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Re: A Buddhist teacher admits ... BUDDHISM HAS FAILED!
Odd. Reminiscent of an American evangelist. Slightly scary.
JohnMac
Re: A Buddhist teacher admits ... BUDDHISM HAS FAILED!
@Jundo said:
It is time to begin exploration of technology and the laboratory, medicine, biology, engineering, nanotech, genetics and coming advances in neuro-science.
I watched the video, and it is unclear to me how these things are going to influence the billions of humans. The USA is home to about 350 million people, the European Union to about 550 million. China has about 1.4 billion people, India about 1.3 billion, out of a total world population of 8.1 billion people.
New technology doesn’t move so quickly towards the billions. There are still people to whom a smartphone is new, and it has spread like wildfire, being the first computer that many people own.
54% of the world owns a smartphone.
You could follow the road of politics. In the successful Trump election campaign of 2016 he made use of Cambridge Analytica to find the psychological levers which motivate people to vote a particular way. They profiled 50 million Americans from Facebook data.
Would you want to “persuade” all these people to take up Dharma?
Jeroen
Re: Being fed up with all things spiritual
From what I have read @Jeroen perhaps you should steer clear of Tibetan Buddhism or any path that has "woo woo" as you disparagingly term it. From my understanding (and I am happy to be corrected if I'm wrong, and that's a possibility as I am no expert) Zen and Western/Secular Buddhist paths do not have devas or deities.
After all, the Buddha did not demand people accept his teachings blindly but to test them for themselves. I think the fact there are so many different Buddhist paths in existence are testament to the fact people took that advice. Wouldn't it be better to find a path suited to you rather than try to fit a square peg into a round hole and be so frustrated?
I say this while I too am reassessing my current path in Buddhism.
Re: A Buddhist teacher admits ... BUDDHISM HAS FAILED!
@Jundo said:
100% of the proceeds will go to Buddhist and other charities, nothing to me. I would never sell Dharma.
I don't care about the money from the book. You're still trying to sell it. You're selling Dharma. You just aren't keeping the money. My guru earns his living from his books. What he doesn't keep are the annual offerings made by his centers and the national organization. He sends the checks back. I don't care if you keep the money or not, Jundo. I care about seeing things for what they are, and you sir, are, for whatever reason, trying to sell a book.
Good luck :-)
Re: A Buddhist teacher admits ... BUDDHISM HAS FAILED!
While science relies on empiricism, technology, “objective” observation, and analysis, the Dalai Lama, Varela, and Engle were convinced that well-refined contemplative practices and introspective methods could be used as equal instruments of investigation. They saw the potential not only to make science itself more humane, but also to ensure its conclusions were far-reaching. They formed the Mind & Life Institute to bridge this divide and advance human well-being.
“In today’s world, the entire population of
seven billion people is one human community,
living on one planet. Individual survival
is entirely dependent on community
survival—so caring about your community is
ultimately taking care of yourself.”
–His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama
Shoshin1
Re: A Buddhist teacher admits ... BUDDHISM HAS FAILED!
Second in the series ...
To save the suffering sentient beings we have utterly FAILED to save, it is time for ...
A ZEN MOON SHOT!
Traditional means rescued me, I hope you, and certainly so many generations of millions of Buddhists ... but what of the BILLIONS and BILLIONS of this world's suffering beings we have thoroughly FAILED to reach? We have broken our vows so far.
Thus, it is time to add to our meditation and twirling beads, looking toward the Zen of the 22nd Century, respecting the past but not trapped in a museum of the 12th Century.
The old methods are powerful methods, they are to be cherished, kept and nourished, but they reach relatively few, failing to liberate the hearts of most. It is time to begin exploration of technology and the laboratory, medicine, biology, engineering, nanotech, genetics and coming advances in neuro-science, all in extension ... never replacement ... of our ancient Buddhist teachings and wonderful Zen practices.
Please take a moment to hear why ...
Jundo
Re: A Buddhist teacher admits ... BUDDHISM HAS FAILED!
