Overview
The problem with ‘practices’ is that playing with the body/brain (the doorway to AWARENESS) is a very dangerous thing. This is why being a member of a closely-knit spiritual group with competent travelers on the path with you is critical. In the West at least, I’m not aware of any such group that I’d recommend at least. I mean, mindfulness mediation, Zen or the like is generally pretty safe, but one never knows; even then ‘spiritual emergencies’ can arise, and there often is nobody to help. Indeed someone who ‘blows up’ might be disenfranchised from the group.
When I was in the Kundalini Yoga organization, there were several letters per day, coming in over decades, of people who had ‘played home chemistry experiments on themselves and it had gone wrong. Many of them were in terrible pain, generally leading to insanity and multiple organ failure. I’m not exaggerating. They would write in (this was before the Internet really) for advice, and there wasn’t a support network available at that time. Insofar as I know, there still isn’t.
Now, in my heart I love Zen, and adore the early Zen teachers, as they would say that they know nothing special, that they had nothing to teach, and that being called a teacher would be embarrassing to them. They were pretty much correct. However in the modern world, with 24×7 mind control from media and the internet (via our masters the cell phone, and someday the brain chip), we actually do need some practices, if we are to pry away the huge gunk covering that society traps us with (so that we give our money to the robber barons, the techno barons and kleptomaniac elites).
The practices that I know, I observed while observing me over the years. When i was hurting I would sometimes find myself doing these automatic practices, so that is how they developed. I was also trained a bit in Kundalini Yoga, but rather poorly trained. Still, it became rapidly obvious what the practices were doing, and that understanding was greatly enhanced by knowledge of neurology. Really some of the best practices that sound so mystical and ominous, supposedly linked to vast invisible forces, are nothing of the sort. But rather, simple ways to stop partitioning our awareness away from our whole selves, and from nature. Nothing creepy. Nothing occult.
Yet it is occult these days. And that is tragic. It’s as if blowing one’s nose were some great occult secret, so nobody would do it. No, go ahead, blow that nose! It’s all clogged up/running.
So I’ll list a few practices here by name, just so that I can talk to a few folks about them in private.
Practices
| Name | Danger | Purpose |
| Awareness (Mindfulness) | minimal | Your standard mindfulness training from various traditions like Zen. |
| Tracing | minimal | Awakens communication with the right brain hemisphere and holistic perception. Reduces egoic pain and separation. |
| Grokking | minimal | Deepens the benefits of tracing and starts to build a conscious bridge to the unconscious. |
| I | minimal, if not done obsessively | Gokking ‘the I’ |
| Delving (Black Sludge Practice) | moderate to extreme | Also known as ‘shadow work’. It’s a prerequisite for anything past minimal danger practices. |
| Symboling (Imaginal engraving) | moderate, if not done obsessively | Solidifies the conscious to unconscious bridge. |
| Upper stitching | minimal, if not done obsessively | Solidifies the conscious to unconscious bridge plus merges the ego and the superego. |
| Full stitching | extremely dangerous | unites the id, ego and superego + more. |
| Upper untangling | minimal to moderate, if not done obsessively | Partially frees AWARENESS stuck in the body. |
| Full untangling | Extremely dangerous | Frees AWARENESS stuck in the body. |
| POTENTIALITY (acceptance/amor fati) | minimal to extremely dangerous | You gain the ability to form bonds beyond your body, if any such are available to you in the movie you find yourself within. |
| Golden Cloud with Silver Interior | You will die. | If you find yourself doing it, you won’t need anyone to tell you why. |
| Play | minimal, unless you try to ‘play’ doing tricks from the show ‘Jackass’ or the like. | What you do after all the dumb pet tricks are done. After all the hiding, all the seeking is done. Well, for the time at least. Hiding, seeking and helping (play) are eternal loops. |