Awake in This Life

Terry Patton hits the topic of enlightened activism on several different levels in his most recent blog post.

One of the problems with conventional political activism is that it can be so painfully egoic. Egos commonly experience anxiety, and on that basis they feel an urgency to take action. But anxiety-based activism tends to recreate the disharmony that motivates it. If you’ve ever volunteered in a political campaign or for a political cause, you’ve probably come across the incredible narrowing of vision—and often the incredible lack of understanding or compassion for the “other side”—that accompanies these efforts, even if the candidate or cause is otherwise just. That anxious urgency frequently leads to unnecessary conflict, emotional burnout, and even a disaffected cynicism that gives up on the very possibility of meaningful change.

via Evolutionary Activism — A Bodhidharma Strategy | The Integral Heart.

Could it be that the MSM is verging on a discussion involving higher order self-hood? Is fully responding to life starting to creep into our dialog? While this column doesn’t necessarily do this, we can still lean into hope.

The person leading the Well-Planned Life emphasizes individual agency, and asks, “What should I do?” The person leading the Summoned Life emphasizes the context, and asks, “What are my circumstances asking me to do?”

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Summoned Self – NYTimes.com.

Sensors up, heart open.

I’m always appreciative of empirical explorations of the things I yammer on about from the cushion. I also like that for any of Brooks’ perceived failings he’s intellectually curious; something refreshing among the punditocracy.  We are, it appears, moral animals. But when we attach to our morality, we lose its offering.

By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.

Paul Bloom of Yale noted that this moral sense can be observed early in life. Bloom and his colleagues conducted an experiment in which they showed babies a scene featuring one figure struggling to climb a hill, another figure trying to help it, and a third trying to hinder it.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Moral Naturalists – NYTimes.com.

As much as I enjoy philosophical discourse, the whole “Free Will” things get’s old. This, in my view, is because the arguments as to whether or not we have it tend to miss the most fundamental aspect of the debate: free will is an intedependancy. In other words, there is no free will if there is no fresh water or clean air. Any of our choices depends on all sorts of stuff. I once heard it said that the Buddha pointed this out at Deer Park when he exclaimed, “There’s no such thing as independence! All things are interdependent. Got that, Jack?”

Still, in “Your Move: The Maze of Free Will” , GALEN STRAWSON, makes the flawed case… again.

You arrive at a bakery. It’s the evening of a national holiday. You want to buy a cake with your last 10 dollars to round off the preparations you’ve already made. There’s only one thing left in the store — a 10-dollar cake.

On the steps of the store, someone is shaking an Oxfam tin. You stop, and it seems quite clear to you — it surely is quite clear to you — that it is entirely up to you what you do next. You are — it seems — truly, radically, ultimately free to choose what to do, in such a way that you will be ultimately morally responsible for whatever you do choose. Fact: you can put the money in the tin, or you can go in and buy the cake. You’re not only completely, radically free to choose in this situation. You’re not free not to choose (that’s how it feels). You’re “condemned to freedom,” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase. You’re fully and explicitly conscious of what the options are and you can’t escape that consciousness. You can’t somehow slip out of it.

via Your Move: The Maze of Free Will – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.

Soren Gordhamer, organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, writes that we need to 1.) know that our external reflects our internal, 2.) do one thing at a time, 3.) invite instead of force, and 4.) know where our attention is most needed. Phrases for any spiritual practitioner to live by.

As a conclusion, Gordhamer gives us this money quote:

In the coming years, the amount information at our disposal is only likely to increase. When Google recently launched Google Buzz, their team addressed the challenges of this information era, saying, “we want to present some tools and techniques to help you manage your attention better.” While this is partly a technological problem, it is also an internal and life balance problem.The challenge of our time is to live connected and use all the great social media available to us, while at the same time harness and direct our attention where it is most needed at any given time. After all, where we decide to put our attention is, essentially, how we choose to spend our life.

