Numinous Nonsense

The folks at the OneCity Blog on BeliefNet were kind enough to accept an article that I’d recently finished up on the potential downsides to making Buddhism completely secular. It’s entitled, Secularizing Buddhism: Making it Accessible or Stripping the Roots?
Here’s a little snippet from the article:
The problem with not seeing how Buddhism [...]

A nice fellow named Joel responded to my comment yesterday, and I decided to write another big chunk of material to try and clarify some of my current thinking around “enlightenment”. Here’s Joel’s original comment, followed by my response:
I appreciate Vince Horn’s comments regarding the need to demystify enlightenment. I’d like to [...]

These questions, with my responses following, were recently posed on the Tricycle blog:
How do we know what enlightenment is precisely if no one we know has reached it? Who is qualified to serve as judge to gauge whether someone is, in fact, enlightened when clearly those left to label someone as such are most likely [...]

I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, I become the very thing I look at and experience the kind of consciousness it has; I become the inner witness of the thing. I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousness – love. – Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I heard that [...]

I’ve noticed lately that I really haven’t had much to write about it. Part of it I think is because I’ve been quite busy with other projects, but I think the bigger reason is that many of my fundamental assumptions about the way reality works have come into question. I’ve found that it’s [...]

I had the great fortune, earlier this month, of spending a long weekend in Alabama visiting with one of my favorite dharma teachers, Daniel Ingram. He invited several dharma buddies to come out and have a weekend of hanging, talking, practicing, and hiking around the woods of northern Alabama. I made some new [...]