An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book II

The Daniel Ingram book, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha is also available in HTML for on-line reading here.

From the Foreword:

I have also written this book in what is clearly my own voice. Those who have read this work who know me tell me that they can almost hear me saying it.

…

I should also mention that I consider myself and many of those who hail from the lineages from which I primarily draw to be dharma cowboys, mavericks, rogues, and outsiders. Really wanting to get somewhere is a sure ticket to feeling this way in most Western Buddhist circles. What is ironic is that I also see myself as an extreme traditionalist. The strange thing is that these days to be a Buddhist traditionalist, one who really tries to plunge the depths of the heart, mind and body as the Buddha so clearly admonished his followers to do, is to fly in the face of much of mainstream meditation culture.

I am drawn to this voice.

An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

In checking back with the Buddhist Geeks podcast I discovered an exceptional new dharma book, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book By Daniel M. Ingram. So new in fact that it won’t even be published until next month (01/09), but you can grab it now in a free PDF e-book at the author’s website.

I’m just reading the Introduction now.

Rumi – Masnavi I Ma’navi

Masnavi I Ma’navi – Book I: PROLOGUE by Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi

“HEARKEN to the reed-flute, how it complains,
Lamenting its banishment from its home:
“Ever since they tore me from my osier bed,
My plaintive notes have moved men and women to tears.
I burst my breast, striving to give vent to sighs,
And to express the pangs of my yearning for my home.
He who abides far away from his home
Is ever longing for the day ho shall return.
My wailing is heard in every throng,
In concert with them that rejoice and them that weep.
Each interprets my notes in harmony with his own feelings,
But not one fathoms the secrets of my heart.”

Milarepa: Magician, Murderer, Saint

FILM – Milarepa: Magician, Murderer, Saint

“Milarepa depicts the humble beginnings of the man who was to become Tibet’s greatest saint.

A true story based on centuries-old oral traditions, a youthful Milarepa is propelled into a world of sorrow and betrayal after his father’s sudden death. Destitute and hopeless, he sets out to learn black magic – and exact revenge on his enemies – encountering magicians, demons, an enigmatic teacher and unexpected mystical power along the way. But it is in confrontation with the consequences of his anger that he learns the most.”

a memetically engineered nontheistic religion

The Church of Virus

[The Church of] “Virus is a collection of mutually-supporting ideas (a meme-complex) encompassing philosophy, science, technology, politics, and religion. The core ideas are based on evolution and memetics because one of the primary design goals was survivability through adaptation (religions die, not because they grow old, but because they become obsolete). If a new religion is designed around the premise of continuously integrating better (more accurate, more useful) concepts while ensuring the survival of its believers, it could conceivably achieve true immortality.”

The Problem with Atheism

In On Faith by Sam Harris

“…

Now let me just assert, on the basis of my own study and experience, that there is no question in my mind that people have improved their emotional lives, and their self-understanding, and their ethical intuitions, and have even had important insights about the nature of subjectivity itself through a variety of traditional practices like meditation.

Leaving aside all the metaphysics and mythology and mumbo jumbo, what contemplatives and mystics over the millennia claim to have discovered is that there is an alternative to merely living at the mercy of the next neurotic thought that comes careening into consciousness. There is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves.

…

One problem with atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems more or less synonymous with not being interested in what someone like the Buddha or Jesus may have actually experienced. In fact, many atheists reject such experiences out of hand, as either impossible, or if possible, not worth wanting. Another common mistake is to imagine that such experiences are necessarily equivalent to states of mind with which many of us are already familiar—the feeling of scientific awe, or ordinary states of aesthetic appreciation, artistic inspiration, etc.

As someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, let me assure you, that when a person goes into solitude and trains himself in meditation for 15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years at a time, in silence, doing nothing else—not talking, not reading, not writing—just making a sustained moment to moment effort to merely observe the contents of consciousness and to not get lost in thought, he experiences things that most scientists and artists are not likely to have experienced, unless they have made precisely the same efforts at introspection. And these experiences have a lot to say about the plasticity of the human mind and about the possibilities of human happiness.

…

My concern is that atheism can easily become the position of not being interested in certain possibilities in principle. I don’t know if our universe is, as JBS Haldane said, “not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose.” But I am sure that it is stranger than we, as “atheists,” tend to represent while advocating atheism. As “atheists” we give others, and even ourselves, the sense that we are well on our way toward purging the universe of mystery. As advocates of reason, we know that mystery is going to be with us for a very long time. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that mystery is ineradicable from our circumstance, because however much we know, it seems like there will always be brute facts that we cannot account for but which we must rely upon to explain everything else. This may be a problem for epistemology but it is not a problem for human life and for human solidarity. It does not rob our lives of meaning. And it is not a barrier to human happiness.

“

Is Depression Adaptive?

“Not only does consumer culture encourage us to engage in activities contrary to our well-being and avoid other, more beneficial activities, but it also causes us a great deal of stress—one of the key triggers of a depressive episode. Keeping up with the Joneses—not to mention the Hiltons—requires that people spend long hours at demanding and stressful jobs, skip holidays and needed sleep, and amass record amounts of debt in order to have the latest fashions. As well, the ideals that television and advertising present, in terms of aesthetics and emotional well-being, are so far beyond the means of average people that many end up feeling bad about themselves for not living up to those ideals—but that does not stop them from trying. The result can be lowered self-esteem and a reduced sense of well-being.

While mental health professionals have traditionally looked at depression as a result of either genetic, biochemical, or environmental factors, some evolutionary theorists are now looking at depression in a much different light. Randolph Nesse of the University of Michigan has argued that, like pain, depression and depressive symptoms serve the adaptive function of stopping humans from engaging in activities that are harmful to them or of little benefit.”

-From
Buying Happiness: The Depressing Reality of Materialism By Peter Dodson
Briarpatch Magazine

A nation drugged into ignoring its own best interests.

Nietzsche and Buddhism

Dukkha, Inaction, and Nirvana: Suffering, Weariness, and Death?
A look at Nietzsche’s Criticisms of Buddhist Philosophy
-by Omar Moad / The Philosopher, Volume LXXXXII No. 1

“A dialogue in the Sutta-Nipata presents the Buddha responding as follows to an enquiry on competing metaphysical theories. ‘Apart from consciousness’, he says, ‘no divers truths exist. Mere sophistry declares this ‘true’ and that view ‘false’.’ A similar notion appears in Nietzsche’s Will to Power:

‘Judging is our oldest faith; it is our habit of believing this to be true or false, of asserting or denying, our certainty that something is thus and not otherwise, our belief that we really ‘know’ what is believed to be true in all judgments?’ “

http://www.the-philosopher.co.uk/buddhism.htm

Anti Matters

Anti Matters Vol 1, No 1:

“An open-access journal addressing issues in science and the humanities from nonmaterialistic perspectives”

From the inaugural Editorial:

‘So what is in this first issue of AntiMatters?

The first item (“What Buddhist Meditation has to Tell Psychology About the Mind”) is a plenary address to the American Psychological Association delivered on August 23 of 2002 (eight days late!) by Eleanor Rosch and published here for the first time. Rosch explains why Eastern traditions, particularly Buddhist thought and meditation, can reveal a quite new understanding of what the human mind and its knowing capacity actually are. She is critical of biological and psychological approaches to meditative and religious experiences since in taking our present versions of the body and the mind for granted they marginalize these experiences.’

Rumi says,

“We seldom hear the inner music / But we’re all dancing to it nevertheless”