Blogger, Matthew Yglesias suggests:

The map lumps the plains states in with the church belt, but if you look at the data more specifically you’ll see that nine of the ten churchiest states are in the south and the remaining one is Utah.

Question: I’ve got a nuts-and-bolts question about meditation.  There are so many varieties:  following the breath, paying attention to whatever arises,  focusing on something particular (like a prayer), Tonglen, etc.  After years of teaching and practice, which methods have proven most helpful to you and your students? Is it useful to try different types of meditation at different stages?  What are your recommendations for the beginner, as well as the more experienced student?

Answer: This is a great series of questions about what is core to any authentic spiritual practice. So let me first start by saying that the heart of enlightenment, or awakening, or whatever you want to call it, is stillness. We can uncover the stillness that is the source of everything when we become truly still in these bodies we inhabit. Now as simple as this sounds, most of us find it rather difficult to actually become still. There is always a sense of movement, be it in the body or the mind, that minimizes our recognition of stillness. We might recognize it briefly, but then in our excitement we find that it’s gone. So we practice, over and over, moment by moment, year after year, to open ourselves to the deep quietude that permeates and lies beneath all experience, by meditating.

When we start out, we usually find it difficult, so we do simple things like following the breath, scanning the body, or reciting a sacred verse or mantra. All of these are great ways to open our experience to stillness, since they tend to allow our discursive minds to take a break. Suddenly we notice that the chatter has died down and there is a vastness to our experience that we may never have known before. It’s not beginner’s luck. It’s an invitation to the amazing party of authentic spiritual work, a celebration that is at once glorious and challenging.

As we get better and better at stilling our mind, we can begin to use any number of different techniques to train ourselves more deeply, allowing us to explore the various meditative states that are always available to us. However, I’ve seen this exploration lead people astray for years. They become skilled at uncovering various meditative states and confuse these states with enlightenment. Enlightenment is not a state. Rather, it’s the groundless ground of all states that is consciously integrated into the lives of those practitioners interested in sharing it. This is why I prefer to encourage students to simply open to what is showing up in the moment, then watch without commentary as each thought or feeling shows up. Just watch. As this watching continues, a subtle awareness of what we might call the “watcher” develops.  This is a naked awareness that is both still and totally oriented in the present moment. Consciously meeting our lives from this open stillness can’t help but awaken us to what is eternal in us.

Give it a shot… and report back.

Over at digitalZENDO, there is an great piece on discussing the elusive experience of insight that Zennists call kensho:

Avoiding talking about Kensho, does not make use virtuous or spiritual. Maybe it’s the contrary, it perhaps avoiding a direct conversation that could be valuable.

I actually agree that at times we blow this one. A direct conversation about it is valuable. How we do it, however, really matters. For any teacher to, as an example, to offer up their experience as a model will only generate more attachment among their students. Especially if the students are far enough along the path to be desperate for enlightenment. On the other hand, totally clamming up about kensho generates attachment as well.

Jaye Seiho Morris points out that the work is important and takes guts:

It’s a unswerving and progressive effort towards “full awakening,” at the same time, learning to be helpful as possible to others, without thought to how I might personally benefit. Anything aiming for less than that target is settling.

Settling only results in a kind of purgatory where our egos know enough to be dangerous and our True Nature remains only partially realized. This partiality will always lead to suffering because there is a felt sense of being perpetually incomplete. It is best for all concerned to go all the way with the process of “uncovery” and refuse to settle for anything less that Dai Kensho, or the Great Awakening. At the same time, it is imperative that teachers remind their students that the experience of awakening is not awakening. Clinging to one’s experience of kensho, be it great or not, only lets the ego in the back door of the whole process, thus derailing it.

Last week’s  NYTimes.com posted a nice piece by Norman Fischer:

As most people know, a Zen meditation retreat is not a vacation. Despite the silence and the beauty, despite the respite from the busyness, the experience can be grueling. The meditation practice is intense and relentless, the feeling in the hall rigorous and disciplined. We start pretty early in the morning and meditate all day long, into the late evening. It can be uncomfortable physically and emotionally. And some people find it hard not to talk at all for a week. So, what’s in it for them?

