buddhism

Passion without spaciousness is blind obsession. Without spaciousness, passion is confined to fixed channels, and its energy is often destructive. You act on emotions compulsively, or impulsively.

Spaciousness is functional only when wed with passion. Without passion, spaciousness produces only a stupid peacefulness. Spaciousness, by itself, is passive.

Spaciousness is an attitude: the willingness to suspend the process of meaning-making. Spaciousness is the willingness to allow unknowing, uncertainty, confusion, ambiguity, meaninglessness.

Compassion is about having good intentions. Tantra is not interested in that. Good intentions pave the road to mediocrity, self-righteousness, and irrelevance. Tantra cares about effective action, not socially-acceptable sentiments.

For humanistic psychology ... religious experience is a direct feeling, rather than the discovery of objective truths. The essential feeling is a oneness overcoming all inner and outer divisions.

However, [according to] the Dharma ... the ultimate religious experience, Awakening, is something else entirely. It is described, not in terms of feeling,

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Spirituality promises a total explanation of everything. Tantra rejects that. Things often happen for no particular reason. There is no ultimate “why.” Not everything can be understood; and that’s fine.

Reality can’t be fixed, because it has no fundamental flaw. There’s just things we like, and things we don’t like, and ways we can respond to them.

From the Dzogchen perspective, tantra is a bunch of cool things for Buddhas to do .

Viewed from Dzogchen, tantra’s attempts to bring about enlightenment are comical. It’s like a school of sharks scheming about how to get wet.

That doesn’t make tantra useless, however. It can be reinterpreted as practical methods for accomplishing practical ends.