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Cultivating Consciousness: A Conversation with Ronald E. Purser on Mind Space (2026)
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Matthew O'Connell
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Matthew O'Connell
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, my name is Matthew o' Connell and this is the Imperfect Buddha Podcast on the New Books Network. The place for exploring the meeting point between philosophy, Buddhism and contemporary practice life. Sponsored by o' Connell Coaching. Yes, that's me. A great way to explore the themes that come up in these conversations. Visit imperfectbuddha.com for more information. Welcome back everybody. We're very lucky today because we've got a returning guest, a very popular guest last time around, Ronald E. Purser, author of a wonderful book on mindfulness, which did rather well. We'll see if his new book does just as well. It's called Mind Space Discovering Meditation without the Meditator, and we're going to be talking about that book quite a bit today. So Ron, how are you? And how have you been in the meantime since your last book came out?
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Ronald E. Purser
Thank you, Matthew, for having me back. I'm a big fan of your podcast. Yeah, it was a nice long break. What was it, six, seven years ago the book came out, so I had a lot of time to catch my breath so to speak, and recharge and kind of get back into some of the deeper questions that McMindfulness wasn't really meant to address, but was kind of pointing that there might be other possibilities besides just focusing on the present moment without judgment. So, yeah, good.
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Matthew O'Connell
So your new book has these two words, mind and space. Why don't we begin with the basics? What do you mean by mind and what do you mean by space? And why did that end up being the name of the book?
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Ronald E. Purser
Boy, I'll tell you, coming up with that title was a real struggle between. Well, it was a collaborative brainstorming effort between me and the editors. And titles are really notoriously, sometimes difficult, especially subtitles. There were all sorts of titles that were floating around. And actually, I'll tell you the story that kind of triggered it. We had been playing with a number of different titles. I had a really rare meeting with Tarthing Tuku at Odeon, and in that meeting he asked me a question. What is your understanding of the relation of mind to space? And I won't go into the response to that, but a few days later, I suddenly remembered the question. I said, that's it. That's the title. Mindspace. So those are two really big questions. Matthew, should we unpack. Now? Elevator pitch. I'm not good at elevator pitches, but damn it.
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Matthew O'Connell
Damn it. I knew that would happen. Just so listeners know, we. We had a first go at this conversation. It didn't quite work, and I. I think I already admitted that it's quite difficult not to come up with very big questions as soon as you touch on these themes. Right?
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Ronald E. Purser
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Don't get me wrong. The burden is on me. I'm right. I mean, that's where you're at. So.
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Matthew O'Connell
But we don't want the conversation to be burdensome.
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- [05:29]
Ronald E. Purser
True. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. That's true.
- [05:32]
Matthew O'Connell
So, well, look, I think. Yeah, I think we could do it this way, right? We could start off by saying, why is the book important? Who is it aimed at? And then maybe we can explore both mind and space from those two orientation points. How does that sound?
- [05:48]
Ronald E. Purser
That's a nice warm up. Yeah. Yeah. The purpose of the book is several, but mainly it's the kind of book I wish I had had 40 years
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Matthew O'Connell
ago
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Ronald E. Purser
because I was introduced to the original work, which Mindspace is basically my attempt to contemporize or make the original work, which is a book by Tarthank Tuku, published in 1977, Time, Space and Knowledge, A New Vision of Reality, published by Dharma Publishing. I was about 25, 26 years old or so, and I stumbled across this book when I was a freshman in college and I put it immediately back on the shelf. I said, whoa, that is it. That's a deep book, but I don't think I am ready for it yet. I, of course I was taking courses in college and, and a few years later when I landed in California, transferred to a different college and I realized that the Nygma Institute, the Nygma Institute, which Tar thing Tuku founded, was offering courses on this book. So I trekked down to Berkeley and signed up for a very intensive program. Was 10 months long. And we went through this book over a period of 10 months, paragraph by paragraph, with only about four or five of us in the class. Almost like Christian approach to Lectio Divina where you read each line very carefully and contemplate it, discuss it. So I found the book difficult at first, but the way we approached it in that sort of very supportive atmosphere with some of his students, it opened it up for me. And it's been my go to, you should say, I should say practice or fundamental root text since, since, since that time. Now I've been sort of in between. Sometimes I would be deep into it. Other, other times, you know, with career and family, didn't have as much time to devote to it. But to make a long story short, coming back to your question is there were a lot of comments by people, either newcomers or even senior students in the Enigma community that this original book was very difficult. And I felt that, okay, maybe, maybe there's a way that I can contribute to make it more accessible sort of in a. As commentarial tradition has it, in the Indo Tibetan tradition, oftentimes commentaries are written on an original teaching or sutra or text to elaborate or present different ways of understanding it and so on. And it started out that way. The original manuscript actually was in that format. And then over about a year, year and a half's time, I massaged that into the new format of Mindspace, which is more of a narrative format, more of a, well, if you want to put it in publishing terms, a trade friendly language. And that was my introduction to wanting to write this book. But it was also, it was something gnawing at me for a long time because when I was writing McMindfulness, you know, it was a polemic, it was a critique of the mindfulness industry. That's a whole different energy in terms of where you need to be to be, you know, sort of going against the current in the mainstream. And that took a lot out of. That took a lot out of me psychically, to. To kind of put a stake in the ground and be a contrarian. I didn't enjoy. I didn't really enjoy it that much, to be honest with you, Matthew. But I felt. I felt it needed to be done. And I think it cleared a space for people who may have gone as far as they could with contemporary mindfulness. And so my book was meant to be sort of a bridge into deeper territory. And that. That's really the intention behind it. Yeah.
