Excavating Frames

Last updated on: March 18, 2011 at 7:31 am by Dosho Port

Excavating Frames 2011-03-18T07:31:00-06:00 Dosho Port

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I was recently passed a journal article, “Excavating Our Frames of Mind: The Key to Dialogue and Collaboration,” from the social work field. Margaret McKee offers a valuable perspective – really practical stuff – for dharma practitioners with a post-modern, deconstructionist, narrative inclination. In other words, those that are open to being emptied some more by the blooming global dialogue about life.

This perspective is so in line with basic Buddhism – we don’t see the “world” but just our own minds. And right there is delusion and enlightenment.

This perspective is vital if we are to really hear others’ stories and value our own (making peace with the whole raggedly lot of humans crowding together here whipping through time and space), developing a Buddhadharma for the 21st century that is true to the coreless core of the tradition and engaged with developments of our contemporary culture.

This article got me thinking that there needs to be more postmodern deconstructionism offered specifically in regard to Buddhist ethics and how we always seem to be limping behind.

Just then I was given Buddhism and Postmodernity: Zen, Huayan, and the Possibility of Buddhist Postmodern Ethics, by Jin Y. Park. For a guy like me, a completely thumpa thumpa moment. Stay tuned for what I glean from Parks book.

For now some excerpts from McKee’s essay:

There are no self-evident facts that ever add up on their own to understanding; rather it is when a person first has a theory or a framework that he or she knows what facts to look for.

That act of framing draws the boundary around what is to be noticed and named as the relevant things of a particular world that establishes the story in which those facts belong and cohere.

Things are selected for attention and named in such a way as to fit the frame constructed for the situation.

What assumptions am I making?
Is my understanding being framed by values and interests that are not really my own, that I have assimilated uncritically?
Does this situation remind me of one in my past?
Are my feelings constraining my perception of this situation? Have I been recruited to a view that is suppressing information that might help me change my frame of mind? How might someone whose gender, social location, or culture is different from mine look at this?

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