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# Re: Buddhist / Bardon

#### Message 03181 of 3835

- To: BardonPraxis@yahoogroups.com
- Subject: Re: [BardonPraxis] Buddhist / Bardon
- From: Jwingate2002@...
- Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2004 06:47:45 EDT

    Hey Derrick -

    I read your mail carefully. Although I don't know much about 'zazen', I
    think I might see where the problem is.

    The 'Thought Control' exercise is not really *meant* to impact your daily
    life very much. It is only with the next exercise, 'Thought Discipline', that
    you bring, if you like, 'mindfulness' into your everyday life, and see what
    follows from doing that. I also think that perhaps magic is different from
    Buddhism in that you have to go after things very positively and wilfully. It
    is
    more a case of, if you wish to behave mindfully then do so!

    In other words, you say that zazen made you more mindful. Now you are doing
    Bardon you are less mindful. But you haven't reached the second exercise yet
    where the exact instruction *is* to do everything 'mindfully'. At that point
    you *deliberately become* mindful - the exercise to produce mindfulness is -
    be mindful! Mindfulness doesn't appear as a by-product of something else, you
    go after it and achieve it yourself.

    With the Buddhist exercises they may have an effect you did not consciously
    intend, and probably a positive one, but nevertheless in magic you have to
    quite deliberately *intend* the effect. Maybe this would help you to see
    whether magic or Buddhism is 'more for you' (although of course the Buddhist
    exercises are not really "Buddhism", just tried and tested ways to get certain
    things done).

    When you mention a one-pointed meditation on the breath, you are again
    talking about something more similar to Bardon's second exercise than his 1st.
    Of
    course it needn't be the breath, it's about concentrating on anything you
    like, to the exclusion of everything else, whenever you like, and preferably
    all
    the time. Doing breath-concentration *wouldn't* fulfil step 1 since there is
    still Mastery of Thoughts to consider, where you must concentrate on nothing.

    I know that the stage 1 mental exercises sound similar to other things, I
    had the same reaction. But I wasted alot of time trying to adapt other ideas I
    already knew to Bardon's - especially breathing exercises. Eventually though I
    just started again as if I knew nothing, and things went alot faster and
    smoother when I did. Then again, I knew at that stage that magic was something
    I
    really really wanted to do, and nothing else could replace it.

    If you wanted to do both, you'd have to consider carefully what each
    exercise *does*. If it were me and I wanted to do one-pointed breathing as
    well, I
    would wait until I was sure I had exercise 1 down, then incorporate it into
    exercise 2. Then I would forget all about it when doing exercise 3, or practice
    them concurrently and try not to confuse them!

    Hope this helps, Jason

    [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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