Buddhist Geeks (Video)

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We are 100 percent fueled by your generosity.  Help us keep the battery full by contributing to our Generosity Crowdfunder. http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/generosity The post Generosity Crowdfunder – Support the Ongoing Conversation appeared first on Buddhist Geeks.

Episode Description: In this video clip taken from the Buddhist Geeks Conference 2012, Daniel Ingram asks the geeky question, “What does your contemplative character sheet look like?” We’ll be exploring these topics and more at the Buddhist Geeks Conference, Aug. 16th — 18th in Boulder, Colorado. Only 20 tickets left to attend the conference. Click […] The post What Does Your Contemplative Character Sheet Look Like? appeared first on Buddhist Geeks.

Episode Description: How do we create Buddhist startups? What types of products would a Buddhist startup create? In this video clip taken from the Buddhist Geeks Conference, Rohan Gunatillake shares with us his thoughts on why creating Buddhist startups is important and his personal experience building his mobile meditation app, buddhify. We’ll be exploring these […] The post We Need More Buddhist Startups appeared first on Buddhist Geeks.

Episode Description: Can 8 weeks of practice change how the brain processes sadness? In this video clip taken from the Buddhist Geeks Conference, Kelly McGonigal shares with us the power of mindfulness and offers research on the efficacy of mindfulness practice on depression. We’ll be exploring these topics and more at the Buddhist Geeks Conference, […] The post The Power of Mindfulness appeared first on Buddhist Geeks.

Episode Description: How do we integrate the heart principle with our technologies? In this video clip taken from the Buddhist Geeks Conference 2011, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche – a Buddhist teacher and an advocate of Western Buddhism – explores the intention of digital dharma. We’ll be exploring these topics and more at the Buddhist Geeks Conference, […] The post The Intention of Digital Dharma appeared first on Buddhist Geeks.

Episode Description: How do we upgrade the operating system of the mind? In this video clip taken from Lifehacks 2.0, Vincent Horn – Chief Geek of Buddhist Geeks – explores how we can upgrade the operating system of the mind, moving from a self-referential way of knowing ourselves and the world to a center-less and […] The post Mind Hacking: Upgrading from Windows ME appeared first on Buddhist Geeks.

Episode Description: What is the most important thing when it comes to Buddhist practice? In this video clip taken from the Buddhist Geeks Conference 2011, Buddhist teacher Kenneth Folk discusses attention as a technology for awakening and offers a three-speed transmission to work with attention in daily life. Episode Links: Kenneth Folk Dharma Buddhist Geeks […] The post The Three Gears of Attention appeared first on Buddhist Geeks.

Episode Description: What is the difference between pain and suffering? In this video clip taken from the Buddhist Geeks Conference 2011, Kelly McGonigal explores the neuroscience of meditation to help us understand how practice shapes the mind, as well as fresh insights into concepts like mindfulness and suffering. Episode Links: The Center for Compassion and […] The post Pain is Not Suffering appeared first on Buddhist Geeks.

Episode Description: “Transcendenz offers to connect our everyday life to an invisible reality, the one of ideas, concepts and philosophical questionings which the world is full of but that our eyes cant’ see. By bringing together the concepts of augmented/altered reality, Brain Computer Interface (BCI) and social networks, Transcendenz offers to live immersive philosophical experiences.” […] The post Transcendenz appeared first on Buddhist Geeks.

Episode Description: What are the limitations of DIY and online dharma? In this video clip taken from the Buddhist Geeks Conference 2011, Ethan Nichtern – Buddhist teacher and founding director of the Interdependence Project – explores the limitations of online dharma, the meaning of Buddhism, and offers up a way to become a more sane […] The post Exploring the Limitations of DIY Dharma appeared first on Buddhist Geeks.

  Episode Description: In this episode, taken from the Buddhist Geeks Conference 2012, Buddhist innovator and mobile app maker Rohan Gunatillake talks about how he turned his personal practice into a popular mobile app.  He then shares his ideas on ...

