Killing The Buddha Motion Comic

We wanted to give you a sample of our Bestseller: Killing The Buddha Motion Comic! The motion comic is featured with audio and video, can be read on any smartphone, computer or iPad.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Is enlightenment elitist?

The concept of the chakras, or energy wheels within the body, is common to both Chinese and Indo-Tibetan subtle body theoretical frameworks. The Chinese describe the energy as moving in circular patterns in the body. The Indo-Tibetan systems describe a central channel with a solar and lunar set of parallel meridians, which must be united to fully open the central channel. When these energies are integrated, there is said to be realization. Similarly, the kundalini theory describes the energy as traveling from the base of the spine to the top of the head.

Click here to download:

Kundalini_chakras.mp4 (3421 KB)

The nihuan point, which corresponds with the pineal gland, represents the third, or wisdom eye. The human body is actually a universe which can be described in alchemical terms as "as above, so below" which sees the human body as both the microcosm of the multiverse and the fundamental source of the design of the cosmos.

According to Taoist alchemical theory, the pineal gland of the enlightened adept becomes equivalent to the North Star because everything between heaven and earth has become one being. The mind and body of the adept is identical to the mind and body of the universe simultaneously. This idea that the inner dimensions are actually more real than our conventional third-dimensional reality is based upon the ability of advanced practitioners who travel between inner worlds. The other basic idea is that the reproductive energy of the lower body can be taken to the head to activate the brain and increase the luminosity of the mind. 

Chinese alchemy is based on the idea that aging can be dramatically reduced if the original pre-birth energy of the body is restarted by natural breathing practices. The basis of Taoism is that embryonic breathing results in a kundalini activation, the Golden Flower, or the union of the individual with heaven and earth, the higher and lower dimensions of reality being unified into a single whole. This single whole is the Tao or universal void. 

The goal of meditation is for the individual to open the third eye by systematically cultivating the mind and body, using variations of heat yoga. All of these alchemical systems describe the human body as a crucible, which can be heated by specific practices, both internal and external, which greatly increase the overall luminosity of the mind/body continuum.

Is enlightenment elitist? To get good at something one must study and practice. There is more access to information about the various practices used to achieve enlightenment through the globalization of our information systems. The nirvana meme has gone into the advertising industry, as well as commercial sports, which use Zen concepts like the Zone or Peak Performance to enhance an athlete's psychological condition. The end result is that a spiritual, non-religious dimension is recognized in Western science as normal. What do you think?

 

 

The Seventh Yoga of Naropa: Forceful Entry (Switching Bodies)

The forceful entry is a legendary yoga that is said to have been lost in its complete form in Tibet, although Indian yogis claim to have preserved the tradition. Like many of the yogas, there are two or three versions. The art of hypnosis, for example, is described in medieval India not as suggestion but as forcefully entering another's body and controlling them. The most important idea of forceful entry is that it is possible for an adept to switch his consciousness from one body to another without dying and without discontinuity of consciousness. The idea would be that the yogi who possesses this skill is able to transfer his consciousness from an aged body to that of another body. In China it was believed that it was possible to transfer consciousness into the child of a wealthy family, resulting in enhanced material benefits. There is a recurrent legend in China that Taoists who have been traveling out of body have returned to find their physical body cremated and thus were forced to enter the body of a recently deceased individual in the area in order to maintain an earthly existence. This is the basis of one of the stories from China of the Eight immortals (eight Taoist masters of ancient times).

One of the most beloved figures of the Eight Immortals is Ti Kuai Li or Iron Crutch Li. He is usually shown with a crutch and a gourd that contains medicinal herbs; he is associated with medicine and healers. He is known as an irascible and unpredictable figure and, since he has the form of a beggar, is known to fight for the rights of the poor and needy.

He was not always a crippled beggar. One time when he had left his body to go to the mountains to do his spiritual cultivation (some say with Lao Tzu himself), he gave precise instructions to one of his students that if he was not back in seven days to burn his body. Unfortunately, while he was away his student got news that his mother was very ill and on death’s door. Even though it had only been six days that his master had been gone his student decided that he had waited long enough; he burned his master’s body and then took off for his home village to visit his ailing mother. So when the master returned after being gone for seven days he found that his body was now a heap of ashes. Desperate, he was forced to enter the body of dead beggar he found at the side of the road, who had a crippled leg. From then on he inhabited this unfortunate body, hence his often terrible temper.

