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

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.

Buddhism in comparison with Judaism and Christianity

I was just talking with a friend about the differences and similarities between Judaism and Buddhism.  It makes for an interesting starting point in explaining what Buddhism is.  It's too broad, but narrowing back to the points one might cover in such a discussion works.  We spent about half an hour talking about that theme, related to him leaving town (Bangkok) soon after; that's about right for how long such a thing would take.

No matter what writing or other channel one uses setting up an audience perspective, who you are talking to, is very important.  Before you do much writing it seems like talking to everyone, adopting a general listener perspective, would be completely workable.  In actual practice that doesn't work very well.  We are accustomed to communicating things to people in different ways, and "talking out into the world" only works for some subjects.  You have to assume what people already know, for example, or match use of language to what people can relate to.  Doing that "in general" is problematic, especially related to narrowing down a very broad set of ideas to what one might be able to say in 10 minutes or so.  We had a great discussion, and already had a feel for what each other might already understand, so all that worked out.

I'll start with a bit he told me about Judaism, but cut that part short, because it's interesting and somewhat related but not the main part of what I'm trying to share here.  Then I'll cover passing on a short take on what the Christian perspective is.  Odd, right; everyone knows that, don't they?  Maybe not.  I live in a Buddhist country, for example, in Thailand, and for people here it's a foreign religion.

Judaism

It's far from intended as a summary of what Judaism is all about but that friend made some interesting points, which I'll share an abbreviated version of.  The obvious qualifications apply:  I won't get what he meant completely right in my own summary, and he was only breaking off a part of the broad set of ideas that comprise Judaism to share them, based within a fairly limited scope conversation.  I'm not saying this is inaccurate, but a lot more is being left out than included.  Framing these ideas properly within the rest of what hasn't been expressed wouldn't be possible using only assumptions and extrapolation.  It's still interesting though.  I cut the material detail back even further to avoid making mistakes in interpretation, since I'm sure I didn't completely "get" what he was saying, only hearing part of a broad set of related ideas.

A main theme was that it's within basic human nature to desire things, and it's seen as ok within Judaism.  This was framed as a response to his take that Buddhism is really about cutting off all desires, simply eliminating wanting anything to achieve a very unusual form of inner peace.  That's not right, really, but I'll get to that part.  It's partly right.

Of course Judaism sets up plenty of limitations about what you shouldn't want, or shouldn't do, or experience (eating pork, murder, and so on).  We didn't get into all that.  The idea was that an interesting and novel form is set up for framing desires, and for satisfying them.  It's fine to want things, if they aren't prohibited, and fine to experience the things you want to experience, but you have to be thankful and receptive in very specific ways.  It's a form of communion with God and the rest of reality to be given things (with "given" here used in the broad sense, including earning them, in a conventional sense, or granted potential to experiences by chance).  Acceptance of positive things is responded to with a form of prayer, a step that occurs before you have the experience.  Like saying the blessing, right?  Just extended a lot further, across a lot of the scope of human experience.  It almost sounded more like a mindfulness related take on life, to keep track of all positive things as they happen to you, to emphasize self awareness and conscious experience of momentary reality.

To me this is interesting because it frames human experience in a different way.  Prohibitions and ethical guidelines, what you should do, are different kinds of things, and this enters into a different kind of experiential space.  It makes a lot of life experience a holy sort of undertaking.  Not just eating, as I took it many kinds of experiences, or as I took it all positive kinds.  Adjusting the form and perspective of routine activities, or special events and circumstances, frames much more of life experience within the scope of religious practice than occurs within Christianity.  Everything one experiences throughout their lives relates to God's setting things up, in Christianity, but the moment to moment experience isn't framed within religious practices, as it's commonly taken.  Christian teachings are much more active related to telling you what not to do and what general perspective to take up, then moment to moment you take it from there yourself, the form is a bit open.

This has been barely a shell of what I understood him to be saying, but I'll move onto the difference between that and Christianity, as I interpret it, and try to clarify this a little further through contrast.

Christianity

He asked me about the  Christian worldview, how it works out, moral guidelines and restrictions, adjustment of ordinary perspective.  People in the US just assume that everyone knows that, right?  There they kind of do.  Even someone raised to reject it would have some idea what they are rejecting, even if everyone isn't really on the same page about how it all maps out.

I just saw a fragment of an interview with Richard Dawkins, this one, which I may or may not get around to finishing, and it's strange to me how modern atheists seem to take on and reject relatively unsophisticated takes on Christianity.  The most literal forms are a bit absurd:  God looks like Zeus, he lives in the sky, Jesus is his son, you are following rules in order to gain admission to heaven, angels are related in some way, the Devil is out to get you, you can sin all you want, you just have to ask for the slate to be wiped clean and it's all good again.  Dropping out the most absurd half still leaves lots of relatively absurd parts.

To back up, I studied religion in a university program, or in two of them, really.  The second focused only on interpreting limited religious scope as philosophy but the first included actual religion classes, not philosophy-context versions.  To put details to that I studied religion and philosophy, focusing on Buddhism, in an undergrad program at the University of Colorado, and comparative philosophy for an MA at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  And I'm an industrial engineer, which I studied at Penn State, but that doesn't relate.  I've considered different forms of religion a good bit.  Study of Islam came up more than Judaism, but I covered quite a bit on Christianity and focused most on Buddhism.

