Faculty . Professor, SF State
Dr. Ron Purser
Awareness isn’t the watcher behind your eyes, and it isn’t the calm you reach in meditation. It’s the openness those things are happening inside already here, never owned, never something you arrive at.
On the classes I teach
A short introduction in Ron’s own words the questions his courses explore and what students can expect. Watch more at Dharma-College.org.
A few reflections from Ron
What first drew you to explore your inner life?
One of my earliest memories is sitting alone on the floor of my room, surrounded by toys, pausing in the middle of playing to ask the same question over and over: What is this that’s this? No answer ever came. But in the not-getting, there was a potency to it, a kind of vibrancy shining through everything in the room. That question never really left.
What are you currently curious about or investigating?
The question I’m sitting with right now drives my book in progress, The Alchemy of Time. I’ve grown dissatisfied with the way Western Buddhism delivers impermanence: accept that things pass, hold loosely, don’t cling. Useful, but stoic and low-altitude. What Tarthang Tulku calls Great Time isn’t a more graceful relationship to passing. It’s the recognition that ordinary time itself is the lead and the alchemy is its turning.
What is one insight that has stayed with you over time?
One insight that keeps proving itself, decade after decade: practice is not a project. The minute it becomes one a goal, a state to reach, a better self in the making the very doer the practice was meant to loosen is exactly what’s running the show. The whole improvement orientation cinches the knot it claims to be undoing. The more I sit with that, the less it feels like a teaching and the more it feels like a release.
A simple practice you return to:
What I keep coming back to barely qualifies as a practice. I sit briefly sometimes ten minutes, sometimes two without trying to get anywhere with the sitting. No technique to apply, no state to produce, nothing to refine. Anything deliberately produced becomes another knot, so the simplest thing turns out to be the most useful: rest in what’s already here. Most mornings, that’s the whole practice. The harder part is catching the moment I’m about to turn it into a project.
What helps you find balance in daily life?
Balance, for me, comes from the rhythms of an ordinary day. Reading and a short sit in the morning. A long walk or hike with my dog mid-day. Gym four or five times a week — because I sit too much for the writing and the body needs the counterweight. Practicing guitar in the early evenings, which gets me out of the head and into feeling. A walk with the dog the early evening before dinner. Time with my partner. Quite ordinary, and very rich.
A place physical or internal that brings you a sense of peace:
There’s a hill near our house I hike up most days with my German Shepherd. A lone tree at the top, and a bench overlooking the Pacific. On a clear day, the sky and the ocean are the same blue. The dog lies in the grass at my feet, panting, looking like he’s smiling. I don’t have a better word for what that is than natural joy.
A book, teaching, or idea that has influenced you deeply:
Tarthang Tulku’s Time, Space, and Knowledge. I bought it as a college freshman, opened it, found it impossible, put it down but couldn’t shake the feeling I’d just held something I wasn’t yet ready to read. Years later I picked it up again, walked into the Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, and I’ve been a student of Rinpoche’s for the forty years since. TSK still works on me in two registers at once: bold enough to break the temporal straitjacket and the fear of death, and quiet enough to be a soft ripple of joy when I sit with the text.
A few words for someone just beginning to explore their mind:
What you’re after is what was already happening before you started looking — perception in its freshness, before commentary, before vocabulary, before technique. The mind you want to know is already here, only covered over by the effort to find it. So the actual work of beginning isn’t to add tools, but to notice everything that gets added the moment inquiry begins. Loosen, and watch what loosens on its own.
Websites, books, or YouTube channels:
ronpurser.com — articles, interviews, and media archive in one place.
Books:
- Mind Space: Discovering Meditation Without the Meditator (Dharma Publishing) — the most direct entry point into the contemplative work.
- McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality (Repeater Books, 2019) — the cultural critique that put my work on the broader map.
- The Alchemy of Time (forthcoming).
Interviews and media: Long-form interviews and articles — including Chris Hedges’ On Contact, ZDoggMD, Friends Between Worlds, Tricycle, and many others — are collected on the Media pages at ronpurser.com.
Something people might not expect about you:
I play guitar in a band called The Ohm Domes. The name is a stealth Om dressed up as a unit of electrical resistance the right kind of joke for a band that plugs in and turns it up. After a day spent writing, an early-evening rehearsal loud, electric, in the body is one of the few things in my week with no contemplative agenda whatsoever.
Bio
Ronald E. Purser, Ph.D., is the Lam Larsen Distinguished Research Professor of Management at San Francisco State University. He is best known for McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, the international bestseller that ignited a global debate on the commodification of meditation. His work has been featured in over a hundred major media outlets, including On Contact with Chris Hedges, Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp, and radio interviews on the BBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Radio New Zealand.
A student of Tarthang Tulku and the “Time, Space, and Knowledge” (TSK) teachings since 1983, he has been practicing and teaching this body of work for more than forty years. He is the author of Mind Space: Discovering Meditation Without the Meditator (Dharma Publishing) and is currently completing The Alchemy of Time (forthcoming). At Dharma College in Berkeley, he leads courses and seminars on Mind Space and TSK for contemporary audiences. He lives in Pacifica, California, with his German Shepherd, Candy.
Explore the live online courses Ron teaches.