₦airaland Forum

Focus your attention on the top of your neck. Take that energy and transmit it in two lines to your hands. Then from the hands, bounce that energy right back to the heart center and ground it.
Rama

“Wisdom,” she began, “cannot be found in books. Nor can it be found by talking with learned professors. You may gain information this way, but you will never gain wisdom. Wisdom cannot be found by traveling. You may see the wonders of the earth, but you will not find wisdom. Wisdom can only be found inside your own heart. To give love unselfishly is the greatest wisdom that there is.”
Rama

Move the kundalini from the solar plexus region into the heart center, which purifies it and connects the two halves of you being. Bring the kundalini down again from the heart center to the navel center.

In pranayama you don't worry about taking breaths, you focus on exhalation. If you exhale properly you will inhale. The more deeply you exhale the more deeply you will inhale

Meditation means the cessation of thought. For years we practice, and like any other art, we get better at it each day.

Rama

Mara

It is our argument that a sufficiently low price can turn a security of mediocre quality into a sound investment opportunity - provided that the buyer is informed and experienced and he practices adequate diversification. For, if the price is low enough to create a substantial margin of safety, the security thereby meets our criterion of investment.

The reader can test his own psychology by asking himself whether he would consider, in retrospect, the selling at 156 in 1925 and buying back at 109 in 1931 was a satisfactory operation. Some may think that an intelligent investor should have been able to sell out much closer to the high of 381 and to buy back nearer the low of 41. If that is your own view you are probably a speculator at heart and will have trouble keeping to true investment precepts while the market rushes up and down.

I think you have to learn that there's a company behind every stock, and that there's only one real reason why stocks go up. Companies go from doing poorly to doing well or small companies grow to large companies.

Experience teaches that the time to buy stocks is when their price is unduly depressed by temporary adversity. In other words, they should be bought on a bargain basis or not at all.

It requires strength of character in order to think and to act in opposite fashion from the crowd and also patience to wait for opportunities that may be spaced years apart.

A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock.

Losing some money is an inevitable part of investing, and there's nothing you can do to prevent it. But to be an intelligent investor, you must take responsibility for ensuring that you never lose most or all of your money.

If I used justice, you'd all be dead. The karma that you throw at me when you don't like me -- if I just let it come back, you'd all be destroyed in no time.
Rama

I have often discussed the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path in talks I have given about meditation. But, since I also teach Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist mediation, I have a very eclectic approach to the subject.
Rama

I think the most miraculous thing is learning. I get out of the way and let the students learn. Then you get to watch this amazing thing happen.
Rama

September 23,2000

Meanwhile, I noticed every now and then Rama would close his eyes and I'd start to feel a little funny. I asked him about it and he said he was “Just bringing the consciousness up a little bit.” “Don't just bring it up, knock me off my mundane feet!” I exclaimed. I wanted out of the illusion, I wanted illumination, and now right before me, disguised as my old friend was the means

Astrology has never been one of my interests, but when an eclipse occurs or a solstice or equinox comes to pass I sit up and take notice. Things do seem to be affected by these events. My first visit to Rama's home coincided with the vernal equinox.
Lakshmana

At some point my ears became involved, and one day my mother called a taxi (she did not drive) and took me to a doctor too important to make house calls—an ear specialist. (For some reason I got the idea that this sort of doctor was called an otiologist.) I didn’t care whether he specialized in ears or assholes. I had a fever of a hundred and four degrees, and each time I swallowed, pain lit up the sides of my face like a jukebox.

If grass can grow through cement, love can find you at every time in your life.

Stop thinking and end your problems.

(Zazen music plays in the background, and Rama speaks to the beat of the music.) Psychic development. What lies on the other side of seeing? How can you know what someone thinks of you, when they're not there? How can you avoid the traps and pitfalls that others may set up for you, or see opportunities that might not present themselves to your physical mind and body? How do you develop your intuition, so that you can just know what's true and what isn't? What is the border between the mental and the psychic? When are psychic impressions just imagination and not accurate information? Why are some people more psychic than others? Psychic development -- with Zen Master Rama. We live in a world filled with automobiles, highways of the mind, urban disasters, billions of people living on a tiny planet, sharing the diminishing natural resources of the earth. Pollution -- air pollution, noise pollution, psychic pollution -- it's getting dark out there. But it's always light in the inner worlds. In the inner-dimensional psychic planes, there is no pollution. There's endless, infinite, awareness. Beyond mind, beyond time, beyond space, there's immortal awareness. The universe is a giant mind. Some people have the ability to tap into that mind. We call them psychic. Others don't. We call them dull. But they have potential. The unlimited mind, the diamond mind of the Buddha, is your mind, if you can get in touch with it, if you can figure out where it is and what to do with it, and stop thinking so much and tap into that psychic part of your being. So sit back and relax for the next 45 minutes or so, and let's talk about psychic development. How you can escalate your level of awareness with patience, practice and a good sense of humor. What to expect, what to avoid. How to know what you don't know. Psychic development. (Zazen music ends.) There are two ways to come by money in this world. One is to inherit money. The other is to make it, to acquire it. If you inherit money, you can squander it and lose it. You can use it, or you can make more money. You can also start with no money and acquire money and get richer and richer, or you can acquire it and lose it. Once you know how to make money, even if you lose it, it's easy to do it again.
Rama