The idea of being trapped without a body, or consciousness traveling from body to body, is relatively common in yogic alchemical literature.

The Sixth Yoga of Naropa: The Yoga of Consciousness Transference (Phowa)

The phowa practice and visualizations can actually result in anatomical changes. The practice is performed daily, using visualization and breathing techniques until success is signaled by lymph or blood oozing from the fontanel point in the head where a baby’s soft spot has closed. When the tiny hole spontaneously opens in the skull, a straw is inserted to prove that the process has been completed successfully.

The belief is that after the process is successfully completed, the practitioner can automatically leave the body through the head at the time of death and attain rebirth in a higher dimension, which is described as a Buddhist utopia. The other benefit of the practice is that at any time the adept can choose to die by practicing the visualization, although suicide by this method is discouraged.

The Fifth Yoga of Naropa: Yoga of Death

The bardo is the after-death state. The idea of bardo yoga is that success in this yoga permits the practitioner to determine their after-death destiny, including the option of being reborn in a particular environment in a human form. Tibetan yoga emphasizes practices that allow the practitioner to prepare himself for the often-terrifying experiences of death. It is believed that if the yogi misses his opportunity for union with the clear light because of fear, he will then experience a nightmare, which will project him into an uncontrolled, possibly negative rebirth unless he can successfully navigate the apparitions, realizing that they are merely mental projections.

The goal of all non-theistic meditation traditions is for the individual to consciously dissolve the indestructible or immortal drop into emptiness, which is also the Spiritual Embryo of Chinese medicine or being returned to the void. The Six Yogas of Naropa represent a number of techniques that can be used to achieve the integration of the three bodies consciously during the death experience. As the physical body drops away, there is a gap of perception, which if consciously observed, results in the union of the sambhogakaya and dharmakaya bodies. One of the major reasons for the practice of dream yoga is that the state of awareness of lucid dreaming, in which the consciousness realizes it is dreaming while dreaming, is considered an important prerequisite for an individual to consciously observe the process of dying without fear and distorted perception.

Half of the Six Yogas are for practitioners who are living, while the other half are for practitioners during the process of death. As the Dalai Lama says, Tibetans believe that at the time of death the only thing one has to rely on is the depth of one’s meditation and spiritual practice.

The Fourth Yoga of Naropa: Clear Light Yoga

The idea of clear light and the experiences associated with practitioners who have had luminous meditation experiences is probably the most important theme in the Tibetan yogic worldview; experiences of luminosity are common to many other meditation practices as well. It is believed in the Tibetan view that at the time of death there is a universal experience of seeing a brilliant white radiance, which is considered to be the underlying reality itself. The belief is that an unprepared person is terrified by the brilliance of the void in its luminous form and flees, preventing true liberation; liberation results when the practitioner can unite with the clear light of the void without fear.

Almost all Tibetan practices are said to be preparation for navigating the death experience successfully. The Dalai Lama describes meditation as a means for the practitioner to achieve deeper and deeper levels of clear light during his or her lifetime. In China, Bodhidharma (470-543 A.D.), the founder of Zen, describes a number of clear light experiences in his famous Bloodstream Sermon. He says these experiences occur prior to complete enlightenment, which he describes as seeing your true nature or Original Face.

The Third Yoga of Naropa: Illusory Body Yoga

The concept of the illusory body practice is twofold. (1) To realize that the physical body is an insubstantial form projected by a subtle body, which is in turn projected from an even more subtle body, which is void. (2) Illusory body practice results in allowing the practitioner to travel to non-physical realms to access information. Successful illusory body yoga using a mirror is also a means of the subtle body separating from the physical body.

