This is the seed syllable "hreeh" for the Padma family and is the seed syllable within my favorite mantra:
Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh
I worked on the hues to give the symbol the fiery radiance it is meant to have when visualizing it at the root chakra (pulsing with each exhale and rising as a flame up the spine, transmuting sorrow/sadness into compassion, appreciation, and gratitude). It is related to the Sanskrit word for "conscience" or "organic shame" and is therefore the empathic element within mahakaruna, great compassion, which purifies us of all negative states. Conscience generates the feeling that the only loss in life is time wasted not loving, since only love gives meaning and purpose to life, only love generates the deepest and profoundest celebration of what is.
Amida Buddha, the artchetypal Buddha of love and light, radiates love as light and grace to heal us of everything, carry us to supreme perfect enlightenment, touch our true nature and activate it into a living energy, and pour through us to heal all worlds. Each chant is an affirmation and trust in the living moment that this is happening and that this is true, and moves the process endlessly forward until complete. After chanting the mantra several thousand times to over a million times, eventually one just uses the seed syllable to activate the whole living sense of all the Amida sutras and the core mantra itself. The seed syllable can be visualized on every chakra to purify each one, it can ride the breath, and activate every latent ability within our Buddha nature. Drawn on the roof of the mouth with the tongue, it can connect the two channels of the microcosmic orbit (the frontal and spinal energy channels). Or it can be held at the 3rd eye in deep concentration until we enter a samadhi unity with the symbol and feel its core essence as part of ourselves.
I wanted to add some immortalist thoughts in a more journal fashion today. I have not posted on this blog in a while. This is partly because the foundations have been really laid down in the series of entries that have been given. I have been filling in some details, though, with further research, mainly on the herbal front. I have been studying Aryurveda, both in the traditional Hindu and Tibetan forms, as well as a kind of emerging synthesis form. There is a book called PLANETARY HERBOLOGY by Michael Tierra. One point of his writing is that we have an emerging global culture and we can evolve a planetary herbal system for the first time. While much of modern medicine seems to be more and more focused on chemical or pharmacological treatment of almost every illness, there is another line of research that is very promising and that is to create a global herbal database, hopefully compiling data on how the herbs are being used, what illnesses have been successfully treated, and with what protocols the herbs have been used. I do feel, in this regard, the "anecdotal evidence," usually discounted by clinical scientists, is useful to record and compile, though I would prefer better note taking of the details of use. Even regular clinical studies have been a little deficient by my standards. For instance, I do feel that diet is a more critical component that regular medicine gives credit to. Most studies on the use of herbs do not factor in the kind of diet a person has and do not factor how the herbs may have a different action within a multiple stage protocol than when taken in isolation from a protocol.
For instance, when a person has had a lot of animal flesh food, dairy products, processed foods, excitotoxins like MSG and Aspartame, and white sugar, they are going to react to cleansing herbs differently than someone who has a sattvic diet, eats on a less chaotic schedule, and does good food combining. For someone who has had a poor diet, it seems important to cleanse the intestinal track of mucoid strands, anaerobic pathogens, and other toxic debri. This allows the colon to act more like an eliminative organ so that the whole body can be cleansed more efficiently. If certain cleansing herbs are used first, before the colon is cleared, then the bloodstream may get loaded with cellular toxic debri and not be able to efficiently eliminate them. The toxins may, in this case, get pushed out through the skin via some kind of skin rash or pimples. This, in turn, may aggravate other illness conditions.
For similar reasons, once the colon is cleared, a liver and gall bladder flush may be necessary. The idea of this protocol phase would be getting all the detox organs up to speed so that they can efficiently help regenerate the body. From a Naturopathic perspective, most illness conditions can be reduced to a deficiencies and toxicities that can be healed by creating a foundation in a good diet, clearing the digestive and eliminative pathways, and doing an herbal detox program. Once this is established, then herbs will work more efficiently and with less side effects. Many side effects are really just cleansing reactions which may not be necessary if the body is able to purge the toxins efficiently. Sometimes just getting the elimination system cleared and drinking lots of pure water is enough for the body to heal itself.
I have found that nearly everyone has a certain lack of order in their diets. It seems that corporate marketing creates a subliminal factor in getting people to consume and that this factor makes it harder to establish a kind of healthy and consistent discipline to the dietary world. This is coupled by a massive spin around several contradictory and competing versions of what a good diet is, with a vegan diet being the one most left out of most of the discussions. I feel that the vegan diet is the healthiest. It is possible that a raw food vegan diet may be superior to a cooked food vegan diet, but at present, after having experimented consistently with a raw food vegan diet for a year and a quarter, I concluded that there might be two weaknesses to the raw food vegan diet. One is that, without cooking vegetables, you are more likely to consume live parasites which may adversely and intensely affect health. This is especially true with the popular "grocery store raw foodism" where people rely on food trucked sometimes over 1,000 miles and fumigated with carbon monoxide from the exhaust, subject to extremes of heat and cold, and subject to handling at various junctures along the way. A lot of organic growing relies on composting where animal fecal matter is mixed in with plant wastes. If compost is not done properly and the compost pile is not heated by bacterial activity up to a certain temperature, the parasite eggs may not be cooked sufficiently to become sterilized and have a chance to invade a human host further down the time line. It is very easy for composting to be done improperly, since many people are relatively new to organic farming and are still in a learning process. But with our economic world linking very distant places together it is hard to double check on all the critical factors, almost impossible really, and cooking is simple insurance to cover a number of these factors. It may be possible for a raw food person to overcome these factors, but they should at least be looked at. The second problem is legume digestion. It seems that legumes are more digestible when cooked. While cooking cuts down the number of useful enzymes in food and the raw food diet has the most enzymes (an important positive factor in this diet), legumes still seem more digestible cooked and very cooked at that (like in a crock pot soup). When I was into raw food, I tried several ways of making legumes more digestible and found none of them were as digestible as a thorough cooking within a soup. Even sprouting legumes did not significantly change this for me.