Meditating everyday is essential. If you meditate every day and learn to control and stop your thoughts, you'll become psychic. It’s that simple. If you start to give more thought to the world around you and stop exposing yourself to situations which drain your energy, and instead do things for yourself that make you feel better -- make your body feel better and your mind feel better -- you will discover through a trial and error process that you will have more energy. Then you need to begin the third part. You are meditating every day now. You are looking at things and not just doing them, but you're asking yourself, "Is this beneficial? Is this helpful to my sensitivity and my awareness, or am I just wearing myself out?" Great. Then you have to learn to control your emotions, to be able to glide through them. Again, meditation will help you here and particularly concentration exercises. By practicing concentration exercises and meditation, zazen, you will find that you will gain the ability, when strong emotions strike, to not be swayed by them. If suddenly you get depressed, it doesn't have to throw you or change your course of action. You won't necessarily give up. You can push those emotions aside eventually, or you can cultivate happy emotions or become emotionless at times when you need to be very, very sensitive. You need to develop a quiet mind and a happy life. You need to shield yourself from the bombardment of the world at some times. And then, at other times, you go right out in the middle of it and have a great time with it and be unaffected by it, in the same way that you learned to be unaffected by emotions. You don't want to become so sensitive that you can't interact with people in the world. If you get to that point, you are not practicing psychic development. You are running away from the world, and you've made yourself weak. Psychic development makes you strong. It develops a common sense attitude in which you don't expose yourself to forces and people and situations that would drain you, not because you're afraid, but because you're smart. Why waste your time being around people who drag you down? You don't live forever, at least in this life. So practice meditation, concentration exercises, and begin to think more about regaining your sensitivity by avoiding draining situations. Not because of fear but because of intelligence. Try to be still inside. Learn to quiet and stop thought, and you will find that you will be able to develop your mind. Your psychic intuition will start to come about, and [you should] practice it. In every situation, feel before acting, just for a second. Look for a feeling, and you'll learn through a trial and error process when it worked and when it didn't. You will feel it's a good car and you'll buy it, and it won't be. Then you know that that wasn't the right feeling. You will feel that this could be a good person to know and it will work out well, and that was the right feeling. Eventually you'll learn to isolate that feeling, through practice. That is how you become psychic -- through practice. (Zazen music begins.)
Rama

It is important, then, to build that buffer around yourself. You need to start to think about your life and the way you lead it. Ask yourself, "Does your household create a feeling of beauty and sensitivity?" [Does it give you] what you need? You are trying to become sensitive. If it doesn't, redecorate it, move to another location. Do the people you associate with engender that sensitivity? Are they harsh and abrasive and generally unaware? Start to associate with people who are more aware. Meet them. Take a yoga class, study different forms of self-discovery, whatever. You will meet people who are drawn to those things. Some people are crazy and fanatical -- avoid them. They won't help. But people who are more balanced and calm and introspective, associating with them will raise your energy level.
Rama

Again, this feeling is the sensitivity that you will develop in time, and I think it's always wise, particularly in the beginning, to balance your new intuitive and psychic understandings with good old common sense. The two should not be different. A good psychic perception follows your common sense. So I wouldn't launch on your career of psychic perception and start to make a lot of random choices based upon your new-found psychic abilities, without first subjecting them to the analysis of common sense. Some day you might become very, very psychic and very sensitive, and you don't have to bother. But in the beginning, common sense should, in a very premeditated way, arbitrate your psychic perceptions. Suddenly you have a psychic perception to quit your job and move to India. That might not be a psychic perception. You might be getting carried away. It might be a faulty perception. Then common sense says, you don't have enough money, you need the job, you don't know what India is like, and so you decide not to do it. This might be smart. If your psychic seeing was very developed and you practiced it for years and found that, through a trial and error process, you could now determine what is a psychic intuition and what is psychic garbage, then sure, if you get the feeling, do it. But I suggest caution, because you can't tell. Don't listen to voices, don't listen to voices. If you hear voices talking to you, forget it. Disregard the information, even if it's right occasionally. You are dealing with non-physical forces that are trying to influence you, that come from outside of yourself, and who knows what they will have to say and why. For the same reason, I suggest that you do not get involved in what I would call channeling, tapping into spirits that are not physically present and all this stuff. Your own psyche, your own mind, has the ability to properly reflect and determine through feeling what is correct and what is not. You don't need anybody to tell you what's right or wrong. What you do need, perhaps, is someone to show you how to come to those understandings, which come from meditating, learning to be more aware, overcoming mental conditioning and cultural conditioning, learning how to do systems analysis of your energy and these sorts of things -- the arts of Zen and self-discovery, which will enable you to unfold that psychic ability.
Rama

