David Chapman's site on meaning, Buddhism and ethics, covering Buddhist modernism and developing ethical, social and cognitive competence.
HN commenters say they like his writing and point to it for his extensive work on Buddhism, alongside his Meaningness site.
In no particular order of importance, and likely in far too much detail:
You Need More Lumens (https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens) prompted me to put lots of really strong LED lights in my living and working spaces. Subjectively this has improved my QoL and productivity by at least as much as taking prescribed amphetamines, a very surprising result.
Nutrition: the Emperor has no Clothes (https://metarationality.com/nutrition) convinced me to disregard essentially everything I’ve read about nutrition and instead to pretty much only trust self-experimentation. This freed me to try objectively insane things like avoiding wheat completely because I read a paper once (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4809873/) or only eating beef for a month because a YouTube personality said it was good, with largely positive impacts on my health and thus QoL and productivity.
Nutrition Offers its Resignation (https://metarationality.com/nutrition-resigns) neatly crystallized the two previous experiences into a gut-level understanding that institutions have completely orthogonal goals to yours, and if it serves their goals to hijack yours by claiming your goals as their own, they will do so without hesitation because that is simply their nature. This dramatically refined my distrust of establishments - I realized that doing the opposite of what they say is no better than doing what they say (“+2 and -2 are equally distant from 2i”, as someone once offered as the most concise…
> Most versions of Zen are made-up export products designed to flatter Westerners. Kind of like the samurai movie honor bushido stuff.
I don't think so. If you go to a zenkai or a sesshin held by a western zendo, and then go to one at a Japanese temple, you won't notice too many differences, apart from the language. Many American zen teachers trained in Japan at some point, or their teachers did, and they brought these practices back more or less verbatim. In fact, in many American zendos, students chant the same sutras, _in Japanese_, as in Japanese zendos. Plus, there are regulatory bodies, like the Soto Zen school, that certify affiliated western zendos as authoritative. It's not made-up, it's hardly an "export product," and it certainly isn't designed to flatter anyone.
> https://vividness.live/zen-vs-the-u-s-navy
That seems like a rambling, self-published book by a Vajrayana practitioner with an axe to grind against Zen, for some bizarre reason. But there are plenty of real books about the rise of American Zen, or Buddhism in the west, that are well-researched. _Zen in America_ by Helen Tworkov is one.
> Japanese people think Buddhism is a thing you do at funerals.
Not at all. Buddhism, and Zen especially, permeate Japanese culture very deeply. Japanese aesthetics, architecture, landscape design, visual art, calligraphy, the tea ceremony, and the martial arts, have all been strongly influenced by Zen. And it's all over pop culture, too—just think of how pervasive…
It seems like a major personality crisis for me. Any crisis makes you feel bad and personality crisis all the more so. But there is a bright side, personality crisis is a chance to grow above your head. I agree with existential psychology on it.
I believe that you can help youself by learning some bits of development and existential psychology. Development psychology describes some common kinds of personality crises, and it helps to understand what going on when dealing with concrete life story. Existential psychology can give advice what to do.
So my advice is don't start making abrupt changes in your life right now. I think that your last failures can make anyone to feel depressed and to lose faith in himself. You can stop trying to find your place in tech, but it not be good to do it just because you feel depressed.
Give youself some time to learn youself, at least half a year. Read some books or talk with psychologist -- some kind of existential psychologist will do, I believe. As for books, I personally greatly like Kegan.[1]
If you see that "kicked in three month" is a pattern, and you don't understand what precisely causes it, I believe that it needs some research. It is hard to do such a research without external help, it can take years of struggling to understand is cause external or internal, if it is some of your psychological traits causes it or something else. You need someone with whom you will be able to discuss this topic honestly. Again psychologist is…
>Did she even study Buddhism at all?
Did you?
https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/biggest-misconception-about-buddhism/
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/ten-misconceptions-about-buddhism-249449
https://vividness.live/the-making-of-buddhist-modernism
The book you are referring to means nothing because it is a recent interpretation exactly as the author of the article is describing. From The Making of Buddhist Modernism:
>1. Rahula selects from the vast corpus of Buddhist literature certain features that can be interpreted in such a way as to resonate with a modern worldview, especially the Enlightenment, Protestantism, Transcendentalism, and science.
>2. This selection excludes or obscures other features of Buddhist literature, for example the many stories of miracles, magical feats, supernatural beings, and literal heavens and hells.
>3. When Rahula does address these, he tends to present them as ethically significant myth, symbol, or allegory.
>4. By focusing on elite literature, Rahula’s presentation occludes many features of the tradition on the ground, such as ritual, devotion, and exorcism, that are actually more central to many Buddhists’ lives than abstract doctrines.
>Many ordinary Buddhists would not recognize much of what Rahula presents as their practices, attitudes, and beliefs. What he suppresses would give a fuller picture of Buddhism in its various historical manifestations. His emphasis on tolerance of other views, for example, is certainly not…
You seem to take the author's language here as describing early Buddhism, but I think she is describing the observed history of Asian Buddhism, presumably East and Southeast Asian Buddhism. I think this is a clearer reading given that she starts with "Asian Buddhists," focuses on the Burmese tradition, mentions again "for most of its history in Asia," mentions Jack Kornfield who studied in the Thai tradition, etc.
For the language at the end of your comment, this kind of sola scriptura [1] approach is valuable and worthwhile, and it is part of how lay meditation traditions were revived in Asian Buddhism [2] -- but when you describe Asian Buddhist traditions as "later additions ... never encouraged by the Buddha," isn't this what the author has in mind with her next paragraph? Copied for your convenience:
> I want to clarify, by the way, that I’m not necessarily critical of American Buddhist entrepreneurs. The problem is if you mistake this white American Buddhism for all Buddhism, or claim that this is the “right” or “only” way to practice Buddhism.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_scriptura
[2]: https://vividness.live/protestant-buddhism
It's no trick, it's a spiritual path that can't be understood without following and practicing it- the path very much leads to something real that cannot be experienced or explained any other way. Everything Christianity teaches is true in the sense that I mean here. You are not understanding what I am saying and I do not personally know how to explain it more clearly[1], which, as I explained above, is why religions pragmatically also offer this view you hold as the official explanation to lay people, despite being obvious nonsense as an objective truth to anyone that thinks very hard about it.
I posit almost all intelligent monastics and religious people are smart enough to tell the difference between objective truth and religious truth- but it is taboo to explain this to lay people as they will be confused and think it means the religion is "fake" or a "trick", however I don't feel the need to respect said taboo. Perhaps I will learn to respect it by trying to explain it to people unsuccessfully.
[1] David Chapman may be able to: https://vividness.live/visionary-and-objective-truths