rpw3@fortune.UUCP (01/03/84)
#R:houxu:-26200:fortune:21900005:000:4349 fortune!rpw3 Jan 3 01:29:00 1984 <no leading spaces> >***** fortune:net.religion / houxu!eh / 10:00 am Dec 21, 1983 >...the Dharmadhatu Center of New York... They are geared >towards teaching elementary Buddhism.... >Please excuse my inability to explain with exactness. >The Time, Space, and Knowledge (TSK) vision is not traditional >Buddhism... I am not sure what you mean by "traditional Buddhism". Dharmadhatu indeed teaches a certain school of Buddhism, in this case, the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, through a lineage holder of that tradition, Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. But the teachings in TSK also come from a very traditional school, the Nyingma (lit: "old school") lineage, also one of the main Tibetan traditions, in which Tarthang Tulku (author of TSK) was trained. >TSK deals with demonstrable truths that the reader is invited to >experience for his or herself. This is common to all schools. All of the teachers and teaching simply point the way. The student has to do the slog work for {him,her}self. >For example, memory is experienced as a thought of a thought of >a thought ... of an initial awareness. This is the first >exercise of the section on knowledge. You might want to compare that to the basic practice taught in the Satipatthana-Sutta (a Pali text) in the section on "Contemplation of Mental Objects", "...and how, monks, does a monk live contemplating mental objects in mental objects?...herein monks, when sense-desire is present, a monk knows, 'There is sense-desire in me', or when sense-desire is not present, he knows, 'There is not sense-desire in me.' He knows how the arising of the non-arisen sense-desire comes to be; he knows how the abandoning of the arisen sense-desire comes to be; and he knows how the non-arising in the future of the abandoned sense-desire comes to be. When anger is present, he knows,...etc... When sloth and torpor is present, he knows,...etc... When agitation and worry is present, he knows,...etc... When doubt is present, he knows,...etc." [from Garuda IV: Foundations of Mindfulness (Shambala Press 1976) ] >Interpretations are left to the reader. You can have a field >day with this exercise alone! As best I have understood, the point is just to see it happening without trying to manipulate it or use it to to crank yourself up. >What a person takes for continuity of his or her consciousness >or identity is an attribute of the thought process. Given a >stream of thoughts, random thoughts will be of previous >thoughts. This thought of a thought of a thought ... or >memory of a memory of a memory... sustains the idea that there >is continuity. It also says a lot for how conscious the whole >process is. Right. The idea is to notice that what we normally think of as "me" is actually our incessant mental chatter. But as long as we play games with that, we're still stuck. >I read an explanation about how the continuity of the consciousness >depended upon the thought process in a book on Zen many years ago. I >never expected I would see that as a result of meditation, let alone >experience that in one of the first few experiments with the TSK >book. It's like being handed a gold mine and, without the refined >abilities of visualization, having virtually to dig with bare hands. That's the beauty of those techniques: they don't depend on any pre-conditions. You don't have to become perfect to start becoming perfect. The danger, however, is that one can get lost in the brilliance of that "gold mine" (your own mind) and wander off into "yet another road-side attraction". So the traditional schools (including Tarthang Tulku's) repeatedly advise working closely with an accomplished teacher (or his students) in order to have a reliable reference point to avoid self-delusion. That was why I referred you to Dharmadhatu. They may not be using exactly the same language you are using, but it is a reliable "basic training" class while you are looking for a contact with some of Tarthang Tulku's folks. Good luck! Rob Warnock UUCP: {sri-unix,amd70,hpda,harpo,ihnp4,allegra}!fortune!rpw3 DDD: (415)595-8444 USPS: Fortune Systems Corp, 101 Twin Dolphins Drive, Redwood City, CA 94065 p.s. There are Dharmadhatus in Berkeley (Fulton St.), San Francisco (addr?), and "Palo Alto" (Covington Rd, Los Altos) for any Bay Area interests.
tim@unc.UUCP (Tim Maroney) (01/09/84)
Rob Warnock's article was, simply, one of the best articles on net.religion in a long time. He warns of dangers that are real, speaks of practices that do in fact work, and so on. Those of all paths should be able to extract valuable knowledge from this writing, although a non-trivial translation effort may be needed. For instance, the warnings at the end apply no less to the classical Western astral voyager -- if he becomes enamored of his own phantasms to the exclusion of the seeking of truly external entities, he will remain forever bogged down in his own astral excrement, thinking himself the recipient of all manners of wondrous initiations when in fact he has not progressed beyond the "First Matter" or "Uninitiate" level. We need more articles like this, and fewer like "You must accept my worldview completely or you will be damned and suffer forever." There is no reason why Christians need to be publicly intolerant; they can write about prayer and meditation techniques, or share those intuitions which the ineffable Love of their Savior must confer (if the religion be valid). Those who embark on this somewhat ecumenical course will come to find that the methods of their paths are not greatly different from those of other paths. Through this, one may come to the true Highest Religion, which is different for every one, yet always the same. -- Tim Maroney, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill duke!unc!tim (USENET), tim.unc@csnet-relay (ARPA)
dan@scgvaxd.UUCP (Dan Boskovich) (01/21/85)
This is my first time posting to the net and I am checking to see if it works. Thanks for your patience!