Workshop Details
Psychology has detailed knowledge about insanities, having compiled a compendium of ‘mental disorders’ displayed in the DSM and ICD. But what does Psychology know about sanities in general and basic, unconditioned sanity in particular? This workshop will explore 2 kinds of sanity. One is the usual, everyday sort which is conditional to the society one dwells within. A person may be considered crazy or insane if they do not accord to the range of normality of consensus reality. Adapting to a social reality opens the way for one to survive and thrive. But they may also mean one is adapting to a sick society. Thus, one can only be relatively sanity given those conditions. There is another kind of sanity. One more basic, far-reaching and unconditioned by either social constructions or personality proclivities. Psychology does not well understand this more open-ended, unconditional intelligence.
This workshop includes a presentation sketching out these differences, open discussion to clarify things, and a guided inquiry/meditation to better attune to unconditional presence, spoken of in Buddhism as bodhi, the wakefulness of basic sanity.
Learning Objective Participants Can Expect From This Event
- Distinguish the difference between conditioned and unconditioned awareness.
- Describe basic sanity as understood in Buddhist Psychology
- Describe conditional sanity as relative to consensus reality
Who is This Workshop Appropriate For?
- Therapists, meditators and students of psychology and Buddhism
How May This Workshop Impact Your Practice?
- It will inform Existential and experience-near practices of psychological and energy healing
Course Content
Presenter
Ken Bradford, PhD is an author, teacher, and contemplative yogin integrating existential, Buddhist, and Dzogchen thought and practice. Formerly, he maintained a psychotherapy practice in the San Francisco Bay area and was Adjunct Professor at John F. Kennedy University and California Institute of Integral Studies. He is author of Opening yourself: The psychology and yoga of self-liberation (2021); The I of the Other: Mindfulness-based diagnosis and the question of sanity (2013); and Listening from the heart of silence: Nondual wisdom and psychotherapy (Vol. 2, 2007, with John Prendergast); as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles.
