Articles
Explaining Marxian Engaged Buddhism
There are Buddhists in the world. Some are politically engaged, and some of them are Marxists. Regardless of whether a Buddhist is politically engaged or not, they remain committed to the dhamma. That dhamma offers a comprehensive and coherent ontological, epistemological and ethical philosophy that is to be embodied in the daily lives of its…
Read MoreChanges at the SBA
The Secular Buddhist Association has grown a great deal from its humble beginnings. In May of 2009, the podcast The Secular Buddhist was first made available, with an interview format about engaging with the tradition in something of an admittedly fringe perspective. Secular Buddhism was not a term commonly heard at the time, and there…
Read MorePractice Circle: Focusing with Politics
Here in the United States, we are preparing to enter a season of political fear and loathing that may rival or exceed that of 1968. Two presidential candidates, each of whom is detested by millions of people, are apparently prepared to do everything they can to increase each other’s negatives still further. People on all…
Read MoreNow is Strange
Now is strange. We only experience things in the present. Our access to past and future is through reconstruction and prediction. So much of our lives is spent in our heads, living in thinly disguised fictions of time gone and time to come. This seems obvious, and at the same time it seems so surprising. And yet…
Read MoreThe Move to Zoom
After using Adobe Connect ever since SBA started hosting virtual meetings in 2012, we’re making a change. Beginning with our June 12, 2016 meeting of Practice Circle, we’re going to begin using Zoom. It’s a very similar program that has features much like Connect, but it offers a number of distinct advantages. First off, it…
Read MoreOn Modern Mindfulness, Buddhism, and Social Ethics
Introductory note: This is a response to Doug Smith’s recent post here. I think Doug is right on nearly all counts, though he may have misinterpreted some of the contemporary writers he draws from. In any case, I hope this small contribution (cross-posted at Patheos) helps further the discussion. There is much about mindfulness being…
Read MoreOn Some Criticisms of Modern Mindfulness
Is the contemporary mindfulness movement a kind of “fad” that misconstrues the essential message of the Buddha? Pieces by Edwin Ng and Ron Purser (2016a, 2016b) and Stephen Schettini (2014), not to mention the earlier “McMindfulness” critique by Purser and Loy (2013) argue that this is so. Ng and Loy take an overtly “anti-capitalist stance” in their…
Read MoreMy First Float
Last Saturday, I had my first experience in a float tank, sometimes also referred to as a sensory deprivation chamber. I had been curious about them since I first learned about them in the 1970s, especially after seeing the 1980 William Hurt movie, Altered States. Recently, a couple of commercial float ventures have opened in…
Read MoreThinking and Feeling, Critically
We are deep into the political season. Looking at the Trump phenomenon, an article by Phil Torres in Salon bemoans the “anti-intellectualism that runs through the roots of American culture.” Torres notes that, “[T]he most dangerous consequence of Fox News is that it discourages that most important form of rigorous curiosity called critical thinking.” Critical thinking,…
Read MoreSkepticism, Atheism, and the Good Life
Where do we find the good life? The ancient Greeks, our earliest philosophical forebears in the West, thought the highest aim of reason was to answer just this kind of question. Nowadays we often think of reason as allied to the twin aims of (1) scientific skepticism, that is, following the results of consensus science as…
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