buddhism

The attitude of spacious passion makes the tantric concepts and methods make sense . It shows why they exist and how they work. It gives you an intuitive meta-feel for them; an automatic natural understanding.

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.

If we take emptiness seriously, we must realize that we cannot use Buddhism to confirm our selves. There is never any way to be absolutely sure we have found the right lineage or teacher. We cannot rely on Buddhism to provide absolute certainty about anything other than the non-duality of form and emptiness.

Christianity does not have yanas. It does have sects: Catholic, Baptist, Mennonite. So when Westerners first started trying to understand Buddhism, they assumed Buddhist yanas were sects. Mostly this confusion has persisted, and even many scholars still get this wrong.

If panic attacks are real, and people can be coached to not experience them, why is it so controversial to assert that people can learn to induce the opposite of a panic attack? Furthermore, why isn’t there a secular word for such a concept?

A sangha should be irritating. It should include many people whose experience and understanding of life is quite different from yours. They will rub you the wrong way, because the things they take for granted without thinking about them are different from the things you take for granted without thinking about them.

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.

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

Dzogchen trains us to see the world as it is, without reference points. In Dzogchen trek-chod, we experience the brilliant energy of emotions without their conceptual content. Those unnecessary emotional judgements are the basis for dividing the world into pure and impure, sacred and profane.