The illusory body yoga is an exercise to prove the existence of the void, emphasizing sunya, or emptiness, as the ground of non-being. Since Buddhism is non- theistic, the reality that is achieved by the successful practice of these yogas is described as the void; this helps to differentiate it from other worldviews, which describe the self as being linked to a supreme deity. The Western interpretation of these kind of experiences is inherently theistic because of the Judeo-Christian framework. In fact, the individuals who experienced mystical experiences and out-of-body trance states were often accused of sacrilege and punished by the Church.

The Second Yoga of Naropa: Dream Yoga

The goal of this practice is to have lucid dreams. Many Tibetan texts have been created by Tibetans dreaming and communicating with deities. Tibetan literature is believed to be a creation between the tantric deities and the Tibetan masters.

Dream yoga is an ancient practice based on the idea that gaining lucidity or awareness that one is dreaming while one is dreaming provides a quantum leap of awareness. The practitioner uses self-suggestion until lucidity occurs and success is said to provide great spiritual and health benefits to the practitioner. Like all Asian arts, dream yogic practices are transmitted in a teacher to student lineage, usually with an initiation ceremony of some kind.

In Tibet, it could be argued that dreams within dreams are from other dimensions. Skilled practitioners can communicate with enlightened deities, ancestors, etc. and bring this information back as powerful teachings.

Many Western scholars ignore the influence of dreams and their consequences within shamanic cultures. Western society has lost the ability to use dreaming as a survival tool. Hunter-gatherer cultures are essentially based on the visions or dreams of the shamans who function as intermediaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It is normal for example, within a hunter-gatherer culture, for individuals to be guided by dreams with either ancestors or animal guardians. Similarly, in China, many of the meditation lineages in both Buddhism and Taoism consider consciousness projection to be one of the results of successful energy cultivation. The founder of the water-boxing martial arts system, Chen Tuan, was known to leave his body for 100-day periods. Here once again we have the primordial archetype of a shaman who can hibernate like a bear while he travels out of body for three months intervals; during this time fellow practitioners were guarding his body.

The First Yoga of Naropa: Yoga of Psycho

The first of the Six Yogas of Naropa is tummo (inner heat); it is the yoga of psycho - physical heat. This practice uses a combination of visualization and breathing techniques that eventually result in the adept being able to survive arctic temperatures with very little clothing. It is said that in 1100 A.D., Milarepa, the most well - known Tibetan to have completed the Six Yogas, was able to spend all winter in the Himalayas in a light cotton garment.

____________________________________________________

TUMMO/INNER HEAT. Tummo is Tibetan for “inner fire” and is one of the Six Yogas of Naropa. It includes regulation of the breath, concentration on the navel center or in the lower abdomen and visualization of sacred syllables.Traditionally in Tibet, a practitioner of tummo would be tested by being put out naked into the snow and then having wet sheets wrapped around their body. Then they would need to generate enough heat within their body to dry multiple sheets.

____________________________________________________

Heat yoga is probably among the oldest practices, dating back to shamanic hunter- gatherer cultures. Like many of the techniques and practices we will be discussing, the original technique led to physiological, transformative results. These results provided a greatly enhanced survival advantage, which was then passed down to descendants, probably both genetically and culturally. Thus, any culture that had to exist in extremely cold climates appears to have linked inner heat with both a survival and a consciousness- illuminating affect.

In China, at the hunter-gatherer level of development, survival was largely based on skill derived from hereditarily transmitted animal martial arts systems. Each village or clan had a specific animal guardian with a system of corresponding martial arts, often based on sword, spear, and a variety of other weapons; these systems were used to protect the tribe from marauders. Very few students of Zen realize that one of the oldest sayings from the Shaolin temple, the legendary source of both Zen and martial arts, is "kill the leader of the bandits and you save the whole village."

The basis for all martial arts systems is chi development; martial arts skills are determined by the amount of heat that the individual has been able to generate through specific breathing, visualization and meditation practices. Energy cultivation is the basis of both the martial arts and medical traditions dating back toprehistoric times in Asia.

Essentially, an individual who mastered these practices could be expected to live to a much greater age than most people as well as maintain a very high level of health. In theory, this would allow the clans that had mastered these techniques to survive and reproduce successfully at a much greater rate than those who were not able to master this yogic skill. Heat yoga can compensate for nutritional inadequacy in winter months, so fasting practices could benefit those in times of extreme cold or famine. Heat yoga and fasting practices are techniques that ultimately became the basis of many Tibetan yogic systems.

