Self-identified religious gurus and tea sales

 

A friend recently brought up an interesting subject of discussion, raised initially by someone claiming to be "spiritually advanced" in a Facebook group post introduction.  The problems with this sort of claim and context seems obvious enough:  what if such a person was either making up those credentials, using them for some other type of gain, or wrong about their own assessment of attainment?  The "average cult leader" is someone best avoided.

But then it's all not as simple as it first appears.  How do we distinguish an ingenuine master-type from someone who really has had unique, helpful, and informative experiences, who wants to share perspective deriving from those?  Is the problem only related to someone running a scam, or using that as product or service marketing, or is there a broader grey area to be concerned about?  

This example led into such concerns.  It will be helpful using it as an approach point, so first unpacking what that guy claimed, and what context seemed to relate to making the claims.  Some degree of speculation is involved in any review, so I'll try to be careful about flagging which parts are added by my own intuition, which really is most of it, in this case.

About two years ago someone posted a personal introduction in a Thailand-related Facebook group.  Who it is doesn't matter, or whether this guy really is a scam artist looking to sell something based off false claims, or else a genuine and accomplished spiritual seeker who really would be helpful to others, if one were to seek out further contact.  In the end it does matter, related to his case and actual contact, but this will talk around what goes into making such a distinction, and how different contexts matter.

His back-story was that he had just spent some years meditating under the guidance of a master, as part of an established tradition.  I think it even included reference to an actual cave location, and either martial arts or qi gong, but to some extent those details aren't critical.  It was also associated, if not then soon after, with selling tea.  That's a bit of a red flag, coupling offering spiritual insights with a literal product sales-pitch.  In the initial form it was just an introduction though, not a clear marketing step.

I responded to my friend's question, asking about that context and that guy, in discussing my concerns over such a background, in relation to that person making specific claims about spirtitual-scope accomplishments:

I don't know any stories about him cheating people or anything like that. He was telling stories about training in meditation and something like kung fu (martial arts or qi gong) under a master, claims which are typically problematic, but in some instances there could be validity for that.

Related to the specific subject of spiritual attainment, you could find someone in China to certify that you are anything at all by email, with no background. You could be a kung fu master, tea expert, master electrician, whatever you wanted. Real "spiritual" training and experience typically wouldn't come with titles.

He was promoting himself as spiritually advanced; the reference was to training in a cave under a master, or something such. Taken alone the claim implies a related gap. As I see it he is embracing evaluation of that status in taking up the promotion. Someone offering others advice about some meditation practice in a Buddhism group is one thing; that does imply accomplishment, but only indirectly, towards helping others. Using such direct claims as background to sell tea is something else.

This is the problem with [another similar case of a person using a spiritual role to sell tea]. No one can tell how spiritually advanced he is without meeting him, but he is definitely using a spiritual angle to sell tea, for material benefit. I talked to him only one time, mentioning some background with tea and Buddhism as an intro, and he bypassed any further discussion of both subjects to try to sell me a subscription. He's a salesman. That's fine, but even selling spirituality is problematic, to really serve the other role. It can be promoted, but focus on the sales side and literal profit makes one no different than Joel Osteen.

Probably both guys are decent people, and a good bit of that rejection [mentioned in other comments in more detailed form related to other people's takes] does relate to subculture based expectations. I personally don't care for ego and focus on materialism to adjoin spiritual claimed status; my own negative reaction probably relates to something like that.

It could sound like a contradiction, saying that they are probably decent guys, and that it's ok for people to judge and dislike them. As I see it the positioning as a religious figure or accomplished practitioner is the difference. A Christian minister needs to be more ethical than most people to serve that role. Joel Osteen is fine in relation to the ethical standard we hold stock brokers to, but not remotely ok as a Christian minister. This guy brought up the scope in direct claims, and for sure he's using that scope as part of tea sales business. He implicitly embraces being judged differently, since he is tying a business sales function to an image and a background context. Then the last step about me guessing his personal context based on his claims is a bit thin, mostly just speculation.

The introduction based on spending years in some type of meditation training was probably based on some truth; I don't doubt that part. The next implication of spiritual accomplishment is more problematic.  But I get why some genuine, valid, informative experiences would naturally lead one to try to "bring wisdom from on high" to others.

