| | RE: MCTB2  Answer 7/8/18 5:13 PM as a reply to Raving Rhubarb. As Laurel rightly pointed out, there are aspects of that phase in MCTB2 in the emotional models section (and also the rapture section), but:
1) The autobiographical narrative in MCTB2 largely cuts off in April, 2003, as that is when the essential point of my Buddhist practice occurred. That was 15 years ago. I could write hundreds, if not thousands, of pages about what has happened during those 15 years, of which actualism would be a relatively small part, and I am not sure what I would say about it beyond what I wrote in the essay I wrote about it some years ago. I hardly think of that relatively small period in my overall practice history except when I talk with those who are still interested in actualism for whatever reason.
2) This is a book called Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, and so, as such, I have largely focused on Buddhism. This seems reasonable to me. While I have pursued all sorts of things during my life and practice, I left most of that out to focus on the topic of the book. Topics that consumed hundreds of hours of practice and study get sentences or paragraphs only. Some are mentioned in a single line or even just hinted at in a phrase. While obviously MCTB2 contains vastly more autobiographical material than MCTB, still, it is not an autobiography, and I did my best to cut the narrative down to key practice-related points and do only a thumbnail sketch of topics that could have been books in themselves. For example, my phase of exploring Ceremonial Magick, which consumed many hundreds of hours of time at least, gets precious few words, though you can see some influence if you look in the magickal sections. My Daoist study gets almost no words at all. I say almost nothing about my yoga phase. I say very little about dreams in comparison to how important dreams have been in my life and practice. I gloss over my childhood and familial trials and tribulations in a few sentences, but they had profound impacts on my practice. My time exploring Zen gets summarized in the recommendation of a few books. Adolescence itself gets about a paragraph, but it was this huge and complex ordeal that again had large practice implications. The situation with Kenneth gets stripped to bare essentials, but the whole story is like some sort of long-running, low-brow, petty, soap-opera tragedy that has lasted for 30 TV seasons and is still going, and that had way more impact on my thoughts on practice, life in general, and the limitations of insight practice as regards social interactions than the brief AF period, which comparitively is but a blip in the whole decades-long timeline.
3) Even with my attempts to streamline things, the book is 320,000 words, which, were it not in crown quarto size, single spaced, and in a small font, would be about 1,300 pages in many normal book formats. Seriously, I think it is now too long, and so have assembled a team to try to cut to the practice nuggets rather than expand the thing out. If you want more on Actualism, there are hundreds of thousands of words written about it in all sorts of forums, and Richard Maynard has been extremely prolific, as have numerous members of his group, and so I hardly think there is any dearth of writing on the topic. Seriously, what more needs to be said? The number of threads even on the DhO about it would take days to read unless you read exceedingly fast, so perhaps that will satisfy whatever lack you perceive.
4) My writings are fractious enough even when I discuss traditional Buddhism. Adding something as obviously inflammatory as Actualism to the mix would hardly help, I feel. Even the DhO, which is more tolerant of a range of practices and frameworks than many settings, did not weather its Actualism phase well, and one can easily trace some of the major schism and alienation of participants on the forum to that period. Many would list that phase of Actualisms discussion as among the most divisive of the DhO's phases. I get enough of that already with MCTB as it is. I personally found that there was something about Actualism that really got people riled up either for or against, and found that people had a very hard time stripping it down to core technologies and focuses, instead getting rapidly spun up into the politics, rhetoric, personalities, dramas, scandals, cult-like aspects, and hype. It seems to rob even very reasonable people of their level-headedness, and many otherwise reasonable people would get polarized and inflammatory against those who were attempting to be level-headed about it, as plenty felt that only extreme positions on Actualism could possibly be valid and that some inquisitive, open-minded, exploratory, experimental, balanced, curious and empirical approach could only be seriously considered by fools who had betrayed the purity of Buddhism. Similarly, there were those who felt that any attempt to deconstruct, critically investigate, analyze, fuse, cross-correlate, moderate, incorporate, question, or modify what they felt was a pure, perfect and holy teaching of Actualism was vile heresy and an attempt to polute Actualism with the delusional, useless, dead-end "180-degrees opposite" that they felt Buddhism was. These viewponts fractured the DhO at points and alienated many who felt that the atmosphere was just too toxic to stick around. Many never returned. I still get emails which start along the lines of, "Hey, I have this question about practice. I would have posted it on the DhO, but I left during the toxic AF period and presume it is still going on, having never looked at the DhO again, as I was so disgusted." |
