I'm reading Kristin Neff's Self Compassion, and on page 93-94 she discusses what I consider to be reduced secular Buddhism. It's about not putting the second arrow in, preventing mind made suffering. It's the creativity over reactivity. Enlightenment as overcoming trauma and conditioning.
Devotion takes you past that, and perhaps is mysticism. Seeking unconditioned happiness. The unconditioned, the transcendental is a black hole of meaning, because language is conditional. You can't talk about the unconditioned. Merging with an archetypal Buddha. Depth psychology. Wisdom inaccessible to the intellect.
Sex scandals in Buddhist sanghas are caused by nihilism and despair. Human sexuality undercuts most projects except hedonism. Containing sexuality is part of Christianity. The Buddha saw no connection to supporting the spiritual life, and banned sexuality for monks.
Narratives that really juice you up to do the hard work, to keep the discipline. Meditate 2 hours a day, vigilance with ethics, pushing yourself to study the culture, the ideas, the tradition. Pushing yourself to interact with other, develop friendships which are mercurial at best. Sangha is like politics, you have to really tolerate your ideals being violated by the reality of messy humans. Most sanghas are grandma sanghas who press eject at the smallest problems or power plays meant to build buildings. There's nothing wrong with trying to control your environment. Creating good conditions for practice, but wait, how do we get to the unconditioned? Devotion? I love devotional practices, but I don't know if they get you beyond the conditioned.
The perfection of wisdom tries to express. It’s hard not to see quibbles with doctrine minutiae that isn’t yet common knowledge. I suppose this blurb is a kind of playing with simplified and more than Buddhism. Hyperbolic versus plain Buddhism.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment