Gurus, Buddha, Jesus and the spiritual path that kills you and you become someone else, if you don't bolt and run

Sometimes I go online in search of someone, or someones, demonstrating symptoms of being run, advised, corrected and steered by something bigger and smarter than themselves.

Sometimes I go online looking for something interesting, something to engage. Perhaps proof that idle hands, or idle mind, is the devil's workshop? 😎

Recently, I saw something in an online spirituality group with a gob of members, and perhaps it was the devil that made me do it, or perhaps it was something else. 

Everyone uses a fake name at this forum.

monkcaran
Hello everyone. I am a Buddhist monk in Thailand's Chiang Mai. I had previously started a thread on this forum, and it was quite wholesome! If anyone is interested in posing questions to a Buddhist monk, I've set aside some time for that. Especially questions that are beneficial and relevant to ever

Puzzleheaded (me)
What I would like to know from you, which you can write in this thread, is living examples of your own journey from where you were to your becoming a Buddhist and then what happened, where you were tested, challenged, strained through sieves, roasted in furnaces, drowned in tsunamis, blown up in volcanoes, swallowed by black holes and your remains spit out, mirrors you were stood before, etc.

monkcaran
The importance of positive thinking, positive attitude, and positive behavior is a central teaching in Buddhism. According to the Buddha, our thoughts, attitudes, and actions shape our reality and determine our level of happiness and well-being.
Instead of discussing negative or difficult topics, why don't we focus on positive and uplifting subjects?

Puzzleheaded
This is your post topic, and you can choose what you wish to discuss, of course. However, I am pretty sure that anyone who has been on a spiritual path for a while knows there is nothing easy about it; that it is better not to begin the spiritual journey, than to begin and then give up because it is so very difficult. 

There was a Sufi poet named Rumi, who is revered by many today. He wrote, or channeled, a classic poem about the spiritual journey, called "The Chickpea." Perhaps the poem was about what Rumi's own spiritual teacher Shams was doing to Rumi? Or it was about what God was doing to Rumi? 

I had a Tibetan Buddhist friend, who followed a lama, who was a refugee from Lasha. My friend also was a Jungian analyst, had trained at the Jung Institute in Zurich, where he lived. His mother was Dora Kalf, also a Jungian analyst, had studied under Carl Jung himself. She later founded Sandplay Therapy, which her good friend the Dalai Lama told her was applied Buddhism. She said she was not a Buddhist, but was an esoteric Christian. She also was my friend. 

Her son told me that there is no God in Buddhism; that Buddhism is about increasing one's consciousness. 

I later read that Buddha said he was not.a god, but was merely a man, and that a teacher greater than he would come come day. I wondered who that greater teacher might be? 

Was it Jesus in the Gospels? He said his baptism was in fire and in spirit; no one can enter the Kingdom of God, who has not been reborn; the road to life is difficult and the gate is narrow and few enter; many are called, but few are chosen; the work is great and the laborers are few. 

That Jesus mostly is ignored in mainstream Christendom today, which uses a simple, magical salvation formula, instead of Jesus in the Gospel's formula. 

I have told many people, who were born into Christendom and then left it and found a guru in another spiritual tradition, that what they actually did was find a Jesus they could swallow, and sooner or later, in this lifetime, or another, they will have to go back into and through what they ran from. 

Not back into and through the religion, but into and through what the religion mostly sets aside, or ignores, in favor of something much easier, instead of going through the changes and into something much, much larger, which has no end point, but is ever expanding, based on my personal experience. 

That's what angels known in the Bible did to me, who had left Christendom searching for help. I tried the New Age, and found it interesting, but it did not take me where my soul apparently wanted me to go. 

The angels turned me every which a way up loose, upside down and inside out, and stood me before many mirrors, looking at myself. They began doing that in early 1987, and they are still at it. 

I do not call myself a Christian. I do not attend a Christian church. Yet, I don't know when I'm ever not in church.

This fell out of me in the spring of 1993, the third year of a dark night of the soul:

Earth...

The sacred prism 

through which souls are refracted

into their elemental parts,

purified in Holy Fire,

then one-forged

and sent on their way

to not even God knows where,

simply because they are all

unique emanations of God,

evolving...

This fell out of me about a year later, as the dark night, unknown to me, was preparing to lift:

Shaman you now are.

Angels walk beside you

and call you their brother,

even as you curse the heavens

for making you one who weilds the lightning.

Be kind to your brother's and sisters,

but take no prisoners.

Kill them all in my name,

as I have killed you,

so that they, and you, 

might live.

I did not yet know the author was a huge blacksmith, who would come my way later that year in a vision, before all hell broke loose and my time in Boulder abruptly and roughly would end. 

In the vision, the blacksmith had me in his hot furnace on his great black anvil, pounding me with his great black hammer into something that suited him. 

Not long after, I went to Nepal and trekked up to Anapurna Base Camp. At sunrise, the blacksmith appeared in front of and as large as those majestic peaks. I dropped to one knee and heard, "The son and I are one. The son and I are one." 

It was quite a while before I understood the blacksmith was the Christ. By then, I had somehow survived a 16 months black night of the soul in Birmingham, which had made the no fun 4-year dark night in Boulder seem like heaven. 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo,com