- [10:36]
Matthew O'Connell
Good. Maybe before we start talking about mind and space, say a few words about Tartang Toku. He's still alive, if I'm not mistaken, and he is. He's clearly a figure who, who both embodies what we recognize immediately as the Tibetan tradition. Right. And yeah, as we. We've spoken about before, this book of his that you. You described as being difficult for some people, it is quite revolutionary. And it's revolutionary perhaps. Well, certainly to the degree, but perhaps even more so than some of the work that listeners might be familiar with in terms of a figure like Jogim Trungpa, who radically changed the kind of Tibetan presentation. Tartang Toku's book goes a step further. I think it's almost. I think it says at some point it's not Buddhism. And clearly it's influenced by that. And clearly he is a recognized lama.
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Ronald E. Purser
Yeah.
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Matthew O'Connell
How do you think he squared all that? And why do you think it ended up becoming quite challenging for people?
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Ronald E. Purser
Yeah, I think that's a really good question, and there's probably multiple answers to that. Tarthing Dooku came to the United States in 1969, could barely speak English, had $4 in his pocket. And he was one of the first fully trained Ningma lamas to. To come to the US and, and open an institute. And he started teaching Westerners Vajrayana initially very traditional Nygma teachings. And at some point, I, you know, I don't want to speak for him or over interpret, but I think there was a decision that his energy, his time, he made this consciously to stop teaching publicly. He withdrew right about the time the Times Based Knowledge book was released and devoted most of his energy into preserving the Tibetan Nyingma tradition and Tibetan culture in many different ways, through art, through publishing, and so forth. I won't go into the long story of that, but it is quite an incredible accomplishment. And so he was not as well known as Trungpa, having withdrawn from public teaching and tar thing and tar Thing was very interested in Western philosophy and science. And he made a concerted effort to actually have dialogues with philosophers and psychologists, but also physicists. He was very interested in physics. And he felt that these three terms, space, time and knowledge, seemed to have some sort of resonance to the Western mind. And so him and his editor at the time, his close student Stephen Tainer, worked on dictation and dictating the. The initial ideas for time, space, knowledge. It was some 3,000 manuscript pages that were whittled down to what it is. Now, I don't know what it is. 300, 350 pages. But I think he made a very conscious decision not to use Buddhist terms in, in this book. It's not because I. I don't think he was trying to hide the. Hide anything, but that he understood that Western readers would resonate, first of all, more with these terms than they would with traditional terms like rigpa or, or shunyata or whatever. And he wanted it to be a very unique offering to the Western mind. And so that's why I think everyone has sort of a felt relationship with these three distinct terms in their own way. So there was no need to import a new vocabulary. He could use Western terminology. And that's, I think, which is really, really unique about the book.
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Matthew O'Connell
Okay, so let's pick up on your title, Mind and Space. Perhaps you could give us an introduction to why they're so fundamental to the flow of the book. And although you kind of gave us the origin story of the name, the two words in themselves do stand for themselves, like time, space and knowledge. So let's touch on mind. First of all, what are you, what are you referring to with that word?
- [15:03]
Ronald E. Purser
Mind is a very big term. And you could say that everything that appears to us depends on our own mind. Depends on mind. I know that sounds pretty obvious, but all of culture has depended on mind at some point. You know, mind is what figured out how to. How to make fire, right? How to rub two sticks together. And that knowledge was passed on. And so language is also part of a very, very innovative human convention that has passed on the lineage of one from one generation to another. So I think the issue with mind is we have a lot of assumptions about what mind is and what it isn't. Unlike, you could say, the body. You know, with the body, if we look at a body, we have some tangible thing that we can point to, and we have a scientific understanding of the body now through physiology, through medicine, very sophisticated understanding of the material body. But when it comes to the mind, There are a lot of presuppositions, a lot of preconceptions, a lot of overlays that we have inherited. And we have taken these sort of at face value in some respects. And so mind has always been the central, you should, we could say the inquiry of many Buddhist traditions, like, what is the nature of mind? Well, how do we. What is the methodology for understanding mind? And, you know, this is where we come to phenomenal. The phenomenological approach of many contemplative traditions is that we're not going to rely on third person descriptions of mine, which we have in the scientific tradition, which is what it's suited for. So mind in time, space and knowledge is something that is challenged in the sense that we tend to think of mind as the fundamental source of our knowledge, mind as a generative source from which our conscious being originates from. Yet when we try to point to this mind or to discover it, it's very difficult to put our finger on it. And so a lot of the philosophical investigations in Mind, Space and in TSK are questioning these presuppositions, not just philosophically, but experientially through certain exercises. So that's part of the mind side of it. The space aspect is interesting because I was thinking about this just the other day, that going back to these three terms, space, time and knowledge, if you take any appearance or any experience, it seems like every experience or appearance needs a where, a when and how it is known. In other words, where is the experience happening located, when is it happening? Or, you know, in time and how, how do we know it? So there you, there you go again. We, we have the three dimensions that seem to be fundamental to human experience, but we have a lot of assumptions about what these dimensions, what their capacities are. And so when it comes to space, we have a particular understanding of space as sort of as an empty room. That's sort of a naive understanding in a way. It's an ordinary understanding that space is just an empty room and what's left over, it's what's left over when objects are removed. So it's just kind of an empty void, a container for contents in the contents of either mental contents or the contents of objects, physical objects. But in tsk, in mindspace, space is really more of an active accommodating capacity or dimension that is prior to objects that lets anything appear at all. It's not simply the absence of things or emptiness. It's not that. It's more like an alive dimension that allows appearances. So that may sound A bit abstract. But another way of putting it, perhaps, is that our ordinary space is a familiar aspect of a more fundamental space. Perhaps that's a way of parsing that. And so the vision in TSK is points to this term called great space, which is this more fundamental space, the dimension underneath the more familiar ordinary space. I don't even want to use the term underneath, but it's something that's borderless or bottomless, baseless. It's not a foundation. It's foundationless, it's groundless. And that is a difficult notion to crock because our ordinary conceptual mind is oriented towards grasping things, towards pointing out objects, to knowing something. But space is not a thing. And so here we are with sort of a. A challenge to our ordinary knowing as well, because ordinary knowing wants to bottom out, you could say, on the opaque. The opaque density of solid objects, and to label them, to categorize them and to fit them into a certain. Certain conceptual categories and so on. But you could say space is what permits experience to be experience at all. So I hope I'm not going off in too many different abstract tangents, but just to give you a little bit of a taste of that,