Read on…

Rachel Hiles comments on her twitter reluctance over at Tricycle in a post called  A Buddhist’s Guide to Twitter.

As someone slow to embrace the Twitter phenomenon, I’ve approached the site with great caution, and perhaps a touch of suspicion. I often wondered if I could use Twitter without falling victim to my ego and shamelessly indulging in detailing the ins-and-outs of my day, giving a digital voice to my inner monologue. Determined not to be the last person on earth who wasn’t “tweeting,” I did some research and found the advice of Soren Gordhamer especially helpful. In a recent Huffington Post blog post “If the Buddha Used Twitter…” Gordhamer suggests 5 ways in which the Buddha might have approached Twitter, reminding us that it’s not what we tweet but how we live away from our online worlds that really matters…

Of course you can read on, but make sure you give Gordhamer’s post a read as well.

Bodhipaksa, over at Wildmind has just posted this fascinating article:

People who meditate have bigger brains than those who don’t, say researchers at UCLA.

Using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of meditators and non-meditators, they found that those who meditated showed significantly larger volumes of the hippocampus and areas within the orbito-frontal cortex, the thalamus and the inferior temporal gyrus—all regions known for regulating emotions.

Read on… here.

I recently received this in a wonderful letter from one of our virtual sangha members in Germany. It’s a beautiful reminder of how this practice can have profound effects on our families:

Kids develop in phases and each jump to the next level
seems to bring with it both a regression in behavior as well as deep
insecurity shown as uncontainable anger and frustration. As a parent, I find
it very hard to deal with, especially if the phase takes time. Of course
this is nothing compared to real parenting trouble, but a 5 and a half year
old child that is sent into a tantrum over minute digressions from the
24-hour-Club-Med routine she is getting is tough. But tough for whom? Tough
for my ego since my daughter needs to be perfect? Tough for her since she
obviously suffers so much under her own state? Or is it an opening?
Incident after incident I seemed to handle it wrong and say or do the wrong
things. Finally, at the end of my rope last week, I just “sat” with her
anger. I told her I am just going to sit still near her and when she needs
me I am there, with my full compassion. Instead of the usual spiral effect,
after 3 minutes she stopped kicking and screaming and collapsed into a
puddle of tears in my lap. We just sat there for another 20 minutes, holding
each other in silence. There was nothing I could teach her in that moment
that would have helped. No words made sense, just presence. Later on, we
even had a quiet talk about the whole thing.

May we all hold each other in silence.

Over at One City, Julia May Jonas offers Buddhism’s newest celebrity convert (as well as other newbies) some great advice.

Kate Moss, I think this could be a good fit. And to welcome you into the fold, I thought I’d share some tips that might help with your first six months of study. Now I am no Buddhist teacher (far from it), but I have an advantage of having started meditating and studying Buddhism recently and therefore I remember fairly clearly what did and didn’t work. So without further adieu, I present to you, and the rest of the burgeoning dharmic community, my completely unauthorized, subjective and possibly inacurrate top ten recommendations for those beginning Buddhist months:

Read on.

In my experience it is a mistake to equate one’s spiritual path with the pursuit of happiness, as it were. Climbing the mountain of spirit is about becoming increasingly conscious rather than resting in eternal bliss. Mark Vernon writes about this topic in today’s Guardian.

Equating Buddhism with happiness, to stay with that particular association, will dumb it down.

I couldn’t agree more. Equating any authentic path with happiness does the same thing.

Take the Buddhist writer Matthieu Ricard’s book, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill. This French monk, who has spent years living in Nepal, has also written a sophisticated tome on philosophy and a penetrating volume on the interface between science and religion. But his happiness book is a huge disappointment. It trades in the more or less obvious, and seems mostly concerned to align Buddhism with positive psychology, presumably so as to gain from the good PR of the so-called science of happiness.

