BackAtHome:

No.

This thread is only for specific discussion about Diamond Way.

You can start another thread about another group if you wish.

But discussion here should be about Diamond Way.

Understood.

Thank you.

Love.

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BackAtHome
suenam,

I may be wrong, but are you intentionally trying to distract from my original posting? I am not open to that.

Maybe it has not become clear: I do not have a single little bit of trust towards buddhism or buddhists anymore. I explicitly forbid any buddhist leader, teacher or whatever to try to force teachings into or manipulate my life in any way. Doing so is against my expressed will and is a violation of my privacy.

(for all readers of this forum: there were so called genuine teachers who liked to lie down with their students, whose students needed psychotherapy or psychiatric help afterwards, or who directed the inauguration of the temple of one of the teachers who liked to lie down with his students. again, "genuine" is a word for a basic value - this is step 1 in action.)

Just to clarify - in my mind there is a difference between Buddhism as a personal practice and the group dynamics that you are writing about here.
It may well be that in other groups the ideas communicated may always not correspond to the level of practice in everyday life, however upon examination those ideas may be found to be in keeping with what I am calling "genuine" Buddhism. (Certainly there are issues with institutionalisation both in traditional Buddhist countries and in the west which are beyond the scope of this thread).

In DWB this is not the case. I actually do think that in DWB they are much closer to "practicing what they preach," but if one examines what is taught it may be seen to be dualistic and therefore not genuine Buddhism at all.

apologies for any confusion.


On a wider level, one thing I was questioning was the idea you put forward when you wrote, "Can we agree that in pre-buddhistic times we were for one part our mind, school, education, maybe science? For another part we were our heart, family, friendship, love? For another part we were our soul, faith, art, music? All that pretty much unspiritualized, not always bright and shiny but harmlessly enjoyable."

To me this sounds not dissimilar to Nydhal himself who seems to see the relationship of the west to Africa and the Middle East, or indeed the situation with his relationships with women as simply "good clean harmless fun".

Surely any value system is subject to question and self-examination and can never claim such a naïve innocence?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/12/2012 02:51AM by suenam.

suenam,

thank you for your message. Now I understand what you were questioning. The important sentences of text were meant to be the three before the one with the phrase "harmlessly enjoyable". And as stated in that last sentence of text we were not always bright and shiny but, important at least to me, we did not have to. It was okay to not be a perfect personality, because nobody was, for as long as you not intentionally did bad. While now, and since you write about personal practice I guess you would agree, more and more people do not see themselves as people anymore but as free spiritual beings. Again, these are wonderful words (step 1), but somehow being a free spiritual being was combined with the urge to compare oneself to higher spiritual ideals (for example enlightenment or being the perfect non-perfectionist) and thus to devote oneself to some kind of spiritual practice. Often bound to a leader, like Nydahl, who tells them what is right and what is wrong and which books to read and which not and so on. And suddenly the "free" in the free spiritual being was lost.

If I see the development in these last 20 years and think into the future, i am getting the impression that we are heading towards societies of spiritually controllable people. And then I look at the circumstances in the old tibet and I see exactly that.

And then I look back to what people reported in this forum about their experiences with Nydahl or DW in these days already and how the inner mechanics in DW work and I get a really bad feeling. Imagine that on a much bigger scale with people sitting everywhere in the society, economy, public life, education(!) and so on.

What was meant to be a liberation slowly turns into the exact opposite.

Also I do agree with you saying "any(!) value system is subject to question and self-examination and can never claim such a naïve innocence".

Is that okay as an answer to the point you questioned?


This was meant to be a one day's work and turned into almost a week or so. My future posts need to be much shorter if at all.

Love.

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BackAtHome
If I see the development in these last 20 years and think into the future, i am getting the impression that we are heading towards societies of spiritually controllable people. And then I look at the circumstances in the old tibet and I see exactly that.

In any given system there will be followers and leaders - the question here is one of accountablility and responsibility. Those in power have always sought control, whether that be through spiritual means or otherwise - just look at any television commerical to see such manipulation at work.

As I see it a compartmentalised self such as you describe is totally approprite for an industrialised materialistic system but seems to be at odds with the Buddhist ideal - the issue I have with Nydahl is that he tries to marry the two without philosophical rigour, and so runs the risk of taking the worst of both systems without really knowing what he is doing.

He sells himself on the basis of Buddhist ideals while picking and choosing according to what suits him... "I am a buddhist in the talks, except the part where I talk politically, and I am no longer a teacher but an equal when I bed my students" - this lack of integrity is what is self-serving and precludes the possibility that his project can ever be hollistic - Were he to advertise himself as an ego-tripping, self promoting guy who is hungry for weath, power and sex, then he would simply be a modern politician and everyone else would be aware of what is at stake - the fact that he uses spirituality to sell himself is a null move and one which we can be aware of if we truly understand the difference between the spiritual and the political.

suenam,

thank you. It seems you were bringing it to the point when you wrote the non-buddhist values and attitude towards life is at odds with the buddhist ideal. This means the buddhist ideal is an ideal. It is a belief, a faith not a 100% truth in just the same way as any other belief.

Since there is this obvious duality between that which is the buddhist ideal and that which is not the buddhist ideal, then how can Buddhism be anymore "holistic" (another step 1 word) than anything else which is Non-Buddhism? Since it is a fact that we share this world with all these other people of other beliefs, why then shall non-buddhists follow the buddhist way instead of the buddhists following the non-buddhist way?

