About an unusual meditation experience

There is a story about something that happened to me once when meditating that I don't tell very often.  I never really knew what to make of it so there was never a lot of point in sharing it with others.  A friend just experienced a death in her family, a terrible tragedy, and it partly, relates, so I'm writing this down and passing it on related to that.  She would just think I'm crazy, but I suspect it won't be occurring to her for the first time anyway.

[Later edit]:  I thought better of publishing this, and am checking back in on the content 3 1/2 years later.  Why not mention it, since few people read this blog anyway?

It's about meditation, something that happened once during that, and I suppose it could be interpreted as being about lots of other things, about something vague and spiritual, or even about death.  I'll start with the event itself, what happened, and then never really will get far with interpretation.  It sort of goes without saying that this was "all in my head," given the subject matter.  That's the part I could be clearer on, what it means, how "real" one could say it is, but as for me I don't say.  I tried to place it more back when it happened, around 25 years ago now, but I let that drop after awhile.  I went on to study Buddhism more formally in two philosophy and religion degree programs, but instead of being about sorting this out all that was about communicating things I had found out.  That didn't really work.


To begin, I had a strange feeling once when meditating.  For anyone interested in dismissing most of the rest I can explain that was in my younger days, during a stint as a ski-bum, and it was kind of a given that people were exposed to different drugs back then, and I'm not saying that wasn't a factor.  It was a different time, the early 90s, but things haven't changed so much.  Except that where I was, Colorado, has since legalized the drug that was already most common then, marijuana.  It didn't seem like such a big deal back then but it was illegal; now personal use of it in that state is not.  I was using marijuana regularly then and had experimented with different psychedelic drugs.

It started with feeling an unusual anxiety.  Feeling a bit of anxiety related to using marijuana is completely normal; that's a main side-effect.  I had just taken a couple of weeks off of that habit, due to preparing for a drug test for a job I was applying for.  Drifting off into considering strange ideas also wouldn't be so uncommon.  For people that have no exposure to the drug it's perhaps not as intense or unusual as people may expect related to drug use.  Or maybe it really is; people growing marijuana have put lots of effort into increasing the potency and types of effects over the last 20 or 30 years, and it's hard to imagine where that has led now.  This was different though, not really an experience related to some crazy strain or "getting too high."  It's hard to summarize, but I'll give it a go.

I had been meditating for awhile, nothing too serious or interesting, so I relaxed to focus a bit.  It may be familiar to anyone doing yoga--which I did a little of, in part related to being flexible for the snowboarding I did then--that breathing adjustment is part of that.  It's nothing too far out there.  It just turns out that to relax your mind or focus your body developing even and deep breathing helps.  It's funny how it seems to actually work both ways; when you are relaxed your breathing naturally deepens, even seems to "come from" a different place, to change from chest breathing to more stomach / diaphragm based breathing instead.  All that gets to be a long subject so I'll leave it at that, that getting in the habit of adjusting breathing to be a bit slower and more from the stomach can help someone relax.

[Another later aside]:  I took up yoga again seven months ago now, in a completely different form than that earlier practice, which was on my own, without instruction, based on using a text for reference.  At that time I would do a series of a dozen or so standard poses, all relatively slowly, trying to relax into those positions.  This required changing breathing and letting muscles and bones settle into relatively unfamiliar positions, releasing a lot of held tension to accomplish that.  

The yoga practice I had been doing recently was with an instructor, and it was more a cross between that sort of practice and calisthenics.  There were themes to individual classes, like Intro, Essential, Stretching, Twisting, Core Strength, and onto advanced ranges more likely to draw on Indian yoga category names.  Sun Salutation variations came up a lot, guided to be practiced at a fast pace, so that physical conditioning also came into play, along with flexibility and balance.  The breathing that instructor recommended was fast and rough, more timed to correspond with motions than to slow and relax the body.  

