/fringe/ - Fringe

>>130755

In no sense is time an illusion in the Buddhist weltanschauung. Evola is not the end-all be-all of Buddhist thinking, of course, but I attached it just in case someone wanted a nice primer. It's a good enough introduction to some of the more esoteric aspects of the practice, and far better than much of the stuff being put out these days.

>>130775

Can confirm there's a lot of bullshit in Buddhism. Got to the point with my atiyogin guru where he confirmed that I was liberated and granted me full permission to give instruction as to the nature of liberation.

That itch, as OP said, can get scratched. However, once it's scratched… Mostly it just seems to be fun to get back on the wheel, so to speak. Sitting there endlessly for kalpas is basically a form of self-torture. Soto zen is especially notorious for this and so I tend to give more attention to Rinzai with its willingness to shock students into understanding instead of sitting there like some hokey new ager. A sincere student could as easily cave a bandit's skull in as sit there and spout platitudes.

So, you're blameless for wanting more than to throw your brain away at the wall. Maybe Bodhidharma, bara model as he was, liked posing like that, but it isn't for everyone, and the big secret of course is that meditation is more striving, and striving does nothing.

Until a student is ready to abandon Buddhism entirely, they are still not there.

>>130785

>meditation is more striving, and striving does nothing

Could you elaborate? How is striving unproductive?

>>130790

This is as it was taught to me, so please do not mistake this for my personal opinion! I do not count myself as a Buddhist and I am explaining the point of view of others; whether or not I agree or disagree is not the question.

Anyway, in Dzogchen, at least any Dzogchen that means it, striving for Buddhahood is seen as an act of delaying it, or rather, it is goal-oriented and thus still subject to karma. Rather than expect a student to actively do anything, including meditation (there is Dzogchen meditation but it is very much like zazen in that if you are trying, you are failing), the student is instead supposed to be introduced to the nature of the mind directly, that is, Dzogchen cuts the floor out from under all other vehicles to Buddhahood because they are goal-oriented and will never actually get anywhere because having a goal implies there is more work to be done and some future in which you have changed your fundamental nature. Since that fundamental nature is denied in Buddhism, Dzogchen seeks only to cause students to directly see–that is to say, intuit without conceptual elaboration–the mind as empty, void of any possible final single state, and in so doing, understand itself as a kind of enlightened meta-state.

In a nutshell, meditation as meditation can never in itself lead to Buddhahood because the very act implies that one is not yet a buddha, and that would make buddha-nature conditioned, which will not do. One must genuinely intuit it, and it is useless to try to fake it or to try to shortcut to it because that still assumes a desirable and conditioned end state. Besides, the goal is not to be thoughtless for longest, but to realize the nature of thought. In no way does this mean that meditation is without value, but it's a conditioned act that will lead to conditioned results.

Dzogchen seeks to basically cut the bullshit and the sitting around for ten zillion kalpas by saying "Here's the nature of the mind, here's spaciousness, here's rigpa, do you get it yet?" at which point the students all more or less short-circuit. It can be an extreme brain-bender and I won't lie, I saw some students who were on the verge of tossing their sanity down the toilet. To come out the other side supposedly enlightened has been itself very enlightening.

My advice as a confirmed Buddha? If you're a native English speaker, skip the lessons on Tibetan (easily one of the ugliest languages on Earth to read it you're an English speaker, I mean some of it is just like, how did anyone find it aesthetically pleasing ever?), if you can click with Discordianism then you'll save yourself the headache of translation. If not, honestly, whatever. The less you worry about Buddhism, the better.

>>130775

Hey don't knock all Eastern philosophy.

This thread is so awful I don't know where to start. Many of you are so far off-base that it wouldn't be worth the effort it would take to unfuck your views.

Mandala painting helps with deity yoga. Deity yoga is practiced to improve visualization so that you can overlay the dreamworld and the physical world to become master of both worlds which is Buddha. You posses the seed of Buddhahood but until you realize you are dreaming even in your dreams at night at all times, you are not fully enlightened. If any of this is news to you, like you >>130775, I suggest you shit the fuck up because you're only continuing the same negative habits of ignorance, arrogance, and somehow thinking you have the right to teach that of which you have no mastery or even serious experience.

