Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha - An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

Models of the Stages of Enlightenment awakening. While energetic practices are very interesting and may lead to lots of insights and other nice effects, that is not the same thing as enlightened being having stable, perfected energetic systems. My friend Kenneth has asked me to add that there is something good that progressively awakening does to the channels and energetic system, and I have to agree. However, defining exactly what positive changes are made is difficult, and none of the models I have seen really do an adequate job or contain enough flexibility to accommodate how dynamic our energetic systems are. Suffice to say, this is one more set of models that is getting at something but contains much that needs revision.

THE SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE MODELS

Specific Knowledge Models basically state or imply that

enlightenment will somehow magically provide hidden conceptual information about all sorts of specific things in life, such as the workings of particle physics, how to bring about world peace, who one’s disciples should marry, and the like. Some go further and state that

enlightenment progressively brings complete omniscience, meaning the ability to know everything about the whole universe simultaneously.

While these might seem to some people like reasonable things enlightened beings should somehow know, let’s include other things it might be good to know, such as how to create safe, inexpensive lithium ion batteries for electric cars, how to consistently beat the return of an S&P 500 index fund over the long haul, how to balance the federal deficit while providing everyone with good social support but not raising taxes, how to instantaneously make every blue-collar Republican realize that they are voting against their own self-interest, and how to build a fusion reactor that is safe, inexpensive, produces enough energy for everyone, and has no radioactive disposal issues. When you look at these, the concept of specific knowledge gained by merely seeing the true nature of ordinary sensations begins to seem as ridiculous as it really is.

The only specific thing I did gain a little insight into was the beauty of differential equations that discuss the oscillation from the imaginary quantities (potential) to real quantities (manifestation), but that’s about it. Other than a bunch of direct knowledge of how the mind works and 293

Models of the Stages of Enlightenment

a whole lot of knowledge about what a load of crap most religious and mystical dogma is, and that includes Buddhist Dogma, I didn’t really get any specific knowledge of anything else. So much for that idea…

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS

Here is another thing that didn’t happen: psychological perfection.

While the mainstream Western Buddhist world is absolutely drowning in notion that somehow Buddhist practice will either eliminate all their psychological “stuff” or cause them to become self-actualized in the good old psychoanalytical sense, nothing could be further from the truth except perhaps the Action Models. I think that I learned more about reasonable psychological health from reading one book on

Transactional Analysis (Vann Joines’ TA Today) than I did from over a decade of highly successful Buddhist meditation. That doesn’t mean that I have achieved perfect psychological health, not by a long shot!

Focusing on psychological growth is an epidemic disease in Western insight practice. Many of the major retreat centers that purport to foster insight practice in the US and Europe are actually bastions of the worst pop psychological bullshit retrofitted with a bastardized Buddhist front.

You have only to go to a few small group meetings on retreats, as I mentioned in Part II, to hear that the vast majority of people who are supposed to be doing insight practices are actually just wallowing in their own neurotic crap. Sure, they may be highly intelligent, super sophisticated, fantastically well-rationalized, pseudo-Buddhist practitioners of the Great Sacred Neurotic Crap Wallow, but they are wallowing just the same.

As I mentioned before, that this sort of behavior is tolerated on meditation retreats at all is mind-boggling, but that it gets reinforced and rewarded as often as it does is a crying shame that reflects as badly on the teachers as it does the practitioners. I have had insight teacher after insight teacher try to focus on what I was feeling and how my relationships were going when all I wanted to do was talk about my attempts at insight practices, as I assumed, often wrongly, that they were insight teachers.

While the dharma is vast, and the teachings of the wisdom traditions contain a lot of material for helping grow psychologically, that doesn’t mean that it has anything to do with awakening or insight practice at all, 294