  Episode Description: In this episode, taken from the Buddhist Geeks Conference 2012, Tami Simon, founder and publisher of Sounds True, explodes the taboo around charging for what is of ultimate value. What if commerce were seen as a positive engine supporting the dissemination of spiritual teachings versus something to be avoided or disdained? Episode Links: Sounds True Transcript: Tami: It’s wonderful to see an entrepreneur born within an entrepreneurial company. Well actually maturing within an entrepreneurial company. So Vince, you know I actually just feel so proud of you. I did from the moment I met you and I couldn’t believe that we had the chance to hire you and then the chance to watch you take your wings. And it’s an honor and a pleasure to be part of the Buddhist Geeks conference. Here my first time here at Buddhist Geeks. So this phrase selling the Dharma, this phrase was introduced to me when I was 22 when I first started Sounds True. And so just to give you a little bit of background. I went to Swarthmore College and was in the religious studies department. And in my sophomore year was studying with a professor who was there for one year from Sri Lanka, Gunapala Dharmasiri, and he was there on Fullbright scholarship and he was teaching a course that I took called Buddhism and Existentialism. And soon after taking that class I dropped out of college. And I decided instead to travel to Sri Lanka, India, and Nepal for a year. And when I came back I started Sounds True. When we launched our very first catalogue, I sent it to Professor Dharmasiri because I wanted to show him what had become of me. So I sent him the Sounds True catalogue and he wrote me back a letter. And now to give a little context he had been a Theravada monk for the first 16 years of his life before he became a professor. And he wrote in this letter to me “leave it to Tami to sell the Dharma.” And there was something in that letter and the way that he used that phrase, it was humorous, it was slightly derogatory, it was slightly a rib, and I could also tell that he was slightly chucked, slightly like I knew she would do something. She was bold. She wore her ripped jeans to class even when I thought that was perhaps disrespectful. I told her not to dropout of school. It was disrespectful to her parents. And here she is selling the Dharma. And this letter from him and the use of that phrase stuck with me. And truthfully it stuck in my heart. Was I doing something that was in anyway disrespectful to what I cared the most about, to what I had given my life to in that year when I was traveling in Sri Lanka and India and Nepal. I gave my life to doing everything I could to introduce the practices, that I had been introduced to, to as many people as possible. Was there anything contradictory or wrong or bad in starting a business for the purpose of selling these teachings? So it’s an idea that haunted me for quite some time. But I have to say it doesn’t haunt me anymore. I actually feel that the work that we’re doing at Sounds True and in the relationships we have with other people to sell the Dharma is an evolutionary movement that is tremendously positive and is creating all kinds of access. So I want to talk a little bit about that. I want to talk about some of the questions I’ve had and how I’ve sorted it out. One of the things that I’ve asked is why is it that there’s so much, you know, Vince introduced this. This is controversial. Why is it controversial to begin with? What’s the big deal? We’re producing books and audio programs. We’re giving authors royalties. We’re charging $4.99 for, less than a fancy Starbucks drink, for two hours of incredible down-loadable content. So what’s the big controversy? And I’m not a historian of religion so I’m not going, clearly, and I’m not going to speak about this. I mean I already talked about my college dropout status.

  Episode Description: In this episode, taken from the Buddhist Geeks Conference 2012, Matt Flannery, founder of the incredibly popular micro-lending service Kiva.org, joins us to discuss his personal journey. He shares what it was like building Kiva.org and his own struggle to balance reflective practice--in his case Zen--with making big changes in the world. Episode Links: Kiva.org Kiva Buddhists @mattflannery on twitter Transcript: Matt:    Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. I really really appreciate my first ever Buddhist Geeks’ conference. Wonderful to be here. I started listening to the Buddhist Geeks podcast a little while ago maybe two or three years ago at a period when I had insomnia. So it says something about the podcast which is it’s very relaxing and it gets your mind working at the same time enough to get it off of whatever you’re worried about and help you go to sleep. So after doing this for several months in a row I wrote Vince and talked about maybe potentially coming here. And it was cool to see the people behind the podcast and it’s great for me to be here. I titled the talk Buddhist Geeks of Action. I am perhaps not a Buddhist Geek. I think sometimes I’m Buddhist and I think most of the time I’m the geek. I’m barely, almost never in the same thing at the same time. So maybe you guys can help me throughout the weekend wrestle with those two things. I have sometimes struggled with the dichotomy between being quiet, reflective, relax, working on my practice and also getting a lot done and being a person of action. So hopefully I’ll allude to that in several ways throughout the talk and then just talk about my work, my personal story behind work and some ideas for the future based on this work that maybe you can apply to your work. Real quick this is a picture of me in Cambodia. I was here at a village bank outside of Cambodia. How many of you guys know what a village bank is? Okay. Great, some of you. Village banks exists across the world. They’re groups of people that get together and share money. So people put money in a pot and they simply rotate the money around throughout the group. And there are several different schemes, several different forms of this. But what’s amazing is most of the time in such a setup like this people pay back each other at enormously high rates almost virutally 100% of the time. And usually people like this are illiterates. So when I was there we were going through our accounting training, working through our passbooks, learning how to do basic ledger based accounting. People that don’t have any financial background all the time pay each other back all the time across the world. It’s an incredible phenomenon. I discovered it several years ago when I was traveling in Africa and have just been dedicating myself to working in this kind of work ever since. And I’m not in the village bank but in this picture I am in the picture. Real quick. I run a website called kiva.org which is person to person lending website. People lend other people all across the world for the purpose of poverty alleviation. We started it in Africa and since then it’s spread to about 65 countries. We have tons of lenders, about a million lenders and we have tons of borrowers, about a million borrowers. People are lending to people. Often times the borrowers are unbanked, so you can’t send them the money directly so we work with NGOs all across the world, who source the loans and distribute the loans to people like those people in the village bank in Cambodia. Sometimes we lend money directly to people as well onto their cellphones or their PayPal accounts in certain countries where electronic payment systems exist. They don’t exist everywhere right now but they’re certainly spreading so eventually this whole thing will become an online digital community of people lending to people both locally and globally to help them.

