_by_shakko_09.jpg)
Not a pretty insight, since I´m pretty "Faustian" myself. Also, note the cliffhanger at the end. Apocalypse in two weeks time?
The main criticism against Jiddu Krishnamurti seems to be "he didn´t answer the question". (OK, I know he is deceased, or perhaps reincarnated into another root-race, but since he is forever new on YouTube, I might as well speak of him in the present tense!) For a long time, I shared this criticism. At the very least, I thought, he "answers" people´s questions in an *extremely* roundabout fashion. But then, I started thinking, or perhaps non-thinking. Many of his fans react in a way that mirrors the reactions of his criticis. They essentially concede that K didn´t answer the questions, but then make up strange excuses for it: K tries to communicate the uncommunicable, K´s explanations are really beyond all explanations, in short, K is enlightened so how *dare* you, a mere inquisitive mortal monad, question (!) him. Or not really so strange, since this is how all guru-worshippers always defend their chosen savior-figure.
Something´s clearly up.
I think this becomes obvious when Krishnamurti explicitly *does* answer a query. Thus, in one of the clips linked to above, he very explicitly says that he doesn´t believe in God, and that man is left to his own devices, as if all alone in a jungle. How is that *not* answering the question? Really, we are hard to please! It´s also obvious from the clips that K didn´t believe in an immortal soul (at least not in the traditional sense), that he doesn´t regard enlightenment as a process of discreet stages but as something effortless and instantaneous, and that he absolutely repudiates all gurus. Only a weak person needs a savior. He also mocks the notion of atman ("Who is he? Who is Atman?") and the soul ("Soul? What do you mean? The sole of a shoe?").
I think people pretend not to understand Krishnamurti´s answers because they, at bottom, make them feel uncomfortable. Something which tends to confirm his message, ironically enough. Krishnamurti tries to declutch the guru-worshippers from the chosen objects of their worship. This is probably doomed to fail. We all need a God or a guru (or a nanny state). That´s why it´s safer pretending that you don´t understand, or fall down before his lotus feet, making *him* the new guru, once again pretending that you don´t understand...
Maybe that´s the secret of the human condition. We are all running away from Krishnamurti.
 |
| Attribution: Vinograd 19 |
"Secret of the Vajra World: The Tantric Buddhism of Tibet" is a book by Reginald A Ray, an American scholar who seems to be a practitioner of Tibetan-derived Buddhism himself. This book is strictly speaking a sequel to an earlier book about Tibetan Buddhism by the same author, "Indestructible Truth". While that volume concentrated on the "exoteric" aspects of the Tibetan religion, "Secret of the Vajra World" deals with the esoteric traditions. Both volumes are difficult, despite Ray´s attempts to sound as accesible as possible, since they deal with a subject-matter that is complex and - frankly - very, very strange. Another problem is that the author doesn´t always reveal the secrets. For a more fortright exposé of Tantric Buddhism in the Tibetan cultural region, including all the sex and drugs, I recommend "Tibetan Yoga. Principles and Practices" by Ian A Baker...
That being said, "Secret of the Vajra World" is nevertheless interesting, and I can´t say I have fully assimilated its contents yet. My impression of Tibetan Vajrayana after reading it (something I didn´t see the first time I perused the work), is that the tradition looks like a curious combination of two very different strands of thought. One of them seems to be "standard" Mahayana, with all the usual metaphysical notions about Emptiness, Buddha-Nature, Dharmakaya, and so on. The other strand is harder to pin down, but must be some kind of "pantheist" shamanism, earth religion or magic. Certain aspects of Vajrayana seem to point "upward", while others lead "downward". Some practices are more typically "Buddhist" in nature (such as various meditation techniques), while others are more "pagan" (feasts or perhaps orgies) or "magical" (visualizations, attempts to manipulate cosmic energies). Of course, to an actual Tantric, this may all be a seamless whole, but to an outsider, it looks as if Mahayana have indeed been mixed with something wholly other. It could originally have been Tantric Shaivism, but Tibet also had shamanic cults and the like.
