Foreword and Warning
those that don't. There are those who are masters of some things and those that have more work to do. While there is a strangely pervasive movement in the West to try to imagine everyone is equal in the world of spirituality, it is obviously completely delusional and wrong-headed.
When I went looking for teachers and friends to practice with and help me along, rather than get mad that some people claimed to know more than I did, I was excited by the opportunity, however rare, to study with people who knew what they were doing. This just makes sense. Read this as another warning: if you get good enough at these things, people will often have bad reactions to you if you go around talking about it, and the number who will instead find your achievements a source of inspiration and empowerment, as they rightly should, will likely be few.
On that same front, it is a very strange thing to have such a completely different language, set of experiences and perspectives from most of the people around me. I can often feel like an alien wearing a trench coat of normalcy, and I dream of a world where conversations about the sorts of events and insights that have come to dominate my everyday experience are much more common and normal. Reading between the lines, you should take this admission as yet another warning. If you get way into this stuff, you will discover this same loneliness.
I should also mention that I consider myself and many of those who hail from the lineages from which I primarily draw to be dharma cowboys, mavericks, rogues, and outsiders. Really wanting to get somewhere is a sure ticket to feeling this way in most Western Buddhist circles. What is ironic is that I also see myself as an extreme traditionalist. The strange thing is that these days to be a Buddhist traditionalist, one who really tries to plunge the depths of the heart, mind and body as the Buddha so clearly admonished his followers to do, is to fly in the face of much of mainstream meditation culture.
In that same vein, I should further mention that the path I have followed has been dangerous, destabilizing more often than calm, excruciating more often than pleasant, harder to integrate than most other dharma paths I have heard of, and in general quite a rough ride. It has also been profound, amazing, and more glorious than most other paths I have heard tell of. Surfing the ragged edges of reality has been ix
