Philosophy Meets Buddhism Seminars with Gus Santo

Each seminar has a one-time fee of $40 (non-refundable) and all proceeds are donated to the Blue Lotus Temple.

May 6th, 13th, 20th, & 27th. 6 pm – 7 pm.

Both of these thinkers talk about Forms. But their meditations on appearances lead them to drawing very different conclusions from their experience of form. Plato imagines a separate world to secure the eternal being of intelligible ideas. The Buddha, on the other hand, saw forms and names as ephemeral—manifestations of mere appearances in an ever-changing manifold.

August 5th, 12th, 19th, & 26th. 6 pm – 7 pm.

Buddhism has humorously been described in the West as Stoicism on steroids. Even though the Buddha antedates the Greek stoics by two hundred years, and the Buddha flourished in an Indian culture quite different from the pagan culture of ancient Europe, both Stoicism and Buddhism agree on the importance of the search inward for the causes of suffering.

October 7th, 14th, 21st, & 28th. 6 pm – 7 pm.

Phenomenology is just a learned word which means looking at appearances and seeing what is truly present, in order to distinguish appearance from mirage and illusion. The courageous Buddha’s insight into what is truly present in appearances goes one step further than the German Philosopher was willing to go. This seminar is key to understanding how Western and Eastern thinking differ and where they agree in surprising ways.

Following his service in the U.S. Army as a drill sergeant, Gus Santo became a Benedictine monk for six years and studied philosophy, monastic history & theology.

After graduating summa cum laude from St. John’s University he was appointed an instructor as a member of the philosophy faculty at St. John’s. Later, Gus left the monastic life and worked as a job analyst at City Hall in Chicago for the Department of Human Resources. When he retired from the City of Chicago he became an MHP (Mental Health Professional) at Pioneer Center in McHenry, Illinois. He became a dharmic practitioner in 2020.

Gus has taught a variety of adult education philosophy classes at Unitarian Universalist Churches in Hartland, Wisconsin, and McHenry, and has led a number of seminars on Western Philosophy and Buddhism here at the Blue Lotus Temple in Woodstock.

Host or Publisher Blue Lotus Buddhist Temple & Meditation Center