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Hello! New member
MichaelMasoEllis
New
Hi 
I registered to participate in the discussion and communityness...
Primarily interested in practice and cool ways of communicating insight.
Into:
Art meditation movement embodiment mysticism worship experience
Humor...koans parables mythology transpersonal psychology
Practical synthesis of traditions....radical psychological and conceptual freedom..
Altered consciousness and knowing the self...trance and chanting...ancestral wisdom..
Life resonance...shadow work..devotion to the mystic arts...rumi..buddha..christ..
The central axis of spacial awareness and the subtle experience of shifting awareness
Neuriscience and body mapping...beauty...stillness...mystery...peace...
Cheers! M
4
Comments
Far too intellectual.
Hye thee to a nunnery!!
Oh, ok. Stick around.
We might just learn something.
Welcome!!
It's a mish-mash-hotch-potch of a forum, but - to unashamedly steal another member's opening 'signature' line, "I hope you find something useful here!"
(@genkaku will slay me for that. Rightly so!)
Hi
Welcome. 
Me too. Still working towards 'cool ways', normally use a sledgehammer.
(A sledgehammer?? Near lobster claws? Iz dat wize....?!)
Welcome @MichaelMasoEllis.
As usual, @federica leaves me speechless.
More seriously, welcome.
Hi ..... Nice to meet you. See you around.....
Yo. So what, if any, experience have you had with Buddhism so far?
Welcome...
Welcome. I hope you find newbuddhist to be home.
Just slugging away at the vippassana man
about 10 years or so... i really dig what the buddha taught.. im far less interested in the institutions of buddhism than i am in the practical wisdom.
I try always to place practice above semantics... it seems to me that its highly intelligent to do what works. My training in transpersonal psychology has combined nicely with 'repatterning' of the self... which i believe is really the core of the vippassana practice.
Bhuddism is just a word...encompassing many things...so not sure what youre specifically asking maybe.. haha.
...yeah... meditation! Woo!
Im very interested in considering gautama sakyamuni as a practitioner.. and therefore thinking critically about what influenced his practice... i have visited temples and whatnot in southeast asia and india and im also interested in the cultural manifesation of Buddhism. albeit with a critical eye and a penchant for the truth...
My practice now includes varying methods of working with the nonverbal subtle experience that has resulted primarily from vippassana. My first 10day sit left me in ruins...and the second wasnt any easier. Embodiment has been such a source of peace, health and fullfilment for me... even having died a thousand times. Sorted out my posture for zazen ... only took 10 years lol... the central axis work has just been such a game changer and a priceless resource...
As an artist i loooove the aesthetic sensibility of zen ...
Phew what a rant!
Peace and gravy..:)
H> @federica said:
Haha yeah i know right!? Id go to a nunnery but it would take some charming to let me stay there...being male.. lol
No answers in the mind... but that never stopped mine offering retrospectives.
Its just a story machine...and stories are beautiful imho.
You iz Hinayanist? (they do that vipassana) ...
Long live the unheretical!
[lobster goes and sits in the naughty corner with the Theravadins and gravy makers ...]
That's great. I first encountered Zen Buddhism about the same time I took a Cognitive Psychology course in college. I was immediately struck by how this brand new (for the time) field of Psychology basically ripped off Buddhism. Buddha discovered and the Zen monks refined mind as a process of dependent functions (skandhas) and the "You are not your thoughts" insight a thousand years before George Mandler established the ground rules. Now I'll have to look up "Transpersonal Psychology".
Yes... the ' hinayana ' distinction is relevant.
Broadly speaking..there is a lot of bulls*#t in..everything...maya and illusion and all that...lots of teachers are just making a living.. for me...liberty comes from critical analysis of ones own experience.. its all so subjective after all...unless of course i want to belong to something.. but that requires kowtowing to the big wigs...
Never was good at following the rules! Haha well im pretty sure the buddha was a radical himself.
Oh and HERESY HERESY HERESY!
'
To be fair.. i have had some truly great practice teachers whom i respect so much.
