This week we speak with professor and teacher Roger Walsh. Roger shares his journey from being a hardcore neuorscientist and psychiatrist to becoming an avid meditator and mystic. Once Walsh discovered that at the core of all the religious traditions was “a technology of transcendence” he jumped head-long into vipassana meditation–bringing, as he put it, his personality into his practice. Following that he practiced Shikantaza in the Zen tradition, and then also spent many years practicing in the Vajrayana tradition, which he now teaches alongside Lama Surya Das.

Roger also explores with us a model of human needs and development, based on Carl Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He points out that Maslow added a level of needs above self-actualization toward the end of his career, that was about the need to transcend the self. He builds on this by saying that with that need has been met, the culmination of spiritual practice is service, otherwise known as the bodhisattva aspiration.

This is part 1 of a two-part series. Listen to part 2, The Core of Wisdom.

Episode Links:

Shikantaza ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikantaza )

Lama Surya Das ( http://www.surya.org )

Trekchö ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekcho )

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs )

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