Professor Donald Hoffman and the Case Against Reality

After following Donald Hoffman for the past couple of years, I'm only more astounded by his ideas derived from the work he's doing with a team of mathematicians and cognitive scientists! Not only is he apparently the only cognitive science voice with a mathematically testable (falsifiable and therefore actually scientific) theory of consciousness, he seems to be single-handedly dethroning materialism. Among the many gems in this interview is his take on belief. In Buddhism we talk about freedom from a fixation on views; in Dzogchen we're utterly suspicious of beliefs - the view is no view. Somehow proponents of materialism, naive realism, physicalism, and the rest seem to have leveled the criticism of dogmatism against any and all, yet dodged it themselves. Until this:

Roots, Embodiment, Race, and Gender

In seminary talks 2.5 & 2.6, Bruce discussed and read from Susan Murcott's First Buddhist Women: Poems and Stories of Awakening. I recently came across a panel discussion from the Harvard Divinity School's Buddhism and Race Conference hosted by the Harvard Buddhist Community. The panel consisted of Buddhist women teachers and academics, discussing their roots in Christianity, Judaism, Atheism, and African American heritage. I had Murcott's text fresh in my mind while listening to these brilliant women and wondered about the 2500 years between the two sets of voices. Both, clearly, found a transformative depth in the Buddhadharma and both, to my ear, expressed it in remarkably direct terms.

Here is the panel: