The Imperfect Buddha Podcast

What does it mean to be a hundred? Perhaps Fredric Nietzsche would know. He’s in part the star of the show. Along with regular guest Glenn Wallis. We look at the ideal reader, the ideal thinker, and perhaps the ideal practitioner. We discuss his work in progress, Nietzsche NOW! A book that wonders what Nietzsche would have to say about Wokeism. We also discuss the podcast on its 100th birthday and I get asked a question or two to celebrate. Come along for a slice of Nietzschean cake and topical takes on another of Glenn’s works, Non-Buddhist Mysticism.

What is a podcast in 2023? Everyone’s got one apparently. Which means the whole craze will no doubt come to a timely end soon. Then what? The reinvigoration of quality journalism, or just a slow chug on into a future of ever too much to listen to, think about, care about, bother with? Who knows.

This podcast will continue as it started; navigating terrain somewhere between intelligent practice, informed discussion, critique where needed, and humanity where it can be found.

Do join us for more if that suits you too.

We remain at New Books Network, on itunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts and possibly elsewhere.

Thank you for listening.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Peter Fenner, Ph.D, is an adapter and teacher of non-duality, and an author. His two books, Radiant Mind: Awakening Unconditioned Awareness (Sounds True, 2007) and Natural Awakening: An Advanced Guide for Sharing Nondual Awareness (Sumeru Press, 2015), draw on a dialectical method adapted from his monastic training with the Gelugpa School of Tibetan Buddhism. We discuss philosophical psychology, the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist thought, the challenge of patterns, meditation, and the relationship between the different vehicles in Buddhism.

This episode features a longer introduction in order to update listeners on a slight change in direction or the podcast as well as an attempt to contextualize non-duality.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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The Think Pieces continue. This month, it is a look back at a piece on being Buddhist and identity. The text version can be found below. Themes picked up on in this episode include:

• Identity in an age of identity politics
• Playing identity politics, or not
• The discomfort of committing to the Buddhist identity
• True me versus contextual me
• The therapeutic age
• Buddhism as capture V Buddhism as liberating force

More reflective exploration of the themes of post-traditional Buddhism and non-buddhism can be found at the Imperfect Buddha Site.

Original Blog post here.

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In this episode, Pierce Salguero comes on to discuss two of his books: Buddhish, A Guide to the 20 Most Important Buddhist Ideas for the Curious and Skeptical (Beacon Press, 2022) and A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine (Columbia UP, 2022).

Pierce is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities, fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, near Philadelphia.

The major theme in his scholarship is discovering the role of Buddhism in the global transmission and local reception of knowledge about health, disease, and the body.

After graduating in 1996, he lived in Asia for four years — more than two years in Thailand, with extended stays in India, China, and Indonesia as well. During this time, he trained as a practitioner of Traditional Thai Medicine (TTM). Pierce participated in extended stays at Buddhist meditation centers and monasteries in Northeast Thailand and India, including a summer as ananāgārika (white-robed monastic resident) in a Thai Forest-tradition monastery.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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And so it continues. The fifth and final installment in this series on doubt continues to explore an enlightened vision of practice in the 21st century. It explores the call to practice, honesty, doubt’s place and epistemic humility. It also looks at how to practice with doubt through suggestions for meditation practices and contemplative exploration.

What’s more, this episode serves as a launch pad for a series of Think Pieces that will intersperse interviews with guests.

Each Think Piece has a text version that can be located at the Imperfect Buddha site, where comments are welcome, along with ideas for guests.

Text version here.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Welcome to the new season of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast. After a well-earned and challenging summer filled with drought, war, political strife and ridiculous heat, we’re back in the saddle and raring to go with some intellectual stimulation aimed at the practicing life. Four episodes are lined up with Buddhist scholars, philosophers and practitioners.

First off we have Jin Y. Park. She is Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy and Religion at the American University and also served as Founding Director of the Asian Studies Program from 2013-2020. She specializes in East Asian Buddhism, Buddhist and comparative ethics, intercultural philosophy, and modern East Asian philosophy. We touch on Derrida, non-western philosophy, Merleau-Ponty, and two fascinating figures from Korea she has carried out research on; Kim Iryop and Pak Ch’iu, philosopher-practitioners well-worth taking a look at for their unique engagement with Buddhism.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In an historic event, the second Buddha himself Nagarjuna returns from the dead to team up with Jacques Derrida, non-Buddha, perhaps, to take on emptiness. They clash with identity politics. Bump into Jordan Peterson and the misses, and go for a coffee with John Gray. What you say? All of that in a single episode! Yes, dear listener. All of that in a single episode. You are called to enjoy the second part of my extended conversation with Mr Peter Salmon; awesome author of An Event, Perhaps.

Added bonus: Episode features a discussion and a moment of hauntology. Pay attention so you don’t miss it…at the end.

Peter’s book An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida (Verso, 2021) is currently discounted here. 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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The fourth installment in this series on doubt continues to explore an enlightened vision of practice in the 21st century. It explores the call to practice, honesty, doubt’s place and epistemic humility.

Text version here.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Welcome to this Great feast conversation. Philosophy Professor at Seattle University, Soto Zen Priest, Sangha leader, and Dharma teacher, Jason M. Wirth is the author of Nietzsche and other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy (Indiana UP, 2019), Engaging Dogen’s Zen and Mountains, and Rivers, and the Great Earth, both from 2017. In a rare and deep conversation, we discuss whether Nietzsche is a Buddha, the problem of ideology and Buddhist identities, advice from Gramsci on good sense, Heidegger’s Zen, the Kyoto School & even Critical Buddhism.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Today I talk with Peter Salmon, author of An Event, Perhaps; an intellectual biography of Jacques Derrida. Our conversation was rich: We tackle Derrida and Buddhism, Derrida and the culture wars, Derrida and practice. Foucault gets a mention, as does Heidegger, as does spiritual enlightenment, mindfulness and spirituality. Our conversation was incomplete. We made plans. This is now the first part of a two part conversation. The second helping is going to be even more Budhistsy.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In the third part of this series on Doubt, we head off to the Great Feast. Come along and dine with the Buddha, your favourite philosophers, and any other great mind you have a penchant for. You won’t regret it.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In this episode, returning guest Daniel Ingram comes on to discuss a range of fascinating questions concerning practice. We explore coming through the pandemic, the impact of long-term relationships on practice, first Buddhist books, hardcore Dharma practice, how life might have been different without practice, suffering and karma and Daniel’s new project, The Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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“Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” Voltaire

You know too much, yet understand too little. And it’s the same for me, and everyone you and I happen to know.

And, so it begins.

What follows are a series of posts and audio-casts that respond to this living human condition, bringing together practice materials from non-Buddhism, post-traditional approaches to Buddhism, and the work of Peter Sloterdjik. Each post represents a visit to the Great Feast and provides ideas for practice for those who simply cannot find a home in mainstream Buddhism, Mindfulness, Atheism, or some other form of spirituality.

This second part engages Peter Sloterdijk and the challenges of creating a practice in our contemporary moment.

It can be read and re-read here if you have appetite for more here.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Stef Aupers is professor of media culture in the Institute for Media Studies at the University of KU Leuven in the Netherlands. As a cultural sociologist, he studies the role of cultural meaning in the production, textual representation and consumption of media. Stef has published widely in international journals on the topics of religion, modern myth, conspiracy theories and the way these cultures are mediatized.

We discuss the fascinating phenomenon of conspirituality, which refers to the overlap between conspiracies and spirituality, something we have seen explode with Covid, and now the attack by Russia on the Ukraine.

In this conversation we dive into conspiracies, the spiritual turn, the sacralisation of the self, the New Age, Covid, and more. As always, these conversations bridge the gap between the intelligent practitioner and the academic expert and there is something for everybody in this rich conversation.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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“Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” Voltaire

You know too much, yet understand too little. And it’s the same for me, and everyone you and I happen to know.

And, so it begins.

What follows are a series of posts and audio-casts that respond to this living human condition, bringing together practice materials from non-Buddhism, post-traditional approaches to Buddhism, and the work of Peter Sloterdjik. Each post represents a visit to the Great Feast and provides ideas for practice for those who simply cannot find a home in mainstream Buddhism, Mindfulness, Atheism, or some other form of spirituality.

This first part engages Socrates and the Buddha and tosses a practice salad of exciting ingredients for the hungry practitioner.

It can be read and re-read here if you still have appetite for more here. 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In the practising life, choices must be made. Those choices occur at all levels from big picture views of the world, a whole life, and society, to the everyday choice of how to be in the world, how to act, and what to commit to. In this three part series on Secular Buddhism, we find figures who have made a specific choice to stick with Buddhism and attempt to change it. Winton Higgins notes that there are two lines that characterise the loose network of groups and individuals who identify as Secular Buddhist, one is more scientific, the other philosophical, though inevitably there is overlap. Data or ideas? Experience or observation? Dichotomies such as these never truly exist but signal a stance we might take towards what is.

Winton is a useful figure to start off our series; intelligent, well-read and more towards the philosophical line, Winton is happy discussing Martin Heidegger and Pope Francis and does so in our chat today. One interesting observation the more critical listener may notice is the unashamed reliance of Secular Buddhists on the idea of an original Buddha and an original Dharma and going back to the source. In my preparation for this conversation, the most interesting critique I found was not the contemporary criticisms of the more traditional forms of Buddhism, but a more academically informed concern about the degree to which an original Buddha or Dharma can be traced.

The Pali Canon being like the Bible is a mishmash of reconstruction with wide ranging takes on both the figure of the Buddha and the Dharma and therefore all readings of it end up being necessarily selective. The critique then is not the interpretation but the reliance on a text which has a contested present and contested past. Apart from this tension, Higgins openly states that Secular Buddhism is in line with the lineage of Buddhisms stretching back to our archetypal origins. This is not a problem in my view and the conversation is interesting for what it reveals about an individual working with the present and the past in making sense of how Buddhism may be brought into a contemporary, lived practising life.

Enjoy, the next step in this series will be with the man himself, Stephen Batchelor.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Take a trip to the Great Feast in this first in a series of posts on the practising life. Non-Buddhism meets post-traditional slants on practice, whilst tackling complexity, doubt, and ecological thought. Practise questions and suggestions are woven throughout as a response to all you who desire practical things and have asked for them. This might just be a revolution in rethinking meditation and the practising life.

An audio read. Original text located here.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Today I speak to Stephen Batchelor, figurehead for Secular Buddhism, well known author, and Scot. I present the lovely man some of the critique aimed at his work in the book Secularizing Buddhism, and from my previous interview with Richard K. Payne. We also discuss some of his intellectual influences, touch on phenomenology, Gianni Vattimo, and whether Stephen is fixated on the past in his relationship with early Buddhism. Stephen was game throughout for what turned out to be a constructive and illuminating conversation.

Next up will be one of Stephen’s collaborators and philosophically informed secular Buddhist teachers, Winton Higgins, all the way from Australia.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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From immanent Buddhism to cruel optimism, from secular subjectivity to the unconscious material running through your personal practice, today's episode features a returning guest in the figure of Richard K. Payne who is here to discuss his latest work and the contributions made by many great authors thinking deeply and critically about contemporary Buddhism. Published by Shambhala Publications, Secularizing Buddhism was released on the 3rd August, so if you like what you hear, why not consider getting a copy. It features contributions from Ron Purser, David L. McMahan, Bikkhu Bodhi, Sara Shaw, Gil Fronsdal and many more.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Something like a provocation, something of an introduction; this audio-cast presents a recent piece of work over at the Imperfect Buddha site on non-practice for all those interested in how to apply the non- to the practising life. Built on Complex world, Complex Practice and prior to a series on applied practice, this is the audio version of an elaboration of the opening shots of a revolutionary practice. See what you think, do the warm up and get ready for the main meal. Background music by Funki Porcini. Accompanying texts: Complex World, Complex Practice and You Need Non-Practice!

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Tina Rassmussen is one of our first meditation teachers on in a long while. Well, being a practice based series, this was inevitable. Tina was co-author of a book on jhana states and concentration that I have had on my shelf for a long time. Concentration is not the topic of our conversation, however. Here are some of the themes we explored; • Compatibility issues between neo-Advaita and Buddhism • Generational conceptions of practice; from Boomers to Millennials • The need to evolve our understanding and ways of thinking about and describing awakening/enlightenment • The phases and stages of a practising life • Roadblocks, hurdles, maturation; limitations • Critiquing the language we use to talk about self, ego, awakening • The way belief shapes practice, perception, expectations and the contours of subjectivity Enjoy the spring everyone and let’s all wish a swift end to this pandemic.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Who will think on Buddhism? Who has the chops to do so? What does it mean to place Buddhism in a configuration of contemplation alongside other thought and one’s personal experience of living a life in some way intimate with Buddhism as practice, as culture, as being and becoming? Although this season of the podcast is practice focussed, this does not mean a return to the warm bosom of feeling, perception and awareness minus thought. The mind demands expression. We are thinking, feeling, acting beings. To think better is a desire that Buddhism has expressed and struggled with throughout its history. Western Buddhism, especially in the States, has evolved in a variety of expressions and forms, and in many ways that expression has channelled the wider anti-intellectual trend in American popular culture, as well as the return to feeling and intuition, and even the lingering New Age focus in on the self. Sitting is doing is a view shared by today's guest Jane Affleck. An artist, occasional academic, and writer. My desire to get Jane onto the podcast was inspired by a piece she wrote for the Side View. It had a title that caught my attention; Meditative Awareness and the Symbiotic Real. The basic idea was that meditation and meditative relationships with the environment can behave as an antidote to anthropocentrism; an extension, if you will, of our over-focus on the selfing process that Buddhism is so concerned with. If ideology is collective selfing, anthropocentrism is species level selfing; this theme is set to be a central one in practice as this century unfolds so expect more guests on here to discuss it. With Jane, we talk about the intimate relationship with the environment that can be fostered and the way that relationship can challenge experiences of selfhood and many of the traps that accompany a self focussed approach to the practising life. We explore how art and the process of creation are integral to this process too.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Down the country path we stroll for another practice episode, this time with our regular guest Glenn Wallis. We go through the personal questions I've been posing to all the guests this season, but we also make time to talk about the non-buddhism practice group, Incite events, and Glenn's new book An Anarchist Manifesto. The episode has a written primer that you may find stimulating.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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And so it goes on. This is our second episode in the new practice series. In the meantime, I had something of an allergic reaction to social media, and the internet more broadly. Despite a pretty disciplined relationship with digital life, I had something akin to an epiphany mid-January and realised that in my own way I had got caught up in maintaining what I am increasingly thinking of as the synthetic real. The digital life is seductive in ways that are not always easy to identify and like many insidious forces in this world, it can creep up on you in unexpected ways. What this means long-term is anyone’s guess. For now, I have reduced my internet time drastically, with time spent on social media cut by 90% and I am thrilled by the results. If such concerns orbit your life too, you may want to check out Jaron Lanier’s work on social media. Our guest this time is Gregory Kramer, insight meditation teacher since the 1980s, he has developed a practice called Insight Dialogue; A sort of interpersonal meditation practice. Gregory teaches meditation, leads retreats and has written two books on Buddhist practice. The first on Insight Dialogue, and the second released in 2020 called A Whole Life Path. Gregory was candid in his answers. There are powerful moments in this episode that arise as we venture down the path of the deeply personal nature of practice. Gregory’s work is rooted in early Buddhist traditions yet he lives a house-holder’s life. His commitment to the practising life is evident throughout. In his own words; “...my own life experience have led me to emphasize an integrated path of development, where individual and interpersonal meditation are joined with contemplation, ethical inquiry, and a commitment to kindness.” Other point of interest, Gregory’s been married for over forty years and has three sons and five grandchildren. He was once a music composer, performer and taught composition at NYU while scoring films, video and dance works. He also developed devices for the music and recording field, and was even a founding figure in the science of auditory display and data sonification.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Asian and Buddhist and living in America: Does any of that matter? Those focussed in on practice and not much else regarding Buddhism might proclaim a resounding no. Others, all too aware of the tendency of western practitioners to ignore culture, and Buddhism beyond the meditation cushion might instead bellow forth with a resounding yes! Whatever your take, today’s guest Chenxing Han has written a book that fills a gap in our collective understanding, and appreciation of the role of Asians in making, shaping and living western Buddhism. Be the Refuge is not merely another book obsessed with race and social justice, however. Those themes do appear but it is more than another product in the polarised times we live in. Yes, some of the buzz words and concepts are there, but this book is as much a work of poetry as it is a research project designed to illustrate the often sidelined role of Asians in making and shaping Buddhism in the West. If more than two thirds of U.S. Buddhists are actually Asian American, perhaps it’s worth becoming more aware of them, right? Be the Refuge is both critique and celebration, countering the erasure of Asian American Buddhists while uplifting their stories and experiences. The Oriental monk, the superstitious immigrant, the banana Buddhist: dissatisfied with these tired tropes, Han asks, Will the real Asian American Buddhists please stand up? Her journey to answer this question led to in-depth interviews with a pan-ethnic, pan-Buddhist group of eighty-nine young adults. Weaving together the voices of these interviewees with scholarship and spiritual inquiry, this book reenvisions Buddhist Asian America as a community of trailblazers, bridge-builders, integrators, and refuge-makers. Encouraging frank conversations about race, representation, and inclusivity among Buddhists of all backgrounds, Be the Refuge embodies the spirit of interconnection that glows at the heart of American Buddhism.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Happy New Year to one and all and welcome to this new season (proper) of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast. Focussed on practice, this season engages Buddhist teachers, long-term practitioners, and creative innovators engaged in the practising life. Interspersed with regular interviews, this practice focussed season finally gets the podcast off of the couch and responding to the long stream of listeners calling for a practice focus. Our first guest is meditation teacher, artist and author, George Haas. George moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1992. He started practising Vipassanā at Ordinary Dharma in Venice, and studying Buddhist texts extensively. In 1998 he began study with his current teacher, Shinzen Young, at Vipassanā Support International, where he is now a senior facilitator. He began teaching meditation in 2000, founded Mettagroup in 2003, and became an empowered teacher through Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society, where he taught from 2007 to 2016. Along with his daily Morning Meditation and full schedule of one-on-one students, he continues to teach weekly classes and intensives in Los Angeles, and offer day-long, weekend and extended retreats around the country. He's also an artist with works in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, the Library of Congress, MoMA and the American Irish Historical Society. Mettagroup Founded by George Haas in 2003 and named the Best Online Buddhist Meditation by Los Angeles Magazine in 2011, Mettagroup uses insight meditation to help students live a meaningful life. Drawing from Buddhist teachings and John Bowlby's Attachment Theory, the Mettagroup techniques serve as a model of how to connect with other people, and how to be completely yourself in relationships with others and with work.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Santiago Zabala was once described as a most ignorant philosopher by the American philosopher Brian Leiter: An interesting take that one will need to interpret for themselves in listening to this conversation on fake news, the role of interpretation, freedom, and being at large. Santiago is not at all ignorant, of course, and might be better understood as a pluralistic thinker in the stream of European philosophy, thus accompanying living thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek, and Simon Critchley; philosophers who aren’t afraid to risk controversy by expressing ideas and opinions on all manner of topic, from film to Covid. Thinkers that Mr Leiter no doubt dislikes, in fact he considers poor old Zizek to be a charlatan and bigot! American Imperialism indeed! Santiago is rooted in the hermeneutic tradition of philosophy and we discuss the role and unavoidability of interpretation in our relationship with the world, and the latest phenomena of fake news, online battles, and the wider sphere of social life, politics, and, that topic so fundamental to western Buddhists, freedom. What is freedom today? What would it mean to use the concept of ’being at large’ to understand how we might or might not be free today? What does it mean to have a return to order? We cover this and more in this conversation which stretches well beyond the world of Buddhism, but also philosophy, by looking at how society is evolving today. We discuss Santiago’s latest book, Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts, but asides from his books you can also find his writing in The Guardian, The New York Times, and Aeon, to name a few. This is the third in this trifecta of episodes signalling a return to podcasting for the Imperfect Buddha Podcast.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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This episode involves a conversation with the Tibetologist Sam van Schaik. Sam wrote his original PHd thesis on Dzogchen and the work of Jigme Lingpa and has been involved in the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library, where he currently works, and also teaches at the SOAS University in London. He also happened to write one of my favourite books on Tibet, called appropriately, Tibet: A History. Well-written, entertaining and informative, Sam’s overview of the history of the country that has lived larger than life as a place holder for all manner of western fantasy is a book with academic chops but aimed at a general audience. If you like Donald S. Lopez’s work on Tibet and Buddhism, this is one for you for sure. We discuss it as well as his book Tibetan Zen but the lion’s share of the conversation concerns his latest work on Buddhist Magic. Something of a companion piece to Tibet: A History, it looks at the role magic has played throughout the history of Buddhism and in the wider world of Buddhism today beyond Mindfulness, Secularism, and the cute fantasy that westerners hold that Buddhism is not a religion, but a philosophy. Such folks might like to wonder if the other world religions have ever made similar claims too. I get a story in about my first encounter with the Shugden Oracle in case you are interested.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In an attempt to make more sense of non-Philosophy, and therefore non-Buddhism, I interview Irish philosopher and academic John O Maoilearca, the author of All Thoughts Are Equal, an exceptionally accessible introduction to the work of that pesky French philosopher Francois Laruelle, who we’ve been name dropping on the podcast for quite some time. Laruelle's work navigates an interesting paradox. On the one hand it can be incredibly straightforward, perhaps more so for those who have not been indoctrinated into philosophical thought. On the other, it presents a wide range of challenges to established philosophy and systematic modes of thought, including those found in Buddhism. We talk about non-philosophy as a heuristic in this regard, therefore as a kind of practice that people can engage in, and experience certain kinds of liberation through. A practice, I would argue, that compliments Buddhist ideals and fits perfectly well into the practicing life for those intrigued by post-traditional explorations of Buddhist materials, notions and practice techniques. In part, this episode acts as a preparation for grappling with non-Philosophy and so we unpack three of its most important concepts. Topics include; • What makes Laruelle’s non-Philosophy so radical and so intriguing for the world we live in today? • The Democracy of Thought. • What are we to make of the democratization in an age of alternative facts, and the difficulty of distinguishing narrative and reality in polarized times? • Decision, sufficiency, and The Real. • The most important contribution John’s book makes to Laurellian thought. • Where non-philosophy is heading. • Henri Bergson & Mysticism.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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"How do animals think? What does it mean to be at large? What is Buddhist Magic or even Tibetan Zen? These are questions posed by the three guests to follow in a rather lovely triad of interviews and conversations for the Imperfect Buddha Podcast; each one unique and diverse, each with a European guest, each tackling a topic that has long interested me: from non-Philosophy to Freedom in our age, from seeing Tibet without the romanticism, to the role of interpretation as a fundamental facet of existence. Mysticism, Fake News, and animals all get a look in too." Taken from this intro to the new season of a resurrected podcast. To be fair, it had never really been assigned to the tomb, but rather, was resting. With three episodes being released back to back, this super short intro provides an overview of what's to come and will help you to decide what to listen to.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Rethinking Practice at the Great Feast @INCITE Seminars Saturday, July 25th, 10am-2pm EST / 4-8pm Europe /3pm-7pm UK. Online via Zoom. Come and join us on the 25th at Incite Seminars for an original workshop on Buddhism at the Great Feast for Incite Seminars. Pay what you can and dive into this experimental event online through Zoom. Description below. Western Buddhism and spirituality more broadly provide us with a rich menu of practices, messages and visions of the human condition and what is possible and even desirable to do, avoid, and strive for within a human life. Yet, as many of us have come to realize, these practices, messages and curative fantasies do not always live up to expectation. The overly prescriptive ideals of what it means to be human, what practice is, and what we should be doing with it all too often reduce the Buddhist practitioner to the role of a passive performer of tradition and can lead to a loss of faith, disenchantment, and the feeling of having been conned. Can critique and disenchantment lead us to creatively reclaim our sense of ourselves apart from tradition, and discover new lines of inquiry, practice, and ways of relating? In this hands- and minds-on workshop, we will explore the possibilities of making a new relationship to Buddhist practice through the concept of the The Great Feast of Knowledge. This concept, articulated by Glenn Wallis, asks what happens when we invite any kind of thought, practice, insight or claim to exit its ideological bubble and interact with the great, vast planes of knowledge, human struggle, and discovery that sit outside the walls of its meaning-making apparatus? What might happen if we were to bring figures like the Scottish philosopher John Grey or the postmodern concept of hyperreality into our meditation practice? What would it mean to go on retreat with the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, or the work of Social Anthropologist Tim Ingold? A key idea from Francois Laurelle that will be useful to us here is the democracy of thought, which served as an inspiration for Wallis’s Feast. Laurelle poses that all thought is equal, and for us that means that our own thought can participate at the feast if we can just muster up some courage. There is a price to pay, of course. You must expose your inner-world, and your private practice, your secret desires, needs, and fears, to the wider world and risk their disruption, and even destruction. Armed with epistemic humility and renewed curiosity, whatever happens, the Great Feast brings us back into the collective struggle of our species to come to terms with the human condition. This experimental and explorative workshop may serve to help those who are disillusioned by the whole project of Buddhism, or the spiritual, to find a way forward that remains critical but infuses personal practice with new life. Post-traditional and non-Buddhist tools will be explored initially, though we may manage to make some our own in the process.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Ok, I went and did something a little bit different. I spoke directly to the time we live in. It may work. It may not. This is the first in a short series of audio articles. You can read the text version if you prefer over at the Imperfect Buddha site. It steers a path towards the practising life through the tumultuous times we inhabit...in stages. This is the preamble...and this is the intro to the it from the site; "And so it begins. This is clearly the preamble, but to what? A short series on the world we currently inhabit with a view to ho the practising life might engage it. Can we think away from the enticing polarised landscape we are often pulled into by social media, the media and the politics of the moment. It's not enough to remain aloof, or indifferent, so what do we do? Not, what should we do, that's not up to me, but how could we relate, openly, with curiosity, with presence, with care, with intellectual honesty, with a refusal to kowtow to the unthinking games of politics on display. Engage politically, but avoid the allure of merging with the crowd, and the cheap payoffs promised, or dive deeply into a tribe and swim in their idealogical formations and performance; both can be worth a try if you can hold your shit together as you do so. Heaven forbid I should advise you to do otherwise. What I will do though is explore out-loud, and possibly fail. Either way, I'm willing to have a go.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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A new episode is here. The lingering challenge of conspiracies, fake news, and the emergence of information silos means that we as a global society are being confronted with a major challenge to our relationship to information, to facts, and to the epistemological challenges we have always been burdened with regarding knowledge and the act of knowing. Conspiracy Theories are with us to stay and if you look at them for longer than a glance, they begin to mutate, twisting into odd shapes that can appear familiar and alien all at once. We cannot afford to look down our nose at them any more, they are part and parcel of the world we inhabit, and we must contend with the wider issues they raise. In this episode, recorded under quarantine, the Imperfect Buddha podcast explores the wider, hidden implications of the conspiratorial mindset and the challenges it represents. We look at its close relationship with spirituality, religion, and the New Age. We go deep into the psychology, the epistemological challenges, and explore practice ideas and the ethical duty we may all do well to consider exhibiting towards those enchanted by global conspiracy. We have tried to avoid treading familiar ground and the practice suggestions are not only for conspiracy theorists; they are for us too. For as we suggested in our episodes on cults (whose members share many characteristics with dogged conspiracy theorists), we have our own role to play in the world of conspiracies. Music for this episode comes from Odd Nosdam.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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“In a society that has no future, the present gains exponentially in importance.” In the time of Corona, what are we to do with happiness? Today’s guest is an expert on the subject and the well-being industry. Dr Ashley Frawley studies the relationship between the ideology of self-care, technologies of the self and wider social policy and practice. In her book, The Semiotics of Happiness, she explores the roots of happiness and its inclusion as a goal of wider society. We discuss Mindfulness, its rise, and possible wane, and the ideas that underpin the culture of self-development, as well as what might come after the Mindfulness fad. We talk about the current pandemic and the impact if might have on the obsession with the self. “If your purpose in life is emotional well-being then any upset is an attack on your whole purpose in life.” Topics covered include; • Is happiness increasing or decreasing after decades of experimentation with practices such as self-esteem, self-development, and Mindfulness? • What happens to a society that has no future, or no real collective future goals? • Mindfulness as the acceptance that we cannot change the world, or resolve social problems: a commitment to passivity. • Is mindfulness on the wane? If so, what magic bullet comes next? • Spiritual narratives and the one cure to save them all; how technologies of the self escape critique. • Mindfulness promoted as a magical bullet • Have we given up on solving social problems in meaningful ways? • The role of tradition and our commitment to something greater than ourselves vs freedom to apparently do whatever you want. • Self-obsession and centering happiness within yourself leads to misery • Our search for meaning and truth have turned inwards; as there are no external projects for meaning making people seeking meaning from self-help books, rules for life, quick cures. • Humans need collective, future orientated projects, where we have agency and can act on the world • Misanthropy as a consequence of the focus in on the self; profound distrust in humans. Music: Odd Nosdam.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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The Practising Life in many ways starts when there is a crisis. Our capacity to walk the talk, make our practice more than a mere means for survival, or for managing the banality of our existence is tested. Buddhism has many resources for facing crisis, but there is another tradition that is just as good, if not better; Stoicism. And some of its proponents lived through their own pandemics, and faced them head on. Albert Camus makes an appearance too. In this short, improvised episode of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast, I provide a dispatch from Italy and life at the start of a third week under quarantine. I also provide thoughts, suggestions and ideas on the practising life in a time of crisis. There are also a number of predications on the sort of future we might face at the end. This is my small act of kindness, a theme that is fundamental in making sure that we live this crisis rather than merely survive it, and I hope you find something of value in this topical episode and live well the days, weeks, and months to come. Feel free to get in touch if you'd like support and coaching in facing this crisis.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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This Turn takes us deep, deep down into the deep dark world of ideology to show why it's such a fundamental concept for understanding ourselves and the world, and the entanglement between the two, in an articulation of the concept of interdependence that rarely gets explored by Buddhists or spiritual folks alike. Three Europeans will help us on our way and after regular requests, I provide some practice tips, a new Bodhisattva vow and more. Though practise tips are actually present throughout and the more discerning listener will see just how much gold dust and nuggets can be sifted from this enduring topic: too often dismissed or merely articulated in its grossest form. If it’s all too much, you might want to listen in more than one sitting and ponder the goods served up by these great thinkers and my own humble attempt to make their ideas as relevant and contemporary as possible to practitioners like you, and why not, if needed, wash it all down with a nice cup of Ted Meissner tea. Menu of the Day: Great Feast Specials 01. Overview of the themes that ideology forces us to confront. 02. Antonio Gramsci; ideas that capture populations and Buddhist groups, cultural hegemony...interdependence of the underappreciated kind. 03. Antoine Destutt de Tracy: coining ideology, the science of ideas, the sensual nature of ideas, ideaophobes...feelings are wrapped in ideology (who would’ve thought it). 04. Louis Althusser: identification, capture, the naturalness of it all...how ideology is in your subjective experience and on your meditation cushion. 05. Practise tips: entering the Great Feast, the bodhisattva vow...committing to the world beyond our dreams and fantasies. Background music is provided by some wonderful local musicians from Trieste; Riccardo Morpurgo Trio, a jazz ensemble, and Amorth, a music producer and electronic music artist. Along with these two dynamos, we have a fantastic Trip Hop artist still going strong from the UK, Funki Porcini.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Podcast meets Podcast. Adam Robbert from the Sideview boards the Imperfect Buddha to discuss the work of Pierre Hardot, author of Philosophy as a Way of Life, along with a long list of our shared favourite topics. We get into the nitty-gritty of the practising life, contemplation, reflection, embodied consciousness and martial arts, the path ahead, challenges on the way, and more. This is most definitely a Great Feast conversation.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Off we go with our first long-form interview/conversation for 2020, and it’s with returning guest Daniel Ingram! Are you ready for more? It seems that many of you are. Back in 2019 when Daniel was visiting here in Trieste, we discussed a range of material we might cover on the podcast and one topic that repeatedly came up for Mr Ingram was his take on Integral Theory. We finally got the conversation done before Christmas and here it is. For this one I play the devil’s advocate somewhat as my knowledge on Ken Wilber’s work was quite limited and I had heard mainly complaints about it from our more educated listeners. As always, however, it was a pleasurable conversation and Daniel’s take on Wilber’s core theory seems pretty attractive as a model for understanding stages of growth, both for individuals and groups. We cover sex scandals, power grabs, groupy love, spaced-out gurus, religious fundamentalists, and how we are all too human. See what you think, and don’t forget to visit Daniel’s website; it’s called Integrated Daniel after all. For those new to the podcast, and crazy for Daniel’s enlightenment stories and pragmatism, there is a plethora of past conversations to enjoy. From our first ever conversation with him years back, there’s a far more recent and fun series on non-Buddhism in which Daniel tackles the Speculative non-Buddhism project as well as an episode looking into the Practising Life; our theme for this year of podcast episodes.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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What's coming up in 2020 in the coming months? Find out by listening to this tidy little introduction and update on the podcast. Music provided by Funki Poricini.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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This is our fourth foray into the land of Buddhism, Cults and Cult-like behaviours across mainstream Buddhist groups. Let’s be honest, this topic is always perversely interesting. If you missed out on our past episodes covering these topics, there are links and short intros below to those past episodes, which were a lot of fun. For our latest journey, we interview Dr Michelle Haslam, PhD, a clinical psychologist who ran afoul of the machinations of the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT) and has since written a psychological report on their tactics and set up a resource site filled with testimonies from ex-followers along with articles to warn the general public about their often dysfunctional behaviour. She shares some of the horrendous tactics employed against her after leaving the group and discusses some of her psychological analysis of the NKT, their practices and group dynamics. She is also currently working in an undisclosed location despite mentioning that she has worked in safeguarding in the interview previously. Michelle has had a dreadful website put together by a mysterious psychologist, who doesn't actually appear to exist in the real world, immediately after publishing her report. It's defamatory and quite sad and makes awful claims about her. Be your own judge of it should you stumble on it. The introduction involves an added presentation on cults that ties together the multiple themes from our last episodes and that concludes our forays into cult-land. If you have heard it all before, you can skip it by jumping to the interview proper at 37.10. Note: Those who critique the New Kadampa Tradition often end up being trolled, attacked, and threatened by folks, who hide their identities and usually claim to not be any part of the NKT. It is obviously difficult to prove that they are so I am putting this here as a potential warning so that you dear listener can make up our own mind about who is to blame if this podcast should come under attack.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In a time of environmental meltdown, political and economic crisis, what should we do? What role can practice play? How are we to envision our place in the world, as protagonists in the destruction of our home, and mere bit part players in global conflict? Can we make a difference, or should we retreat to our personal spaces and meditate and be done with it? This new episode of the podcast explores such big themes and the work of Brooke D. Lavelle and Zachary Walsh, our two guests, as we take a look at the bifurcated road ahead of us; a Great Transition, or a Great Collapse await. While many of us may like to see life continue on as usual, I think most folks are starting to realise that business as usual is killing us slowly. It is time to make change move in a direction that sees us and the many species surviving this century, but practice remains, as Sloterdjik would remind us, and the big picture is always grounded in the lives of practitioners in this conversation. We discuss such uncomfortable topics as love, care, practice and transformation. We touch on environmentalism, activisms, but also the underlying themes challenging these worlds of work at present and the need to both practice and think and imagine the world differently.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Our year long-series on practice continues and we stray further into the world of politics and economics with this episode's guest. Economics is a form of human practice of course, and not a solid, eternal fixed inevitability. Like politics, it's a topic often resisted by spiritual and religious folks. In a democracy, we would all do well to educate further on this topic, so why not combine a conversation on Buddhism and economics? That's just what we have done in this episode with Clair Brown, who is an economist at U.C. Berkeley. In this episode we discuss Buddhist Economics, the name of her book on the topic. Clair has been active in seeking to construct and teach alternatives to the free market, neo-liberal economic model we are still living under and Buddhism, along with the work of E.F. Schumacher, plays a role. Using real world evidence and data, she has been developing policies towards an economics more suited to our 21st century plight and a reduction of suffering globally. Clair has a dedicated website on the topic with a reading group section for those interested in working with her book.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Professor of philosophy, religion and integral ecology, at San Francisco University, Sam Mickey is our guest in this episode. We tackle many a topic but return throughout to the theme of the Great Feast, and embodiment, in facing existential threat, and environmental decay. We tackle the theme of justice too. Many of the themes connect to titles of his books including; On the verge of a Planetary Civilisation: A Philosophy of Integral Philosophy, and the wonderfully demanding title, Co-existentialism and the Unbearable Intimacy of Ecological Emergency. Do not panic, however, Sam is a wonderful conversationalist and shares my own hopeful outlook on our future, and this is evident throughout. He also anticipates a future conversation with the ever-present Daniel Ingram in which we will tackle integral theory and the work of Ken Wilber.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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It took a long time to get this one done and I hope it was worth it. Please note that the creative extras took up very little of that time, rather, it was finding a way to talk about big issues as a living practice beyond partisan politics and ideological capture. This podcast episode tackles politics as living culture and suggests that complexity marks our age in a way that we cannot ignore, but almost always do. From Twitter to CNN and Fox News, very little thought seems to go into public discourse these days. It's all about the hits, whether emotional or site visits. This podcast episode invites you to change games and provides you with some tools for doing so. It also offers some meta positions on it all & doesn't forget to include Buddhism in the discussion. It will no doubt disappoint some, excite others, anger a few, and turn off others. For some of you, it may be a small act of sanity in a world going increasingly off the rails.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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It's been another busy period but finally it's time for Cleo Kearn's interview to be released into the world before I head off on holiday. Ritual and Resistance is the title of our conversation as we tackle ritual, religion, Buddhism, resistance and change. We discuss the following topics in the first half; Continental Philosophy, Anthropology and Religion, religious sacrifice, Shamanism and Catholicism, Durkheim and Lacan. And then go deep into discussing ritual; its ubiquity, its role in societies, why some survive and others don't, its role in social formation and dissolution, freeing and managing desire, selfhood, challenges to ritual in our age, Buddhism and Tantra, death, activism, innovation and more. Enjoy!