- [21:59]
Matthew O'Connell
again, there's a lot in what you're saying too. You started off by using a. Or making reference to the phenomenological nature of many practice traditions. Maybe that's where the interesting creative tension emerges for people engaging with this kind of material, certainly if they have a philosophical background, but also a practice background. What I also hear in your answer is the kind of struggle we all face with bringing language to bear on what are quite abstract and subjective experiences and attempting to build a kind of description of what might be the shared dimension of that. I think also you're kind of describing an experiential characteristic of space like nature, for those who engage in certain kinds of practices, some of which are presented and explained in the book itself. And so perhaps you could say something more about that. There are 18 chapters in total. They're quite dialogical in a way. Right. It's almost like a. It's not explicitly so, but it comes across as a conversation with someone who's explaining these ideas in quite a direct and immediate manner. And occasionally there's a pause and there's an invitation to a certain kind of practice. And I think that might be worth sharing with listeners if they want to get a taste of why this book might be useful and why it might be a more accessible form to some degree, as you said, of time, space and knowledge. So if you were inviting someone into a practice to meet the quality of space that you've just described. How might that come across in the book? Is there some sort of meditative, contemplative invitation that you give?
- [23:41]
Ronald E. Purser
Well, one simple one, without getting into the details of particular exercises is a very unusual sort of axiom. And it's a quote from the original book which can be a contemplative invitation. And that. That quote is, Space is projecting space into space. Exclamation point Mark. Space is projecting space into space. Now that if you just think about that, it seems a bit absurd in relation to our conventional way of knowing. But again, this vision is about challenging our conventional way of knowing. It's not concerned with maintaining our presuppositions or abiding by the rules of conventional views. So this contemplation is very, very simple to just allow oneself to see what happens. What is it, what. What's going on right now, if space is projecting space into space. So that's sort of one way of playing around with these ideas, and that's. I think that's a really good point, is that this approach is not about being so serious about formal practice now. It's a serious inquiry, don't get me wrong. But the attitude is one of the exploration and curiosity and playfulness. There are no expectations. And when it comes to where one should be arriving at in some sort of goal or some sort of hope, you know, preconceptions or fantasies or what this is going to produce, these are also part of, you could say, the challenging here with the vision, particularly those that may have been in, you know, fairly more strict meditative regimens. This is a lot looser and a lot more fun in many ways. I mean, there's a lot of humor going on in. In the classes and in. In mind space too. I. I tried to. I tried to inject, you know, the humor that I experienced or the. The. The free play aspect of what is unleashed as the vision sort of unfolds. The kind of the loosening up of tension and tension in all aspects. Mental, emotional, physical, spiritual tension. So there's a thawing out. And that term thawing out is from Taran Tuku. And that's what's interesting is that we're not so much after trying to change anything, going from something to something else. We're. We're more trying to be with appearance in a way that is less constricted. And there. There lies the space aspect there, too, because contraction and constriction is kind of a frozenness that manifest in many different ways. You know, like if you have a feeling of being mentally blocked, which I do sometimes, there is a psychophysical component to that. And the idea of fluency, idea, fluency, physical fluency, fluidity, freedom. You know, these are all kinds of words that we use to point to something that is opening up, something that is kind of making us feel like a child again. And you know, we can all think back to a time where something happened. We were just kind of naturally joyful as a child. We weren't as self conscious. Right. You know, maybe it was three, maybe four or five. But along the way something really radically, kind of gradually, maybe suddenly began to creep up on us and we, we have kind of lost touch with that natural freedom. And so yeah, I think that one way that this book opens things up is I played around with kind of dialogues between imaginary characters. They kind of pop up in different chapters depending on the theme that I'm trying to, to work on. And I had a lot of fun with those. And those, those dialogues are kind of a manifestation of various things that I went through and other sort of psycho modalities that I played around with. Yeah,
- [29:02]
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Matthew O'Connell
pick up on a. On a few themes there. I guess there are three that I'd like to tie together somehow. I'd like to be generous as well and think of this book as something akin to a kind of unconventional invitation into an experiential exploration of mind and space as you posit it. I like the fact that you mentioned the use of humor and playfulness. There is a kind of critical angle that could be taken in response to some of what you said, and it has its place. But again, if we're not taking ourselves so seriously and if we're not aligning with a kind of rigidity of mind, then I think sometimes that distinction between the kind of theoretical, the analytical and the critical, and then the experiential and the playful is. Is marketed in a work in a way that's excessive. Allowing critique or criticism, allowing a more theoretically serious approach should not deny us the possibility of playfulness or openness to the kinds of invitations that your book is attempting to provide. So that's the first thing I'd like to say in response to some of our more critical intellectual listeners. The other way I think that's really interesting for thinking about how TSK gives birth to your book is that it provides a kind of two waves of a topography of consciousness. And topography is one of those words we don't use so often. It's often just geographically, how should I say, employed. But the topography also implies this kind of experiential exploration of the terrain that we're in. And I would say that what I found most interesting when I first read Time, Space and Knowledge was that it was quite curious because it was, as you suggested earlier, it brings you into a kind of relationship with the materials at hand. You know, we're not talking about abstract space. We're talking about the immediacy of it and what it's like experientially, to touch space. And as you described earlier, there is a certain experience of space where it's kind of alive, it's not dead, it's not devoid of. What can we call it? Creative potential or tension. And as you rightly said, without space, there is no form, there is no object, there is no you and I moving around. We'd have no space to move, basically. And so I think that we have to acknowledge that both Tarthang Tulku's original book and your attempt to make this more accessible are quite timely in a way, because they are also expressing a willingness, a Playful willingness to make a break from Buddhism in this case and say, well, what do we do with this? These are fundamental characteristics of you and I. We can't deny that we don't need to kind of reify them and turn them into these very, very special, unique substances that one tradition gives us access to. We have to at least make an attempt to kind of explore them more experientially and come to know them for ourselves. I think your book does that in a very nice way.
