Talking About Dharma
By Michael Erlewine
It’s hard not to refer to my own experience in talking about dharma because that’s all I have. How’s that for a Catch-22?
How to do that without seemingly gilding the lily, reifying our own experience and thus appearing too self-oriented. Not sure how society wants us to handle this. It is not socially acceptable to refer to ourselves too much, not to mention be labeled selfish.
Historically, this seems especially true of any reference to dharma and it’s results. We are not supposed to have any experience much less claim realization. I have spent decades watching how the Tibetan masters handle this, which is always professing that they have no realization whatsoever, and at best they say they are just repeating or parroting what they have read or been taught.
I get that, some kind of humility, but it is so transparent as to be embarrassing. Of course, they have some realization or knowledge, otherwise they would not be rinpoches or high teachers. This must be some form of cultural etiquette.
And it’s worse for those of us just learning dharma, when all we have, if we are honest, is our own experience for sure and what little realization we have accumulated, with no one else to speak for us or about us. And, as mentioned, it’s ridiculous to parrot the masters and feign humility.
At this point, we don’t have enough realization to even be humble and are trying to figure out what actually we do have. I have stumbled across this endlessly over the many decades I have been practicing dharma.
This is particularly true in that non-man’s-land from when we begin doing deity practices and eventually segue into the non-dual practices like Mahamudra and Dzogchen. No one talks about it.
Not only are the non-dual practices ineffable, meaning they cannot be expressed in language, yet folks either can’t or won’t try to talk about them, even though over the centuries there are libraries of written teachings that do.
Yet, people like me are expected to make sense of all this, each on our own. Yes, I understand that we each have to turn the wheel of the dharma on our own. However, I see nowhere where it says we have to do it alone. There is no reason why while practicing individually, on our own, collectively we should not discuss and try to bring clarity to the process of practicing dharma.
Dharma may be self-secret, but there is nothing secretive about the non-dual dharma practices other than the inherent difficulty of accomplishing them. IMO, we need to be able to talk about all this.
[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]
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“As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.”
