doc benway

In my experience, if something’s coming up often it may be worth looking at a bit more closely. One valuable thing about this place for me is it can show me things about myself I otherwise may not, or may not want to, see. I have no idea if it is applicable to you, just sharing my perspective.

Christianity, as a path, was redeemed for me by Anthony Demello. Its presence in the lives of many is a different beast altogether.

Thanks, I can use all the luck I can get. Your reactivity sure made it feel personal. If not, I stand corrected. I feel no addiction to correctness. Or that is at least the objective. The I who is correct is ignorance from its foundation. The pointing out of his flaws is appreciated.

It’s clear you took my post personally which means you must at least loosely identify with one of those categories or with the dear departed, or maybe just the history here. I clarified in my response to luke if you are interested. It’s not that “a libertarian” couldn’t consider themselves a “Daoist” but I stand by my comments regarding personal cultivation and Trumpism.

I thoroughly enjoyed my lockdown time. Alas, I’m back to work full time which for me is more stressful.

I never invalidated the alt-right or GOP experience, not did I insult it. Although, to be clear, I strongly disagree with their policies. I was simply pointing to the group that got shit-canned for lording their political views here with the support of moderators. I didn’t say anything derogatory, that was your perception. Your words, not mine. Wow, you’re out there with your assumptions and projections... My lack of empathy? I don’t think that’s very accurate. You’re saying I don’t empathize with imaginary people I label in a way they don’t label themselves? That’s quite a story you’ve created.

What experiences?

Like others, I would recommend avoiding the flights of intellectual fantasy Drew indulges himself in but that is your choice. I've had training by lineage masters in Daoism and Bön Buddhism and no one has ever emphasized the need for full lotus. There are important points of posture during seated meditation but the specific position of the legs, other than crossed in some way, does not seem to be critical. That said, here is an excellent program of stretching to guide you to full lotus posture: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25711032-becoming-the-lotus

You might never, ever come down!

Beautiful! .

You can take things literally, that’s the fundamentalist approach, or go past the concrete details to the deeper meanings. You can focus wherever you choose. The concrete details of the Daoist sages, the Buddhist scriptures, the Abrahamic stories, all of them are somewhat alien to me. The exaggerated stories and dimensions, the miracles and horrors, pick your poison. If any one of them is a door to self discovery for you, that is a beautiful thing and should be supported. All can and have been a doorway for people to growth and awakening. And some are associated with far more corruption and abuse than others throughout history. That’s part of what it has to teach us for sure. They’re just stories, expressions of humanity. We can learn a lot from them, good and bad, as long as we can find one that speaks to us and that’s a very personal thing. They reflect the collective voice of populations throughout time and space. Wisdom lives in all of them, and corruption too - yin and yang. Rejecting doesn’t make them go away and doesn’t help us grow. They’re here now and for the foreseeable future. Understanding more deeply helps everyone. I can easily see how someone could have an association of opening the heart, of unconditional love with Jesus (or just about anything or anyone else). My relationship to Jesus is a negative one. That’s my experience based on my unique karma. Why judge another’s personal experience and invalidate it? I will never know your inner world nor you mine.

pierce

astute

Wow! Sweet! 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽 So we would do some preparatory breathing and tsa lung. Then say a poem and practice. Or all 3 poems and don’t interrupt the sitting. One at a time, 3 in a row, any order or permutation. Most people connect to the body easiest. When you can connect with confidence and facility, rest in daily activity. Apply whichever of the doors is needed for the circumstances. Be playful and inventive. Do it in lucid dream or sleep, that’s a party!!! I pray I will be doing it as I die. I’ve been connecting to the Bön bardo prayers lately... I can send the phonetic Tibetan if you like. No special permission needed.

Anyone interested in awakening through Christianity would enjoy studying Father Anthony Demello's writings and talks. He was an enlightened master, born a Hindu, later became a Jesuit, and a psychologist. It is not at all difficult to find evidence of spiritual depth in the Abrahamic teachings. That said, I think it is easier to see when looking from a place of already understanding rather than ignorance. The esoteric understanding of each of the traditions is well hidden, not too dissimilar in that respect to Daoist scriptures. And the number of those indoctrinated into these methods is very small. Perhaps this is why it has been so effectively corrupted and manipulated? One can say the same about Laozi. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/laozi/ You can't trust what you read or hear in any media in any given moment today, let alone 80 years ago... In the end, the understanding is in us not in a written or spoken document. Any of the wisdom traditions can speak to the right person at the right time. Any can be misused. We need to take responsibility, find what speaks to us, and work with that. In my experience, the more deeply one's spiritual awakening the less likely they are to criticize other traditions. This is because once awakened, it is easy to see the truth in any of these writings.

There are also practices associated with each of these 3 poems which point to the characteristics associated with each of the 3 kayas. Body - connecting to the experience of stillness in the body. With time the experience of stillness transcends the physical body and the potential is there to connect with the unbounded or empty aspect of the basic Nature. Speech - connecting to the experience of inner silence, the resting of the narrator and judge. This facilitates connection to the present moment and in this un-fabricated experience all is perfected. Nothing to be added or taken away, the body of enjoyment or perfection. Mind - connecting to the spaciousness of the heart/mind, the openness that allows anything in the heart or mind to arise and depart without interference of grasping or aversion. All that arises is free and liberates in unbounded space. Whatever was blocking us is gone so in our meditative experience we feel the opposite - un-bounded, pure, powerful, whatever... That’s why different people describe the experience differently or why we have different experiences of the Refuge at different times. In that liberation is bliss.The four immeasurables arise and manifest in our lives.

