Does management teach “mindfulness” to create compliance with a broken system that continues to inflict moral injury on frontline workers? 

Ron Purser is a professor of management at San Francisco State University and a student of Buddhism since 1981. He’s an ordained Zen priest and a faculty member at Dharma College (check out their Illuminate TSK app with exercises).

Learn more about Ron on his website, check out his book McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, his podcast The Mindful Cranks and his Current Affairs article How the Life Coaching Industry Sells Pseudo-Solutions to Our Deepest Problems. And here’s the book we mentioned Time, Space and Knowledge: A New Vision of Reality by Tarthang Tulku.

Topics and Timecodes:

0:00 Intro

1:31 What is McMindfulness

9:36 Mindfulness without addressing structural issues, moral injury

17:34 History of “managing” unhappy workers, blaming the victim

25:17 The fallacy of “self” improvement

28:03 McMindfulness and spiritual crisis, vipassana

32:04 Should westerners meditate AT ALL?

36:40 Can westerners awaken within our own culture? How?

52:50 Beyond McMindfulness

56:09 Time, Space, Knowledge: direct pointers to NOW

1:06:17 Lack and the black hole at the center of us

1:13:29 Living through labels vs. direct experience, mind and time

1:25:10 How can someone apply this to THEIR day to day struggle? Trusting YOUR experience