Re: Ole Nydahl and Diamond Way Buddhism
Date: October 15, 2009 07:39AM
while i agree with you Kate, i think it goes deeper...
it is not just the idea of ole being perfect, there is also this ideology at work in the group as a whole.
Buddhism could be described as an idea that one must work on the conflicts within, and that in fact all perceived conflicts are in fact internal.
Fascism could be descibed as it's opposite, the idea that there is some perfection if only we could target the "culprits" (Witches, Jews, addicts, satanists, paedophiles, etc.) - there is this perception of the guilty and the innocent, good guys in white hats and bad guys in black hats.
this may sound controversial because who would refuse to condemn paedophiles, however it is often the case that those who cry the loudest about it are the people who go into elaborate detail about the sort of inhuman tortures that they would like to inflict upon such people - the fact is that we all have some darkness within us, and if we do not admit and confront that, then we instead externalise it and inflict it upon others.
In the case of DWB, there are some rather strange paradoxes at work in their idelogy. on the one hand there is this idea of sexual liberation, and yet when examined closely, it is in fact simply a sort of victorian moralistic (and hypocritical) form of patriarchy. The same goes for their form of "buddhism" - it looks like tolerance and freedom, and yet it is only tolerance and freedom for "us" and judgement and condemnation for "them" (the bad guys in black hats).
DWB are very tolerant, but only if you do things their way - otherwise you represent a challenge.
for me - this means that they do not seem to have a fragile belief system at all, but in fact are perpetrating something quite insidious and hard to pinpoint. i know of some DW members who call themselves anarchists and who would reject this ideology completely if it were obvious to them, and yet they still do not see it, such is the insidious nature of this ideology - it is slavery masquerading as freedom, and repression masquerading as liberation.