March 30th, 2023
- recorded & on youtube
- M > what practices required? are there more elements than simply being an effective sangha? collective meditation
- P > was the first buddha also a sangha?
- important elements, including... trees
- Overstory novel
- no-self & emptiness same thing
- M > sense of opening/surrendering to something larger, but not necessarily EVERYTHING
- can be like, a group
- buddhist teaching
- distinction
- ultimate/absolute
- implicate order — David Bohm
- vertical theology — Christianity
- sacred
- mythos
- historical/conventional/relative
- explicate order
- horizontal theology
- profane/mundane
- logos
- I would say the law of the excluded middle is... kinda true, sometimes.
- first interpreted these as a kind of metaphysics
- but then realized buddhism is essentially phenomenology, and always have been
- western confusion - nirvana as brain state
- vs an experience
- which IS a brain state from the physicalist paradigm
- suspend physicalism, and
- then phenomenological approach becomes experimental/empiricism
- but this seems like the major obstacle for awakening for people
- M > more than other dogmas?
- P > maybe not
- also first interpreted "ultimate" as more true
- but it's also about being able to fluidly move between the two
- bodhisattvas live in the action dimension
- Iain McGilchrist - "not so much free will but free won't"
- M >
- P > Bernardo Castrop - big proponent of idealism rn
- meta-paradigm
- what would facilitate collective awakening?
- not replacing physicalism with another paradigm
- but ability to be fluid with paradigms
- "the view from nowhere"
- any framing is necessarily putting us at a slight remove from direct experience
- P > bian ballace - first person science
- P > I would question the "seeming"
- the experience IS reality
- eg Don Hoffman seems to be adding an extra thing with Interface Theory of Perception
- M > right, overemphasis on symbolic kind of interface
- P > colonized by LH-mode
- language/math have done disappearing act
- conflating map/territory
- everybody knows this
- but then ChatGPT... does it have anything you could call experience?
- DALL-E etc trained on
- ooh, law of excluded middle relates to perspective
- M > sunsets, co-perception
- P > I try to notice when I'm imposing frames on experience
- and even "my frame" is a frame!
- but speaking from my experience—whatever that means
- practice I really like here
- Douglas Harding's "having no head"
- M > but how then... different perspective
- Lyn Marguelis > everything is equally evolved
- P > things in the way of collective experience
- verbal stuff
- M > parable of the canoe
- ego
- P > decades of training in individualism
- has been a monk for 15 years, first went to plum village 9 years earlier, 1999
- had SO MANY canoe-like experiences at plum village
- definitely a sense of transcend & include happening at PV
- not saying it isn't also happening somewhere else
- Thich Nhat Hanh wasn't referring to just monks when talking about collective awakening
- Life Itself program
- Elinor Ostrum 8 core design principles
- that she found in ALL (?!) communities she'd studied that were successfully avoiding tragedy of the commons (which btw has very little evidence)
- and very overlapping with these 6 harmonies
- Thich Nhat Hanh is the first monastic to revise the ruleset
- in considering books I may write, here's a potential publisher that's relevant for obvious reasons: