2-04. Spiritual Practice and Cultural Embedment

8:08 - structures of consciousness have a hand in the structure and form of phenomena that appear

8:20 - there are a priori conditions that determine the type of phenomena that do appear

8:55 - pre-Kantian thinking is called metaphysical, post-Kantian is called critical

9:01 - structures were thought to be inherent in objects; Kant found that they were in part created by the subject

10:27 - culture is a magnet

12:19 - the structure of pre-operational and concrete operational thinking are universal, with varying surface structures

13:09 - pre-operational thinking represents objects to thought, but cannot operate on them

13:32 - concrete operational can start to operate on an object (as well as represent it)

14:01 - formal operational can perform the operations mentally

15:35 - the moment of experience is the most fundamental reality

20:36 - each stage adds some amount of freedom

20:50 - lower levels are strongly deterministic; higher levels aren't as deterministic

24:27 - getting lost in a perspective is the experience of samsara

27:42 - modernity requires evidence; post-modernity says that the subject is involved in the phenomena being perceived

28:16 - there's a narrow empiricism and a broad empiricism

30:09 - contemplative prayer or vipassana will free you from your ego, it will not free you from your culture

31:38 - there are several ways culture seeps into your cognition that your cognition is unaware of

31:50 - one of the simplest ways is the structure of language

31:54 - if you think in English there are a whole lot of implicit assumptions about reality that are in the structure of your language that may not be the structure of reality

32:06 - a satori will not break you from cultural influences

36:50 - meditation will not free you of cultural biases, but it will give you higher perspectives that have a capacity of reflecting on them, making it more likely that you will question them

37:08 - (but it's still not a guarantee)

37:39 - anybody can get enlightenment at any level

37:47 - but enlightenment won't get you free from your level

38:02 - absolute reality is not something you can see, it's the seer

38:10 - vertical growth adds the number of perspectives your enlightenment can exist in

40:48 - a tradition gets you to transcend your individual ego; the next step is to transcend the tradition

41:08 - identifying oneself as a member of a tradition is another drawing a boundary

41:31 - cafeteria style mix and match spirituality is generally a bad idea