Ah, Bhante Vimalaramsi is an american monk originally from the theravada tradition who IIRC uses Sutrayana for his take on what the Pali canon says, as he deviates from the theravada interpretation of the text.
"Sutrayana" meaning "not Vajrayana" is typical for Tibetan Buddhism.
after a good nights sleep, I think I mixed up pali / sanskrit and the monk I am referring to surely considers himself "Suttayana" :-)
I really appreciate your comment. I think I’ll remember the phrase “Buddhism on easy mode” for the rest of my life! Your observation about preparation, behavior, state of life etc is also very poignant. I am Catholic and something that I’ve found delving into the writings of the saints is that it is often like staring at the sun: it’s too intense and I’m not ready for it. For example, when I was an atheist in college…
The Catholic tradition and Christian tradition in general are deeply informed by Stoicism, especially Stoic ethics. So coming from that kind of tradition, you might find that you're already aware of many of these things, even if you couldn't quite tell where they originally came from.
There's speculation that Jesus might have been a Buddhist or at least well known in Buddhist contemporary circles and interacted with them. If you search online you'll see plenty of sources that mention it as a plausible possibility (there's a BBC documentary even).
> Once we have crossed the Arising and Passing Away (and if we don’t suddenly die or get severe brain damage due to some unfortunate life circumstances), we shall enter insight stages five through ten regardless of whether we want to. It doesn’t matter if we practice from this point on; once we cross the A&P, we are in the Dark Night to some degree and become what is sometimes called a “Dark Night yogi”, or simply “d…
btw. Daniel Ingram refers to himself as an Aharat/aharant and it is kind of a no-no in buddhism to talk about your own "awakening-status". That's a serious red-flag.
Either that or it's a cultural difference and he doesn't see the point of hiding it.
In a country of deaf men, would hearing sounds count as hallucinations?
If a person was born who could hear radio waves, would it count as a hallucination, or would we be able to design an experiment to test whether they can actually hear radio waves?
Same question for hearing neutrinos or dark energy waves.
you need some ego. otherwise you won't know where to point your fork to eat.
I haven't quite achieved an ego death yet through meditation, but reading through a fair amount of psychedelic journeys suggests that eliminating the ego, while perhaps useful and enlightening in moderation, sort of defeats the point of living a life in this world. If the world really does exist simply to provide experiential distraction from the existential dread of being an absolute consciousness in the void (which…
No-self is not really about eliminating the ego, it's about eliminating the craving for an ego. These two are not the same; in fact, the latter seems to be harder. It's why so many meditators anecdotally get stuck in their "Dark Night". I don't know what psychedelic "ego death" does exactly, but I'm skeptical that it addresses craving.
btw. Daniel Ingram refers to himself as an Aharat/aharant and it is kind of a no-no in buddhism to talk about your own "awakening-status". That's a serious red-flag.
Either that or it's a cultural difference and he doesn't see the point of hiding it.
Any other instance that comes to my mind is cult leaders. As in I am not aware of a western theravāda teacher referring to himself as an arhant
Either that or it's a cultural difference and he doesn't see the point of hiding it.
Any other instance that comes to my mind is cult leaders. As in I am not aware of a western theravāda teacher referring to himself as an arhant
He covers the motivation for this in the book (as well as other departures from traditions of not talking about things he considers important to talk about). Basically there's a tradition of people keeping people in the dark about things that he thinks does more harm than good.
I'm not qualified to comment on the wisdom of either approach, just pointing out that it's covered in the first part of the book, and other parts, e.g. "Mushroom Factor".
All of the real meditation traditions around the world - including the ones inside of Christianity - spend decades training highly skilled teachers to help people 1) avoid problems like this, and 2) clean up problems like this when they do happen. And even so those traditions never, ever (in my experience) describe themselves as anything other than perilous. "The way is long and narrow." "Like a snake entering a bamb…
Kind of skimmed, but why do you need these enlightened people?
http://myhopeforthe.world is just packed with high impact decision-making issues in future as that work rolls out into the climate (and other) crises.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade Your own eyes jump around all day, but you never notice. You do not notice, because your visual sense, fills the gaps, and even refills these gaps, with storys that make sense. "You frozze with fear" when the bike approached, instead of "My eyes filled the buffer to slow for my car". Meditation is trying to break these cobbled together parts of the self-computer appart, trying to…
A good response to "that's not falsifiable" is offering a test that could prove the assertion false. This is only more unfalsifiable metaphor. Also: saccades are very easy to notice if you just pay a little attention to them, just like noticing your tongue in your mouth or your nose in your vision. They're not a deep psychological enigma.
The rewritting of what has actually percieved and what has happened, after it happened as a inability to act, is for many a enigma. Otherwise you wouldnt regularly get this stammered stories in front of some judge after traffic accidents. The idea, that cause and effect, could be rewritten by your visual system to keep its story straight, even after a failure, is quite the enigma in my eyes.