>Hurr durr I practiced Zen and nothing happened, let me tell you how much smarter I am than Buddha, a man who saw past lives so deeply he mapped out the entire spiritual path from start to finish

You dumb fuck.

>>130885

Your view of the Buddha as having attained a fixed end state of mastery over causal worlds is not correct. Buddha is awakened as to the nature of the mind and phenomena, undeceived by appearances or forms, attached to neither their arising or non-arising. Mastery as a kind of lordship doesn't really come into play.

>>130885

>saw past lives so deeply he mapped out the entire spiritual path from start to finish

I thought one of the differences between Hinduism and Buddhism is that in the latter there is no immortal self reincarnating endlessly.

Suggestions for excelling as a student no matter which spiritual traditions you study under:

1. Always assume that whatever you know is incomplete. Assume that there is always a higher understanding. Even if you become a teacher, also remain a student, forever.

2. If you meet someone who seems to understand better than you, humbly ask them to teach. Keep asking until THEY tell YOU that you understand. Don't try to tell them that you understand them fully until they say you do.

3. No matter how good your teacher is the real teaching must come from within you. At very high (or even low) levels of practice you may find your teacher testing you with false information. If he can trick you, you deserve it, because it means you are not developing inner awareness and are unworthy of higher teachings. Everything you say to your teacher, you are silently being tested on, but spill your heart to them and hold nothing back so that they can see you for who you really are and identify weak points to strengthen within you. If you cannot trust your teacher with this level of intimacy, find a new teacher.

4. Never assume that because one teacher says you are enlightened, or gives you a title, that you're done realizing things. What is the end of the path in some schools is the halfway point in others.

5. If reality did not disappear, and if you cannot describe what comes after reality disappears, YOU ARE NOT EVEN HALFWAY! Keep going!

6. However humble you think you are, it is not enough. However much pride and arrogance you can cast aside, it is not enough. Right now you may be thinking "I am not very prideful or arrogant". That very thought is enough pride and arrogance to destroy you. You HAVE to be humble. That which created you sees through your eyes, and you cannot hide from it because it is fundamentally part of you. You cannot bluff it or deceive it in the slightest. You can only befriend it.

7. Make sincere effort as much as possible. When you quit, do not burn any bridges. You may often find that after quitting you strengthen your understanding. Things work in cycles and what departs today often returns tomorrow, slightly changed.

8. If you succeed at eliminating your ego you will die.

YOU.

WILL.

DIE.

If you are afraid of death you're going to fuck up the process. You have to accept your death, realize that the dreamlike images that appear at and after the time of death (which are usually disturbing or violent) are no more than a projection of your own mind, accept them, and let go of them. You can find a more detailed description of this in one of the latter chapters of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, available here: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=093BD502D561B73DDFE61435A4C48C8A and I've included a video that touches upon it. DO NOT GO INTO EGO-DEATH UNTIL YOU CAN REALIZE THAT IT'S ALL A DREAM. Do not run from or towards any death visions, ignore them and chant that it's a projection of your own mind. Identify everything that appears, no matter how frightening or wonderful, as an aspect of yourself, emotionlessly.

9. During the death process don't go into the white light unless you want to come here again. The white light is rebirth into this world. THE BLUE LIGHT IS FREEDOM. If you are taking the bodhisattva path, the path of one who returns to teach and assist other beings, then choose the white light.

10. This shamanic death and rebirth experience is not even halfway. Until you go inside yourself and find emptiness you are not even halfway done. If you have not realized the void, experienced the absolute, you are not even halfway. Getting to that point is halfway. Figuring out what to do once you get there is the beginning of the real path. To help you out I'll tell you that what you need to do there is Tummo (inner fire) meditation, so be adept at it before you go.

11. RELAX. Always. Chill the fuck out when you have a breakthrough. You are not the savior of the universe, that is not your job. Your only job is to chill out and help once you know the truth, and if that doesn't appeal to you you're welcome to just chill and live like The Dude from Lebowski. Or Winnie-the-Pooh. Just flow along with it and let it take you where you need to go.