Salvation or liberation doesn´t entail going "forward" or "up", but rather "backward", retracing the evolution-involution of consciousness to its original, primordial state, a state that in some peculiar way is both heavenly and pre-human at the same time. Indeed, it´s often explicitly compared to the consciousness of a small child, who simply takes in impressions and is awestruck by them, with no conceptual overlay or analysis whatsoever. (Tibetan Buddhism doesn´t romanticize animals, though. Their consciousness is seen as dull and mechanic.) There is no "God" in this system, but there is a "Ground Luminosity" which is experienced as a gigantic clearing or opening (perhaps as a cloudless sky) within which all phenomena spontaneously arise. There is no particular "meaning" to any of this, and in a certain sense it´s all just an illusion, and yet if this empty nature of all phenomena is grasped, the Tantric practitioner can attain supernatural powers and hence manipulate the illusion at will. Or perhaps not really at "will", since the enlightened "mahasiddha" does everything spontaneously, once again as a small child, and yet somehow always does the right thing anyway, precisely for that reason. This "crazy wisdom" is hard to grasp, but certainly doesn´t sound like a buddha entering nirvana!
However, there is also a somewhat different tradition within the bewildering world of Vajrayana, known as Dzogchen. This entails an almost bizarre spiritual technique, in which the meditator spends weeks in complete darkness and somehow tries to cope with the hallucinations created by the inevitable sensory deprivation. Dzogchen is said to be extremely dangerous, and I can well believe it! The interesting thing about this practice is that it seems to suggests that everything *isn´t* an illusion, after all. From the Ground Luminosity (or Dharmakaya) arise certain energies, in every color of the rainbow. These are the energies of creation or emanation (my terms), and the task is to magically manipulate them in order to form a "rainbow body", identified with the sambhogakaya. This is intriguing, to be sure, since the sambhogakaya is the heavenly enjoyment body of the Buddha in Mahayana theology. Presumably, the sambhogakaya therefore has some kind of "form" or "boundary", although one that is infinitely malleable to the Dzogchen master. Thus, the goal of the Tibetan mystic isn´t to disappear into the void or become one with Brahman as a drop joins the ocean, but rather to remain in the world, but armed with limitless powers ordinary phenomenal mortals can scarcely even comprehend....
.jpg)
The United Kingdom in 2021. Who is in power there, again? The Trans-Tories? If this is how Britain look under a "conservative" administration, imagine the hell unleashed if Woke Labour ever came to power! Or one of the smaller loony lefty outfits...
I just had to share this. It´s "the Moon eats people" all over again. I sometimes suspect Mathiesen is right. Unless there´s more than one god, and we *really* need to re-establish contact with the higher one stat, the one that actually is "on our side"...
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neptunesdolphins
Amazing information in this one. How does this girl know so much? She must have access to a truly extraordinary source of knowledge!
The most funny factoid is the claim that there are a lot of sexy young girls in the "outer court" of Maitreya Bodhisattva´s heaven world Tusita. They habitually seduce "Dharma masters" stupid enough to be reborn there.
But why is that a *bad* thing? Especially since I and the Dharmic lover-boys can stay there for 576 million years!
Or have I misunderstood something?
This scene almost makes me cry tears of joy. EDEN HAS BEEN RESTORED AND IT WAS US WHO DID IT!!! Until it turns out that even a reptilian Eden has a snake...
Although in this case, the snake is probably a Velociraptor!
In the West, al-Ghazali is often, or perhaps always, depicted as the man who single-handedly (no less) killed off Muslim science and brought the Islamic (or was it Islamicate) Golden Age to an end (thank you, btw). The latest offender is Neil deGrasse Tyson.
In this clip, Swedish scholar Filip Holm argues to a large extent in al-Ghazali´s defense. The real culprits were (surprise!) the Mongols, who sacked Baghdad, the Golden Age capital par excellence. So no, al-Ghazali wasn´t to the right of Genghis Khan, it was more or less the other way around! While it´s true that al-Ghazali´s influence did make Greek-derived philosophy less popular in the Muslim world, neither it nor science simply disappeared. For instance, there were schools of science in both the Ottoman Empire and Persia long after the avatar of darkness had been translated to happier hunting grounds. Nor did al-Ghazali regard mathematics as an invention of the Devil, indeed, he explicitly said the exact opposite.
Holm clearly has great respect for the man, a man who realized at a late point in his life that his worldly knowledge was just vanity and that real certainty could only be found in God. Of course, it still remains a fact that it was NASA rather than some whirling Dervishes who placed the first man on the Moon, but then, who knows, with the way modern civilization is going (the SJWs being our very own internal Mongols), perhaps we shouldn´t be too cock-sure of our ultimate success even in *that* un-godly realm..
(No Subject)
Date: 2021-10-18 05:28 pm (UTC)(No Subject)
Date: 2021-10-18 07:22 pm (UTC)The divine would be on our side consistently if we were a little more often on the side of the divine! We're not, and according to occult teachings, there are times when we run off the rails in a big way, and have to be yanked back hard. You've heard of the destruction of Atlantis? That's an often-quoted example.