How we relate to Buddhism, meditation, science....

This is a rather surprising interview I stumbled on via a link somewhere in the email newsletter I get from the Buddhist center I used to attend. It's from Tricycle magazine. It is lengthy, but really explores in some depth the way science, technology and ideologies impact our culture, how we relate to each other, and how we understand and relate to spirituality, particularly Buddhism, meditation, mindfulness practices, etc.

Here's a snippet from where he talks about mindfulness practice in corporate culture:

"Mindfulness is enabling corporations to “optimize impact”? In this view of things, mindfulness can be extracted from a context of Buddhist meanings, values, and purposes. Meditation and mindfulness are not part of a whole way of life but only a spiritual technology, a mental app that is the same regardless of how it is used and what it is used for. It is as if we were trying to create a Buddhism based on the careful maintenance of a delusion, a science delusion. It reminds me of the Babylonian captivity in the Hebrew Bible, but now the question for Buddhists is whether or not we can exist in technological exile and still remain a “faithful remnant.”

Bringing Buddhist meditation techniques into industry accomplishes two things for industry. It does actually give companies like Google something useful for an employee’s well-being, but it also neutralizes a potentially disruptive adversary. Buddhism has its own orienting perspectives, attitudes, and values, as does American corporate culture. And not only are they very different from each other, they are also often fundamentally opposed to each other.

A benign way to think about this is that once people experience the benefits of mindfulness they will become interested in the dharma and develop a truer appreciation for Buddhism—and that would be fine. But the problem is that neither Buddhists nor employees are in control of how this will play out. Industry is in control. This is how ideology works. It takes something that has the capacity to be oppositional, like Buddhism, and it redefines it. And somewhere down the line, we forget that it ever had its own meaning."

It's an interesting read. www.tricycle.com/feature/science-delusion

Not exactly about the article, but I was just talking to someone who expressed more or less this idea: "The problem with our culture right now is that it's being overrun by a sort of fundamentalist right wing religion that is anti-science, wants to change all the laws, and has no respect for other views."

And I thought, the funny thing is that when I talk to or read articles/books by religious people, they sometimes say, more or less: "The problem with our culture right now is that it's being overrun by liberal secular materialism that is anti-religion, wants to change all the laws, and has no respect for other views."

Now it's possible that both are true, though it seems unlikely that two groups that each think the other is way more powerful are both right, since that seems logically impossible. But I'm wondering if both are actually false in a different way. (Let alone that I'm not even sure there are really "two" sides here, because it really depends on who you talk to.)

Maybe this is true:

"As a human being I am prone to feeling small and powerless and afraid, and it is comforting to blame that on various other groups of people."

Don't know.

I blame people who blame people who blame people.