I found this bulletin on myspace. It is absolutely brilliant. It might be hard to understand or care about to read for some. But to others, the information will bring immeasurable benefit. Its kind of long, but worth the read. I'm going to print it out and memorize it for myself. Love Stephanie :love: P.S Here's his website if you want to learn more. Then central message is fantastic. http://homepage.mac.com/davkobza/Menu24.html Mar 22, 2006 3:04 AM Subject: Rules For Practice of Yoga Body: I felt that this book of rich ancient wisdom that sits on my shelf and reminds me of the higher truths is a crime not to be sharing all the time. Although this is one of the higher teachings and perhaps doesn't make sense out of context I'll risk it for the sake of all beings: Before you learn the methods of Yoga, it is extremely important that you learn the manner of Yogis. These simple rules are of the utmost importance: Keep before the mind the fact that you have firmly decided to reform your life and to transform your conscious and subconscious mind into superconscious mind. Enrich yourself with every possible truth and renounce untruth and prejudice as soon as possible. Every mental and physical condition is in accordance with the judgement of supreme consciousness and supreme nature. The child may weep if an operation is needed but parents decide to do the operation to save the child. In the same way, you are unhappy and full of anxiety, but this operation on your mind is permitted by nature to save you from destruction. Even death is nothing but the greatest operation; after this operation, old age is removed and the Self is incarnated again as a child. Ponder over it and be free from all cares of body and mind. An unhappy and restless mind cannot concentrate. Make every possible effort to make your mind happy and peaceful. The standard of admission in Yoga is a peaceful and happy mind. Increase the atmosphere of expectancy and remove melancholy from the mind. Believe in yourself and in your mind, and that you will obtain the supreme state. If you fail to obtain some positive results in your practice, do not lose confidence. Owing to your inexperience, you are not yet able to recognize the positive higher changes in your mind. You may have the traditional habit of looking at the back of your mind. Make it a habit to stand as a witness in every mental activity. Thus, you will save yourself from being the agency of mind and become the guide to your mind as an instructor. Don't play with your mind as if you were a servant and an agent. If you do so, you will face calamity. Truth in speech, simplicity in manner, and firmness of mind are infallible divine instruments to certain success. You must concentrate your mental waves with utter and complete confidence in yourself and in the nature in you and around you, which have manifested innumerable suns, stars, and planets. Don't be nervous; a nervous attitude may interfere with your performance. Know this: Mental and natural powers are looking to you to give you something that you have never seen before. They want to enrich you with divine and eternal powers. Eternal forces are serving you constantly, whether you know it or not. Before birth and after death, where no material things can go with you, these natural forces are serving you. Wherever you go, they are there before you. Remember, you can do anything and everything that has been done by any great Yogi or Saint in human history. By your performance you can become a son of God, and by the highest performance you can become one with God. Nothing is impossible to the mind. One wave of the mind is always skeptical of everything. Do not consider this wave as an ordinary one. Try to solve it in a right way through your instructor and practice; otherwise skepticism will wreck your performance. Here or hereafter there is no success or happiness for the skeptical. Always, from the beginning of your practice, it will try to create doubt and suspicion in your practice, but after a few days of practice these mental waves will be the first to applaud your success in concentration. These mental waves of skepticism at first refuse to recognize anything. They recognize facts: nothing but facts. No philosophy, no religion, no gods or God is recognized by these waves. They recognize only direct experience. Therefore, to conquer these waves, practice constantly. They recognize your successful experiementation. When these waves perceive directly the eternal electromagentic current of supreme consciousness, they recognize your feat and bcome your fast friend. When you have mastered your skeptical nature and obtained the right method of autosuggestion (dhyana), you will have powerful mental waves in your favor. Now those waves which are weaker and still present in your mind cannot disturb you because you have seen the truth. Now you are not only the master of your mind, but you are going to become the master of all material minds. Practice of Yoga will open the third eye in you, which is called "Yoga dristi," or "divya dristi," or "divine eye." Demand complete silence from your material mind and command it completely. When you achieve this control, nothing can disturb your practice. Do your practice seriously. If you do it lightly, you may lose faith, confidence, and enthusiasm in yourself. When you see any