Alan Klima, PhD. How to Formulate a Spirituality Reuptake Inhibitor

Описание: Part 5 of 12. This talk by Alan Klima, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California at Davis, was given as part of the 2015 UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain research summit "Perspectives on Mindfulness: the Complex Role of Scientific Research" on May 21, 2015.

The playlist for the full conference is at:    • 2015 UC Davis CMB Research Summit: Perspec...  

See http://cmbmindfulnesssummit.faculty.u... for full conference program and http://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu for information about the Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis.

Talk abstract:This presentation will linger on three statements that can possibly intersect scientific and spiritual worlds of belief and practice and which if looked at too closely might cause disruptions in the metabolic connections between science, meditation, and the consensual realities formed in culture: 1) “I am the body,” 2) “I can learn to control and shape myself,” and 3) “I know what I want and I can discover what to do in order to get it.” While we do not yet know what effects protracted attention to and questioning of these statements might have on researchers’ brains, it is beginning to become clear that these three assumptions have been passed over quickly in the contemporary proliferation of mindfulness cultures and have thus sanitized from them certain not unimportant considerations such as surrender, devotion, and formlessness.

Alan Klima, PhD is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He has studied Buddhist meditation in Thailand for the last 25 years, including meditation on corpses, as well as the styles that have been transmitted into contemporary Thai and Euro-American cultures commonly known as “vipassana.” As a teacher of meditation, he has so far strictly refrained from any reference to the brain, and is currently on a mission to discover whether this is stubbornness or a potential budding insight that could be expressed in his current writing project entitled, Surrender and the Mindfulness War Machine, a theological reflection on contemporary mindfulness cultures through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “war machines” (which are not bad or evil things in their philosophy, but nomadic assemblages originating, but not always remaining, in tension with the State or other ossifications such as scholarly and scientific disciplines).

Organizing Committee: Clifford Saron, Ph.D., Chair; Catherine Kerr, Ph.D.; David Meyer, Ph.D.; & Evan Thompson, Ph.D. Dr. Klima is introduced by Clifford Saron.

Videography by George Rosenfeld of Sylvan Video -http://sylvanvideo.com/