Waking Up Sam Harris

[RichardH]

The opinion expressed by Harris in the video is his truth. Some share it, some don't. I am familiar with the view-set and do not share it. The good news is that there is room for everything. There is no need for a zero-sum attitude.

Gassho
Daizan

[Daiyo]

I've watched the video and couldn't but wonder: What's so wrong about having a religion?

I know that many atrocities have been done (and are still being done) in the name of religion, but how many good deeds have also been done out of beliefs?
How many slaughters were performed for political reasons? Would someone dare to say politics should not have influence in our lives?

I think it's just bad news sell better than good ones. And these days it is cool, sounds smart to be against religion.

Sorry if I was too rudimentary.


Gassho,
Walter.

[JohnsonCM]

I do not understand how someone can practice Buddhism and be a committed theist or atheist. Aren't those the kind of ultimate positions that are undermined by sitting in openness?

It makes sense to speak from a theistic angle in one context, and an atheistic angle in another context. If I'm talking with a Christian friend it might feel right to use the language of God and Grace. If talking to a friend who is science minded, or an atheist, a different language makes sense. It makes sense to have an honest view or perspective and have passion around it, but how could that view become fixed in the mind? Staking out an absolute position might be effective politics, but is it really held absolutely?

I don't get it.


Gassho
Daizan

If you want to read something interesting read into the kabalah. Many people would agree that people of the Jewish faith are extremely devout, more so their rabbis and holy persons. Yet the words of Rav Ashlag and the Ari are so amazingly similar with Buddhist thought that it is truly beautiful to see how the two worlds mesh

[Jundo]

Hi - not wanting to interrupt the 'just go sit' imperative of this thread but a Sam Harris video came up on my Secular Buddhist facebook link.

He does seem to be making a case for abandoning buddhism or the language/ narrative of buddhism in favour of a purely secular methodology. I think I read somewhere that this approach is termed as a 'first-person science'.

VIDEO

This doesn't seem to quite resonate with the teaching here?

I do tend to err on the side of throwing the baby out with the bath water but wouldn't want to see it disappear all together?

Gassho

Willow

Thank you Willow.

I only have reservations about so-called modern "mindfulness" movements and certain very "stripped down" ways if certain vital Teachings are left out of the mix.

I do feel that "Mindfulness" or other like meditation courses and therapies stripped of their Buddhist elements miss the real "powerhouse" medicine this Way has to offer, to wit, the embodying of basic Buddhist Teachings on "non-self", "Emptiness" "Dukkha/the Four Noble Truths" "Impermanence" the Precepts and Bodhisattva Vows and others. These must be a doorway (doorless doorway) to Awakening.

Without allowing someone to fully transcend the small "self", and to truly embody "Emptiness", meditation is often little more than a relaxation technique or watered down medicine. (Can we keep these in a very secular format? Possibly. The jury is out.)

Let me note that David Loy and Ron Purser had some additional criticisms of the "mindfulness" movement in a recent essay (such as its being co-opted merely as a tool to up corporate and military efficiency) ...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-purser/beyond-mcmindfulness_b_3519289.html

Folks for centuries have turned to Zen just to relax, improve their health, improve their performance in their career. Is that a problem? Well, perhaps not, especially if it leads some to delve deeper later on. But it is a shame that they are missing the real power of the Practice, like someone who gets on an airplane but never takes off.

What about all the Chanting and Incense and Oryoki and Robes and such. Well, this came up again recently on another thread: Bottom Line is that some folks may find these powerful Practices and "Dharma Doorways", and some not. (Time for a link to my "Turning Japanese" post) ... Take 'em or leave 'em. We Practice a bit of the Traditional around our Sangha ... like Bowing and Oryoki and such ... because of what they Teach. But what about a lot of the superstition, baseless legend and hocus-pocus fiddle-faddle that surrounds Buddhism (and traditional Zen too, Bryson, is not an exception)? Well, we would all do better to throw much of it in the Dharma Dumpster, if you ask me (although, even then, some of the myths and magic have a certain power too, and resonate with some folks).

http://www.treeleaf.org/forums/showthread.php?12734-Lay-robes-playing-house&p=136835&viewfull=1#post136835

I also have no trouble to using the word "Buddha" in various ways (we actually do so now, although really all three ways are one way ultimately! ). One is to refer to the "historical" person who was a psychologist/philosopher some 2500 years ago who understood much about the human condition and Suffering (Dukkha) and the various other principles mentioned able. One is as "Big Buddha", which stands for that which is the Flowing Empty-Wholeness of All Reality (i.e., the Big Enchilada), although all labels are ultimately inappropriate and it is just a name for an impossible to name. And then there is "Buddha", this archetype model of a fully enlightened being who may exist mostly as an aspiration in our hearts more than as a "real" being, a way of living free of all greed anger and ignorance which we all are targeting to become somewhere down the road (and even now can manifest when we manifest such qualities in our life).