- [33:33]
Ronald E. Purser
Oh, thank you.
- [33:34]
Matthew O'Connell
That's the sales pitch I would make. It's a bit longer than an elevator pitch, Ron.
- [33:38]
Ronald E. Purser
Oh, I'm glad you made that for me. I'll steal that from you. Yeah, I think that's exactly. Probably the reasoning or the intention here is that, yeah, look, we're Westerners, so can we resonate with these dimensions in ways that don't require isms? You know, I think that's what appealed to me in many ways initially with this book that I didn't have to. I didn't have to enroll in Buddhism, and nobody does. There have been practitioners in TSK that have been devout Catholics, people from all kinds of traditions, and they have said that it actually enhanced their appreciation of their own tradition by. By immersing themselves in. In TSK that the mystical. I don't know who used the word mystical, but the deeper dimensions of their own tradition came alive for them. So I found. I find that to be interesting. And even artists that have engaged with this practice have found their art had. Had become different, more more creative sort of ideas were flow. It's hard to say how it'll affect different people. But I think we're coming back to this idea that there is something universal when it comes to space. I mean, even the word universe, right, is kind of the background of the universe is mostly space, if you want to get into physics about it. But the space of embodiment is. Is something we. We all share as human beings. So I think we're on to something here that. Not to say that TSK is sort of the best approach because it has these universal pointers. I'm not. I'm not saying that either. But I think what's interesting is we're not going into a very simple assertion to say that the body is space and that's it. It's a much more careful exploration because we know for a fact that objects are solid. Our body is solid. It keeps us from walking into walls. But on closer inspection, that very same body is very pervasively open. If we really apply a deep investigation using various practices and exercises. But the ordinary mind wants to flip into these mutually exclusive categories. Things are either solid or they're, they're empty. But mind space is kind of an approach that says, well, maybe not, maybe they're not mutually exclusive. And that sort of ambiguity is a doorway that can be investigated and expanded. And so even if we can get a taste of this, then our focal setting, and that's a, that's a technical term that's used throughout the time space knowledge books. And in Mindspace, the body as it appears as a solid entity is, is just one focal setting. And that focal setting can be opened up, it can be challenged. And when that occurs, then we can learn to hold two realities at once, if you want to put it that way, that we can operate in conventional reality as things are solid and dense and opaque, but at the same time we can also operate as if they are completely space like. And that is a higher knowing capacity that is not bottoming out on the solidity of appearance, but participates in the higher dimension of space, which is that fun, more fundamental openness, the more fundamental accommodating nature of physical appearance, of materiality. So, yeah, so there are a lot of technical terms, there are a lot of, you know, interesting terminology with, throughout both books, mindspace. Tsk. And one of them is that there's this notion of levels, levels of space, levels of time, levels of knowledge, three levels. Another way of putting it is there's a lower space, lower time, lower knowledge, higher space, great time and great knowledge. But those are just pointers. They're just provisional pointers. They're not actualities. But we have to use language, we have to use pedagogical approaches to challenge our ordinary way of knowing. So
- [38:53]
Matthew O'Connell
if you're new to the podcast, you might not know that I help people out on occasion through my coaching work. O' Connell coaching is an attempt to translate non Buddhism, post traditional takes on Buddhism and spirituality more broadly and weave them into a worthy companion to the practicing life. I originally trained as a counselor, then life coach, and have fashioned my own approach into a working space for helping others to reconsider the practicing life. If you are stuck in your practice or looking to construct a way forward through a difficult or challenging moment, or if you wish to fashion your own practice in life, get in touch, I may be able to help. Imperfectbuddha.com coaching
- [39:54]
Ronald E. Purser
perspectives. Huh? Huh? Yeah, they're like, I think they're concentric circles. And higher spaces are more accommodating, more Inclusive of lower spaces. And so that's why there's no negation of appearance. There's no denial of solidity or density or dualism. Right. These are very useful biological survival qualities that we need to operate in order to stay alive as human beings. And. But they don't offer the potential that human being has, human beings have for freedom, freedom from dualistic limitations. So on the one hand, we have to operate within duality, dualistic knowledge. But on the other hand, dualistic knowledge is very constraining, and so is time. Time, which is operating in a linear fashion, which is moving from the past through the present to the future, always kind of the forward momentum of time leaves us off balance and restless and feeling like satisfaction is deferred. It's always up ahead somewhere else. And that includes spiritual seekers that were always searching and seeking for some sort of destination, which could be called awakening, enlightenment, whatever you want to call it, whatever tradition it is. But that path orientation has its own limits as well. So as you can see, at every level, space, time and knowledge, there are challenging questions that are being posed throughout this inquiry.
- [41:42]
Matthew O'Connell
Great. And you're using that word again, inquiry, which I think is another term that bears repeating because as you were suggesting throughout the book, is not prescriptive. It may be descriptive, it may be explorative, but it's inviting readers and practitioners into a kind of exploration. What you were just saying as well, it made me think about the fact that often this kind of get to somewhere from here is implicitly rooted in a kind of form of transcendence. And that transcendence I often think of as almost a form of escape. Right. I'm going to get away from the material. I'm going to get away from the conventional self. I'm going to finally reach a place that is beyond what is present. But you seem to be looking at not just this idea of intimacy that we've touched on before, but there seems to be a certain degree, I think, of generosity towards these three primary spheres and the two that you focus on in your book. There's a certain sense in which if we're going to be explorers, we're going to. We can also learn to be generous and accommodate more space, more knowledge, more time, more mind. As we explore, too, it's not just about being receivers. Right. Passive receivers of an external reality. Through building these kinds of new, expansive, richer relationships with these different dimensions, we are generous towards them in a sense. Right. And that seems important.
- [43:09]
Ronald E. Purser
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's a really interesting point that we're participating in these dimensions. And so you could. You could say that the unfolding of the vision is learning or allowing one to participate even more deeply in these dimensions. And the one. The more that one participates in these dimensions, the less one feels separate from what is manifesting as appearance. In other words, that intimacy with space, time and knowledge. Since everything is space, time and knowledge, that participation then becomes a very creative dance, a very, you could say, open potential for. For allowing what needs to arise in any particular moment or time. I guess what I'm trying to say is that at least let me speak personally is that I feel that have. I think. I feel there's. There's a capacity that taps into, you could say, the creativity of being with this particular vision, that more possibilities seem to be available that would not necessarily. You might not. You might not have access to. If one was locked into a more rigid patterning of life. And yeah, I. I think that there is a. A generosity of, as you put it, and that could be a creative generosity, a form of grace, blessings, even. You want to use a spiritual, religious term, it seems that things seem to be going more my way. If we want to resonate with the time dimension. There's less struggle, less striving, there's more contentment with one's life, but also a deeper sense of value, a deeper sense of meaning and purpose, that we are not just nihilistic victims of a insentient universe. We're just like accidents that happened biologic, kind of an emergent out of the primordial soup. I think there's something much more meaningful here in terms of our. Our tr. Nature, of the nature of homo sapien sapien. There's the wisdom aspect of what it means to be alive, what it means to be a human being with all other beings on this planet, in this universe, and who knows what other sort of dimensions that there is, that participatory deepening that happens in terms of appearance and phenomena which all are occurring within space, all are arising within time and being consciously known in some. Some shape or form. So, yeah, I think it's. It's a. It's a very unusual and very unusual approach to say the least. Yeah, it's. It is. It really is. I. I'm very grateful and very honored. I don't know what words to use that, that. That I stumbled across this at such a young age and still have the community of practitioners and friends that have been with. Working with this vision for over 40, 50 years.
- [47:33]
Matthew O'Connell
That's a hell of a lot of generosity right there.
- [47:35]
Ronald E. Purser
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [47:37]
Matthew O'Connell
Both in terms of community, but also in dedicating yourself to this form of exploration. Just to riff on what you just said, I was thinking again, it's funny, you know, because this question of, of meaning and of telos and whether there's some kind of fundamental meaning to the universe and everything we talk about it and again we create this division between speculative fancy and then threadbare, honest, crude, raw appraisal of what might actually be the case. But I think it's a little bit like agency. Human agency. You know, some people will insist that human beings have no agency. Right. It's all predestined. Yeah. At the same time I just kind of think, well, fine, but it turns out that if we believe we have agency, we appear to have it.
- [48:29]
Ronald E. Purser
Yeah.
- [48:30]
Matthew O'Connell
And if we act like we do, we tend to live better, more self directed lives. And it kind of feels that way with meaning and purpose too. I think it's very good for us to be resistant to the notion of trying to get to a singular meaning or purpose that will somehow cover everything.
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- [48:48]
Ronald E. Purser
Yeah. That's dangerous.
- [48:49]
Matthew O'Connell
It sounds exactly. But to suggest that there might be a characteristic to reality for humans which is inherently meaningful in some way, and that some way is actually open, not closed. Turns out that the quality of our lives is greatly enriched by believing that and even by experientially exploring it. Yes, we may find something that's partly created by our own imagination. But again, even if you're aware of that, I don't see a problem with it. It's better to live like that, right?
