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bodhidave

@bodhidave.bsky.social

1.7K followers 310 following 3.7K posts

humanistic psychodynamic Buddhist deconstructionist ... and all-round sweet guy interested in cross-cultural parallels in contemplative practice . https://utexas.academia.edu/DavidCollins [header is the rock garden at Ryōan-ji; avatar is an enso]

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bodhidave @bodhidave.bsky.social · Nov 21

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The numbers of followers for this account increased this week. I'll re-post an essay I have online which reflects on the present-day "mindfulness" movement.

In that piece, about half-way through, I mention the experience of practicing the jhānas ... and ...

thesideview.co/journal/deco...

Deconstructing Mindfulness

There’s been a marked increase in studies of mindfulness and meditation in recent years.

thesideview.co

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bodhidave @bodhidave.bsky.social · 12h

It's mutual. 🙂 🙏

bodhidave @bodhidave.bsky.social · 12h

Socrates was described both as a "gadfly" for provoking unknowing/ aporia (in Plato's *Apology*), and as a "midwife" for nurturing the life which is born from that place of non-knowing (*Theaetetus*).

I like how in "Altura's" Portuguese you can see the connection between "concept" and "conceit."

English translation:

It's okay to rest in perplexity. In fact, a good impasse (aporia) can be the ideal moment to notice the cessation of the conceptual mind.

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bodhidave @bodhidave.bsky.social · 22h

(Although meditative calm and quiet and silence can be, and are, hugely helpful and beneficial...)

In tonight's #meditation there was a sense for how it's not about being calm. It's about what is true.

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bodhidave @bodhidave.bsky.social · 23h

Feeling achey and sneezy— apparently I've developed ragweed sensitivity. Didn't write as much as I'd wanted. And the political news is distressing.

Sitting to meditate I felt unsettled. I initially thought of that as a fault to overcome. Then I remembered "he" in this poem— bsky.app/profile/bodh...

bodhidave @bodhidave.bsky.social · Sep 2

From Nammalvar (8th c. Vaishnava saint and poet, translated in A.K. Ramanujan, *Nammalvar: Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu*).

The Tamil has three pronoun forms — to indicate "this here," "that there," and "the in-between." And in the original the subject of the poem, "he," is its last word.

The Paradigm

We here and that man, this man, and that other in-between, and that woman, this woman, and that other, whoever, those people, and these, and these others in-between,
this thing, that thing, and this other in-between, whichever,
all things dying, these things, those things, those others in-between, good things, bad things,
things that were, that will be,
being all of them, he stands there.

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bodhidave @bodhidave.bsky.social · 1d

Dewey Decimal System?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dtr...

SCTV High Q Night School sketch with John Candy, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Rick Moranis

YouTube video by SCTV

www.youtube.com

bodhidave @bodhidave.bsky.social · 1d

Fascinating topic. I've mentioned how waking up out of dreamless sleep in the middle of a meditation sequence ("form jhānas") suggests to me my waking-thinking process is a thing generated—some part of us knows how to boot that up, like it does sleep and dreams.

Meanwhile 🙂 bsky.app/profile/bodh...

bodhidave @bodhidave.bsky.social · May 28

I use this image a lot. On the left is an evening primrose as we see it. On the right is the same flower photographed with film that registers ultraviolet — bees, moths, and butterflies can perceive ultraviolet.

The very way we see the world is a kind of story, a poem, our eyes and minds tell us.

on the left, a yellow, four-petaled evening primrose flower, and on the right the same flower photographed with film that detects ultraviolet, and showing a star-like "nectar guide" pattern in the center of the flower

bodhidave @bodhidave.bsky.social · 1d

for comparison, I had a look at a map of U.S. abortion restrictions by state abcnews.go.com/US/state-sta...

a map of U.S. states color-coded to indicate the most to least restrictive abortion laws, with an overall trend towards southern U.S. states being the most restrictive

bodhidave @bodhidave.bsky.social · 1d

In the modern West, women are actually more likely to attempt suicide than men, but more men die from suicide — because they use more lethal means (e.g., women taking pills, and men using guns).

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bodhidave @bodhidave.bsky.social · 1d

In tonight's #meditation the sense was that what it's all about is the fact that there is anything, and how experience registers that, and that those are utter miracles.

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