(Is there a "news" thread / catagory)

Has this been reported here yet?
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mindfulness-anderson-cooper-60-minutes/

Documenting the Mindfulness-fad, minus any mention of Buddhism (aside from reference to a Chinese Zen).

Crediting Jon Kabbat-Zinn for it all.

And it's going to change America for the better!

I was very close to mentioning this as a follow up to my post about magick and how MBSR is the greatest example of magick I know of, considering just how world class it's reverberations have been. I was hoping someone would bite, but unfortunately no one replied. I can't tell you how unbelievably vindicated I felt after that was aired, unbeknownst to me, the day after I made that post. Talk about synchronicity! The post is here: http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/5620639

I'm an arrogant son of a fucking bitch somedays, but I won't go hating on MBSR because it does help people and it has done more good for awakening than probably anything else that has ever existed, in terms of sheer numbers. PR matters. Marketing matters. I fucking hate marketing, but it's true. This type of advertising is the best thing to happen to awakening in all of human history. If in the future it becomes far less fringe to talk about this stuff and more people take it up, the most important reason why will be the 10 seconds JKZ experienced at the IMS in whatever trans-conceptual super-knowledge he had and shit like this that followed. (Could you imagine if JKZ told a teacher at the retreat, "So I had this crazy magical experience about the future for about 10 seconds and had this amazing idea! I think I'm going to commit the entirety of my entire fucking life on this knowledge!" How would that go down?)

More succinctly: Fuck yeah!

RE: Mindfulness on CBS 60 minutes
re: Ryan Kenneth Johnson (12/16/14 11:35 PM as a reply to Chris J Macie. )

Thank you, Ryan, for alertness, enthusiasm, and the link to the informative post (at "One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge").

"I won't go hating on MBSR because it does help people and it has done more good for awakening than probably anything else that has ever existed, in terms of sheer numbers"

I apologize for the negative, or at least skeptical slant, to my questions in the initial post. The cynical take being perhaps my version of your "arrogant son of a fucking bitch somedays." And admitting that, as yours, perhaps most of ours, my path to where-ever it's going began with exposure to relatively watered-down, popularized versions of 'Dhamma'. And it's likely that a significant fraction (one-in-a-million would be "significant") of all those touched by what's now a growing fad (and business – pardon the continuing cynicism) will be led to enquire deeper – to their individual benefit, and that of the entire nouosphere (that means, roughly: humankind as an ongoing mental-spiritual phenomenon, or, but not quite so grandly as usually, 'human history').

from RE: One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge (12/12/14 10:16 PM):

"… MBSR, a consequence of this koan magick spell, will result in more awakened people than any other single spell that has ever been casted by human being. "

Allow me just to suggest as footnote to the first quotation and this one, that the efforts and legacy of G.Buddha may also have played a role.

It happens, I have a hard time myself not bringing my own excessive anger to this forum. I consider it great practice. I wrote my post like that to also be a little over the top silly and jokingly, since this subject matter is quite serious. Yeah, Siddhartha played a role no doubt. But it really was many people over 3,000-5,000 years, probably longer, that made today's practice possible.

I particularly singled out Jon Kabat-Zinn for explanatory purposes. My objective was to make a case on why the strange phenomena, otherwise known as magick or the powers, aren't something to be ignored. Most people say at least one of two things,

"Oh, yeah, there's all sorts of strange things in meditation. But what really matters is insight, awakening, enlightenment. Just let go of whatever arises, and be present!"
Or,
"I know everything how the cosmos works, therefore, I know with 100% certainty that scientific-materialism is true and additionally I have perfect understanding of all the implications such a conceptual model has. Ergo, such strange phenomena are mearly products of the mind and thus are irrelevent."

I take a stance similar to Daniel, and I'll add some additional bluntness: I don't give a fuck if either of these two statements are true or false. The first statement is sorta-kinda true and the second one is true insofar that people aren't running around shooting fireballs out of their hands in Times Square Harry Potter style. What we do know is that these strange things happen and can affect the world profoundly. I don't consider this spell a good example of a smoking gun proof (there are better examples), but if that doesn't make someone go, "What the fuck?" Then I don't know what to say!

So I'm kinda making this topic into a discussion of magick, because MBSR was born out of it. There is a lot to take from this discussion. For example, how JKZ approached the question of what to do with his life and succeeded, most people fail at this, it's a good case study that we can learn from. Or, that perhaps magick is something to talk about and not be ignored.

This was an interesting read on the critique of Mindfullness vs Buddhism.
http://www.salon.com/2014/12/06/mindfulness_truthiness_problem_sam_harris_science_and_the_truth_about_buddhist_tradition/

Chris,

There is a "Meditation and Culture" category for this sort of post, which is a category I had asked to be created months ago, although I wanted to call it something else since I was thinking of practice more broadly than just meditation. I also had a list of subtopics, but those don't appear to be posted with the basic category.

Anyway, I was thinking primarily of the discussions around the ways these practices are morphing with Western, postmodern culture, or how the cultures are interacting, and so on.

Can threads be cross-indexed?

Or put into multiple catagories? 

(Each category/list of threads is just a list pointing to thread-objects; pointing from multiple places doesn't disturb the thread contents.)

I know this is a hardcore board, but seems to me, that anything that might help those who do it become even 2% better as a human than they were before is a pretty good thing and should be encouraged.  IMO, it's not all or nothing.  It's not that those who don't make path or reach certain goals that are common on this board are wasting their time.  I don't think it's a time waster if it's helping those people in any way.  And certainly it's probably way better on average than most of the other things most people tend to fill their day with.