The Imperfect Buddha Podcast

Off we go with our first long-form interview/conversation for 2020, and it’s with returning guest Daniel Ingram! Are you ready for more? It seems that many of you are. Back in 2019 when Daniel was visiting here in Trieste, we discussed a range of material we might cover on the podcast and one topic that repeatedly came up for Mr Ingram was his take on Integral Theory. We finally got the conversation done before Christmas and here it is. For this one I play the devil’s advocate somewhat as my knowledge on Ken Wilber’s work was quite limited and I had heard mainly complaints about it from our more educated listeners. As always, however, it was a pleasurable conversation and Daniel’s take on Wilber’s core theory seems pretty attractive as a model for understanding stages of growth, both for individuals and groups. We cover sex scandals, power grabs, groupy love, spaced-out gurus, religious fundamentalists, and how we are all too human. See what you think, and don’t forget to visit Daniel’s website; it’s called Integrated Daniel after all. For those new to the podcast, and crazy for Daniel’s enlightenment stories and pragmatism, there is a plethora of past conversations to enjoy. From our first ever conversation with him years back, there’s a far more recent and fun series on non-Buddhism in which Daniel tackles the Speculative non-Buddhism project as well as an episode looking into the Practising Life; our theme for this year of podcast episodes. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's coming up in 2020 in the coming months? Find out by listening to this tidy little introduction and update on the podcast. Music provided by Funki Poricini.Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is our fourth foray into the land of Buddhism, Cults and Cult-like behaviours across mainstream Buddhist groups. Let’s be honest, this topic is always perversely interesting. If you missed out on our past episodes covering these topics, there are links and short intros below to those past episodes, which were a lot of fun. For our latest journey, we interview Dr Michelle Haslam, PhD, a clinical psychologist who ran afoul of the machinations of the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT) and has since written a psychological report on their tactics and set up a resource site filled with testimonies from ex-followers along with articles to warn the general public about their often dysfunctional behaviour. She shares some of the horrendous tactics employed against her after leaving the group and discusses some of her psychological analysis of the NKT, their practices and group dynamics. She is also currently working in an undisclosed location despite mentioning that she has worked in safeguarding in the interview previously. Michelle has had a dreadful website put together by a mysterious psychologist, who doesn't actually appear to exist in the real world, immediately after publishing her report. It's defamatory and quite sad and makes awful claims about her. Be your own judge of it should you stumble on it. The introduction involves an added presentation on cults that ties together the multiple themes from our last episodes and that concludes our forays into cult-land. If you have heard it all before, you can skip it by jumping to the interview proper at 37.10. Note: Those who critique the New Kadampa Tradition often end up being trolled, attacked, and threatened by folks, who hide their identities and usually claim to not be any part of the NKT. It is obviously difficult to prove that they are so I am putting this here as a potential warning so that you dear listener can make up our own mind about who is to blame if this podcast should come under attack. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a time of environmental meltdown, political and economic crisis, what should we do? What role can practice play? How are we to envision our place in the world, as protagonists in the destruction of our home, and mere bit part players in global conflict? Can we make a difference, or should we retreat to our personal spaces and meditate and be done with it? This new episode of the podcast explores such big themes and the work of Brooke D. Lavelle and Zachary Walsh, our two guests, as we take a look at the bifurcated road ahead of us; a Great Transition, or a Great Collapse await. While many of us may like to see life continue on as usual, I think most folks are starting to realise that business as usual is killing us slowly. It is time to make change move in a direction that sees us and the many species surviving this century, but practice remains, as Sloterdjik would remind us, and the big picture is always grounded in the lives of practitioners in this conversation. We discuss such uncomfortable topics as love, care, practice and transformation. We touch on environmentalism, activisms, but also the underlying themes challenging these worlds of work at present and the need to both practice and think and imagine the world differently. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our year long-series on practice continues and we stray further into the world of politics and economics with this episode's guest. Economics is a form of human practice of course, and not a solid, eternal fixed inevitability. Like politics, it's a topic often resisted by spiritual and religious folks. In a democracy, we would all do well to educate further on this topic, so why not combine a conversation on Buddhism and economics? That's just what we have done in this episode with Clair Brown, who is an economist at U.C. Berkeley. In this episode we discuss Buddhist Economics, the name of her book on the topic. Clair has been active in seeking to construct and teach alternatives to the free market, neo-liberal economic model we are still living under and Buddhism, along with the work of E.F. Schumacher, plays a role. Using real world evidence and data, she has been developing policies towards an economics more suited to our 21st century plight and a reduction of suffering globally. Clair has a dedicated website on the topic with a reading group section for those interested in working with her book. