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Secular Buddhism

8ball said:
The breath is kind of just an anchor to keep returning to when you find yourself getting immersed in your thoughts. One metaphor I heard was that your mind is like a puppy; if you try to get it to stay in one place it will keep getting distracted and hopping off here and there, but to train the puppy you just focus on the breath and when it scampers off you keep gently coaxing it back (not forcefully or harshly, but gently bringing it back to that spot) until the puppy learns a greater degree of control. Once you are able to return to that stillness without such a struggle, you move onto other techniques.
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Robert Wright is interviewed in this podcast, Edie . He discusses his breakthrough with meditation, amongst other things.

‎The Secular Buddhist: Episode 284 :: Robert Wright :: Why Buddhism Is True on Apple Podcasts
 
Threshers_Flail said:
Great post danny la rouge.

I'm giving meditation another go so this thread is timely. I've only seen meditation as a relaxation/fuck off anxiety technique up until now, yet I'm eager to look more into the Buddhist side of things.
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Has anyone had any success meditating today?


In their book, Buddha’s Brain (2009), Hanson & Mendius describe the strain, disappointment and worry that the evolution of the human brain and mind has inflicted upon us, some of which is evolutionarily successful (as Robert Wright says: if people who suffer are more successful at passing on genes, then suffer we will), but on top of those evolutionary strategies, we now live in environments that our ancestors did not evolve to inhabit. So, the responses our brain exhibits are often a misfit for our circumstances anyway.

Chapter 2 of Buddha’s Brain goes into this in more detail, but basically, the “pangs of living range from subtle loneliness and dismay, to moderate stress, hurt, and anger, and then to intense trauma and anguish. This whole range is what we mean by the word, suffering”. (p24). The Buddha, Gautama, recognised this, and while his prescription can’t stop us or our loved ones getting ill or dying, it can help us to deal with the dismay, the suffering, that life will bring.

Our limbic system evolved to bring us emotions such as affection and affiliation. These emotions can help us feel secure. We can stimulate these ourselves. It turns out that while we evolved to respond to caring from others, we can gain the same benefits by caring for ourselves. If you think some of this stuff sounds wet and weedy, remember there’s a basis for this stuff in evolutionary psychology and neurology.

Meditation is one of the tools that can train our minds in this direction. So, if you feel irritable or unable to focus during meditation, just remember that that’s perfectly natural, and that every step will help. Meditation isn’t a destination, it’s a process. The process is the point.


When I began this journey, I downloaded an app called Chill, which sends you reminders to be mindful at intervals throughout the day. It might seem like a bit of an oxymoron to have your day interrupted by smartphone alerts aimed to help you to be more clear-minded, but I found it helped in the early stages, when my mind was even more unruly than currently. I don’t feel I need the app any more, but I’m not counting my chickens, so it’s still on my phone.

Good meditating. Feel free to share: community is important.
 
Trying to be less cynical and I'm glad that meditation is helping Danny. I've battled with mental health problems problems my whole life.

I was interested in Western Buddhism in the 90's. Used to do guided meditation at a place in Golders Green. Still have fundamental doubts about it. Feels like anti-humanism. This old article explains somethings better than I could.

Buddhism is the new opium of the people | Mark Vernon
 
yield said:
Trying to be less cynical and I'm glad that meditation is helping Danny. I've battled with mental health problems problems my whole life.

I was interested in Western Buddhism in the 90's. Used to do guided meditation at a place in Golders Green. Still have fundamental doubts about it. Feels like anti-humanism. This old article explains somethings better than I could.

Buddhism is the new opium of the people | Mark Vernon
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Out of the Buddhists I've met (the proper ones, not people "playing with Buddhisty ideas"), the only one of those things I think they're guilty of is that of making it into a religion.
 
There's a lot of interest in Buddhism in psychoanalysis, British psychoanalysis, especially people into Bion, who wasn't a Buddhist but had some very similar ideas. Although he was seen as quite radical, after having been very eminent, and his respectable reputation suffered when he moved to California in the 70s (though not in California where he had a big influence) he traced his own ideas back to Freud and the techniques of the free-floating attention of the analyst and the free associations of the patient, both based on allowing an uncensored flow of thought, observed, not guided or forced. He's now very popular and a big influence on current practice.

