The Imperfect Buddha Podcast

Pierce Salguero joins us to discuss his new co-edited volume, Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice. While modern mindfulness frames meditation purely as a wellness tool, the Buddhist tradition has long recognized its inherent psychological and physical risks. We explore multi-tradition historical texts, the anatomy of practice crises, and the ethical responsibility of teachers and app developers to provide something along the lines of informed consent.

Key Discussion Points & Timeline

Contrasting modern wellness marketing with historical accounts of meditative danger; the book provides a sourcebook for Dharma teachers, clinicians, and serious practitioners.

Multi-Tradition Mapping throughout covers Pali, medieval Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan sources, many of which we touch on.

Traditional sources diagnose destabilization and even offer a range of physical, energetic, and lifestyle remedies to mediate crisis: whether they would be a good fit for today’s practitioner is another matter.

Challenging the modern claim that adverse effects only happen to the unprepared or mentally fragile.

Classical lineages show that severe physical ailments and mental destabilization can happen randomly, even to advanced practitioners.

The hidden risks of unmonitored, commercialized meditation apps.

Why creators have an ethical duty to move past treating meditation as a risk-free panacea and offer clear safety guardrails.

How different cultures draw the line between a spiritual breakthrough and clinical pathology.

The ongoing project of integrating traditional remedies with modern psychology and neuroscience.

Links & Resources Mentioned

The Book: Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice.

Guest Website: here (Includes the book's introduction).

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What does it mean to connect with mind and space without the typical baggage of contemporary meditation trends? In this episode of the New Books Network, Matthew Joseph O'Connell sits down with author and practitioner Ronald E. Purser to discuss his timely new book, Mind Space: Discovering Meditation Without the Meditator (Dharma Publishing, 2026).

Drawing from his decades-long engagement with Tarthang Tulku’s seminal 1977 work, Time, Space, and Knowledge, Purser offers a refreshing, experimental, and surprisingly playful guide to understanding our structural realities. Rather than preaching a prescriptive self-help routine, Mind Space serves as an experiential commentary that invites readers into a radical, non-dualistic inquiry of how we inhabit our lives.

Key Themes from the Episode

Beyond McMindfulness: How Mind Space transitions away from corporate, present-moment-focused trends and pivots toward a deeper, more expansive territory of human freedom.

The Anatomy of Mind and Space: An etymological and philosophical breakdown of mind as our generative source of knowledge, and space not as a passive, empty container, but as an active, alive, and accommodating dimension.

The Myth of the Inner Manager: A critique of the reflexive, modern impulse to over-manage every facet of our internal lives, and how to cultivate a state of un-management.

Digital Colonization: Confronting the psycho-physical compression, social comparisons, and anxiety induced by modern screens, and how the acceleration of time flattens our capacity for deep meaning.

The Playfulness of Inquiry: Why true contemplative practice thrives on curiosity, experimentation, and humour rather than rigid, sombre discipline.

"Space is not a thing. It is what permits experience to be experienced at all. When we realize space is projecting space into space, our rigid focal settings begin to thaw." — Ronald E. Purser
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Welcome to the Imperfect Buddha Podcast on the New Books Network. Today, we’re stripping away the incense and serenity to look at the cold, hard wall of practice.

We are joined by Mark Shinji Blacknell, author of Just Stare at the Damn Wall!. Mark isn't your typical "mindfulness guru"—he’s been a Marine, a bus driver, and an alcoholic, bringing a crude and down to Earth view of enlightenment to Zen.

In this episode, we dig into the friction between Mark’s focus on simple biology and the Soto establishment he knows all too well. We’ll be asking:

The Technology of the Wall: In an era of bio-hacking and apps, why choose a directive as primitive as staring at a wall?

The Myth of Enlightenment: Why does Mark tell his readers to "forget enlightenment" and embrace being a "doctor of nothing"?

The Shadow Side: We discuss whether "McMindfulness" ignores how meditation can make unstable people more dangerous.

Raw Acceptance vs. Nihilism: How do we differentiate "accepting life as it is" from a passive, terrifying nihilism?

The End of the Path: If the goal is "doing nothing for nothing," how do we even know we’re practicing?

From meditating with prisoners on death row to the often dirty and frustrating reality of being a practitioner, Mark joins us to explain why the only way to fail a practice is to stop: the rest is all part of the process. Is this book just a very long way of telling us to shut up? Let’s find out.

Host’s webpage: here

Mark Blacknell: here
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Michael Uebel is a psychotherapist and researcher currently based in Austin, Texas. He is recognized as a pioneer in applying psychological insights to the historical intersections of social, personal, and imaginative phenomena. He is a Research Affiliate at the University of Texas at Austin and a psychotherapist in both the public sector and in private practice.

Uebel has taught literature and critical theory at several universities, including the University of Virginia, Georgetown University, and the University of Kentucky.

Seeds of Equanimity: Knowing and Being (Mimesis, 2025), is an innovative introduction to the philosophy and psychology of equanimity.

Uebel challenges the popular modern view often associated with certain mindfulness practices that equanimity is a state of impartial quiescence, solidity, or inner stillness, achieved through emotional regulation.

His book reanimates the concept of equanimity by drawing on its philosophical and psychological genealogy by tracing its origins and development, framing it as a dynamic, active, and flexible existential condition.
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In Against Identity, philosopher Alexander Douglas seeks an alternative wisdom. Searching the work of three thinkers – ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, Dutch Enlightenment thinker Benedict de Spinoza, and 20th Century French theorist René Girard – he explores how identity can be a spiritual violence that leads us away from truth.

Through their worlds and radically different cultures, we discover how, at moments of historical rupture, our hunger for being grows: and yet, it is exactly these times when we should make peace with our indeterminacy and discover the freedom of escaping our selves.

Alexander Douglas was born in Canberra, Australia where he studied music and philosophy. He now teaches the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics at the University of St Andrews. He has published two books on the philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza and one on the philosophy of debt. He has grown increasingly interested in combining ideas from Western and East Asian philosophy.

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