"... sacredness is a stance toward the world, not an inherent quality of some bits of it; ... adopting the stance that everything is sacred generally leads to better outcomes than the stance that nothing is sacred."
https://vividness.live/sutra-tantra-and-the-modern-worldview
"Secular modernism rejects ethics based on self-denial, as Christianity and Sutrayana ethics both are.
On the other hand, secular modernism is wary of the phrase 'beyond good and evil'. ('Didn’t Hitler say that?')"
https://vividness.live/sutra-tantra-and-the-modern-worldview
(1/2)
"Secular ethics is basically Christian ethics minus the self-denial. If Tantra has any ethics at all, it is not like that. I would say it simply has no ethics. I consider that a non-problem; it just means you have to take your ethics from somewhere else. However, some Buddhist teachers would disagree."
https://vividness.live/sutra-tantra-and-the-modern-worldview
(2/2)
"We have no excuse for being ignorant of what the Buddha taught. He established a highly regulated monastic order during his forty years of teaching. About 3000 of his sermons have survived. His arguments are clear, systematic and practical. We know exactly what he wanted his followers to do. He is a most impressive thinker even if we disagree with his values."
#EricHarrison, 2016
https://perthmeditationcentre.com.au/articles/general-articles/why-i-am-not-a-buddhist/
"Tantra can seem extremely complex and technical. However, its mass of details are all just hints about how to maintain the passionate, spacious attitude.
The tantric attitude is valuable regardless of how you come to adopt it. On the other hand, the tantric practices and doctrines have no intrinsic value. They exist only to promote the attitude."
https://vividness.live/the-power-of-an-attitude
(1/2)
"Technical mastery and intellectual understanding are important in tantra, but not all-important. They are only means to an end. Asking:
What do I need to do, or to understand, to live with greater gusto and wider vision?
is the guide to deciding how far to take particular techniques or studies, and which to take up next."
https://vividness.live/the-power-of-an-attitude
(2/2)
"There are no spiritual problems; but there are real problems. Small ones like dirty dishes in the sink, and big ones like global warming.
Spaciousness and passion both lead you to regard all situations as workable.
...
'Workable' does not guarantee that there is a solution. 'Nothing is fundamentally wrong with the world' does not mean that everything can be fixed, or that life can be made perfect. Catastrophe is always possible. Death is always certain."
"Tantra is unusual—possibly unique—in avoiding both eternalism (fantasies of metaphysical salvation) and nihilistic pessimism.
I think this makes tantra the ideal religion for geeks (like me.) Geeks refuse to believe in things we have no evidence for. We’re usually dismissive of spirituality, because its metaphysical claims are either false or meaningless."
https://vividness.live/tantra-is-anti-spiritual
(1/2)
"The problem with rejecting spirituality is that often the only alternative seems to be nihilism: the idea that everything is meaningless. That leads to rage, depression, and sterile intellectualization.
Tantra has a cogent answer to nihilism, and upholds purpose, meaning, and value. At the same time, it has a practical, realistic, engineer-like outlook, without fanciful metaphysics."
https://vividness.live/tantra-is-anti-spiritual
(2/2)
"... that passionate, active connection was rejected by most traditional Buddhisms. However, it’s so highly valued in the secular West that Consensus Buddhism—based on Theravada and Zen—has tried to incorporate it.
This seems to me an uneasy fit. I’ll suggest that tantra may be a better starting point for modern Buddhism, because its fundamental values are closer to modern ones."
If Chapman's descriptions of vajrayana are accurate - and they do seem based on deep reading of primary texts, or at least translations - I find it easy to agree that it's a practical and potentially useful spiritual path for modern geeks.
But I'm left wondering what #Tantra has to do with the Buddha or Buddhism? Other than arriving in the anglophone world in the luggage of Buddhist teachers. Tantra predates Siddartha Gautama, and nothing Chapman describes about it seems particularly Buddhist.
"Romanticism (and its descendant, the psychotherapeutic world-view) consider that emotions are inherently meaningful, and superior to reason as a path of understanding. This can produce pathological inwardness, and wallowing in feelings, which leads nowhere.
Tantra values emotions as tools, but does not consider them inherently meaningful. It leads out, not in."
https://vividness.live/passionate-connections
I'm not sure that's a fair summary of the psychotherapeutic view of emotions.