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Are we all going down it too? Daniel Ingram returns to the podcast for a third and final conversation and what a rich one it was. I believe it is well worth your time. After reading some Trash Theory, Daniel accepted Glenn Wallis’s challenge to read his book and after exploring the infamous SNB heuristic, based on the work of the rascally Frenchman Francois Laruelle, he came in for round three. We go back to the heuristic that started off the Trash Theorising, touching on Decision, Sufficiency, and the Great Feast of Knowledge, before exploring novel takes on refuge, philosophy and practice. The first two recordings have solicited quite a lot of reaction from folks on Facebook and Twitter and at the Post-Traditional Buddhism blog. This includes Tom Wooldrige who has a new blog dedicated, it seems, to critiquing Daniel’s Pragmatic Dharma approach from a psychological perspective that has stimulated reaction too. Subsequently Evan Thompson has chimed in on Daniel’s views, as has David Chapman, and Glenn Wallis. This is a sort of eruption and a sign of the feast taking place. I argue that we need more of these kinds of conversations. Let’s see what you think after hearing this final one in this series.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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You’ve had the initial goods and as promised here’s the second helping of Mr Daniel Ingram. This conversation gets right to the point and tackles, in a rather condensed and humble manner, a work of collective, creative production over at the Speculative non-Buddhism site called Trash Theory; an exploration of practice beyond decision, beyond enchantment, beyond capture. Well, that’s the plan anyway. We start out with a quick chat about the SNB, x-Buddhism and non-Buddhism, before going through a number of postulates, or principles for practice, that have been explored and are continuing to be developed by Glenn Wallis and company. We went through it pretty quickly as we just had an hour to play with, but it was fun and an interesting exploration that will be continued in a follow up conversation to be recorded this Thursday. You’ll find a link to the original post we worked from below, though there are, at the time of writing, six posts on the theme at hand. This one is a good start for the curious and it’s pretty accessible. Both episodes with Daniel feature the same introduction so if you have already heard the first conversation, you will want to skip it. It’s possible that Dan and I will tackle some of Ken Wilber’s work in the follow up to Trash Theory, so if you have any insights into why Wilber was full of it, or specific points that underline problems with Ken’s work more generally, let me have them, as I have only a superficial reading of his work and never felt motivated to read beyond a general introduction to his ideas, which seem pretty simplistic, though potentially useful. Either way, enjoy this turn of events as we continue to dive into practice on this season of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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After the creative wonders of the Critical Turn #1, we have the magical appearance of Daniel Ingram in two conversations covering a great deal of ground. Our first conversation covers a wide range of topics from practice to waking up, from generation-X to cynicism. The second covers a series of posts from the Speculative non-Buddhism site called Trash Theory. We discuss the SNB briefly and then tackle some weird and wonderful postulates those boys have been playing with of late. That second episode will be released within the next 24 hours. Both episodes feature the same introduction and will be released in the same week. This is because folks will likely get more out of one episode than the other; though I shall post them in the order we recorded them. The second episode is also incomplete and Daniel and I will be recording its follow up this coming Thursday (20th June, 2019), which means you have the opportunity to chip in with your own comments, complaints or curiosities, though you’ll obviously have to be quick. It’s possible that we will also tackle some of Ken Wilber’s work in that episode and Daniel’s take on it, so if you have any insights into why Wilber was full of it, or specific points that underline problems with Ken’s work more generally, let me have them, as I have only a superficial reading of his work and never felt motivated to read beyond a general introduction to his ideas, which seem pretty simplistic, though potentially useful. Music is supplied by Kali Phoenix & Hundred Strong.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Critical turn #1 On a deep dark night in a deep dark wood, something strange happened over at the Imperfect Buddha podcast. Was it a moment of folly? Was it a moment of genuine madness? It remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure is that a critical turn took place and in good company too. For in that deep dark wood there was a gathering and a fire and those who turned up were Samuel Beckett, Peter Sloterdjik, Francois Laruelle, and Evelyn Underhill. Animal presences could also be heard amongst the trees and in the undergrowth, whilst the fire crackled away providing the warmth that would stimulate a rather atypical exploration of recent themes to appear on the podcast. This is the first of perhaps many critical turns, or, if it is deemed a forest fire like disaster by listeners and critics, it may be consumed as a one-off event, just like a Tibetan sand painting. As I have been saying for several episodes now, the creative and the critical are great bedfellows and this is my expression of a meeting between the two. There are strange sound effects, music, disembodied voices and narration. For the more practically minded, what I do is lay out a number of principles for guiding a sort of critical engagement with Buddhism, Buddhist materials, and practice materials more broadly beyond spirituality. I also reflect on the topic of mysticism which came up in my conversation with Ken and Hokai. This is in fact the intention for future critical turns, to pick up on and addressed issues left over from conversations with guests, identify unanswered questions, and make links to broader issues covered in the life time of the podcast. This may also produce interesting material to explore with future guests. It is an experiment, so it may or may not work. Feedback will hopefully be worthwhile and indicate the direction that further critical turns take. Prepare yourselves, expect the unexpected, and try not to take it all too seriously. Comments, complaints, suggestions, corrections, pledges of large sums of money, can all be made at the usual places. Enjoy the show!

