Much perspective on American lives and goals can be gained from the book "Buddhist Practice on Western Ground" by Harvey Aronson. Shambhala is working to have all their extensive collection of Buddhist and mindfulness and meditation books in Kindle format and they have gotten around to the Aronson book. I am delighted. I did read the book a few years ago but when I can read it on Kindle, it is different. I can easily highlight the important passages and collect them in an ordered file for printing or publishing or collect them with Kindle Fire or iPad on the special site kindle.amazon.com. I actually prefer this latter way since it is an easy step to share those highlights on Twitter.
I have been checking regularly to see when the Aronson book is ready for a Kindle and now I have it. At the same time, Love 2.0 and its dual emphasis on meditation and on the nature of love and how we love has re-emphasized for me some of the parts of Aronson. Both Aronson, as a psychotherapist and a Buddhist teacher and translator and Sheena Iyengar, a blind professor of business at Columbia University who grew up both as a Sikh in India and as an American in New York, stress the difference between the US and much of the Asian world in the area of individuals and our picture of what and who a person is.
Both of these authors stress the difficulty many Americans have understanding the normal, everyday Asian perspective. It is a little ironic that we use the word "individual" to refer to a single person, a unit of humanity that cannot be further divided: not dividable = individual since most of the background assumption in Asian society is that going down that far, focusing on one person and that person's ideas, interests and goal is going too far. If we were to start considering each heart, each set of lungs, each liver and each set of kidneys as the basic units, we would have gone into divisions we don't currently emphasize. For much of Asian society, it is the group, often the family that is the unit and there are no important units inside that group.
When Americans get a good view of the Asian perspective, they usually take refuge in ideas of freedom, of individuality and personal power, especially power of choice. In Iyengar's The Art of Choosing, she explains how surprised she was to find that American grade school expected her to be developing her own picture of who she was and what she was to become. But knowledgeable people increasingly put together evidence and theory questioning whether expecting each human to decide on a career and to decide on an employer and to decide on a love partner is such a good idea. No question, it sometimes works well. But confused, adrift, disappointed, lonely cases show that it sometimes doesn't work well.
If Americans weren't quite so sure that Daniel Boone and his musket alone in the wilderness is the epitome of the best life, we might learn why other approaches to life, love and others can also work quite well. If we weren't so certain that we know the path to living well, we might be surprised at what other paths do.
-- I have been checking regularly to see when the Aronson book is ready for a Kindle and now I have it. At the same time, Love 2.0 and its dual emphasis on meditation and on the nature of love and how we love has re-emphasized for me some of the parts of Aronson. Both Aronson, as a psychotherapist and a Buddhist teacher and translator and Sheena Iyengar, a blind professor of business at Columbia University who grew up both as a Sikh in India and as an American in New York, stress the difference between the US and much of the Asian world in the area of individuals and our picture of what and who a person is.
Both of these authors stress the difficulty many Americans have understanding the normal, everyday Asian perspective. It is a little ironic that we use the word "individual" to refer to a single person, a unit of humanity that cannot be further divided: not dividable = individual since most of the background assumption in Asian society is that going down that far, focusing on one person and that person's ideas, interests and goal is going too far. If we were to start considering each heart, each set of lungs, each liver and each set of kidneys as the basic units, we would have gone into divisions we don't currently emphasize. For much of Asian society, it is the group, often the family that is the unit and there are no important units inside that group.
When Americans get a good view of the Asian perspective, they usually take refuge in ideas of freedom, of individuality and personal power, especially power of choice. In Iyengar's The Art of Choosing, she explains how surprised she was to find that American grade school expected her to be developing her own picture of who she was and what she was to become. But knowledgeable people increasingly put together evidence and theory questioning whether expecting each human to decide on a career and to decide on an employer and to decide on a love partner is such a good idea. No question, it sometimes works well. But confused, adrift, disappointed, lonely cases show that it sometimes doesn't work well.
If Americans weren't quite so sure that Daniel Boone and his musket alone in the wilderness is the epitome of the best life, we might learn why other approaches to life, love and others can also work quite well. If we weren't so certain that we know the path to living well, we might be surprised at what other paths do.
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
