We finally made it. Our latest episode of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast has just been published over at Soundcloud and readers are invited to go and check it out. It is actually our twentieth episode and we have been going for well over a year now. Like all creative projects, there is a need for renewal and inspiration and you will likely notice some of this going on in the direction our conversation takes.
This episode takes forward our exploration of post-traditional approaches to Buddhism but we choose to begin with a discussion that touches on a variety of topics including Jordan B. Peterson, Sam Harris, archetypes, political correctness, and more.
We then move onto the discussion and exploration of post-traditional Buddhism, drawing on the original ideas of Hokai Sobol, and tying together all of the themes into a wonderful unitary whole…of sorts.
This episode represents change, not only for the content of our discussion, which is more serious than usual, but also for a number of sound bites which bring Sam, Jordan and Slavoj Zizek into the conversation. We hope you enjoy these and that they don’t upset the flow of the conversation, which goes deeper down the rabbit hole than usual.
Let us know what you think.
Episode is sponsored by O’Connell Coaching: oconnellcoaching.com/
Music supplied by Taos Humm and RSD from Bristol, UK. Go and support the artists by throwing money at them.
Taos Humm stolenbodyrecords.co.uk/product/taos-…er-pre-order/
RSD rsdbristol.bandcamp.com/
The Imperfect Buddha 
It’s been hard to follow this podcast as a whole since I’m not familiar with Jordon Peterson’s or Sam Harris’ work. But what it sparked for me was the question: “what is the point or value of your Buddhist practice?” It’s more than therapeutic, making me feel more calm or happier, although that’s helpful. It’s no longer about ‘achieving or arriving’ at enlightenment, as a static, absolute state of mind or being beyond ‘suffering’. It’s now about shifting consciousness into an ongoing process that yields new insights into self/other, consciousness, reality, world, society, life, evolution, etc. both intellectually and experientially. It’s a process of ongoing shifts of consciousness that yields new insights into one’s own condition and the condition of humanity. But that can’t be done by meditation alone. It is provoked by an interaction of practices: meditation, observation of life, and reflection. It’s not about arriving at some absolute or ‘correct’ truth (politically correct or otherwise) but encountering startling new insights and perspectives that challenge what you thought was true, that shifts you into new perspectives that might be true that you hadn’t seen before. Meditation is the process of ‘clearing the decks’ of habitual mental and emotional states and preconcieved notions so that you can experience something new. The primary method is “inquiry”, questioning all experience, including Buddhist teachings. I see Buddhism as ‘wisdom that comes from radical doubt’: everything can be tested, probed, deconstructed, interrogated, viewed from different perspectives. It’s about developing new capacities to experience life in an intense and transformative way. It’s also about seeing and experiencing new connections between things that you had not noticed before. Seeing dharma as a method of inquiry rather than as “truth”. Self or non-self as process, world as process, interdependence as process, impermanence and emptiness as process, etc, as practices of inquiry and critique rather than static “truth.” In such a process, one never ‘arrives’ at an absolute “truth”, but engages in an ongoing process of discovering new ways of perceiving life.
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