Hacker News Reader

Comment by SMAAART | Hacker News Reader

Forefront? HA! My experience is diametrically opposite: prolong Buddhism practice often leads to ego-centric behaviors that are swept under the rug and not talked about.

I was warned about it when I started getting "serious" about my practice, but I didn't believe it until I confronted it, face-to-face, on a daily basis. To this day I am the renegate and persona non grata at my Temple, ex except for the Abbot and my Zen Master who know how to tolerate, navigate, and leverage that BS for the greater good.

Samurai training is Buddhism training on steroids.

Regardless, my practice continue with a lot less time at the Temple, and I have relinquished my Center (the Center that I founded).

View on HN

Buddhist vipassana meditation is based on deconstructing the ego altogether as well as all desires, and recognizing the illusion behind them. So if people are being egocentric, they probably have not progressed very far in their spiritual path.

You'd be surprised. Even very realized people like Chogyam can be boisterous, womanizing, drunks. There are plenty of examples of highly awakened people doing conventionally bad and egocentric things. Unfortunately, this kind of stuff holds a lot of people back, if not dissuade them completely, from trying a little bit of meditation to improve their lives. There's a lot of archetypes of this in /r/streamentry. The term is crazy wisdom or divine madness, coined by Chogyam himself.

Ironically, and bit hilariously, conceit/pride is one of the fetters discarded at enlightenment, yet the Buddha Gautama has been quoted, "I am the greatest!"

Such people may have achieved some sort of genuine stream entry at some point, and then slipped back/regressed into very ego-centered patterns of thinking. Regardless, it calls their advice into question. I'm not surprised that some folks are dissuaded - and I'd caution people against doing "just a little bit" anyway, if they're aiming at anything like actual stream entry/enlightenment. Vipassana meditation demands a serious commitment; the casual, halfway-committed version of good practice is perhaps best represented by western Stoicism, or by common practices (not aiming solely at enlightenment) in e.g. Hinduist-inspired religions.

So humans being imperfect, stupid creatures negates anything else this person may have to say?

The idea that Buddhist teachers should be some kind of perfect being is utterly false, and to be fair, if you ever thought so or believed someone when they claimed to be such a one; perhaps buddhism wasn’t so suitable for you anyway.

The goal is not to become some kind of zen droid. Quite the opposite.

> So humans being imperfect, stupid creatures negates anything else this person may have to say?

Humans are just naked apes, no need to judge that harshly.

Having sex and drinking alcohol is fine in my mind, since i don't believe in religious morals.

Cognitive dissonance makes it possible to preach one thing and do another. We call it hypocrisy no?

Everything Shakyamuni has ever said is just a "finger pointed to the moon". It is only known through the memory and writings of other people, so it's sensible to take that statement — and pretty much everything attributed to him — with a grain of salt.

I’ve heard it said to be careful. That one may find upon deconstructing their ego, and finding that it’s all an illusion, that they stare into the face of god, and that god is them staring back at them. That they are it. That they are the divine. How intoxicating. This person and the drug addict who thinks they’re Jesus are on the same wave length. The drug being a dangerous shortcut. So have they not progressed very far? Or have they progressed somewhere else? Like the saying: far out man.

Having had these experiences, the god I saw and became one with was a being with a childlike sense of wonder at the universe it had accidentally created.

More of a "whoops, woah cool" than a "let there be light"

Very much unlike of the Christian conception of God.

I'm not describing this well, because I can't describe it well. But I can't imagine anyone experiencing something similar would be a jerk about it. See the universe unfiltered though the mind's perception and it just...is. Timeless and meaningless.

Consciousness and ego create their own meaning.

The point ought to be that there's nothing overly special about "being the divine" - after all, God is everywhere. In eastern tradition, this would be called "having the Buddha-nature", or the underlying potential for spiritual enlightenment. It doesn't even mean that you have attained more power over the material world (the sort of power you might naïvely ascribe to a "God"), albeit practitioners of spiritual/ascetic magick would say that there's a very real path to explore in that whole expectation.

Even Christianity that is like the most basic principle. God created man in his own image. So that's basically the same as saying to know God look in the mirror.

That honestly just sounds like mental self-flagellation done to inflate the ego and feel superior.

Said simply, it's not.

You'll love this chapter on MCTB https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-ii-light-a...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com