dear shuddhasattva ji ,
I intend a longer post at some point but don't have time now:
prabhu ji , you are supposed to be having a break , now I feel responcible for destracting you from your work because I am crossing into some areas which I know concern you greatly .
my appologies if my comments aren't in total agreement with your veiw but Iwould ask you to forgive my tollerance as there is method to my madness :namaste
I am by no way condoning many ignorances present in the system but simply would like to raise some points for concideration .
In short, aside from the historical abuse of fear, power and secrecy to build up institutions staffed by those selected as boys from rich noble and merchant families, or the families of already powerful, quasi-dynastic monks, a major reason why this treasurehouse needs to be radically and revolutionarily opened, casting off all of the old bonds and fears is presented serially as follows:
One of the marks of readiness for tantric practice is the absence of fear at the prospect of things going wrong. I am not sure I agree, by the way, with the characterization of tantra and vajrayana as fancy, when in my mind, vajrayana practices are the most direct, eliminating need for extensive bulwarks of theory and enumerative lists galore.
this is perfectly true if as I had said the motivation is correct ,
excuse my flipant use of the expression fancy , I am simply pointing at the ficckle tendancy in human nature for facination ,
neither am I an advocate of extensive theorising , I am an advocate if solid practice .
It gets right to the heart of the matter; the union of compassion and wisdom,
yes if one is actualy practicing it rather than fancying that they practice it .
This union, which requires the practitioner to regard all beings with the most intimate sympathy, universalizes the sense of self-cherishing which is constantly engaged in limited, ego-driven externalizations; projecting limited cherishing on this or that person.
and to acheive this one needs guidance to some extent followed by practice .
In regarding each and every being the aspirant is required to see them as the embodiment of the universal union of the guru and dakini, the merger of the absolutely pure motivation for eternal universal service, and all-encompassing insight which turns away nothing as separate from itself.
We haven't got an excuse anymore to hide away the teachings from the supposedly unworthy thru a system of selection that ostensibly, and in its doctrine quite reasonably, presents itself as making sure that people don't hurt themselves and others with teachings improper to their level of evolution, in reality conserves these doctrines mostly to those who are unworthy of learning them, much less teaching and stewarding them.
the teachings are not hidden , but I have to ask what use are they in the hands of those not adequately taught to use them ?
And the main reason we don't have an excuse is because the world is, as Dyanaprajna said, literally going to hell. Civilization will collapse within 150 years (probably much sooner), and humanity is likely to go extinct before the fun is over. Even right now, 50,000+ species are going extinct per year, and this number is both growing and accelerating - and it is directly due to human industrial activity.
civilisation has been collapsing for many aeons it is simply that as it degenerates it excellerates , I agree wholeheartedly that are not only going to hell but being subjected to hell all around us ,it is here ! and again whole heartedly support your concerns about the needless destruction caused by our own deluded greed .
We are quite literally destroying our own life support mechanism. There is a lot of built in redundancy in biodiversity - many species doing the same biochemical input/output or structural role, a link in a chain of chemical and physiological dependencies. But remove enough species, and you start losing roles.
and for these reasons we should be practicing fewness of wishes , but even with such practices there is imperminance to be taken into concideration , this planet , this solar system is not eternal .
however I agree it does not give us right to abuse the situation .
but we must allso question why are we clinging to the idea of life , do you want future births ? when we know life is imperminent why cling to it .
again I stress that gives us no right to abbuse the system whilst here .
Aside from the myriad ecological & environmental problems, there's also the simple problem of resource shortage: we are running out, in the near future, of water, oil, phosphate (needed for fertilizer to maintain agricultural production levels) and other key commodities without which our industrial economy cannot function. These alone could spell the end of 'modern' civilization and the collapse of world population down to a paltry figuring, eking out a halflife amongst the shattered remains.
