In his book, Saints and Psychopaths, Bill Hamilton describes the distinction between Hindu and Buddhist dharma using the analogy of the wave-particle theory of physics. According to him, Hindu's look at things from a broad perspectives, while Buddhists look at things from a more granular perspective.

I don't fully understand this analogy, despite a working understanding of wave-particle duality. He says the distinction between the two means you shouldn't intermingle Buddhist and Hindu practices, but that's what I've been doing... and I don't understand why that's a problem.

If someone could explain this analogy, and/or why it's bad to mix the practices, it'd be much appreciated.

What pages are you referring to?
My general take from memory is that within "Physical Reality" Buddha spoke of the rules and lessons to free yourself. Outside of physical reality he said little. (No expert here) In Hindu teachings they go way outside of physical reality models and into the nonphysical realms and try to explain the big picture...
well that's my take without reading the exact pages
~D

bill was coming from a perspective that when doing insight practices, where you looked at the granular nature of things, very digital, very particle, to do that really well required high dose, consistency, and the like, as any subtle solidification can block the fruits of the practice, this being the classic Mahasi perspective

he similarly would tell you that if you were practicing jhana, which is very analog, very wave, that you should really just do that: he would spend lots of time slowly reeling in, slowing down and calming and stabilizing attention so as to go really deep into jhana: heavy and well-done set-up yielding heavy and deep jhana

there is merit in what he says from a pragmatic point view and particularly early on, before people are at least stream enterers and before they have solid jhana skills

the Atman perspective similarly doesn't blend well in the short term with the anatman perspective (Self vs no-self), though in the long-term and once solid insight is established, something useful can come from both perspectives: cue Tom Pepper to jump in with something in his classic style here, ;)

daniel

Hi Daniel,

Thanks.

You know, this has been one of the nicest aspects of practice, the visible and invisible. I really cannot find a contradiction in theistic and buddhist practice. You know I had this funky out-of-body experience when I was 15 yo and in my mind I was like, "Huh, wow. Looks like there is a God." But that's definitely the kind of experience I kept to myself. I did however try to re-create the conditions for that experience for a good ten years and during the first three years afterwards, I really, really hoped it would happen again. It was amazing: no judgement, stunning welcome and truly a tremendous amount of perceived bright light. When I dropped out of it I was totally arched in bed with the pillow and my cheeks soaked, and I had a huge smile on my face. (And I can accept a materialist view, too, that this is just the brain chemistry of puberty. It could be both and something else.)

And with a cessation event and a dying event in meditation, it's really interesting to see that similar source-style pure or "free" consciousness, the unattached just consciousness turn on and off. And that gave me the since that at some point, even the massive bright source turns on and off. And I find that I like cosmological theories of the infiniverse (universes) that show universes expanding and collapsing all the time, spreading oddly like a drop of cream in tea until the gradients are all even.

Anyway, I relate to M T: it was natural for me to see "both" practices early on. In early 2012 I was having a lot of "in the wave" and "everything's particulate/analog-TV-static-like" experiences. What seems clear to me now (uh-oh...) is that a perception of particulates precedes, for me, jhana, and that jhana is much like I'd experience if I were on the back of a cetacean going for a deep dive: just a smooth, pulling down to the calm floor of very smooth, magnetized attention.