Okazaki Castle
03-13-2007, 11:01 AM
This thread is for techniques whereby one can attain Enlightenment. First of all, for those who like to argue, Enlightenment involves transcendence of Mind. Second of all, for same, read Glen Morris's book 'Path Notes of an american Ninja Master' wherein he devotes more than one chapter to how to attain enlightenment, giving specific techniques to do precisely that. It is an experience. If you disagree with the possibility of attaining enlightenment within this very present lifetime of yours, then wait till you do attain it, and then argue with him over his techniqueology. He's currently dead, you see, so you do need to be enlightened to so argue. He was of Rank Oshihan, and is, as per the traditional descriptors of that rank, was able to talk to dead people and spirits, so all bases covered there.
Thus, this thread is not for argument as to possibilities regarding the attaining of enlightenment by the unenlightened. Start another thread if you want to do that. This thread is for the presenattion of techniques as to how to practically attain enlightenment, fast preferably, within this very lifetime. All may contribute. It is best if you do so contribute to give the full techniques minus at least one key needed to fully realize that state. You may give the full technique openly if you're brave, supid, crazy or don't give a damn though. An interesting topic of discussion is why this proviso should be so. Take it elsewhere please. Steal if from here, for example, and put it there. Stealing exists and, as such, should be unconditionally accepted by the enlightened within a love system :) .
So then, intro over, here are my techniques for this process. I omit one key from them.
First learn how to meditate:
I. The meditative practices
In this section the nature of the human energetic system is outlined to the extent necessary for you to be able to easily understand and apply the more advanced techniques presented later on in this book. As such you probably won’t use much of the knowledge covered in this chapter until a bit later on, but it is good to begin to become aware of it now so that it is all comfortable and familiar to you when you do get round to using it. Also covered is how to internalize your attention for the purposes of refining, directing, and moving energies around within your body. It is this which forms the basis of much of the advanced work, and so it is essential that you gain a good degree of competence in it before moving to that advanced work. Not to worry though, it really is very easy and with a few weeks of practice will flow most naturally. To start with then, let us begin by looking at how to become more aware of you yourself and your own deeper nature.
Internalizing you awareness (otherwise known as meditation)
Probably the most important factor in learning how to meditate effectively is to realize that it is best to take things slowly enough to enjoy them. Don’t rush straight off and try to meditate for 3 hours in a row. You will only cause yourself to come to view meditation as yet another form of arduous work and so will come to dislike the whole process. After which you’re not going to get anywhere, no matter how much effort you put in. Much better to initially meditate for only a minute or so at a time. Very soon you will come to so enjoy the peace and the pleasure of this one minute that you will begin to enthusiastically look forward to it every day and will actively desire an increase in the amount of time you meditate for. At this point, do increase the length of your daily meditation. But only at the rate at which you still continue to enjoy every moment of the meditation. Focusing on the sensations of the meditation and the effects which it has on your body and the free flow of your energies it produces will probably help you to do so. And soon you’ll be able to meditate comfortably and with pleasure for 15 minutes, ½ hour, even an hour or more if you wish.
To turn more towards the technique side of it all, a large part of what meditation consists of is holding your attention focused on various parts of your body and then seeing how it feels there. Combine this with the refinement and development of the energies and energetic patterns within your system and the drawing of various energies into the body and moving them around internally and you have as complete an understanding of meditation as is necessary for our purposes.
The next step in learning how to meditate is learning how to internalize your attention. This is incredibly easy to do. First take the index finger of your left hand. Gently bite the tip of it. Now focus on feeling the tip of that index finger, which should be quite easy to do as you will still feel the pressure of the bite.
Next take the index finger of your right hand. Now try to focus on this as intensely as you can, without biting, squeezing or touching it in any way. Really try to feel the tip of that finger. Close your eyes if it helps. You might feel the finger heating up or getting tingly. This is to be expected in anybody who has a reasonable energy level for energy will flow to where the focus is held. Practice this for a few minutes, or until it is quite easy and natural for you to focus on the tip of a finger and feel it or be aware of it.
