My advice to everybody doing meditation or anything vaguely similar: do *the least you can* and still get some benefits, or (if you want to see it through) be prepared to dedicate 5 to 8 years to it full time, and lose almost everyone in your life and most of your material assets
Conversation
That's the sort of strain which real attainment requires in these traditions. This, for example en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaih%C5%8 does not exist because lesser medicine cured all the patients. You are not going to get a slick, cooperative enlightenment tradition in the west: not happening.
1
17
To make it work you'd need a Western institution which could support students through most of a ten or fifteen year practice, and put them to work in a direct confrontation with the ills of the world as workers to pay their way and harden them enough to survive being enlightened.
3
1
13
People will sabotage their own enlightenment to protect themselves from the crushing moral responsibility which lands on most shoulders after attainment. Being a monk protects from this, a bit, but for nearly everybody else it hits head on: you *can* help, so you *must* help.
4
3
18
It's taken me *years* to let go enough of that responsibility to be a truly effective actor inside of market capitalism: to put up the boundaries, and embrace the materialism and egotism enough to get a handle on capitalist reality. Any enlightenment tradition has to handle this.
2
1
24
So I don't have any good ideas about how to do this. Even if I laid out a syllabus and somehow found the time to teach, where are the *students* going to find the time to learn? The *economics* just aren't there: how are the meditators to pay their way for. say, 10 years of work?
11
2
15
Replying to
So would you recommend not doing using the Cutting Machinery app every day? interested in your thoughts.
1
Cutting Machinery is small - the app is gone (Mike and Euvie aren't doing it any more) - and it was never more than a few hundred users. Few enough that I can personally manage the necessary support. But it's always been a question: what do we do with the long haulers in a year?
2
2
How many people *can* I get through the further stages? I *think* my ability to find time to carry people still exceeds the care load, but it's hard to know. God help us if it's ever a viral hit :-)
1
2
Yeh I noticed CM stopped working a while ago. I'vw continued the practice as much as possible (still hear your voice in my head at each point).
1
Interesting. Mine still works (had to check - I've field stripped my meditation practice to the bare necessities and don't use CM at the moment).
I think you maybe can't download it again, though? Euvie will know.