More E-sangha Thought Control

Zen teacher Jundo Cohen has just mentioned on his blog and videocast that he has been banned from E-angha. (E-sangha is a well known (or notorious) Buddhist web forum that I’ve blogged about before…)

Why did Jundo Sensei get banned from E-sangha? Well, he stated in this thread concerning the beliefs of:

“the vast majority of Soto Zen Buddhist teachers in the West! Namely, (1) traditional ideas of rebirth and reincarnation are not to be taken literally in this modern age; and (2) Shakyamuni Buddha was a man, not a god or super-human being, and though enlightened … was a human being like the rest of us.”

On the thread on E-sangha in question, he actually states, after much back and forth with people leading up to this:

“But, in fact, the non-literalist views I am expressing on Reincarnation represent, I believe, the generally dominant view among Zen teachers in the West right now. The reason is not that we have lost the direct line to Buddha’s brain that you’all so evidently possess. The reason is, quite simply, that we no longer live in an age of superstition and hocus-pocus. I do not believe in a magical view of Reincarnation for much the same reason that I do not believe in flying dragons, the tooth fairy, genies, Qilin (a kind a giraffe with fish scales and wings) and such. We do not believe that earthquakes are caused by giant catfish under the earth, or that stomach aches are due to ghost possession, and other things that the same primitive folks (who wrote the Sutras) believed in. Now, we know a little better (although, granted, we have our own modern myths and superstitions). “

Please go read Jundo’s blog entry and watch his video though (along with reading the thread if you can). I’ve mentioned Jundo before as one of the Buddhist teachers attempting to use new media and technologies for teaching. He’s committed to sitting online every day for nine years and working with people without a sangha of their own.

As I’ve detailed before, E-sangha has a bit of a control freak mentality when it comes to “proper” Buddhism as well as a completely authoritarian moderation structure that brooks no dissent or questioning of how the forum is run. If you question moderator decisions, espouse “improper” Buddhist views, or are from an organization that the moderators do not like, you will be banned. Jundo actually made the unforgivable error, in addition to his heresy, of posting a moderator threat to him in public and pointing out that he was a Soto Zen priest on a Soto Zen forum on the site, while the person threatening him wasn’t even a Zen practitioner. The fact that they banned a Zen teacher, one who was trained and recognized by Nishijima Roshi, for pointing out that most Zen teachers in America don’t take reincarnation literally or that they think of the Buddha as a man, not a god, is just an indicator of how bankrupt the forum is as a site for Buddhists.

The Open Buddha site that I started hasn’t really taken off. This isn’t really surprising as it is hard to build community and the reason that I hear, over and over again, about why people hunker down and put up with the bullshit policies on E-sangha is because that is the one place where you can actually find a critical mass of people. I think it is time for people to really re-think this decision.

The Destruction of the American Dream

I’ve been reading “The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America” during the last few evenings and it got me thinking a bit.

One of the basic arguments of the book is that intelligent and educated people are selling out to survive in America. They are forced to make the Devil’s choice between living their dreams or having a middle class life.

During the 1980s, people were seen as selling out in order to get rich but the author, Daniel Brooke, makes the argument (personally and through interviews with others) that the truth of the matter, especially 20 years later, is that people are selling out in order to not be poor. In other words, in order to live the kind of life that people in the 1950s and 1960s took as something that could reasonably be had, such as owning your own home, living in the area where you grew up, or sending your kids to a reasonable school, people have to choose to work in those fields that provide an inordinate degree of wealth, regardless of the desirability of those careers. How many people really want to be a corporate lawyer as their dream job? The trade off for making this choice is that service oriented jobs, like teaching or working for a non-profit, or creative jobs, like writing or other artistic careers, are not an option if you want to do well financially and have a family. Brook makes the point that in earlier decades, the starting wage for most professional careers was higher than the cost of a year’s tuition at leading universities and that the pay difference between, say, a starting lawyer on Wall Street and a public school teacher was only a couple of thousand dollars a year. Education was affordable, one didn’t start a career $80,000 in debt, and taking a professional job was not the choice between money or fulfillment.

These days, in order to own a home in any major city, especially on the coasts, it takes two people working high paying professional careers. Working class people need not apply. My wife and I have certainly found that out. We actually own our home on the Oakland/Berkeley border. We only managed to purchase it because we had the down payment from our previous home, paid for through luck more than planning. That home had grown in value during the boom . Our mortgage is so high that I see little possibility that people with average professional careers could afford a home (we both work in high tech). On top of this, realistically, we bought a lower end home for the Bay Area by buying in Oakland. We couldn’t even afford a large house if we’d wanted one. If our house was two miles to the north, well into Berkeley, it would cost at least 50% more. If it was actually in San Francisco, it would be at least double the price we purchased it for. I have friends who are in high paying careers that own one side of a duplex with another couple in San Francisco because that was the only way to have a house. Compare this to the union factory worker or music teacher 40 years ago who was able to buy a home with a normal salary. As an example, both of R’s parents were schoolteachers. The pair of them were able to buy a home decades ago (the mid-1960’s, I believe) on their pay. This is a a large home right in the middle of Berkeley, perched on a hill with a huge lot. Teachers were able to buy this…

America has effectively priced much of the middle class and all of the working class out of buying homes in most cities. This is one of the roots of the current housing crisis where people are finding that they have mortgages on homes that they cannot really afford to pay now that their homes are no longer going up in value. If you know any professional writers (I know a few) or independent professionals, ask them about the cost of their private health insurance, if they even have any. Ask them about the costs of having children where one half of a working couple needs to quit working for many years (not a cost that can be afforded) or the astronomical cost of child care needs to be assumed somehow.

There was a brief time after World War II where the country was headed the other way. What happened? Well, a lot of things but one of them is that the system of taxation in this country was ripped apart to the advantage of the wealthy. As they say, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Housing, for example, is a limited resource in cities. If people want to live in the city, the prices are driven up by supply and demand. If you are wealthy, this is inconvenient and you buy the house (thus continuing to drive the prices up over time). If you are not wealthy, well, I hope you enjoy renting (and sharing your apartment with two or more friends). At this point, the concentration of wealth and the economic disparity between classes is at the kind of level one expects to see in the so-called “Third World,” not the nation that we pretend the United States to be.

But, back to the book, the point is clearly made that most of us that have a choice (this leaves out those that don’t even get that far economically) have to choose between the potential of living a fulfilling and creative life in a profession we love and in a place we love or in doing what it takes to make the money to get the life we’ve been led to expect (home ownership, providing for a family, etc.). While I enjoy much of the work that I do in tech, this point gets driven home every time I think about actually going for that doctorate in Religious Studies or Buddhist Studies. I could do it but could I keep my home and do it? Could I pay to live while I did it? (Heck, could I pay for my child support or my daughter’s college?) When I was done with the degree, could I survive working in a field with that degree or would I again have to choose a career in something else because even if jobs are available, the money in them isn’t enough to provide a decent livelihood?

How is this going to end? How bad will this get before something is done? I certainly don’t expect our bought and sold elected officials in either state or federal governments to do anything about this. They know where their money comes from and they manage to stay in that upper class of society, generally. Sooner or later, something has to give and I really am afraid of what it will look like when this occurs and what it will bring.

To quote the book:

“Those at the bottom are stuck; those with the education needed to get ahead are trapped: do what you need to do to support a family at the ever-rising going rate or do what you want to do and give up on the American Dream. For young educated Americans, the nation is fast becoming the land of compulsory yuppiedom. [...] Today, just paying the bills in metropolitan America requires that most educated young people join up with one of those undertaxed corporations like Cisco or Microsoft or the law, banking, and consulting firms that keep them undertaxed. The best that you can hope for is to become what novelist Douglas Coupland termed a Microserf.”

Mindfulness and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Meditation

Sitting Monks R and I attended the “Down to a Science Cafe” in San Francisco last night near her work in SOMA.

Down to a Science describes itself as “an ongoing Science Cafe, a casual forum where leading scientists discuss their research with the public. The mission is to promote civic discourse through scientific dialogue with a focus on science here in the Bay Area.”

The guest last night was Dr. Phillipe Goldin of the Department of Psychology at Stanford. (I’ve seen his name elsewhere as “Philippe Goldin,” which I actually think is correct, as his Stanford home page uses it.) Dr. Goldin’s topic was “Mindfulness and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Meditation.” Dr. Goldin and his peers and students at Stanford have been studying and using mindfulness techniques derived from Buddhist meditation practices in a clinical psychology setting. He presented an overview of some of this work, specifically in using mindfulness with anxiety disorders, and then did a Q&A around this work.

I found it interesting that Dr. Goldin is a former Gelugpa monk and spent several years living in the Dalai Lama’s main monastery in Dharamsala, India. This reminded me of Dr. Alan Wallace, who is also a former Gelugpa monk. Dr. Wallace runs the Santa Barbara Institute, which is running several research programs also focusing on an objective study and understanding of Buddhist meditation techniques and the results of practice.

The use of meditative techniques in clinical settings and the objective study of meditation practices, along with how the brain is affected by them, are areas that have been getting more study over the last few years. Dr. Goldin said that he expects quite a few more studies from a variety of institutions to be published over the next few years as this becomes a more important area of study.

With the permission of Dr. Goldin and Kishore Hari, the Down to a Science organizer, I recorded the presentation for podcasting. This is available in a variety of formats with a Creative Commons license on the Internet Archive. I’ve enclosed a lower bitrate version of the file as an enclosure in this blog post as well. Be sure to listen through to the Q&A during the second half of the lecture. Some of the answers that Dr. Goldin gives are very interesting (at least in my opinion).

Within the next week, the Down to a Science website will also have a copy of Dr. Goldin’s slides from the presentation as well so you should check that site later if you are interested in them.

I’ve also found a program on ABC National Radio of Australia, “All in the Mind,” where Dr. Goldin and others spoke. This program is “Dr Mindfulness: science and the meditation boom” and audio is available through the website.