I find it all very interesting. I have to be in psychoanalysis as part of my clinical training and my analyst is a Buddhist, it's clearly there in her technique.
 
Red Cat said:
I find it all very interesting. I have to be in psychoanalysis as part of my clinical training and my analyst is a Buddhist, it's clearly there in her technique.
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It is very interesting. I'm not looking for a religion, or even really a philosophy: I'm an atheist/humanist/secularist, and as far as philosophy goes, I'm happy with the anarchist-communist, Marxian, area I've inhabited for decades now. What I'm interested in is things that work in a therapeutic sense. Wisdom and practice I can use to quiet my mind, train my mind, give me tools to use to help face the stress and suffering of life. And I'm finding this stuff very useful. I don't see myself telling people "I'm a secular Buddhist", but I have told people I'm "using Buddhist techniques", and can see myself eventually saying "I practise secular Buddhism".

I read Walpola Rahula's "What the Buddha taught" as a teenager, as well as books by Christmas Humphries on Zen and meditation. I was far more taken by that first book, and the human Buddha of the Pali Canon, rather than the deified one of the Lotus Sutra. For that reason the fact that Stephen Batchelor and others focus on Early Buddhism, the Buddha of the Pali texts, resonates with me: that was the Buddhism that interested me. And it's interesting to read the take on this all which says (I paraphrase), OK, Gautama Buddha lived at a time when reincarnation and the influence of Karma (which just means "action") on subsequent existences was part of the Eastern cosmology. He was a man of his time. What is interesting about his teachings isn't that stuff, which was standard for his time and culture, but the stuff that set him apart. The stuff about the actions we can take to help us deal with suffering. So, we can set the reincarnation and so on to one side, because it can't be proved, but also because it's not really relevant: what's relevant is stuff I can use to live my life now. Buddhism in that sense is about practice rather than belief.

And the stories can be seen as parable. They don't have to be factual. They impart wisdom and bring us practices that can help us find a calmer, less stressed-out way of ricocheting through life, reacting to reactions that are in themselves reactions to reactions to reactions. And this can all be made sense of in terms of evolutionary psychology and neurology.

So that's where I am. It helps, so I'm doing it.
 
My training is in cognitive therapy and Buddhist ideas are rooted in that tradition too, particularly in Paul Gilbert's work in compassion focused therapy, which I'm finding I'm more and more drawn to, professionally and personally. It's there from CBTs beginnings with Beck in the seventies though. The older I get the more I believe kindness and acceptance are what can save us, and this informs my politics. Probably slightly hyperbolic but I'm sincere.
 
Good thread, I'm going to have to work through those links. There's definitely stuff in buddhism that's useful if you can separate it from the more mystical stuff. Meditation has helped me through some really dark times, was the only way I could get to sleep for about 3 months (not in that place now thank fuck)
 
and yet one of the other significant religions of asiatic civilisations, islam, is still seen as a head choppers religion so it's literally impossible to come out as a secular muslim. Despite psychoanalysis heavily being routed in xtianity and judaism. this is the siege mentality we have to deal with on a daily basis. this is what i mean when i say therapy never works for me but i guess I'm a petulant head chopper and a raging homophobic misogynist innit?

Sorry danny, just had to let it out. good thread though, look forward to reading more about it.
 
I just saw your comment about buddhism having no creator myth. but surely it has an origin myth? That must play a similar role to Islam's creator myth.
 
i used to be an atheist - but meditation led me to accept that god does exist, but not in any way like Christianity or Islam - not as an entity that is separate from us, and not as our all knowing, all powerful creator. But I think you really do have to start dipping in yourself to see that, it's just not worth trying to explain it.