The concern is that Ricard knows better. Right at the end of his book he explains why the science of happiness actually won’t do. However commendable and altruistic its goals, he explains, it bases its analyses “on a rather fuzzy assessment of the nature of happiness, lumping together superficial pleasures and deep-felt happiness.”

Could it be that happiness is a temporary state that arises spontaneously out of the trait of the ever deepening awareness brought on by meditation? Happiness ebbs and flows, in other words, while consciousness has the potential to perpetually increase.

Contrast Ricard’s book with Stephen Batchelor’s introductory classic, Buddhism Without Beliefs. Batchelor was a monk for many years too. He speaks Tibetan and reads Pali. He is also heavily engaged in bringing Buddhism into the west. So what does his book have to say about happiness? Precisely nothing. The word itself appears exactly once in his text, and then only to dismiss it.

This is a great point. But this isn’t to say that happiness isn’t a byproduct of an authentic spiritual practice. And what is an authentic spiritual practice? It’s a body and mind that are both committed to meeting stillness, over and over again. Results are best when this practice is coupled with a guide who knows the terraign, a map of the terraign, and a group interested in walking the terraign together.

Living in this way, however, is not necessarily, as Vernon asserts, a “pick’n'mix approach” or a “search for the tastiest bits” of Buddhism or other traditional practice. In fact, while often problematic for seekers, traditions can be helpful in familiarizing us with the terraign of practice as much as it can be a hindrance. Furthermore, cherry-picking from traditions as a way of offering tastes of happiness will always keep awakening to the Truth beyond name and form at bay. But there are many valid approaches to deepening our consciousness that have nothing to do with either dumbing down tradition or selling bits and pieces of happiness.

For those interested in enlightenment, their spiritual work can not be about simply seeking happiness. Rather, it must be about seeing what’s true… even if it hurts. Even if the truth isn’t pretty, even if the mess of it all is overwhelming, the serious practitioner knows that facing his or her life with their full attention, without flinching, is the work. Once this process integrates itself with any serious student, they will find that happiness comes and goes while awareness only intensifies. This intensity brings with it something deeper than happiness; something we might call peace. And that peace has the potential to inform all things with the quiet joy that is always present in every moment.

One of the simplest influences on my early practice was a line delivered by a very unassuming Zen priest. She told me that unlike prayer, which was like talking to God, meditation involved nothing other than listening to God.

Listen. Listen with your full mind and you will learn exactly what the Universe is trying to teach.

It wasn’t long after this bit of wisdom was thrown at me that I began to think that the whole idea of prayer was a little odd. Why would God care what I wanted? Why ask God for favors? Besides, wasn’t God infinite, and if so, how could He be separate from me? Talking to God, then, is an act of supreme egocentrism.

Anyway, a national day of prayer is about to be celebrated and Deepak Chopra offers up a nice bit of writing on the subject:

Whether or not a national day of prayer is worthy of the name depends on what prayer is meant to be. In the Bush era, public or group prayer followed the pattern set down by Nixon in the Sixties: it was a validation of conservative values. God was for law and order and against hippies. God was against anyone who didn’t believe in him, a ridiculous position when you think about it. Shouldn’t God, of all beings, not need the approval of others? As long as prayer was simply a shout-out to evangelicals and supporters of the current war, I think it had little value as a national activity.

And I love this question; one so similar to the one I asked all those years ago:

… prayer is one process: consciousness interacting with itself. Religions enforce a division between the one who prays and the one who answers, but why?

Over at the Intent.com, Yumi Sakugawa points out something I’ve noticed for some time in our sangha:

In new research highlighted by an article on the ABC news site today, more and more young Americans are less likely to go to church or identify themselves by any organized religion. According to the article, between 30 to 40 percent of young Americans say they have no religious affiliation.

