Calling All Nerds

Dharma Nerds aims to be a hub for intellectual and creative exploration of dharma themes in Buddhism, Yoga, Advaita and related traditions. I welcome submission of your articles, photos, film and other visual art, poetry, creative writing and sound explorations. I love articles on modern and post-modern dharma scholarship, but also heterodox and counter-cultural explorations …

Anatta: Don’t Take Anything Personally

I've discovered a new bit of dharma today. To practice Anatta or Non-Self—don't take anything personally. That's practicing non-self in a really pragmatic way. Don't take anything personally, not anything that comes from within your own mind, or anything directed at you from another person, or any circumstances in your life. Don't take anything personally. …

Scary Jim Carrey’s ‘Big Woke’

When I blithely subtitled my new blog, 'Navigating the Dharma Apocalypse', it was meant as a flippant joke. But it does have serious side effects. Today I'm introducing a new Dharma Nerd, this time from the Yoga-NonDualist tradition—Matthew Remski—who looks critically at Jim Carrey's 'Big Woke' and how audiences are reacting to it. Check out …

Loch Kelly: Awareness is Everything

Since I started diving into Culadasa's text, The Mind Illuminated, I've begun to understand the difference between awareness and attention. Indeed TMI is all about the science of distinguishing these two modes of consciousness, how we experience each state and how they work together. But something in Culadasa's work rang a bell—I had heard this before, …

Zizek at the Movies

Things are getting way too serious on this blog as well, so let's change things up. This short film by Michael Morgenstern, Lilly in the Grinder, is a virtual portrayal of Zizek's critique of western Dharma as a placebo for the existential crisis of late capitalism. That's supposed to be a joke.

Culadasa: Bullet Train to The Big One

I've been digging into Culadasa's book, The Mind Illuminated, (2015, Hay House), and his video presentations. I have also been trying out his methods. The most outstanding feature, and what I believe is the core of his method, is that there are two modes of conscious perception: focus (concentration) and peripheral awareness, which I call 'field' …

Culadasa: The Map and the Territory

 The Mind Illuminated, by Culadasa (2015, Hay House). I got the book from Alibris, new for $17. It's a huge book, as one would expect as it is a systematic compilation of  Culadasa's life-long study of meditation and neuroscience. It's dense but extremely well orgniazed, very readable, with lots of nice illustrations, graphs and charts. I …

Buddhadasa: D.O. and Self

Buddhadasa's main teaching, as presented in Santikaro's book, Under the Bodhi Tree, is that Dependent Origination is a teaching on how self arises, how self is generated over and over again, through the chain of reactions as described in Dependent Origination. I have understood Dependent Origination in two ways. The first is that Dependent Origination is the way the …