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7 August 2017

Sometime back I wrote this.
"I  find myself dismissing meditations on objects,dieties,mantras and mandalas as lower level to vipassana which in my opinion is the ultimate. I found myself looking at a Mahayana buddist book and thinking, this chantings and focusing on objects is creating more patterns in our brain, this is not what buddha taught."

http://mystic-babe.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/am-i-getting-intolerant.html

Sure ways of self realisation - this amazing book explains how all types of meditations work.
In one way it is true that the other ways of meditation create more mental patterns, but the other techniques will help us get to the state where we are able to do vipassana properly faster.
He says Vipassana is like walking towards enlightenment, where as tibetan buddhism(i.e tantra yoga) is going by rocket. (but then who id in a hurry? for some like me we need to understand how everything works, more than be enlightened :-)) also what u choose is based on your personality, for some vipassana is itself rocket fuel like for my cousin and Yuval Noah Harrari )
So my intolerance was short lived (atleast towards other meditation styles, not towards monothiest religions )
The first step in any meditation is controlling the monkey mind, Vipassana uses noticing the breath to achieve this, however this can be achieved by focusing on any object - a word - chanting, an image - mandala,  ishta devata, etc. Mandalas and mantras are like easter eggs which work on our subconscious mind.
Rishis of ancient India knew how to programme our mind with sounds and symbols. These tools will be there with us for a while on the journey, Ultimately like vipassana says we have to break thru these patterns as well to reach enlightenment.


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