Jane Laurel Carrington:
[...]
And then back home when I tried talking to people about my practice at my local meditation center (a big mistake), a couple of people jumped all over me and made me feel like I was some sort of pervert. I wish I were exaggerating, but I'm not. They said this kind of thing was "dangerous," others said it sounded "scary," and I never, never said one single word to judge or criticize other people's practice. On the contrary, I was supportive and positive, open-minded, but in return I wasn't even treated with simple courtesy. People told me to avoid going on the internet (as if the medium itself were dangerous), they scoffed at me and told me I was dabbling in stuff that was far removed from the true dharma. I kid you not. I'm not upset about it any more, but at the time it was extremely off-putting. I guess I now have a hard time feeling at ease at that place. Talk about one-upsmanship, these guys acted like they had the real deal, and that was the end of it, and they also dismissed any talk of hoping for enlightenment or even stream entry as crazy (not that I even ventured to confess such audacity to them).
[...]
Jane, stories like this are a real bummer! I wish I could say I don't have my own. There are two factors which I've found important to remember here:
1) It's easy to forget, once you've started doing it to whatever degree, that the whole point of this stuff is to be a
loser
in some way. We're losing cherished illusions, well-protected blind spots, and self-deceptive stories... especially when we take the plunge through DN into EQ and beyond. I think people who aren't ready for this sense it and are afraid, and they throw up defenses to protect themselves from facing it (which is fine if that's what they have to do... but it sucks to get slapped in the face with those projections when we're in the midst of our first DN, when we're usually reaching out for connection and support).
2) It's normative for humans in our post-modern society to adopt various cultural artifacts-- clothes, ways of speaking, books, places to go and things to do-- in order to construct a diy identity since there is no overarching monoculture to provide unquestionable ready-made role identities and since there *is* a pervasive consumerist ethos which suggests that we are *free* to engage this diy identity project in any way we see fit (as long as we don't stomp on others as they do the same). Lots of folks use dharma or even teaching dharma to do this, and they are quite pleased with themselves for being able to generate a pleasant half our sit on a daily basis, acquire the proper outfits, opinions, manners of speech, and etc. They have the reaction 1) above when faced with someone who is actually engaging in practices that undermine the assumptions of identity which confer the illusions of security that most humans generally crave.
It's a damn shame but it is what it is. Thank goodness for the interwebs :-)