A few weeks ago there was a flurry of activity in the NYTimes on topics relating meditation to contemporary science and culture. The eminent scholar Donald Lopez summed it up well in an article posted at The Immanent Frame, a blog sponsored by the Social Science Research Council:
On Sunday May 25, 2008, the New [...]
(previous installment here)
Joseph Goldstein: I’ll give you an example of something you have experienced. When you’re listening to music, your mind is quiet, it’s concentrated on the music. Is your mind grasping at any one particular note you know? Probably not.
Wright: Actually, different music is kind of different.
Joseph Goldstein: But you have at least [...]
(previous installment here)
Wright:There are people who report absolute ecstasy through meditation. Is it realistic to hope for that?
Joseph Goldstein: Well, first it’s important to understand that there are different kinds of meditation and some kinds of meditation have this vague goal of blissful states. Other kinds of meditation have as their goal wisdom.
Wright: And [...]
(previous installment here)
Wright: I gather that Buddhists, as a metaphysical matter, believe in free will, at least in the sense that they believe that people are capable of true freedom. But in One Dharma you were saying that, still, what most people think of as freedom is kind of backwards. Most people think that [...]
(previous installment here)
Wright: What is it about the pursuit of pleasure in the conventional way that makes it the road to unhappiness, according to Buddhism?
Joseph Goldstein: First, I think it’s important to realize that the path for each of us will depend on the form that we engage in it, so what I’m saying will [...]
(first installment here)
Wright: If somebody gave you just two sentences to characterize the essence of Buddhism generically, could you even do that?
Joseph Goldstein: The Buddha did. He summed up the whole thing in one sentence. He said, “Nothing whatsoever is to be clung to as I or mine.” He said, “Whoever understands this [...]
Among the tricks recommended in the voluminous online “how-to-blog-more-regularly” literature is: Write ‘em ahead of time and set ‘em up to post automatically in the future. I’m going to try that as a way of clearing out some of the stuff that’s been sitting around in my Drafts folder for a long time.
First [...]
Visitors to this site who have been attracted by a series of recent posts may be wondering: what’s the connection between the Buddhism/meditation stuff and all this interest in psychopharmacology? Fair question; or two questions, actually. First question: What’s the relationship between the meditative practices that have developed in the Buddhist [...]