3/6 Then Culadasa talks in depth about a series of synchronous personal events that lead him to uncover self-destructive behavior that persisted post-awakening. From my perspective, this points to some very tangible ways to start tackling some of our far-too-common 'guru' abuse.
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4/6 One of those synchronous pillars also hints at the psychotherapeutic potential of using a plurality of distinct personalities to understand and work with trauma & general mental health - a topic I've been deeply intrigued by for years now.
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5/6
@OortCloudAtlas notes that some of this personality work seems to be found in Vajrayana. I'm no expert, but I get the sense that tantric practice has a lot to say about psych dev. Yet, it seems to be primarily focused on post-stream-entry. Thoughts/Corrections?
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Replying to @JaredJanes
It's not so much that Vajrayana is for stream-enterers specifically, but that it's made for non-monks; people with lives, mates, jobs, kids, etc. So the psychological component is much more fully and usefully addressed, IMO.
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Replying to @OortCloudAtlas
That makes perfect sense, I suppose I was referring more narrowly to much of the emotional work I've found in Vajrayana (mostly Trungpa writings & Aro Lineage) starting with an understanding of emptiness that I'm not sure exists pre-stream-entry. Would love
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Replying to @JaredJanes @OortCloudAtlas
This poses difficult epistemological problems. There's the textbook answer, but it's not clear what it means in practice. Some vague conceptual and/or everyday experiential understanding of emptiness might be adequate as a base; how would we find out?
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That aside, "stream entry" (whatever that means—it's pretty unclear!) now seems like a relatively low bar, or much lower than it was historically, since modern Mahasi-derived practice leads to it fairly quickly in many cases.
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So, plausibly, contemporary vipassana methods may be adequate as ngondro for Vajrayana. And in fact this seems to be the case; many students do come to Vajrayana when vipassana seems to have run out.
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Ngondro also has a strong focus on devotion and priming the student for indoctrination into the matrix of tantric ideologies. I feel the intercultural aspect of ngondro is quite firmly entrenched in that way. The therapeutic realm of ‘improving’ our experience is quite scattered
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Replying to @techgnostic @Meaningness and
I’m all for a fluid relationship between therapeutic modalities and fruitional meditations. Just feel like the stricture of ngondro provides a strong foundation. Althugh, I hope therapeutic structures become more integrated with open mind instruction in a consistent way.
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To clarify, I was using “ngondro” in the broad sense of “any preliminary practice that gets you to the starting point of another one” rather than referring to the specific Tibetan tantric ngondro. I think that one doesn’t function well outside the Tibetan theocracy.
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