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Professor of philosophy, religion and integral ecology, at San Francisco University, Sam Mickey is our guest in this episode. We tackle many a topic but return throughout to the theme of the Great Feast, and embodiment, in facing existential threat, and environmental decay. We tackle the theme of justice too. Many of the themes connect to titles of his books including; On the verge of a Planetary Civilisation: A Philosophy of Integral Philosophy, and the wonderfully demanding title, Co-existentialism and the Unbearable Intimacy of Ecological Emergency. Do not panic, however, Sam is a wonderful conversationalist and shares my own hopeful outlook on our future, and this is evident throughout. He also anticipates a future conversation with the ever-present Daniel Ingram in which we will tackle integral theory and the work of Ken Wilber. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It took a long time to get this one done and I hope it was worth it. Please note that the creative extras took up very little of that time, rather, it was finding a way to talk about big issues as a living practice beyond partisan politics and ideological capture. This podcast episode tackles politics as living culture and suggests that complexity marks our age in a way that we cannot ignore, but almost always do. From Twitter to CNN and Fox News, very little thought seems to go into public discourse these days. It's all about the hits, whether emotional or site visits. This podcast episode invites you to change games and provides you with some tools for doing so. It also offers some meta positions on it all & doesn't forget to include Buddhism in the discussion. It will no doubt disappoint some, excite others, anger a few, and turn off others. For some of you, it may be a small act of sanity in a world going increasingly off the rails.Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's been another busy period but finally it's time for Cleo Kearn's interview to be released into the world before I head off on holiday. Ritual and Resistance is the title of our conversation as we tackle ritual, religion, Buddhism, resistance and change. We discuss the following topics in the first half; Continental Philosophy, Anthropology and Religion, religious sacrifice, Shamanism and Catholicism, Durkheim and Lacan. And then go deep into discussing ritual; its ubiquity, its role in societies, why some survive and others don't, its role in social formation and dissolution, freeing and managing desire, selfhood, challenges to ritual in our age, Buddhism and Tantra, death, activism, innovation and more. Enjoy! Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are we all going down it too? Daniel Ingram returns to the podcast for a third and final conversation and what a rich one it was. I believe it is well worth your time. After reading some Trash Theory, Daniel accepted Glenn Wallis’s challenge to read his book and after exploring the infamous SNB heuristic, based on the work of the rascally Frenchman Francois Laruelle, he came in for round three. We go back to the heuristic that started off the Trash Theorising, touching on Decision, Sufficiency, and the Great Feast of Knowledge, before exploring novel takes on refuge, philosophy and practice. The first two recordings have solicited quite a lot of reaction from folks on Facebook and Twitter and at the Post-Traditional Buddhism blog. This includes Tom Wooldrige who has a new blog dedicated, it seems, to critiquing Daniel’s Pragmatic Dharma approach from a psychological perspective that has stimulated reaction too. Subsequently Evan Thompson has chimed in on Daniel’s views, as has David Chapman, and Glenn Wallis. This is a sort of eruption and a sign of the feast taking place. I argue that we need more of these kinds of conversations. Let’s see what you think after hearing this final one in this series. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You’ve had the initial goods and as promised here’s the second helping of Mr Daniel Ingram. This conversation gets right to the point and tackles, in a rather condensed and humble manner, a work of collective, creative production over at the Speculative non-Buddhism site called Trash Theory; an exploration of practice beyond decision, beyond enchantment, beyond capture. Well, that’s the plan anyway. We start out with a quick chat about the SNB, x-Buddhism and non-Buddhism, before going through a number of postulates, or principles for practice, that have been explored and are continuing to be developed by Glenn Wallis and company. We went through it pretty quickly as we just had an hour to play with, but it was fun and an interesting exploration that will be continued in a follow up conversation to be recorded this Thursday. You’ll find a link to the original post we worked from below, though there are, at the time of writing, six posts on the theme at hand. This one is a good start for the curious and it’s pretty accessible. Both episodes with Daniel feature the same introduction so if you have already heard the first conversation, you will want to skip it. It’s possible that Dan and I will tackle some of Ken Wilber’s work in the follow up to Trash Theory, so if you have any insights into why Wilber was full of it, or specific points that underline problems with Ken’s work more generally, let me have them, as I have only a superficial reading of his work and never felt motivated to read beyond a general introduction to his ideas, which seem pretty simplistic, though potentially useful. Either way, enjoy this turn of events as we continue to dive into practice on this season of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices