My perhaps extremely obvious question is, why is this necessary?
I’m not opposed to finding new ways to explain old ideas to Western audiences, but why do we need to dress it up in the language of complexity theory? All Buddhist theory ultimately exists for the purpose of helping point people to the way to awaken for themselves. Maybe there’s some people who need it explained in terms of complexity theory to make sense of it, but I suspect there’s other, more familiar and more accessible metaphors that would help a larger number of people. Also, as ever, there’s some risk in misunderstanding when translating to another ontology, and I’m not sure if translating to complexity theory results in conveying the same connotations, which might result in subtle confusions that are hard to tease out.
Great questions! I’m totally with you on this—so here are a few reasons I see:
research is now starting to show that mindfulness-based interventions can be harmful, not only helpful—so we need a theory to tell us how to use meditation correctly and effectively
On the complexity side—we have a poor understanding in science how to deal with the “observer”—the hard problem of consciousness, second order chaos in finance, social phenomena and structures. These traditions claim to understand it—perhaps they do?
more general—we are in need for a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world to solve the metacrisis. Perhaps these wisdom traditions have something that, when made appropriately rigorous, can help us understand how to human better—not just individually, but collectively (hence the need for a shared language).
My perhaps extremely obvious question is, why is this necessary?
I’m not opposed to finding new ways to explain old ideas to Western audiences, but why do we need to dress it up in the language of complexity theory? All Buddhist theory ultimately exists for the purpose of helping point people to the way to awaken for themselves. Maybe there’s some people who need it explained in terms of complexity theory to make sense of it, but I suspect there’s other, more familiar and more accessible metaphors that would help a larger number of people. Also, as ever, there’s some risk in misunderstanding when translating to another ontology, and I’m not sure if translating to complexity theory results in conveying the same connotations, which might result in subtle confusions that are hard to tease out.
Great questions! I’m totally with you on this—so here are a few reasons I see:
research is now starting to show that mindfulness-based interventions can be harmful, not only helpful—so we need a theory to tell us how to use meditation correctly and effectively
On the complexity side—we have a poor understanding in science how to deal with the “observer”—the hard problem of consciousness, second order chaos in finance, social phenomena and structures. These traditions claim to understand it—perhaps they do?
more general—we are in need for a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world to solve the metacrisis. Perhaps these wisdom traditions have something that, when made appropriately rigorous, can help us understand how to human better—not just individually, but collectively (hence the need for a shared language).