[Buddha-l] Shamatha book--clarification

[Franz Metcalf]

Curt et al.,

Curt wrote,

> There is nothing "courageous" about Batchelor's agnosticism.

It mystifies me how you could consider that powerful, clear, and 
unflinching passage you quote from Batchelor as not courageous. 
Batchelor is admitting the possibility--painful and arduous as it 
is--of growing and changing as we age. And that means he's challenging 
himself to continue that journey. He's calling his years as monk an act 
of "dressing up." Can you imagine how hard that is? And, in this act, 
in this process, he's not naively denying those phases, he's not 
splitting. Indeed, he invokes Freud himself as support for the depth 
and nuance of this hard growth. (But then I suppose you don't consider 
Freud courageous, either.) And now he's not merely facing the fact that 
what he reviled is, in fact, deep and vital; he's actually *using* it 
to critically better himself and the culture he sprung from.

If you don't think all this takes courage, I can't imagine what you 
think does.

Thank you for the beautiful excerpt. You may not have liked it, but I 
certainly did. We never know just how we're going to spread the dharma.

Franz