I have no idea if the breathing part "worked;" I wasn't able to take the practice far enough to get a feel for that.  My flexibility never really developed, related to not stretching in between classes, which I often only attended for one hour per weekend.  Running was probably a negative factor.  I would stretch before runs, which I'd typically do twice a week, but it seemed like leg flexibility decreased along with the leg muscle conditioning.  Sitting at a desk for a work-week definitely didn't help, but then the yoga seemed to offset some of the impact of that.


[Back to the original writing]:  But why do breathing exercises or practices?  Relaxing is nice, but why go that next step, to link it to breathing.  I was using yoga as stretching, which it sort of is, but it's also different, and you need calm breathing to be able to do some positions.  Of course this relates to mental and physical state too, it's not just about some magical effect of breath, but it was all coupled naturally enough.

So just then, related to this meditation experience, I used regular breathing to calm myself--nothing interesting just yet.  In a way it worked but it felt as if the anxiety ran deeper, as if I could somehow continue to follow that experience.  I'd never really had any experience like that before, of being able to recognize and "follow" a feeling; I was only messing around with meditation a little.  Oddly it seemed that I could really stay with that feeling, sort of explore it more deeply, in a sense I can't explain at all.  Finally it seemed this experience of anxiety was really related to some deeper experience of fear.  But what would I be afraid of, really, related to drifting off inside my own mind?

I can't convey what it was like but I want to say that it was like travelling into the experience, even though that makes no sense.  I felt the normal experience of myself start to fade a bit as I did so.  Finally I had a choice, to go back, to stop, or to release my apprehension over really experiencing this fear, and go on to see and experience what it really was.  Oddly it seemed the reservation was over not existing in some sense, losing myself, since there seemed to be some core connection to ordinary perception that I was examining.  Somehow it only seemed possible since I could set or "lock" my breath, to stabilize it as a slow form of diaphragm breathing.

None of this made any sense, and it still doesn't now, which is why I never communicate about it.  I'm talking about vague feelings and interpretation of an odd experience.

It felt as if at a deep core of myself the connection to even experiencing, in general, related to this apprehension, an odd type of reservation or a desire, a fear of not being.  Saying that "I felt fear" really doesn't do the experience justice.  I wasn't afraid, in a conventional sense, like when you are in a bad neighborhood and you don't know what is going to happen next.  Some part of that carried over though, a vague uncertainty, and a relatively tangible experience of fear itself.  I let that go, just experienced it, and moved into the center of it instead of trying to avoid it.  In that process I experienced flashes of my life, in a strange sense, but not like memories, like I felt connections dissolving.  It was like I was gone, along with a normal form of experience.

There was another side.  Things were already strange but this is where it gets more so.  I'd stopped with the "I," so it was a different form of experience.  It wasn't really sequential, not related to other types of experiences, not really sensory.  The fear ceased, and "below" that was an unusual experience of selfless connection, an immersion, a dissolving.  I didn't really seem to experience myself, but an odd kind of positive, broader energy, somehow tied to a sensory experience of light, even though I wasn't "seeing" anything in an ordinary sense.  Without a normal flow of time for reference it was all not really clear.

And that was kind of it.  It seemed a bit like the experience of light, so closer to that in terms of sensory scope, but just different, odd.  Later I kind of came out of it, so it seemed I had really just fallen asleep, that it was an odd dream.  And so it could have been, or so in a sense it really was; what else could internal experience be?

After that

The really odd part was how it changed me; of course I could've just imagined that, or fell asleep and dreamt it.  I was a good bit different after.  That inner dialogue, inner voice we all naturally hear, went quiet.  That alone would have been odd, to experience myself in a fundamentally different way than I ever had, but that wasn't the end of it.  Things seemed different.  It was kind of odd to experience at first, but meat seemed way too common to me to eat it, to what I was made of myself.  I became a vegetarian, immediately, and didn't get back to eating meat for over a decade and a half (after some health problems; living in a country without many vegetarians--in Thailand--made it hard).  There was nothing particularly idealistic about that part; it just seemed like a natural thing to do, as if actually eating meat should've seemed unnatural all along.  I gave away what was in my refrigerator; the change was that fast.  