(1/2)
Maybe that's a reflection of psychotherapy or counselling practice in the US, where Chapman lives? All my encounters with psychology and counsellors in Aotearoa have been based around the idea that emotions (and dreams) expose truths that we try to rationalise away. Because we can use our rational faculties to lie to ourselves, but we can't do that with our emotions.
(2/2)
"It is the tantric attitude that transforms—and remember, that attitude is the union of spacious freedom with passionate connections. Those tend to dissolve arrogance, aggression, and self-aggrandizement. Tantric power comes from unclogging energy—not from collecting and concentrating it."
"... this is exactly the choice between tantra and sutra (mainstream Buddhism) ..."
https://vividness.live/free-flowing-energy
(1/?)
"Do you want to face your peculiar self squarely? Do you want to experience your spiky feelings fully, not flinching? Do you want to throw yourself into the world, with all its vivid fascinations, its unpredictable agonies and ecstasies, acting as best you can and accepting the consequences?"
https://vividness.live/free-flowing-energy
(2/?)
"Or would you rather be a nice no-one-in-particular? Would you rather suppress your unruly passions? Would you rather shut off the firehose of energy? Would you rather find peace by retreating into a bland, safe space, inhibiting your impulses to get involved?"
https://vividness.live/free-flowing-energy
(3/?)
"Fortunately, this is not a one-time choice. It is possible to take both approaches at different times, depending on your ability to cope with more and less intense circumstances."
https://vividness.live/free-flowing-energy
(4/4)
"In flow [states], commonly you lose your self. Activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; you stop being aware of yourself as separate from the action. Musicians report that 'the music plays itself'. Footballers feel their body as part of a joint organism, the team, which acts as one. In sex, you may lose track of whose body is whose."
https://vividness.live/tantra-and-flow
(1/2)
"This is, of course, a common theme in all of Buddhism. Psychology sees loss of self as a temporary illusion, though; whereas Buddhism sees the self as a temporary illusion."
https://vividness.live/tantra-and-flow
(2/2)
"But emptiness is not non-existence. Nihilism—for Buddhism—is the refusal to see that emptiness is also form. The emptiness of meaning is not a problem. The ambiguity of purpose, value, and ethics is no cause for worry, much less despair. Meanings continually arise spontaneously. Their lack of any ultimate source does not make them any less real or compelling."
https://vividness.live/a-dzogchen-shaped-hole-in-the-culture
"Another strategy is to turn down the master volume knob on your whole being. If a particular problem energy is too strong to deal with, you can’t turn it down, but you can drain energy out the whole system.
This produces low-energy stuckness. It can appear as depression, niceness, cluelessness, and general uselessness. Many people misuse Buddhism this way, as a tool for lobotomizing themselves, because they haven’t got a better way of handling intense emotions."
"Creativity is central in tantric Buddhism. However, the goal is not “self-expression.” (Selves are not particularly interesting.) Nor is it to make something new just because it’s new. Nor is it about connecting with the Absolute Infinite.
Creativity means allowing the spaciousness of specifics to express themselves. It means being the space in which latent meanings coalesce into visible forms."
"The aim of tantra is not to fix the world. The world is unfixable. The aim of tantra is to liberate it from imposed meanings."
"Vajrayana is attractive as an approach to Buddhism that affirms the value of everyday life, and aims to enjoy and enhance the real world, rather than to reject and escape it.
However, Vajrayana is said to be the most advanced and difficult of all Buddhist approaches, and to be entirely impossible without extensive instruction from a lama. 'Lama' is the Tibetan translation of 'guru', and gurus have a bad reputation in the West now—often deservedly so"
https://vividness.live/evolving-ground-learning-relationship
(1/2)
Not to mention that whenever you say "Lama" to someone in the modern anglophone world, we immediately get a mental image of a llama. Which is not altogether conducive to the sense of reverence needed to recognise someone as a spiritual teacher.
(2/2)
"The Tantric lama uses brute force and a fixed set of cheap tricks to blast through the student’s avidya—their stubborn 'non-seeing' or 'unenlightenment'. That may be enormously valuable, and necessary at first, to give the student an initial taste of the electric, sacred, vajra world. It is limited because it can’t communicate any specifics about that world, or how to work with it. It’s just shoving you into it, BLAM."
https://vividness.live/evolving-ground-learning-relationship
Sounds much like taking entheogens.
We can read as many books about Tai Chi as we like, and have as many conversations, and attend as many classes. But if we don't practice the methods diligently, and seek expert help to make sure we're doing them right, we still won't know how to *do* Tai Chi. Nor gain anything much from it.