I have no trouble to use "Buddha" in such ways. When it comes to tossing away mention of the "Historical Buddha" (just because, as Sam Harris says, the term "Buddha" is sectarian), I feel this is going to far. I see no more reason to ignore him any more than I ignore Plato or Freud. If, on the other hand, one wants to call the other two "Buddhas" by some other name ... or no name at all ... no problem by me. The names are just conveniences anyway. Call em what ya want or nothing at all ... but don't toss away the Reality and Aspiration they stand for.

Gassho, J

[Jundo]

Another critical article on the Mindfulness movement from a recent Tricycle, pointing out that much of the recent scientific research is too cherry-picked and too hyped ...

Tricycle October 01, 2014
Don’t Believe the Hype
Neuroscientist Catherine Kerr is concerned about how mindfulness meditation research is being portrayed in the media.

... Assistant Professor of Medicine and Family Medicine at Brown University, Kerr directs translational neuroscience for Brown’s Contemplative Studies Initiative and leads a mindfulness research program at Providence’s Miriam Hospital. She takes no issue with the value of mindfulness practice; Kerr has personally reaped enormous benefit from Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in a two-decade-long battle with cancer, and as a researcher she has studied the beneficial effects MBSR has had on others. But as a scientist committed to facts, she was worried. “I think we are all going to need to take responsibility and do something so that the coverage looks slightly more balanced,” she wrote to her Facebook friends who are scientists, clinicians, philosophers, and contemplatives in the meditation research community. “Otherwise, when the inevitable negative studies come, this whole wave will come crashing down on us.”

... The Huffington Post is the worst offender. The message they deliver becomes a ubiquitous, circulating meme that people put up on their Facebook pages and that becomes “true” through repetition alone. The Huffington Post features mindfulness a lot and tends to represent only the positive findings (and in the most positive light imaginable) rather than offering a balanced reading of the science. They use that approach to justify the idea that every person who has any mental abilities should be doing mindfulness meditation. I don’t think the science supports that. The Huffington Post has really done mindfulness a disservice by framing it in that way.

... he clinical trial data on mindfulness for depression, for example, is not a slam-dunk. The results are really not better than those for antidepressants. In general, mindfulness is not orders of magnitude stronger than other things that people are doing right now to help manage stress and mood disorders. So you have to look at mindfulness in the context of a range of options. Unlike other therapies, mindfulness can be self-led at a certain point—it becomes a practice rather than a therapeutic modality in the same way that exercise is a training or practice. But mindfulness doesn’t work for everything and is not suitable for everyone.

... [And not just for studies on meditation, but for all medical studies in the news] ... a report published in Nature reviewed preclinical cancer studies and found that over 80 percent of the findings reported in top journals were nonreplicable. That means we can’t trust them. They’re likely not true!.

... It is a big problem in science communication across the board. That is how things work in these TED-style forum talks—it is not about skepticism or careful thinking; it is about who can tell the most dramatic story.

... I’ve heard reports of people who have abandoned chemotherapy to do mindfulness. I don’t know if that has really happened. Certainly there are people who go off their antidepressants or lithium and think that mindfulness is going to manage their serious depression or bipolar disorder. That’s a concern we have with the current hype around mindfulness. People might see it as being more active than it really is. It doesn’t resolve those situations.

http://www.tricycle.com/blog/don%E2%80%99t-believe-hype

Gassho, J

[Anshu Bryson]

Another critical article on the Mindfulness movement from a recent Tricycle, pointing out that much of the recent scientific research is too cherry-picked and too hyped ...


Gassho, J

Harris, being a neuroscientist, would likely not disagree with Professor Kerr's viewpoint.

There were, however, also some points for reflection for followers of the Dharma in that article - http://www.tricycle.com/blog/don%E2%80%99t-believe-hype - as follows:

...When promoters of mindfulness only focus on its effects on brain mechanisms—and I say this as a brain scientist—they are missing a big part of the story. Similarly, when Buddhist critics of mindfulness attack secularized mindfulness because they are worried it is corrupting the dharma, they too are missing something important... I worry that our tendency to parse the world into competing abstractions—scientific reductionism on the one hand or dharma purism on the other—may cause us to miss this hard-to-see qualitative shift that may be the true source of the power of mindfulness...

...People who think of mindfulness as “training their brains” are taking refuge in an idea that has not been proven; they are either unaware of or unable to process the problem of scientific uncertainty. Similarly, people who are concerned that “McMindfulness” could be watering down the dharma could also be viewed as ideological and intolerant of the uncertainty that comes with something new. Insistence on surefire answers, whether in science or about a received notion of the dharma, can be an avoidance of the existential problem of uncertainty...

Gassho,

Bryson

[Anshu Bryson]

Oh, and one more point she made, which tracks with things you have said on another thread recently, Jundo:

"It seems like the dynamics of ritual are very important..."