Given that this is the case, what does this mean karmically? I cannot imagine a greater crime than destroying a species, let alone 50-99% of all the species on the planet. We are all accomplices in this crime, unwitting though we be, we are trapped by our participation in civilization to be so. We share the responsibility, though we don't want things to be this way. Most of us are completely ignorant as to even being accomplices.
you have hit it squair on the head , this is samsaric existance , dukka !
the only way to stop it is to rise above it .
cease to be reborn to it .
a bodhisattva can libberate others by the strength of his prayer , one does not need to take birth to benifit others .
That may spare us from blame to a degree, but it certainly won't spare us from the consequences. It is we who will have to pay the butcher's bill, and that means the consequences we see in our own lives, and those of our descendants, and also... our rebirths.
I have no decendants I chose not to give birth to the house of continued suffering , but as beings are still karmicaly bound they will be born none the less , so my part in this world ? assist in what ever small capacity possible to raise conciousness , not through opinion but through necesity .
if we eliminate most life from the planet, especially higher lifeforms which, as the preeminent biologist E.O. Wilson said in his 2002 book, The Future of Life, will be half gone, at the least, by 2100, as what sort of life forms, exactly, will we be reborn as?
with our birth was sewn the seed of our death , we can avoid it no other way than to seek liberation from birth and death .this was the buddhas message .
That is a massive karmic reset and a victory for the forces of Mara to reduce our mindstreams back to the lowly realms of animals and hungry ghosts as penalty for our own blind ambition as a civilization. Imagine the scale of suffering and ignorance that we will have to once more endure to get back to something like our present state, an organism neurologically complex enough to realize its own Buddha nature as the already self-perfected and inate potential.
is this not allready a society of hungry ghosts and hell beings ?
in human form or other form the suffering is the same .
except in animal form we lack the reasoning to elevate ourselves .
but by dint of our actions we may well forgo the blessing of a human birth .
We have little reason then to worry about the consequences of tantric yoga / vajrayana, when we're already damned by default. We NEED vajrayana to awaken enough people quickly enough within the next 20 years to avert the crisis that is not only coming in the future but already here amongst us, already casting a pall of suffering across much of the world's population.
death canot be averted , life may be prolonged and the quality maintained further but death is inevitable .
The buddhadharma has become mostly counterfeit, exactly as Shakyamuni Buddha predicted 2500 years ago in the Manjusri sutras.
not entirely you , I and many others fight to keep it from sinking , what we need is a truely combined effort which would take total dedication and surrender of personal opinion .
Let the treasurehouse be opened, let the secrets be made open, and let the truth be its own protection.
It is open !we have the most perfect dharma expounded by the buddha himself, we simply need to practice it , the truth will reveal it self .
vajrayana , mahayana , theravada , each poses the same wisdom , each respectively posess pitfalls whereby delusion and bad practices are possible ,
therefore if you have the good fortune to meet with the teachings of either one , count your blessings and practice diligently .
).
) . The point was that most of them could be characterized as independent free-thinker types so when it came to following authority embodied by Tibetan lamas, it were always the others (like Christians) who would follow authority blindly but not them "enlightened Buddhists". As they believed that all Buddhas would dissolve into "white light" it was the guru/lama who would be used as an anchor for devotion. So, I did guru-yoga, which didn't do any harm although I kept asking myself why a living, mortal person should be more suitable as an object of devotion than the Buddhas, given that even they were not persistent. What did affect me negatively was the worship of the wrathful black Mahakala form, whose artistic depiction went right deep into my subconscious, with all the skulls and gore, even though I didn't "know" much about it intellectually. What also affected me was the worship of said form which was done by chanting in Tibetan. No offense intended but I know that mantras can have an effect on the mind regardless of whether you can understand them. I also secretly uncovered another members' statue that he worshiped, depicting a naked woman with an animal's head. Had I made an informed decision, I wouldn't have joined a tantric group of all places, but the point was that they didn't reveal the actual nature of their religion, and that I trusted them, believing that their form of Buddhism was well-tried and that the elements they taught were actually suitable for attaining enlightenment or at least a more joyful state of mind.