Enlightenment After the Enlightenment: American Transformations of Asian Contemplative Traditions

My dissertation traces the contemporary American assimilation of Asian enlightenment traditions and discourses. Through a close reading of three communities, I consider how Asian traditions and ideas have been refracted through the psychological, political, and economic lenses of American culture. One of my chapters, for example, discusses how the American Insight community has attempted to integrate the enlightenment teachings of Theravada Buddhism with the humanistic, democratic, and pluralistic values of the European Enlightenment. A second chapter traces the American gum Andrew Cohen's transformation from a Neo-Advaita teacher to a leading proponent of "evolutionary enlightenment," a teaching that places traditional Indian understandings of nonduality in an evolutionary context. Cohen's early period shows the further deinstitutionalization of traditional Advaita Vedanta within the radically decontextualized Neo-Advaitin network, and evolutionary enlightenment engages and popularizes another less-known but influential Hindu lineage, namely that of Sri Aurobindo's integral yoga. a A third chapter examines contemporary psychospiritual attempts to incorporate psychoanalytic theory into Asian philosophy in order to reconcile American concerns with individual development with Asian mystical goals of self-transcendence. In conclusion, I argue that the contemporary American assimilation of Asian enlightenment traditions is marked by a number of trends including: (I) a move away from the rhetoric and privileging of experience that scholars such as Robert Sharf have shown to be characteristic of the modem Western understanding of Asian mysticism; and (2) an embrace of world-affirming Tantric forms of Asian spirituality over world-negating renouncer traditions such as Theravada Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. I also reflect on how the cultural shift from the modem to postmodern has affected East-West integrative spiritualities

Religion as practices of attachment and materiality: the making of Buddhism in contemporary London

This article aims to explore Buddhism’s often-overlooked presence on London’s urban landscape, showing how its quietness and subtlety of approach has allowed the faith to grow largely beneath the radar. It argues that Buddhism makes claims to urban space in much the same way as it produces its faith, being as much about the practices performed and the spaces where they are enacted as it is about faith or beliefs. The research across a number of Buddhist sites in London reveals that number of people declaring themselves as Buddhists has indeed risen in recent years, following the rise of other non-traditional religions in the UK; however, this research suggests that Buddhism differs from these in several ways. Drawing on Baumann’s (2002) distinction between traditionalist and modernist approaches to Buddhism, our research reveals a growth in each of these. Nevertheless, Buddhism remains largely invisible in the urban and suburban landscape of London, adapting buildings that are already in place, with little material impact on the built environment, and has thus been less subject to contestation than other religious movements and traditions. This research contributes to a growing literature which foregrounds the importance of religion in making contemporary urban and social worlds

Dharma Diversity And Deep Inclusivity At The East Bay Meditation Center: From Buddhist Modernism To Buddhist Postmodernism?

Through an ethnographic study of the East Bay Meditation Center (EBMC) in Oakland, California, this paper examines recent attempts to diversify meditation-based convert American Buddhism. Celebrated as the \u27one of the most diverse Buddhist sanghas in the world\u27, EBMC opened its doors in January 2007 with the goal of offering a more diverse alternative to the predominantly white, middle-class populated American Buddhist groups in the Bay Area. The EBMC is rooted in a \u27gift economy\u27 and offers weekly meditation groups for People of Color, LGBTQI populations, and people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. While the EBMC houses separate identity-based groups, it is its attention to the multiple axes of difference-race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and disability-what I identify as \u27dharma diversity\u27-that mark it as unique. In conclusion, I suggest that EBMC\u27s diversity culture might indicate the emergence of a new postmodern stage in the assimilation of Buddhism in America

The Return Of The Repressed?: Psychoanalysis As Spirituality

Recent years have witnessed an increasing embrace of forms of religion and spirituality within the field of psychoanalysis. This article examines the emergence of the phenomena of psychoanalysis as spirituality, namely the radical claims, advanced by a number of influential contemporary analysts, that the unconscious has an inherently mystical dimension and that psychoanalysis can function as a modern secular spiritual practice. It creatively adopts Freud\u27s concept of the return of the repressed, the return of desires that, being socially unacceptable, have been excluded from consciousness, to suggest that the current conflation of psychoanalysis and spirituality signifies a recovery of the hidden historic religious and esoteric origins of psychoanalysis. It concludes that the wider post-modern shift within psychoanalysis has undermined oppositions between the scientific and the religious, the objective and subjective, the ego and id, and created a contemporary context in which these repressed esoteric roots can manifest in culturally acceptable ways. © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2012

Wedding the Personal and Impersonal in West Coast Vipassana: A Dialogical Encounter between Buddhism and Psychotherapy

Numerous studies have noted that depth psychology has been one of the most prevalent frameworks for the interpretation of Buddhism in the West. Similarly, many commentators have bemoaned the assimilation of Buddhist thought and practice into western psychological discourse. This paper argues, however, that such critiques often fail to adequately distinguish between reductive approaches that reduce Buddhist phenomena to psychological states, and dialogical enterprises that utilize psychology as a tool to extend, through dialogue, the aims of Buddhism. Through a focus on what I identify as "West Coast Vipassana," a distinctive current within the American Insight Community, I examine attempts to incorporate personal life into Buddhist practice. While there are numerous incidents of the reductive approach in the Buddhist-psychology interface, I interpret West Coast Vipassana as providing a more legitimate and dialogical or "skillful means" approach to Buddhist practice in a contemporary Western climate

Queering Buddhism Or Buddhist De-Queering?: Reflecting On Differences Amongst Western Lgbtqi Buddhists And The Limits Of Liberal Convert Buddhism

The efficient processing of spatio-temporal data streams is an area of intense research. However, all methods rely on an unsuitable processor (Govindaraju, 2004), namely a CPU, to evaluate concurrent, continuous spatio-temporal queries over these data streams. This paper presents a performance model of the execution of spatio-temporal queries over the authors\u27 GEDS framework (Cazalas & Guha, 2010). GEDS is a scalable, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)-based framework, employing computation sharing and parallel processing paradigms to deliver scalability in the evaluation of continuous, spatio-temporal queries over spatio temporal data streams. Experimental evaluation shows the scalability and efficacy of GEDS in spatio-temporal data streaming environments and demonstrates that, despite the costs associated with memory transfers, the parallel processing power provided by GEDS clearly counters and outweighs any associated costs. To move beyond the analysis of specific algorithms over the GEDS framework, the authors developed an abstract performance model, detailing the relationship of the CPU and the GPU. From this model, they are able to extrapolate a list of attributes common to successful GPU-based applications, thereby providing insight into which algorithms and applications are best suited for the GPU and also providing an estimated theoretical speedup for said GPU-based applications. © 2012, IGI Global. All rights reserved

From Theravada To Tantra: The Making Of An American Tantric Buddhism?

This paper examines recent innovations in the American vipassana or insight community, specifically a current I identify as West Coast Vipassana that has revisioned the Theravadin Buddhist goal of liberation, from a transcendental condition that demands a renunciation of the world, to an embodied enlightenment that affirms everyday householder life as a site for awakening. I draw on Jeffrey J. Kripal\u27s tantric transmission thesis to advance an essentially tantric hermeneutic of West Coast Vipassana. I argue that while West Coast Vipassana is originally based in Theravada Buddhism, an Asian renouncer tradition that sharply differentiates between the immanent and transcendent, it has taken a markedly tantric turn in America. I also note, however, that it considerably differs from traditional Buddhist tantric traditions such as Tibetan Buddhism or esoteric Japanese Buddhism in being distinctively modern and American. © 2013 Taylor and Francis