The Religious Tradition
Feb29

The Religious Tradition

Posted By on Feb 29, 2024

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton   6 minute read This excerpt is from the chapter ‘The Evidence Bases in Religion, Science and Politics,’ and explores how a Wisdom or Religious tradition comes about. It follows on from The Scientific Tradition.         The Wisdom tradition But what about a Wisdom tradition such as Buddhism? Here the authors [of The Embodied Mind] draw upon the philosophical tradition of Phenomenology, in particular the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Greek word logos traditionally means ‘word, thought, principle, or speech’ and has been used among both philosophers and theologians, and the word phenomenon—which because it comes from the Greek phainomenon, from the verb phainesthai, meaning “to appear, become visible”—means ‘appearance’ and so the word Phenomenology can be glossed; ‘what you can say about the phenomena of experience / what appears to be in the world, (by implication) if you set aside speculative theories, for instance theories about whether you and the world exist, whether there are “real objects” out there.’ Martin Heidegger’s’ answer was ‘you appear in the world as if thrown here’ and the appropriate response to your existential situation was ‘care;’ you should look after yourselves and your world (Heidegger has a critique of technological excess that is very pertinent today). Phenomenology ‘pushes us back onto our experience’, and the authors call this experience ‘first-person experience’ or ‘first-person evidence;’ because it is only accessible to a first person (to an ‘I;’ to oneself). This is relevant today: Critical Race Theory and proponents of Woke assume that all white people are racist. Obviously, it is possible to tell whether someone is racist from their words and actions, but beyond that, such a realization can only come from self-knowledge and awareness: in other words, from a first-person perspective. The only person who can truly know for certain whether they are racist is the person themselves: as they are the sole person with access to their inner world. And what they do with that knowledge is their business: this is how conscience works. In Buddhism, for true confession to take place, the practitioner must see their failing for themselves; any person hearing a confession is only witness to an inner process. Confession therefore is a ‘first-person to first-person’ matter, just as a preceptor witnesses a Buddhist ordinand’s effective going for refuge to the Three Jewels. Varela [co-author of The Embodied Mind] went on the create a new field; Neurophenomenology, bringing together neuroscience—including the scientific study of brainwaves of meditating monks—with first-person reports of meditative experience. I explored these ideas in a Shabda[1] article entitled ‘Consciousness and...

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Contacting the tangible
Feb16

Contacting the tangible

Posted By on Feb 16, 2024

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton     11 minute read This excerpt is from the chapter ‘Buddhist Practice’ and it explores a physical warm-up for meditation followed by a grounding meditation. Link to led meditation on video.     Grounding meditation When a Zen monk dressed in black robes walks slowly down a gravel path, he is practising walking meditation. He feels the contour of the rock pressing though his sandals; the sensations of his robes fluttering about him in the breeze, deliberately sensing everything tangible in his experience. Moving slowly helps him limit the amount of information coming in, thus he can pay close attention to the details of his experience, sink deeply into what he is experiencing and come into an intimate relationship with the world around him.[1] Grounded in our present moment experience in this way, life tends to be pleasurable; of course, the monk spends long hours sitting in zazen[2] without moving, which requires great discipline. In most secular mindfulness eight-week courses,[3] body awareness is central. The idea of mindfulness is introduced as coming into more intimate contact with our experience; in week one people practise the ‘raisin exercise’, spending five minutes or so investigating every aspect of the experience of a raisin; putting it into their mouth, sensing its texture; its smell; its taste; savouring how it feels in their mouth, and so on. The theory is that our western lives are so driven, we are so obsessed with ‘doing’, that much of the time we run on ‘automatic pilot’, ceasing to notice just what we are experiencing, and missing a large part of our lives. We might imagine that we are getting things done and this may sometimes be the case, but certainly on automatic pilot we abandon a level of colour and richness to our lives. The eight-week course encourages us to wake up from automatic pilot and purposefully bringing awareness to our present moment experience, while holding back from making judgements about it, thus experiencing the ‘being’ mode, where our life is grounded in lived experience. In this way mindfulness gets our mind back on our side. In this way Buddhist and secular mindfulness practice begin with an attempt to ground ourselves in our experience; that is, in the experience of sensation. A feeling of grounded-ness is the effect of being in touch with the tangible, leading to an increasing feeling of confidence. Meditation is the most efficient way of working on the four foundations. In meditation we cease doing our normal activities, retiring to a quiet place where we won’t be disturbed, in order to look carefully into our...

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