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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This is the second instalment of my wide-ranging conversation with Ken McLeod and Hokai Sobol. It features an extended introduction that is, in part, a response to feedback from episode 50, and I invite our more critically leaning listeners to gift feedback on what is an ongoing experiment in crafting conversations that will increasingly respond to the challenges raised and explored throughout the life of this podcast. The conversation was largely unplanned and improvised & this means it features free-flowing exploration, rather than a programmed engagement with a few straightforward ideas. We journey into the terrain of mysticism and practice and most of the topics covered are explored within the context of these two. Here's just some of what we cover; - Mysticism - Sloterdjik & Jonathon Haidt (Žižek too!) - Ethics V Morality - Social duty & mystical practice - Universal human rights & authority - Transactional & utilitarian approaches to practice - Verbing outcomes: nirvana & freedom as practices - Purity & purification - Critical thinking & engaging with the taboos of our time - Risqué practices & the Protestant strain in western Buddhism - Teacher/Student relationships & ongoing challenges. End music is by Bristol based artist Aisha Chaouche and is called "So what?"

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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This is a quick introduction to help you on your way through the new season of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast. After a year of traipsing the globe with academics in an outrageous attempt to address the anti-intellectualism rife across Buddhism, and spirituality more generally, we have landed with both feet on the ground in the terrain of practice. The challenge for this season is clear: to approach the whole concept of practice afresh. Not ignoring the past, but looking at it all in as contemporary a lens as possible, whilst bringing the great wealth of knowledge gained from our academics to bear on the personal, the subjective, the intimate, and the phenomenological. Our first foray into such terrain is carried out in Kostrena, Croatia with Ken McLeod and Hokai Sobol and together we discussed all manner of topic from practice to culture wars, from Peter Sloterdjik to Jonathon Haidt, from non-conceptual mind to evil, from social duty to the great themes of our time, and the way they all interrelate with practice. The conversation is divided into two parts. Being recorded live outside the studio, the quality is not the best but it is perfectly listenable and I hope the occasional passing car and slight echo won’t get in the way of your listening pleasure. End music provided by The Naturals from Bristol. The track is entitled 2HGS and is rather wild. Enjoy the episode and let us know what you think at the usual places.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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We have come to the end of our series engaging with academics from the world of Buddhist studies and other relevant disciplines and what better way to complete it than with an interview with Donald S. Lopez Jr. Donald is the Arthur E. Link distinguished professor of Buddhist and Tibetan studies at Michigan University and the well-known author of many books on Buddhism. He specialises in late Indian Mahayana Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism and his books include Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, The Madman’s Middle Way, Buddhism and Science: a Guide for the Perplexed, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: a Biography, and two titles that will be coming out this year with one on the Lotus Sutra that I am looking forward to. Donald’s books are aimed at the general public as well as fellow academics and they are entertaining and very well written. He draws on rich historical analysis and contemporary analytical tools for understanding complex religious phenomena and the West’s relationship with them in a way that is insightful and illuminating. They are also full of unexpected moments and wit. Donald and I talk about his work, his writing, his books, Buddhism, philosophy, and more. It was a pleasure and honour for me to speak with him and I think this is a great way to round up this series before we move on to the practitioner and teacher cycle later this year. Thank you for listening to the podcast and I hope you found it as stimulating as I have. Music by Ghosts & Kate Stapley.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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We reach our penultimate episode in this series with Buddhist academics. Richard K. Payne is former Dean of the Institute of Buddhist Studies and Yehan Numata Professor of Japanese Buddhist Studies at the Institute of Buddhist Studies at Berkeley. Richard also trained as a Shingon Priest, and provides interesting insight into Buddhism at his blog, Critical Reflections on Buddhist Thought. We get stuck into a whole range of topics in the conversation, from White Buddhism to perennialism, from Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True? to mind-body dualism. We also touch on popular themes to the podcast such as transcendence, ideology and anti-intellectualism. You will find the article on Traditionalist Representations of Buddhism at the podcast site.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Here we are, the last in our three-part series on Buddhist Modernism, post-Modernism, and what comes after. We hope you've enjoyed it and found it educational and are ready for the final run. Professor Ann Gleig joins the podcast from sunny Florida for a discussion of her brand new book 'American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity'. Our discussion centres on her text and expands out to touch on issues such as social justice, recent sexual scandals in Buddhist communities, the loss of boundaries between the academic and practitioner, and obviously, lots more. A big theme in Ann's book is the development of post-modern influences in the current western Buddhist landscape, she explores multiple modernities and the ways scholars are attempting to make sense of the changes afoot, which you dear listener are part of. Ann's book is as new as can be, surveying the current landscape of American Buddhism and beyond. 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In this second part of the series on Buddhist modernism, Buddhist post-modernism, and what comes next, I interview David L. McMahan, who is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College in the US. David is the well-known author of The Makings of Buddhist Modernism, which had a serious impact on more learned, thinking Buddhists in the West who were willing to challenge some of their assumptions about Buddhism and its development here. David’s book acted as an analysis of the Western influences on how Buddhism was shaped and showed that they had an insipid influence in ways that practitioners were generally oblivious to. From the role of romanticism, to secularism, to notions of selfhood, David’s book was an incredible journey into the underlying structure of Western Buddhism itself, revealing how this often described ancient wisdom tradition was actually in great part the creation of Westerners. We touch on the book and discuss how he views it today and its influence, but most of our conversation is about work he has written since then, editing and making contributions to books including Meditation, Buddhism and Science from 2017 and Buddhism in the Modern World from 2012, and we touch on his first book, Empty Vision: Metaphor and Visionary Imagery in Mahayana Buddhism from 2002. David has an interest in the relationship between the humanities and science and how this affects Buddhism and is interested in maintaining an important role for the humanities in understanding Buddhism at a time when science has become fetishised and pushed to the forefront as a validating force for an idealised form of Buddhism and we talk about this in some detail. We also talk about phenomenology, Western philosophy, developments in contemporary Buddhism, and of course the issues of modernity and post-modern thought and its potential impact on the current Buddhist landscape. I was still rather ill when interviewing David so if you hear my voice stammering and weak, this is the reason why. I don’t think it gets in the way of the interview but it was strange to hear myself with an almost alien voice, panting, and unfortunately, sounding ready for the hospital. In two weeks the final part of this series will be available with Ann Gleig, a fellow Brit working in Florida, in which we explore her book American Dharma: Buddhism beyond Modernity, and it would be interesting to get some feedback on what you all think about all this. We are doing this for your benefit after all.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Date: Saturday, February 23, 9am-1pm, at Culture Works in Philadelphia Cost: Pay what you can, upwards to $90. For more than a decade, movement-based scholar AK Thompson has worked with Benjamin to weigh in on the key debates of our crisis-filled era. From engagements with pop culture’s latent promise to critiques of the cherished certainties that guide movement struggles, he has foregrounded the operational value of Benjamin’s insights. In Premonitions: Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt (2018), Thompson reveals how we might do things with Benjamin today.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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“All Buddhism is Cultural Buddhism.” Scott Mitchell is the Rev. Yoshitaka Tamai Professor of Jodo Shinshu Buddhist Studies at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley and the author of "Buddhism in America: Global Religion, Local Context"(2016). His research interests include Buddhism in Western contexts, Buddhist modernity, Pure Land Buddhism, translocal religions, ritual studies, and media studies. Scott and I had a lively conversation and covered a variety of topics including; what are the live issues in American Buddhism right now, what is the relationship between America, Europe and the rest of the world in terms of innovation in Buddhism, S. N. Goenka & the practice of meditation in Asia, the rise of China and its potential influence on global Buddhism, the lingering problem of a single/true Buddhism, post-modernism & Buddhism, heritage Buddhisms and decolonisation. This is the first episode in a three-part series on Buddhist Modernism, Post-Modernism and what comes after.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Does western philosophy lack imagination when thinking about rebirth and reincarnation? What would Wittgenstein say? This episode features Dr Mickel Burley, a philosopher of religion from Leeds university in the UK. He wrote a fascinating book called Rebirth and the Stream of Life, which inspired me to have him on. He’s a big fan of Ludwig Wittgenstein too and we get to talking about a man who is widely considered the greatest philosopher of the 20th century as well as his thought and its uses for thinking about spirituality, Buddhism, rebirth and more. We also bridge the episode to our earlier discussion of karma and rebirth with Jayarava. Mick has also written on cannibalism, animal sacrifice, Hatha-Yoga, and the lack of imagination in philosophy surrounding rebirth and reincarnation. We manage to discuss philosophy East & West too. 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Hey, it’s 2019 and we’re off to a bang with two new episodes! The first one is quite the experiment with our first guest host filling in for the mysterious, ephemeral stranger that is Mr Stuart Baldwin. Our first intrepid visitor is Gavin McCloskey from Northern Ireland has been China based for quite some time. He is his own man of course, and he brought some fine questions along for us to discuss. I’m afraid I did most of the talking, but Gavin had some great contributions to make and it was good having him on. Our conversation touches primarily on practice and some of my more far out ideas emerge. You can hear Gavin’s views on Goenka and Mahasi Sayadaw and his experience of retreats with those lineages. We talk about innovation in practice, enlightenment, reincarnation, and much more. See what you think and let us know how it goes in this experimental conversation. Feedback would be appreciated! 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Date: Saturday, January 19, 9am-1pm Cost: Pay what you can: Suggested amount: $90 Facilitator: Joshua Ramey is a writer, teacher, and activist who studies political economy and anti-capitalist political theory. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Villanova University (2006) and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Concentration in Peace, Justice, and Human Rights at Haverford College. He is the author of The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal and Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency. What is money? Money functions as a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value, but this is what money does, not what money is. There is a very deep paradox at the heart of money, because money is not itself, but what it represents. Money is the representation of social agreements—agreements about who is obliged to whom, about what is more or less valuable, about what can be changed or altered in the past and the future, and about what must stay the same over time. Far from being a simple thing, money is metaphysical: social, political, abstract, and weird. Although economists tend to think of money only as a “veil” that covers the true reality of exchange relationships, money actually has the power to control which exchanges and which economic activity take place, at all, because money is essentially a form of credit, an expression of approval and judgment of affirmation by some human beings in favor of the activities of others. However, most of us (and most economists) are either confused about or in denial of the fact that money is not a commodity, but a form of credit that is issued into existence almost entirely by private bank loans. And new money is created not on the basis of pre-existing savings or assets, but on the basis of demand for credit and willingness of bankers to supply it. This means that the private banking system has enormous power over not just their own investments, but over the amount and kind of credit available to the entire economy, whose priorities are wildly different from that of the speculative classes. This seminar will introduce the history of money and the formation of the modern monetary system based on private financing. It will then look at the contemporary politics of debt, austerity, and class warfare in order to explore possibilities for concrete struggle against the class power of bankers and megafinance.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University in 2006 and is tenured at Williams College in their Religious Studies Department. He has three primary research areas: Japanese Religions, European Intellectual History, and Theory more broadly. He has been working to articulate new research models for Religious Studies in the wake of the collapse of poststructuralism as a guiding ethos in the Humanities. Jason and I discuss his book 'The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences' from 2017 as well as his text on inventing religion in Japan. We delve into the role of enchantment and the myth of disenchantment, the role of enchantment in science and the fascinating indulgences of many of the great scientific thinkers in spiritualism and enchanted beliefs. We cover East & West philosophy, The Kyoto School, Metamodernism, and more. Our conversation also joins up nicely with previous guests and the desire to give emergence to something new after post-modernism and modernism, and for Buddhists, something beyond the cultural infiltration of both in contemporary western Buddhism. Music.

Matthew O'Connell a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Dale S. Wright is distinguished Professor of Religion at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He is author of The Six Perfections: Buddhism & the Cultivation of Character, and Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism. He is also coeditor with Steven Heine of The Koan: Text and Context in Zen Buddhism, The Zen Canon: Textual Foundations of Zen Buddhism, Zen Classics: Formative Texts in the History of Zen Buddhism, and Zen Ritual: Studies of Zen Buddhist Theory in Practice. More importantly for our podcast, Dale is author of 'What is Buddhist Enlightenment?' A text that forms the basis for a good chunk of our conversation. We explore the notion of enlightenment in Buddhism and in particular the pluralism of definitions, a secular reframing of the thing, how western philosophy challenges Buddhist notions of enlightenment, myth and myths that are encased in different interpretations of enlightenment. As with so many of our podcast conversations, this one heads off into places unknown, exploring questions, reflections, intuitions and interesting ground that we hope you will find as stimulating as we did.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Our year long jaunt through the world of academic engagement with Buddhism continues. In this episode of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast, we talk to William Edelglass, professor of Philosophy, Environmental Studies, and Buddhist Studies at Marlboro College. William has been a teacher in a variety of settings, including a federal prison in New York, a Tibetan refugee settlement in Nepal, and for many years as a wilderness guide at Outward Bound. Before going to Marlboro, William taught Western philosophy at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, Dharamsala, India, to Tibetan monks, and Buddhist philosophy to American college students on a Tibetan studies program. William also teaches a range of fascinating courses at Barre Centre for Buddhist Studies. William and I cover quite a bit of ground in our 2-hour long conversation spanning Buddhism, Philosophy, and our current political climate. Here are just some of the questions we tackled; What stand out lessons have each phase of your professional life taught you? Which lessons continue to influence the way you work and think about what drives you? What philosophical challenges do the different Buddhisms present to Western Philosophical thought? What philosophical challenges does Western Philosophy present to Buddhist thought? How do you think Western practitioners might take a more critical and explorative approach to Buddhist thought? What are we to do with the challenges of nihilism as practitioners? What are we to make of mysticism? How can we renew philosophical thought for practitioners? Why is Shantideva such an important figure for you and what challenges do his work and thought raise? Why is Levinas an important figure for you what challenges do his work and thought raise for Buddhism? Music for this episode comes from George Glew and is called Higher. 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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What is attention? Where are the boundaries between 'my' individual attention and that of those around me? Whose paying attention to what? And, what are the consequences of how attention is manipulated and manufactured by the media and by ideology? Yves Citton explores these questions and many more on the podcast today with special attention paid to his fantastic book "The Ecology of Attention" which analyses attention-related phenomena emergent at a number of levels from the individual to the social arguing throughout that there are high stakes for how we understand and work with these phenomena: for teaching, performance, the environment, and freedom itself. Yves Citton is professor of Literature and Media at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis and executive director of the Ecole Universitaire de Recheche ArTeC. He taught for 13 years at the Université Grenoble Alpes and for 12 years in the department of French and Italian of the University of Pittsburgh, PA. He got his PhD from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and has been invited Professor at New York University, Harvard and Sciences-Po Paris. Music for these episodes is provided by the Bristol-based artist Something Anorak. Check out his work on the usual sites including Bandcamp.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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This week, you lucky listeners get two episodes for the price of one! Unusually for the podcast, we recorded two episodes back-to-back in just two days and for this reason they are kin, intimately connected, and shall go forth into the world as such. Each one shares the same intro, but don’t panic, it’s relatively short. Both conversations were less structured than usual. I did have questions, but allowed both conversations more space to evolve and flow, and there may even be a bit of rambling on both sides from time to time, but never enough to bore: We are exploring new creative spaces after all! Our two guests are at opposite ends of the career spectrum and their interests and concerns mirror generational shifts towards contemplative practices. Zachery Walsh is finishing up a Ph.D. programme, while Robert Forman has retired from teaching Religious Studies at University. Robert Foreman isn’t a typical guess for the podcast. Much of our work has been critical of Western spirituality and explorative of more philosophically leaning themes and aimed towards constructing divergent ways of imagining Buddhism, spirituality, contemplation, and notions of path tradition and outcomes. Robert spent much of his career exploring themes that have come up on our podcast episodes uniting his spiritual bent with academic writing on topics including mysticism non-duality pure consciousness and even ending up in a debate with Stephen T. Katz on whether mystical experience is socially constructed, or an innate universal capacity. Robert is a long-term practitioner of TM, that’s transcendental meditation, and we start off our discussion by talking about this controversial practice. We get into a range of topics covering his interests and non-academic writings including his recent “Enlightenment ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.” I do my best to lead the conversation towards more academic topics, but I’m only partially successful. I hope that the attempts to do so make for an interesting conversation all the same, and it must be said that Robert is game throughout our chat and generous with his time. Either way, our conversation remains loosely connected to the academic theme we have this year. My conversation with Zack Walsh was quite different, but not necessarily devoid of the personal or traces of Mystical enquiry, although perhaps he or I would use slightly different language to refer to such. Zach is currently working in the Institute for advanced Sustainability Studies in Germany exploring the relationship between contemplative practices and ecology. He has written some great work that resonates with many of my own concerns, insightful critiques of mindfulness and meditation culture using a variety of lenses that deserve wider attention, and has more recently developed what he calls the Contemplative Commons, which becomes a central topic of our discussion. We also look at the interplay of social justice, activism and contemplative practices, future directions for the development of spirituality firmly grounded in the imminent world, Metamodernism, and transcendence, and we even get into discussing modern day China, and there is film reference to boot. Enjoy this tandem cycle through different lives and minds as the Imperfect Buddha Podcast continues its journey onwards through destinations unknown. Music for these episodes is provided by the Bristol-based artist Hundred Strong, this time in collaboration with Cali Phoenix, a singer from Scotland. Check out her work on the usual sites including Bandcamp and her latest album Voices.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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This week, you lucky listeners get two episodes for the price of one! Unusually for the podcast, we recorded two episodes back-to-back in just two days and for this reason they are kin, intimately connected, and shall go forth into the world as such. Each one shares the same intro, but don’t panic, it’s relatively short. Both conversations were less structured than usual. I did have questions, but allowed both conversations more space to evolve and flow, and there may even be a bit of rambling on both sides from time to time, but never enough to bore: We are exploring new creative spaces after all! Our two guests are at opposite ends of the career spectrum and their interests and concerns mirror generational shifts towards contemplative practices. Zachery Walsh is finishing up a Ph.D. programme, while Robert Forman has retired from teaching Religious Studies at University. Robert Foreman isn’t a typical guess for the podcast. Much of our work has been critical of Western spirituality and explorative of more philosophically leaning themes and aimed towards constructing divergent ways of imagining Buddhism, spirituality, contemplation, and notions of path tradition and outcomes. Robert spent much of his career exploring themes that have come up on our podcast episodes uniting his spiritual bent with academic writing on topics including mysticism non-duality pure consciousness and even ending up in a debate with Stephen T. Katz on whether mystical experience is socially constructed, or an innate universal capacity. Robert is a long-term practitioner of TM, that’s transcendental meditation, and we start off our discussion by talking about this controversial practice. We get into a range of topics covering his interests and non-academic writings including his recent “Enlightenment ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.” I do my best to lead the conversation towards more academic topics, but I’m only partially successful. I hope that the attempts to do so make for an interesting conversation all the same, and it must be said that Robert is game throughout our chat and generous with his time. Either way, our conversation remains loosely connected to the academic theme we have this year. My conversation with Zack Walsh was quite different, but not necessarily devoid of the personal or traces of Mystical enquiry, although perhaps he or I would use slightly different language to refer to such. Zach is currently working in the Institute for advanced Sustainability Studies in Germany exploring the relationship between contemplative practices and ecology. He has written some great work that resonates with many of my own concerns, insightful critiques of mindfulness and meditation culture using a variety of lenses that deserve wider attention, and has more recently developed what he calls the Contemplative Commons, which becomes a central topic of our discussion. We also look at the interplay of social justice, activism and contemplative practices, future directions for the development of spirituality firmly grounded in the imminent world, Metamodernism, and transcendence, and we even get into discussing modern day China, and there is film reference to boot. Enjoy this tandem cycle through different lives and minds as the Imperfect Buddha Podcast continues its journey onwards through destinations unknown. Music for these episodes is provided by the Bristol-based artist Hundred Strong, this time in collaboration with Cali Phoenix, a singer from Scotland. Check out her work on the usual sites including Bandcamp and her latest album Voices.

