Muni's PlaySource: “I Sing The Body Electric” (2016)
Rob Burbea identifies five common orientations in modern Dharma practice that can become over-dominant, restrictive, and “gross.”
| Orientation | Habitual Lean (Gross) | Soulmaking Lean (Subtle) |
|---|---|---|
| Concentration | Continuity and forced focus | Flexibility in ways of looking |
| Reification | Realism and solidity | Emptiness and fabrication |
| Atomism | Microscopic sensation bits | Energy body resonance and fields |
| Solitude | Escape from the world | Re-enchantment of the cosmos |
| Sanity | Sanitized serenity | Eros, fire, and soul-intelligence |
1. Concentration: Continuity vs. Flexibility
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The Habit: Viewing “continuity of mindfulness” as the golden key to liberation. It treats mindfulness as a “way to live” or a fixed state to maintain.
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The Alternative: Emphasizing the deliberate and flexible exploration of a range of ways of looking. For Burbea, liberation comes from noticing the different effects of these ways of looking on “dukkha, contraction, self-sense, and perception.” It is about the “availability” of different lenses rather than staying focused on one object.
2. Reification: Realism vs. Emptiness
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The Habit: An uninvestigated “realism” that assumes things exist independently of our perception.
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The Alternative: Approaching practice through the lens of emptiness and the fabrication of perception. This recognizes that “the energy body itself is formed, fashioned, and fabricated” by the mind’s way of looking. We “enchant” the body into being through the way we attend to it.
3. Atomism: Microscopic Bits vs. The Field
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The Habit: Prioritizing “microscopic attention” to find “atomic” moments of sensation (e.g., moments of taste or points of pressure).
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The Alternative: Tuning to the space or the field of the body. Burbea prioritizes a “sensitivity and sensibility towards and with that whole field of vibration, energy, and feeling.” He shifts from the “microscopic” to the “refined,” sensing the body as “electricity, harmony, and subtle energy.”
4. Solitude: Escape vs. Re-enchantment
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The Habit: The “intentionality of Pali Canon Buddhism” which views practice as an “escape from the world” and emphasizes “disenchantment” and “isolation” (cittaviveka).
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The Alternative: Re-enchanting the cosmos. This involves “opening the eyes and opening the knowing to the world” to sense the cosmos as divine, as bliss, or as sacred. It is a “cosmopoesis”—the making of a sacred world.
5. Sanity: Sanitization vs. Fire
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The Habit: A “narrow conformity to conventionally prescribed modes of expression” that results in “soggy serenity.” It is often characterized by an “uninvestigated suspicion of desire, passion, and eros.”
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The Alternative: Reclaiming fire, passion, and eros. Burbea argues that the “sanity of secularism” limits the soul. Practice should be “unfettering” and “vivifying,” allowing for a range of soul-intelligence that exceeds the “safe” and “sane” limits of modern culture.