Changing the Name

It's become clear to me that we need a new title.

When I started "Free the Teaching!" it perhaps reflected accurately my feelings at the time, following the Inquiry Report and the Channel 4 news piece. On the one hand, the leadership was advocating change, reflection and progress; on the other, there was the sense that some were more concerned with damage limitation. The aggression of our opponents was being returned tit for tat. I was frustrated with this, and I had lost much of my respect for the reactionaries. In short, I wanted to have a go.

Of course, that was not my only motivation. I had also come to believe that our problems were not the result of malignant outside forces, or (even worse) of any shortcomings in the Teaching as we have received it, but of a failure to fully understand that Teaching or put it into practice. So "Free the Teaching" also represents a call for all of us to stop limiting the Teaching with our ideas about it. This was not a woolly or sentimental view - I had some clear ideas about what we had got wrong, and about what needed to be done to put it right. I wanted to test those ideas on others.

Maybe the most important point I wanted to make was that it is time for all of us to take a stand and stop relying on something external to us called "the Teaching". We need to recognise that ahankara is not original sin, but an illusion. There is something called the self, which is what we really are - not just in samadhi or when we reach an imagined Himalaya of the spirit, but what we are here and now, whether or not we know it. The ego distorts things, of course; but its effect is entirely peripheral to the self, and to our essential nature, which is particular to us, but also pure. Our talents, our affections, our deeper impulses and emotions are all routes towards the self (or, if you must, the Self). I'm OK, and you're OK as well. That is what His Holiness is telling us.

What worried me most was to see that there was so much despondency around. Some people were furiously hanging on to their old view of the School; those that had dropped that were, on the whole, losing their faith in it. If we were to procure a Guna-Meter from somewhere (can you get them on mail-order?) I think that the needle would have been pointing towards T and dropping. In order to get back to the S, we had to have some R.

Anyway, maybe that has been done enough. I'd like this blog to retain its edge and bite, where necessary - those are aspects of reason, after all; it has to be a forum for open discussion, where people can express their views freely; but perhaps with a little less heat, and a little more light.

So - we need a new name ... click "comments" below and have a go.