Hi BJ:
On Jul 10, 2007, at 7:33 AM, billy jim wrote:
Hi Vaj, I'm back in mudville - the home of TM obscurities, brought
out again by your illuminating post. Yep I'm just a roach running
around looking for another hiding place - the light is really too
intense here so I have to find another piece of the dark.
This is your summary of Alan Wallace's views I presume - very Vajra-
naught in its mode of generalization. Of course, (now master??)
Alan Wallace could be a vajrayana triumphalist, like you. I have
never found many of those in my association with dharma
practitioners but they are around. Most of them spout a continual
line of judgements about whatever they wish from they many books
they have read.
Alan Wallace could easily have given an honest assessment, such as:
"TM never tended to deepened as a meditation practice for me,
despite long hours of rounding. I think I needed some practices in
the interim between sessions to facilitate expansion."
As someone who reached the culmination in samdhi with direct training
under some of the greatest lamas of our time (including the tutor of
HH the 14 DL and Dalai himself, he is uniquely qualified, not merely
as a scholar or academician). He does speak in a rather universal
way, as (as I've mentioned here before from the Patanjali tradition,
the very same thing applies): you can't skip the prerequisites of
samadhi and then hope to bear ripe fruit. The 'all the angas is
satisfied by going to the blank
nepa state' is BS, plain and simple: another false TM view.
This isn't a bomb, it's a basic relative truth, experientially and
theoretically in both the Patanjali trads and the Nine-fold Nyingmapa
paths. The only way it becomes a "bomb" is if you did not test the
assumptions you were given and just accepted views your were told.
That's hardly my fault, but the individuals responsibility. If people
want to assume false views, that's their business. Kaboom!
But he can speak uniformly for me and many others in his judgements
because he is a "master" - correct?
Well he's accomplished the relative aspect (the theoretical basis)
and the absolute (the experiential completing of actual training).
You could call that whatever you wanted I guess. In a retreat
setting, he would be the retreat master.
Now it can be told! Ex-monk and academic speaks for the poor
meditators wasting lives in TM-ville. Now they finally have a voice!
They'd hear the same from the Patanjali tradition (as has been
previously pointed out), so this is hardly a unique POV. Both
traditions say the same thang.
If you don't meet the prerequisites of samadhi, no cigar. It's not
some blank tradition that proves this, but millenia of continuing
direct experience and repetition.
Somehow this makes sense to me. Some of the academics I have met
are so emotionally involved in their own judgements that they sound
like some of the barking dogs here on FFL.
Lucky, Vaj, that you are not one of those Vajra Triumphalists. That
would make you a mere polemic-hurling poster here - you would
simply have a highly infected form of TB.
Thanks, that's why I enjoy introducing balance by shewing the
universality of the experiential truth behind this (the same
experiential fact behind two very different trads). We share so much.
Let's not get wrapped up in "schools". In that sense ALL traditions
have a deep, unalloyed aspect which is truly non-sectarian and beyond
school or sect.