I'd never had any significant experience of any "sixth sense" or anything like that but unusual things seemed apparent, things about to happen, or happening nearby out of sight, details about people.  It would relate to a sense of expecting someone to walk in a door, to what was happening elsewhere, or in the immediate future.  I didn't know what to make of that so I didn't make anything of it.  It was just something odd that would happen.  In one instance I had a strange impression of someone around that time and asked him if he had either had an unusual form of meditation experience or had died before, and he was surprised that I asked, since he had been resuscitated in relation to severe trauma from a car accident.  I can't really describe what seemed different about him.  He lacked the noise and roughness other people exhibit.

You might wonder how this relates to death, since I mentioned that, and so far it seems not to connect, beyond that odd example.  I didn't really know how to interpret it, but the flashes of my self, not so much memories, but about connections, and the vague relation to light reminded me of those near-death stories.  I don't think that I died, of course; in fact I know that I didn't.  The part that seemed vague at the end, that I didn't say much about, seemed to relate to dissolution into the experience of a greater underlying whole.

I did wonder if any of this related to how people are on a different level.  That fear felt really fundamental, and of course the other experience had some odd universal connection feel to it.  I don't know.  I got the sense that the fear was connecting to something very basic and common, a fear of death, the kind of underlying experience we never really examine or couldn't really embrace, generally.  My interpretation was that one main connection point we have to life experience is fear that it will end, that this ties us into a lot of how we see ourselves, setting up an underlying tension that we don't really consciously notice.  

The rest, it seemed like somehow that related to what we really are.  It didn't feel like I "came back" with answers, of course.  I did get a sense we have nothing to worry about, in the broadest sense, that it's all connected, and ok on a level we never could experience, at least not as the selves we are.  It seemed like the separation of individual self from everything else that we experience is mostly just misinterpretation, if that makes any sense.  It seemed like a "self" is really just a collection of attachments, ideas, feelings, and expectations, but we aren't that at all.

Years went by and I never placed that experience.  The effects of it that I just mentioned faded to some degree over time, some parts relatively quickly, some never really going back to a former form.  I felt like I always was a much quieter person mentally than I'd ever been before, that my inner dialogue never really did resume in the same type of form.  It did come back though.  The odd effect of sensing things about to happen or insights about people faded quickly enough, maybe over a few weeks.  Not a lot changed otherwise.  It seemed I retained just a little capacity to stop being myself if I tried to.  But why would I do that?  It doesn't really shed light on the rest of this but a couple of reasons come to mind, purposes, and describing that works as a tangent.

It's sort of just a trick that someone can do, but it's easy to experience if someone else is lying if you experience how they experience themselves, if you change to be them instead.  There's nothing to it; you just stop being yourself temporarily, and naturally absorb more of them.  I've heard of a similar practice, or perhaps an identical one, described as exchanging self for another.  It doesn't take any special ESP access to know what someone near you is experiencing, on some level, because they exhibit it in so many ways.  Even without talking, but people are very expressive when they convert their thoughts into communication, even when they are guarded and filtered.  Maybe especially then, in a limited sense, because you can sense a different kind of tension in them when there is a divide between what they say and what they think.  Sometimes people who experience no core, inner other self can be scary.  Being mentally quiet, consistent, and genuine is one thing, existing as a less ego-based self, but some people are pure randomness, just disjointed, to themselves there is no center.  That alone doesn't make them bad people, but that form is really strange.  It can work out badly.


This part is a bit of a different tangent, but aside from that, for sports purposes, an odd type of experience of selflessness can be useful.  It turns out you can only perform a difficult physical task up to a certain level if you are thinking about what you are doing, because that overlays a "you" onto the experience, it creates a bit of a feedback loop, "you" do it, then you also analyze and experience it.  It's more direct to just do it (like the Nike ad, right?).  