This gets odd because what I accept as the most sophisticated form of Christianity and that answer to how it defines a standard American's worldview are two completely different things.  Funny how that goes.  The same comes up in Buddhism; the core message and practices I don't see as overlapping much at all with a conventional take or worldview here in Thailand.  Even among monks, to some extent, but I probably won't fill that part in much here.  I was ordained as a monk here once, for two months, with an earlier post here on how that went.  Let's break all that apart then.  I'll start with how I see Christianity as two different things, how people tend to take it, what I see as a more mature and developed form. 

I can't do justice here to the range of how religions are interpreted; that's too long a subject for a 1500 word blog post only about that.  We reviewed a relatively old work on that theme, from 1979, that mapped out some interesting ideas on that, James Fowler's Stages of Faith, described in summary form in this related reference.

In a basic form Christianity is interpreted as a set of rules, an afterlife scheme, and an explanation for things people couldn't otherwise know (who started the world, what the earlier form of it was, what happens after death, is there a soul or spiritual form of people).  Those parts should be familiar to most.  You can pick and choose which parts to take up or leave aside, of course. 

In answering my friend's question this was more or less what I focused on, about how Christianity tends to define an American worldview.  Rules stand out; you should or shouldn't do a lot of things.  Stay within those bounds and in general the more prescriptive parts, about what you should do, or general approach, can be a bit flexible.  It doesn't necessarily relate to momentary perspective all that much.  Ideally of course I think it should; I'll get into more of that related to what a more sophisticated take might be.

Jesus taught about being more compassionate, about seeing yourself as connected to others, as here to help others as much as to help yourself (or more, one might reasonably interpret).  All this works well from a practical standpoint, and not just as a set of rules to follow, when you consider that your connection with your family, friends, co-workers, employment context, country, social groups, and so on really do define you. 

The more you consider all of those ties and demands as important the better a person you turn out to be.  Your own longer term good follows.

Beyond just being external rules to follow, or break, all the different ethical short-cuts also limit your support of and connection to those around you (lying, stealing, treating people unfairly, failing to be empathetic and supportive to others, etc.).  Benefiting others benefits you.  To the extent you are reliable, consistent, supportive, and so on you are a good friend, family member, employee, and social group member and all those connections will be stronger.  Only following a list of 10 or more restrictions doesn't help to highlight that.  Of course that's not exactly where the Old Testament left off, but that is a main difference in the two sets of ideas.

The most mature perspectives on religion develop this, and set aside the mythology.  Jesus was a person but it's not necessary to believe that he performed miracles, or was a divine being in some way, or that he talked to the Devil like my friend and I conversed. 

The mythology is what people like Richard Dawkins tend to attack.  They want to accept that you can just assume the ethics and social connections are important, and take them up and leave aside all the rest.  What they don't realize is that this also works as a mature interpretation of Christianity, that it is really the point, or also the point of any other religion. 

I've taken ethics classes, about the study of morality, and another part they miss is that it's not so easy to derive what Jesus taught as what we should do, as a positive approach to ethics and reality in general.  I'm not getting into all that here, just suffice it to say that it really doesn't work to use a standard approach to get to the same general context (eg. accept Kantian ethics derivation, or Utilitarian / Consequentialist versions instead).  Those approaches take the short-cut of heading for an end point they already accept, basic Christian and Buddhist morality, more or less.  They gloss over that what seems to be a complete and independent derivation really isn't that at all.  You already know what "doing the right thing" is because it's in the air; all that has been an underlying theme in every organized society since prior to known history.  If it wasn't people couldn't collect into an organized society; there would be chaos instead.  That does come up in places from time to time but there's a function in order; it tends to spread.

In the end I told that friend that Christianity asks us to put others above ourselves, to focus on the interests and needs of other people.  To me that is completely consistent with everything else I've said here, even though if what I mean by that isn't clear then it wouldn't seem so.  In the end that's really a pursuit of our own highest good, our own self-interest, because we really are linked in with other people in countless ways.

Jordan Peterson gets all this; the people who reject what he says about religion don't get him.  An example:  he admits that there is an appeal for successful men to have many physical or relationship partners, since they can.  An example like Tiger Woods might come up.  It's obvious enough why that doesn't work out in his own case; that typically prevents a successful monogamous relationship from succeeding.  Someone like Donald Trump might seem to be able to cheat the system, to have a wife and experiences outside that relationship.  But then he has two ex-wives now, and others end up identifying people for who they really are related to their values, as in his case.  It's atypical for an incriminating voice tape to turn up but that would come up in different ways.  It's not an isolated example; practicing generosity or empathy pays similar returns, and so on.

Buddhism

One mistaken take on Buddhism is that it suggests that people should cut off all desire, get rid of attachments of all forms, which will result in achieving an unconventional neutral perspective, and "inner peace."  Taken the right way all that sort of works but it's just as wrong as it is right, and it's much more incomplete than it is descriptive.  I'll pass on how I explained it.

