Burnt - please respect other peoples belief systems. Yes there are probably many phony schools around. but there are also many true teachers. We have a lot to learn still. It is disrespectful to simply trash a load of related belief systems just because they are not provable by science. I know many people for whom spiritual practice and meditation have changed their lives, sometimes drastically, in a positive way - including myself.

I do not believe it encourages inaction. For me meditation encourages centered, grounded thought and helps keep the ego at bay. It helps cultivate self-love. It helps people in this nuts western city environment to STOP for a bit and feel, open up more intuitive awareness... all these things help people to live better lives. But if you have no belief or faith in such things you will not see it... you have to be open to it.

I am not claiming that meditation is useless its very useful for the individual doing it. But it does not change the reality outside of your self. Only you can do that through action.

It is naive to think you can vibrate away all the worlds problems.

http://www.geoffgilpin.c...pdfs/Quantum-Failure.pdf

This is a nice article by a guy who was part of the TM movement and discusses a bit about how it was not a harmless happy movement. I also feel that its important that people stand up against this nonsense. Its based on deliberate misinterpretations of science it purposely deceives and is morally questionable.

Note I am not talking about personal spirituality that's fine. Meditate, trip, do rituals and have fun that's all fine. But when people start making absurd claims that meditating with a crystal in your room will cure your cancer that's where I draw the line and try to stop the spread of misinformation. I only wish more people who were informed would do the same.



I don't know how much charity would help these people. What they really need is land rights and that needs to be won in court and respected by the nation governing the land they live on.

I agree to a degree with what you said burnt..but I think that meditation and spirituality, psychedelics etc can be a PART of instigating real change in the world.

Sitting in a room and tripping out all the time and not interacting in the world wont do it though. But going out and teaching other people how to do these things so they can see the world for themsleves in a differnt light is benificial and yields real, tangible results.

I used to hate trancendentalsim. I still dont like alot of trancendentalists becasue they seem to walk around saying silly things like "oh it' all illusion"..."nothing is real"..they seem to want to sit in a void all day and not live life.

Thats so..boring. I believe that we can trancend these things..It's hard to explain what I am talking about but metaphore does a good job...but I just see alot of people who seem to not really get it at all and all they do is walk around shutting the world out.

I think a real trancendentalist would accept and even embrace the world the way it is and focus on how to make real change in this place..while at the same time realizing that they shouldnt really take any of it very seriousily..but you cannot just shut it out and pretend you are not here.

I know lots of "buddhists" and zen types who talk like this and I cant help but think they dont really get it at all..its the american pretend it not real sort of buddhism. It doesnt matter what they do because it's all just illusion...yet they are still here.

it's funy though becasue now I belive in trancendance..I just have my own take on it I guess.

"The world is loaded with problems and meditation isn't going to make them dissolve away. Action will."

Yes I think you are correct..but actions dont come from out of thin air, you know?

People require a foundation from which to launch theyre actions from...alot of the environmental movement was started by people in the 1970's who were hiipies in the 60's and had psychedelic experiences..

Green peace itself was started by a man after he had an LSD session at hollywood hospital(a hospital in canada, BC in the 70's that ran legal LSD sessions)..

Parts of the amazon are being protected as well and tribes are getting some clean source of income becasue western people are drinking ayahuasca and having these wonderful experiences that are helping to see the amazing and natives peoples, the earth etc ina new light..

You could argue that peoples LSD experiencs in the 1950's and 60's played a huge role in the anti war movement and the end of vietnam..

There are many types of action...action itself means nothing without the foundation that dictates the TYPE of action one will take.

Yes agreed psychedelics can inspire changes in behavior whether good or bad depends on what the person does with it.

But that's completely different then thinking positive thoughts will stop crime. Which is what the transcendental movement was saying.

Shoe

Thank you for staring this thread its a really fascinating idea indeed. I have come to the conclusion that all of our experience arises from ignorance."There are two types of ignorance, innate ignorance and cultural ignorance. Innate ignorance is ignorance of our true nature and the true nature of our minds, this results in an entanglement with delusions of the dualistic mind.

