A message from the heart: I don't have the wisdom to find words which are adequate as a response to your message. The sense of hurt and despair, at least in the context of this forum, saddens me. An intuitive response:Simon E. wrote: Dont kid yourself, Of course its personal.
I will take full responsibility for my part in the response to my posts.
It was unwise and possibly premature by a few years.
It did not occur to me ( naively ) that by responding to Macolm's account of his journey with empathy that the reaction would be defensiveness,fear, and dismissiveness.
But actually that should have been predictable..after all you do not know me.
Although I suspect that Silent Bob is someone I knew while we were both students of CTR.
I received teachings from the 16th Karmapa.
I knew Ole before he was Lama Ole.
I also recieved teachings from Kalu Rinpoche and Chime Yongden Rinpoche... before becoming a student of Thrangu Rinpoche.
Whose retreats in Nepal I attended.
Between that time and becoming a student of ChNNN I had grown weary of western Buddhists.
I looked around and saw few of them walking the talk.
Most of the time many of them were notable for a lack of basic human kindness and decency.
They were filled with opinion and a need for attention.
Many of them, a much higher proportion than the general public, were depressed or suffered from clinical anxiety. ( I am a psychotherapist )
Their Buddhism may not in all cases have been the cause of their clinical condition, but it sure as hell wasn't helping it.
Instead it was making solid their neurosis and grasping after an identity.
In short ,when I read the post which led to Namdrol becoming Malcolm I was moved by it, and felt the need against my own better judgement to respond.
This was a mistake. This online community has formed over several years and has well established behaviors. The mores are embedded.
Unless one has the kind of clout that Macolm clearly has, any questioning of those mores are seen as a threat and the result is aggression.
Self appointed guardians of the Dharma take up their cudgels,
So as I said...a mistake.
Good will to all of good will.
Any contact I have in future with this forum will be of a " read only " kind.
A more intellectual response, but not one which really engages with your message as it should: A pattern I've seen many times, both in my own life and the lives of others, is what Hegelians perhaps call "the leaping transformation of a thing into its opposite". As a practising psychotherapist, it is unlikely that you have not encountered it. An example of this comes to mind from Isaac Deutcher's The Prophet Armed, the magnificent first volume of his Trotsky trilogy. In his account of Trotsky's youth and involvement in his first illegal group, which included both Marxists and Narodniks (populists), who were not Marxists and some of whom were anti-Marxist. There was fierce debate within the group about the virtues and vices of Marxism, and the young Lev Davidovich Bronstein (this was before he had taken the non-de-guerre "Trotsky") was the most vociferous and eloquent opponent of Marxism in the group for a long time. It turned out, interestingly, that the ferocity with which he opposed Marxism in these debates was in fact a patina. His opposition to Marxism was not nearly as inflexible as he was at pains to make it seem. Underneath it all, probably subliminally, he was becoming increasingly persuaded of the virtues of Marxism, this presumably passed some inner threshold, and lo and behold one fine day he reversed his public position completely. While I do not expect something of this kind to happen en-masse on the list, my sense is that the passion in many of the messages and the extent to which Malcolm's changed positions have stirred things up tells a story about positions which are perhaps somewhat less entrenched, underneath it all, than they appear to be on the surface. Something I've also learnt in ther areas of life is that it is important to be very patient indeed. Much of my own passion has been invested in activism and awareness-raising around intersex -- I am intersexed: from development in the womb, my anatomy has not followed the usual paths of male or female -- and it took literally years for seeds which I planted here in South Africa to begin to germinate and to sprout. Please don't lose heart.