David Loy to speak in Nashville

The occasion for this talk is the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture and the Vanderbilt Divinity School's 2008 Howard W. Harrod Lecture. Afterwards, those of us who would like to discuss the topic further will decide where to go to do that.

Here is Parking and reception and other info:
There is a reception beginning at 6:00 p.m. we are invited to. The reception is hosted by Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Benton Chapel is attached to The Divinity School located across 21st Avenue South from Scarritt Place. Free parking may be found on 19th street or parking is available for $1.50 in Wesley parking Garage on the 1st level. The garage is across the street from Benton Chapel and the Divinity School.

Finding the Reception (6:00 pm until 6:45 I'm assuming the ending time since the talk starts at 7pm)
Go towards the Chapel. You will see a stairway that goes to the adjoining building.. the Divinity school. Tillet Lounge is on the Main floor (which is the 2nd floor) of the Divinity School. There will be signs directing you to the David Loy Reception in Tillet Lounge.

The talk will last about an hour. There will be time for questions and answers afterward. Books authored by David Loy will be for sale, and he will be on hand to autograph them.

Here's a quote from an interview with David Loy:

It helps us to understand the particular kinds of ways that we are stuck today. There is a Zen phrase, ''bound by ropes of our own making,'' which means, trapped by our own ways of thinking. Our dukkha isn't just something individual. Dukkha is also collective, culturally conditioned suffering, which has a lot to do with our cultural institutions. If there's such a thing as collective dukkha, then there's such a thing as collective lack, and collective understanding of that lack. Buddhism emphasizes delusion, and there's also collective delusion; for example, myths about what America is and what it means to be American.

An important point about lack is that it's unavoidable. It's the nature of lack that you're going to have to deal with it one way or the other. Historically, people have usually dealt with lack in religious terms, referring to some other reality. But if you doubt any spiritual reality, if you are a secular person living in what you understand as a secular world, then you're going to have to objectify and cope with your lack right here and now, which is why consumerism is so addictive. The promise of consumerism is that something you buy or consume is going to fill up your sense of lack. But it's also the nature of consumerism that nothing ever can. Consumerism never makes you happy. Yet, it's always promising to make you happy. It's always the next thing that's going to make you happy. That?s one example of a collective bind that we've gotten ourselves into.

Lack can also help us understand war and our response to terrorism since September 11th. Psychologically, war, despite all its horrors, is a comforting, familiar way for us to project our collective sense of lack onto somebody else. So, for example, we might come to believe al-Qaida is the cause of our lack, they are our problem, because, hey, they are trying to kill us! This involves a lot of anxiety, obviously, but we also feel a sense of relief that we can now understand what the problem with our lives is and how to deal with it. To keep lack from gnawing at our core, we objectify it: the problem is those terrorists over there, and if we eliminate them, we eliminate our sense of lack, and then we will be okay. Part of the tragedy with that projection, of course, is that it's a false promise, just as with consumerism. If you kill those guys, you don't solve the basic problem. There's always going to be some other enemy, somebody else who starts to threaten us, because, insofar as we're thinking in that way, we have to keep finding or creating new enemies, just like we have to keep finding new things to consume.