That clearly left off with the open-ended conclusion that I don't know how this case works out.

One unusual twist here is that the context helps us try to fill in the gap related to knowing how genuine this form of self-identification really is.  Pairing it with selling something is a red flag, but not necessarily a clear indication of the context being false or invalid.  He easily could've had interesting, useful experiences that he really would like to share.  He could also just happen to sell tea.  We have to judge further from other input, or completely suspending judgment is an especially valid approach.

It helps to reference what an "accomplished Buddhist master" actually does look like, but to be clear it won't work to hold anyone who has had any other degree of exposure to the same standard.  The modern paradigms that come to mind are Ajarn Chah (of the Thai Buddhist forest tradition), and Thich Nhat Hanh, of the Vietnamese Zen tradition.  Both are regarded as accomplished, well-informed, personally-transformed and genuine teachers.  The Dalai Lama is along the same line and type, with opinions varying as to whether his political stance and purposes reinforce his spiritual leader role or conflict with it.

Thich Nhat Hanh; we don't have that many genuine spiritual guides like him

Both of these teachers emphasize personal practice, study of core teachings and practices, embracing an unusual degree of humility, and a rejection of materialism.  To be clear I've shifted from Asian spiritual themes in general to focus on Buddhism here; it could be that qi gong practice, or Taoism, within a yoga tradition, or whatever else, doesn't retain the exact same focuses but are also valid.  Equally valid?  Who knows; that's the kind of thing people need to explore on their own personal journey, and decide for themselves.

A materialist theme was one underpinning thread in what the person was communicating (in the introduced status), but only indirectly.  Adjoining the very limited description of practice background was a context including special clothing, elaborate furnishings, and art-collection oriented teaware.  To be clear I don't see all of these as problematic at all in relation to anyone's personal interest in tea.  It's fine to bridge over to collecting teapots, and statues and figurines, owning unique tables and cabinets that relate to the interest, and wearing traditional Chinese martial arts inspired clothing (or other robes; whatever it is).  Those interests aren't invalid in any way, or even problematic.

a dear friend combines interest in tea, teaware collection, and ceremony, and it completely works

The potential problem is connecting ownership of a lot of "stuff" with spiritual attainment claims.  To me that's a contradiction with that context.  One would typically start such a spiritual journey by limiting focus on ownership of a range of items that expands their self-image definition.  Not right away; setting up some sort of shrine and owning some meaningful symbols would be typical, but pretty soon in focusing on internal versus external connections would come up.

form can seem to overtake function, or maybe this is just an everyday look (photo credit)

The cave context itself works as an example of how we would tend to use intuition to break down what is implied but not directly expressed.  There's nothing wrong with meditating in a literal cave; that could be a quiet, comfortable, isolated natural space.  It could also be seen as a red flag related to a teacher putting image above function.  The same would come up related to actual certifications of attainment.  You might wonder, do such things even exist, would that be common?  There's no tight connection to the rest of this but an interesting tangent comes to mind.

judgement based only on appearances is problematic; his religious practice could be completely valid and useful

I don't want this to be about "naming names" but during the time I was ordained as a monk I went on a retreat to a different sect's meditation center well outside of Bangkok, arranged by my "monk-teacher."  I don't think it was chosen as the best possible location and setting for such a training, or the most authentic source, it was just relatively close, and set up for that kind of visitation.  

That sect was and still is controversial for selling a lot of magic amulets and such, for focus on material gain as a part of the organization context.  Stories about talking statues I heard there were really crazy.  They use that revenue to build larger and larger facilities, a theme that comes up in some US Christian ministries.  I didn't care for the teachings or form of meditation practice, which related to a accepting that the Buddha was alive in a heaven realm (a bit of heresy there), and to "guided meditation" focusing on trying to see crystal angel images and such.  If you said that you visualized a certain thing you would be given a certificate announcing your level of attainment.  All not good, as I saw it.  I didn't want any certificate.

