A nice appetizer before you listen to the latest Imperfect Buddha interview with Ron Purser.
In this episode, Ron Purser comes on to the imperfect Buddha podcast to talk about neoliberalism and its impact on mindfulness, Buddhism, spirituality, and the experience of all these in the individual and the impact is greater then you likely believe. You are a neoliberal subject to some degree and the ethics and manner of practice of this insipid ideology has seeped into almost all contemporary spiritual practice. Such practice can be a site of resistance to the excesses of... individualism, goal achievement, productivity, and self-serving interest. Such practices can reconnect us to a social and environmental vision and experience of ourselves in the world. But this is only possible if you become aware of how neoliberalism has participated in shaping your practice in certain ways. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek was not wrong when he stated that Buddhism, among all the world’s religions, is the greatest companion to neoliberalism, which would prefer you to keep focusing in and on yourself; “It’s up to you they say! You must do it alone, and if you fail well, it’s all your fault!” Does this sound familiar? It should do as it’s a major part of the neoliberal ethic.
Ron and I talk about a range of interesting topics that go beyond neoliberalism. We cover McMindfulness, freedom, liberation free from the neoliberal ethic, and other exciting utopian topics. We talk about the alternatives to a practice informed by the near liberal ethic. So don’t panic, it’s not all nay-saying, we’ve got some solutions here too!
Change? Isn't that what Buddhism is about? Here are some thoughts on resistance to it.
The latest and darkest episode of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast. A more in-depth look into Incite Seminars with Glenn Wallis. We cover darkness, Buddhist resistance to exploring such themes, the positivity brigade of contemporary spirituality, neoliberalism, the work of Peter Sloterdjik and more.
Next week we'll be recording an interview with Ron Purser on neo-liberal Buddhism and Mindfulness. To help you all be fully prepared and ready to listen, I wrote a few words on the topic. See what you think!
The Imperfect Buddha Podcast shared a link.
So what about sex? Guest Ben Joffe and I discuss Karmamudra and Buddhism's particular relationship with sex, desire and sexuality in reference to Dr Nida Chenagtsang new book on the topic.
This blog is on a brief hiatus as I am too busy to dedicate any time to writing posts. I am putting together a more significant text for a journal, which I might reword into a short series of posts here at a later date. Finally, I intend to write a piece on resistance as the first post back. For now, here's a posting at the Speculative non-Buddhism site positing the idea of neo-liberal Buddhism. I can't help but think Mr Wallis is on to something.
http://posttraditionalbuddhism.com/…/immanent-critique-for…/
The Imperfect Buddha Podcast shared Tenzin Peljor's post.
Here is a fresh voice of a man who ran into the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT) at the age of 17. Many young people who look for Buddhism will likely run into a con...troversial Buddhist group (be it the NKT, Diamond Way, Rigpa or Triratna) because these groups have the greatest missionary drive and the best online marketing and SEO, as well as the best financial sources – often based on their cultish, manipulative, exploitative system.
The success of these controversial Buddhist groups is also enabled by the lack of care by trustworthy Buddhist groups when it comes to their websites and SEO. Trustworthy Buddhist groups very often lack care, financial resources, don’t see the need or lack the means to have good online presentations and a good SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). As a result, if a teenager (or any newly interested person) looks for Buddhism or meditation via internet, he will highly likely find a controversial Buddhist group listed first. Getting into it can turn out to be the biggest harm of one’s own life.
An Ukraine friend, when he was 13 years old, looking for meditation, checking the internet, found Diamond Way. He went there to the local group and was totally put off by their way of presenting Buddhism. He was on the edge to think Buddhism is not a thing that could help him anyway. But, clever as he is, he found out that there are also trustworthy Buddhist groups. When he discussed this with me in Berlin, he asked me: »Where are the Bodhisattvas in the internet who help spiritual seekers to find save sources of learning meditation or Buddhism? We are totally left alone. If you google for ›Meditation‹ or ›Buddhism‹ in your local town, you’ll find the controversial groups and if you don’t know about that, you can become their prey.« I totally agree with him.
Recently, a Buddhist temple asked a Professor of Religious Studies what they could do to improve regarding presentation, the Prof replied: »Make a very good website.« Most trustworthy groups totally neglect the need for that. That’s a shame. If trustworthy Buddhist groups really care and take compassion seriously, they must also take care about their websites and SEO in order to give spiritual seekers a fair chance to find them. That’s a matter of compassion and not am matter of missionary work.
