15. SOME MORE TECHNIQUES FROM EASTERN PRACTICES

The field of metaphysics suffers from a shortage of workable techniques and processes. However, there have been a few. With what we know now, we can take these techniques, correct the flaws (which may have been intentionally introduced to block advancement) and improve them into something useful. One example is the chakras which I discussed earlier. Here are a few more.

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THE PRANA (or Pranhayana) BREATHING EXERCISES

This is one of the key techniques of Yoga. First they labor at mastering various techniques of breathing, especially rhythmic and hypnotic ones. Then they work at drawing in cosmic energy (called Prana) with the breath and running it out to the extremities of the body or collecting it in the stomach or in the bottom chakra.

This is a mockup drill of considerable power, but few of them realize that they are mocking up the energy for the body to draw in (a few advanced ones are aware of this). If you consider that the universe is mocking up energy for you, that puts you at effect and it makes this a long and difficult procedure. If, however, you consider that you are mocking up energy for the body, then it becomes a simple and powerful technique that runs quickly and easily.

The idea of mocking the energy up outside and having the body draw it in with the breathing is actually quite smart. This makes the energy acceptable to the body and brings it in on the body's normal inflow.

You can just push golden energy into the body, but there is some resistance and it is not easy to get the body to have or use the energy. Mocking up golden energy in the air around you and having the body breath it in is orders of magnitude easier and often gives a distinct rise in the body's energy level. Go ahead and drill it a little each way and you'll see what I mean. You should occasionally flow some energy in contrary to the breathing just to keep from going slavishly into agreement with the body, even though it is much easier the other way.

There's no sense in making a big deal about the breathing itself. With a drill like this you should consciously control your breathing, but it hardly matters what you do with it as long as you are in control. It doesn't have to be rhythmic (unless you're trying for some kind of a trance) or deep or shallow or any other specific thing.

Realize that you are not actually breathing in energy. You are just fooling the body into accepting the energy that you are mocking up for it by flowing it in with the breath. This means that you can breath shallowly or erratically and still run a big flow of energy all the way out to the fingers and toes.

An interesting drill is to mockup a cloud of golden energy around an object and then flow the energy in and out of it in rhythm with your breathing. This might help with levitation etc.

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THE DIAMOND CUTTER: INTROSPECTIVE DRILLS ON NOTHINGNESS

The "Diamond Cutter" drill (sometimes found in Mahayana Buddhist texts) was so called because it exposed the true spirit hidden within the corporeal shell much as a diamond cutter exposed the true diamond hidden within what seems to be an ordinary stone.

This was one of a general class of drills where one meditated on being nothing or looked inward and found nothingness.

Occasionally these kinds of drills would produce a keyed out OT, but usually they just keyed the person in and knocked him down scale.

Ron tried out various techniques in this direction and found that they generally were restimulative and unworkable (only one process, "Conceive a Static" worked to some degree). Eventually he concluded that you could not process in this direction because a thetan had to have a game and the static is a no games condition. But in this case he was wrong.

The real bug in these drills is that the static is not a pure nothingness. It is a nothingness with potential.

If you run "I am nothing", it will kick your teeth in because it is wrong. If you run "I am a nothingness with infinite potential", you are moving in the direction of truth and rehabilitating native state and will gain in power. The ancient drills must have occasionally hit this the right way and so they sporadically produced a powerful result.

But alternating techniques are much stronger than simple contemplation. And even with the right concept, drills on nothingness can knock out havingness. So our best technique would alternate the nothingness with a powerful havingness raising command. This gives us the following high horsepower process:

Mock these up, alternately. Don't worry about it if it seems very vague and unreal at first, just carry on, it will get better.

A) Look within yourself and see a nothingness with infinite potential.

B) Look within yourself and see the entire physical universe.

You can also vary this by seeing the magic universe or any other universe that you have some reality on.

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ZEN AND THE ART OF DISAGREEMENT

In the final analysis, you can only trap yourself.