This takes a different form, and makes sense in a different way, when the margin is so small for what you are doing to even be possible, when being completely in that moment is absolutely necessary, or else it won't happen.  Snowboarding was a good example.  I would "board" bumps / moguls (actual terrain features caused by people making turns, like a small mound maybe two yards / meters across), and do so fast enough that I'd go through / past / around more than one in a second, or several.  You can't think and react that fast.  I would use tricks to drop conscious perception of the actions back when I snowboarded, like singing in my head, but eventually you can just go there mentally, and drop out layers of mental participation.

Maybe rock climbing is a better example.  Your mind can be a bit scattered and you can still snowboard in unusual ways, but there's something compelling about hanging on a rock face by fingertips and the edge of an oddly designed shoe.  You can stay at that edge, at the limit of what you can do, but overthinking it any at all won't work.


Anyway, fast forward a couple of decades and I wonder what all that was about myself.  I can't imagine this would be reassuring to anyone else but somehow I'm sure that we've nothing to worry about, related to death, and to life too.  I'm somehow certain that we connect and it all "makes sense" on a level we'll never be able to experience.  It's nothing at all about making sense, about reasoning, or about us, in any remotely conventional sense.  I had the impression that an experienced self is more about mental habits, assumptions, and preferences than any underlying part of what we really are, that a conventional form of self-experience is just really about the noise part.

Later thoughts and tangents:

There are lots of directions I might take further thoughts in.  It seems there should be a better way to place that experience, and the changes in perspective that resulted from it.  There are differing conventional descriptions of odd forms of experience, but it would be problematic to match it to one.  

Certainly 25 years later I've changed perspective related to what it meant, and how I view my ordinary life.  I've finally got back to meditation again, a practice I only revisited once in between during a two-month stint as a Buddhist monk.  During the pandemic I was able to meditate regularly for a month or two, related to gaining some time and energy due to my daily commute dropping out.  I've even been considering a connection between running focus and meditation, since for both you are at opposite extremes of the experience spectrum, dropping out all physical and most mental activity, or else engaging your body in repetitive, familiar physical activity.  Not much of all of it completely links together, or really informs what that experience was about, or what it may have meant.

To me it seems like I'm a normal person; maybe that doesn't come across in this.  If anything I seem much more normal than the average person.

I can't pass on much for advice or summary related to any of this, but I do want to make one last point.  In reading up on different forms of meditation experience the idea came up of people having unusual experiences tied to drugs (as I did), and being "reborn under the sway."  Anyone going through something like this should seriously consider parting with any negative habits right at that point, any attachments that seem questionable or problematic at all.  

It's too long a story to relate to how that played out in my case, but cutting that cycle short right then would've been better.  Instead I did a longer version, and dropping out some normal attachments and retaining one primary and somewhat negative one didn't go well.  I'm not saying that marijuana is bad, but if you experience a reset of some sort letting such a habit go then would probably be for the best.  I guess the same could be true for a move; eventually I parted ways with that habit related to making other conventional changes, including that one.

The meaning of suffering in Buddhism

The four noble truths are seen as the main teaching of the Buddha, the core ideas that all other ideas relate back to, just presented in different ways.

Those truths are (roughly):

1.  that suffering or some type of dissatisfaction is an aspect of normal life (dukkha in Pali, but I won't refer to "original" concepts here throughout this),

2.  that there is a cause for it (attachment),

3.  and a resolution for it (enlightenment, although the teachings get odd on this point),

4.  and that there is a way to reach that (the 8-fold path).

image credit:  ieet.org

Lots of online references or even Wikipedia would fill in more details about all that, with the rest here just about my take on what is meant by suffering.

The concept wasn't clearly originally meant as suffering, or at least not in the same group of senses the English language expression is used.  We wouldn't really know what the original meaning is for sure for a few reasons.

