[Kanzeon]

ALG:

You continue to misrepresent things you do not understand. You continue to pull out sentences from wikipedia and present them as fully developed doctrines.

LOA is dependent on the individual creating his or her own reality. It has one philosophical root, and that is solipsism. I can't disprove solipsism, and I won't try.

But, now you're going on about illusion and karma, without understanding WHY they aren't solipsistic. Karma is the law of cause and effect that governs everything in the universe. The law of cause and effect (your karma) might lead you to be driving down the street at noon. I can't change your karma by changing my intentions. It is possible that I can change mine, but the law is considered exceedingly slow and, from the perspective of what you call manifesting, extremely nonspecific. In the moral plane, you reap what you sow: if you are angry, anger will (eventually, maybe not in this life, or the next, or the next), be directed at you. Because all things are interdependent, one person can't pull a pin out, and get a big house, because the forces of cause and effect are weighing in to give someone else that big house, and have been since the begining of time. Karma is a very large heavy wheel - theoretically, one can extract oneself entirely, but there isn't an inclination to perform parlor tricks with those stuck in the wheel. Karma is not exclusively personal - if you wanted to understand that, you might start with the notion of "transference of merit."

The world in traditional Buddhism is not illusory in a solipsistic sense. The "illusion" is related to dependent origination: that all object are empty of inherent existence because they are products of other events. This is very different than saying that reality has no objectivity, or reality is essentially a hallucination.

You found Dzogchen in wiki, as well, I see. Dzogchen practice is esoteric: I wouldn't presume to tell you what it means. But, from my limited knowledge, I would doubt that it is solipsism. The master you mentioned is a practioner of dream yoga. He says that our waking reality is LIKE a dream; not that it IS a dream. I'm quite certain that he sees the average person's dreams as subject to the laws of cause and effect as waking life. In other words, dreams have causes, and most of us have EVEN LESS choice in dreams than in waking life. As anyone who has tried will tell you, it is the work of a lifetime to control your dreams. So, to the extent that dreams are LIKE waking life, dreams do not indicate that you can manipulate waking life. It is much easier for me to pick up a pencil and move it across the table, than it is for me to decide to dream the table and pencil, and dream moving it. In other words, to the extent life is a dream, it is for most of us uncontrollable, not controlled, and the reference to the dream is not to explain how you are free of the laws of nature to suddenly will things into existence.

In general, dream yoga uses techniques of lucid dreaming to confront the unwinding of karma during sleep. If you buy the notion of intention, then surely you are intending in your dreams, and your dreams themselves are part of the large karmic wheel. By great effort, it is claimed that one might manipulate the dream state, with physical states imagined in the dream, as part of a reversal of certain intentions. I don't think you'll find a Dzogchen master claiming that if you can levitate a log in your dream, you can levitate it in reality. Additionally, you state, again and again, that it is YOUR dream. But, if you know the first think about illusion in Buddhism, you know that the root illusion is that of self. How this actually works in Dzogchen I have not clue one, and neither do you, and a quote from one guy on wiki won't explain it either. But to say that the dream is YOUR dream, and reality YOUR reality is to skirt the paradox of dualism and land in the camp of the monist. As the zen master famously said "not two, not one" - Buddhist metaphysics walks the line between monism and dualism, which is why it is so difficult, and why quotes out of wikipedia, or even quotes from specific masters, without a great deal of broader study placing the quotes in context. Radical monist idealism - that you create your own reality - is solopsism. It may be true: I can't disprove it. But we all need to name it by its true name.

I'm completely done with this. I post this for the benefit of anyone still watching this thread. My overwhelming point, from the start, is that philosophies and religions contain actual ideas, actual content, and that content is interrelated. There is intepretation, and disagreement, but we need to respect that content as a whole, else we misrepresent the idea by taking it without context. You have no such respect. You hunt around for quotes and ideas to drape respectability on your ideas. You have no respect for the ideas you abuse in your quest, or the traditions that created them. You can't construct an argument by taking half of the Sermon on the Mount and adding the last three lines of the Heart Sutra. That isn't an argument or a philosophy: it is an intellectual monstrosity.

The reason you do this is simple: because if you take away all the spurious references to illusion, sleight of hand in claiming that you can take Christ's words about God and remove God from them, and flit from sect to sect and choose one quote here, and one quote there, without noting that each of these quotes and doctrines have consequences for other ideas, you are left with your philosophy: YOU CREATE YOU OWN REALITY. And when you say it simply, naked, without all the rhinestones you stole from the attics of the great religions, PEOPLE LAUGH AT YOU. And with good reason.

Enjoy your parlor games.