Matthew O'Connell a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Our second podcast episode for the week is for Incite Seminars with regular guest Glenn Wallis. As per usual, our conversation takes many interesting and creative turns, and is longer than the usual Incite seminar podcasts. We discuss the topics of Unlearning, education versus learning, and introducing radical ideas into Dharma halls, as well as much more. As indicated in the introduction to this podcast, Glenn will be returning soon for a regular podcast discussion of his brand-new book A Critique of Western Buddhism, out now for Bloomsbury. For those interested in engaging with Glenn directly, his Unlearning Seminar takes place in Philadelphia September 29th and is a must for educators looking to think about educating differently. Click on the link to find out more: Incite Seminars: Unlearning & Radical Education.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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This week regular listeners to the podcast will be fortunate enough to get two episodes in a single week. The first will be with Charles S. Prebish, a figure well known in Buddhist studies. Charles has written classic volumes in Buddhist studies such as Luminous Passage: the practice and study of Buddhism in America and masses of articles. He was also a pioneer in the establishment of the study of Western Buddhism. He co-founded the Journal of Buddhist Ethics and the Routledge, Critical Studies in Buddhism series, and he is emeritus professor at both Utah State University and Pennsylvania State University. In the podcast Charles talks about his own personal relationship with Buddhist practice and the field of Buddhist studies, how it has developed since its inception to today, the current scandals in Buddhist communities, his experience with a number of prominent Buddhist teachers including Chogyam Trungpa, and some potentially controversial thoughts about the future of this academic field. It seemed appropriate to have Charles on as the first guest as his view of the field is very long and very wide and this serves as a great introduction for what is to come.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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John Paetsch joins us for a short chat about his upcoming seminar for Incite. We discuss Deleuze, philosophy, freedom and what you might expect from the event. I also add an extended introduction for listeners so that that they can contextualise the topic and understand better why we are promoting Incite. The event page is here. 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In this episode, Ron Purser comes on to the imperfect Buddha podcast to talk about neoliberalism and its impact on mindfulness, Buddhism, spirituality, and the experience of all these in the individual and the impact is greater then you likely believe. You are a neoliberal subject to some degree and the ethics and manner of practice of this insipid ideology has seeped into almost all contemporary spiritual practice. Such practice can be a site of resistance to the excesses of individualism, goal achievement, productivity, and self-serving interest. Such practices can reconnect us to a social and environmental vision and experience of ourselves in the world. But this is only possible if you become aware of how neoliberalism has participated in shaping your practice in certain ways. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek was not wrong when he stated that Buddhism, among all the world’s religions, is the greatest companion to neoliberalism, which would prefer you to keep focusing in and on yourself; “It’s up to you they say! You must do it alone, and if you fail well, it’s all your fault!” Does this sound familiar? It should do as it’s a major part of the neoliberal ethic. Ron and I talk about a range of interesting topics that go beyond neoliberalism and include finding the edge in practise and Time, Space & Knowledge. We cover McMindfulness, freedom, liberation free from the neoliberal ethic, and other exciting utopian topics. We talk about the alternatives to a practice informed by the near liberal ethic. So don’t panic, it’s not all naysaying, we’ve got some solutions here too! Ron was a great guest and I enjoyed our conversation together and I think you will too. Don’t forget to leave comments at one of our groovy locations.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In this episode of the imperfect Buddha podcast I speak with Glenn Wallis again. We cover a range of topics but at the core of our discussion is darkness: a topic that many folks shy away from and yet in our problematic times is a theme that needs looking at more closely and more deeply. Glenn will be leading a workshop on darkness on 4 August in Philadelphia. If you’re interested in participating, take a look at the webpage dedicated to the event at the Incite seminars websites: https://inciteseminars.com/darkness/ We talk about the motivations behind Incite seminars and why they are an important response to the challenges of our times, as well as the need for creativity in approaching practice, whether Buddhist or philosophical, and theory. We also touch on the work of Peter Sloterdjik and in particular his book ‘You must change your life’ which I for one found challenging. We also talk about the Speculative non-Buddhism website and what’s happening there. We also touch on the topic of our upcoming episode on neoliberalism and Buddhism with Ron Purser. As always Glenn is a great conversationalist and someone who is thinking at the edge of what passes for normal in terms of Buddhism, spirituality, enquiry and the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the complex, multifaceted world we live in. So, brush off your critical thinking skills, wake up your creative desire to think deeply and widely and take a listen.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Welcome to a new project. The Imperfect Buddha podcast is collaborating with Incite seminars by bringing you short podcast interviews with workshop facilitators at their upcoming events. This is done to promote such seminars, but more importantly, to spread the good word, and collaborate with like-minded folks. Incite seminars act as a breeding ground for intense engagement and enquiry into the humanities. They feature a range of speakers who are experts in their field. These podcast interviews will be shorter and feature just 10 questions with some space for discussion. They will give you a sense of what you will find by participating in the Incite seminars as well as an introduction to an important topic that you may wish to go off and read about on your own afterwards. The first podcast features Ulrich Baer introducing listeners to the themes of his seminar: Rilke & Heidegger and notions of being and presence. The themes are all wonderfully relevant to Buddhists, traditional or otherwise. 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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So what about sex? The latest episode of the imperfect Buddha podcast touches on an area that I've wanted to discuss for some time on the podcast: sex, sexuality, and desire. These are such complex topics and still surrounded by taboos that it can be difficult to have a frank conversation about them. The discussion with my guest Ben Joffe explores topics such as gender equality, the use of sex as practice, and more in drawing on the work of Dr Nida Chenagstang and his recent book Karmamudra: The Yoga of Bliss (Sexuality in Tibetan Medicine and Buddhism), which Ben edited and did much of the translation for. Needless to say, the area is so vast that we could only really just get things started. For this reason, you’ll find that the introduction is far longer than usual and I hope this doesn’t put you off: it provides an overview of Buddhism's historical relationship with desire and sexuality. Ben and I touch on homosexuality too as well as the issue of sexual abuse by gurus and the role of women and equality. I would recommend reading more of Ben’s work on these topics if they interest you and there is a link below to a Facebook posting of his on gender equality. However, Dr Chenagstang covers such delicate areas thoroughly throughout his book and it comes highly recommended if you have an interest in Karmamudra, and the dispelling of myths surrounding sex, sexuality and desire. Enjoy the interview and let us know what you think.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Why wouldn’t you want to join a cult? That’s a question Stuart and I get round to addressing in the latest episode of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast. We also find time to cover Alison Mack and life after Smallville in a sex cult, Miranda, the latest Maitreya, and a number of other cults we missed out the first time round. Stuart brings his new found insights into super-powered hypno-wonder, and I reveal my disappointing IQ as we skirt around topical issues such as...IQ and the Alt-Right, existential crises and why being in a cult can actually be fun. We get in some conspiracy theories, give a mention to Michelle Pfeiffer, and even manage to spend a few words on Buddhism in the process. We had fun on this one and may offend a person or two. Please take this as a trigger warning. This episode features blasphemy, swearing, mention of S...E...X, Sam Harris, mind control and other topical human wonder. Music supplied by Trieste’s Lorenzo Fragiacomo.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Welcome back to the Imperfect Buddha Podcast. After our lively discussion of theory and practice, we embark on a new series of interviews for all you Imperfect Buddhas. Our first for 2018 features Evan Thompson, professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, well known for his books “Waking, Being, and Dreaming: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy”, “The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience”, co-authored with the late Francisco Varela, “Mind in Life: biology, phenomenology and the sciences of mind” as well as “Self, No Self?: perspectives from analytical, phenomenological and Indian traditions”. Evan was invited onto the podcast due to his 2016 closing address to the ISCS and what appeared as a critical turn from Evan in the form of a critique of the fetishisation of mindfulness and its co-option for neo-liberal ends. Evan also argued for an embodied view of consciousness in his talk and critiqued the idea, popular in neuroscience work on meditators, that technology such as FMRI can give us a full or accurate picture of mind and an adequate picture of the significance of meditation and other contemplative practices. In his writing, Evan explores cognitive science, phenomenology, the philosophy of mind, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Buddhist philosophy in dialogue with Western philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Evan has additionally been involved with the Mind and Life institution and its dialogues between scientists and the Dalai Lama.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Happy New Year folks! Stuart finally makes his return to the Imperfect Buddha podcast in an in-depth discussion of the role theory and practice might play in a post-traditional engagement with Buddhism. This topic was inspired by a recent series of posts on exactly this topic over at the Post-Traditional Buddhism blog. Our discussion goes critical as Stuart and I take our usual meander down the rabbit hole of taboos, and biting critique of the dysfunctional face of contemporary Western Buddhism. This may just be our most controversial, critical issue yet! So, start 2018 with a bang and listen in. Music by Bristol band Scalping.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In this episode, I spoke to Ken McLeod, in person, in Croatia and we discussed a variety of topics, including; Vajrayana Buddhism, issues of language and his appreciation for Wittgenstein, direct experience V the conceptual mind, challenges for advanced practitioners, his ongoing relationship with practice, and more. Ken McLeod is a senior Western translator, author, and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. He received traditional training mainly in the Shangpa Kagyu lineage through a long association with his principal teacher, Kalu Rinpoche, whom he met in 1970. McLeod resides in Northern California, where he founded Unfettered Mind. He has currently withdrawn from teaching, and no longer conducts classes, workshops, meditation retreats, individual practice consultations, or teacher training. Music by Gravenhurst.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Here it is folks, the latest episode of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast and the last in our series on post-traditional Buddhism. It is also the final part of our series with Hokai Sobol. In this interview, Hokai tackles listeners question, well, at least some of them. We had over 18 to get through and although Hokai inadvertently covered some of them whilst answering others, we didn’t get through them all. I think listeners will find something of real value in Hokai’s answers and thoughts as we cover a wide terrain. Some of the questions covered include; 1. Has Hokai played around with any word instead of mystic/mystical? 2. What are the axioms that underlie the mystical approach as you define it? Or, what are the assumptions that drive the mystical approach as you’ve defined it? 3. Can someone pursue all three approaches at the same time? What are some of the possible adverse consequences of doing so? 4. Are religious and therapeutic approaches necessary starting points for a mystical path? 5. Do either of you see a role for community on the mystical path? 6. What are Hokai's views - if any - about the transmission of mystical practice? 7. Can mystical ways of practice ever be divorced from religious systems/symbolism/language? I suspect not, but I'd be interested to hear. 8. Does Hokai have any general advice for mystical practice in the midst of 'normal' life? 9. Where does this approach take us? Is there an end? A goal? 10. Can maps be a tool for people to understand their minds? 11. Is the open discussion of progress on the path helpful? Is it hurtful? Should it be discussed publicly, or left between student and teacher? If it's hurtful, can you please explain why you believe it to be so? Theme tune for the episode is from The Naturals.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Hokai Sobol joins us for an in-person chat in Trieste. Our conversation was a second attempt at a podcast episode and this time it all worked out and there was enough content to span two episodes. Before lunch, we discussed Buddhism in the West and approaches to it. You can find out more about that in episode 11.3. After lunch we tackled the topic of mysticism and practice and that's what you will hear in this episode. Hokai is welcoming questions and queries from listeners for a follow-up episode. So, if you have thoughts, questions or doubts after listening to either episode, please leave a comment or question below or on the Imperfect Buddha Twitter feed so that Hokai and I can discuss them. So who is he? Hokai is a practitioner, pathfinder and mentor. Besides guiding a local Buddhist group gathered in the Mandala Society of Croatia, he works with a number of individual practitioners around the globe whom he meets regularly over Skype for mentoring. Hokai proposes that deep practice can be pursued in the midst of one's life, as long as it is clearly distinguished from religious activities and therapeutic transactions. Both Stuart and I have benefited greatly from Hokai's approach to mentoring and exploring Buddhism as a pathway. Music is provided by Ossia, again from the Young Echo collective. 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Hokai Sobol joins us for an in-person chat in Trieste. Our conversation was a second attempt at a podcast episode and this time it all worked out and there was enough content to span two episodes. Before lunch, we discussed Buddhism in the West. After lunch we tackled the topic of mysticism and practice, which you can find out more about in part two. Hokai is welcoming questions and queries from listeners for a follow-up episode. So, if you have thoughts, questions or doubts after listening to either episode, please leave a comment or question below or on the Imperfect Buddha Twitter feed so that Hokai and I can discuss them. So who is he? Hokai is a practitioner, pathfinder and mentor. Besides guiding a local Buddhist group gathered in the Mandala Society of Croatia, he works with a number of individual practitioners around the globe whom he meets regularly over Skype for mentoring. Hokai proposes that deep practice can be pursued in the midst of one's life, as long as it is clearly distinguished from religious activities and therapeutic transactions. Both Stuart and I have benefited greatly from Hokai's approach to mentoring and exploring Buddhism as a pathway. Music is provided by Vessel from the Young Echo collective. 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Oh what fun we had...in putting this episode together, which is actually our twentieth! This episode takes forward our exploration of post-traditional approaches to Buddhism but we begin with a discussion that touches on a variety of topics including Jordan 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. Who knows? Perhaps a revolution is brewing. Music supplied by Taos Humm and RSD from Bristol, UK. 