In the end I don't know how genuine or spiritually advanced the guy I'm discussing here is.  Meeting him would help a lot in making that distinction.  It's a problem defining yourself as spiritually advanced, but not the same kind of problem I might seem to be implying.  People do experience shifts in perspective and even distinct breakthroughs in spiritual progress.  If that is what triggered his self-declaration there's a pretty good chance that he's just the kind of person someone pursuing a spiritual path would want to meet, and would be lucky to meet.  Just as likely he has experienced some positive aspects of spiritual pursuit and still wouldn't be helpful, due to not getting far, and not having prior exposure to the right kinds of teachers and practice, especially related to placing unusual experience after it happens.

I may be over-reacting to the coupling of spiritual attainment claims with product marketing.  We always tend to be biased in relation to expecting what we already experienced to repeat, and prior negative conditioning could be steering me in the wrong direction related to this.

I've not really fleshed out a sort of worst-case yet here: what if that guy had unusual, interesting, potentially helpful personal experiences, but then derived a number of relatively inaccurate, unhelpful, and potentially damaging conclusions and personal practice steps from them?  That can happen.  

To clarify context with an example, some people really do believe in Traditional Chinese Medicine, and then it matters whether Traditional Chinese Medicine is a set of valid practices or not, or a complete scam.  Maybe it's in the middle, with forms varying, and to me that seems likely.  If that third option is the fact of the matter then it would be possible to run across better and worse references.  Someone with limited legitimate exposure and information, actual positive contact, could have the best of intentions but still pass on very bad guidance.  Experiences would vary in relation to differing exposure, and the exact same external inputs would affect different people differently, in terms of ingesting rare herb or root supplements or undergoing different practices.

I've met a tea vendor before who also sold TCM herbs as a separate second business, and asked him about that subject (not one of the two people I've already discussed).  He wouldn't say if it was valid or not, but his participation in the business implied that he either saw it as valid or else thought it wasn't but didn't care.  

He implied that it was legitimate, but instead of defending it he pushed the validation step off to other people involved who did the TCM analysis and prescription, roughly fulfilling the doctor's role (in the separate Western medicine context).  He saw himself as more covering the function of a drug store, which doesn't try to validate the use or effectiveness of anything sold, they just offer it for sale.  Fair enough.  If he personally thought it was a complete scam that still seems a bit unethical, but withholding judgment is perhaps still a potential option.  I'm not sure to what extent he was really "bought in," or else was working within an ethical grey area instead.

This paradigm can't really hold for someone advocating meditation / spiritual practices; they would have to be involved, and completely bought-in.  Using that range of experience as a background for unrelated product marketing is perhaps a step closer to a grey area.  Really a tea vendor is either selling high quality, good-value, as-sold tea products or else they're not.  If they cite health claims that they don't believe in themselves or tell mythical stories that they don't think are true that sort of doesn't matter.  No one really knows which health benefit claims are valid anyway.  If it relates to a product-background detail maybe it does, or maybe still doesn't; if the tea really doesn't come from beside a wishing-well where some magic event occurred in historical times.  

It's probably a more common case for a tea to be sold as from a specific village area when it's really from an area next to it, or as a spring harvest version instead of fall, or from young farm-grown plant sources instead of older natural environment tea trees.  The "red flags" sort of matter, because if part of the background isn't real the rest might not be either.

Ideally people should be buying tea for the actual experience of that tea, not as part of a story.  In reality different themes like that do tend to mix.  Spiritual attainment and tea quality and experience might seem an odd coupling but it wouldn't be completely new for them to combine.  Tea experience can take on a meditative form, and the principles and practices found in religious context can support that, and can positively couple with it.  Mixing the sales aspects, and marketing, with spiritual practice scope becomes a little strange; one general theme here in this writing is being aware of potential problems with that.

I wrote about that more directly in a blog post about mixing tea experience and "cult" experience, religious group participation, in a limited form.  It's less of a sweeping critique of anything remotely like that than an initial title summary may imply.  I personally don't see a problem with combing varying forms of interest, tea with mindfulness and religion practice, tea experience with aesthetic interest and art collection, and so on.  Focus on the most extreme forms, which would tend to be more negative, helps highlight the scope of the concerns, but in general limited mixing would probably typically be positive.  Even the more extreme example I mention, related to a contact I've discussed here, is probably experienced generally positively by most people who come in contact with that group and form.  