Another way of saying the three kayas are inseparable is to say that the view, path, and result are all precisely the same. Resting in the Nature of Mind is the view, resting in the Nature of Mind is the meditation and conduct, resting in the Nature of Mind is the result. In our tradition the basic teaching is look to the thought. Leave it as it is and it self-liberates. What is next is an unspeakable state. In that instant is the opportunity to connect to the Nature of our Mind. It is nothing special, perfectly pure and un-elaborated, un-contrived. It is clear and vivid. It is always there. Full of infinite potential, giving rise to all without bias. No identification with a constrained subject is there so it is non-dual. When the experience of non-duality arises, the dropping of the identification of awareness with a finite self, that is the 3 kayas, it is the view and the result. Because it is unbounded and unimputable it is called empty or Dharmakaya (we say Bön ku). All enlightened qualities are perfected there so it is Sambhogakaya (we say dzog ku). All is accomplished and manifests in response to what is needed without effort whatsoever so it is Nirmanakaya (trul ku). This is quite literally present in every moment and yet we experience the grasping and aversion of ignorance. Both are equally real and valid, neither is better or worse. If one is preferred that is already duality. That I find an interesting quandary. The lesson is don’t try to understand or explain, just rest.... There are a number of refuge prayers in Bön and all have some “religious” references or connotations. TWR wrote a set of 3 for his secular teachings that I find are beautiful and instructive. They point to the 3 kayas. With time we penetrate the meaning more deeply as we connect to the states being pointed to... Inner Refuge Prayers Body The center of the victorious mandala, one’s own body The source of all positive qualities without exception Is the expanse within the three channels and five chakras I take refuge in this body of emptiness Speech All the gathered clouds of suffering and misery Are complete cleared by the wisdom wind Revealing the unelaborated, primordially pure expanse of the sky I take refuge in this body of light Mind From the pavilion of the five wisdom lights Rays from non-dual spheres of light emanate Clearing the webs of the darkness of ignorance I take refuge in this body of great bliss

While the ultimate nature of reality is non-dual, the nature of human experience is rooted in duality. While the base is Buddha-nature and none of us are ever other than that, still we as sentient beings are trapped in samsara until liberation. This is why we engage in our chosen path. The number of mantras or lifetimes one may need to achieve liberation is not something anyone can predict, IMO, not even the great masters. Edit - one might even say that we, as sentient beings, are the path

:strips down enthusiastically, except for the mask...

That brings back such memories! I played in a Balinese Gamelan throughout college. I played gangsa. You struck the keys while using the other hand to follow behind and damp the key you just struck. When the tempo picked up it was insane! Never played anything like your teacher's composition... WOW!!!

Welcome back! No sign of Cam in quite some time.

I appreciate the response. I'm not very familiar with the traditional Buddhist path I don't question or criticize the gradual, progressive path at all. My comment was more meant to point out the inseparability of the kayas which I believe is an important point, regardless of which path we take. I highly recommend the preliminaries to everyone, as do the Bön teachers I know. That said, I suspect that the preliminaries are less effective for Westerners due largely to cultural differences and due to the way most engage with them compared to the traditional approaches in the East. And a relatively small number of Westerners actually complete them, from what I understand. I think some of the Bön lamas are a bit more flexible now than in the "old days" for this reason. Many of us in the West are in desperate need of practices that can help with our challenges. Few have the patience, commitment, or access to work through the entirety of the sutric path, even fewer the tantric path. Dzogchen is an ideal practice for the Western lifestyle in many ways but, as you accurately point out, there are many pitfalls. I believe the decision to open up such teachings comes from a place of compassion and I also think it has been relatively successful when you look at the number of people engaged in the practices and the feedback they provide. These practitioners may never reach the level of accomplishment that might be possible had they moved through the formal and traditional process. At the end of the day, they will never be lineage holders or monastics, nor do they need or want to be. But if their lives benefit from access to the teachings, it's probably a good thing. In the Bön community there are differences of opinion on all of this.

Now we're Dharma shaming?

I'll differ a bit with this CT. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding your comments. From the dzogchen perspective, at least from the teachings I've received, if one connects to the Nature of Mind one is connected to all 3 kayas. There is never any separation, no connecting with one but then needing somehow to develop others. We can approach them through different doors - body, speech, and mind, but once we rest into our fundamental essence there is no distinction or differentiation. There is no practice of perfecting paramitas as they are already spontaneously perfected in the Natural State. This is the major difference between tantra and dzogchen. In tantra, one continues to practice generating bodicitta. In dzogchen, one simply rests in the Nature with the certainty that bodhicitta is already perfected and will manifest when needed.

I wrote a long reply and deleted it... While this is a great topic for discussion, I get uneasy whenever addressing these things with words and concepts. It's so easy for the intellect to objectify, reify, and grasp. None of that helps us to connect and truly "understand" through direct, naked observation and manifestation. My teacher always emphasizes relating to the 3 kayas in a deeply personal and practical way rather than in a conceptual way. Got to get back to work for now...