What I am trying to say here is that everyone including buddhist leaders like Nydahl and others have no objective justification for anything they do. As for anyone it is always a question of the viewpoint from which we look at what is done. Then how can someone who does not acknowledge that there is no ojective truth and accordingly refrains from trying to convert people into his belief system truely be wise?

Buddhism and in special the likes of Nydahl will have to learn that.

The longer we look at that from the viewpoint of our cultural background, the more we see the inherent contradictions. And then we can go back to compassion and say "but hey, there were some really smart and useful thoughts in what Buddha said and what some of his followers made from it". That is the level were one can meet as equivalent partners. Any forced subordination to or hidden manipulation by a Nydahl or someone like that is nothing else but spiritual suppression.


But back to my original posting: Did you find any statements which you could confirm or experienced yourself?

What I'm saying is that even from the perspective of a system in which the compartmentalisation of the self is seen as beneficial, Nydahl's varied roles still appear as a conflict of interests.
This is even more true from the perspective of a system which puts more emphasis on integration.

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BackAtHome
But back to my original posting: Did you find any statements which you could confirm or experienced yourself?

I'm not sure what you are referring to here, could you clarify please?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/13/2012 05:47AM by suenam.

(@suenam: Please excuse my sometimes bad english. I meant the message from June 9, 2012.)

Okay, this is meant to be be useful. Then maybe another way to be useful is to share my personal conclusion regarding Nydahl and DW. To do so I have to clarify the following in advance:

Believing buddhists when they said buddhism was only a philosophy, I once had a trustful interest in buddhism but never saw myself as being a buddhist. I never asked for or admitted to becoming a student of Nydahl. I saw Nydahl only three times at three different dates, one in a public location and two in a DW center. At the third date it was obvious that Nydahl and DW are far too authoritarian for me and I left in the middle of the event. Still, many years later here I am, writing these words.

Experiences with buddhists including Nydahl always seemed to consist of two parts. One part is that which is done at the physical level (words spoken, gestures made and so on). The other part is a personal experience which I would describe as happening at the mental level. Unfortunately it is impossible to provide physical evidence for what is happening at this other level.

That is why I shall state that the content of this message is based on personal experience and just an expression of my opinion. Only by comparing reports of different people one may come to a conclusion whether these are truely just reports about individual experiences or if there is something more behind it.


Figuratively speaking, I see Nydahl and DW as being surrounded by a diversity of viruses. The moment one comes too close to them, one is infected immediately. There is no asking, no preparation and no commitment, it happens. Or maybe it is made to happen at a disguised level. As with every other infection, if at all one notices to be infected, it is already too late and cannot be undone.

After the infection, permanent unconditional rejection seems to be one possible way to prevent that these influences befall ones life. Quite a few messages in this forum show that people adopted an attitude of duality towards Nydahl and DW. But this just means that one will not be converted into a Nydahl clone. This doesn't free one from these influences on the mental level - it is just the way to keep these influences from entering. In the period following, instead of positively progressing on ones own path one needs to focus on not being dragged away into the woods by these influences.

This can cost several years of ones life. Sometimes one may even fear to never again completely be free from these influences for the rest of life.

I got the impression that somehow Nydahl and DW are profiting from this, as if the lifeforce taken away from a person to a certain degree is then available to Nydahl and DW for their own interests. We experience this in everyday life when alpha animals think they where elevated when suppressing others. But this is different in that it seems to happen at the mental level and even without the physical presence of the alpha animal.

(As unusual as this statement surely sounds, I found a source reporting about the buddhist Kalachakra-Tantra that the guru repeatedly devours and destroys his student and absorbs him or her energetically. But please keep in mind, that it is not possible to provide evidence for this.)


From my point of view I would like to ask everyone, especially the ones with yet undamaged ideals and trust, to consider whether the curiosity is worth the possible risks described by some members of this forum (e.g. post by Alchi, September 2, 2010).

Let us continue to shed light on this matter. Let us hope for justice so that one day we can truely enjoy fresh air in our lifes again.

Love.


(Maybe reports about personal experiences or conclusions are more interesting to read, but I am still convinced that if we want to stop this we need to look at the inner mechanisms of DW in partcular and buddhism in general.)

I'm not sure if what you are describing here is any different to any other idealogical struggle. It would seem that what makes it particularly "cultish" is the seperatist mystical element and so I would suggest the anti-virus to that would be education, awareness, and applied critical thinking which I take to be the purpose of this thread.

As a result of that the "evidence" may seem esoteric and require interpretation, but I think it is necessary to make such connections that can "ground" those attempts by the cult at mysticism/mystification. There are very specific mechanisms using words/thoughts at work here which need to be made transparent in order to de-mystify that process.

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that one would have wasted several years of one's life as I can't really accept the idea of some original purity - surely we are born into a world full of such "viruses" and the achievement of "idealogical health" is not a given, but rather something one has to work at regardless?

Back to your question - Yes, I understand you are referring to your post from June 9th, but which part of that post? Which question are you asking?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/14/2012 08:06AM by suenam.

Shamarpa's recent statement concerning Ole Nydahl:
[www.lama-ole-nydahl.de]