- [49:20]
Ronald E. Purser
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Agency should be celebrated in my opinion. I guess the question is you're kind of sort of alluding to is what's the quality of that agency that that one is cultivating or that one is. What's the word? Even if it's a placebo, Imaginary placebo. Why not? It's, I think the tension of agency is part of what all contemplative traditions are trying to undo or lessen. And the freeing up of agency does not negate. Agency unleashes its creative potential to express to, to and you know, the book. Towards the end of the, the last chapter in the book, which is actually a riff on some of the last chapters of Time, Space and Knowledge. I felt like I had a, I had to end on a, a wondrous note, I guess, because I do talk about wonder. Wonder is a central theme in, uh, Tarthing Tuku's uh, tsk. Towards the end of the knowledge section. So I sort of ventured into that in mind space and I think that touches on what you're some of the comments you were making that we don't need to romanticize the idea of purpose or, or even, you know, become dogmatic about, you know, saying we have, you know, the sole purpose, the exclusive teaching. Right. All that kind of stuff. But but to celebrate the idea that human beings can express themselves through these three dimensions to the fullest capacity possible. And I think that is a different way of turning the kaleidoscope here, right? That rather than romanticizing awakening, whatever that means, I don't know what that means. But on the other hand, if you think about it as an expressive capacity for creative being, right. We are human beings. Why do we have the word being in human being? There's something about that word that is very intriguing to me. And what do you think, Matthew, about that word?
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- [53:57]
Matthew O'Connell
You've passed it back to me. That's cheating. I feel like avoiding it, but there we go. Let me see if I have anything to say in response. Well, I mean, I guess I operate from. I operate from a very wide frame. So you might be familiar with the notion of the great feast, which is something that a mutual connection of ours, Glen Wallace came up with.
- [54:20]
Ronald E. Purser
That's right, yeah.
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- [54:21]
Matthew O'Connell
It's his riff on a concept produced by one of his great inspirations, Francois Laruel, who comes up with this idea of the democratization of thought, which can be taken in different ways. I mean, I'm sure that some of his hardcore followers would have it a certain way, but I don't really care about that. For me, at least, the democratization of the thought is the idea that at the emergence of any idea that we fellow human beings have come up with, every single concept and idea and practice that we've created has a certain inherent value at its emergent point, then what it is afterwards is entirely up to us. And traditions have obviously reified, sacralized, and done all kinds of things. But for us, I would suggest that a human being from that perspective has a certain birthright to play and to touch and to experience and to learn about any of that without it having to be fossilized into some kind of hierarchy. And so my view of the human being is it both needs to be rescued from our kind of overbearing ideological practices. And that includes the positive ones. Right. There are a couple of them in your own discourse, more romantic readings, we might say, for example. And my view is that whatever reading we come up with, materialist, spiritual, religious, non religious, they're all perfectly fine at their emergence, you know. And therefore, if you as a fellow human want to think a certain way with certain ideas, go for it. This is a wonderful, wonderful thing. And so I think the human beings. I'm kind of getting to the answer. I think human beings are a combination of all the ideas we've had about them and that materially we're this odd, tripart creature. You know, we're animal, we're material, and yet we have this non Material world that we live inside, which is language and symbolic, experiential exchange. Creativity runs through all three of those. The harnessing of that creativity, which I think is a project you're directly engaged in with the book, is partly what makes life worth living. And I think that allows that shared humanity to emerge where we might actually have these kinds of conversations and not get stuck in our roles, but not end up being kind of flaky and overly spiritual about the whole thing at the same time. I guess that's a bit of an answer.
- [56:46]
Ronald E. Purser
No, it is a great answer. And it sounds like the phrase that comes to mind for me is creative freedom, freedom to create. And, and so, yeah, so I think the vision of tsk. And it makes a very strong point, is there is this inseparability of being and human being. Now being is a. Is a really loaded term and it has a lot of baggage. So I don't really want to go deep into that, especially from a Western tradition. It's, that's not what we're really pointing to. But I guess the miracle is that it's not that that somehow being is so far away and one day will ascend to, you know, merging with, you know, this idealistic image of whatever being is. It's no we're already, it's living. Expression, time, space and knowledge are inseparable from being. The way being expresses itself through our humanity, through our biology, through language. And so I, yeah, I think that, that you were talking about, you made a point about ideology. I can't recall. Overly focused on transcendence. I, I lost my train of thought. But I think that, I think I touch on that. My language for that is, I use the metaphor of the inner manager, that we, we over manage our lives in many ways. Not just when it comes to spiritual practice, but, you know, just overall our whole society is over managed. You know, my day job was a professor of management and I despised my own discipline. I did. But I had a very generous department that allowed me to be a chameleon, or at least I became a chameleon. And I was always concerned about how to unmanage everything. And so that sort of seeped into the book. You know, we, we, we've made ego the devil, the demon in spiritual circles. It's, you know, it's been, oh, we have to transcend the ego, we have to overcome the ego. And. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. But I thought the inner manager is a little less, it's, it's, it's more distaste. Distasteful. Than ego, even. And that's why I utilize that as a. As kind of a device, a pedagogical device.
- [59:38]
Matthew O'Connell
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not a bad one. I think it reflects an idea we actually touched on in a previous conversation, which is the reflexive self, which is this notion that emerges from the work of Anthony Giddens as a description of the kind of new forms of subjectivity that emerged from the 1950s onwards, and that today are not just as you describe them, but they are a kind of. They are what I want to call them. They are allied with what we might describe as digital colonization.
- [60:11]
Ronald E. Purser
Oh, yeah.
- [60:12]
Matthew O'Connell
This idea that now we are not just managing our lives, but we're exporting our lives, like an Excel file, onto the digital sphere and allowing ourselves to be constantly on the go, like a 247 manager, as hyperreality forces us to always be present in this kind of pseudo present. I wanted to make one other comment as well, then I've got a kind of final question for you. You mentioned being again just at the end or at the beginning of your last response. And I was thinking as I was listening to you, being is also a participle, right? So as a present participle, grammatically speaking, it implies movement, implies dynamism. Oh, yes, right. And we could pick up on agency again if we really wanted to keep going with this. I think one of the questions to the answer of what is being? Is quite simple as well, which is that it is what you started off with today in our conversation. Being is situated by its nature. It is in place, in time, and in relationship. And I think that's also part of the answer to the other question about what it means to be a human being. Human being is always a process. It's always in process, and it's always situated in time, place, and relationship. And those. Those dimensions can be tacked on or added to or taken as aspects of what you're doing with your book. But I think in that, you know, intimacy and generosity is also that kind of back and forth between what we experience as being conscious creatures and our indebtedness for our existence on those dimensions. So, again, I mean, that's just something that came up, came to me while listening to you, but there it is.