Why the original meaning of "suffering" is not available:

-most notably, because use of language changed over time.

We get the most direct source references in Pali, transferred from an earlier chanted tradition, probably translated before that from a local dialect language (but again, do lots of research to get the full story of speculation about the Buddha's native language if you like).  English expressions and concepts change a lot over the course of a century, and language in general is like that, so even the Pali step alone isn't necessarily consistent, and "suffering" always was just a ballpark guess at a summary.

-context change:  specific ideas are presented within the framework of a culture-based perspective, so if a modern American says something and a modern Thai person says a nearly identical thing the different contexts still can shift the meaning a bit.  Since the Buddha was talking about ideas that may or may not have been from a mainstream religious, psychological, or "philosophical" perspective (and what philosophy means is really inconsistent over much shorter time frames) we can't have any idea about that context, or how it changed.  What we call Hinduism today, earlier versions of a diverse set of ideas, were part of that, but even today it would be hard to summarize, and completely impossible to trace back to one time and place 2500 years ago.

-interpretation change:  Buddhism interpreted today, and 50 years ago, and 100 years ago are all relatively different things, and you couldn't simplify it down to one interpretation per a time anyway.  It would be interpreted as religion by one, psychology by another, as differing forms of philosophy by others, mixed with other ideas, rituals, practices, or cultural aspects by some, and so on.


All that said what follows will be my take, not any other objective reconstruction.  I won't bother to defend it against other main interpretations to save time and avoid endless regression of possible ideas.  To me it's as well not to pin this down to one specific concept because to me part of Buddhism is figuring out what the concepts and guidance and review process means related to your own life and perspective (worldview), but all the same for the sake of discussion I will.

My take on "suffering":

I think this really works best as a family of concepts, to be sorted out by the individual related to their own experience.  To keep it unified and general "dissatisfaction" might work but as I see it for different people lots of different specifics might apply:  stress, unfulfilled desire, unhappiness, even shades of other less general and specific emotions and statuses like anger, hatred, jealousy, etc.  To some extent these could be broken down as the causes of some feeling of discontent (the way the concept is framed in that original structure) and then the way it is exhibited in a particular circumstance (those emotions or perspectives).

image credit www.perasonaltao.com

In some interpretations people have tried to turn it around and see how a goal of happiness works instead.  That's backwards from the original structure, right, but it still might work, or at least could be informative.  All the same in this particular teaching the Buddha was saying you can remove a perspective element that causes unhappiness (or whatever interpretation), and what you are left with is happiness.  But why put it that way, backwards?

One reason proposed by some is that the structure is set to match what a doctor does with an illness or disease:  identify the condition, identify the cause, propose a cure, then implement it.  Also it may be informative to turn around the pursuit of happiness in the first place, since in a way it's obvious that seeking it directly couldn't work.  It's more typical for us in modern times and Western culture to associate states, activities, and ownership with happiness so we might seek out all sorts of conditions related to being happy:  to eat good food, to own something, to have a good career, or financial stability, to do any activity one likes, or be in a certain relationship, and so on.  Or maybe to seek out a balance of just some of those.  In rare cases we would turn it around and look for removing obstructions (illness, job dissatisfaction, using different self-help approaches, etc.), but usually  it's the other way around.

How is the Buddha's message different than a conventional approach

So the general direction is different, not looking for happiness and related conditions, but what else is different about all this?  Actually it seems closest to either psychology or self-help, when looked at from this perspective.  In those endeavors one is looking for either a cure or at least a different approach.  Usually in other cases it's not like that; the current worldview, perspective, desires, etc. are all accepted as the starting point, essentially implicitly but there all the same.

Also the Buddha is saying this can be conducted by an individual, to some extent, leaving aside the need for external guidance, additional explanations of teachings, meditative practice guidance, etc.  It starts from ordinary perspective.  Unhappiness, or something like it, is a condition the individual is causing through their own assumptions, related to specific desires and specific views of self (which starts into other teachings a bit).

