Oops again, 'Doing their nuts' maybe doesn't translate for you guys. Means getting frustrated, excitable, even angry...

That's rather lovely and profound stuff from Robert Monroe, and well supported by lots of other traditions too. Rather than needing to learn PUL Buddhist teaching says that it (wisdom and compassion) are inherently our true or Buddha nature.

That everybody is enlightened already, but that it gets covered by layers of ego built obscuration. That depending on how far we get sucked into this reality (Samsara) we lose touch with it more and more.

All spiritual practice/paths being about peeling this back so that we reconnect, recover our knowing. The loss starts when we pass the first judgement early in life. The five skandas framework in Buddhism set out how we get from first contact with form to having built an ego by judging all we've encountered,  by then seeing all through the filter of pre-conception.

I've never worked with a guru, the point about egotistical teachers delivering is one that's made in the book on Vajrayana mentioned above.

These are my favourite Sanskrit words (from the end of the Heart Sutra):

OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA

Approximately: 'Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone to the other shore. Realisation. Yippee!!!!!'

Thank you very much for the kind wishes and the help. My best wishes to you all too....

Hi Icat. I might tend towards slightly different words, but essentially I agree on the potential power of vows and the need to be careful of them.

My own take tends towards the view that mind  is ultimately all powerful, and at the highest (God/unity) level creates all. Which means that a vow taken in circumstances where you connect at highest/deepest level is binding in the very fundamental sense that depending on what outcome you commit to (choose) whether keeping or breaking the vow that that will come into existence.

Your higher self, or God or Buddha nature  - if the vow was taken at this level - will bring whatever reality you committed into existence for your subjective/relative/local ego existence.

There lies I guess potentially the power and the danger of vows.

I don't know, but it seems to me that there is a safety mechanism - that the process is probably self regulating. That if your level of awareness is such that you take the vow at the superficial level of ego/subjective knowing that it's implications are limited. But that if you truly have reached the stage where you can enter into a vajrayana vow at the level that it's supposed to operate from (vajra or higher awareness) that it's potentially very powerful indeed. That as they say the vow and it's consequences good and bad may then follow you from life to life for good or ill.

With the only hope for releasing a vow of this sort being achievement of the level of awareness at which the vow was taken.. But if the effect of breaking the vow is to plunge you into very difficult circumstances that may prove very difficult indeed to achieve ......