Haytor Neidan Self-Cultivation!

Ch’an Dao Blog Article – Neidan As We Get Older! (18.4.2025)

I suspect the ancient Greeks encountered Buddhist monasticism when visiting India (such as Pythagoras), learned the Buddhist method of “looking within”, and then adjusted the technique as a means to “prove” the efficacy of their particular philosophical perspectives (the work of Plotinus may be taken as an example of this endeavour). Later, via the Greeks, a community of Jews (in Qumran) started sitting in meditation to personally attain a “glimpse of Yahweh” – a practice that eventually spread to the reformed Jewish sect of “Christianity” – whose adherents started to meditate whilst sat in the caves found in the Egyptian Desert (this type of Christianity spread to Britain – hundreds of years prior to Catholicism – becoming “Celtic Christianity”).

Reaction & Religion Go Hand in Hand!

UK: The Kind Idiocy of Mary Augusta Ward [1851-1920]! (24.3.2025)

It is incredible that someone such as Bishop Smith thinks that Mary Ward – the co-founder of the “National Women’s Anti-Suffrage League” – is a person worthy of remembering when she dedicated her life to preventing society from developing – a process which required the lifting of the religious ignorance that had dominated the West for over a thousand years. Furthermore, the White, middle-class and thoroughly “male” interpretation of Christianity Bishop Smith and Ward seem to be peddling has virtually nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ – and has more in common with the ramblings of St Paul – a fantasist who never met Jesus. The situation is probably more confusing than even this – as many of the letters ascribed to Paul – particularly the misogynistic editions – are thought to be forgeries.

Defining ‘Emptiness’ (Sunnata) and ‘Nothingness’ (Akincanna)! (5.2.2023) 

What does this mean? Dull nothingness (akincanna) is a thought form with a non-descript content. In other words, a thought is generated which is defined by the usual boundaries and parameters that constitute the average structured ‘thought’ form – but the meditator misunderstands this ‘non-descript’ content and mistakenly grasps it as being the empty mind ground. The trap here is that a manifest ‘thought’ (and stream of thought) is masquerading as the psychic fabric from which all structured thought arises – and which pre-exists all thought. This state is mistaken as complete and perfect enlightenment and those trapped within it start misleading others down the wrong path.