DharmaCatLamp
Member
Howdy.
I watched a film recently called Naan Kadavul. It was pretty good, it's about a kid being left in a city in India just for him to become an Aghori. For those of you who do not know the Aghoris are a group of Hindu mystics who practice a lot of kind of spooky stuff. They hang out around cremation grounds and cover themselves in ash from human pyres, they will eat dead bodies or parts of them, meditate on corpses the whole 9 yards.
That is some pretty crazy stuff and I wouldn't recommend doing it lol. What I will say though is that this spirituality has a point to it. In a society like India where people are highly stratified and obsessed with purity it makes sense for a group like the Aghoris to come about.
The point they make, even if it is in an elongated way, is that God is in everything. There can't really be pure or impure if God is in everything. Their practice is often sensationalized and they have a tendency to be portrayed as dark magicians. However I think at the heart of it they make some pretty good points. I also don't think focusing on death is entirely a bad thing. I have done plenty of charnel ground contemplation and can say it has helped me in a variety of ways.
Charnel ground contemplation is the practice recommended by the Buddha of going to a charnel ground and witnessing the decaying bodies or to focus on your own body and imagine what will happen with it after you die. This practice is not recommended for people new to meditation as it can be kind of disturbing. The first time I did it I felt incredibly weird for at least a few hours afterwards. It is meant at least in part to help mendicants get over sexual desire.
Now to be fair if someone said " These guys look crazy" I don't think my first instinct would be to say no. This is kind of crazy and is certainly an extreme form of spirituality. I don't think I would recommend most people do this sort of stuff. I just think it's important to remember that God is both the order and the chaos. We should not be so attached to our purity and we should be willing to understand the variety that comes from religious experience.
Aghori practice can be kind of horrific to some of us but there is truth in it. Thankfully for my stomach we don't have to go and experience the aghori lifestyle to take a positive message from it.
Also the film is pretty good and I really like this song from it. He doesn't do anything too crazy on screen. I put this in debates cause I could easily see people thinking this stuff is completely nutter butter crazy.
I watched a film recently called Naan Kadavul. It was pretty good, it's about a kid being left in a city in India just for him to become an Aghori. For those of you who do not know the Aghoris are a group of Hindu mystics who practice a lot of kind of spooky stuff. They hang out around cremation grounds and cover themselves in ash from human pyres, they will eat dead bodies or parts of them, meditate on corpses the whole 9 yards.
That is some pretty crazy stuff and I wouldn't recommend doing it lol. What I will say though is that this spirituality has a point to it. In a society like India where people are highly stratified and obsessed with purity it makes sense for a group like the Aghoris to come about.
The point they make, even if it is in an elongated way, is that God is in everything. There can't really be pure or impure if God is in everything. Their practice is often sensationalized and they have a tendency to be portrayed as dark magicians. However I think at the heart of it they make some pretty good points. I also don't think focusing on death is entirely a bad thing. I have done plenty of charnel ground contemplation and can say it has helped me in a variety of ways.
Charnel ground contemplation is the practice recommended by the Buddha of going to a charnel ground and witnessing the decaying bodies or to focus on your own body and imagine what will happen with it after you die. This practice is not recommended for people new to meditation as it can be kind of disturbing. The first time I did it I felt incredibly weird for at least a few hours afterwards. It is meant at least in part to help mendicants get over sexual desire.
Now to be fair if someone said " These guys look crazy" I don't think my first instinct would be to say no. This is kind of crazy and is certainly an extreme form of spirituality. I don't think I would recommend most people do this sort of stuff. I just think it's important to remember that God is both the order and the chaos. We should not be so attached to our purity and we should be willing to understand the variety that comes from religious experience.
Aghori practice can be kind of horrific to some of us but there is truth in it. Thankfully for my stomach we don't have to go and experience the aghori lifestyle to take a positive message from it.
Also the film is pretty good and I really like this song from it. He doesn't do anything too crazy on screen. I put this in debates cause I could easily see people thinking this stuff is completely nutter butter crazy.