At this point you have learnt to internalize your awareness. When you are focusing on the tip of your finger you are more aware of it than of any other part of your body, and you feel it more intensely. That insight alone, if applied, is sufficient to make all the sexual sensations more intense.
Next you might try gently rubbing the point between and slightly above your eyebrows and then holding your focus there for a while. Or gently rubbing you navel or your clitoris / head of your penis and holding your attention there for a while. This is just to accustomize you to focusing within, on your own body, rather than out there in the external world. Once you are familiar and comfortable with the process, move on to the next stage: clearing the mind and holding a steady focus.
The blackness and clearing the mind
In this section you learn two of the most important aspects of meditation: how to clear the mind and hold a steady focus. Most people do not have a clear mind. They are continually thinking all the time. Usually it will be a series of random, fairly disconnected, buzzing, unfocused thoughts which fills their head. Either that or they’ll be recalling the past or worrying about / planning for the future. Though they’ll probably only really notice this properly when they sit down to meditate for the first time.
All these random, unfocused thoughts which pass unbidden through your mind prevent you from holding a strong, single focus on one thing alone. And it is such a strong, single focus, properly directed, which best produces results, both esoterically and in the physical, “real” world. Further a stream of random unfocused thoughts prevents clear awareness. All your perceptions, all your logical thought processes and all your conclusions will be coloured by your random thoughts and preoccupations at the time, rather than being pure, clear and true.
This need for purity and clarity is especially pertinent with regards to meditative practice. It is subtle stuff we’ll be dealing with here (at least at first, until your energetic structures open up more), and as such you need to be able to clear the mind and still the imagination first so that you know that the impressions which you get in meditation are the real truth of the matter and not just a product of your over-active imagination. In other words, you need the clarity which being able to empty your mind offers.
So then, let us turn to the technique. Place your awareness at your 3rd eye point. This is the point in your body just above and between your eyebrows and about ½” - 1” into your head. Though when you’re just starting out holding your focus close to the surface of the skin is OK.
If necessary, the first few times you try to hold your focus at this place you can rub the area between your eyebrows with your finger for a few moments and then close your eyes and focus on the lingering sensation of pressure at your 3rd eye point which rubbing it with your finger produced. Much as you bit the tip of your finger in the previous section in order to help you focus upon it.
So, holding your focus at your 3rd eye point, imagine, visualize or “see” in your mind’s eye pure blackness. Nothing else. Just pure, dark blackness. Focus on this blackness to the exclusion of all else. If other thoughts come, gently throw them out and return your focus to the pure blackness. If you begin to see other colours, turn your attention away from them and focus on the blackness once again.
And that’s it. Repeat the meditation every day, or twice every day, for around five minutes or so until you get the hang of it. Once you can hold a concentrated, forceful focus on the blackness, try relaxing that focus, making it gentle, relaxing, observing. Then focus on the blackness in this gentle way.
It is this gentle, yet at the same time pure and steady, focus which characterises the meditative state of mind. A concentrated, forceful focus you can only hold for so long: 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes somewhere there. But a gentle meditative focus now? That you can hold pretty much indefinitely. Which is it’s great advantage.
At any rate, through your practice of the technique given in this section you will have learnt to clear your mind and to hold a steady focus. Let us now turn to the next section where you begin to learn how to productively apply these skills.
Beauty and ugliness
The meditations presented in this section you need only ever do once or twice each. The purpose of doing them is to experientially realize that what you focus upon affects the state in which your mindforce is held. This shall be explained in more detail below. First, the technique.
