While digital technologies are, in themselves, neither the problem nor the solution, they contribute to making us increasingly divided and distrusting of one another. Dan Nixon argues that we can begin to create something better by cultivating an ongoing, open-ended spirit of questioning towards all we encounter in our digitally-mediated experience by asking: what is this?
The Secular Buddhist Network online group held its second meeting 18 February. The focus for most of the meeting was a discussion of Stephen Batchelor’s ‘ten theses of secular dharma,’ which appears at the end of his 2015 book, After Buddhism: Rethinking the dharma for a secular age.
In a dharma talk given to the Community Meditation Center (New York City, USA), Stephen Batchelor discussed a secular perspective on the Noble Eightfold Path.
Bodhi College is offering an online course, After Buddhism and Beyond, that will include a comprehensive series of lectures, reflections, and discussions on the theme of Secular Dharma. The course will be taught by Stephen Batchelor and begins 13 February 2021. Registrations are still available.
From November 2020 to February 2021 a Tuwhiri dharma book reading group on Zoom will go through a new Tuwhiri publication, ‘What is this? Ancient questions for modern minds,’ by Martine and Stephen Batchelor. Limited to 12 participants, the group will be anchored by Ramsey Margolis in Wellington, New Zealand, and Suzanne Franzway, in Adelaide, South Australia.
In a dharma talk given to the Community Meditation Center (New York City, USA), Stephen Batchelor discussed the centrality of imagination and creativity to the dharmic path.
Stephen Batchelor argues that a wise and compassionate response to the threat of climate extinction demands direct engagement with life itself irrespective of any a priori beliefs about the origins and end of suffering. By entering into a contemplative, empathetic, and existential relationship with the pain of the world, one seeks to respond with situation-specific compassion.
Freida Maverick is giving a talk on secular dharma at the Hamilton City (New Zealand) Library on Sunday afternoon, 02 August. Freida will be discussing the topic based on her understanding of this new approach to Buddhism from reading Stephen Batchelor’s books and listening to his dharma talks
In a dharma talk given to the Community Meditation Center (New York City, USA), Stephen Batchelor emphasized that nirvana should be understood as an experience of the cessation of reactivity rather than an end state or experience of complete and ultimate freedom from the poisons of greed, hatred, and confusion.
To integrate contemplative practice into life requires more than becoming proficient in techniques of meditation. It entails the cultivation and refinement of a sensibility about the totality of your existence—from intimate moments of personal anguish to the endless suffering of the world.