Buddhism is about limiting attachments, about examining parts of a worldview and personal perspective and discarding what doesn't work.  What makes the cut-off or fails to is problematic to describe in broad terms.  The introspection / review process is a methodology, not a form of external mapping of that sort.  There is a good bit of ethical guidance in the core teachings, but that's only one part of a set of 8 main types of teachings.  I have a graphic about that handy:

Ok, maybe it touches on a couple branches.  That's only one broad, general model of what Buddhism is, so relying on that as a complete description only goes so far.  And it only breaks teachings and subject scope into 8 parts, which is of limited helpfulness, since detailed review follows or else it's meaningless. 

A more detailed idea mapping makes things worse than they might really be, since there are a lot of different starting points and relatively equivalent explanations for different parts:

In the end for me Buddhism is really a system of introspection and adjustment of self-definition and worldview, a set of ideas I'll get back to developing just a little more.

Thais don't necessarily take it that way, even though 90% of them are Buddhist.  They take it as explanations for supernatural reality, as ethical guidance, and so on, all a close parallel to how Christianity is most commonly interpreted in the US.  Go figure.  People get it that meditation is a part of it but even their take on meditation and mindfulness practices (two related but different things) tend to not be mature, in my experience. 

They think meditation helps you accumulate spiritual good credit, karma or merit.  Sort of, maybe, but there is also an introspective aspect, which is probably more of the main point.  It's not an ordinary form of introspection, and I can't really do justice to describing how it's different in a short space.  Mindfulness is about staying calm and consistent, being able to apply rules in different circumstances, but it's also a practical tool for clearly observing a layer of reality that usually goes completely unnoticed.  It helps you unpack what is typically only included as subconscious experience.  That should ring a bell, for students of psychology.  Being present in the moment isn't nearly as simple as it seems, and the inputs in how we interpret reality and what we react to aren't simple at all.

One might wonder what parts of self, normal experience, or reaction should be "cut out of" normal perspective and life practices, or at least what I'm claiming.  If Buddhism doesn't reject desire and does reject some view of self what is being retained, and what is left aside?  It's not so simple, but engaging such ideas is critical.  You drop what doesn't work, and keep what does.  There's not really as much clear, external, well-defined guidance for that as one might think.  In a developed conventional religion it might seem that there definitely would be, but to me that's not really what Buddhism is.  The starting point is your own perspective, life experience, and momentary experience of reality--only that.  As you delve into what you think you are, and what you really are, you untangle the knots of all sorts of assumptions.

An example:  it would be easy to define yourself based on what you own, in a consumer oriented society.  It's relatively low-hanging fruit, but examining the role of that within your own worldview could turn up that you've accepted the assumed importance of this as an external assumption, and you could later also drop it. 

An example:  that friend I started out mentioning talking to was moving without owning much; this is a very practical approach to experienced reality.  For some it would be natural to own a lot of clothing, furniture, electronics, collections of goods, and so on, but keeping all that limited simplifies your life.  The desire to always own more only complicates it.  This kind of realization would only work so well in the form of external guidance: "don't own a lot of things."  If someone could unpack what they think about a lot instead, what causes them stress, what goals they serve that can be cut back or simply eliminated, then giving themselves this advice works much, much better.

I'm into tea, and write more about that subject than Buddhism (here), and it comes up a lot related to people collecting teaware (or even tea itself).  Part of that is functional, but it also seems to become just a normal way of relating to things, that you mark out how much you enjoy a subject by how much you own related to it.  It can be a habit to collect things.  It's not exactly a vice but examining why it happens could be informative, and dropping it could free up space for working on something else.  You can only make tea in one device at a time; owning dozens of devices isn't necessarily functional, it's closer to collecting artworks.

Of course that's just an example.  In different individual cases different coarse findings would turn up earlier on, then more and more subtle levels of understanding and adjustment could occur.  The past and future are particularly fruitful areas to consider.  Regrets, worry, and even anticipation can cause people a lot of stress.  It's easier to say "just live in the moment" than it is to let the past and future go, and only deal with what is actually occurring in the present.  The tools of meditation and mindfulness help with this; they turn up what is simmering beneath the surface in your mind, and what is weighing down present moment perspective, in two different but related sets of ways.


I could keep going in lots of directions from there but that covers the main point, fleshing out what a friend and I talked about over the course of a half an hour or so.  Buddhism isn't about rejecting any normal view of reality, just uncovering what goes into one and improving it, little by little.  It's a negative process in the sense that things are removed or dropped, instead of added.  The end point is kind of a funny thing; eventually one gets to a purer form of more direct experience.  I'm not so sure about "enlightenment" or that process ever being completely finished; I guess that has to be a real thing.  It's generally as well to not worry too much about that.

So a Buddhist could definitely have a family, or own things, take up hobbies, exercise, and so on.  They would generally try to be positive and helpful to others, and take a leaner approach to material things, to not focus on them.  Really it's more about perspective than it is material ownership or following rules though.  It would be better to have more stuff and keep the perspective lighter, or really to do both, to focus more on positive forms of experience and less on piling up things and accumulating status.

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.