“kick ass dharma” = dharma free of dogma, cultural baggage, metaphysical hubris, institutionalized nonsense, and idiot compassion.
B. Alan Wallace at Upaya
I first heard of B. Alan Wallace years ago in an Integral Naked interview. I immediately liked him due to his intellectual sharpness and his deep knowledge in Buddhist scholarship and hardcore practice. It’s rare to see someone who has the passion and the proficiency on both Eastern introspective practice and Western scientific discipline. But more importantly, Wallace is not the stereotypical armchair philosopher and scholar. He is courageous in talking the talk and backing it up with action — a true hybrid dharma teacher.
There are many things I admire about Wallace. Let me count the ways…
1) He’s a hardcore dharma practitioner, well-versed in both Theravada and Tibetan Buddhist tradition. A prolific author, translator, and researcher whose primary interest is to integrate Buddhism with Western science and create a discipline called, Contemplative Science. (Also check out the audio of his lectures at Santa Barbara Institute.)
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I joined Tricycle’s 90-day meditation challenge called The Big Sit back in February. Although I’ve been already practicing formal meditation since January, I felt that it was a good idea to join a group of virtual meditation practitioners as part of my Open Practice to keep my momentum going. I’m glad I did.
Today is day 90 of the Big Sit. I’m happy to report that I’ve completed the challenge, and then some. Geeky as I am, I even kept a log of it in my (hyper)stream. (See my #bigsit Twitter stream on Friendfeed.) As you can see in the stream I have two practice sessions daily. I practice in the morning and in the evening, 1.25 hours each session, for a total of 2.5 hours a day. Each practice session is a mix of sitting and lying down meditation. I’ve described the details of my meditation practice in my previous post, see Algorithmic Approach to Meditation.
For experienced and expert meditators 90 days of dedicated sitting practice may seem to be a piece of cake, but I’m neither experienced nor an expert. Continue reading >
It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog. Don’t worry, I’m still alive, kicking and (hyper)streaming 
Actually, I shifted my attention to micro-blogging via Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook (see (hyper)stream section). Also, I didn’t have a topic to write about these past few weeks that deserve a post here on my blog. In any case, I don’t want to leave this blogspace static for too long. After all, there was a time when I posted daily, even multiple times in a day.
So I’m breaking my blog silence by posting a couple of fresh videos from my kick ass dharma teacher, Shinzen Young. Continue reading >