Focus at your 3rd eye. Enter a clear, meditative state of mind using the “seeing the blackness” technique presented in the last section to get there if necessary. Once a calm, clear, meditative state of mind has been attained imagine, visualize or “see” in your mind’s eye the most beautiful natural scene you can. A seascape or a mountainscape for example. It is best not to make it a person as you don’t want to fetch other associations into the process. Really experience, within your head, every aspect of that beautiful scene. What it looks like, in detail, the smell in the air, the slight breeze drifting over your skin. Really get into it and see it, experience it, as totally as you can. And see how it makes you feel to do so.
As a result of your focus on beauty you’ll probably feel calm, pleasant and be smiling gently. Or something equivalent or very close. Remember that sensation and that focusing upon beauty produced it.
Next, focus upon ugliness. Once again, place your awareness at your 3rd eye and enter a clear, meditative state of mind. Then imagine, visualize or “see” the ugliest landscape you can think of. Something like a crowded cityscape, in the industrial zone, with lots of cars, noise and pollution. Really see, feel, smell and hear it all. And see how it makes you feel to do so.
As a result of your focus on ugliness you’ll probably feel stressed, unpleasant and not calm. Compare that sensation, that state of mind, to the one which was produced within you when you focused upon beauty. And the thing you will have realized is that what you focus upon affects your inner state of being.
Now, you can control your focus and so you can control your inner state of being. Therefore you yourself are responsible for your inner state of being: your emotions, your moods and your mindstates. And you can control and change all of these things merely by changing what you focus upon. In practice what this usually amounts to (at least when you’re still starting out on the esoteric path) is deciding for yourself which aspects of any experience you choose to focus upon: the fact that she’s left you or the fact that you now know where you stand and are free to pursue other women? The heaviness of the problem itself or the solution to that problem? The choice is yours. It may be that it is other factors which fetch your experiences into your life but the way that you perceive and interpret those experiences, and so how you live them and what effect they have upon you, is up to you to decide.
A pine tree and a black panther
Let us jump straight to the technique here. Focus at your 3rd eye. Enter a calm, detached, meditative state of mind. Focus on a pine tree i.e. visualize, “see”, imagine or connect to, a pine tree at your 3rd eye. Really experience the pine tree in all its detail. And see how doing so makes you feel.
If you want to take it deeper then, rather than just “seeing” the pine tree before you at your 3rd eye, you can move your awareness forwards into the pine tree itself and see what it feels like to be there.
Now do likewise with a black panther instead of a pine tree.
Whatever level you are at, you will have felt at least some difference within your mindstate when you focused on the panther as compared to when you focused on the pine tree. If you already can, or as you learn to, hold a clear focus more strongly you’ll pick up on all the little details to this difference: how the pine tree feels calm, expansive, content, purifying etc.; and how the panther feels detached, feline, powerful, aware of its surroundings and quietly aware of the strength and viciousness it has to draw on if necessary.
And so through your practice of the techniques given in this section you will have experientially realized another important thing about focus: when you focus upon something you pick up on that thing’s essential nature. What in fact happens, esoterically technically speaking, is that the energy of that thing and the energy of your mindforce merge when you focus upon that thing using your mindforce. So by focusing on a particular thing - anything - you can experientially understand that thing’s essential nature.
It is this ability to directly experientially understand a thing just by focusing upon it which we will use in the next section when we turn to meditating upon the chakras. However, this ability is also useful for finding your own answers in every and any area of life whatsoever. You want to know what a particular person is like? Focus upon him in your meditation and you’ll know far more clearly and accurately - and quickly - than if you were to try intellectually analyzing his words and actions. You want to know a solution to a problem? Focus on that solution (not on that problem) and its essential nature will become clear to you. Of course, the more strongly that you can hold a clear focus, the clearer will be the understanding you get when you focus upon a particular thing. Once you can get a clear understanding of things in this way, you can begin to use it as a tool to arrive at your own beliefs, understandings and opinions.