I'll cite that other blog post for further reading:

On tea popularity and tea cults

Engaged Buddhism and crisis, related to the US election result

I wrote about why Trump might have won the election in the  last post, nothing at all to do with Buddhism, just reading up and passing on some theories.  It's funny that subject isn't dropping off.  More theories crop up about the role Facebook played (people see feed posts of only like-minded individuals, or even fake news), or blaming media sources for being biased (they were, just different sources for both candidates).

I was also just talking with a friend about the relation of Buddhism to this issue, about how non-attachment relates to potential stress.

His point:  we live in an imperfect world, and trying to experience it differently than it actually is isn't useful, or pleasant.  According to the teachings of Buddhism we need to live directly in the moment, which involves accepting things as they are.  So no freaking out, even if someone doesn't like the election result, or even in cases of real crisis.  I guess that could even extend to something like 9/11, so that a truly enlightened person might just think "we live in that kind of world now," but really how that reaction would work out sort of depends on interpretation.  Getting upset might be in order.

It sort of works, the extended "keep calm" take.  Sometimes it seems like freaking out is normal, maybe even for the best.  My grandmother died last year and I think it was healthy to be quite upset.  The King of Thailand died last month and this whole country was upset, and I think they should have been, that it may have been a healthier reaction than just saying "all things are impermanent" and moving on.  Buddhism has nothing to do with being emotionless, to me.  Of course that is just an interpretation, and I'm not claiming I've got it all figured out, that my take is just what the Buddha would have said.

This might be a good place to go a little deeper into what that friend was saying, which I'll quote:


The best thing is to not conceptualize your experience. Things are as they are. The interpretation that you conceptualize after the fact is totally subjective and not factual or even necessary. It is something to come to terms with, not the fact that Trump won or the King is dead. It is an indulgence of the world of ideas which have no basis in reality. Being in the here and now is the only antidote to this. 


It sort of works.  This sort of abstract take on things can also part ways with a practical, normal reality.  If I had no attachment to my grandmother then there wouldn't have been anything to be upset about, but I did, and that attachment was a good thing.  Now I'm mixing terms, since caring for my grandmother and the form of attachment Buddhist theory is talking about are almost certainly two different things.  The Buddha wasn't saying that people shouldn't love their grandmothers, and if he was then he was a jackass.  But I've spent a lot of time reading direct teachings from the Buddha, and interpretations, and it can all really make sense, and it's useful.  He was no jackass.

no need to let dying get you down, for some

It's hard to say if the Buddha transcended the normal experience of human emotion from the mix of old stories, if he would have seemed anything like us, or quite different.  It seems conceivable he was serene and transcendent in nature, but so much spin gets added to those stories that what is in them now hardly seems to be clear on that.  Teachings and descriptions say he did, essentially, that he was fundamentally quite different.  Per some stories he also did magic tricks and talked to deities, and in others he seemed to reject things like magic tricks and talking to deities (not completely unlike Christianity, although that is a different story).

I'll edit down my response a little, in which I embraced that line of thinking, discussing the normal experience of emotions to what might be a reasonable interpretation of applied Buddhist non-attachment.  The discussion was between three people, so the response might seem odd.  My ideas were positioned against two different kinds of response, that Zen-like-state version and another friend's more typical take, a bit shocked.  Then again, a Trump supporter wouldn't be shocked, but no need to go into that tangent here, all of this applies more generally than to someone just being upset about that one thing.


I get it about making peace with the result and our own reaction to the result.  Trump as President is the new reality, in January, and only limited forms of rejecting reality make sense (eg. taking actions that actually do change it).  At the same time grief is natural, and loss of a person and loss of an understanding of reality and a set of expectations aren't so separate, in this case.  

An emotional reaction is in order; this is human nature.  Moving to acceptance is a process, and negative emotions are part of the process.  Or potentially even moving through denial and anger phases, then onto depression and acceptance.

I cope through discussion, and a little writing.  For someone else they might just flip a switch, and say this is now, that other set of circumstances was then, and all is well.  Things are just as they must be, a mix of external events and whatever response we naturally take.  I've only lost the idea that Americans would have better judgment, not a reality where they actually did.  That was always only an expectation.  It's nice philosophizing about loss.  

