Notes from the Underground, as one dream suggested,…[Read more]

Uncannily I had a dream this morning involving a flood in New York; but it may have been in relation to my imminent though unconsciously formed intent to check out what’s up with the tao forum, which intent may have brushed up against the undercurrents of your visioning. Ahem, perhaps that’s a bit convoluted. Still, it seems remarkable. A woman…[Read more]

I found Energy Medicine at a local university library. Excellent stuff, really lucid.

Interestingly, Christopher Hyatt of New Falcon, the publishing house that is a bastion of Leary-related thought (including Robert A. Wilson of course), has increasingly moved into energy work himself, heavily influenced by Israel Regardie, who was a dedicated…[Read more]

Points taken.

Apparently he influenced alchemy… (but no, the book doesn’t really say much about that, as I recall, though we know he made lots of people very uncomfortable/enlightened them).
I do highly recommend that book–I just bumbled across it in the library.

Simon

Nagarjuna, of course, was not Tibetan.

His use of ‘sunyata’ was unique to him (though he was influenced by tradition, as are we all); later, it was elaborated upon, not just by Tibetans, but by Indians; therefore, the Tibetan idea of ‘sunyata’, is not necesarily the same as Nagarjuna’s original idea of same. Indeed, the very deceptiveness of…[Read more]

Hi Rex

Thanks for the link.
It would be great if someone translated those alchemy texts he wrote eh? Maybe they have; I’ll look around.
What you say about his use of the negative method sounds right on to me: escaping the surface language mind’s tendency to become identified with its own-cum-collective constructions. It is actually what he…[Read more]

Thanks for the links, especially the book link: I’ve long been interested in learning about this method in detail, which is usually dispatched in a few words in written sources I’d so far encountered.

Simon

Hi Wendy

I don’t if you’ve delved much into the fourth way material, but finding information that is not incredibly dense and hard to put totether into a coherent practice format has been a tall order, so this new text I mentioned is quite a feat I think; it is itself a display of some kind of enlightened poise, so elegantly and coherently is…[Read more]

Hey there,

I’ve been and still am quite busy with various things.

I got into studying the Gurdjieff material in the late eighties, upon picking up P.D. Ouspensky’s book, ‘The Fourth Way’. Perhaps the main reason I got much out of that extremely arcane text was because I had a good, straitforward yoga-martial arts-zen teacher (with a sufi…[Read more]

Steiner says a lot about Saturn, and I couldn’t pretend to summarise it.
But certainly he initially presents it as a kind of beginning of a primal differentiation, primal movement, which he characterises as ‘heat’, which seems similar to the buddhist idea of the initial ‘skandha’ of ‘situatedness’–but yes, then ‘Saturn’ becomes something else…[Read more]

I think you would find Rudolf Steiner’s ‘An Outline of Occult Science’ interesting in this regard.

Simon

I agree with freeform: Your misery can be a great opportunity.
Nietsche fiercely protected his misery!

Suffering is what really has driven the intensity of my practice, what has yielded the firmest, least self-deluding gains: Actual ability to change state through intent, to overcome errant patterns decisively. Suffering can also bring…[Read more]

No problem. Without you there would be no universe to fall of off.