The trouble with a belief structure which is a rational, logical construct built upon the information you’ve learnt or received in your life is that such information is rarely completely accurate: it will come from people and institutions who have their own axe to grind and their own limitations holding them back. And often such information will be completely inaccurate due to the limited scope and depth of human knowledge at the moment, and also for some more insidious reasons. Far better then to arrive at your own understandings independent of the biased, incomplete and frequently downright wrong information put out by any governmental, corporate or mass media body. And arriving at your own understandings is precisely what the technique presented in this section is for.
More to follow...
Regards,
OC.
Thus, this thread is not for argument as to possibilities regarding the attaining of enlightenment by the unenlightened. Start another thread if you want to do that. This thread is for the presenattion of techniques as to how to practically attain enlightenment, fast preferably, within this very lifetime. All may contribute. It is best if you do so contribute to give the full techniques minus at least one key needed to fully realize that state. You may give the full technique openly if you're brave, supid, crazy or don't give a damn though. An interesting topic of discussion is why this proviso should be so. Take it elsewhere please. Steal if from here, for example, and put it there. Stealing exists and, as such, should be unconditionally accepted by the enlightened within a love system :) .
So then, intro over, here are my techniques for this process. I omit one key from them.
First learn how to meditate:
I. The meditative practices
In this section the nature of the human energetic system is outlined to the extent necessary for you to be able to easily understand and apply the more advanced techniques presented later on in this book. As such you probably won’t use much of the knowledge covered in this chapter until a bit later on, but it is good to begin to become aware of it now so that it is all comfortable and familiar to you when you do get round to using it. Also covered is how to internalize your attention for the purposes of refining, directing, and moving energies around within your body. It is this which forms the basis of much of the advanced work, and so it is essential that you gain a good degree of competence in it before moving to that advanced work. Not to worry though, it really is very easy and with a few weeks of practice will flow most naturally. To start with then, let us begin by looking at how to become more aware of you yourself and your own deeper nature.
Internalizing you awareness (otherwise known as meditation)
Probably the most important factor in learning how to meditate effectively is to realize that it is best to take things slowly enough to enjoy them. Don’t rush straight off and try to meditate for 3 hours in a row. You will only cause yourself to come to view meditation as yet another form of arduous work and so will come to dislike the whole process. After which you’re not going to get anywhere, no matter how much effort you put in. Much better to initially meditate for only a minute or so at a time. Very soon you will come to so enjoy the peace and the pleasure of this one minute that you will begin to enthusiastically look forward to it every day and will actively desire an increase in the amount of time you meditate for. At this point, do increase the length of your daily meditation. But only at the rate at which you still continue to enjoy every moment of the meditation. Focusing on the sensations of the meditation and the effects which it has on your body and the free flow of your energies it produces will probably help you to do so. And soon you’ll be able to meditate comfortably and with pleasure for 15 minutes, ½ hour, even an hour or more if you wish.
To turn more towards the technique side of it all, a large part of what meditation consists of is holding your attention focused on various parts of your body and then seeing how it feels there. Combine this with the refinement and development of the energies and energetic patterns within your system and the drawing of various energies into the body and moving them around internally and you have as complete an understanding of meditation as is necessary for our purposes.
The next step in learning how to meditate is learning how to internalize your attention. This is incredibly easy to do. First take the index finger of your left hand. Gently bite the tip of it. Now focus on feeling the tip of that index finger, which should be quite easy to do as you will still feel the pressure of the bite.
Next take the index finger of your right hand. Now try to focus on this as intensely as you can, without biting, squeezing or touching it in any way. Really try to feel the tip of that finger. Close your eyes if it helps. You might feel the finger heating up or getting tingly. This is to be expected in anybody who has a reasonable energy level for energy will flow to where the focus is held. Practice this for a few minutes, or until it is quite easy and natural for you to focus on the tip of a finger and feel it or be aware of it.
At this point you have learnt to internalize your awareness. When you are focusing on the tip of your finger you are more aware of it than of any other part of your body, and you feel it more intensely. That insight alone, if applied, is sufficient to make all the sexual sensations more intense.