Immediately I'm reminded of posts you see on the internet that seem to echo this, but in a sense which are such different and light versions they somehow seem completely different.  People find lots of ways to say that they can be happy if they can just find contentment within themselves, and not worry about what other people say, or not embrace fear, and can control their own expectations, and so on.  So what is different here?  These teachings seem a bit more specific:  the concepts aren't completely simple and clear to us, but it doesn't seem to boil down to a half-dozen such feel-good slogans.  Also the eightfold path goes on to suggest a lot of hard work, not just a simple perspective shift, lightening up.

As my grandmother used to say, other people's complaints or problems are like water off a duck's back to her, it doesn't matter.  But that seems to only capture some of what's going on here.  The Buddha goes on to suggest re-evaluating an implicit concept of self, a personal code of morality, to take up meditative practice, and to read further in other teachings.  That's not just lightening up.

Enlightenment:  really?

picture credit:  www.highexistence.com

What about this difference; a completely different end point than a person that is just relaxed and not self-absorbed, or doesn't desire a lot of things they probably won't have, like owning a lot of things, or supermodels.  It's as hard as any other step in Buddhism to say what Enlightenment means, although of course a lot of different people drawing on a lot of teachings will do just that.  

For many it's something that will happen in a much later life, only after many lives as a monk or something such.  A little seems to get lost here because the goal sort of drops out, and the general direction with it.  Others find elements more grounded in this one life experience, but some of these in stages that relate to meditative attainment, levels of Zen meditation training and such.  If that's the actual right answer--and there may not really be one--then it only applies to people into such things.  An interesting take in Thai culture is that it is a distant goal (not in this life) but accumulating religious merit is a factor, so the religious ceremonies and good deeds and in particular alms given to monks are all practical contributions, steps towards it.

What about a more practical interpretation, what if we try to bring it back to a simple, everyday concept?  That may be out of place, arguably.  But if we try to do that it could simplify to the degree to which we can eliminate certain types of unhappiness, based on certain types of perspective problems.  In particular it might relate to desires, expectations, views of self, and relation to time, to confining experience more to immediate awareness and not getting caught in stress related to the past and present (again all dipping into other teachings).  Someone wouldn't need to be completely enlightened for that kind of interpretation to work, not a "Master" you do an apprenticeship under, not really even the Buddha.  You wouldn't really need milestones for this to work either, not to be half-enlightened, or at certain other types of markers.

Real self-awareness would relate to each person having some idea of the extent to which it was working, if not a clear understanding of further steps and specific goals.  There probably wouldn't really be a stopping point, although one might expect a leveling off of the work on such a thing, and the gains.  It would seem likely it would be ongoing, forever, a work in progress, sort of how life itself works.

Steps to Buddhist practice

This I really can't answer, of course.  There was the eightfold path, in the teaching version (summary image earlier in this entry).  It wasn't so clear someone could do all of that, although it seems to some degree following up on all parts would be required, and to some degree an individual practice may well emphasize just one part.  Without some additional reading up and information it's hard to imagine the other parts would work (for example, "practicing" only through moral practice or meditation without knowing any more background, the wisdom step).  Those are three of the eight parts of the path, by the way, so it's nothing too exotic.  I should probably drop this for now and rejoin it for more on other practices and approaches.

Do you need to learn Buddhism from a Master?

An online friend and I just discussed an interesting point in Buddhism, do you need to learn it from a Master, or are much more limited forms of exposure also valid?

I would expect even from my initial post my perspective would be clear, or maybe it wouldn't be.  To me Buddhism starts from the teachings of the Buddha in any form; reading the versions of his own words as passed down, from personal guidance from a meditation master, from reading a popular book on the subject, or from exposure to a blog or online discussion.