Matthew O'Connell a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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This episode starts off our exploration of post-traditional Buddhism, or better, post-traditional approaches to Buddhism. This might just be a major feature of the future of Buddhism in the West, if Buddhism actually manages to survive the rest of the century here as a powerful source for personal and social change. David Chapman may not think so, but who knows? If Buddhism was to benefit from a sufficient degree of cultural innovation, there's no reason why it shouldn't find itself once again providing meaningful responses to some of our wider concerns. After a short preamble and our usual silliness, we get into a serious discussion of the power and appropriateness of post-traditional approaches to Buddhism, even touching on how traditional Buddhists might explore such an approach themselves. Stuart gets in yet another dig at Shambhala...but if you are a good ol' Shambhalian, do try to avoid taking it all too seriously. We also include our end of year awards for 2016. A strictly tongue in cheek affair, it will give you the chance to hear all about the big Buddhist winners from last year with categories including; Buddhist scandal of the year, best book, best website and best German.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In this episode of the imperfect Buddha podcast, we finally get round to speaking to David Chapman. For those familiar with David’s work, there is so much that could have been discussed as he writes on all manner of fascinating topics ranging from Buddhism to philosophy, psychology to Vajrayana, artificial intelligence and more. Our interests converged on the topic of maturation outside of religious and spiritual discourse with David’s recent exploration of adult development and maturation just the sort of topic that we like to explore here on the podcast. David has built on the work of Robert Keagan, an important living psychologist, in exploring adult development and maturation through five key stages. David focuses on three of them, aligning the final stage with Buddhism, in particular Dzogchen. An understanding of these stages has important consequences for Buddhists, especially considering the potential conflict between self-development, maturation and concepts such as no self, impermanence and so on. We cover additional topics such as the present and future of Buddhism in the West, the current state of university campuses in the Anglo-American world, the problem with SJW’s and post-modern theory, nihilism and determinism, practices that may shift people onwards through the last three levels of maturation and more. Enjoy! Sponsor The imperfect Buddha podcast is sponsored by O’Connell Coaching. If any of the topics in the podcast are personally relevant and/or problematic, or if you wish to explore life after Buddhism and are looking for support and guidance in personal development, an exploration of spiritual practice and transformative practices within a coaching context, follow the link to find out more here. The imperfect Buddha podcast supports up-and-coming musicians in Bristol groups. Oliver Wilde, a Bristol musician on the Howling Owl label, provides this episode’s music. Do have a listen and if you like what you hear, support the artist at the band camp site.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In this episode, writer, critic, Buddhist scholar and Philadelphia punk legend punk Glen Wallis returns to the Imperfect Buddha podcast for the second part of our discussion on non-Buddhism and its consequences. We go deep into an issue at the heart of contemporary western Buddhism: the seemingly irresolvable division between immanence and transcendence, which in lay man's terms is the distinction between spirituality as escape or as embodiedness. You may not know how deep these two go down the rabbit hole of modern spirituality and how they sit right at the dysfunctional heart of Buddhism. Applying constructive critique, we look at how Buddhists and teachers avoid the consequences of thinking them through to the very end and how that lack of insight leads to all manner of escapism and confusion. This is an episode full of much of what Buddhists admire; compassion, wisdom, insight, perception, generosity. For those who don’t know Glenn, they will find the voice of a rare intelligence and generosity. We additionally explore death as cessation, peak states and problems surrounding the way we think about them, materialism V idealism, collective and personal freedom, and the social ramifications of it all. We also explore the construction of new ways of thinking about Buddhism’s greatest gifts of insight and potential methods for liberating Buddhism from itself and in so doing Buddhist practitioners that they may come to Buddhism with fresh eyes and greater imaginative capacity. I consider this the most valuable interview undertaken by the podcast so far and a must for advanced Buddhists, Buddhist teachers and those with a rich understanding of this religion, spiritual path and philosophy. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be a cynic, grab a stool and come on in. There has never before been a conversation quite like it in the history of western Buddhism. Episode music by Bristol (UK) based post-punk band Idles. 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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(Note: please be aware that the sound quality is not at its best in this episode. Skype was apparently having a bad day! We did our best to make it listenable. The second interview has much better sound quality) Why would a modern day Buddhist engage with the work of non-Buddhism? Why bother to be forced to question your relationship with Buddhism? Why risk destabilising the status quo? Why not carry on as usual? If the last episode didn't convince you, maybe the man who started the thing will. The instigator of the non-Buddhism project graces the Imperfect Buddha podcast with his presence and with such rich material and such a sharp mind, we couldn’t contain everything in a single episode. The humanity shines through and for those who may have been unsettled when approaching the revolutionary work at the Speculative non-Buddhism site, will find the content of the podcast surprising. This is not to say there has been any loss of the sharp critique many will be familiar with, non-Buddhism has work to do and there is no shying away from its powerful insights. Part of what emerges in our discussion is the need to go further: to question, to reflect, to delve, to think it all through and appreciate the limits of what we know, and pretend to know. Throughout, we talk about the speculative non-Buddhism heuristic and expand on many of the topics we touched on in our last episode. We also cover the how of applying non-Buddhism as a form of practice and to thinking critically about Buddhism, the relationship between the individual and society, and the changes that can take place when non-philosophy is applied. Glenn Wallis Bio Glenn holds a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies from Harvard University's Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies. His scholarly work focuses on various aspects of Buddhism. For a long time, he was concerned with how to make classical Buddhist literature, philosophy, and practice relevant to contemporary life. His recent work is best summed up in the title for a book he is currently writing for Bloomsbury: A Critique of Western Buddhism: The Self-Help Myth with critique drawing from François Laruelle's non-philosophy and Peter Sloterdijk's anthropotechnic. Since the early 1990s, he has taught in the religion departments of several universities, including the University of Georgia (where he received tenure), Brown University, Bowdoin College, and the Rhode Island School of Design and the Won Institute of Graduate Studies. Episode music by Bristol (UK) based post-punk band Idles. 

Matthew O'Connell a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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This episode tackles a complex but thoroughly important topic, namely non-Buddhism. A theoretical project/applied critique of Buddhism as ideology; as an unintentional prison. This work gets at the heart of what’s missing in Buddhism and Buddhist discourse; a failure to understand the collective formation of selves. Due to such, Buddhism operates at the level of the individual and the abstract mythical landscape that is the six realms. It fails to understand the collective formation of selves and the omnipresent role of ideology in the mass suffering and ignorance that grips our species. Non-Buddhism is here to wake Buddhists up to this ignored and uncomfortable reality. Glenn Wallis is the architect of this wondrous and terrible journey into the heart of darkness. He is a wordsmith and profoundly insightful corrupter of all that is beloved and pure in Buddhism in its guise as escape from reality. He is also a punk rock driven despiser of conformity and liberal ignorance. Glenn may be more compassionate than many realise as he provokes whilst simultaneously offering western Buddhist a way out of their voluntary imprisonment in the false promise of Buddhist refuge. Stuart and I tackle the vocabulary, the concepts, the philosophy, the hard business of thinking, so that you dear listener can get a grasp on one of the most radical critiques of Buddhism to emerge in its entire history. Really. Will it withstand the power of insight? Will it remain intact? Will it be changed by those who get it? Who knows? That’s in part going to be up to you. Can your Buddhist identity take it? Can you withstand the depth of dismantling decimation? Can you handle the truth? 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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What do the Dalai Lama, the X Files, UFOs, Sex Magic, Tibetan singing bowls, Yeti-Monsters, demons, dharma, wizards, Tantra & Darwin have in common? Why, Ben Joffe of course, the latest guest on the Imperfect Buddha podcast. Ben Joffe is a cultural anthropology PhD candidate from South Africa currently based at the University of Colorado. He specialize in the anthropology of contemporary Tibet, Tibetan exile, and Buddhism; in the study of religion, magic, witchcraft, esotericism(s), neo-paganism(s), neo-shamanism(s); and long, dangle-y earrings. His research is focused on Tibetan Buddhist non-celibate tantric ritual specialists, or ngakpa/ma who live outside of Tibet, and the globalization of Tibetan Buddhism. He is interested in how the esoteric knowledge and charisma of these long-haired tantric Buddhist wizards is currently being mediated, circulated, appropriated and contested as part of increasingly transnational networks of exchange, and as part of Tibetans’ efforts to make legible a Tibetan nation in exile and to preserve and reform Tibetan culture as stateless peoples. 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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So, what is After Enlightenment? Here it actually means something quite specific; it means after the myths, stories, and fantasies have failed us or fallen apart. It means after peak experience/s, initial/later/accumulative experiential breakthrough and/or awakening like experiences have taken place, come and gone, or become too familiar. It means after the illusion of escape, salvation, perfection, or happiness, has hit home and we are left wanting, or even bored. What do we do after all this? One issue that emerges when looking at contemporary western Buddhism in a critical post-traditional way is the lack of support and guidance available outside of mainstream Buddhism for those driven by a desire for some sort of spirituality, personal growth or self-development. We are frail, we do need each other after all. So, where do we go? Do we give up on Buddhism or spirituality completely? Do we look for another balsam? Do we accept the contradictions and limitations of tradition and keep at it anyway because there are still payoffs? What would an after enlightenment look like? Who will help us on our way? Who can help us out when we take the red pill and leave the Buddhist bubble and realise that our initial dreams or fantasies have failed us? Get ready for some shameless advertising…this episode explicitly explores coaching and support options for disillusioned Buddhists, ex- or current, the spirituality fed up, the pragmatists who don't go for the noting practices, and anyone else in need of support or guidance and that is currently in possession of an idea of self-development that goes beyond Buddhist meditation. See what you think. It's our second shortest episode yet!

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In this last episode in the enlightenment series, we interview Daniel Ingram, the Arhat. Dan created quite a bit of controversy when he came out and claimed enlightenment a few years back. For listeners of our previous episodes, you will know that such a claim is loaded with all sorts of assumptions and implications. Dan joins us in stripping away many of the romantic myths surrounding the ideal of enlightenment and presents his pragmatic model of awakening. We also discuss the future of awakening. Dan is the author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and one of the most interesting characters to come out of the pragmatic dharma movement. He stirred up a great deal of controversy when claiming Arhatship and was instrumental in setting up the Dharma Overground; a site dedicated to exploring progress in practice in a lively, peer-to-peer environment and a location where folks make often dramatic progress in their pursuit of awakening. In this chat, we covered the following themes; 1. Daniel's coming out & the impact this had on the Buddhist community 2. His model of awakening and how it contrasts with the views we explored in episode 7.0 3. Exploding popular myths surrounding enlightenment & addressing taboos 4. The political implications of claiming, or not claiming enlightenment 5. Death & awakening 6. Evolving models of awakening 7. The degree to which individuals are willing to 'get enlightened' 8. Supporting up and coming teachers 9. The future of it all 10. ...and more. 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In discussing enlightenment, it is necessary to consider the change in perspective that accompanies such a radical shift. We are beset by dualistic thinking and the way we frame our perspectives, our personal and impersonal experiences, is beset by this philosophical bedrock. So what are the alternatives to the subject-object dualism we inherited from Mr René Descartes? In the latest episode of the Post-Traditional Buddhism Podcast, we interview Professor Adrian Ivakhiv, who shares his thinking around an alternative perspective, one based on viewing the world as process and as always in relationship. This view has much in common with Buddhism in which a truly separate self has no place and impermanence and inter-connection form the basis for our experience. The metaphors that emerge from viewing the world in this way lend themselves to the abandonment of anthropocentrism. This coupled with greater concern for the ‘us’ over the ‘I’ leads us inevitably towards greater environmental concern and deep questions concerning co-existence not just between races and nations, but with the other living and non-living creatures that inhabit this Earth. Adrian is a Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture with a joint appointment in the Environmental Program and the Rubenstein School of Environment & Natural Resources. His research and teaching are focused at the intersections of ecology, culture, identity, religion, media, philosophy, and the creative arts. He is the author of Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (Indiana University Press, 2001) and Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, and Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), an executive editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, a former president of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada, and on the editorial boards of several journals including Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, Green Letters, The Journal of Ecocriticism, and two book series in the environmental humanities. Adrian's interdisciplinary background includes work in the humanities, creative arts, and social sciences. Canadian by birth, his research on culture and environment has taken him to Kyiv (a.k.a. Kiev), Ukraine, and the Carpathian mountains of east central Europe, Cape Breton Island and Haida Gwaii off either coast of Canada, the U.S. Southwest, and southwest England. In a previous life as a choral conductor and ethno-psych-avant-garage-folk-punk-fusion musician, he performed at monasteries in Egypt, concert stages in Ukraine, and at the Canadian Parliament Buildings in Ottawa (honestly, once). When he isn't teaching, researching, writing, or serving on committees (aargh), he makes music, hikes in the Green Mountains, eats Vermont's artisanal cheeses, and reads The Nation, Grist, Spacing, and Ji Magazine. He has lived in Burlington since 2003. From his west-facing window he watches for Champ. He is the author of “Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona” (Indiana University Press, 2001), “Ecologies of t he Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, and Nature” (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), an executive editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (Thoemmes Continuum, 2005), and a former president of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada. His current writing projects include a book of popular philosophy entitled "Against Objects: Philosophical Living in the Shadow of the Anthropocene" and a book-length analysis and assessment of the environmental arts and humanities. He blogs at Immanence: EcoCulture, GeoPhilosophy, MediaPolitics.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Stuart & I have made what may be our most controversial episode yet. We tackle "Buddhist Enlightenment" © and its taboos and do what many Buddhists would likely consider sacrilegious. A few of the questions we tackle include; What is it? Who’s got it? Can it be understood, formulated in a way that could liberate the masses as a form of human practice? Why bother? Is it the shiznit? How would it look if unreliant on Buddhism? What could a secular, humanist outlook as the basis for reconfiguring it produce? Who are the top ten enlightened dudes? How can you spot a fake? It’s the sort of material that could drive masses of keyboard warriors to start quoting their favourite Buddhist books or teachers in a furious, emotive rant against all that is evil, for the first time encapsulated in an hour and twenty four minutes of a Soundcloud download. If you are brave enough, download or stream the latest episode and enjoy a rather interesting take on Buddhism’s ultimate goal. We had fun with it and raised as many questions as we may have answered. Questions which one of our upcoming guests will hopefully respond to. Come and get enlightened. Come and listen to the Imperfect Buddha Podcast.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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This episode features a guest interview with Shaun Bartone, active in the field of activism in Canada and a follower of Engaged Buddhism, Shaun discusses why and how Buddhists could and should engage. We discuss the issue of diversity in Buddhism, including issues for minorities and transgender folks. Shaun has been involved with different forms of Buddhism over the years and is currently on the board of directors of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In this episode Stuart and I discuss Engaged Buddhism. We look at whether Buddhism gives people an excuse to disengage politically, as well as the limits that Engaged Buddhists reach when they fail to critique the causes of institutionalised suffering. We discuss Ken Knabb's work in critiquing Thich Nhat Han and put forth some suggestion for meditation practice that could help individuals and groups overcome the trend of apolitical behaviour amongst western Buddhists. Our usual banter will help you through this Xmas/New Year episode and in spite of the subject matter, Stuart & I really had fun with this episode. Enjoy and Happy New year to one and all.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In this episode, guest Jayarava hits the Imperfect Buddha podcast with some hard truths regarding the impossibility of rebirth & karma whilst drawing on the work of Sean Carroll & his own research into Buddhism. It's not an easy pill to swallow but it may just prove liberating to those braver Buddhists willing to confront the finality of death. Whatever you end up deciding, it's a fascinating topic and Jayarava's insights are not easy to dismiss. The interview is straddled by a very short discussion on the challenges of the material and Stuart shares his own destabilising reactions, which will no doubt be shared by many a listener.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In this episode, Stuart starts with a short interview of Ian Lawton, documentary film maker, and they look at his latest project The Dharma Bum. We then get stuck into a discussion of the academic world of Buddhist Studies and Secular Buddhism, exploring the role academia can play in informing Buddhist practice. We also look at the potential limitations of Secular Buddhism in its guise as Protestant Buddhism and end by making recommendations on where to go next in order to be enlightened by the more accessible academics. It probably sounds less fun than it actually is bu in the process Matthew invents some wacky theories and Stuart finally sounds professional, so that has to be a plus. Episode 5.2 will feature an interview with Jayarava, self-defined feral scholar, as a follow up and hopefully he will set us both straight on the role of academia in enlightening Buddhists. 

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In this episode, we have our first interview at the Imperfect Buddha Podcast with the wonderfully insightful Tenzin Peljor, an ordained German Buddhist monk. Tenzin is no ordinary Buddhist monk, however, he is a crusader for clarity and right information, particularly in the world of Tibetan Buddhism, where he is committed to shining light on untruth. He runs two English language sites which provide a wealth of information and resources including interviews with noted Buddhist Studies academics, as well as exposes of the cultish behaviour that we discussed in our last episode. He is also one of the best informed individuals regarding the NKT and as an ex-member writes with great clarity in order to dispel the myths propagated by that group. He tells his story of his involvement with the NKT and what it was that drove him to leave. We also discuss aspects of a monk's life and explore important texts that help with leaving behind the western romanticism of Tibet.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In this episode Stuart & I discuss Buddhist cults and cultish behaviour in Buddhist groups. We look at cultish behaviours in particular and how they manifest in even innocuous Buddhist groups. We discuss the wider implications of the trade off between belonging and autonomy and the three core theories that explain why people get involved in Buddhist groups. We also look at the difference between cults and new religious movements and the difficulty in the academic world of defining a cult. To avoid such a trap, we focus on cultish behaviours instead and ask to what degree each of the organisations we discuss exhibits them. We invite listeners to consider to what degree their own Buddhist group may exhibit such behaviours and why they are present. We cover the NKT, Rigpa, Shambhala, Michael Roach and HH, Maitreya Ron Spenser. In this episode, someone is bound to get offended, but it's all good as Stuart and Matthew get culty. Second additional note (07/09/2015): Dear Listeners, We recently put out a podcast episode covering cultish behaviour in Buddhism and discussed some of those behaviours along with how they are expressed in a number of small and large Buddhist groups. We also managed to make a mistake which needs clarifying here. In that episode, which has since been edited to remove the offending section, we, or better I, made three assertions concerning the figure of Indy Hack. This was an unfortunate mistake on my part and I wish to clarify that mistake here so listeners who may have heard the earlier edit can be clear on the issue. Indy Hack has asked me to clarify three points and I am happy to do so here for the benefit of mutual understanding and good faith. 1. Fabrication of articles: I wrongly stated that Indy Hack fabricates articles. I have understood from Indy hack that this is not true and I apologise for stating so. This was a mistake on my part. 2. Membership of the NKT: I unwittingly assumed Indy Hack was a member of the NKT. Indy Hack has informed me that this is not true so again this was a mistake on my part. I apologise for making this assumption. 3. CIA & the Dalai Lama: I incorrectly associated a story I had heard about the CIA and Dalai Lama to Indy Hack. This was a genuine mistake. Indy Hack has not told this story and again it was a mistake on my part to have made this link. It is worth noting that Indy Hack has been helpful in clarifying these issues and we at the Imperfect Buddha Podcast will strive to do better with future episodes. We wish Indy Hack all the best with his work. We also wish clarity and wisdom to all those venturing into the public sphere with podcasts. This is the last I will mention of this unless events take a strange turn.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In this episode, the Dharma Oveground and Buddhist Geeks get enlightened, Francois Laurelle and the non-Buddhists speculate, Hokai Sobol and Kenneth Folk do their own thing. Matthew and Stuart cross the line and fumble over names. This is part 2 of our first real episode exploring a number of innovative elements in contemporary western Buddhism. We move on in our discussion from Tibet to look at the Pragmatists that emerged from the Dharma Underground and the intelligent destruction of Buddhism fuelled by French and German speaking philosophers in the form of Non-Buddhism. We also bring in some considerations of the significance of the claims of enlightenment made by a number of the Pragmatists and the importance of some of the critique made by Glenn Wallis and his cohorts. Enjoy and leave feedback, criticisms, complaints and observations at our Facebook page, Twitter feed or even here. The next episode will feature a special guest and discuss Buddhist cults! All show notes can be found at the Post-Traditional Buddhism site.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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The second episode of the IMPERFECT BUDDHA PODCAST has been released from its cage. This episode is split into two parts. 2.1 explores experimentation within Tibetan Buddhism in the West and discusses the work of Reggie Ray, Chogyam Trunpa's American student who is doing good work and opening Tantric Buddhism to the LGBT community. We look at the Wales based Tantric Buddhists known as the Aro-Ter, whose monks and nuns are married couples and wear long hair. We also explore Unfettered Mind and Ken McLeod's project of westernising Mahayana and Tantric Buddhism. Enjoy!

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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What is the Imperfect Buddha Podcast? Where does it come from? Why listen to it? All of these questions and more are presented in this introduction designed at clarifying for new listeners just what kind of podcast you are getting into. Running since 2015, the Imperfect Buddha Podcast has sought to challenge western Buddhism’s taboos, its anti-intellectualism, its friction with tradition, its enlightenment cults, Buddhist cults, dodgy teachers, flirtation with the New Age and Hinduism, and bring it all to a wonderful little thing called the Great Feast. There’s a whole episode dedicate to this place in case you’re interested.

If you like critical, intelligent engagement with contemporary Buddhism, the practising life, and what it means to wake up, get enlightened, meditate and save the world, this podcast is for you. Hosted by Matthew O’Connell and put together by a vast team of Bodhisattvas and Dakinis. Each episode is guaranteed to put merit in your bank.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices