| | Glad you had a good retreat.
Just a small point, IMS and the DhO don't always see eye to eye, but this is a generalization and would depend on the individuals in question. That disclaimer aside, there is a lot of hush, hush culture there at IMS that MCTB and the DhO were reactions against rather than alignments with, and that continues 15 years later, unfortunately.
I do not hear that they are embracing open, clear, egalitarian, empowered, straightforward, down-to-earth, practical, top-to-bottom demystified dharma in the way I would like, but this is just my personal vision and idealism and certainly not necessarily something they should or need to do, I would just like it if they did. They are a business with an established hierarchy, after all.
There are lots of great things about IMS, and I have benefitted from retreats there, but if it was really doing its job, the DhO would never have existed, nor would MCTB, as they would have done something that filled those needs and more decades ago and so the DhO and MCTB would have been redundant, but they didn't, and so they are not.
Thus, speaking personally, I see that there are some commonalities of purpose, but substantial aspects of IMS still stand as an established and entrenched force against the sort of open dharma that I advocate and thus, while their facilities are great and the food is good and some of the teachers will sometimes talk about the dharma in a way that is actually real and free of the standard taboos, there is much that comes out of that place that is anything but, and this is a grand tragedy, at least as I see it, and will, like so many things, such as science, politics and the like, require the passing of those in power before some attempt at real and comprehensive reform is actually possible, not that it will necessarily happen, so we are probably going to have to wait a few decades to see what arises. |