Of course there are qualifications about that; some forms of Buddhism seem more valid and useful than others, and some seem essentially wrong to me.  Lighter expressions of "go with the flow" do communicate some of the essence of Buddhism but generally don't get to what I see as the original ideas and practice.  For me different versions are potentially more applicable for different people, so for some a lot of reading of theory may be a great place to start, and for others meditation practices, or others yet highly interpreted versions of core teachings translated to a modern context and practices.  This idea of many paths to a similar goal is not limited to Buddhism; it's part of the earlier diverse Indian tradition we refer to as Hinduism, which includes pantheism, mythology, references to social role practices, and lots of other ideas.

As I see it the degree to which these ideas or practices improve ordinary every-day, momentary experience, simplify it and remove problems a person conventionally causes through errors in perspective, to that extent it is matching the original aims of Buddhism.

So what about enlightenment, the final goal to be clear of all "attachments" and improper views of self?  There must be something to that, but I don't see it as a practical goal, or seeking out an enlightened Master as a practical or necessary starting point.  We still have versions of the Buddha's own words available, likely modified over time, and to me we can benefit from others' interpretations regardless of whether they have attained states of consciousness we couldn't possibly relate to or not.

Learning Buddhism from a novice?

But the discussion I mentioned itself is also informative, from that friend, so I'll cite it here, in it's entirety to preserve not just the individual points but the whole context.

In response to an initial discussion of Buddhist theory she wrote:

This is really funny.

Let me ask you something. Can you become a really good chef by studying food science?

Your approach to Buddhism is the same as tea!

You can't become a carpenter by analyzing the book of carpentry, you can't understand tea by reading about what others have said alone.

If you stick to standing outside, you will never get the feel of what's inside.

It's like someone had gone rock climbing and analysed the route for you. And by listening you think you understood the very route, but another climber tells you another route, and you thought..wait, I thought at the rock you had to use your grip instead of stretching your leg far to reach the next holding!?

It's like a carpenter practicing all his life to get his skills just right and wrote a book about it, and although after you read it you understand exactly what tools to use for which type of wood, you understood every single word in this book, but you are still not a carpenter.

There are 20 something different words for "snow or ice" for the Eskimos, but without going to the north pole you wouldn't be able to recognize the meaning of such words.

Don't you get it? If your feelings and sensations doesn't match, you'll never believe or truly understand what people are trying to say.

Experience is different to knowledge, and language can not explain experience or skill.

The limitation of language is this, for something abstract or experiencial, it can not be exact. For e.g, in meditation there are many different states,

In the beginning if I say you'd experience numbness, or pain, do you think these two words means exactly the same physical sensation to different people?

And if I had experienced this does it mean everyone else would experience the same sensation? No!

So how can you talk about Buddhism when a lot of his teaching was for really high level yogi who could do a lot of things such as controlling their breath till the extend they don't need to breath much at all!??????????? So let's see you read a text and become a yoga practitioner?

One can't even understand the terminologies of yoga unless one tries to practice it!!!!

If you've never had an ice-cream, and I try to describe it to you, do you think you'll know exactly how it taste like?

I mean well but this is already stretching what I can do with language. To be honest I am giving up.

To which I responded:

You assume I'm not a high level yogi. Do you know that? I've practiced a good bit of meditation, some guided by monks that have practiced all their lives. I've practiced some yoga, and have been an ordained monk. I have experienced some unusual effects of unusual meditative states.

But I'm not an advanced yogi, and we see the teachings and scope of Buddhism differently. The Buddha taught different paths are valid, and therefore taught in different ways, ideas that could sound contradictory or could relate to different valid approaches. All would need to tie back to personal experience, to essentially be about that, but different focus on meditation would be a part of it.

I've also drank a good bit of tea, and taught myself to cook, and done a lot of rock climbing, and built a house once. For all these things one benefits from experienced assistance but you don't need to learn from a master chef and so on. It could speed up the process and help you get further but for each if you declined to start until you had the ideal support you'd never get past frying an egg, or being able to only scramble on rocks instead of climbing 5.8 and then 5.9, and so on.

