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Re: Dzogchen and ngöndro

Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2012 9:33 pm
by Adamantine
Dechen Norbu wrote:Adamantine, I'm not answering your accusations or feeding your provocations.
Please remain on topic.

Thank you.
Dechen, I ask the same of you. You are the one that used your personal experience as a qualifier of ngondro not working, period, and not relating to Dzogchen practice. So your claims about your personal experience are "on topic". Then others share their personal experience about the topic at hand, and you discount them. So your discounting the experience of others is "on topic?" I reply that this is crazy-making, and suddenly it is off-topic. How convenient. You can't dismiss this progression of dialogue as "accusations" or "provocations" You can ignore them, that's your right. I find it a bit odd that you can't seem to see the contradictions in your approach though.

Re: Dzogchen and ngöndro

Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2012 9:45 pm
by Karma Dorje
The New Yorker wrote: Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University’s business school, argues in a new book, “The Righteous Mind,” that to understand human beings, and their politics, you need to understand that we are descended from ancestors who would not have survived if they hadn’t been very good at belonging to groups. He writes that “our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group’s interests, in competition with other groups. We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players.”

One of those mechanisms is figuring out how to believe what the group believes. Haidt sees the role that reason plays as akin to the job of the White House press secretary. He writes, “No matter how bad the policy, the secretary will find some way to praise or defend it. Sometimes you’ll hear an awkward pause as the secretary searches for the right words, but what you’ll never hear is: ‘Hey, that’s a great point! Maybe we should rethink this policy.’ Press secretaries can’t say that because they have no power to make or revise policy. They’re told what the policy is, and their job is to find evidence and arguments that will justify the policy to the public.” For that reason, Haidt told me, “once group loyalties are engaged, you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Thinking is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for supporting evidence.”

Psychologists have a term for this: “motivated reasoning,” which Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, defines as “when a person is conforming their assessments of information to some interest or goal that is independent of accuracy”—an interest or goal such as remaining a well-regarded member of his political party, or winning the next election, or even just winning an argument.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012 ... z1yMvTLcsw" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I read this the other day and had to chuckle about the parochialism this ngondro debate has evoked.

Re: Dzogchen and ngöndro

Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2012 9:53 pm
by heart
Karma Dorje wrote:
The New Yorker wrote: Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University’s business school, argues in a new book, “The Righteous Mind,” that to understand human beings, and their politics, you need to understand that we are descended from ancestors who would not have survived if they hadn’t been very good at belonging to groups. He writes that “our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group’s interests, in competition with other groups. We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players.”

One of those mechanisms is figuring out how to believe what the group believes. Haidt sees the role that reason plays as akin to the job of the White House press secretary. He writes, “No matter how bad the policy, the secretary will find some way to praise or defend it. Sometimes you’ll hear an awkward pause as the secretary searches for the right words, but what you’ll never hear is: ‘Hey, that’s a great point! Maybe we should rethink this policy.’ Press secretaries can’t say that because they have no power to make or revise policy. They’re told what the policy is, and their job is to find evidence and arguments that will justify the policy to the public.” For that reason, Haidt told me, “once group loyalties are engaged, you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Thinking is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for supporting evidence.”

Psychologists have a term for this: “motivated reasoning,” which Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, defines as “when a person is conforming their assessments of information to some interest or goal that is independent of accuracy”—an interest or goal such as remaining a well-regarded member of his political party, or winning the next election, or even just winning an argument.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012 ... z1yMvTLcsw" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I read this the other day and had to chuckle about the parochialism this ngondro debate has evoked.
Yeah :smile:

/magnus

Re: Dzogchen and ngöndro

Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2012 10:37 pm
by Ogyen
So at first I thought - perfect, this thread is totally for someone like me. New to Dzogchen, preparing for preliminaries, this should answer all my questions!!

Here is my play by play commentary.

Page 1 - wait, do I need these preliminaries or not? Answer: NO, it's a rope, NO, it's a tree, NO, it's a fan, No you're all wrong, it's a wall. Ugh...where's the ELEPHANT?!

Page 4 - wow, this thread is the most confusing thing I've ever stuck my eyes in. :tantrum: what IS dzogchen?!?!?!?!?! Is Ngondro truly useless??

Page 10 - I give up. This IS the big kids' club. I'm hopeless, I'll never understand this...

Page 14 - No, I changed my mind. I don't give up. Screw the confusing willy-waving, I can (somehow) understand this too. Ok, back to the basics, the good points: preliminaries are ok, no preliminaries are ok. Got it. Different paths, different methods, different minds. One primordial state. Got it. It's like driving a car. You can just drive it if you need to, you don't need to know the inner mechanics of fuel-injection to make it go from point a to point b. But if you break down.. ok ngondro is a FOUNDATIONAL preliminary useful for many practices.

Page 17 - Ngondro is only useful if you are going that way. THAT way is determined by your path and teacher's instructions. My teacher wants me to do Ngondro as the rest of our sangha, but never said anything about not being able to take dzogchen teachings. So this must be like two different ways to learn a language: through good old fashioned grammar, OR through pure immersion. Regardless, speaking the language IS speaking it. NO artificiality there. The concepts I want to speak are already in me, I just have no vocabulary yet in the new language to speak them with...

Page 20 - ok, I think I have the hang of this mess of a thread. It's not that any one way is right, it's just that there are many roads to Rome, and the point is to go to Rome. The new language is that of stillness, I have many options to benefit from. My teacher is wise, I will do what he advises and if he says, Ngondro is useful for me, then I trust it. But I can also seek out methods which also resonate with the Dzogchen that already is. I am. That is enough to wake up.

:meditate:

Re: Dzogchen and ngöndro

Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2012 10:40 pm
by Dechen Norbu
:thumbsup:

Re: Dzogchen and ngöndro

Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2012 10:57 pm
by rose
Temporarily locked.