Besides, you'll find out yourself one day whatever happens.
 
well you know what they say. if God didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

That kind of solved my dilemma with my relationship to islam when i thought about it for a while. whether god exists or doesn't exist is not really something i care about. well, it does cocern me, but only insofar as a compulsion. but even if the whole world became atheist according to dawkins/hitchens/harris vision of atheism then that compulsion would still exist, we'd just call it something else.
 
danny la rouge said:
It is very interesting. I'm not looking for a religion, or even really a philosophy: I'm an atheist/humanist/secularist, and as far as philosophy goes, I'm happy with the anarchist-communist, Marxian, area I've inhabited for decades now. What I'm interested in is things that work in a therapeutic sense. Wisdom and practice I can use to quiet my mind, train my mind, give me tools to use to help face the stress and suffering of life. And I'm finding this stuff very useful. I don't see myself telling people "I'm a secular Buddhist", but I have told people I'm "using Buddhist techniques", and can see myself eventually saying "I practise secular Buddhism".

I read Walpola Rahula's "What the Buddha taught" as a teenager, as well as books by Christmas Humphries on Zen and meditation. I was far more taken by that first book, and the human Buddha of the Pali Canon, rather than the deified one of the Lotus Sutra. For that reason the fact that Stephen Batchelor and others focus on Early Buddhism, the Buddha of the Pali texts, resonates with me: that was the Buddhism that interested me. And it's interesting to read the take on this all which says (I paraphrase), OK, Gautama Buddha lived at a time when reincarnation and the influence of Karma (which just means "action") on subsequent existences was part of the Eastern cosmology. He was a man of his time. What is interesting about his teachings isn't that stuff, which was standard for his time and culture, but the stuff that set him apart. The stuff about the actions we can take to help us deal with suffering. So, we can set the reincarnation and so on to one side, because it can't be proved, but also because it's not really relevant: what's relevant is stuff I can use to live my life now. Buddhism in that sense is about practice rather than belief.

And the stories can be seen as parable. They don't have to be factual. They impart wisdom and bring us practices that can help us find a calmer, less stressed-out way of ricocheting through life, reacting to reactions that are in themselves reactions to reactions to reactions. And this can all be made sense of in terms of evolutionary psychology and neurology.

So that's where I am. It helps, so I'm doing it.
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I think I am looking for a religion, I'm not sure. I've never really been interested in therapy as just a therapy, and psychoanalysis is an immersive training, and transformative, it's not a technology, but it's not a religion. I love Marxism used well, it explains/describes so much, but it doesn't help me live a good life; it does help me to think in terms of dynamic relationships, processes and the creativity of conflict, the big picture, ideas it has in common with psychoanalysis, and maybe Buddhism too, I'm not sure.

Recently, I read a paper by a psychoanalyst who was also a Buddhist who pointed out that the tendency to seek religion in psychoanalysis while proclaiming their atheism and she warned that if you have a need for religion or spiritual life, to fulfil that need in religion, not therapy. She was writing at a time when religion was seen as suspect in those circles, things have changed now, but it got me thinking, I think she's right. I'm also interested in the Quakers, and the sitting in silence and allowing something to be born, it seems to have something in common with meditation.

Sorry danny la rouge if this is veering too far away from your OP. Thanks for the links.
 
dialectician said:
and yet one of the other significant religions of asiatic civilisations, islam, is still seen as a head choppers religion so it's literally impossible to come out as a secular muslim. Despite psychoanalysis heavily being routed in xtianity and judaism. this is the siege mentality we have to deal with on a daily basis.
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Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi "Rhazes" and Ibn Sina "Avicenna" are two of the fathers of psychology & medicine.

Not to mention all of the classical Greek texts that were preserved in Arabic, Syriac or Persian translation.

Freud was heavily influenced by Jewish mysticism. Anyway sorry Danny I'm going off topic
 
Why Radical Mindfulness?
"To explain the purpose of the London Radical Mindfulness project, we need to outline the wider context in which it arose, beginning with discussions on the left around ‘Acid Communism’. This was a term coined by cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who sadly died in early 2017. He had previously done popular work on the concept of capitalist realism, arguing that capitalism had come to be seen as so ubiquitous and inevitable that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. This had occurred because the growth of neoliberalism since Margaret Thatcher had acted as a form of ‘consciousness deflation’, a destruction of the very idea that there were other political possibilities.

Instead we became framed as only competitive individual subjects, in a world in which ‘There is No Alternative’. Acid Communism was his later proposal for how we counter this. In his talk All of This is Temporary he looks to various ‘consciousness raising‘ projects of the 1960s such as trade union class consciousness and feminist consciousness raising groups. These are frequently discussed topics on the left, but more unusual is how he places these alongside what he calls psychedelic consciousness. He argues that 60s counterculture, through its experiments with art, music, drugs and spirituality, had been successful in popularising the notion that reality was changeable, that the future was open, that experimentation and creativity were necessary. The fact that massively popular groups such as The Beatles were at the forefront of this psychedelic consciousness shows how widespread it had become. Acid Communism is the attempt to recapture this spirit of experimentation and its sense of a malleable future. This can’t simply be a repeat of 60s counterculture however, but must involve the creation of entirely new ideas and practices."

Why Radical Mindfulness?
 
What is Radical Mindfulness?
[Editor: I have contacted Graham Jones, one of the organizers of London Radical Mindfulness. He sent me his recently published book, The Shock Doctrine of the Left.Graham and I have made plans to do a podcast for Engage! after I read the book. Meanwhile, his group, London Radical Mindfulness, has been ramping up publications on the web, showing the direction for this work, which I wholeheartedly support.]

What is Radical Mindfulness?
 
dialectician said:
Not even creation through sound? interesting.
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It’s like Gautama wasn’t interested in those sorts of questions, more like that he was interested in why we feel the need to ask those questions. He seems to have been an atheist about Brahma (the creator god of the time), and an agnostic about other stuff, but not an atheist about heavens and hells and reincarnation and so on. Who knows what his personal cosmology looked like. Whatever it was, to the extent of creation etc, he doesn’t tell us. It’s not what he’s teaching. He’s teaching about the nature of suffering, and meditation, and how to calm the mind, how to deal with mental turmoil.

In the earliest texts, he’s very much a human, teaching about the world. Later texts, the ones scholars believe were composed (they were initially memorised and passed on orally, which is why they’re so repetitive: to make them easier to memorise) after his death, start to add more divinity-like attributes to him, even the later Pali ones, but the much later Lotus Sūtra is like full of griffins and magical creatures, and Buddha has wheels on his hands, glows in the dark, and all sorts of bonkers superhero stuff. And then Tibetan Buddhism is more like the Catholic Church of Buddhism (though interestingly, not so much the Dali Lama himself, especially in his more recent writings, like “Beyond Religion”. He says, in another book, “don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to become a Buddhist, use it to become a better whatever-you-already-are”).

People can believe whatever they like, so long as it doesn’t get used as an excuse to coerce or oppress others, as far as I’m concerned. I’d join a meditation group or whatever with traditional Buddhists quite happily, so long as they accept my secularism.
 
danny la rouge said:
No apology needed. It’s on-topic as far as I’m concerned. Personal questing, and what helps, is all in the same category, and therefore interesting to me.
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Just as a quick question, one of the links above mentions the Buddha as not talking specifically about meditation and such techniques as such. It sounds from your post above like you have knowledge otherwise.
 
8ball said:
Just as a quick question, one of the links above mentions the Buddha as not talking specifically about meditation and such techniques as such. It sounds from your post above like you have knowledge otherwise.
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The Satipatthana sutta is exactly that.

I have a whole book devoted to interpreting and discussing it.
 
Really sorry to hear about your depression Danny...I wasnt aware of that. Wishing you all the best.

I haven' t got a lot to add, but I did go through a similiar interest in the past, primarily triggered by psychoactives. In trying to make sense of what I was thinking and experiencing I definitely found a lot of parallels with the Buddhist tradition and fumbled my way through that, trying to ditch the bits I felt were a bit irrational and superstitious and seeing what was left and could be learned.