- [61:58]
Ronald E. Purser
Yeah, well, yeah, going back to what we were talking about earlier, every appearance has this triangulation of these three. Space, time, and knowledge. And I found that really interesting because it's almost Occam's razor, you know, it's like, you know, in other Contemplative systems Buddhism there, you know, there's five and eight, five aggregates, 12 links of this. And TSK is really much more. More austere. And. And I. I found that to be really. I don't know, it just was unusual to me when I first came across it. And. Yeah, being as a. As a verb, is it. You said it was a participle. But no, it does imply movement. And I think that's a very important point because I think one of the major stumbling blocks of a lot of meditative traditions or a lot of approaches, the meditation, is this privileging of silence or stillness. And whereas. Yeah, and so that sort of space is very still and. And can be very peaceful, which is very nurturing, there's no doubt about it. But that's why time is brought into the equation. Because our lives are. Are not just sitting still. We're in movement, constant movement. And so these two dimensions, space and time, are not antithetical to each other. They're not. They're in unity with each other. So how do we learn how to be in harmony with a dynamic unity where we can be not moving, but at the same time moving? Right. How can we be in a centerless center that is dynamic, open to the explosion of possibilities, of being? And that is sort of the dance of space, time and knowledge. The celebratory nature of being is very, very active. It's a very active and engaged with, participating with intimately, with all of appearance. So that is, you know, the search for being is not something that's necessarily aiming towards some sort of static point of arrival. It's more of a. An expressivity of possibilities. Right. And. And that is not limited by any kind of finite ideas.
- [64:49]
Matthew O'Connell
I've got a last question for you which I'm going to adapt based on what you've just said. So I used this phrase, digital colonization before. And I kind of feel that we, all of us adults especially we have kids. I think it becomes more pertinent. But all the same, we have a kind of duty to think about and confront the kind of push towards the ever increasing amalgamation of digital forces in occupying our internal space. Right. Taking up our space, taking up our time, filling our heads with useless knowledge. So if I were to ask you a kind of practical question based on that premise, how would you see your book and these principles we've been speaking about lending a hand to young people to not just uncouple from the digital colonization process, but recalibrate their conscious relationship with stimulation, with a sense of inner and outer, a sense of how they are situated in place and may actually be rather disembodied because they spend far too, too much time staring at a screen.
- [65:59]
Ronald E. Purser
Yeah.
- [65:59]
Matthew O'Connell
Could you see a point of meeting there?
- [66:02]
Ronald E. Purser
Oh absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I was very interested in this phenomena going back to the early 2000s when we were just what they used to call it cyberspace when the Internet was just starting to, you know, gain its traction. And so I've had a long term interest in this idea of, to the temporalities of distraction is a term that I used a long time ago and there have been a lot of good scholars in this area that have been tracking this better than I have. But. I think it has to do with the feeling of spatial and temporal acceleration due to, as you said, the digital technologies which are obviously designed for addiction and engagement. That word engagement. Engagement with what? Well, with scrolling, doom scrolling and staring at screens. So, and I think there is this, you know, epidemic of anxiety that has overtaken unfortunately people in their teens. Gen Z I, I have friends whose teenagers are suffering immensely from this problem and also from social comparisons and social media. It's, it's, it's quite sad. So I think there, the interest in mindfulness obviously has been one way that people have turned to, to gain some, some spatial and temporal relief from the constant stimulation of one's awareness. And so I think one way of thinking about it is there's a feeling of contraction going on when people are in this mode of staring at screens. There's a subject object sort of tension that's amplified. It's a particular hypnotic trance that people are put into under these technologies. And so yeah, a lot of the practices can help with disengaging from that mode of knowing. I don't know exactly what your question was aiming at there. Can you rephrase just the last part of the question?
- [68:55]
Matthew O'Connell
Yeah, sure. So my question was really to what degree do you think the kinds of practices that are offered and the kinds of visions that are offered in your book might lend a hand to people sort of experiencing the bombarding nature of digital colonization?
- [69:13]
Ronald E. Purser
Yeah, you know, instead of just practicing mindfulness, which is very helpful, I mean it definitely can lower one's stress. I think there's a, another level of practice of trying to understand what's going on in terms of the interplay between thoughts, emotions and phenomena. There are some practices like the mind body thought interplay which appear in the book. And so one is trying to track what happens when I'm, you know, you can actually examine what happens, what's the quality of my bodily awareness as I'm, you know, fixated on my electronic device or tablet or whatever it may be. What is the sort of the circuitry that is unfolding in, in my, in my experience and also what kind of self is showing up in those particular situations. So you can actually conduct this practice, let's say, when you actually are on your phone and, but also practice it, let's say when you're out for a walk. And then you can compare those two experiences in depth and notice the qualitative differences which may, you know, provide, you know, unexpected insights into how one is, you know, lost One's agency, so to speak. One's agency has been colonized. One particular self is being formed, the formation of a particular self in those particular situations. So rather than just trying to calm oneself, we're trying to develop, I use the word insight but knowledge, I'll use the word knowledge. We're trying to develop new ways of knowing which are not going to be as easily contracted as easily co opted in those particular situations. So that's kind of a long answer to a very simple question. There's.
