Questions and Comments about 'Catalytic Dharma'

Kenneth asked me to write up some thoughts I shared with him during a conversation about the challenges of being open about arahatship. The result is in the guest writings section. Any thoughts?
Naomi

I don't know. I don't know if I am doing the right thing. I keep regretting having said something. Someone tells me I am having a psychotic episode...ok...but then i see someone else gets motivated by it.

The stink of enlightenment really can get stinky. But from this standpoint, I am nothing special. There ain't much here to be special anyway. I just see more clearly and am perhaps more intimate with my own sheet than others. But for millennia, the arhat has been placed on a pedestal and worshipped as a living saint. I burp, fart, pick my nose and occasionally occasionally swear. Far from that ideal. But at the same time, "I" am free. There is a freedom here from the misery I was immersed in...and I don't want to keep it to myself. Aaaagh, what to do? Just going to go with the flow. If people believe and get inspired to do the same, then so be it. If people call me crazy and spit in my direction, so be it.

I am glad Daniel came out of the closet. I would have been lost, and dwelling incessantly in crappy states of mind with no idea of what to do if he hadn't. Thus, I feel doing the same will help others in a similar situation. And it was my choice to follow up on what Daniel claimed to see if he was full of sheet or not. Funny enough, he was telling the truth. It is each person's choice.

I really don't have any fear of the consequences. It is something that just seems to happen. Let it happen I say. The times are changing! I don't think we have much control over what happens anyway. Let people think what they think. Let those who are not satisfied come and and see for themselves to see if we are full of sheet.

I love the wide-open way in which you frame the issue! It seems to me that people gravitate, for whatever reasons, more to the "traditional" dharma institutions or to the experimental, r&d lab communities. Often we humans than try to rationalize our personal inclination retrospectively, to try to link our personal choice to a "right" way. Then we get dogmatism on whichever "side" we chose.
Alternatively, it seems possible that we can simply recognize that sociologically there is probably great value to their being more conservative and more experimental versions of similar institutions operating at the same time within a given civilization.
We need more open dialogue between the members of groups occupying different bands of that spectrum. Such dialogue cannot evolve in an atmosphere of mutual distrust and caricature, but must get at the living actuality of the "other". What is good, true and beautiful about attempts at conserving traditional contemplative institutions? And likewise, what is so about attempts at forming experimental institutions?
Only being able to see the bad, the false and the ugly in the "other" is a pretty good sign that we're not really engaging them, whatever side of such a discussion we start out identifying with, right? And this seems to be reflected equally in the posts of our critics-- and of ourselves right here in our responses to them lately!
--jake

edited to note: Nick posted while I was typing this. Well said, Nick Each of us is 100% responsible for our own freedom. Having the benefit of open dharma is truly catalytic for receptive folks who are ready to come see for themselves.

I enjoyed this piece, Naomi. Thank you for posting it.

My opinion about whether or not to use traditional attainment vocabulary to contemporary realization vacillates. On the one hand, for those of us who have experienced a great deal of spiritual wisdom and transformation, it can seem pretty clear that what is experienced 'now' is what occurred 'then.' On the other hand, using re-defining traditional language is a cumbersome task that asks many to attempt a rather arduous journey toward a radical paradigm shift.

What I can't deny is that it is possible to awaken. The potential for realization is organically woven into the fabric of our existence. At the same time, I can't say for sure that I know how far down the rabbit hole goes. I don't even know what the actual implications of awakening are, in that the various traditions have very different things to say. I have yet to experience any kind of realization that definitively points me toward and understanding of what I should "do." For, it would seem that awakening is about what "is," not what should be or what could be. So, it seems to me that defining enlightenment in terms of what someone should or shouldn't feel (or do) is generally unhelpful. This is why the traditional models, and the thus the traditional language and interpretations (which are usually tightly interwoven) are less than attractive to me.

I guess that's why you won't catch me labeling myself with some Pali language honorific title'¦ at least not lately. I think that many years will pass before I've integrated the insight I've been so fortunate to realize. I hope that I will have a better idea of the implications somewhere down the road. But I'm prepared for the possibility of not ever receiving a definitive answer.

I hope that wasn't too off-topic.

These days I'm getting more and more committed to the idea that, when it comes right down to it, people doing this (western buddhism) are grownups. Being all grown up, it is time for all of us to start talking in a way that is open, direct and free from unhelpful mythology about what practice and development are supposed look like.

Am I afraid of getting flak? Sure. I'd like to have a credible voice that people can listen to. But on the other hand, what other people think of me isn't in my power to control. I can't worry about it. You have to be willing to make public mistakes eventually if what you are doing is actually right speech. Otherwise, what you are doing is not telling the truth of your experience.

This, so far, is the truth of my experience:

On August 5, 2010 I decided that I'd had enough suffering. This somehow let me drop my ideas as to what this was supposed to be and let me see finally what had been in front of my face the entire time. I still have no idea how to talk about this in a way that makes sense, and I don't know what it will look like in ten years, it keeps changing. It's too big for any one viewpoint. What I do know for sure is that insight disease is dead and along with it, the imaginary self that I'd wasted my life trying to protect.

