The Creative Dharma newsletter will be hosting an online event, Creativity and contemplative inquiry: a conversation with Jacqui O’Reilly, on 16 October 2021. Jacqui is an artist and musician who uses sound, video and installation as critical tools of her artistic practice for intervention in the ecological crises of our time.
Revamp: writings on secular Buddhism, Winton Higgins’s newest book, tracks the emergence of secular Buddhism, and has as its focus on today’s climate emergency and intensifying social injustice, as they cry out for radical socioeconomic and political change.
The editors of the newsletter Creative Dharma are holding an online meeting for readers in late February 2021. The editors will discuss what is planned for the newsletter and answer questions from readers.
Commenting on the English novelist Phillip Pullman’s interview with the New Scientist journal, Ramsey Margolis urges us to to develop a creative, imaginative approach to the dharma so that we can respond to the issues we’re facing today as living beings on this planet: climate emergency, social inequality and exclusion, species extinction (including our own), and much more.
Tuwhiri is about to launch a newsletter for meditation practitioners who are interested in bringing creativity into their dharma practice. It will also be inviting the participation of artists who are interested in creatively engaging with the dharma, bringing this sensibility into their practice of art.
Ramsey Margolis sets out his experience creating and sustaining a secular dharma community in Aotearoa New Zealand, and offers some practical tips on how to make one work.
For over three years, a small group of people who run secular Buddhist communities have been meeting online to discuss a variety of topics, including how their communities are organized and run, the nature of the dharma in our contemporary age, and the practice of meditation from a secular perspective.
Ramsey Margolis emphasizes that secular meditation is primarily about stillness and self-observation. When we sit regularly, we become becoming mindfully aware of not just the content of our thoughts but also the emotions and mind states that inform these thoughts.
Ramsey Margolis explains how Winton Higgins’ After Buddhism: a workbook, was produced as part of the creation of a new non-profit organisation dedicated to developing a secular dharma: The Tuwhiri Project.
In a talk given in 2015 Ramsey MargoIis offers a few thoughts today on the practice of translating Asian texts, and how we discern that inadequately translated texts are misleading us, as dharma practitioners, in Aotearoa New Zealand today.