Don't do anything crazy, although marching around and showing public disapproval seems harmless enough, if one felt inclined.  That really is feedback, likely not so functional, but it's a real thing.  I do the same online, move some ideas around a little.  I share the experience with friends and talk it through with others that don't share perspective as well.



It might seem like I'm taking it a bit personally, more as a tragedy than necessary, or compared to people I've talked to back in the States not so much at all.  I guess I see it as move back to the perspective of the 1950's, one in which men are better than women, whites are better than minorities, and religious tolerance and tolerance for people that see gender differently are non-issues; it's normal to be straight, and not really ok to be Muslim.  And I don't want to go back to that.  I don't want to be better than Mexicans for being white, I want all people to be created equally, like it says in the Constitution.  But all that is tangent.  We could almost as easily be discussing my reaction to 9/11 here instead, any change or event that's hard to accept.

he can't be that bad

Engaged Buddhism versus a less active take on Zen

There are two different takes on Buddhism that map onto two reaction patterns, which may not be familiar to everyone.  Zen would be, in general, one interpretation of which that friend is advocating.  It's all about equanimity, dispassionate acceptance, staying at the center.  How to take that related to immediate experience and what we should do or not do could go in different directions.  Here I'm sort of condensing it to mean inactivity, although it typically wouldn't be equivalent to doing nothing.  That friend isn't saying "do nothing," he's saying don't get upset, because the cause for being upset is only the way you position the ideas.

The story about the one founder spending nine years facing a wall indicates otherwise, that inactivity is just fine, or even great practice, but even that circumstance was probably not exactly like that.  Maybe that guy (Dogen) meditated part-time, and was socially engaged otherwise, although that's not how that story typically goes.  "Real" Zen may be more like a second pattern I'm going to discuss, about a way to be active, to not get away from emotion or doing things.

It's about Engaged Buddhism, a variation of Zen teachings taught by Thich Nhat Hanh.  Sound familiar?  He is a pretty big name, still with  us, but getting up there in years now.  To be clear, he is teaching Zen, part of that tradition himself, and there surely isn't a lot of discontinuity between what he is saying and some other very inactive-oriented form.  Zen is zen; a direct experience of reality, and people are just describing it differently, or different but related means to the same end.  Here is a website about his community and teachings.  Here are some related points from his 14 Precepts of Engaged Buddhism:


Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world...

Do not accumulate wealth while millions are hungry.... Do not maintain anger or hatred... 

Do not lose yourself in dispersion and in your surroundings. Practice mindful breathing to come back to what is happening in the present moment. Be in touch with what is wondrous, refreshing, and healing both inside and around you.... 

Do not utter words that can create discord and cause the community to break. Make every effort to reconcile and resolve all conflicts, however small.

Thich Nhat Hanh (photo credit)

So he is teaching others to be active, but to change perspective.  The same ideas about letting go of attachment are there, common to all types of Buddhism, just stripped of any directive to not experience certain kinds of things.  We suffer to learn not to suffer, to get to the root of what it is, then the form of experience can change so we aren't adding that to it.

One point in there is interesting, about not just avoiding staying inactive in meditation, but also about not losing your self-awareness to activity, described more clearly here:


Buddhism has to do with your daily life, with your suffering and with the suffering of the people around you. You have to learn how to help a wounded child while still practicing  mindful breathing. You should not allow yourself to get lost in action. Action should be meditation at the same time.

Interesting!  He's not really saying we should do a certain kind of activity, again more related to perspective in general, really in this all a "being in the moment" theme.  More about a specific crisis event helps clarify that:


John Malkin: When the World Trade Center was destroyed, you were asked what you would say to those responsible. You answered that you would listen compassionately and deeply to understand their suffering. Tell me about the practice of deep listening and how you think it helps in personal situations...


Thich Nhat Hanh: The practice of deep listening should be directed towards oneself first. If you don’t know how to listen to your own suffering, it will be difficult to listen to the suffering of another person or another group of people.

I have recommended that America listen to herself first, because there is a lot of suffering within her borders. There are so many people who believe they are victims of discrimination and injustice, and they have never been heard and understood...