Ah cool yeah nice. Its funny how stuff gets appropriated hey. For me it shows the method is sound if it transcends the paradigm..
Sounds like a Meetup introduction.
What if there were a method of 'unpatterning' the self . . . ?
It may be worth remembering that psychology is not just some reconfigured version of Buddhism any more than Buddhism is some slick and convenient rewrite of psychology.
The old Zen teacher Ta Hui once wrote (approximately), "I have always taken a great vow that I would rather suffer the fires of hell for all eternity than portray Zen as a human emotion."
There are SO many...
But what about... Psychology = soul study..? Neuropsychology? The practice of Buddhism.. as gradual release from sankara tyranny? Surely psychology and buddhism are complimentary...
Oh no i said the word soul... i can tell thats a bit vague maybe..
For purposes... soul=story
I feel like we probably have very different understandings of psychology.
I believe my point is that the sankara tell a story and that psychotherpeuric methods (of which mindfulness is one..) help to move through the story and thus gain enough perspective to transcend it.. thus transpersonal psychology...to do with transition and transformation. Zen is supposed to be the direct route to such liberation.. but perhaps the emotional forces are so strong with some people that therapy is a good first step?
Contemplation - illumination - expression...an upward..inward...outward.. triadic spiral towards the great void of the unknown! Dun dun dun !!!
In any case it seems to me that the emotions have life of thier own and it is no less necessary to feel through them than it is to not be attached to them...lots of evidence to support the health benefits of emotional release...and the consequences of supression.
^^^^
@MichaelMasoEllis -- Well, you certainly can explain it. And lord knows there are plenty of people making packets of money with such explanations... very nice and sometimes very rich people.
It's probably a character flaw, but I always get a bit edgy when someone claims -- implicitly or explicitly -- to have an in-control handle on Buddhism and to offer that delightfully-decorated handle to others (it's out of the goodness of their hearts, dontcha know). It just reminds me of that bridge in Brooklyn that so many have bought and sold.
Sometimes I think the "bitch-slap" was invented with Buddhism in mind.
"bitch-slap"
Not wise... but delicious.
Nice to have you here, @MichaelMasoEllis
Wow, interesting discussion...I'm sure Buddha would quite agree that even HIS thoughts aren't original, no one has a patent on all of dis stuff, heh. Same subject, I guess, different angle. It's all ... good?
We agree to agree and disagree agreeably around here. Welcome to our 'mosh pit'.
When I studied Psychology in college, most Professors were very familiar with Buddhist philosophy and in the textbooks it would mention pioneers like Jung were fascinated by what they were hearing. I think Buddhism has made an impact on Western Psychology that isn't often acknowledged.
When I hear people talking 'psychology' I usually hear 'Buddhism'....
Ah.. thanks! And thankyou to everyone for the welcome
Welcome @MichaelMasoEllis , i hope you have a great time in here
Willy Shakespeare wrote all the Buddha's stuff.
Welcome to the forum! It sounds like you have a lot going on there, how do you keep track of it all?
Also there's a lot of jargon, so could you briefly explain what these are:
"Radical psychological and conceptual freedom" - do you mean like developing an open mind?
"Life resonance and shadow work" - I've no idea, I'm afraid! Jungian shadow perhaps?
"The central axis of spacial awareness" - like where our awareness is centred or something?
Haha well.. it is a lot isn't it?
I keep track of it on mah boss website
Www.michaelmasoellis.com
I like your interpretations of my jargon..a few things:
an open mind.. and freedom from spiritual hierarchy..as in...a free mind.. free from manipulation...because it is grounded in non-mind..nonverbal..nonconceptual experience..
Yes jungian shadow.. but the shadow is present in all spiritual paradigms...a simpler term is dukkha in this context...the shadow is symbolised differently in different paradigms. But we deal with it most effectively with internal work.
Central axis of spacial awareness means exactly that...spacial awareness is on a spectrum 'gross (big) to subtle'..meaning more experience of space..in a smaller space...it means felt experience of space in meditation..the experience of the center is orientated by balance and gravity.
Cheers