Midweek Foughts: Dealy Lamas & Bellys
Some thoughts on cultivating the belly
Given all the recent news regarding the Dealy Lama's rather controversial method of checking if a child on his lap was a demon or not, I thought I'd introduce some brief thoughts on cultivating the belly through a Tibetan lens.
As usual, people focus on the least exciting part of everything. In this case, the least interesting part of Tibetan Buddhism. This is, of course, because your average person is more a mentally defunct mutated monkey than a bona fide human being. So it's the same old story; instead of taking great value away from something, let's focus on the base lout entertainment.
I don't know what it is with this animal, but its love for pedestrian drama is firmly entrenched. Be that as it may, let us be momentarily superior and look at something Tibetan and worthwhile for us - given we can expend our energy to enhance ourselves rather than spend our limited life and energetically diminishing ourselves for some oxygen-thieving chimp sideshow.
This is my whole thing, after all; having seen the power and outcomes of belly cultivation, I've also accumulated quite an extensive list of unique exercises that free up the belly and "re-functionate" it.
Part of the challenge I've found with most people is they're chronically tight in the wrong places. They also lack the ability to sit correctly to allow the belly to function without severe tightness and pointless muscular contraction that gets in the way of the proper functioning of the entire vascular and gaseous exchange system.
In this respect, you may be interested to know the so-called Kargyud-pa sect, like Zen practitioners, don't close their eyes in meditation. In my work, I've noticed manipulation of the eyes and face yields exciting results regarding breath effectiveness. More on that another time.
Kargyud-pa practitioners often practice a type of breathing similar to stock standard pranayama. Their "energetic spiritual model" of the body is constructed upon such ideas. They consider the left and right nostrils to be the origin of energetic flows called nadis.
Rather like old Willy Reich's orgone, this prana or energy permeates the universe and is swimming in the air we breathe. Interestingly for all the nose-breathe people, of which I am one, the Tibetans are another archaic culture that promotes nose breathing from a young age, like the American Indians and many others.
For Tibetan practitioners, breath is life and perhaps the fundamental role in their practice.
The Tibetans, like the Dindu….sorry - Hindus, also have a feminine and masculine conception of each nadis, corresponding with each nostril as the point of origin for each flow. The aim of the yogi, with the breath, is to blend the different esoteric (feck... I said esoteric, does this mean I have to shoot myself) tendencies into unison.
Due to the Dealy Lamas's apparent indiscretions, the talk of Recent Twatter Convert-Bible-Thumping Puritan Town has been about how naughty Tibetan practitioners like to have sex0rs and therefore are degenerate. Indeed this ritual Tantra is the case sometimes by higher initiates, though not everyone in Tibet embraces it by any stretch.
I don't have a problem with tantric practitioners doing naughty sex magic because I despise moral fags - Twitter moral fags being the equivalent of fainting couch Victorian spinsters, so this kind of closed-mindedness is to be expected; however, such people should note more often, the erotic deity art of thangkas, for example, represent this EsOtErIc MaScUlInE FeMiNiNe union I've described above symbolically - and breathing as we've discussed plays a critical role in the yogi achieving this union. Of course, there are channels and various other things involved; however, this goes beyond what I'm bringing to light here.
What I do like about the Tibetans, however, is not their tongue-sucking ways; nay, I like how sophisticated their integration of body and mindfulness practice is. Perhaps more so than any other Buddhist group, they excel at this from a physiological point of view. Like Zen, the physiological angles, once understood, are apparent in their purposes.
It is widely recognised by almost all Tibetan Yogis that enlightenment, whatever you feel that means, cannot be obtained by a person in a state of extreme contraction, i.e. most of us. Thus, when you look at it, many of their yogic practices focus on releasing tension and breath control - for autonomic regulation of tension and contraction. In much the same way I have described here on my Snrubstack.
As well all know - being able to relax and understand our own minds gives us some degree of control over the worst excesses of our lowly and shabby primitive drives, and this is important, particularly for us, given how far away we are from anything primitive.
So, in summary, the entire project for the Tibetan yogi requires several fundamental pillars:
belly completely and perfectly relaxed and functional
Spine straight and centre of gravity learned; this is the only thing that allows the belly to relax while we're upright.
The centre of gravity, according to the Tibetans, in terms of the meditational pose, at least, is indeed the belly itself.
Once this position is mastered, it is believed that the nastier character contractions we experience (i.e. the beloved self of the average personality enjoyer) start to naturally dissipate.
Now, there are scientific reasons why this is the case. In Zen, the same disciplines are strictly enforced as the primary goal of the initial practice, and nothing else. So ask yourself, why is this?
It's simple - aside from all the mystical bullshit - I have been promoting, and I believe this is the seated man's natural posture. This is how we're meant to sit - and all the seriously dumb dumb idiot bits of human beings we've all grown to hate so much are primarily due to us physiologically forgetting ourselves and what we're meant to do.
This is why I've always respected the Japanese - when our suicidal little friends decide to kill themselves, like Mishima, for example - a courageous act by any stretch - they committed Hara-Kiri - thrusting their knives into the spiritual centre of man, the abdomen.
Modern humans in the West are such irredeemable sickos because they are entirely disconnected from their abdomen. I personally don't even think it's because of words or Marxism or whatever else everyone theorises as the reason we're all such spastics - no - it's primarily because they have a physiological disconnection - you sort this short-circuiting out, you sort out the idiot oxygen thieving animal by and large. Big claims, I know. But people who genuinely disrespect this creature and its ability to reason its way into and out of things will know what I mean. If you view the scumbot as anyone with a brain does, as a crappy robot - all of this will make sense.
Anyway, where were we…ahh, yes, so in short, the Tibetans agree with me that breath is life. And cultivating the belly is life.
Look out for this week's meditation, and I have another short tome coming out on the weekend, also. The meditations are on substack now but will form a part of my ultra mega course coming out mid this year. It will be so far beyond any of the gumroad trash any of the usual lineup of mongoloids have released it'll blow your mind.
Finally, forgive me for using the word esoteric. Another word on a long list ruined by people on twatter. Up yours twitter threaders.