Gassho,

Bryson

[Jinyo]

Thank you for your replies.

I found this podcast on 'Stealth Buddhism' on Buddhist Geeks interesting.

http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2014/08/bg-331-stealth-buddhism/

Gassho

Willow

[Anshu Bryson]

A combination of late flights both going and coming, and a great bookshop at the airport, meant that not only I could buy Harris's book, but I had time to read it over the weekend. Actually, it is very good. Some very interesting commentary on self/non-self.

As readers of this thread will be aware, he is keen to get rid of the sectarian religious trappings surrounding meditation practice. Rather than seeing that as a negative, though, I see it as a door for people who might not normally look to Buddhism (because of the sectarian religious frameworks they have grown up in themselves) to explore the practice.

He has said before: "One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced. In a world that has long been terrorized by fratricidal Sky-God religions, the ascendance of Buddhism would surely be a welcome development..."

He just doesn't think that the majority of people, because of those sectarian differences, are likely to embrace Buddhism. So, he chooses to tread perhaps a narrower path to get a broader audience of people to take up the practice than just Buddhists... That, however, doesn't stop the Buddhist from continuing on their own path!

Harris doesn't seem to be peddling the 'mindfulness as therapy' line; he is much more talking about overall human wellbeing. But, in the end, he seems to be saying "just sit"...

Gassho,

Bryson

[Diarmuid1]

What makes me uneasy about Harris are
a) his anti-Islamic rhetoric at a time when developing countries in the Muslim world are being bombed into the open arms of extremist ideologies;
b) his self-publicism.

When he rationalises killing of non-combatants (and combatants, for that matter) and is clearly caught up in the image of Sam Harris, "author, philosopher, neuroscientist", I wonder what exactly his meditative practice does for him? Perhaps I need to read the book!

[Hans]

Hello,

just to clarify my initial posting: I did not say that Sam Harris is a great spiritual teacher, nor do I claim that his understanding of certain areas of science must mean that he is particularly knowledgable about other aspects of life.

In a world where thousands of books are simply written to continuously make the readers feel good ad nauseam, I felt that this book was like a well researched breath of fresh air.

Please let's not have a political discussion about his views on Islam. We can all read and learn from Kodo Sawaki despite his political POVs after all, so I don't see that as a problem, unless one wants to make Sam Harris one's Guru

In my humble opinion a book should be read and criticised based on what it actually says, not based on whether one agrees with the author's world view.

Gassho,

Hans Chudo Mongen

[Diarmuid1]

You are right, Hans. I do not want to discuss politics. I don't really see much point to politics. My question is more about Sam Harris's use of meditative practice. He seems hooked to the ego and hooked to the idea of the Other (to the point where he can rationalise killing it). In my hopefully equally humble opinion, what a book says should be weighed up alongside what its writer does. But I must also repeat that I have not yet read the book, so perhaps I should not be trying to discuss what it says!

[Diarmuid1]

An Atheist does not reject God, he just does not believe there is one.
If you don't believe there is X, there is no need to reject X.

Wouldn't it be slightly more accurate to say that actually an atheist believes that there is no god? It's a small nuance, but it seems to me that an atheist defines him or herself just as much by their belief as a theist does. The difference being that atheists tend to use logic and scientific reasoning to support their beliefs whereas theists use logic and faith to support theirs.

Both are believers though!

[Daitetsu]

Wouldn't it be slightly more accurate to say that actually an atheist believes that there is no god? It's a small nuance, but it seems to me that an atheist defines him or herself just as much by their belief as a theist does. The difference being that atheists tend to use logic and scientific reasoning to support their beliefs whereas theists use logic and faith to support theirs.

Both are believers though!

I have to disagree here.
According to that logic, non-skiing would be sports, non-smoking an addiction, and abstinence a sex position.
According to that logic, if I said I believe in pink unicorns, that would make you automatically a believer as well (i.e. someone believing there are no pink unicorns).
People could claim all sorts of weird things and say that you are equally just believing (namely the opposite).
Atheism is a lack of belief though.
So it makes more sense to say that Atheism is a non-belief.

BTW, in order to avoid further off-topics in the Sam Harris thread the discussion was continued in another thread:

http://www.treeleaf.org/forums/showthread.php?12743-Theism-Atheism-Painting-and-God

Gassho,

Daitetsu


PS: The following link might be helpful (enough to read the first page): http://www.alternet.org/story/148555...ief?page=0%2C0

[Jundo]

A short podcast interview with Sam Harris. Although he is a mindfulness\vipassana practitioner, the meditation he recommends seems very close to Shikantaza in flavor.

http://www.ttbook.org/listen/79466

Expanded interview here ...

http://www.ttbook.org/book/our-segments-sam-harris

Gassho, J

SatToday