I have labeled the 12th dynamic as "Reason" and it encompasses the domain of logic. That it is only the 12th and not the top implies that it is not an absolute truth and that you can operate outside of it.

Early on the track you could be trapped by your own logic and this is perhaps the ultimate trap.

Zen is famous for its koans. These are concepts to meditate on which are aimed at freeing you from the trap by exteriorizing you out of the game and the pattern of agreement. An often quoted example is "The Sound Of One Hand Clapping". Another is "The Sound of Silence", which doesn't mean that you hear how quiet it is or feel relief that the noise has stopped but rather that you contemplate the sound of the nothingness that isn't there.

The direct approach would be to drill disagreement through mockup processing as is done in the Philadelphia Doctorate Course. But any direct approach is limited by the factors of accessibility.

Zen, on the other hand, is a subtle approach which tries to undercut the entire pattern, not just the parts that are accessible.

On a conscious level, you could, for example, mockup silence with and without sound, but that would be missing the point of the koan. In that kind of a drill, you are moving upwards in the pattern of agreement and learning to disagree at a basic level, but you are still to some degree in the game. The koan, on the other hand, is more like listening to a sound that was never put there in the first place. It is outside of the entirety of the game.

This approach can exteriorize one from the jewel of knowledge and the entire sequence of universes.

The best way would be to mockup your own koans. Contemplate that which you consider to be truly impossible by definition and find it anyway and discover that there is no way to communicate it but it still is.

Being of a mathematical bent, I contemplated the place where two and two equals five in the absolute sense (without redefining the number line) knowing that such a place could not exist by definition and contemplated that location anyway.

This is a limited approach. Even in exteriorizing from the game, you will not actually abandon everything without viewing it. Therefore you will put it back and reach back into it. But it is still an exterior condition, much like exteriorizing from the body, but a step higher.

But there is a liability to this technique. It can take you so far out that you experience a severe drop in havingness and motion. That in turn can cause you to pull things back in again. So you need to balance this with havingness processes and OT drills. Especially, reaching and withdrawing from the physical universe, and mocking up games etc. You might also need to do a variation of the ext/int rundown on the button of interiorizing and exteriorizing from games or universes or frames of reference.

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Having found these gems within the various Buddhist practices, and knowing that Ron's early work drew on this material as well, you would expect to find a tremendous degree of spiritual awareness in the orient.

Let me disabuse you of that notion.

The vast majority of Buddhists are not practicing Zen or the Trantras (Tantric Buddhism is the Tibetan flavor - the word Tantra could be translated as meaning process or drill) or the Sutras (the diamond cutter is a sutra).

Most Buddhists follow one of two popular schools.

In the one case, they pray for the coming of Matreya. This is the Buddha who is to come who is supposedly studying in heaven attempting to build a better bridge.

In the other case, they pray to be reborn in the pure land. At some point, the Amithaba Buddha (who might or might not have been Buddha's deciple Ananda) promised that when he achieved enlightenment, he would create a world which was so good and pure that if you were reborn there, all your sins and karma would fall away and you would be set free.

I think that observing this is one of the things that drove Ron to freeze Scientology and guard it against alteration (which also guards it against advancement). He saw the shattered remnants of what must have been a very advanced mental science decayed into superstition and with its key processes mostly lost or twisted with subtle traps and errors that would derail the majority of the population.

But in this world, things will not remain the same. They either advance or decline. It doesn't work to try and cast it all in concrete. That simply assures that the change, when it comes, will be a decay instead of an improvement.

By the way, Ron didn't say that he was The Buddha (Gutama Siddartha). He said he was the Matreya, meaning that he was the next Buddha who'd studied and found a better way than the eightfold path. Since the Matreya is prophesized to be a chubby westerner with red hair and is often depicted as sitting in a chair instead of in the lotus position, there might be some justice in the claim. It wouldn't surprise me if he had been one of the Buddha's deciples and had vowed to fulfill the prophesy (this is pure speculation). Of course he didn't spend the last few thousand years in heaven, but that might not have turned out to be a practical approach to research.