Consider carefully the differences and similarities between confidence, arrogance, and empowering others to realize that they can do it also.

The word to the wise is: don’t believe me or anyone else! Take the time to verify these things for yourself from your own direct experience.

I could easily be fooling myself, you or both of us on numerous points 349

So Who The Heck Is Daniel M. Ingram?

and for all sorts of reasons from innocent to evil. There certainly is a well-developed and ancient tradition of doing so. However, “my”

attainments shouldn’t matter so much to you, as the only person’s understanding that will really help you is your own.

My personal experiences with the “psychic powers” are not yet as fully developed as the more fundamental areas, but I have enough experience to be able to help all but the most advanced practitioner of them. As to scholarship, I feel that reading widely and really considering the meaning of what one reads and how it might actually be applied is a very good idea, and have myself read around 150 dharma books, both traditional and modern. While I have been authorized and encouraged to teach by a formal lineage, this is a mere formality and not a sure sign in anyone of real understanding or attainment, much less teaching ability. Luckily, realizations are not dependent on conditions such as formal acceptance into a lineage. I have chosen a lucrative career path that has little to do with meditation, and this eliminates my financial dependence on the dharma and the temptation to water things down for mass consumption or popular appeal, as is so commonly done.

I have found that if I repeatedly ask those who start talking with me about dharma practice the questions, “What do you really want and why?” and, “What would you be willing to do to get that?” I usually come to the conclusion that they are not really interested in the things I am interested in (i.e. the things mentioned in this book), and thus I can turn the conversation to other topics and avoid wasting our time. Those few who do share some of my interests are my dear companions in what I call The Dharma Underground, and for them I am extremely grateful.

But enough about me, let me tell you about my book! I think that I have made my influences and “humble” opinions on a wide variety of other subjects very clear throughout this work. To be truthful, sometimes I have picked up this book and thought, “Goodness

gracious, what a harsh rant. What a heap of reductionist dogma, false certainty, pretentiousness and my own neurotic stuff. I pity the poor, innocent, and pathologically nice, mainstream, ritualistic, disempowered Buddhists unfortunate enough to have picked this thing up and simply been kicked in their soft and flabby posteriors by it to little good effect.”

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On other days I have picked it up and thought, “Wow, this really is the book that I wished I had read all those years ago when I decided to really go for it. It would have been so extremely helpful to have had so many details about high-level practice laid out this clearly, so many myths dispelled, so much honesty about what the path is and isn’t.