If legumes are soaked overnight, drained of their soak water, rinsed, soaked again, slightly sprouted, rinsed, and then thoroughly cooked in a soup it seems that legumes shed a layer of natural toxins that are used by nature to protect the legumes-as-seed when sprouting (against molds, insect pests, etc.) and are literally easier for our body to handle. Legumes are the main viable protein in a vegan diet and should therefore be made as usable as possible by our body. The usual carnivore strategy is to load a lot of high protein animal muscle tissue into the body, bombard it with intense HCl acid in the stomach, and purge out the uric acid and nitrogen waste products from the system, along with hopefully dead maggot eggs laid by flies at the stockyards, and the urine that gets stuck in the system between organ death and cell death of the animal (animals die twice biologically, whereas death in the plant world is very different, some plants are so alive before being cooked that you can replant them and still have them grow; animals first die on the organ level when the heart and brain do not function, then the cells choke in the toxins secrete into the bloodstream when the organs no longer pump the blood, these toxins are consumed when animal flesh is eaten). One fallacy in the animal flesh eating strategy is that we do not use any "protein". Animal flesh eating diets are considered superior because they are high in protein. But humans do not really use protein at all. All the proteins of animal flesh must first be broken down into amino acids before they can be used. It takes massive acidic activity to break down animal muscle tissue to unlock its amino acids. Carnivores in nature have twice the HCl level of human beings for this purpose. Animal muscle tissue is very tough. Plants, on the other hand, do not have "complete proteins" (as if that is a disadvantage) and are already partly broken down, and therefore are easier to assimilate. Through cooking a soup, some of the processes of good digestion can be carried out outside our body so that the digestive process can be easier in our bodies. Preparation of legumes seems very key to this and probably works better in a cooked vegan diet. A quick stir fry, for the other vegetables, or a sauté under a lower heat (animal muscle tissue needs a higher cooking temperature to sterilize the maggot eggs and other pathogens that could be there, especially since the organ similarity of animals to humans may be enough of a match for humans to get cross species diseases), can preserve the enzymes that are sometimes lost during cooking. It is also possible to prepare high enzyme foods like papaya and pineapples to also compensate for enzyme loss.
In writing these notes, I am pointing to how much of a medicinal art really good cooking is and how little focus there is on this way of cooking. Very few people in modern society even cook from farm fresh ingredients, but open all kinds of boxes of processed powders and mix them together instead. Many people who are trained in gourmet cooking are really focusing on making food that taste good and only secondarily on its medicinal qualities. This is sometimes seen when, for instance, one TV chef who will remain nameless, got high cholesterol from his own cooking, almost got a lethal heart attack as a result, and had to switch to using less oil in his sauces. When you factor in keeping the nutritional and medicinal properties fully alive, factor in how food can synergistically combine with each other, and how to keep the properties at full potency, then everything matters, including how long each item needs to be cooked. What I learned from eating raw for over a year was that I was overcooking all my food and weakening all kinds of nutritional and medicinal potencies. I gained a sensitivity to a vital element that is easier to experience in raw foods and a wish to keep this vital element alive.
For instance, Omega 3's in oils have a lot of good healing properties, but also get destroyed easily by high heat. The best way to protect the Omega 3 factor is to put Flax Oil in last, after the stove is turned off, and to only gently stir it in. The same with adding this to a nutritional smoothie (only stir in after blending as the last ingredient). In terms of stir frying, I use olive oil and make sure it does not smoke. I add onions first and let them turn a little transparent, then add garlic, and then immediately add some pure water, then cardamom, then turmeric, and then some ginger. This creates the base for the fresh veggies to get added. They are added in terms of hardness, with the most hard veggies that need the most cooking coming first. If there is a hard veggie that is added later than this, I chop it finer so that it can cook more easily. Chopping finer is a good strategy for tough root veggies. Sometimes the cooking requirements of various veggies is so different that it is better to prepare these separately and then mix them together later on.
I find that herbal teas are even more sensitive to this and rarely use tea bags anymore. If I use tea bags, it is for when I go to restaurants, where I order a pot of hot water with my meal and make my own brew and use stevia as a sweetener. Regular green tea goes a little acidic when left to simmer after boiling for over a minute or two. Pu Erh tea, at least some varieties, seem to benefit from more boiling for a longer time, but still do best to remove them from simmering shortly after the boil (more tannins are leached out then). Every herb has its best way of being brewed and needs to be lumped in with herbs that have a similar or compatible brewing need (and then, if needed, combined together). I am still learning what is optimal for many medicinal herbs.
I am going to stop my notes here and post them, and maybe pick up later on.
