As far as I can tell, religion in the West (overwhelmingly just Christianity) is practiced for worldly or heavenly gains, and not enlightenment/awakening, which is the final goal of Buddhist practice.
bigbodhi
2
Posts
1
Topics
A member registered 11 days ago
Recent community posts
Many commentators on Buddhism have argued for the necessity of adapting the teachings to a Western audience, on the basis that the cultural and metaphysical friction between the sutras and modern-day sensibilities is what has fettered its proliferation across the West. The goal of this project, therefore, is to determine whether this is really the case[1], what is to be done about it, as well as the broader question of how best to present the path to awakening and resolve the difficulties that arise for practitioners.
Thus, I am looking for other practitioners to compare experiences with, so as to determine where practitioners get their spiritual guidance from, what guidance is and is not effective, what pitfalls do and do not arise, and what research questions are and are not worth exploring when it comes to optimizing practice.
Initial work will be devoted to an extensive analysis of each collaborator’s path of spiritual progress, and what about it was ineffective and effective. This should be completed in the 1-3 month timeframe. Then some different approaches (to theory and practice regimes) will be tested against each other on a to-be-determined test cohort, with the end goal of producing a usable body of research. This is estimated to take about 6-9 months.
If a coherent picture of ‘best practices’ arises, then the next order of business is to figure out distribution, which relies too much on currently unknown factors to be worth planning out at the moment.
[1] As supposed explanations for why something is the case frequently prove to be mistaken, and successes and failures attributed to the wrong causes.