Well, there is a lot in all of that to parse and perhaps respond to.
I agree with Tom Tom and Sawfoot in that threats of violence are not good, and I will address that.
Regarding the odd juxtaposition of Sawfoot's comments that would imply that those who aren't at "the top" are tolerated at best, hopefully people have found that nothing could be further from the truth and that much support is lent to people at all levels and that those at all levels benefit from having people around at different levels.
I personally have been at many levels regarding all sorts of things and have found it really helpful to have people who could teach me things, found it fun to share with people going through similar things to me, and found it fun to teach others things that other people taught me. I hope people here find the same thing to be true. I have learned a tremendous amount by being a part of this forum.
Regarding the critique that only those methods decreed by the Overlords are welcome here, those who know the history of the place will remember that one of the primary sources of the greatest instability arose when I refused to block certain methods and emphases that were considered by many traditionalists to be heretical, those being methods and emphases that I initially was yet at the time very skeptical of, then tried out to see what they were about, then came to some more experienced view on them that contained a bit more perspective for having done the experiment, as it advocated here.
There have been a whole lot of different practices and styles of practice and traditions and fusions and innovations advocated here by a wide range of people, and that is one of my favorite things about the place, as it has taught me a lot about things I didn't know much about. I hope people have similar experiences.
Regarding the critique that if someone believes "X" and we believe "X" not to be true then we might hold other things about them with skepticism, consider that the vast majority of my colleagues who are doctors are Republican Monotheists, a viewpoint that might be argued by some to have aspects that contract aspects of Scientific Materialism as a strict doctrine, the Republican part coming in regarding things like climate change denial, Creationism, pro-capital punishment (the science of which is strikingly not in its favor), pro-War on Drugs (the science of which is strikingly not in its favor) and the like, which are not necessarily strictly Republican views, but very common in those circles.
Were one to think, "Ah, Doctor Y believes in God. He must be crazy. I won't go to him for care as he can't be a good doctor," then one might be missing out, as some of the best doctors I know are fervent Theists, some Monotheists, some Polytheists, and some with views that if you actually really got them talking would blow your mind.
If you needed life-saving care, would you refuse to be cared for by one who wasn't a strict Scientific Materialist? I hope not.
Regarding the Dharma, I have gotten lots of good, helpful, practical advice from people who possessed many views on the world and engaged in lifestyles that I found less than appealing. This is called "Taking the good, leaving the bad." It is a practical view. I realize that pragmatism seems to not be among the primary values you hold dear, but perhaps you will see the practical value of it at some point.
Regarding the experiences I had that lead to the past life list, those experiences were a series of what were like bubbles that radiated out in about 1 second off to the back of my left shoulder sort of at a diagonal, and they conveyed a very large amount of information in an uncannily short amount of time. The experience occurred, that is true. Interpretations clearly are the interpretations and separate from the experience: at least this is something we agree on. The value comes as one experiments with various views and sees what benefits, what doesn't, and the like. Again, pragmatism is my foundation premise. Ontology is hard to come by, as has been noted before by some pretty smart people.
You clearly feel compelled to find deep truth, and I can appreciate that passion at least. Consider doing the basic experiment advocated here, that being meticulous sensate inquiry in high dose for long enough to get into the relevant territory which has been well-tested and verified by many, not just a small secret cabal.
Regarding the specialness you ascribe to new religious movements, there is nothing new about this, nothing unique to me in this. It is a tradition that was taught to me by numerous people that goes back way before I was born and is actually quite large, just not always obviously so, particularly if you don't know the history of the thing.
What is ironic in your critique is you seem to think this was all some secret that I was keeping back in the day to feel special, when in fact the reverse is true: these were things that have all been in plain sight if you know where to look, going way back to the original Pali Canon, found in abundance in the Commentaries, and widely disseminated in various places, just not that much in this period in Western Buddhism and some aspects of Asian Buddhism, those being gross generalizations and somewhat stylized stereotypes to illustrate general points, as it is really much more complex than that.
I just found myself going from the one situation of open disclosure of the stages of practice, finding the maps what were well-laid by many long before I got there, and then found myself in a situation, first at IMS, then at other places, where the maps were suppressed, where progress wasn't expected and talking about it was taboo, and, having come from a tradition where progress was expected and normal and the maps were just one more helpful thing, like a tuning fork for a piano player, like a road map to a driver, and finding that culture of secrecy and tabooness very dysfunctional, I endeavored to advocate for practical, time-tested solutions that were totally open in plenty of places, just not those.
You again have to know the history of where all of this is coming from to appreciate why that work done by me and others, including plenty of those here and in sister communities, is really important, and how wide and open an effort it has been, an effort to normalize good practice, to bring things down to earth, to make the dharma more accessible and easier for people, and to help people navigate in the difficult territories that Feel-good Western Buddhism often tried to pretend didn't exist or simply didn't know about at all.