I think I see where you are coming from Jundo....
As digital communication grows, the Dharma can be spread through online resources like apps and virtual communities, making teachings accessible worldwide.
And with the improved translation technology which is becoming available this can help spread Buddhist teachings to people worldwide by making them available in many languages. This promotes cross-cultural understanding and wider access to Dharma teachings AKA Buddhist wisdom.
And Buddhism's values can influence how we use and develop technology, promoting well-being and ethical responsibility.
Digital Dharma...The shape of things to come...
Shoshin1
Finding freedom in the words of the enlightened
I have started a little light spiritual reading again, picking up my search for the words of the enlightened, and I have started with a contemplation of why exactly I read them. It is not because of…
- A search for enlightenment. I have come to realise that the spiritual is a unique path, and if enlightenment comes it comes of its own accord like a gift from the universe. Really it is more about meditation. “Sitting silently, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.” As Osho said.
- A need for progress in a spiritual sense. In reality, there is no progress, we are already that. It is just that we are fooling ourselves by identifying with all kinds of small, limited things.
- A need for a firm path. Wanting to be a Buddhist or belonging to any religion betrays a deeper insecurity, a fear that others know more and that you are better off following in their wake. But truly, once you start on the inward journey, you find that your path does not agree with their path, and you have to let go of where you started out in order to walk your own way.
It all turns around freedom and an increasing maturity, and the words of the enlightened help us free ourselves from those places where the mind has been fooling us. The mind picks up all kinds of little pieces of knowledge during childhood and bases beliefs on that, it becomes embedded in a personality structure, and it’s only later when you hear Ram Dass talk about the masks we wear that you find out it is all delusion and hearsay.
In the Tao Te Ching it says “The man of knowledge learns something new every day, but the Man of Tao lets something go every day.” The words of the enlightened help with this letting go, they destroy your questions, your preconceptions, shake your mind to its very foundations until you realise you’re not that either, that all your thoughts are impermanent and that you have gotten into the habit of grabbing onto them.
Then you become a Watcher, you let go of judgment, of action, of being a doer. And every morning you come across these things in the stages of waking up, in that moment between sleep and awake, following which comes the blessing of the morning. Today is a good day.
Jeroen
Re: A Buddhist teacher admits ... BUDDHISM HAS FAILED!
If you can explain Dharma in English without using foreign language terms or even the word Buddhism, while making clear its obvious benefits, then you may have something that will catch on. I think that was the great benefit of mindfulness based stress relief, that it presented mindfulness as something new, fresh, without baggage and beneficial. And that is why many therapists got on the bandwagon and promoted it.
Jeroen
Re: A Buddhist teacher admits ... BUDDHISM HAS FAILED!
Idle interruptions from a zafu.
Yes the title of your thread is bombastically eye-catching but this is understandable from a marketing outlook when having to compete with a million other Buddhist books.
I certainly don't envy any Buddhist author on their new book launch on Buddhism's failures, trying to assert that no spiritual materialism was involved in the making of it, because no profit from it accrues to the author. Of course, fame itself is a profit that bests any material profit.
I do not know you personally, (although I have referred other seekers in the past to your site) and so am not accusing you of the above. I only marvel at how difficult a practicing exercise it must be to labor over such love without becoming entangled with its outcome.
From this zafu's view, the world is little more than a stage where karmic inertia continually arises and departs, from former states of congealing to their latter states of dissipation.
The Buddha only offered the means of lessening the attachments and corresponding sufferings that any actor might experience of this stage's karmic chaos.
Expecting Buddhism to be something more than that, or judging it by worldly views as a success or failure, can be a classical defense of one's own spiritual materialism.
Vows can be just as bombastic but in the end, are simply an expressed hope of furthering selflessness over selfishness. I think that the quantifying of such balances are better left to the practitioner observing themself than to the world as a whole. I remind myself sometimes of all that the Buddha chose not to teach about because he said it just didn't apply to ones walk along the path towards suffering's cessation.
In Gassho
how