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Beyond McMindfulness

Ron Purser

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Guest Introduction

I’m joined by Ron Purser to discuss how mindfulness, rather than starting any meaningful revolution, is feeding right into the neoliberal capitalist ideology, and becoming what Purser calls “the new capitalist spirituality”. Ron is a professor of management at San Francisco State University, as well as an ordained Zen dharma teacher in the Korean Zen Taego order of Buddhism.

We discuss the incompatibility between meditation practice and neoliberal capitalism, the difference between democratic socialism and anti/post capitalism, and the flexibility of our experience of time.

Ron has decades of contemplative practice in a particular style that focuses on our experience of time, and he shares a few practices that help dislodge our ordinary experience of time passing. We also discuss the differences between a serious contemplative practice that questions the basic structures of experience, and a lighter practice that only serves to relax and comfort the practitioner.

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