If America succeeded in that, she could bring that practice to the international level. The fact is that people know America has the capacity to hit. To hit very hard and make people suffer. But if America does not hit, that brings her more respect and gives her more authority...

Violent action creates more violence. That’s why compassion is the only way to reduce violence. And compassion is not something soft. It takes a lot of courage.


So it would seem his advice is for people to understand why they feel as upset as they do about any changes, to make peace within themselves, and then apply the same process to others.

An interesting question:  would Thich Nhat Hanh still get angry?  On one read, no, he would be past that.  A philosophy and religion professor of mine once told a story of being at a function where Thich Nhat Hanh spoke, of being involved with the organizers and presenters, and conveyed how at one point someone in the crowd interrupting and asking questions that weren't relevant was throwing off the communication.  Thich (a bit much always writing all that) went in the back at one point to cool off a little, and expressed that the disruption was making him angry.  He was still human; he still experienced the normal range of emotions.  Some might say "he's not a real Buddha then" but I'm not sure he would claim to be one.  Emotions aren't a bad thing, but keeping a balanced perspective is still better for us.

Of course America isn't going to turn into a country full of millions of Buddhas.  This is intended as practical guidance, though, nothing abstract.  He thinks we can make peace within ourselves, and then make peace with people we would ordinarily consider our worst enemies.

It's odd thinking of a Trump supporter as an enemy in the same sense as a terrorist, but the dynamic is playing out that way this week.  Violence and hate is occurring on both sides.  Compassion and understanding won't work like flipping a switch but there is something to this, it's practical, or at least potentially so.

Of course we can't take "the other side" with us, completely.  If someone absolutely hates minorities and they don't want to change, or can't find influence to shift that perspective, then there is only so much that can be done.  Talking ISIS or Al Qaeda out of conducting terrorism seems a stretch.  But Thich Nhat Hanh is saying we can more or less break that cycle, bit by bit.  Or at least that's our best chance, not success through being the last one standing through successful application of violence.

Our President-elect isn't much of a Buddhist, but the rest of us can do better, and even he can.  A simple part of shifting perspective might just relate to giving him the benefit of the doubt.  When he says "illegal immigrants from Mexico are criminals and rapists" he is more or less expressing racist views, but it might be better to accept that as rhetoric aimed at coordinating shared views about concerns over the impact of illegal immigration with other Americans--his supporters--than jumping to the conclusion that we've elected a new version of Hitler.  The KKK supports Trump, and is happy he was successful, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he or his average supporter shares most of their views.  These teachings from Buddhism apply to trying to understand the most extreme opposing perspectives, to try to sort out the roots of views that seem clearly wrong by relating to them.

My friend's point was more about our own initial reactions, something much easier to control than to actually conduct peaceful relations with ISIS and white supremacists.  Our family is Buddhist--we live in Thailand--and although my own beliefs and background aren't so simple in terms of alignment I try to teach my kids to apply the most practical aspects, and then it's their mother's job to enforce the religious ritual aspects.  As I tell my son, if you can't control yourself then you don't stand much chance of controlling anything else.  Of course this isn't folk wisdom from my own tradition, in which righteous indignation is quite acceptable, it's from Buddhism.  On that subject, I'll add a little more about my own take on Buddhism related to everyday experience here.

looks cool, might be functional

Buddhism and everyday experience, some of my own thoughts

We just celebrated Loy Krathong here; that's sort of one set of practices related to Buddhism, holidays, rituals, and such.  That relates to floating a small bread or leaf and flower boat, lit with a candle along with incense, to carry off your sins.  I don't know the connection to Buddhism, but then Thais aren't always clear of those ties either.  I'm talking about something else, about immediate perception, not rituals.  About those boats, in addition to clearing off sins you also get to make a wish, kind of a common theme in Thai Buddhism.  No need to worry, America, I've got you covered; I burned my wish asking for that political / social mess there to clear up nicely.  Now hopefully it's not like the birthday one, where you can't tell anyone what it is or the magic doesn't work.