Welcome back to the Imperfect Buddha Podcast. After our lively discussion of theory and practice, we embark on a new series of interviews for all you Imperfect Buddhas. Our first for 2018 features Evan Thompson, professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, well known for his books “Waking, Being, and Dreaming: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy”, “The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience”, co-authored with the late Francisco Varela, “Mind in Life: biology, phenomenology and the sciences of mind” as well as “Self, No Self?: perspectives from analytical, phenomenological and Indian traditions”...
Tomorrow, our next episode will be released. It's an interview with Evan Thompson. We discuss all sorts including the work of Tomas Metzinger, who some of you will no doubt be familiar with. We even touch on the SNB. It's a good one and I think you're all going to like it.
The Imperfect Buddha podcast just got off of an interview with the rather nice Evan Thompson, author of Waking, Dreaming, Being. A great guest & a great discussion covering many topics including embodied consciousness and its relevance to meditation practitioners, mindfulness and awakening, the social implications of leaving behind a dualistic view of consciousness, phenomenology, the neo-liberal co-option of Buddhism, & much more. It will be up next week for all you lovely listeners.
Happy New Year folks! Stuart finally makes his return to the Imperfect Buddha podcast in an in-depth discussion of the role theory and practice might play in a post-traditional engagement with Buddhism. This topic was inspired by a recent series of posts on exactly this topic over at the Post-Traditional Buddhism blog. Our discussion goes critical as Stuart and I take our usual meander down the rabbit hole of taboos, and biting critique of the dysfunctional face of contemporary Western Buddhism...
New Year's episode of the Imperfect Buddha podcast will be out tomorrow featuring the return of Mr Stuart Baldwin & an intrepid exploration of how theory and practice might be used in contemporary western Buddhism. It may just be our most critical episode yet! 
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The Imperfect Buddha Podcast shared Existentialism's post.
Merry Solstice, Merry Saturnalia, Merry Xmas. Stuart and I will be podcasting during the holidays with a new podcast episode ready for the New Year. Phenomenological exploration of theory and practice will be afoot. For now, here's some phenomenology talk
"Another phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger, added a different spin. Philosophers all through history have wasted their time on secondary questions, he said, whi...le forgetting to ask the one that matters most, the question of Being. What is it for a thing to be? What does it mean to say that you yourself are? Until you ask this, he maintained, you will never get anywhere. Again, he recommended the phenomenological method: disregard intellectual clutter, pay attention to things and let them reveal themselves to you. ‘You see, mon petit camarade,’ said Aron to Sartre — ‘my little comrade’, his pet name for him since their schooldays — ‘if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!’ Beauvoir wrote that Sartre turned pale on hearing this. She made it sound more dramatic by implying that they had never heard of phenomenology at all. In truth, they had tried to read a little Heidegger. A translation of his lecture ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ had appeared in the same issue of the journal Bifur as an early Sartre essay in 1931. But, she wrote, ‘since we could not understand a word of it we failed to see its interest’. Now they saw its interest: it was a way of doing philosophy that reconnected it with normal, lived experience. (Illustrations Credit 1.1) They were more than ready for this new beginning. At school and university, Sartre, Beauvoir and Aron had all been through the austere French philosophy syllabus, dominated by questions of knowledge and endless reinterpretation of the works of Immanuel Kant. Epistemological questions opened out of one another like the rounds of a turning kaleidoscope, always returning to the same point: I think I know something, but how can I know that I know what I know? It was demanding, yet futile, and all three students — despite excelling in their exams — had felt dissatisfied, Sartre most of all. He hinted after graduation that he was now incubating some new ‘destructive philosophy’, but he was vague about what form it would take, for the simple reason that he had little idea himself. He had barely developed it beyond a general spirit of rebellion. Now it looked as though someone else had got there before him. If Sartre blanched at Aron’s news about phenomenology, it was probably as much from pique as from excitement. Either way, he never forgot the moment, and commented in an interview over forty years later, ‘I can tell you that knocked me out.’ Here, at last, was a real philosophy. According to Beauvoir, he rushed to the nearest bookshop and said, in effect, ‘Give me everything you have on phenomenology, now!’ What they produced was a slim volume written by Husserl’s student Emmanuel Levinas, La théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, or The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Books still came with their leaves uncut. Sartre tore the edges of Levinas’ book open without waiting to use a paperknife, and began reading as he walked down the street. He could have been Keats, encountering Chapman’s translation of Homer:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise — Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
Sarah Bakewell
