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

My personal experiences with the “psychic powers” are not yet as fully developed as the more fundamental areas, but I have enough experience to be able to help all but the most advanced practitioner of them. As to scholarship, I feel that reading widely and really considering the meaning of what one reads and how it might actually be applied is a very good idea, and have myself read around 150 dharma books, both traditional and modern. While I have been authorized and encouraged to teach by a formal lineage, this is a mere formality and not a sure sign in anyone of real understanding or attainment, much less teaching ability. Luckily, realizations are not dependent on conditions such as formal acceptance into a lineage. I have chosen a lucrative career path that has little to do with meditation, and this eliminates my financial dependence on the dharma and the temptation to water things down for mass consumption or popular appeal, as is so commonly done.

I have found that if I repeatedly ask those who start talking with me about dharma practice the questions, “What do you really want and why?” and, “What would you be willing to do to get that?” I usually come to the conclusion that they are not really interested in the things I am interested in (i.e. the things mentioned in this book), and thus I can turn the conversation to other topics and avoid wasting our time. Those few who do share some of my interests are my dear companions in what I call The Dharma Underground, and for them I am extremely grateful.

But enough about me, let me tell you about my book! I think that I have made my influences and “humble” opinions on a wide variety of other subjects very clear throughout this work. To be truthful, sometimes I have picked up this book and thought, “Goodness

gracious, what a harsh rant. What a heap of reductionist dogma, false certainty, pretentiousness and my own neurotic stuff. I pity the poor, innocent, and pathologically nice, mainstream, ritualistic, disempowered Buddhists unfortunate enough to have picked this thing up and simply been kicked in their soft and flabby posteriors by it to little good effect.”

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So Who The Heck Is Daniel M. Ingram?

On other days I have picked it up and thought, “Wow, this really is the book that I wished I had read all those years ago when I decided to really go for it. It would have been so extremely helpful to have had so many details about high-level practice laid out this clearly, so many myths dispelled, so much honesty about what the path is and isn’t.

What a joy it is that there are books that convey such an enthusiastic and empowering view on these practices. Maybe there will be a few people out there who just needed a little prodding to realize their full potential as great and powerful meditators. Wouldn’t it be great if I can find a way to get this book into their hands.” I hope that you had something like both reactions, as I think that both points of view have some validity.

Two interesting and practical questions for you are, “Who are you in direct experiential terms?” and “Who is it that knows?” Answer these, and you will come to know all of this directly for yourself. The first and last job of anyone who teaches meditation should be to make herself or himself redundant. This book is the best I have been able come up with to help accomplish this, as I have tried my best to pack it with everything useful that I know.

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Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha

36.CONCLUSION AND BEST WISHES

I do hope that people will not settle for becoming lost in the dogma of this work, Buddhism, or of any mystical tradition. I hope that they learn to actually do the practices that lead to freedom and to the deep integration of that freedom into their lives. I hope that they have faith that mastery can be attained. I hope that they will learn to ask good questions that will help them to accomplish this. I hope that the culture of Buddhism and the world in general will become less sectarian instead of more. I hope that students of meditation will use spiritual conceptual frameworks as tools and not worship them as sacred dogma. I hope that the huge amount of magical and fantastic thinking that accompanies spiritual traditions will immediately vanish from this planet forever.