Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Modern Western Buddhist Teacher
ScottPen
Maryland Veteran
This guy gives what I find absolutely fascinating talks which associate behavioral, psychological, and neurological science with the Dharma. His podcast has talks and guided meditations. I'm listening to the episode called "two paths to liberation: samadhi and vipassana" right now.
4
Comments
Thanks, I'll be checking out his podcast.
@ScottPen I've read through your other threads and we seem to be very similar people. I would recommend Dan Harris to you. He has a podcast 10% happier and a couple books, his first by the same title and his recent one Meditation For Fidgety Skeptics.
I can relate well to him so maybe you will too.
The link seems to imply he is associated with the Dharma Punx group, I assume there is a link with Noah Levine’s book of the same name?
Noah Levine is Josh Korda's teacher.
@person- can confirm. I am also a person. I appreciate the heads up and will check him out.
You guys ...
Wish I was a person and not a lowly marine creature ...
I have a degree in Psychology (emphasis on "Learning and Behavior") and I find that Buddhism can be taken as a form of self-administered cognitive-behavioral therapy.
And with educational psychology (the three types of learning: auditory, visual, kinetic .. and rituals use all 3).
But it is all just mind-play and Buddhism goes more deeply than that. Don't get caught up in ideas, since we are on the path of learning to be open to experience rather than caught up in the "monkey-mind" of our thoughts.
But yes, I DO find it fascinating to how it all ties together.
For that matter, there is a lot of Buddhism in Christianity too. Again .. fascinating.
@FoibleFull- Thanks for your thoughts. My entry into Buddhism has been paved with the assertions of therapeutic and evolutionary psychologists. Perhaps I'll eventually move past the monkey-mind scientific fishhook that has me on the line at this point. I guess I'll find out
We are not in therapy, even though most of us are partially, partly or often insane. Dharma is not science or psychology, though it is often therapeutic ...
Dharma is a means to end preferences, hooks, opinions, mind itself ...
Tee Hee ... so to speak ...
I'm a partial myself
it's a good point to make that Buddhism isn't therapy, there seems to be a lot of mixing and matching going on, trying to appropriate spiritual teaching and leaving out the spiritual seems daft to me. I have experienced therapy as I had PTSD for years, and although I am grateful to my therapist for helping me out of that appaling condition there is no similarity to Buddhist practice.
During a dharma teaching in my tradition, it is often started by reminding us how to set a proper motivation on how to listen to and apply the teachings.
One of my teachers elaborated upon this by saying that people have all sorts of reasons for their interest in dharma. Some want to become knowledgable, some want it to help them with their careers, for example, while some people are interested in meditation as a form of relaxation or even to sort of take a "time out" from our stressful lives. Then he went on to say that our motivation for listening and applying the teachings would correspond to the result of doing so (so-to-speak).
Really, he was trying to remind us that our ultimate motivation for listening to and practicing dharma should be to transcend suffering and samsara and to reach perfect enlightenment. Although there could be some benefits to having a more lesser "worldly" motivation, it really does not fit in with the ultimate purpose of practicing dharma.
Your teacher's point of view makes sense, especially if his goal is to teach in a way that helps people to "transcend suffering and samsara and to reach perfect enlightenment."
Over the last couple of months I admit I've only scratched the surface of the dhamma. I've found, so far, that the farther I move away from a materialist and secular interpretation of Buddhism, the farther I move away from being able to allow it to help me in any way at all. Perhaps some of the folks your teacher was referring to are like me, and interacting with the world just a little more skillfully is still a pretty beneficial thing to them and everyone around them.
I've come to believe over the years that the best path is the one you will actually do, rather than the pure, ideal one. Good is what is helpful so over time circumstances and people change so what is helpful will change too.