[FRIAM] cafeteria buddhism

[Merle Lefkoff]

Glen, this made me smile.  I teach in the Buddhist Chaplaincy program at
Upaya Zen Center here in Santa Fe.  My course is about the intersection
between Complex Adaptive Systems science and Buddhism.  Happy to tell you
more if you're serious.

Also, thanks Owen for asking me to send my recently published paper to the
FRIAM list.  Will do--I'm just back from the Women's March in D.C.  Here's
what I saw:  after a change in initial conditions (Trump's election), some
wicked self-organizing began, characterized by lots of positive feedback
loops, netwar, and distributed leadership (leadership emerged but it was
very distributed and was an emergent property of the new social system).
And everyone--a million marchers we think--were so KIND to one another.
Very inspiring.  My friend Micah White, the co-founder of Occupy Wall
Street, has been moved to start organizing a global Women's Party.  If
anyone can be a catalyst for this, he's the one.

On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 11:15 AM, glen ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> The recent mentions of various aspects of Buddhism by RobertW, Marcus, and
> Steve, and my perhaps too flippant rejection of it, got me wondering.  I
> started seriously doubting Americanized Eastern religions after/while
> reading Tao of Physics so long ago.  But I didn't think much of it after
> that.  I remembered it when I stumbled on someone making fun of Madonna's
> apparent cafeteria spirituality (circa 2000?).
>
> I'm a big fan of syncretism. (My official religion is Holonic Pantheism in
> a Rhizomic Bath.)  But I worry about it quite a bit.  An analogy with
> numerical methods might help communicate my point.  When you express some
> mathematical problem and try to apply an algorithm to it, it's wise to
> examine the problem to see if it meets all the prerequisites assumed by the
> algorithm.  If you apply it inappropriately, you may get garbage, or you
> may get something that looks right, but isn't.  Or you may get something
> that works perfectly well, but then you change the problem slightly and
> have a false confidence in how the new algorithm will work.
>
> Picking and choosing the yummy parts of a tradition (like Buddhism) is
> attractive.  E.g. many of the drugs we take that make our lives so much
> better were developed through purposefully harming various animals (from
> mice to beagles).  -- Or, more interestingly, I really _enjoy_ harming
> myself by drinking too many pints on the weekend. -- What are the
> implications of adopting concepts like Dharma without the rest of the
> context?
>
>
> On 01/21/2017 02:21 PM, Robert Wall wrote:
> > The Buddhist have their notion in the /Dharma/, which is kind of an
> Operators Manual for the brain. But people don't seem to WANT to live that
> way even though they like to decorate their homes with statues of the
> Buddha.
>
> --
> ☣ glen
>
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-- 
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
merlelefoff at gmail.com
mobile:  (303) 859-5609
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
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