Buddhism

I think if you have one book on Buddhism–of any sort–on your shelf, that is sufficient.  The task is to master desire and attachment, and neither of those exist or arise at the cognitive level.  They arise in sensations, and that is where their cessation must be found.

And if I posit that thoughts, too, arise from a non-thought place–from sensations and emotions, except when thinking is needed as a tool to solve some concrete problem–then that place is where you must look to control them.

I was thinking last night about the process of what I guess gets called mindfulness meditation, where you focus on just sitting, or on your breath, or on a mantra, and try to keep your mind clear, letting thoughts arise and then pass on.  And it felt to me like you are taking the output of the end of a tunnel, and trying to use that to work backwards, such that if you don’t feed thought, the part of you which creates thought will in turn cease creating them, being malnourished.

This could work, but I also read that meditation quickly becomes stressful for many people, and it is easy to see why: you are not fundamentally liberating the trapped energy, because you are not starting with sensation and emotion and learning to allow it to flow freely.

My reasonably erudite opinion, therefore, is that there is no faster or better path to the heart of Buddhism than Kum Nye.