This subject naturally drifts into review of the related Pali terms, and parsing out roles of teachings and meditation, and separating mental faculties, etc.  I'll try to simplify beyond all that, of course limited to describing a very rough version of my own take.  Per the Buddha, we make life worse than it is, through mistakes in our take on perception and self, or even related to how we deal the past and future.  Accepting present reality as it is really is a lot of the message.  That doesn't mean dropping out our role in possibly changing it; our own activities and intentions are part of that present, as much as external factors are.  But we can't change the past of the future, and suffering over what happened or being stressed over what might don't really make sense; we only exist in this present.

Suffering is used in an odd way.  It's really a translation, and as with a lot of language translation the original range of senses doesn't match the translated version.  Even within one language, tradition and worldview a concept like "self" may not be pinned down as well as it initially seems, but when a concept is at the core of an unusual model of reality things really get unusual.  As I'm describing I see this as prescriptive as much as descriptive; it says how we can do better for perspective, just as much as it describes what people ordinarily do, mentally, in terms of context of perspective.

It matches everything my friend said, and what Thich Nhat Hanh is saying, it's just not as clear as it could be what those really mean.  According to a bad read my friend might be saying "just get stoned and let it all drop," and Thich Nhat Hanh might be saying "just try to be open and understand everything, and be compassionate, but not necessarily do anything."  Those aren't the point, although they may overlap with some of the ideas, and just miss the proper end point, the right view.

Suffering--in the one special sense--isn't being used as pain, or even mental anguish, but in a special sense.  It's about things being unsatisfactory for being different than they "should" be.  Everything really should be exactly as it is, in this present, because there is no changing the present, at all.  We can act, but then that's part of the present moment too.  To some extent sadness is still a reaction about a change that is natural, a carry-over from the past, but we can only part ways to a limited degree with normal human experience.  Maybe the Buddha had moved on, or maybe he didn't, but in a sense we don't need to worry so much about that.  If anger moves us to violence we have went way too far with embracing normal human nature, or if being upset takes us over, but to some extent reacting through emotions is fine.

Where is the right balance?  Hard to say.  It's potentially problematic to put ourselves on a scale of irrational / emotional up to Zen-line Buddha state, because we might just experience gap.  The idea is to improve over time, to personally benefit from a perspective shift, and to use that to help others.  Meditation is described as one tool for doing so, or the teachings are another, with mindfullness emphasized more than both in some traditions (conditioned momentary awareness).  So there is no magic bullet, along with there being no clear end state.

As with any subject someone claiming to be an expert is a bit of a red flag, although some others have varied experiences and perspectives.  I was ordained as a monk here in Thailand for two months once, and it's odd how that shifts things, someone being an authority based on wearing certain clothes, being in a formal role.  Lots of monks could be a lot more familiar with these basic ideas.  We learn from whoever or whatever is a good teacher, and someone in a formal teacher role might have the most potential, or they might not.

Really personal experience itself, our own momentary perspective, is the best grounds for learning.  In a limited sense it's the only basis for it; no one can pass on their perspective to you.  A teacher can lay out examples, or advise about practices, or explain teachings, even hit you with a stick if that somehow seems relevant, but everyone takes the steps for themselves, or else doesn't.  You either notice all this works and experience changes in perspective or you don't.


Unpleasant experiences can be quite useful, although again conventional suffering and our reaction to that suffering as a different kind of suffering are quite different.  Dissatisfaction with very uneventful experience could also be instructive, or maybe physical pain could be, or fear of the future.  Proper perspective of those would be critical, which typically wouldn't stem from just experiencing them, some guidance on how to take them would really make a difference.  Contemplation of death and impermanence as a means to learn is commonly referenced.  In a sense I'm really talking about un-learning, removing parts of ordinary experience that aren't useful, assumptions that relate to self and point of view.


And all that is kind of the simple version, as far as I might go without going on and on.  I like to discuss philosophy (and tea) so if I can help further with discussion I'd be happy to; just look me up.  Of course I'm no living example of these practices completely extended; I'm an ordinary person.  I feel all this works because following it to a limited extent seemed to help, and it has seemed accurate based on introspection.  It might be as well to close by noting this isn't really tied to any particular belief system, to reincarnation or making wishes, or separated from others, although lots of people would certainly take it that way.