What I'm coming to understand about vajrayana Buddhism is that the same is true. I don't know if it's for me yet. But at some point I'll need to piss or get off the pot.
"You might like to think your teacher is special and you are ordinary. That would transfer responsibility for your spiritual development from you to them—which would be great if it worked! But it doesn’t."
https://vividness.live/how-to-learn-buddhist-tantra
Fucking this!
Chapman's metaphor of spirituality as walking a poorly-marked path in the mountains seems useful here. A teacher is a guide. They know some things their students don't, and it's worth following their advice. But they're just humans.
“'Spirituality' is one of those domains everyone feels they have a moral right to an opinion about, which is as good as anyone else’s. Such domains somehow transfer the Western liberal tradition of egalitarian individualism from the moral, legal, and political realms, where it is critically important and mainly correct, into others in which it’s irrelevant and absurd."
https://vividness.live/how-to-learn-buddhist-tantra
Wow, that's challenging! I'll need to think on it.
(1/2)
“'Can’t we all be teachers to each other?' No. You could teach your chemistry professor to ski, if you know how, but you can’t teach them chemistry. Carrying over egalitarian political beliefs into a chemistry course is unhelpful. This is not a political situation. If you think everything has to be political, you can’t learn anything difficult."
https://vividness.live/how-to-learn-buddhist-tantra
Ouch!
(2/2)
Imagine you're trying to explain to a group of people how to install an instance of Ghost for their own blog, and what it can and can't do for them.
"But ghosts aren't real", someone says. You look at them quizzically, wondering why that's relevant. "It's just what the software is called", you explain, "a label for a package of digital infrastructure". "Can I see it", they ask, "can I poke it with a stick?" You raise another eyebrow, "no", you say, again wondering what their point is.
(1/?)
"If it's not an object in the world, it's not real", they insist. Oh. That's never struck you as a problem before. You've come across a plethora of bugs that can stop software working, but not being a thing made of stuff has never been one of them.
You try again to get back on on track. "No you can't poke software, but it's nevertheless useful", you point out. How about we talk about how to install it? But your interlocutor smells blood in the water now, and will not be redirected.
(2/?)
"If it's not real, if it's just a bunch of ideas, any way of installing it will work just as well as any other", they say. You assure them that's not the case.
There are specific processes for getting Ghost installed, configuring and running, and a bunch of gotchas it helps to be aware of. If you don't follow them, or gain the necessary understanding before trying to vary them, it won't work. It could even endanger your computer. That's why you volunteered to teach this workshop.
(3/?)
But despite agreeing to attend, knowing the topic of the workshop and who was teaching it, this person appears to think they know better. Like everyone's opinions about software are equally valid, and nobody is qualified to teach anyone else. You sigh, and ask them to either pipe down so others can learn, or leave.
(4/?)
You go on explaining the structure and functions of Ghost, how to get it working on a server, along with various add-ons (eg the ActivityPub module). None of it is material. But it's nevertheless very real, and has measurable affects on people's behaviour, and thus on the world as a whole.
(5/5)
"Personally, I hate organizations. I am not a 'joiner' by nature, and I find that organizations usually end up mainly performing meaningless bureaucratic rituals for the benefit of the bureaucracy.
However, delivering Buddhism involves much work by many people. The scale of this is not obvious, until you look 'behind the scenes'. We have to coordinate all that work. In the best case, that is all an organization is."
"The problem is that honest efforts to preserve Buddhism can head down a slipperly slope to rigid, sterile orthodoxy. This has happened over and over through Buddhist history. As we slide further down that slope, essential principles and functions are forgotten. Experiential understanding is replaced with scholarship; then scholarship is replaced with text-worship. Living practice turns into rote ritual performance."
https://vividness.live/responsibility
(1/?)
This is a risk for any organised attempt to pass on a philosophical system to future generations, and not just to religious ones either. For example, it's a risk for science and the university system too. It's definitely happened to Marxism, and libertarianism, and I'd argue it's happening to anarchism too.
(2/?)
@cashew
> go ahead, poke the sources with whatever sticks you got, it's free and open for everybody to do exactly that
.... says another workshop attendee, exasperated with the disruption. "What you mean I'm just supposed to believe it's real because someone wrote a bunch of text about it?", asks the skeptic?
Strypey
кеш'ю