Next you might try gently rubbing the point between and slightly above your eyebrows and then holding your focus there for a while. Or gently rubbing you navel or your clitoris / head of your penis and holding your attention there for a while. This is just to accustomize you to focusing within, on your own body, rather than out there in the external world. Once you are familiar and comfortable with the process, move on to the next stage: clearing the mind and holding a steady focus.
The blackness and clearing the mind
In this section you learn two of the most important aspects of meditation: how to clear the mind and hold a steady focus. Most people do not have a clear mind. They are continually thinking all the time. Usually it will be a series of random, fairly disconnected, buzzing, unfocused thoughts which fills their head. Either that or they’ll be recalling the past or worrying about / planning for the future. Though they’ll probably only really notice this properly when they sit down to meditate for the first time.
All these random, unfocused thoughts which pass unbidden through your mind prevent you from holding a strong, single focus on one thing alone. And it is such a strong, single focus, properly directed, which best produces results, both esoterically and in the physical, “real” world. Further a stream of random unfocused thoughts prevents clear awareness. All your perceptions, all your logical thought processes and all your conclusions will be coloured by your random thoughts and preoccupations at the time, rather than being pure, clear and true.
This need for purity and clarity is especially pertinent with regards to meditative practice. It is subtle stuff we’ll be dealing with here (at least at first, until your energetic structures open up more), and as such you need to be able to clear the mind and still the imagination first so that you know that the impressions which you get in meditation are the real truth of the matter and not just a product of your over-active imagination. In other words, you need the clarity which being able to empty your mind offers.
So then, let us turn to the technique. Place your awareness at your 3rd eye point. This is the point in your body just above and between your eyebrows and about ½” - 1” into your head. Though when you’re just starting out holding your focus close to the surface of the skin is OK.
If necessary, the first few times you try to hold your focus at this place you can rub the area between your eyebrows with your finger for a few moments and then close your eyes and focus on the lingering sensation of pressure at your 3rd eye point which rubbing it with your finger produced. Much as you bit the tip of your finger in the previous section in order to help you focus upon it.
So, holding your focus at your 3rd eye point, imagine, visualize or “see” in your mind’s eye pure blackness. Nothing else. Just pure, dark blackness. Focus on this blackness to the exclusion of all else. If other thoughts come, gently throw them out and return your focus to the pure blackness. If you begin to see other colours, turn your attention away from them and focus on the blackness once again.
And that’s it. Repeat the meditation every day, or twice every day, for around five minutes or so until you get the hang of it. Once you can hold a concentrated, forceful focus on the blackness, try relaxing that focus, making it gentle, relaxing, observing. Then focus on the blackness in this gentle way.
It is this gentle, yet at the same time pure and steady, focus which characterises the meditative state of mind. A concentrated, forceful focus you can only hold for so long: 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes somewhere there. But a gentle meditative focus now? That you can hold pretty much indefinitely. Which is it’s great advantage.
At any rate, through your practice of the technique given in this section you will have learnt to clear your mind and to hold a steady focus. Let us now turn to the next section where you begin to learn how to productively apply these skills.
Beauty and ugliness
The meditations presented in this section you need only ever do once or twice each. The purpose of doing them is to experientially realize that what you focus upon affects the state in which your mindforce is held. This shall be explained in more detail below. First, the technique.
Focus at your 3rd eye. Enter a clear, meditative state of mind using the “seeing the blackness” technique presented in the last section to get there if necessary. Once a calm, clear, meditative state of mind has been attained imagine, visualize or “see” in your mind’s eye the most beautiful natural scene you can. A seascape or a mountainscape for example. It is best not to make it a person as you don’t want to fetch other associations into the process. Really experience, within your head, every aspect of that beautiful scene. What it looks like, in detail, the smell in the air, the slight breeze drifting over your skin. Really get into it and see it, experience it, as totally as you can. And see how it makes you feel to do so.