12. Get your ego out of the way so the blessings can get to you. Meditation is essential.

If you are an esoteric Buddhist student I strongly suggest you read Secret Teachings of All Ages, which is a very short enjoyable read detailing the understanding of many non-Buddhist western schools. I avoided this book due to the reputation of the author and regret that I did so. Many of the things that Buddhist teachers traditionally keep very secret are described eloquently herein. In general, while it is best to have a single teacher and a single practice, it is not essential to only know the teachings of one path, since all esoteric schools are merely maps to the same territory, and some maps have much more detail, much more efficient methods, than others. What is secret in one tradition may be public knowledge in another.

If you want the secret teachings of Buddhism I suggest watching Garchen Rinpoche's empowerments on YouTube. They are in Tibetan but he speaks many things that are traditionally kept secret plainly. Some videos have more useful information than others. He has created a big controversy by doing this but in the meantime it will allow you to have firsthand knowledge of things I'm otherwise not allowed to teach you. Most of the stuff we can't say publicly involves things that wouldn't help you anyway, they are intense methods of visualization that only someone with a mind trained to concentrate for hours at a time could even have a chance at success.

In general Tibetans have turned over all the teachings they could to the west in a last ditch effort to preserve the tradition. Although many people, having very small minds with very low consciousness, view esotericism as a divided house, with all of our schools belonging to different ethnicities, cultures, schools, really we are all brothers and sisters of the same physical, spiritual, and absolute realities. We are the travellers of the worlds of form and beyond, preserving the ways handed down by our forefathers to our children, and the entire world, all creatures in all creations, are our children and our parents. Unless we are shut ins who never wish to grow, there is ultimately one path that is rewarding, compassion. It doesn't matter if you practice compassion as a student of Plato, a student of Aristotle, a student of Hermes, Shiva, Christ, Buddha… those who Know are knowers of their heart and mind, masters of their thoughts, actions and emotions. If a being becomes master of their worlds it doesn't matter whether we call the resulting being a Heirophant, a Christ or a Buddha. Titles and names do not matter. Getting your ass to that point by practicing appropriately is what matters.

>>130897

>Don't stop even if you get confirmed

Correct.

>If reality did not disappear, you are not even halfway

Not correct. A life-death-rebirth initiation, common to every esoteric tradition, does not involve the dissolution of reality, whatever one may feel as the dissolution of reality.

>Don't go into ego death until you realize it's all a dream

Initiation experiences should reveal the ego as delusory.

>>130898

>yadayadayadayada

Why do you Buddhists love the sound of your own voice so much?

This does not mean always living without any discrimination. We must discriminate between healthy and non-healthy, appropriate and non-appropriate, so that we and our children grow up knowing how to thrive, but in order to ensure we are seeing things objectively it is also useful to train our minds to think from all perspectives without bias in order to select the most beneficial.

So getting back to the point, in the same way that the concept of a left can't exist without the concept of a right, without a concept of truth there can be none of it's opposite, which is a concept of falsehood. This is a key point of Zen, and it is essential to understand in order to have even a limited intellectual understanding of so-called enlightenment. When we do not attempt to communicate we cannot create falsehoods or misunderstandings. So falsehoods and misunderstandings are at best an unintended byproduct of, and at worst a deliberate inversion of, the quest for an understanding of real truth or higher truth, which we here define as "truth beyond the human mind's ability to define it".

This is part of why Zen monks only bow or move slightly instead of speaking when asked questions, or speak of the physical when asked about the spiritual and the spiritual when asked about the physical. They are answering in this way to call your attention to the concept of dualistic opposites and showing you the doorway beyond suffering which results from freeing ourselves of such concepts. In the East trying to explain Zen with words marks me as an idiot of the highest caliber, but as Westerners your minds have been trained to understand before you accept, so I must attempt to build a bridge halfway across so that more of you can make the leap!

So what we call real truth is actually beyond "truth" and "non-truth". It is what existed before truth and non-truth or any other dualistic frameworks were conceptualized within the mind. It is before thought, which is why meditation, which gradually quiets our minds, can bring us to a state of absolute truth that simply cannot be conveyed in words. We call that unformed state of real truth the "absolute reality", or "God", "the creator", "the source", "Buddha mind", "no mind", "emptiness", "nothingness", "where there is no self or other", etc. and we call this dreamlike physical world we pretend to exist within "relative" reality because things here appear to exist in relation to each other. Within the absolute there is no dualism, no thought, no emotion: those things can only be experienced, can only even pretend to exist or be contemplated of, within our illusory relative minds here in this illusory relative world.

