The Clear Light Sangha did not invent the idea it is built on. The rainbow body — a contemplative attainment in which, in certain Tibetan traditions, a realized practitioner's body dissolves at death into light — is centuries old, hard-won, and, teachers of those traditions stress, not something one schedules.
The Sangha schedules it. Under a Western teacher who styles himself Lama Osel Grey — a title, other teachers note, that he appears to have conferred on himself — the group has taken the ideal and attached to it the one thing the tradition never did: a deadline. The world, Grey teaches, is ending; the window for a clean dissolution is closing; the disciplined few must attain the light before the collapse makes it impossible. Members practice with an urgency that practitioners of the source tradition describe, carefully, as the opposite of the state required.
This is the recurring pathology of the borrowed contemplative movement: a patient tradition acquired impatiently, its slowest fruit demanded on a schedule set by dread. Teachers I spoke to were at pains to separate the Sangha from the lineage it invokes. "The practice is real," one said. "The clock is not part of it. The clock is just the fear, wearing the practice like a coat."
The Sangha declined to comment, except to say, through an intermediary, that the teachers who criticize them have "the luxury of assuming there will be a next century." It is, one has to admit, the whole disagreement in a sentence.