Personal Ecumenism

My own personal ecumenism.  Part of me feels disingenuous regarding the spirit of this blog, that my-own-personal-ecumenism is a little too cognitive, a little too conceptual, a little too wishful, a little too witty.  At the same time I’m reconnecting with the resonance I felt with the phrase, which occurred to me 4 days ago, as I write this.  

Jamgon Kongtrul of Shechen, root teacher of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and one of the founders of the Rime movement within Tibetan Buddhism.

I’ll say a little about the circumstances in which it arose.  I was cleaning my kitchen and listening to a talk by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche on his guru, Jamgon Kongtrul of Shechen (you can listen to the talk here).  Kongtrul Rinpoche was one of the founders of the Rime (ree-may) movement within Tibetan Buddhism.  Trungpa Rinpoche was disparaging the western academic interpretation of the Rime movement as eschewing distinctions between the different lineages within Tibetan Buddhism.  My sense is that this kind of thing compromises the integrity of a lineage.  This is a quintessential example of watering-down.  If you’d like to ignore the differences between 2 types of liquor, just water them down until you can no longer taste the difference.  Simple solution, but you end up drinking water rather than liquor and failing to get a genuine experience of either liquor in the process.  

Donald Hebb, one of my academic forefathers, particularly well known for Hebbian Learning: "Neurons that fire together, wire together".  I don't know whether he said that, but it's a commonly invoked phrase in discussions of Hebbian Learning. 

Just because two lineages have distinct approaches, or even distinct metaphysical views doesn’t mean that either one must necessarily be illegitimate.  The two lineages that I have been trying to reconcile are Shambhala Buddhism on one hand and science on the other.  Just calling it the lineage of ‘science’ doesn’t really capture it, but it’s the most straightforward shorthand I can come up with for the profession that I’m training in.  The path forward that Trungpa Rinpoche offered me was that I can embody both lineages by practicing them and then can understand their interrelationship natively through my own experience.  I, perhaps naively, imagine that whatever incompatibilities and questions of hierarchy appear will naturally find resolution in the common medium of my experience.   Maybe wishful, but inspiring to me nonetheless.  And could I ever use some inspiration right now.