Parallax Newsletter #103

A new summer course with O.G. Rose; Sweeny vs Bard with Tim Pickerell on Varjayana Buddhism; The Parallax View

May 19, 2024

Course: Belonging Again: An Address with O.G. Rose

SUNDAYS
JULY 7/14/21/28; AUGUST 4 2024

WHAT IS BELONGING AGAIN ABOUT?

Our identities, religions, nationalities, occupations, life choices, philosophies, political ideologies, political leaders—none of these are “given” anymore: whatever we face, we find ourselves full of questions. “Is this true? Is this best? Is this valid?” We live during what James Joyce in “The Dead” called ‘a thought-tormented age,’ which, as James K.A. Smith put it when writing on Charles Taylor, is to say that our world is a ‘contested, cross-pressured, haunted world [...] [T]raditional definitions of reality which previously provided stable [guides] for living everyday life (in courtship, marriage, child-rearing, religious faith and practice, interpersonal exchange and the like) are increasingly fluid, fragmented, and deprived of plausibility.’ Might this prove to be an opportunity though? Indeed, it might.

Belonging Again describes our sociological moment where nothing is “given” and yet we find ourselves forced to confront the inescapable reality that freedom isn’t always free. We’re able to be whoever we want to be, but this was made possible by emptying our possibilities of significance. Everything is just like everything else, and so we find ourselves like that donkey between two equal-sized piles of grain of grain: starving, unable to choose, and tempted to flee. If we’re not going to seclude ourselves or engage in some exodus though, we must find a way to achieve “rest” and “belonging” around others who are very different from us and in a world that is ever-changing. And none of this is “natural,” suggesting we will have to become “super-natural” or something—somehow. Furthermore, we will have to “scale” the conditions which make this possible, and how can that be done without slipping into oppression and totalitarianism? The challenge is great.

- Full Ticket includes 5 Sunday Zoom Classes with Q&A/ 5 Digital Campfires Zoom discussion groups
- All tickets include the digital versions of Belonging Again and other books by O.G. Rose

Sweeny vs Bard #62 with Tim Pickerill - Vajrayana Buddhism

Bard queries Pickerill and Sweeny about Crazy Wisdom Masters and the wonderous practice lineages of Tantric Buddhism.

Tim Pickerill is a Brooklyn based Artist, Musician, Writer, and a Vajrayana practitioner within the Karma Kagyu lineage under the Karmapa Thaye Dorje, and Diamondway Buddhism, led by teacher Lama Ole Nydal. An Anthropologist and Artist by training, he spent 10 years studying extensively in Western Esoteric traditions, as well as Hatha Yoga, Kriya Yoga, and Sanskrit, before taking initiation into the Diamondway in 1998.