Re: [BardonPraxis] Buddhist / Bardon

[Jwingate2002@...]

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


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