>>130892

The premise of Buddhism is that there is endless reincarnation as in Hinduism. To early Buddhists even moreso than today, the goal is explicitly to be removed from the cycle of reincarnation and to be free from karma which keeps one bound to the rebirth cycle. It's precisely the same problem as Hinduism in that sense.

There is one critical difference between Hinduism and Buddhism you need to know, that being, Hinduism posits an ontological nondualism and Buddhism posits an epistemological nondualism. To Hindus, there is an ultimate root nature that can be found and unionized with, there is Atman and it is not other than Brahman. To Buddhists, there is no self, Anatman, though the appearance of self arises through dependent origination. It is precisely this undercutting of any kind of root nature which distinguishes Buddhism in its own right.

You will see Hindus certain that they have reached exactly the same state as Buddhists, but very high level Buddhists don't ever make the same claim in reverse. Generally, Hindus are thrown off by Buddhist use of the same Sanskrit terms as Hindus, but to mean subtly different things building to one final opposite conclusion that Hindus tend not to really grasp. Most often, switching from ontological nondualism to epistemological nondualism requires a rather serious crisis internally as the brain struggles to overcome its attachment to is/isn't dual logic in this matter. It's important to get Nagarjuna's material in front of people in that process, so they don't unnecessarily throw the baby out with the bathwater.

A Buddhist is a being with great attachment to Buddhism.

I've never met any Buddhists.

I've never seen any Buddhism.

>>130906

>>130905

>>130904

Perhaps one day you'll stop contradicting your own points and say something true–probably accidentally, if this track record is to be believed–but today is not that day.

>>130906

Also, posting the fucking Tao of Pooh? Really?

>>130927

lol triggered

>>130933

Well I must admit, yeah, you got me with that one alright. Clever move posting a shit book, anon! Not what I expected, points to you for that.

>>130935

It’s a great introduction. It served me when I was a newbie. What’s the problem with him posting it btw?

>>131000

There isn't one, really. It's a matter of taste, I'm just busting his balls for fun.

>>131002

>>131003

Yes, this is all the case.

It takes some balls to be able to go very far on the path and to then get rid of the raft and to abandon this altogether, but this is stepping onto the other shore. For this reason I advocate no Buddhism, nor any other path, for the same reason that a healthy person does not spend his time being treated in a hospital, and would not advocate that healthy others do so either. Why did I say there is much bullshit in Buddhism? For the same reason that the floor of a tub is filthy after showering, or a sewer system dirty after flushing. When Buddhism is needed, it is used and discarded. To attach to it or to reject it is to not recognize it for what it is.

There must come a time when even the notions of god and buddha are done away with in the process of seeing the nature of pure mind. Discarding even the highest, even the notion of an end state or goal, even progress, even discarding discarding itself, and discarding what comes after that, and even the notion of after that, and even this, all illusion ceases to be illusion. Why meditate, then? Why strive to become that which is not other? Meditate for the sake of meditation and the results that follow, should those results suit you, but that will not do to become a Buddha, not in this or any other lifetime. In lesser vehicles, meditation is certainly a great tool for purification, but unless you are a Buddha now in this moment, you will not attain Buddhahood by meditation or by practice or by attainment. None of these will do. It is now or never.

>to those of you who are still on the Chaos wheel of endless acquisition

>>130754

Well no he doesn't, it's self delusion because no matter how deeply you realise the illusory nature of reality

YOU

ARE

STILL

STUCK

HERE

>>130754

You wanna fall into poverty? Cuz that's how you fall into poverty.

Too many hippy burnouts end up roaming the streets, believing they can just ignore material conditions of existence.

The material realm must be dealt with detachment, but it doesn't disappear just because you stop believing in it.

What is this thread supposed to be for?

The Buddhapill is raoften misinterpreted. Or rather, there are many Buddhapills. Which one did you have in mind?

Any actual discussion of Buddhism requires an understanding and exploration of Nirvana and Samara.

>>130913

If everything is Samsara, and the ultimate Nirvana is supposed to end it all…

Is Sunyata real? What appears real to us is Samsara…