I think its impressive how some Buddhist insights match up quite nicely with quantum physics/a view of the universe as a vibrating energy field etc. The idea that the universe expands and contracts like a breath that lasts however many billions of years also matches big bang theory, and so on. Theres some interesting non-romanticised writing done about the similiarities out there - long time since I looked into it now.

It is clear that the Buddhist monks were/are getting high from their practice and having these cosmic insights that paralleled drug highs. Apart from having a focus of thought I think a massive part of this is breathing technique. For example in monasteries amongst the meditation techniques you get circular breathing and other very particular breathing modes, through chanting or otherwise, often lasting hours.

Theres an interesting guy called Stanslav Grof who did lots of experiments with LSD before it became illegal to do so. He wanted to carry on the work and he came up with this thing called Holotropic Breathing, which he reckons can trigger similiar 'LSD' like highs. I forget the science, but its along the lines of short breaths out and longer breaths in IIRC, and changing the ratios of oxygen and carbon dioxide that hit the body and brain. I think that was it. Dead simple to do by all accounts, and again lots of stuff online about it.

Anyhow, my point being that mindfulness is one thing - sitting quietly is mellow enough - but with a bit of concentrated breathwork it seems you can really get into these higher states of consciousness and that can be really powerful and healing.

Likewise, there are people who are really good at consciously switching their brain wave patters through the states from beta waves into alpha waves, theta waves and so on - theres lots of stuff out there about how to learn to do this.

Partly this is also why exercise is theraputic...doing a lot of heavy breathing and getting an oxygen hit is really good!

Its funny as breathing is one of the most basic things we do, but we rarely give it much thought, yet I think it can have profound effects on us.
 
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Fascinating thread Danny, and it certainly resonates with my experience of learning about Buddhism, I shall investigate the links you provide. Thank you
 
Interesting thread Danny. Somewhat related, in that it is built around secular meditation as well as therapeutic ideas, I have been reading this recently: What We May Be by Piero Ferrucci

It is interesting but where I struggle with it is in finding it very individualistic. I find the ideas of the self to be very atomistic in a way that doesn't really fit with my worldview. I've often found this in (Western interpretations of) meditation practices. I know that compassion/loving-kindness mediation involves moving out from the self, but even that I feel operates in quite an individualistic way in a our cultural mindsets (I can't comment on how it operates in the cultures in which it was developed though I suspect it was different). I feel like as soon as people attempt 'self' development in our culture it tends to start with our weird default version of self that is separate from other things. I think you have to be very aware and careful to steer around that trap, and I wondered if you've had thoughts on the problem Danny - if indeed you'd agree it can be a problem.
 
I've encountered a fair bit of various Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions over the years and while a mixed bag it really is a treasure house of wisdom, particularly enjoy the stories of the Chan/Zen traditions of the Tang and Song and their debates with other schools. There was a breadth and always a contest of ideas that seems really healthy compared to some of the more ossified institutions that arose.
 
Rookie question - does anyone here have any precautions on the potential negative effects of some of the techniques being discussed here?
With anything that has any real power behind it, there are always side effects and precautions to be taken.

I've been reading a few stories where things have gone awry (a few proper horror stories), involving buried emotions and also people getting freaked out by certain experiences that arise, ego dissolution being one of them.
 
Brainaddict said:
It is interesting but where I struggle with it is in finding it very individualistic. I find the ideas of the self to be very atomistic in a way that doesn't really fit with my worldview.
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I think that’s a common conception, but it hasn’t been my experience in what I’ve read and listened to. Humans as a social animal has been very much emphasised, to the extent of saying that the point of mindfulness is to interact better. To connect better. To listen better.

Similarly, the idea of non-self or not-self isn’t about dissolving the self. It suffers from translation problems. The point isn’t that you don’t have personhood, but that you aren’t an isolated being: you’re interconnected with everyone and everything else. Who you are now is the result of innumerable causes and conditions. That, and that everything changes and nothing is permanent. Our place in the world is like that. That’s the sort of thing that is meant by ‘anatta’, the word we’re translating as “non self”.

There’s a lot of discussion of just those points: interconnectedness and impermanence in the stuff I’ve put in the OP.
 
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