― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, 12 May 2007 23:48 (sixteen years ago) link
― Curt1s Stephens, Saturday, 12 May 2007 23:52 (sixteen years ago) link
― jhøshea, Saturday, 12 May 2007 23:58 (sixteen years ago) link
― jhøshea, Sunday, 13 May 2007 00:00 (sixteen years ago) link
― c sharp major, Sunday, 13 May 2007 00:06 (sixteen years ago) link
― c sharp major, Sunday, 13 May 2007 00:07 (sixteen years ago) link
― jhøshea, Sunday, 13 May 2007 00:10 (sixteen years ago) link
― jhøshea, Sunday, 13 May 2007 00:15 (sixteen years ago) link
― jhøshea, Sunday, 13 May 2007 00:25 (sixteen years ago) link
― milo z, Sunday, 13 May 2007 00:51 (sixteen years ago) link
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Sunday, 13 May 2007 01:09 (sixteen years ago) link
― moley, Sunday, 13 May 2007 03:16 (sixteen years ago) link
― Bob Six, Sunday, 13 May 2007 09:15 (sixteen years ago) link
― Bob Six, Sunday, 13 May 2007 09:18 (sixteen years ago) link
― jhøshea, Sunday, 13 May 2007 13:16 (sixteen years ago) link
― hobart paving, Monday, 14 May 2007 10:12 (sixteen years ago) link
― hobart paving, Monday, 14 May 2007 10:13 (sixteen years ago) link
― moley, Monday, 14 May 2007 10:22 (sixteen years ago) link
― moley, Monday, 14 May 2007 10:24 (sixteen years ago) link
― jhøshea, Monday, 14 May 2007 14:21 (sixteen years ago) link
― hobart paving, Monday, 14 May 2007 19:39 (sixteen years ago) link
― hobart paving, Monday, 14 May 2007 19:40 (sixteen years ago) link
― jhøshea, Monday, 14 May 2007 20:37 (sixteen years ago) link
― hobart paving, Monday, 14 May 2007 21:26 (sixteen years ago) link
― Bob Six, Monday, 14 May 2007 21:38 (sixteen years ago) link
― hobart paving, Monday, 14 May 2007 22:00 (sixteen years ago) link
― jhøshea, Monday, 14 May 2007 22:13 (sixteen years ago) link
― jhøshea, Monday, 14 May 2007 22:14 (sixteen years ago) link
― remy bean, Monday, 14 May 2007 22:15 (sixteen years ago) link
― Bob Six, Monday, 14 May 2007 22:19 (sixteen years ago) link
― Shakey Mo Collier, Monday, 14 May 2007 22:22 (sixteen years ago) link
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 14 May 2007 22:56 (sixteen years ago) link
― Shakey Mo Collier, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:00 (sixteen years ago) link
― Abbott, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:08 (sixteen years ago) link
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:09 (sixteen years ago) link
― jhøshea, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:24 (sixteen years ago) link
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:27 (sixteen years ago) link
― remy bean, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:44 (sixteen years ago) link
― jhøshea, Monday, 14 May 2007 23:49 (sixteen years ago) link
― lolita corpus, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:12 (sixteen years ago) link
― Aimless, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 00:58 (sixteen years ago) link
― Shakey Mo Collier, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 02:06 (sixteen years ago) link
― Shakey Mo Collier, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 02:07 (sixteen years ago) link
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 02:59 (sixteen years ago) link
― Dimension 5ive, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 03:48 (sixteen years ago) link
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, 18 May 2007 03:12 (sixteen years ago) link
― luriqua, Friday, 18 May 2007 03:18 (sixteen years ago) link
― Aimless, Friday, 18 May 2007 17:15 (sixteen years ago) link
I understand his (Merton's) body was returned to the U.S. on a plane full of U.S. servicemen's bodies being flown home from Vietnam
― Andy the Grasshopper, Friday, 27 January 2023 20:06 (one year ago) link
"Mindfulness is said to be a $4bn industry. More than 60,000 books for sale on Amazon have a variant of "mindfulness" in their title, touting the benefits of Mindful Parenting, Mindful Eating, Mindful Teaching, Mindful Therapy, Mindful Leadership, Mindful Finance, a Mindful Nation, and Mindful Dog Owners, to name just a few."
