>>Did any experience in particular trigger this post or just general musings?

Maybe my answer is similar to yours: I’ve always been afraid of strict precepts. I just don’t like dogma, as I think it quickly becomes a control mechanism. And I’m always afraid of being in a cult, or of joining a group that claims authority on the divine answer. So… I’ve never opted to be initiated into any Buddhist groups as a result. But then again, I remember the precepts pretty well and use them as a practice strategy sometimes. Like, I’ll spend a day or a week just watching my speech and seeing how it affects the way I feel.

What’s interesting is that my martial arts school functions like a traditional one, in that one is initiated by one’s dedication to the practice and subsequent deeper teachings are the natural outcome of this. There are certainly initiation rites (”entering the door” and so forth in Daoist practice) but for the most part, one creates one’s own vows. I, however, have not been formally initiated into this.

When I left Islam, I didn’t break any “vows” per se, but did violate the terms under which I’d “give witness”. I said, literally thousands of times, during prayer ‘Ashahadu la illaha il allah wa mahhamdan resulullah’, that is, ‘I give witness that there is no god but god (or, according to some sufis, a better translation would be ‘nothing exists but god’) and muhammad is his servant and messenger’. Since now I would say ‘I give wtiness that I do not know enough of the great ultimate to comment on it, nor to say that any person served any specific role in relation to it’, I am effectively saying ‘You know all that shit I said? Yeah, I was basically lying’.

These days I’ve gone (back) to the Buddhism and Taoism that I used to use as my guide in examining the big questions, but I’ve gotten very careful about saying to myself or others that I know, if I know not. Part of that is I decided not to take any sort of vows/precepts until I knew I truly understood what they entail. It probably seems like a wimpy approach, but I really want to get things “right”, if indeed that is possible. That being said, I think there’s a very good chance I’ll end up taking Buddhist lay precepts at some point.

Did any experience in particular trigger this post or just general musings?