So let's consider these three conditions, and they're all obviously completely interrelated. First and foremost, it's important to build a shield between yourself and the world. The way you do this is by allowing yourself a kind of a buffer or cushion in which to grow. If we have a little tiny plant and we want it to develop, we put it in a greenhouse. There the little plant will perk along and grow and be real happy. If we were to put it outside in a windy world with harsh elements, the little plant might not develop. It might croak. It might die. Eventually the plant will become really strong, and then maybe we can transplant it outdoors. There’s something very fragile about the beginning stages of psychic development. Eventually, one becomes very strong, and the cushioning isn't as necessary. It is still logical because we live in an abrasive world. We don't live forever. We have limited personal power. We have limited energy. We have a limited life. And you can't use your energy for all things. You have to determine those things that you direct your energy towards, otherwise you get yourself in too many places and nothing succeeds. Life wears us down. We all die here. Depending upon the way you expose yourself to energies and powers and forces, both physical and non-physical in this world, you will determine whether you have a lot of energy or you lose energy. Some places drain you. Some people drain you. Some enhance you. Some situations will empower you. Some will take your power away. It is necessary, rather than just kind of arbitrarily bouncing around in the world and letting whatever happen may, to start to pick and choose among the numerous opportunities that life affords you. The overall purpose, which is kind of understood, is that you wish to develop your psychic ability. With that as a forethought it will now be easier` for you to make choices because that will be the point of decision. Will this job hinder my psychic development or help it? Not simply, is it a pleasant job? Does it give me immediate satisfaction? Will this relationship hinder or help my psychic development? Will this practice? Will this pleasure? Whatever it is. That is the cutting edge that you use in psychic development. Naturally, you practice psychic development when you make that analysis because you have to feel, since things are not always apparent, whether it will or not. Just that is the practice, you see? Doing that every day, with every situation, not in a real intellectual way, not sweating over it, worrying -- that will only drain your power and energy -- but just feeling from moment to moment what you should do, and doing it.
Rama

As I suggested, there are really just two steps, or perhaps three, in psychic development. One is building a shield between yourself and the descriptions of the world that everyone else has. Second is a continual reordering of the mind and the mental structures along with the ability to think in prescribed ways, to analyze in prescribed ways and to stop thought for periods of time. The third really has to do with gaining control of the emotions. Again, being the helmsperson and not being blown all around by the winds of emotion. While there will be the winds of emotion -- they won't go away -- you can navigate or even use them to expedite your journey to get you where you want to go.
Rama

Fire consume the yansh

Most people are blind. Just as the blind person can't see a rose, they can only touch it, and you can see all its wondrous colors and formations -- so the psychic person lives in a world of blind people. That is really how it appears. There are all these people running all over the planet, totally deluded beings, who don't "see" what life is for, what their own lives are about, because they don't see psychically. Therefore, they miss most of the beauty of life.
Rama

Being psychic, then, does not really involve, by and large, seeing the future. In the popular mind, that's what the psychic is all about, but being psychic means rather simply seeing and perceiving things as they are. The car is a lemon, it's a dud, OK, and it's going to have all kinds of problems. You don't have to see the future to see those events occurring. The car is already a lemon, meaning it wasn't constructed properly. When you use your physical eyes and you look at the car, you can't see that because you are just seeing the shiny polished exterior. If you're psychic it means you're using another part of your mind to look at the car. You are not seeing its future. You are seeing right now. Right now, you can see that the welds weren't done properly. You can see that the valves aren't running well. You can see and therefore forecast that information, based upon the way things really are, that the car is definitely going to have problems. Therefore, you don't buy it. So the psychic ability is really not so much to do with forecasting futures, but seeing things as they are now. Seeing beyond the surface -- that's psychic.
Rama