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/14/the-mindfulness-conspiracy-capitalist-spirituality
― | (Latham Green), Friday, 27 January 2023 20:09 (one year ago) link
massive xps to latham's 1st post of this revive:
when your central practice is awareness, you observe myriad manifestations of mind in the process, so that, as a byproduct of awareness, buddhism has accumulated a lot of psychological savvy. but buddhism isn't 'based on' psychology. to the extent it engages with psychology, it's to set it aside.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, 27 January 2023 20:18 (one year ago) link
Thank goodness thumping brimstones don’t ontologically define Christianity then. I’ve always been skeptical of western variants of Buddhism (emphasis on western) for the manipulative capitalist underpinnings sometimes expressed (as linked above). But no religion is exempt from this in the west
― hrep (H.P), Friday, 27 January 2023 20:20 (one year ago) link
Good post aimless
― hrep (H.P), Friday, 27 January 2023 20:21 (one year ago) link
Merton wormhole led me to this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayings_of_the_Desert_Fathers
Must be from the bootleg Bible
― | (Latham Green), Friday, 27 January 2023 20:31 (one year ago) link
Desert fathers are great. No bible, the desert fathers are 100’s of years after “biblical times”
― hrep (H.P), Friday, 27 January 2023 20:35 (one year ago) link
massive xps to latham's 1st post of this revive:when your central practice is awareness, you observe myriad manifestations of mind in the process, so that, as a byproduct of awareness, buddhism has accumulated a lot of psychological savvy. but buddhism isn't 'based on' psychology. to the extent it engages with psychology, it's to set it aside.
― Cry for a Shadowgraph (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 27 January 2023 20:40 (one year ago) link
Feel like that Guardian writer is making it seem that Miles Neale is calling out Jon Kabat-Zinn as being a kind of Ray Kroc of mindfulness when it is the Guardian writer who is borrowing the term from Neale and doing the finger-pointing.
― Cry for a Shadowgraph (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 27 January 2023 20:50 (one year ago) link
Ah, this is interesting. The author of that article wrote a whole book about McMindfulness and Jon Kabat-Zinn responded.https://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/49108
― Cry for a Shadowgraph (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 27 January 2023 21:06 (one year ago) link
As far I can tell from Neale's webpage he has no, um, beef, with J K-Z. Here is something interesting I found there, where he talks about the relationship between meditation and psychotherapy, in particular the concept of spiritual bypass: http://embodied.bestdevserver.com/buddhism/self-care-and-selflessness-a-contradiction/
― Cry for a Shadowgraph (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 27 January 2023 21:09 (one year ago) link
that piece seems pretty sound to me
I've had some minor engagement with the mindfulness industry - it seems to be a curate's egg with the potential to become something much worse - there are ways in which it seems much more appealing than psychotherapy and some of the techniques seem to help a lot but I'm profoundly ambivalent about it and the things it seems to emphasise and downplay. the disavowals of self-help can be about as convincing as "it's not a diet" - and many people involved seem to be cagey or downright dismissive about concepts like karma and reincarnation (or feel the need to translate them into scientific materialist language) and you can forget about god(s) and other beings in other realms* - it's being marketed as more scientific and pragmatic than TM and other new age stuff but also as more authentically buddhist and there is constant equivocation between mindfulness and buddhism as such - *maybe you get more into all that stuff as you go deeper but then it all sounds a bit culty
I'm not suggesting there is or was ever a true version of buddhism somewhere in asia unsullied by western nonsense (although that's a great hook for people selling their own takes on it) but stripmining a religion for its most instrumentally or therapeutically appealing parts and then claiming to be holding the true flame is a weird thing to do (it's a bit like how nietzche and schopenhauer and all them claimed their versions of nihilism were more authentically buddhist than the buddhists). that isn't to say that many of the techniques don't work quite well as advertised so I'm deeply conflicted about it all
― your original display name is still visible (Left), Friday, 27 January 2023 22:00 (one year ago) link
There are a bunch of different takes on this other than "haha this is just the latest brand of Orientalist mumbo jumbo!" There are Secular Buddhists like Stephen Batchelor, then there is someone like Evan Thompson, author of Why I Am Not a Buddhist, to take two examples off the top of my mindhead.
― Cry for a Shadowgraph (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 27 January 2023 22:08 (one year ago) link
The Man can't bust our mindfulness.