It's not a state, it's a developmental stage that enables something timeless to live through this life and this body.

And I want other people to get it, because it sucks to watch people suffer. So I've started talking about it. I hope that people wont think it's ego run amok or delusion in robes. I hope people can start talking about it in a skillful way, and I hope people can eventually see that liberation is the point.

Well said jake! Yes dialoge is useful rather than a warrior attitude.

Its obvious that many people here are faced with a kind of "dilemma". On one side there is this inner freedom on the other side there is this conflict with the outer world.

I am now on the way to make out similarities or in other words to translate the mythiologie in a understandable/relateable language/experiences. From day to day everything makes more and more sense. Means the theorie the scriptures dhamma-vinaya gets mirrowed in actual experience. Its incrediable detailed and accurate. I may can help to solve a lot of confussion/ or to fill the gap of knowledge/ provide a "bridge".

I try to get a fast internet connection etc. and then to come into dialoge (via skype) with some people here in order to get a scope about many things. But i need a few days or weeks to let some ongoing balancing process settle/finish. I dont know there is some knowing which tells me that i can help to solve some confusion and give some direction (because we may touched the same point only from different directions (methods mode of training/practise)). Many of your experiences or descriptions seem touching the point which i touched and yet still iam not 100% convinced. Because of this i want to come into dialoge. If its really the same than its the beginning of a big exchange or unitation (east and west - that it becomes one (would mean the pure dhamma is moving from east to settle in the west)). Right now iam still not yet clear about the "language"/which words match with which insight. Its just a matter of time but out of control so patience is asked!

Just a little forcast.

"I guess that's why you won't catch me labeling myself with some Pali language honorific title'¦ at least not lately. I think that many years will pass before I've integrated the insight I've been so fortunate to realize. I hope that I will have a better idea of the implications somewhere down the road. But I'm prepared for the possibility of not ever receiving a definitive answer."

Oh, hooray! an approach to this issue that has become so contentious as to impair communication-- that provides a wider context, and sets the contention aside.

Back when, I considered myself to have had some kind of definite 'awakening'; and this was assented to by the teachers in the group I frequented. Since the premise of the group was that it was possible for present-day, ordinary, householder-types to do this, it wasn't so big a deal. And since the group didn't consider itself aligned with any of the traditions, no 'titles' were conferred to outrage any official keepers of the tradition.
Since then, I've gone my own way as an 'independent researcher;' I am less interested in what things are called, than in how they work.

There is a linked issue, of course, as to 'how the naming of things works'-- the particular one at issue here is: how does identifying yourself as 'accomplished' work? Does it make you more useful to those you wish to help, or does it alienate them? Does it communicate what you intend to communicate [presumably that you want to, and are qualified to, help others]-- or does it communicate a status? That is, is it 'all about me' or 'all about liberation'?

I offer these as real, not rhetorical, questions; they're an articulation of the same sort of self-questioning that has been part of my 'research.'

"There is a linked issue, of course, as to 'how the naming of things works'-- the particular one at issue here is: how does identifying yourself as 'accomplished' work? Does it make you more useful to those you wish to help, or does it alienate them? Does it communicate what you intend to communicate [presumably that you want to, and are qualified to, help others]-- or does it communicate a status? That is, is it 'all about me' or 'all about liberation'?

I offer these as real, not rhetorical, questions; they're an articulation of the same sort of self-questioning that has been part of my 'research.'"

I think Roomy raises a key point, particularly for a community that thinks of itself as pragmatic. I rarely identify myself as a rabbi anymore because when I do, people stop dealing with me and start dealing with all of their positive and negative projections about rabbis, Judaism and religion in general. The only time I do use the title is when it is useful, as Kenneth suggested would be the case here. I feel the same about levels of attainment in practice. I only talk about it with a very few friends who have a deep interest in this kind of practice. If there was a context in which I believed that a more public conversation was helpful, I wouldn't hesitate to be completely open.

"There is a linked issue, of course, as to 'how the naming of things works'-- the particular one at issue here is: how does identifying yourself as 'accomplished' work? Does it make you more useful to those you wish to help, or does it alienate them? Does it communicate what you intend to communicate [presumably that you want to, and are qualified to, help others]-- or does it communicate a status? That is, is it 'all about me' or 'all about liberation'?

I offer these as real, not rhetorical, questions; they're an articulation of the same sort of self-questioning that has been part of my 'research.'"

Yes!

This actually bothers me more than it probably should, but I find it troubling that it there is so much discord on the definition of being "accomplished". Ok, seeing 50 past lives seems pretty over the top, but I really wish there was something more definitive that more practitioners, classical and "hardcore", could agree on and not worry about alienating or offending or even communicating a status. Contrast this with stream entry, and how it is more clear cut (your first experience of cessation/zero/source).

Although the lack of being independently verifiable makes all of this suspect enough that there will always be somebody whose nose is out of joint.