extraordinary vision, feel no fear; otherwise you may have a nervous breakdown, or you may harbor fear of ghosts or of death in your mind. No harm can befall you. Go into deepest experimentation. Place your body in a comfortable position and soon you will magnetize your body. Your mind will soon be enlightened. There is one other peculiar disturbing wave of the mind: the wave of arrogance. In practice you obtain success, and success sometimes brings conceit, and conceit brings hypocrisy. Be careful. Do no harbor this wave in your mind, as it may ruin you. You are not doing anything that has not been done previously by Yogis. It is not you but supreme consciousness and nature that want to present you before the world for the service of all living beings. Be careful not to become arrogant and conceited. Respect all more than yourself. A proper and clear-cut suggestion is important to your mind. If you do not start distinct and powerful autosuggestion, your mind will start its own suggestion to you, and you will be governed by your mind. By powerful autosuggestion govern your mind, but do not let yourself be goverened by your material mind. Now you have finished the fifth lesson. Close your eyes and recall all the rules. Consider them. Read the lesson again, close your eyes, and remember it. Do this until you remember the lesson by heart. Enrich yourself by the knowledge of anatomy, physiology, psychology, and other sciences to obtain the utmost success in the eternal science of Yoga. Nothing is greater than self-knowledge. Make autosuggestion (dhyana) a vital force in your concentration. Read it. Think of it. Practice it and feel it. Extracted from Fundamentals of Yoga by Rammurti S. Mishra, M.D.
Hi Stephanie, Are you sure the link you are providing is good? Well, if you want serious Buddhism and not New Ageish rambling BS then I suggest you taking the following steps: First is Sotapanna or Stream Entry wherein all doubt about the Dhamma (in its original form) is extinguished. Stream Entry is really no big deal, unless the person cannot see the truth of their own situation. If the truth is being hidden behind other thoughts (desires to escape life, to become dissociated from the world because the world is too harsh and unrelenting; desires to "be" in another world where there is no suffering) then until those other thoughts are either transcended or eliminated, the truth will never be fully seen and realized. Second. Read a introductory book on Buddhism to help you understand the essence of the original teachings of the Buddha. The following book is a gem in its own right: What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula. Another excellent book is: In the Buddha's Words by Bhikkhu Bodhi It is an excellent primer for being able to get an overview of the whole path. Third. Discourses of the Buddha (Wisdom Publication editions of the Digha Nikaya, The Long Discourses of the Buddha; The Majjhima Nikaya, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha; The Anguttara Nikaya, The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha; and The Samyutta Nikaya, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha). But it takes more than developing just a conceptual understanding of the Dhamma. It takes integrating the teachings into your everyday experience so that you see these doctrines at play in your life. When you can recognize what is going on when it is happening, then you won't fall prey to the traps of Becoming (the ego and all) The reason that a person needs to get clear on the main tenets of the Dhamma (The Four Noble Truths, The Three Characteristics of Existence -- Anicca, Dukkha, and Anatta, The Noble Eightfold Path, The Five Aggregates, and the Ten Fetters of Existence) is not only so that they can have a conceptual comprehension of these, but also so that they can turn that conceptual understanding into a real life realization of these from their own experience of them in their everyday life. Remember I said above, "Truth is Experience"? When you begin to see, for instance, impermanence within your own life and within life in general, it changes the way you view these happenings in your life. The same with dissatisfaction (dukkha) and selflessness (anatta). As a matter of fact, these three characteristics are contemplated during vipassana meditation (insight meditation). It is the factor of insight that makes the Buddha's system of training so superior to every other "religion" out there. If you get only one thing from what I'm writing now, and that thing is that insight (wisdom, panna) is the most important factor on the path toward enlightenment. Fourth. Once you have set a good foundation then look into the following texts: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ This is the main source you should be looking at. But at selected essays and treatises. Use this site primarily when learning and studying the Jhanas. http://www.budsas.org/ebud/ebidx.htm This is also an excellent site with many very good essays. Also, you'll need to know which essays to read, which authors to pay attention to. http://www.buddhanet.net/ebooks_m.htm. Pay only attention to the Vipassana meditation exercises in here. Note: Vipassana is Buddha's insight meditation. The best meditative practice and the one that leads directly to Enlightenment. This method will allow you