I agree, I feel special in that, and it feels good, and I know that plenty here feel similarly, as I feel good when I help people in the emergency department, asI feel good when I help this place be what I believe it can be, as I feel good when I cook myself a nourishing meal and think, "Ah, that is good!", and I don't apologize for that feeling, as it is helpful and normal and helps reinforce what I personally feel is good behavior. Plenty of people feel special for doing all sorts of bad things. I think that criticizing people for feeling good when they do helpful things is not helpful.
MCTB is not some secret manual: it passes on lots of details about practice that were compiled from the numerous publicly published sources that it lists (Practical Insight Meditation, In this Very Life, On the Path of Freedom, The Visuddhimagga, The Vimuttimagga, the Pali Canon, and numerous others), combines them with teachings by numerous people, some of which were given in public, some of which were needlessly taught in secret, and adds in some experiential details. It has been available for free online for over a decade. I just don't see where you are getting the take on it that you have. Again, I think that the lack of historical perspective combined with some
internal scripts and drivers is causing difficulties, to use Transactional Analysis language, a lingo that has some pragmatic benefits and has not been well-appreciated by younger generations.
Regarding your notion that you have tried to engage this comment of pragmatic dharma and found it difficult to engage people in the practice of thinking, that is perhaps a bit of a harsh comment and somewhat dismissive. Is it perhaps that you are sufficiently narrow that any thinking that doesn't align with your thinking is not really thinking? It would seem that is your view. I personally put a lot of thought into my posts, and I know that lots of others do also.
I offer the following analogy, realizing that it is a crude one:
Imagine that someone who was studying Algebra burst into a college class on Differential Equations and started yelling about how the square root of a negative number can't exist, as Mr Jones in the Algebra class clearly demonstrated to them all, and that this "i" that they were using for the square root of negative one didn't exist and it was totally crazy to use it, that it was not just imaginary but delusional and that they should all immediately convert to the yelling person's views on this and if they didn't then they obviously were non-thinking and dogmatic cabalists engaged in hierarchical secret teachings designed to make them feel special but doing so based on obvious lies told by the professor and his old boy cronies, people who went around calling themselves "engineers" out of arrogance and a desire to exclude those at the bottom from their special elite club, despite things like Khan Academy videos freely given to teach people how to do differential equations, and despite numerous people for many years successfully using differential equations and even doing so in public.
Let's say that the people in the class, who happened to have used the number i successfully to solve real world problems, such as for properly tuning the damping of shock absorbers in automobiles, and to solve the behavior of electronic circuits that were subjected to alternating currents, tried to explain to the ranting zealot: "Look, it is true that from a certain point of view that the imaginary number i doesn't exist, and yet it is useful and yields good real-world results anyway, and so, if you care about this topic, you should study and learn how to use these equations and try them out in the real world and see how they perform regarding predicting the oscillation of potential and manifest energies and the like in various physical systems."
Let's say the ranting zealot responded, "Screw you all, I'm outta' here." Is anyone in the class going to miss that? Perhaps there was some skillful way to convey something to them that was better than what the class came up with, and perhaps their wasn't. One way or the other, the whole scene was obviously unfortunate, true, and there might be hard feeling all around, true, and that is obviously not good, but I do think that all of this was based on numerous misunderstandings and some complex underlying issues that were never well-addressed.
Obviously those who have seen the utility of something that seems crazy are going to feel sorry for the person who rejected their favorite type of mathematics, and the zealot is going to go off feeling like he totally failed to save a bunch of lost and confused losers. What could have prevented this situation? It is a good question, one I will probably ponder for a long time, as I am sure that all sides of this could have handled things better.
What is interesting is that discussion about the craziness of Differential Equations using the square root of a negative number (which clearly can't exist) actually happened, with very smart, educated, concerned zealots who said that those doing Differential Equations were out of their minds to do that mathematics, and yet the imaginary number i laid the foundation for basically every device you use every day from your car to your cell phone.
The History of i.Another analogy came to mind, which is a bit more childish (but also more emotionally honest):
An 8 year-old boy sees a father kissing his wife and thinks, "Gross! Girls have cooties!" Something in all of this strikes me as similar, like watching a nervous virgin stand aghast while they are watching an orgy and not being able to help feeling bad for them. It is a crude analogy and likely to cause some strong reactions, but regarding the powers and more unusual experiences, there was, from my point of view, however flawed, something of Freud's Latent-phase prudishness in Sawfoot that came to mind in this case. I can only imagine the comments this might create, but it actually gets at something that I honestly felt during this exchange, even if you don't find the metaphor apt, just so you know I can own that and realize it very well might be nothing more than my own confused projections. Take it as just an attempt for me to describe something of my internal experience, as it was a lot like that, and not as some certain critique of anything at all necessarily true about Sawfoot, who I haven't met and don't know well except by his posts here, which is clearly a poor data set on which to base firm conclusions.
Thoughts on how all of this could have gone better, or was it just a poor paradigmatic fit from the get-go, or what?