Because if I mess up, then I know what my failings are, and I know that it's all up to me to steer it back to centre. Hard work, at times. But I prefer it to being able to shove it all off my shoulders and let somebody else handle it.
But at least, for my part, I can look at myself in the mirror, and know that I am "all my own work".
hey, credit where credit's due......
It's interesting, I am reading Stephen Batchelor's Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist (he also wrote Buddhism without beliefs) for review next week, and he touches on this theme in various forms a lot. He was a Tibetan Buddhist monk for several years, and ended up leaving that tradition, in part because he felt it had moved away from this essential core of personal responsibility with guru-yoga and deity visualization etc., i.e. that it recreates a 'faith in a higher power' mentality.
I am not sure this is entirely fair, because the Tibetan Buddhist teachers I have known were very explicit about these methods being tools for discovering the ground of our own awareness, but it's interesting to consider that in the West especially, some people tend to fall into the pattern of approaching these methods as a kind of faith in an outside power. So he makes a compelling case. This is only part of his argument, I might add, but it's interesting....
