It is with some reluctance that I make the following post, but I see this as a community issue and so I address it as such.

I feel, and I don't know for sure, as if a lot of people here are being dishonest with themselves and others. There is a lot of attention-seeking with regards to claims to attainments, lots of subtle hinting at attainments and pretentiousness. That having been said, I do not know for sure, whether or not people here are actually engaging in fatuous posturing, or whether or not they're being sincere. But a lot of what I read here, rings those alarm bells.

I wish there was a more tactful way I could approach this, but I lack the necessary skill to implement it. Thus my bluntness.

Relevant quotes:



and



I appreciate your feedback!

http://dharmafarer.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/7.14-Potthapada-S-d9-piya.pdf

Edit:

I am in no way perfect myself, nor am I exempt from the above faults. I also do not claim any (for lack of a better word) supramundane attainments. I mean, I could be entirely wrong about the thrust of this post, so please, correct me if what I say is not accurate.

Hello, James.

Hi,

Just don't poison the well.

Edit:

In case you're not aware what it is:

I retract all my statements.

I apologize for slandering.

Edit:

I mean, I feel that the intention of the community is good and not insincere. However I also sense that there is maybe some insincerity or posturing. I see it a lot actually, and I cannot participate here without voicing that opinion.

However, I could be entirely wrong, but that is also not what I feel.

This is an internet forum, so there's going to be terrible posting. There are no internet forums without some terrible posting. This also happens to be an internet forum for practitioners of a discipline seeking to reach particular goals, whose attainment requires the development and application of skill by effort. Unfortunately claims to having achieved these goals are nearly impossible to verify.

Similar examples would be forums about weight lifting and martial arts, where you'll also notice egos wriggling like eels in a net ('Do you even lift?'). DhO can attract even worse behavior because the goal we're pursuing is sometimes considered the ultimate goal of human existence. Some special DhO varieties of bad posting include:

• Attempts to introduce, redefine, or reject terms without exerting any advance effort to define those terms (see 'MCTB Technical 4th Path'); results in confusion
• Claims to attainments absent any experiential context or definition of the attainment, though these claims can't be verified or disproven anyway (see 'guys I felt really weird on the toilet Saturday afternoon, so do you agree I'm a stream-enterer?')
• Counter-claims to attainments expressed with some mixture of sarcasm, innuendo, cryptic non sequiturs about the nondual nature of reality and/or admonitions to practice more; these counter-claims do have their place, depending on the context and who's speaking

This forum also shelters priceless practice advice, unvarnished straight talk, and relative piles of ariyas who are willing help seekers at no material benefit to themselves. It can be instructive to read posts from the 'great DhO schism', when many of the DhO's most accomplished practitioners/admins left to found their own sites. While I think it's useful for each teaching arahat who uses the internet to publish & discuss unique teachings on a personal site, there's also no way to prevent the flood of totally ridiculous behavior that will rise like a tide of trash as pragmatic dharma moves into the mainstream (when regular people realize attainments are possible, easier to 'get' than many hobbies in which they're already engaged, and have a truly extreme benefit-to-cost ratio).

Pragmatic dharma-related human behavior is going to get much worse before it gets better, but at the risk of sounding grandiose, the alternative (keeping the dharma to ourselves, discouraging scientific study of the pretty miraculous body-mind changes that we call 'attainments', propagating the obscene lie that enlightenment isn't possible for 'householders') is possibly planetary destruction, although it isn't up to this community - whether we stick around or not, vastly more effective popular dharma is going to happen.

Yes, all good points, and I actually agree with everything.

I am merely pointing out that some of the "behaviour" here is not befitting of ariyas or practitioners of this noble path. I am (and this is not addressed at you but at everyone in general) NOT discrediting this community as being a bunch of fakes. Not at all.

Also, another thing is that I find a lot of people here tend to: adopt a certain way of talking (like Richard's style of writing for example) purely for... I don't know, whatever reason. I don't think that is fitting either, in fact I find it downright annoying.

Meaning Richard the AF founder? His divine scribblings actually cured my insomnia.

Ah yes.

Let's avoid the subject of Actualism for now.

I was merely referring to people copying his style of writing, so that... well why? Why would you... start writing and sounding like someone else? Like what's the point.