We do disagree on how valid Buddhism is for people that aren't essentially enlightened. Do you think the dalai lama is enlightened, or Thich Naht Hanh, or was Buddhadasa Bhikku? If not is what they say still valid and useful? I've attended a number of talks by senior monks here and they imply the opposite, that beginning and intermediate practice is really as much the point, and that they are speaking as fellow practitioners, not Buddhas.

Maybe your approach to tea is the same; you would only value hearing from a Master, and devalue your own experience of drinking a cup of tea, and not care to hear from others that haven't served half a lifetime as an apprentice. I suppose there could be something to that, but to me it ignores the fundamental experience, drinking tea, to focus on a higher goal, transcendent knowledge and practice of tea.

To talk more about Buddhism we would both have to assume there is some value and validity in talking about Buddhism. So even though life experience and practice is the final goal there really is no point in discussing approach, the path. It ends up quite like that for most people, for different reasons, more often due to a lack of interest.
In reading back through what you wrote I missed one interesting analogy, about Eskimos and ice.  You said I'd need to go to the North Pole to experience this ice, right?  But Eskimos don't live there; further South instead.  The error is telling; I could go to Alaska and learn the same thing, but if I thought I needed to go to the North Pole I'd never make it.

Perhaps I never mentioned I was a snowboarder and mountaineer as well.  I'm intimately familiar with different kinds of snow conditions, just in a different context.  I know how they feel to snowboard or ski on, and to snowshoe through.  I know how to dig an avalanche pit (a way to assess snow conditions), and although I'm not trained enough to really assess the findings, and shouldn't be in high risk areas to begin with, I know enough to identify what those areas are, and the layers of different type of snow mean something to me.

To me so it is with Buddhism.  You learn by starting to learn, from whatever sources you have.  Just as you'd never become an avalanche expert without expert training you'd never get to certain types of understanding, practice, and experience without guidance from the right teachers of Buddhsim, but one should be careful about how they take that limitation.  Understanding of snow begins with a walk in the snow; you can start in on Buddhism by reading a book, or from a book or discussion in an online group, even when the sources are relatively uninformed.

But we have the words of the Buddha as well, right, if likely altered quite a bit by centuries of change and language transfer.  Why wouldn't someone read that?  It's not possible to read a good translation of the entire Buddhist cannon, and that only represents one school of thought in Buddhism anyway, but why not read what there is of it translated and widely available.  Basic concepts like "self" and "suffering" will surely not match the original form but the books are there in a local library, so there is no need to go to a remote temple or mountain cave to find a yogi to begin.


There are talks by monks and open meditation centers here so there are easy intermediate sources, but as I see it one should be open to learning from different people that aren't those experts, practicioners, references, and so on.  Of course Buddhism is only about immediate life experience, ordinary perception, so at some point that is the main reference point, not exotic interpretations or visions in a trance like state.

Conclusion

Hard to say to what extent either of us are really right.  There is something to what she is saying; you learn certain things from experts, and to some extent the advanced teachings of the Buddha are an example of that.  But she is also rejecting any value in learning from anyone but an expert, or the validity of something like reading a popular book on Buddhism, or even the words of the Buddha (to the extent we have access to them).  

If someone completely agrees with her they never should have read past the first entry of this blog, or maybe even read that, so in a sense I need not be concerned about such an audience.  The limitations she describes are a separate issue.  It wouldn't be possible for me to assess the degree to which I've been exposed to and practiced "real Buddhism."



Based on what she is saying only certification by a Buddhist Master would determine that, and again there is probably something to that.  Based only on my own experience as a monk the irony here is that very few monks would have any indication of their own status of attainment, based on this qualification.  Of course such a process is referenced in certain traditions and teaching structures, and seemingly she would accept that and only that as valid.  Next we should discuss her own exposure, right, to see what such a process is like.  I've known people that have been through some of that but based on the forms I've experienced it myself I couldn't really judge.