  Episode Description: In this episode, taken from the Buddhist Geeks Conference 2012, Daniel Ingram talks about the ways that contemplatives could learn from the Naturalists. The Naturalists excelled in meticulous exploration, descriptive science, and classification. Their example can serve as the foundation for the next step in contemplative advancement, where the vast spectrum of inner experience, could be described and cataloged in an entirely new way. Episode Links: Daniel Ingram Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha Transcript: Daniel:    Thanks everybody it’s great to be here. So it’s a jungle in there. I’m going to totally geek out during this talk I hope that’s okay with everybody. I hope this place can handle it. I hope I don’t go too far geeky even beyond what this place can handle. So the naturalist. We got we got Chucky Dee here. These guys were amazing. They were amazing. In the 17th to 19th centuries, particularly the 1800s, we had a group of people who were totally brilliant and totally fascinated by the natural world and what they found there. And they suddenly had leisure time and they had ships and they had societies and they had microscopes and they had magnifying glasses and telescopes. And they had the time to really explore. And they had a dedication to seeing what was actually out there and an openness to exploring what was out there and just finding it and describing it in meticulous incredibly clear terms that is unparalleled in anything we see in the modern meditation world today. So this is just one beautiful example of the care they took to draw some of the little things they saw under a microscope. And you see the precision and the care with which they detailed each of these little magnificent structures. So that’s what I hope to bring today is a spirit of that kind of exploration and explain why that is so important for moving contemplative studies and contemplative practice forward. So when the naturalists got to the jungle they encountered a whole lot of amazing creatures and amazing amount of stuff. And when they looked through their microscopes they saw zillions of teaming little interesting things in there. And they saw thousand and thousands of plants and tens of thousands of insects and mammals and fungus and all kinds of amazing things that they had simply never seen before in their native countries. And rather than say everything we see in the jungle is a tiger or everything we see in the jungle is a bug instead they got really really specific and ultra geeky about what all these little things were. So in the modern meditation world, unfortunately, a lot of what happens is that people tend to stay in their tents, their little own camps, with rifles at the ready and anything strange that comes by they tend to shoot at.  They don’t even have the courtesy to stuff it and put it on their wall later. They just try to pretend it’s over there and we don’t like that animal over there cause we’re the animals over here and we’re just going to stay in a nice little tent and drink tea and pontificate. But the naturalist luckily yes they did shoot a lot of things unfortunately, you know, they were the British. Sorry. But they studied these things and they took them apart and they really explored and they took their skeletons and they mounted them in museums. And they really meticulously described them in a way that we have not done anything like with the world as subjective experience. So anyway here’s another one. This is a German. We’re talking about the precisions of the German earlier. And this is someone who really appreciated the intricacy of this particularly beautiful starfish and really elevated descriptive science to art. And it would have been easy when they saw the teaming mass of life and complexity in the jungle to just say there’s no way we could possibly catalogue all that. But they actually did it. They actually did it.