The Mystical Positivist: The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #188

Saturday, June 20, 2015

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #188 - 20JUN15

The Mystical Positivist is now a weekly radio show on KOWS-LP 107.3 FM, Occidental, CA. Listen live on Saturday evenings from 4:00 - 6:00pm, PST, via the web at KOWS Live Stream.

This week's podcast features:

An in-studio conversation with Christine Skarda. Born in Appleton, Wisconsin in 1952, Christine Skarda was educated in the United States and Europe. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy in 1982 and subsequently taught internationally. In 1982, Skarda was invited to join the innovative Sloan program at UC Berkeley and MIT that brought together experts from diverse fields to study intelligence; she thus became a pioneer in the movement later known as cognitive science. Skarda's interest in perception led her to investigate its physiological basis. She held post-doctoral positions in a neuroscience lab at UC Berkeley from 1984 to 1992 and a fellowship in Cognitive Science at the École Polytechnique in Paris between 1986 and 1988.

By the early 1990s, Skarda's own neuroscience research and her analysis of decades of data from the research of others convinced her that the theoretical model of perception prevalent in neuroscience was flawed. Instead of the perceptual system constructing internal representations of a fundamentally separate external world, Skarda presented an alternative model. Reality starts out as an unbroken web, which a perceptual system breaks up. All the data she had analyzed convinced her that our sense of ourselves as subjects completely independent from objects is created by perceptual activity; it is not an actual state of affairs. In fact there are no gaps between the perceiver and the world.

To gain access to this undifferentiated level and to understand how the perceptual process breaks it up into the world we experience, Skarda then turned to Tibetan Buddhism. This tradition offers systematic methods to explore this foundational state. Since 1992, she has been using these methods to investigate where the model prevalent in neuroscience has gone wrong. To this end, Skarda has spent the last sixteen years in meditation retreat in India and the United States under the guidance of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, His Holiness Chetsang Rinpoche, and Khen Ngawang Jimpa Rinpoche. She now also teaches Buddhism, drawing from her background in Western thought and science to explain even the most subtle and difficult points of Buddhist philosophy by using the language of the modern world.

More information about Christine Skarda's work can be found at:

Christine Skarda's Website: christineskarda.com
Buddhadharma Magazine profile of Christine Skarda: No Turning Back (PDF)

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"The Mystical Positivist" Radio Show

The Mystical Positivist is a weekly radio show on KOWS-LP FM 107.3 Occidental, CA, and on the web at KOWS-LP Live Feed, Saturdays from 4 - 6pm PST. Coming up on The Mystical Positivist:

April 20: A pre-recorded conversation with Ken McLeod, Buddhist teacher and author of the newly released book, The Magic of Vajrayana. In this conversation, we plan to explore a compelling quote from Ian McGilchrist's The Matter with Things: If you had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would have been hard to improve on our current formula: remove yourself as far as possible from the natural world; repudiate the continuity of your culture; believe you are wise enough to do whatever you happen to want and not only get away with it, but have a right to it—and a right to silence those who disagree; minimise the role played by a common body of belief; actively attack and dismantle every social structure as a potential source of oppression; reject the idea of a transcendent set of values.

One of the more innovative Buddhist teachers today, Ken McLeod is known for his clear explanations, poetic translations, and pragmatic approach to practice. He is one of the first generation of Western teachers in the Tibetan tradition and one of the few to be authorized to transmit the full scope of these teachings to students. In particular, his approach resonates strongly with those whose path lies outside established institutions.

After graduating with a degree in mathematics, Ken cycled across Europe to Istanbul and then continued his journey overland to India. In 1970 he met his principal teacher Kalu Rinpoche at his monastery near Darjeeling. There Ken began a study and practice in Tibetan Buddhism that lasted more than twenty years. He completed the traditional three-year retreat program two times, translated for many teachers, and helped set up Buddhist centers in Canada and the United States. After his teacher's passing, Ken moved away from the hierarchical structures of Asian Buddhism to explore new approaches.

In 1990, he founded Unfettered Mind in Los Angeles. His approach of one-on-one consultations roiled the Buddhist world in the early '90s, but was quickly recognized as a viable way to teach and guide students in the West. He made individual interviews a central feature of the many retreats he taught in California, New Mexico, and British Columbia. Through numerous small groups in Southern California, he developed the materials that became the encyclopedic meditation manual, Wake Up to Your Life.

Now retired from formal teaching, he lives in Northern California where he hikes and writes. His writings and translations include The Great Path of Awakening (1987), Wake Up to Your Life (2001), An Arrow to the Heart (2007), Reflections on Silver River (2014), A Trackless Path (2017), and The Magic of Vajrayana (2022), as well as a corpus of articles and translations in Tricycle and other Buddhist magazines.