Who is Jon Gabriel? What are the Guru Papers? And what is Diamond Way Meditation? Well very simply:
Jon Gabriel is a former Wall Street burnout who gained over 200 pounds living a stressful life and doing work he hated. Somehow he got clued in, changed his life and developed a diet-free mind-body approach to weight loss. He’s been able to achieve and stay at his ideal weight for years, although his weight loss was initially not rapid. He has since written a book on his weight loss strategy: The Gabriel Method.
The Guru Papers is a book on the hidden structures of authoritarian power in society. Although it covers many aspects of modern life, the book is titled after the Guru/disciple relationship common to Eastern religions.
Diamond Way is a style of Buddhism that specifically uses Guru Yoga (meditation on a teacher) as the fastest way to enlightenment. Diamond Way Buddhism relies heavily and specifically on a Lama (or Guru) as a living example and is thus supposedly the fastest way to enlightenment.
The reason I got the Guru Papers was to evaluate my connection with the Diamond Way group of which I am a member. The reason I got the Gabriel Method is because I’m a big fan of Matt Stone and his 180 Degree Health website. Matt, like many others, like myself, wants real understanding of health and nutrition and Jon Gabriel’s been a hot topic on his blog lately.
I’ve been not doing my Diamond Way meditations for a while now. I get this way every once in a while. A period of pulling back. A period of assessment. The Guru Papers is a good book. I recommend it to anyone looking to build self trust. It’s fascinating too. But the weakest chapter I have read so far is “Oneness, Enlightenment, and the Mystical Experience”. The authors seem to have a pretty fair grasp of Tibetan Buddhism including many of the contradictions. But then they credited themselves for pointing out these contradictions, rather than citing the Buddhist teachings themselves. For example, they identify the experience of unity (as experienced in Diamond Way meditation) as separate from the dualistic concept of Oneness, as conveyed by the teachings. And thus they point out that ironically this dualistic concept is trying to describe something non-dualistic. What they don’t point out is how non-dualism is supposed to be conveyed using the structures of thoughts, words, and language. Hence the Diamond Way reliance on direct transmission through experience. They also describe the experience of unity as useful but again, don’t state much on how to achieve or apply it without the context of some broader teachings.
So how does this bring me to Jon Gabriel? Well, I’ve been interested in various aspects of the mind-body connection lately. Another example is the book Sound Sleep, Sound Mind, which I recently picked up to help with my insomnia. Like The Gabriel Method, it recommends specific visualization techniques that are very similar to meditation. The intention of each book is different, but the approaches are very similar. Each book also goes somewhat into the science of the mind-body connection but I know enough to know that mindset and stress levels have a very strong connection with hormones and there is definite feedback loop there with the body. Anyway, insomnia and overweight are just two possible symptoms of a mind-body system out of whack.
But what really caught me was trying out the visualization techniques described by Jon Gabriel. One of them was very like the Loving Eyes (Chenrezig) meditation, except with less imagery. He also described the different stages of brain waves that the brain enters into, when it is more open to suggestion. His point is that that is when you communicate with yourself and your body about what you want in your life. He leaves it open ended to sort of let yourself “program” whatever beliefs you want. But when I tried this myself, and then let the things I felt like saying come up in while in this state, I started thinking things like “everything is perfect and pure”, “all beings are Buddhas”, or “all thoughts are wisdom”. Oops… guess I started doing Diamond Way meditation.
So I guess my point is, if my own approach to establishing a mind-body balance culminates in something very similar to Diamond Way meditation, what was the point that the Guru Papers was trying to convey? I was going to pull some quotes, contrasting the Guru Papers with Lama Ole, but it would be too much effort to try and find good quotes at the moment.
Specifically though, the Guru Papers keeps talking about how the Tibetan Buddhist teachings keep structuring things in this either/or framework. But in The Great Seal, Lama Ole repeatedly brings up moving past the either/or worldview into the both/and. I.e. both enlightened and not enlightened. Both existing and not existing. Both emptiness and form. But anyways… I digress.
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