Yes, this was a great podcast!

What I found most exciting was the bit near the end about the measured differences in effect on people who have meditated a lot. (Willoughby Britton presented some data on this at the recent Buddhist Geeks Conference.) Some people who have been practicing for decades show strong, objective effects; some do not. (This certainly seems right, based on my experience of long-time meditators!)

So the question is: are the people who don't get the effects not following the instructions they got? Did they get the wrong instructions? If they are doing the wrong thing, is that because they misunderstand the method, or because they are constitutionally incapable, or because they choose to do something other than what they were taught? (My offhand guess: each or several of these factors can be the problem, for different people.)

Getting answers to these questions should make it possible to improve meditation instruction, perhaps dramatically. That would be an extremely good thing—although it would also be extremely uncomfortable for teachers/traditions whose teaching style and/or instructions are shown not to work well.

I found this wildly exciting—I've been hoping for research like this for 20 years, and the results are almost too good to be true. Fabulous! So much looking forward to learning what comes out next!

I wish he'd lose the Theravada anti-emotion theoretical framework, though. "Excitement is just dopaminergic, samsaric GARBAGE"?? Listen to yourself, man, you're wildly excited, too—and rightly so—by ultra-cool stuff. That's a GOOD thing! This religious dogma is 180 degrees out of phase with your reality.

I'm well out of my 30s, unfortunately...

I'm having trouble pulling up writers in that age range to recommend; I don't seem to have organized my mental folders of Buddhist authors that way. Can anyone else reading this make suggestions?

The one thing that comes to mind is Daniel Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book. (The whole thing is available for free online, although you can also buy it from Amazon if you hate trees.) It's two books in one. There's a detailed meditation manual, plus rants about how screwed up Consensus Buddhism is. I practice a very different kind of meditation (plug: free email course at http://aromeditation.org/), so I can't evaluate that aspect of it, but many people I respect have found his manual helpful. His rants I mostly agree with strongly.

Both he and Brad Warner used the word "Hardcore" and started teaching non-Consensus Buddhism around the same time, so they sometimes got lumped, but Ingram was quick to point out that his version has nothing to do with punk. (Warner's does.) Ingram now calls his approach "Pragmatic", which is probably more accurate but less fun.

@ deusex & Will — My concern is not that there is something wrong with mindfulness, but that the word has been stretched so far that it no longer means anything. Or, it means too many different things to too many people for it to communicate. I find that imprecision of this sort is common in Consensus Buddhism. That can make it hard to argue with, because Consensus folks make vague, nice-sounding statements without having any clear idea in mind of what they are trying to say.

@ deusex — I haven't written any books you'd want to read; my Buddhist stuff is all on the web. (I like trees.)

@ Will #2 — Yes, from discussions I've had with Buddhists in both the UK and Australia, the "Consensus" seems to be mostly an American thing.

And #3: I'll write about this issue Real Soon, I hope. The defining moment for the Consensus was the 1993 Dharamsala Western Buddhist Teachers' Conference, at which one of the main issues was the teacher ethics issue. That's an important and real issue, but I think they got partly coopted by the Dalai Lama to carry out an unrelated agenda. I've summarized this point briefly in a comment reply on my most recent post. Accurate recognition of a problem; wrong solution, in my view. More coming when I get a chance to write it up!

Ona, that's very interesting! I do think that Tantra is more similar to Catholicism than Protestantism, in some ways.

And, yes, historical accident has a lot to do with it. Theravada and Zen got started modernizing in the late 1800s, because of (forced, colonial) contact with Western culture. Geographical isolation allowed Tibet to keep Western culture out until the 1959 disaster; so it's many decades behind. And, in the Tibetan diaspora, it's natural that maintaining religious tradition is an important part of maintaining cultural and ethnic identity. I'm totally sympathetic to that.

And yet... Tantra is not a Tibetan thing (or, in the case of Shingon, a Japanese thing). Originally, it's an Indian thing, and it has adapted to many quite different cultures. And can again, I hope!

David

Gabriel, thank you so much for this; insightful praise is a rare gift.

I'm very grateful to Hokai and Vince and the others in the Buddhist Geeks crew for giving me a platform, and for everything else they do. I'm proud to be associated with them.

I don't know enough Christian history to be confident about "all Christianities are solutions to particular social and cultural problems"; but what I do know seems consistent with that.

Yes, for many people the attraction of Buddhism, as with other religions, is The One Truth That Solves All Problems. I don't see it that way.

Hi Mike,

Yes—one of my main concerns, and I believe Hokai's also, is to figure out what Buddhism means in postmodernity—in a global culture that is not merely fragmented, but atomized into 140-character tidbits of decontextualized meaningness. Can Buddhism survive that? Do we care? Regardless of whether it continues as an intact system, does it provide resources that are useful for living in such an environment? Turning the question around, does an atomized culture provide resources for new ways of practicing?

I think the answer to all those is "tentatively yes", and I hope to write about that Real Soon Now.

What you said about play made me think you might find Exuberant Animal to your liking. His basic idea is that most fitness advice is based on routines needed to become a competition athlete. But most of us won't ever be competition athletes, and don't want to be. Those routines repetitively train highly-specific skills, which is boring and tends to cause injury or overtraining.

For most people, optimum performance at an artificial task (basketball, whatever) is not the goal. To stay motivated, exercise needs to be interesting and fun—and play meets that criterion.

I don't like everything about his approach—"creativity" doesn't really seem to be part of it, for instance—but there's a lot I do like.

Oh, and a big +1 on the ecstatic dance!