- [71:29]
Matthew O'Connell
But not a, not a simple challenge. And I love that. Actually. No, that was a really, a really lovely way of thinking about it. I'm going to repeat what you said. You said what kind of self is showing up in those moments?
- [71:43]
Ronald E. Purser
Right.
- [71:43]
Matthew O'Connell
I mean, I think that's great because it doesn't just go beyond mindfulness as you were suggesting, but it actually puts agency in the hands of the person who's exploring and it allows them in a sense, not to disassociate from, but to observe who do I become in those moments.
- [72:00]
Ronald E. Purser
Right, that's right.
- [72:01]
Matthew O'Connell
And it implicitly gives them a kind of a jolt of space which may allow them to choose.
- [72:07]
Ronald E. Purser
Right, yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah. And to inhabit space and time in a different way. So it's a way of diagnosing, experimenting in lived experience, conducting, conducting experiments and then comparing and contrasting, you know. So yeah, I think that it's interesting that, you know, this, this, this problem of temporal acceleration is, it's, it's just, it's amazing that there, you know, that people in the 1990s were beginning to even talk about this. And way before social media, way before iPhones, and a particular French theorist who I was deep into was Paul Virilio. He wrote a book called Speed and Politics. He wrote, he was very prolific, many, many books. But he, he came up with a term that kind of stuck with me from kind of a Greek word. He called it dromology. The study of speed is the structuring force of modernity. And. Yeah, yeah. And so he was really onto this in the 1990s, that the acceleration of technology was fundamentally reformatting our perception. And I was just enthralled by his work at the time. He was very prophetic. And another. Another term I think my friend Robert Hassan came up with it was he said, we're in a chronoscopic society where time doesn't just unfold, but it arrives instantly, you know, in chronological development. You know, it's very different than the clock, the digital. The digital clock. Is that just flashing? You know, it's chronoscopic. It just flattens out the past and future. And we're in this blur of this very condensed, you know, anxious sort of present. Right. A perpetual present that has, you know, very little kind of meaning because it's. It's just contracted and it's. It's just moving in in a way that has compressed. So it's kind of an existential compression that we feel bottle in a bodily way. And that's where the screen, you know, replaces the physical window. When kids, we used to play outside, you know, they'd go outside. There were no screens, you know, and now the screen has replaced that.
- [74:56]
Matthew O'Connell
Well, that's good. That's a nice bit of French. French thinking and local, localized thinking to end on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Temporal acceleration. And it keeps getting faster. You know, you've probably noticed this too. I'm sure listeners have. When I came home from work today, I came in, I was chatting to my son, who's 18 now. He was saying, how are you? And I said, well, I'm good, I'm good, but what a busy day. And I paused and I said, hold on. I don't think I've not had a busy day for five years. That's just one long, busy day.
- [75:32]
Ronald E. Purser
A sense of duration is replaced by exposure.
- [75:36]
Matthew O'Connell
Right? That's great.
- [75:37]
Ronald E. Purser
Yeah. And Virilio, I cannot believe he actually saw this so early on. He called it virtual presence. You know, virtual presence over actual embodiment. It's crazy how I don't know how he had that sort of foresight, but. Yeah, yeah.
- [75:57]
Matthew O'Connell
Well, they've kind of been building in the prophetic nature. The other one that I think really describes the age we live in, I'm going to put it together now with this idea of temporal acceleration is hyperreality. I mean, hyperreality has been around what since the 1970s, I think. Maybe sooner.
- [76:14]
Ronald E. Purser
Right, right.
- [76:15]
Matthew O'Connell
People always forget the most interesting bit about it, which is that we end up preferring the image of the thing for reality because it seems far more palatable and manageable. Right. So it goes along with that reflexive self you were talking about before. But I think the other thing about the speed, you were saying something else about the work of this French guy. Meaning can't hold when the speed is so fast, it's like trying to hold on to an inflatable dinghy that's being pulled across the sea.
- [76:44]
Ronald E. Purser
Yeah.
- [76:45]
Matthew O'Connell
You know, you literally can't hold onto it. So even if there were meaning, any meaning we come up with, simply cannot stick to what we are experiencing as the acceleration of time.
- [76:56]
Ronald E. Purser
Yeah. Because it's surface only, meaning it's skimming. It's skimming the surface of time and it doesn't have any depth to it. I think is another way metaphor for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's flattened out. Right.
- [77:11]
Matthew O'Connell
That's a good place to come to an end because your book is clearly an antidote to all that. So everybody should go and buy a copy. And if they do want to buy a copy, it's out this year on Dharma Publishing. And I repeat the name, it's Mind Space by Ronald E. Purser. Ron, it's been a pleasure talking to you. I think we got lucky with the bad recording of the first episode because we got to extend our conversation.
- [77:35]
Ronald E. Purser
I think so. Yeah. That was a blessing in disguise, wasn't it?
- [77:38]
Matthew O'Connell
Yeah, exactly. Let's call it that. Thank you for coming on and giving up your time. And where can people find out a bit more about what you're up to?
- [77:47]
Ronald E. Purser
Oh, they can look@romperser.com or dharma-college.com and I'll be teaching some courses on Mindspace in the fall through Dharma College in Berkeley online.
- [77:58]
Matthew O'Connell
Fantastic. Okay, folks, you've been listening to the Imperfect Buddha podcast. You take care of yourselves and do whatever you can to resist the temporal acceleration. This is us over and out on the New Books Network. Bye for now.
- [78:27]
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