to tame (first) and cleanse (later) the mind as the most important goals in meditation and as essential pre-requisite to break through Samsara's gravitational pull. http://www.forestdhammabooks.com/ Good but only for advanced practitioners. Only follow their advice when you know what you're doing. Therefore I wouldn't recommend it at the moment until you have more experience. They might tend to confuse because of the language difference (Non-English speakers writing in, for them, a foreign language; this leaves room for mis-communication) The following link is a good starting place to begin your study of the Dhamma. I'm not particularly fond of Thanissaro Bhikkhu's translation of the Pali Canon (he uses too many unclear and inexact words for my liking; I prefer Bhikkhu Bodhi's works published by Wisdom Publications), but I do enjoy his take in his essays. He got a good grounding in the Dhamma and is a native speaker of English so that he can convey the truth of the Dhamma using our own idioms and language: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/study/index.html I would start with the section labeled The Four Noble Truths. What the Buddha Taught book is more concise on this, but ifyou don;t want to purchase the book then you just have to read through all this instead. It'll probably do you some good. Next, I'd say, might be The Five Aggregates, as this is one of the main causes of suffering. After that, I'd look into the sections on Stream entry, Part 1 and Part 2. This will help to give you a sense of what you can do in a practical sense to assist with this stage of the Four Paths. The Four Paths are: Stream Entry (sotapanna), Once Returner (sakadagami), Non Returner (anagami), and Arahant. At the point of Stream Entry, the seeker is assured of no more than seven more births before attaining Nibbana. This is the entry point for the whole of the Path. Once the person has attained Stream Entry, they are effectively on their way. The Four Paths to Awakening are defined by the extent to which they cut the Ten Fetters by which the mind binds itself to conditioned experience. You might also want to look into the Ten Fetters of Existence, as this will tell you what you have to do in order to attain total release from conditioned experience. If you wish to obtain online support then visit the following Yahoo Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jhana_insight/ Good luck in your Path. DC.
I forgot to mention something: The original Buddhist teachings are Theravada (Pali Canon). The rest of the schools arose because after the Buddha's Parinibbana (his passing away) there came to be disagreement in what the Buddha taught, and so different schools were set up by many individual claiming to know and understand the REAL intent of the Buddha's message. The Buddha even predicted that this would occur. This diversity was also primarily due to the teaching crossing boarders into Tibet, China, and Japan. Each culture reinterpreted the teachings to fit their culture and to satisfy their egos. So generally speaking stick to Theravada even though there is disagreement within the Theravada system as there's a Sri Lankan version of Theravada, the Burmese (Myanmar) version of Theravada, the Thai Forest version of Theravada, and now even an emerging American version powered mostly by the three personalities who founded the first Theravadin retreat center in the States, in Massachusetts: Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg who founded IMS (Insight Meditation Society). But all those resources provided in my previous post are in essence Buddha's original teachings despite the existence of Theravadin schools. DC.
"Hi Stephanie, Are you sure the link you are providing is good? Well, if you want serious Buddhism and not New Ageish rambling BS then I suggest you taking the following steps" Well, the link I provided was'nt supposed to be about buddhism, and actually it was new ageish rambling BS. But I liked it, and really found value in the message. I havent read the whole site, but I really enjoyed the "central message". That was exactly what I needed to hear, and was actually an answer I had been asking for. It might not be for everyone, but it did have some good stuff. Thanks for the advice.
hey i like the stuff on yoga- how its so direct and *practical* something most religions lack. have you heard of the mayan calender and 2012? what are your thoughts on it?
Yes, that's what I liked about it as well. It was filled with new insights, as well as old ones that I had forgotten. Its good to have it all down in front of you where you can see it and be reminded. I have heard of the Mayan calendar. In fact I used to be really obsessed with it years ago. I've heard that it is the end of times. Not so much destruction, but the end of time as we know it. Like a consiousness shift or something. I have also heard that it is when our alien friends will be coming back. But watching sylvia brown today, she said that they had never left. They are just not as obvious, but they are still here with us. She also says that they will be returning in the years 2010. I cant wait for that one! (I knew you would understand airweaver ) update: speaking of aliens. Ive never really been concerned with them. But I have been hearing alot about them lately. Like actual siteings all over the place.
