When I said, “I can’t tell you how true this seems to be in some Buddhist circles,” I am mainly referring to the participants of these buddhist circles, or the “sangha members” rather then the teachers.

That is not to say that some teachers don’t show this kind of tendency, but for the most part the teachers I’ve studied with seem to have a greater depth and breadth then what I’m pointing to as Boomeritis Buddhism…

An interesting thing when pointing out “Boomeritis” is that someone can easily be pointing at Boomertis from a stance of Boomeritis themselves (something I’ve been guilty of myself). The other thing being that if I am at an “integral” wave of understanding and I haven’t yet seen a level or wave above that (because it hasn’t emerged yet in myself), then I will easily confuse anything that looks like the previous wave (in this example ‘green’) with that higher stage, when it is obviously much different.

My main point of this post is that in some ‘buddhist circles’ the people that tend to want to be a part of these communities are involved, not to transcend their egoic identifications, but to subtly raise their ego to a place where it can’t be touched. They arm themselves with Buddhist jargon, go to silent retreats and talk the entire time, brag about how many years they’ve been practicing, who they’ve studied with, and how much ‘knowledge’ they have with other retreatants (this is a real-life example from the retreat I just got back from). Narcissism at it’s most clever.

Can you offer a specific example of a known modern Buddhist teacher who you think is infected with the “disease” of “boomeritis Buddhism”?

No doubt that that can happen in any circle, including Wilber and Cohen’s cirlces.

Bob (bobyu at yahoo dot com)