Yes, understood. Former Buddhist here, went pretty deep (abishekha deep). Gave vows back to dharmakaya (with blessing of my teacher) Still stan the Vajrayana pretty hard; but from the outside not in
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Replying to @Meaningness @_awbery_ and
Oh that’s a great question, and perhaps the answer’s too big for Twitter. (Perhaps not.) It had to do with exploring the life of Siddharta Gautama, as best as we can reconstruct it. I began to see him as a guy a) who was responding to Axial age questions similarly to...
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Replying to @Timber_22 @Meaningness and
...the Hellenistic life-practice philosophers (Stoics, Epicurus, Pyrrho) - working with existential questions, and also definitely influenced by Indic cultural assumptions about rebirth and b) who had a very unusual upbringing. I don’t think Siddharta’s dad did him many favours
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Replying to @Timber_22 @Meaningness and
by insulating him from suffering and pain for 29 years. Anyways: result of my inquiry was that I think Gautama is an important teacher, but not •the• teacher, and the four Truths of the Noble Ones are good, but I don’t aspire to nobility....
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Replying to @Timber_22 @Meaningness and
...in this life I’d rather be a halogen, or something else closer to the middle of the periodic table. Anyways, I essentially think Gautama misperceived something about the nature of reality while he simultaneously did see very very deeply.
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Replying to @Meaningness @_awbery_ and
Did that make any sense? (Probably twitter not the best medium for this kind of expression)
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Replying to @Meaningness @_awbery_ and
Hey, thanks for asking. Basically a wise man (who’s on Twitter but I’m not going to tag him here) captured it pithily when we were talking about this: Dukkha is not what all of existing boils down to, as classical Buddhism* suggests.
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Quite so. Not trying to sell anyone on anything but... isn’t that also explicit in Vajrayana?
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Replying to @Meaningness @_awbery_ and
Ha! Yes. It totally is. I had a follow up tweet in the queue making that point...and got delayed in sending it
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Replying to @Timber_22 @Meaningness and
Really, I couldn’t agree harder with your point, and it doesn’t come off as a sales job; it’s just a straightforward description of the Vajra view
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End of conversation
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