>>605690
I got into it as my first experience with practicing a religion. Family had been pretty lax and non-practicing Catholics. Never really learned to pray. I think I might have been to a church for reasons besides weddings and funerals a grand total of 6 times growing up. Needless to say, I became an atheist in my teens. About 5 or so years ago, I started reading some of the perennial Traditionalists like Guenon and became interested in the idea of finding an authentic spiritual tradition.
No idea why I initially decided to look East, but I think it was because the actual metaphysical claims made by Buddhism (and some schools of Hinduism) are both pretty narrow. Easier for someone coming off of skepticism to accept it rather than the broader claims made in Christianity (or Islam, for that matter).
So anyway, I started practicing both Raja Yoga and Buddhism. Eventually I moved to just practicing Buddhism.
Buddhism is a really complicated thing. On one hand, the actual philosophy of the Buddha is really pretty fine, as far as it goes. It just doesn't go far enough. It's also trapped by the culture in which he lived. Hence why he believed in reincarnation and a few other things that make it incompatible with Christianity.
Meme Buddhism ends there. 90% of so-called Western "Buddhists" basically are lol weed and a form of that. I wanted the real thing. For the most part, Japanese traditions of Buddhism in America have turned into lol weed. So I quickly moved on from Zen towards Tibetan Buddhism. To get even more authenticity, I avoided the modernized or secularized versions of that you can find these days.
Actual Buddhist practice takes the Buddha’s philosophy and grafts it on to local belief systems. Tibetan Buddhism draws heavily from their native religion, Bön. It’s essentially a form of shamanism. In addition, the Tibetans picked up a few minor Hindu deities and dramatically expanded their role. Like Hinduism, Buddhism doesn’t really have a sense of “good” or “evil” beyond what is useful to one’s own karma, so Buddhism (and Hinduism) has the unfortunate tendency for good things to get easily mixed in with some very dark things. Some of the deities are apparently positive beings, but have a “wrathful” manifestation that can be called upon to destroy obstacles. For instance, there’s an enlightened being Avalokiteshvara. He also has a secondary “wrathful” form he can manifest as- Mahakala. Google image search that. Ostensibly, wrathful manifestations are horrifying because they horrify “bad” things and protect dharma, but you have to wonder.
There’s a number of opinions as to what these Tibetan deities actually are. Some would say they’re a particular manifestation of the universal reality. Others say they’re more like a tool for meditation. You can get different answers from the same lama, so there’s really no consistency. A practitioner gets a kind of initiatory rite from a lama that “empowers” a particular mantra for meditation. These mantras typically have a certain deity or spirit attached to them, so by "empowering" the mantra, one is empowered to have certain practices with that deity as well. One starts out with some of the beneficent or harmless looking ones like Guru Rinpoche or Tara. Wrathful manifestations like Mahakala are seen as requiring great care, lest they damage the user. I never got deep enough into it to get into any kind of wrathful manifestation practice, but I can say that sitting in on an offering or practice session with some of them, like Mahakala or Yamantaka, is both a really powerful and really unnerving experience. So much so that it actually prompted me to start looking elsewhere.
I discovered a book by Seraphim Rose on accident, visited an Orthodox Church, and immediately realized that was what God actually intended. I’m expecting to be received into it before Pascha.
Yeah. I think there are real spiritual practices with actual power in Tibetan Buddhism. I don't think it's all coming from a good place either.