Considering that the percentage of non-religious people generally fell between 5 to 10 percent in the past, this new data may foreshadow tremendous changes in American politics and culture as more and more of these young non-religious Americans grow up to enter the work force, partcipate in politics annd start raising families of their own. It is highly possible that this trend may continue to increase in the years to come.

The Director of the Interfaith Center of New York, Matthew Weiner, offers up some thoughts over at the Huffington Post, where he gives a fairly unsophisticated presentation of karmic consequence.

Barbara O’Brien offers this assessment:

[Mattew] Weiner takes the position that because Buddhism does teach that a life begins at conception, Buddhists are somehow being dishonest with themselves if they are pro-choice on abortion. This is something I’ve addressed in “Buddhism and Abortion.” I agree that abortion has karmic consequences, but so does imposing rigid moral absolutes on women desperate for abortions.

Karma arises out of clinging, according to traditions. Any of us can get stuck in the tangled web of karma when we attach to our egoic views of what is absolutely right or absolutely wrong. Buddhism, as well as the other nondual traditions, show us a path that supports a way of developing an intimacy with our attachments so that we might soften them, thus breaking what holds them in place. In so doing, we step off the Wheel of Samsara, so to speak, and from this place, an appropriate response is always revealed; one that is generous to all concerned.

Michael Paulson and James F. Smith of the The Boston Globe report on the Dalai Lama’s visit to Cambridge:

After the Dalai Lama slipped off his shoes, crammed his crossed legs into a too-narrow chair, and unceremoniously blew his nose, the world’s most revered and honored Buddhist monk offered a bit of wisdom for the sages: Being smart doesn’t make you happy.

This is a great reminder for both brilliant practitioners and wannabe brilliant practitioners. Still we should be careful. It’s important that we not get anti-intellectual about our practice. Dopey, for all his charm, wasn’t necessarily an enlightened dwarf. At least that’s what I was once told by a rather highly regarded Dharma teacher some years back.

The mind, as well as the ego, afterall, are both divine manifestations of the Infinite. It’s in the getting caught by our minds, brilliant or otherwise, that we find problems. Seeing the mind as a tool rather than getting tooled by the mind takes us to the heart of awakening.

Okay, not really, but over at EnlightenNext, Tom Huston points to Howard Bloom’s vision of how we need to mend rather than end capitalism.

In the midst of our current financial crisis, it may seem natural to cast doubt on the entire enterprise of Western capitalism and wonder if its basic tenets of progress and production have led humanity astray. But according to avant-garde cultural theorist Howard Bloom, writing in EnlightenNext back in 2005, such dismissals tend to overlook the true evolutionary significance of our economic system:
The problem does not lie in the turbines of the Western way of life—industrialism, capitalism, pluralism, free speech, and democracy. The problem lies in the lens through which we see. Capitalism works. It works clumsily, awkwardly, sometimes brilliantly, and sometimes savagely. So we need to dig down to find out why. We need to reveal the deeper meaning beneath what we’ve been told is crass materialism and see how profoundly our obsessive making and exchanging of goods and services has upgraded the nature of our species.

This is a topic I’ve touched on several times in this blog. It’s also fascinating that these basic ideas of retooling capitalism were hinted at by a German named Friedrich List way back in his 1837 book, The Natural System of Political Economy. For those interested, James Fallows covers this topic extensively in his Atlantic article, “How the World Works” .

Fallows writes that List’s alternative economic view offers a way through the obvious “market failures” that old-school, Adam Smith-style capitalism can foster. Could any of us say that Friedrich List was Buddhist in his leanings? Probably not. But as opposed to the dominant Anglo view of economic reality, List’s alternative rests on interdependence rather than what Adam Smith referred to as an invisible hand. Once List’s style of interdependence begins to influence policy, the market can’t be mistakenly seen as God. Furthermore, like Howard Bloom’s some 170 years later, List’s version of economic reality shows us that markets are merely reflections of how we cooperatively meet each other and meet ourselves.