How I came to study the Tibetan Buddhist Dharma

 My parents had been Mystical Christian Ministers from the time I was 6 to 12 years old in Los Angeles of a church they ran then on Hope Street in downtown Los Angeles. So, I was exposed to a lot of intelligent people who believed basically in positive thinking a lot then. However, the other side of this is when does your positive thinking become unrealistic and actually fatal? This I think would be the question I would ask of all Mystical Christians or Christians in general. When does your positive thinking move over into such an unrealistic place where it causes your deaths?

This kind of thinking likely started with Emerson and Transcendentalism and moved towards Mary Baker Eddy in Christian Science later in the 1800s and then moved forward into Unity and Science of Mind  and other groups like this in the early 1900s. Thinking positive is how people settled this country to begin with. But, at a certain point it becomes too much also.

And finding that balance (or the attempt at finding that balance) I think was what eventually led me to Buddhism and especially Tibetan Buddhism.

There is a story about Gautama Buddha sitting against a tree in Bodhgaya, India 2500 or more years ago now (500 years before Christ) and listening to a boat go by or a raft of some kind down the river there. There was a music teacher teaching his student as the boat slowly went by and he said, "If the string is too taught it breaks on the instrument but if it is too loose it doesn't make the right sound."

This made Buddha think about how extremism was not the answer and he came up with the Lam Rim path of Buddhism or "The Middle Way" of the string not being too taught (so it breaks) or being too loose (so it doesn't do anything but flap with not the right sounds.

This middle way or Lam Rim reminds me of the Ancient Greek Statement "Moderation in all things". It demonstrates how if you get to extreme about anything often you go crazy or die.

So, embracing a "Middle Way Path" or "Moderation in all things" is one reason I'm still alive here at age 76.

Because extremism both kills and makes people insane (or they are dead) one or the other.

We see it in the news around the world as people get too extreme about anything. Often people are shot at like Trump has been (and looks like he will continue to be). So, we see all around us how extremism kills.

We see the October 7th event in Israel and the thousands of deaths on both sides that are the direct result of this extremism. And we don't know where all this will lead except maybe more and more deaths of both sides ongoing for hundreds or even thousands of years.

Extremism is death both for the extremist and for whoever they hate including themselves.

So, the "Middle Way path" of "Moderation in all things" appears to be the balanced path to Longevity of having compassion both for oneself and for all other beings as well.

By God's Grace