Even in modern times, martial arts masters are able to fight successfully past their seventies. There have been many cases in which elderly practitioners successfully defeated challengers or armed opponents. In one story, Wang Pei Sheng, a well-known master, defeated four Japanese soldiers carrying bayonets with his bare hands, using tai chi skills, during the Japanese occupation of Beijing. Similarly, in Japan, the belief was that one true samurai armed with a sword could defeat ten armed opponents. In China, the belief has always been that success in combat is determined by the level of chi development of the practitioner. In modern times, these arts have continued to be transmitted because of their health benefits and their associations with longevity. In ancient times, the medical system, the martial arts system and the system of spiritual cultivation were not separate; you see this in the monastic teaching systems that existed in China, Tibet and India.

Six Yogas of Naropa

The Six Yogas of Naropa are a collection of techniques passed down by enlightened couples, many of whom have achieved the permanent union of the Three Bodies. These yogas can be done before or during death, with the understanding that some yogis can only achieve full Buddhahood at the time of death. Each of the techniques is considered a complete method of transcendence in and of itself; the Six Yogas represent a collection of practices of a number of Mahasiddhas. In many ways, the Six Yogas appear to be based on the original shamanic and yogic methods of inner power development; the most complete form results in the union of the Three Bodies.

Naropa, one of the most well known practitioners of Buddhism and tantric yoga, was a student of Tilopa in India in the 10th century. He studied with Tilopa by first being subjected to what are known as "The Twelve Trials of Naropa,” which involved Tilopa's placing Naropa into situations that were quite challenging and painful, testing Naropa's willingness and devotion.

There are many stories of spiritual teachers who test their potential and ongoing students with extremely harsh conditions, demands, requests, and questions. The trials to test sincerity, which many teachers put their students through, are meant to eliminate dilettante practitioners who do not have the mental fortitude or devotion to traverse the path to its end. The students who successfully pass through these trials demonstrate a level of devotion conspicuously absent from many modern spiritual or religious disciplines. The focus and dedication that it takes an Olympic athlete to earn a gold medal are similar to what is necessary for a student to master advanced spiritual disciplines, such as those in chi gong or mahamudra teachings.

The Six Yogas of Naropa, advanced teachings that are the foundations of the Buddhist lineages, especially in Tibet.

What is the Kundalini?

In the writings of the Indian expert on kundalini, Gopi Krishna, we find the following: Heaven has planted in the human body a powerful reservoir of psychic energy that, when roused to activity, can lead to transcendental states of consciousness, genius, and supernormal psychic gifts.

Though millions of ordinary people may know about the breakthroughs in astronomy, medicine, chemistry, and other branches of science, hardly anybody is familiar with a far more important development: the almost unbelievable potential lying dormant in their own brain. It is this power center in the human body that the sages in India knew as Kundalini and that adepts in other parts of the world called by names as varied as the “sun behind the sun” and the “philosopher’s stone.”
-Gopi Krishna, Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man

What is this kundalini that we are talking about here? To understand kundalini we must understand the term prana, which means something quite close to the Chinese chi. Prana is life energy and, like chi, can be linked to the breath. Also, like chi, it is the original energy that gives life to and supports all of our physical, mental and even emotionalactivities. As an old saying goes, “Where there is breath, there is life.” We can go without food or even water (as in some yogic practices in India as well as in China) for days, weeks, or even months at a time but we cannot go for more than a few minutes without breathing.

Many yogic practices are about strengthening or purifying the prana or life force. The specific aspect of the life force that is called kundalini is said to reside deep in the first chakra of the body, lying coiled there like a snake. The image of a snake rising through the spinal core is used to describe the awakening of the kundalini energy. This energy called the kundalini is the juncture where the body meets the other elements of consciousness. Activation of the kundalini spreads this primal energy up along channels called nadis, through the knots of the chakras. Or course to do this one needs proper coaching. Although occasionally pain is described, usually the sensations of heat, pleasure, and even ecstasy are reported.