I'm not saying I'm right. That would be gross negligence on my part to imply.
But that's a ditto for most people saying anything about anything.
Authority is mostly a power fantasy. Sometimes derived from experience, but even then highly specific. I think questioning is good.
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It's a fair enough point that you shouldn't go around spouting off, but the original comment I made was specifically about people spouting off. That was the entire point.
I'm not telling anyone how to practice in private. I don't think I have any business doing that.
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Even if Buddhism gets things right, though, I don't think that qualifies arbitrarily chosen Buddhists to tell others how to practice.
This is maybe a minor point in the grand scheme of things, but I've encountered it enough times that it seriously bothers me.
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Also: it's great if qualified people can defend their practices, but that doesn't mean a claim to authority is necessarily valid.
And when it comes to lineages that are millennia old, we can hardly claim to understand them anymore (yeah, that also applies to shamanism ofc.)
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there are specific accomplishments in the spiritual paths. And saying that they don't do something, or do do something without having them strikes me as dangerous. And, ofc, as you point out, since we've lost so much, who knows what the Buddha and his original Sangha could do?
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i mean, take the various dhyana: the Buddhists now have 8 of them. But there were tons more of them, they are written of, and mostly we don't know what they were. Or when Chan Mahayanna guys wrote about Hinayana stuff they were very clear their enlightments were different.
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I mean it's unambiguous "what we get is not what an Arhat gets". They're not coy about it. And given my understanding of "true" Shamanism, I would never ever pursue it. An absolute shitshow of, at best, interdependence on spirits, at worse effective slavery.
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Anyway, I mostly don't know what's possible, because I haven't done it. But I am disinclined to absolutely rule out certain ends. As I have made some progress, I have discovered that what I thought I knew was possible was absolutely wrong too often.
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I strongly disagree with that dude who was talking shit on Buddhism yesterday. It seems strange to have some weird, absolutist criterion of a path "failing" or "succeeding".
My point is only that the technique working doesn't mean all the ideas about how to apply it are valid.
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Ah well, Buddhist supremacists are full of shit. There's no true path that I can determine, and anyone who's accomplished enough to really talk about such things is so far in the stratosphere that even moderately advanced practitioners can't parse what they say.
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See, this makes me think we were rather in agreement on the fundamentals the entire time.
But I'll acknowledge that, being both young and a bit tipsy, I have a tendency to overstate my point. A lot.
It annoys me, too.