As a result of your focus on beauty you’ll probably feel calm, pleasant and be smiling gently. Or something equivalent or very close. Remember that sensation and that focusing upon beauty produced it.
Next, focus upon ugliness. Once again, place your awareness at your 3rd eye and enter a clear, meditative state of mind. Then imagine, visualize or “see” the ugliest landscape you can think of. Something like a crowded cityscape, in the industrial zone, with lots of cars, noise and pollution. Really see, feel, smell and hear it all. And see how it makes you feel to do so.
As a result of your focus on ugliness you’ll probably feel stressed, unpleasant and not calm. Compare that sensation, that state of mind, to the one which was produced within you when you focused upon beauty. And the thing you will have realized is that what you focus upon affects your inner state of being.
Now, you can control your focus and so you can control your inner state of being. Therefore you yourself are responsible for your inner state of being: your emotions, your moods and your mindstates. And you can control and change all of these things merely by changing what you focus upon. In practice what this usually amounts to (at least when you’re still starting out on the esoteric path) is deciding for yourself which aspects of any experience you choose to focus upon: the fact that she’s left you or the fact that you now know where you stand and are free to pursue other women? The heaviness of the problem itself or the solution to that problem? The choice is yours. It may be that it is other factors which fetch your experiences into your life but the way that you perceive and interpret those experiences, and so how you live them and what effect they have upon you, is up to you to decide.
A pine tree and a black panther
Let us jump straight to the technique here. Focus at your 3rd eye. Enter a calm, detached, meditative state of mind. Focus on a pine tree i.e. visualize, “see”, imagine or connect to, a pine tree at your 3rd eye. Really experience the pine tree in all its detail. And see how doing so makes you feel.
If you want to take it deeper then, rather than just “seeing” the pine tree before you at your 3rd eye, you can move your awareness forwards into the pine tree itself and see what it feels like to be there.
Now do likewise with a black panther instead of a pine tree.
Whatever level you are at, you will have felt at least some difference within your mindstate when you focused on the panther as compared to when you focused on the pine tree. If you already can, or as you learn to, hold a clear focus more strongly you’ll pick up on all the little details to this difference: how the pine tree feels calm, expansive, content, purifying etc.; and how the panther feels detached, feline, powerful, aware of its surroundings and quietly aware of the strength and viciousness it has to draw on if necessary.
And so through your practice of the techniques given in this section you will have experientially realized another important thing about focus: when you focus upon something you pick up on that thing’s essential nature. What in fact happens, esoterically technically speaking, is that the energy of that thing and the energy of your mindforce merge when you focus upon that thing using your mindforce. So by focusing on a particular thing - anything - you can experientially understand that thing’s essential nature.
It is this ability to directly experientially understand a thing just by focusing upon it which we will use in the next section when we turn to meditating upon the chakras. However, this ability is also useful for finding your own answers in every and any area of life whatsoever. You want to know what a particular person is like? Focus upon him in your meditation and you’ll know far more clearly and accurately - and quickly - than if you were to try intellectually analyzing his words and actions. You want to know a solution to a problem? Focus on that solution (not on that problem) and its essential nature will become clear to you. Of course, the more strongly that you can hold a clear focus, the clearer will be the understanding you get when you focus upon a particular thing. Once you can get a clear understanding of things in this way, you can begin to use it as a tool to arrive at your own beliefs, understandings and opinions.
The trouble with a belief structure which is a rational, logical construct built upon the information you’ve learnt or received in your life is that such information is rarely completely accurate: it will come from people and institutions who have their own axe to grind and their own limitations holding them back. And often such information will be completely inaccurate due to the limited scope and depth of human knowledge at the moment, and also for some more insidious reasons. Far better then to arrive at your own understandings independent of the biased, incomplete and frequently downright wrong information put out by any governmental, corporate or mass media body. And arriving at your own understandings is precisely what the technique presented in this section is for.
More to follow...
Regards,
OC.