Dualism reifies polarities and dichotomies, it divides the seamless unity of experience into this or that, right and wrong. Based on these conceptual divisions we develop specific preferences which manifest as grasping and aversion, these are the habitual responses that make up most of what we identify as ourselves" (Quoted from Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche). I have done my own experiments to prove to myself that i do indeed create and manifest my own reality.

I basically begin my experiment with mind training, if i think of any negative thoughts i recognise that specific negative thought and I create the opposite positive thought reaction to the negative thought. By doing this i neutralize my negative thoughts and in time I am training my mind and consciousness to only produce positive thinking. I begin to grow positive thought and thinking which in turn creates positive experiences.

Since i have implemented this type of thinking and behaviour my life has become significantly more positive and the happiness and peace within myself and the environment which i exist within is far more prevalent.

Just some ideas and theories of mine to ponder upon...



Much Peace and Happiness

dude, that must be quite a tax on your brain. I worry that it is a kind of psychosis but I do something simmelar too, so maybe we are both normal. I also find it quite a bit of work: like, focusing only on the positive, controlling my thoughts tightly, analysing myself and my approach... always striving to be the best I can be.

I meditate, and I am finding it increasingly enjoyable. Its such a wholesome feeling.

Thankyou for the link, very interesting site. I hope I can do something, get out and about and get off my ass and actually *do* something to help, thats where the fun is had at anyway.

Shoe

Indeed its intense mind training and it takes quite a lot of concentration every day, I really bask in the challenge though.

I hope I'm not normal. :b

I love your description, it is oh soooo wholesome man pretty much muesli for the mind.


Much Peace and Happiness

You have to remember, it isn't so simple. If you thought and it was, what if i thought i wanted ice cream and someone else thought i dont want him to have ice cream....which will occur?

Also, someone pointed out that the girl in the video was also "motivating the bad", well, would she be doing that if she wasn't putting being so negative and uncaring for it? Things happen naturally, aliens aren't going to beam down and ruin her rice because she wrote "i hate you" on it, but intentions pour out into our actions in the physical realm or the metaphysical.


There is energy everywhere. Even though most of us are ignorant that we are causing huge movements of energy everyday, it still happens. And in doing so, whos to say that our intentions don't have a part with what kinds of energies are directed in which ways?


My belief is that the higher up the consciousness scale we go, the closer the line gets between thoughts|reality. At the very highest level(or atleast very high) of consciousness, we think and things happens. As you go down, you say, and things happen. To the point where you think, and you must do actions, for things to happen.(But it would never happen if you never thought it!)


For an analogy to better understand, imagine a baby. It has very minimal understanding, but wants to do so much. This would be a low-average level of consciousness. As the child gets older, it is now able to ask for things. When the child gets older, it is now able to do on its own that others used to do for them. When the child gets older, it is now able to do things that they think of.
We always transcend levels of consciousness, so we must always be striving upwards if we do seek this i say and it is phenomenon. Ofcours, once we reach that level, it will not be a phenomenon as we will understand it

What worries me in "positive thinking" is the possibility that the world is a balanced equation, therefore anyone who goes for the positive *only* necessarily increases the amount of negativity also. What you deny from your consciousness may take a form outside, perhaps in someone else's mind. If we do this, we may just push the responsibility of taking care of our negative side to someone else.

we are told to embrace and embody the tau:
that is the light and the dark, the duality of it all,
the positive and the negative, the alpha and the omega.

I believe its accepting of the negative that we must do. And, whilst meditation might not directly save anything(maybe ourselves), it has immense positive effects on us giving us the ability to do the actions required TO change the world. It's like eating. Even though sitting down and having a meal doesn't help save the world, or fix our lives, it does give us the ability to do that.

the truth has a certain sound, and that tings the bell for me.
I don't know about "immense" though. positive effects, why certainly.

just to nitpick here, but I do think that the choice of what we eat helps save the world or destroy it (in the sense that we can be supporting some sustainable or insustainable industry)

As for meditation, I dont think per se it makes one person better or helps save the world but it definitely could help save the world if it helps one become calmer, more balanced, etc.. But I dont think burnt was talking about this kind of thing, he was more talking about these kind of cases like some couple that appeared on the news that had their child die because they refused to give some very simple but effective medication for a certain disease this child had, as they were dogmatic homeopaths, or whatever other of these kind of people.