― Cry for a Shadowgraph (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 27 January 2023 22:09 (one year ago) link
Pop Dharma
― Andy the Grasshopper, Friday, 27 January 2023 22:11 (one year ago) link
I guess the only thing I have to add is that these questions - is X too individualistic (the concept of "spiritual materialism" is relevant here also), is Y beneficial or is this spiritual bypassing - never go away, and people that consider themselves Buddhist (hi) keep asking them.
― death generator (lukas), Friday, 27 January 2023 22:27 (one year ago) link
am I correct in my impression that karma is much less central to western buddhism (and spirituality in general) than say 50 years ago? if so is there an obvious explanation for this?
and *why* is it that so many western buddhists and mindfulness advocates are so weird (almost embarrassed) about reincarnation? it sounds too religiony? are they ashamed of believing or not believing in it?
― your original display name is still visible (Left), Friday, 27 January 2023 22:54 (one year ago) link
There is some dancind and tiptoing around that I have never even gotten near to so I don't have much to say.
― Cry for a Shadowgraph (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 27 January 2023 23:01 (one year ago) link
Dancind and tiptoing = the Buddha's reindeer.
― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Friday, 27 January 2023 23:04 (one year ago) link
Hahaha!
― Cry for a Shadowgraph (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 27 January 2023 23:04 (one year ago) link
But do you recallThe greatest bodhisattva of all?
― Cry for a Shadowgraph (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 27 January 2023 23:05 (one year ago) link
lol
― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Friday, 27 January 2023 23:08 (one year ago) link
this dude seems pretty hardcore:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9W4SUepWOQ
― Andy the Grasshopper, Friday, 27 January 2023 23:21 (one year ago) link
it's one path, but it's not a requirement
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, 27 January 2023 23:27 (one year ago) link
A few years ago I read this book with the perhaps cheesy title of Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, by Paul F. Knitter. One thing I remember about it is that he seemed to make an interesting argument for why certain things could be meaningful even if one did not believe in reincarnation or any kind of afterlife at all.
― Cry for a Shadowgraph (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 27 January 2023 23:33 (one year ago) link
I also came to the conclusion at some point that Aimless’s screenname was derived from Buddhism but I don’t know if he is cool with me saying that.
― Cry for a Shadowgraph (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 27 January 2023 23:36 (one year ago) link
my screen name's buddhist derivation is quite indirect and was mostly unconscious when it happened, but I've kept it over the decades largely to honor those hidden roots. it's ok to peg it to that.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, 27 January 2023 23:42 (one year ago) link
Ever since 1978 or so I've had a hard time deciding whether I'm a bad taoist or an easily sidetracked buddhist, so I oscillate between them, depending on which is easiest to impersonate.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, 27 January 2023 23:44 (one year ago) link
bad taoist = several old roommates of mine
Why wash the dishes piling up in the sink? Let the water flow around them
― Andy the Grasshopper, Friday, 27 January 2023 23:52 (one year ago) link
That reminds me the terrible book Zen Guitar for Assholes where the guy recommends doing everything “100%, all out, all the time” or something like that, including doing the dishes. Not realizing that maybe, just maybe such a white knuckle attitude might actually lead somebody to think “Right now I don’t really feel like I can the dishes 100% so I will postpone that task until I feel up to it” instead of some more, say, self-aware approaches to handling the task with minimum wear and tear on the psyche.
― Cry for a Shadowgraph (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 28 January 2023 00:27 (one year ago) link
"Reducing non-western culture to western paradigms - also dud" I've been wondering if the terms in English that are used to describe things like Duḥkha in the way intended or if they just make people think kof them in unintended ways.
You should totally check out this article by Carine Defoort:Is There Such A Thing As Chinese Philosophy?
Link is to a pdf file
― The field divisions are fastened with felicitations. (Deflatormouse), Saturday, 28 January 2023 02:59 (one year ago) link
Today’s Daily Dharma is apropos.https://tricycle.org/magazine/special-transmission/
― The Big Candy-O (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 28 January 2023 13:03 (one year ago) link
I guess philosophy is philosophy and even that doesnt exist
― | (Latham Green), Saturday, 28 January 2023 17:44 (one year ago) link
thx for that link, from the chan/zen-zone
― normal AI yankovic (Hunt3r), Saturday, 28 January 2023 18:42 (one year ago) link
Sure. That was intense.
― The Big Candy-O (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 28 January 2023 18:52 (one year ago) link