Philip Schrodt
Phil has been a meditator since 1990, first in the Quaker tradition and since 2007 in the Insight tradition. In 2019 he was selected for and completed both the intensive and extensive versions of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies course on early Buddhism, and has over 100 days of residential retreat experience with teachers in multiple traditions. During the COVID epidemic he guided meditation on Zoom weekly as part of the larger Zoom meditations sponsored by the Insight Meditation Community of Charlottesville. Phil is an introverted (of course) software developer specializing in data analytics, and prior to this taught university-level courses for thirty-five years, with several teaching awards.
Email: schrodt735@gmail.com
This course
Author's retrospective, January-2025
Well, this is certainly dark! But these things, particularly when one has been a public face of a group—I guided COVID-era noon-time meditations more than 150 times for godsakes!—are super-tough, and it took me a good two and a half years to get past this. Ain't just me: see David French, or about a third of Dan Foster's essays on Medium (mostly paywalled).
End retrospective
Generally attributed, probably apocryphally, to H. G. Wells
This course was originally developed and offered in a COVID-induced Zoom format under the auspices of the aforementioned IMCC in the fall of 2021. Due to a failure to align expectations, parts of it ended up heavily censored according to the doctrinal requirements of… well, I never could figure out the underlying issues, though that's how these things often go… and generally the experience was rather unpleasant. Though it did attract about 35 people. Shortly thereafter— no direct causal connection, merely the organizational zeitgeist[1]—IMCC went through a major organizational schism, losing half their senior teachers, half the board, the president of ten years, and the operations director, which is to say, a schism utterly typical of U.S. spiritual organizations of its size, and I parted company along with the heretics.
The Center at Belvedere had long expressed interest in the course—had COVID waned more quickly even the initial version might have been offered there—and once the figurative dust had settled from the IMCC schism, I decided to give it another try, this time in-person, and the 50-person classroom "sold out"—it was free to members—and maybe half stuck through the whole thing. I was doing my best to present it from a secular perspective but by week six (meditation) with people sharing personal stories about the efficacy of mindfulness and, ahem, consciousness-altering substances (in clinical settings!…mostly…but hey, they were mostly Boomers and this is Charlottesville…) and we'd gone 15 minutes past the allotted time, with no one inclined to leave, I observed "This isn't supposed to be a sangha, but right now, this is a sangha."
As for the possible future of this, I'm currently thinking about once again offering it on Zoom—in the interests of geographical reach and not, we hope, COVID—in the fall of 2023, this time under the auspices of the Zoom-based Serenity Sangha, which lets me teach as I want, lineage be damned, and get back to a non-secular focus, which is to say, make the assumption that those taking it are interested in Buddhism broadly defined and I won't feel obligated to apologize whenever I depart from the received cultural assumptions of materialism.[2] We will see.
Notes
1. In the broader scheme of things, IMCC simply experienced an equivalent of the Devadatta Schism which split the Buddha's sangha late in the life of the Buddha, and the Devadatta schism differed only slightly from the earliest Christian heresy, Donatism. Both can be roughly summarized as "Conservatives seek converts; liberals hunt heretics." In contrast to the Devadatta experience, IMCC did not escalate to the level of assassination attempts nor, to date, have sympathetic devas prevailed upon the Earth to swallow the instigators.
2. Karma?? WTF?? Re-birth?? OMG!!