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The Mindful Cranks

Shortly after my Huffington Post essay “Beyond McMindfulness” went viral, a popular mindfulness promoter accused me of being a “crank”. So why not own it? Alas, The Mindful Cranks was born. The Mindful Cranks was the first podcast to critique the mindfulness movement. Conversations with guests soon expanded in scope to include critical perspectives on the wellness, happiness, resilience and positive psychology industries - sharing a common concern that such highly individualistic and market-friendly techniques ignore the larger structural and systemic problems plaguing society. Whether these be trendy Asian spiritualities such as mindfulness or yoga, or other interventions from therapeutic cultures, The Mindful Cranks will call them out without mercy. I am very fortunate to engage with my favorite journalists, authors and public intellectuals whose works that I admire, as well as educators and spiritual teachers who I have learned from — fellow cranks who don’t simply accept the way things are. They’re modern muckrakers who dare to question the unquestionable. But being cranky can be critically wise and compassionate. Casting a wide net around the impending meta-crisis, The Mindful Cranks also explores with leading thinkers how the problems of our times are deeply entangled with our ways of knowing and being. Rather than just retreating from such problems by sitting on cushion, doing yoga or listening to a meditation app, I believe using our minds is not necessarily a bad thing if it challenges the limits of human knowledge.
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Feb 22, 2023

Our way of knowing seems seduced into seeing things – including ourselves as the self as the knower – as substantial. We believe and take for granted that the world is a myriad of things and objects, that the passage of time is real, and that we can rely on science to tell us how to live and what has meaning and value. Whether it’s our fascination with neuroscience or whether we are perpetual spiritual seekers, it seems the answers we find never seem to fully satisfy us.  And that’s because we suffer from a fundamental and deeply rooted belief and set of assumptions that there is a substantial external world ‘out there’ and a substantially existing internal world ‘in here’ in its givenness as “I-me-mind-mind and my-self”. 

This is what Zen Priest Steve Hagen calls "The Grand Delusion" – and it’s the topic of our conversation based on his book of the same title. Steve Hagen has been contemplating these deep existential questions and this great matter of liberation from delusion for nearly sixty years.  Now semi-retired, Steve Hagen is founder of the Dharma Field Learning and Meditation Center in Minneapolis, and author not only of The Grand Delusion: What We Know But Don’t Believe (Wisdom, 2020) – but many other books, such as Buddhism Plain and Simple, Meditation Now or Never, Buddhism Is Not What You Think.

We cover a lot a difficult themes in this conversation, from how our modern worldview operates from unwarranted assumptions that perpetuates our belief in substantiality, to why our reliance on neuroscience to reveal the mysteries of the mind is a dead-end, to the challenge of using language to point out what cannot be grasped conceptually – and much more.  

Roshi Steve Hagen continues to teach occasional courses at Dharma Field. Although Steve trained and received Dharma transmission in Soto Zen, he has no formal ties to any Zen or Buddhist hierarchy. 

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