I killed my God, so I must be a "master" then ;)
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Yeah. There's a whole class of advanced statements that are true at certain levels and really harmful to anyone not very advanced.
"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."
"Do as thou will is the whole of the law."
"There is nothing you can do."
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Absolutely. At the same time, I went through many years of confusion over seemingly contradictory ideas, and yet I emerged stronger for it I think. The key, as always, is practice practice practice. Get to know your experiential reality before taking any claim too seriously.
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yeah. Also people say "X is obviously nonsense" a bit too often, imo. They don't have the accomplishments to know, in many cases.
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Yeah, good point. Get to know the sensations in the body and the sensations/mental moments that make up the sense of self, and sort out the rest later.
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This is why I questioned @Failed_Buddhist with "words, words, words"!
One of the clearest shifts I've had is to lose interest in talking about practice. It sometimes sticks as a habit, but it feels very not rewarding.
"What is your experience like?" is the only question left.
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If someone describes any sensory underpinnings e.g. of an awakening to me, I instantly know if I am familiar with it.
Jargon is both unhelpful - because it's used in different-but-similar ways - and disguises experience and the lack thereof alike.
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language is sometimes helpful for practice, even for relatively experienced practitioners, because it should guide you to experiences you haven't had. And experiences are a bit of a trap: the pursuit of states can be a problem.
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I'm not talking about the pursuit of states, and I don't think we're talking about the same point in a broader context either.
But that's my bad with the way I formulated it.
I'm saying I find long, jargon-filled philosophical discussions to be less than helpful, mostly.
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If you do stick mostly to one method or discipline, so that it comes to dominate your thinking around certain terms, I think you can do more talk.
For me, I've spent too much time dipping my feet in other people's lakes to do that. My brain is a brambled thicket of associations.
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If anything, I've now been retreating, drawing boundaries around my practice, hemming it in - so that I can talk about it more in the future.
But the sort of discussion we get into on Twitter, where people are coming from 5 different lineages and methods, is flawed.
Actually clarifying to myself what I wanted to do with my practice, and what effects I'm looking for, has been tremendously helpful.
And it's probably made me a bit more difficult to talk to, because I can see that most contemplative practice is just not for me. Which is fine.
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just not for you "now". We'll see.
The paradigms and maps around cultivation can be very useful. They're just very hard to understand and disentangle.
But then, understanding and disentangling paradigms is pretty much my life's work. So, yeah...
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I don't know, I found the conversation interesting and useful. But I am also established in my approach. If I was a seeker I might have found it confusing
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I found parts of it interesting and useful, which is why I engaged. Mostly because seeing what other people say helps me clarify what I think.
The idea is not so much that you can't learn from it, as that the discussion itself will always be in some sense antagonistic.
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