Open Practice in Buddhism

Earlier this year, my Buddhist buddy ~C4Chaos launched his Open Practice, a public discussion of his readings and practice on his Buddhist path. He regularly tweets his meditation practice and his readings and studies of Buddhism, which is both educational and inspiring for others of us pursuing a Buddhist life.

Here is a bit from his blog post announcing his new Open Practice initiative:

What is Open Practice?

Open Practice is a journal of my “spiritual” practice, or simply, practice. In the spirit of Open source and active learning, I will attempt to share as best as I can, my approach, techniques, information, and subjective experiences, in a matter-of-factness way, as I undergo the process of awakening. My goal is not only to awaken, but also to demystify and secularize the path to enlightenment. This sounds like a lofty and arrogant goal. It is. But it’s better to shoot for the moon than to get lost in its reflection.

Open Practice is a work in progress. I’ll flesh it out as I go along. But for starters here are some of its concepts.

What Open Practice is:

• A matter-of-fact reporting of empirical subjective experiences. From this perspective Open Practice is an experiment. I’ll be playing the role of the”subject” of study. Readers play the role of science researchers who are gathering data points of subjective experiences. These data points can then be compared with religious, spiritual, psychological, and medical literature and used for further research on the “science of enlightenment.”
• Active learning. A good way of learning and embodying a practice is to talk about it and be proficient with its language and terminology. Creating a journal of my practice is one way of active learning.
• Open-sharing of techniques. I believe that there’s no one-size-fits-all awakening technology. We groove with what tickles our fancy. Meditation techniques that work for other people don’t work for others. I’ll do my best to document the techniques that work for me and share it with others.
• Increasing serendipitous understanding and meetings. One thing I learned in my years of blogging is that open-sharing leads to targeted serendipity–attracting other people who are openly sharing knowledge and information. This is a beneficial feedback loop that results in adding to our understanding of concepts through healthy dharma discussions and meeting other people online and offline, which then could lead to other serendipitous discoveries. Trust me on this. It’s the law of karma
• Inspiring others to pick up a practice. Hopefully, this would inspire people to question religious dogma and explore the deeper dimensions of the mystical core of their religious traditions. “The kingdom of God is within.” The doorway is practice and the fruition is Grace.

What Open Practice is Not:

• Bragging about attainments. This is not about showing off and proclaiming how good we are in our practice. There’s no place for our delusions of grandeur here.
• My teacher and method is better than yours. See open-sharing of techniques. But if you really think and believe that your method is the best, don’t tell. Show and prove it.
• Useless lemon-eating debates based on parroting and hearsay rather than experiential knowledge. If you’ve read this far, then this should be self-explanatory

Who are invited?

Everyone. If you have a blog (or lifestream), you’re a dedicated spiritual practitioner, and you don’t mind openly sharing your practice to everyone, then I encourage you to participate and start your own Open Practice. Let’s all step out in the open as we tread the path of awakening. And if along the way people raise their eyebrows and ask us what the heck are we doing and what this path is all about, here’s something we can tell them:

If anybody asks you what the Path is about,
It’s about generosity.
It’s about morality.
It’s about concentration.
It’s about gaining insight through
focused self-observation.
It’s about the cultivation of subjective states
of compassion and love based on insight.
And it’s about translating that compassion
and love into actions in the real world.

~Shinzen Young

Godspeed to all of us. Now let’s get it on!

Recently, my friend Alex Rollin has also created an Open Practice initiative - here is some of his blog post announcing his intent:

OpenPractice OpenLocalPractice - Meetup and Call for Fellows

Tue, 07/07/2009 - 16:48 — Alex Rollin

We are all welcomed into the world of individual awareness as we grow in our development. Some of us are called on to serve others in some capacity as aids to our brothers and sisters who are in the process of deepening their own awareness.

As a person who finds himself in such a place of being called on to aid my fellows I look at this as an opportunity to share my own experience and the opportunity before me.

In sharing my experience I am able to engage my peers in ways that I could not have anticipated and can therefore continue to grow and deepen my own awareness and experience.

In the sharing of this occasion I offer you who are reading this and others that you might know the opportunity to share in the building of an understanding or the patterns and ways of relating and the accompanying awareness that goes along with this territory.

As the form of the offer I invite you to begin from where you are at to share your understandings towards the effort of compiling our knowing and learning together and to offer our fellows access to a wider and deeper sense of our and their location in this great mix of relatedness and deepening of understanding of our awareness together.

I have engaged a small group of people in the building of an open system of mindfulness/awareness exercises, activities, and relationships. Would you like to participate?

You can participate by sharing your own development systems with the world through the internet.

By offering up the use of your systems you can allow and engage a network of practitioners who can shed further light and understanding on what you are doing and you can do the same in turn.

In this way I begin work on an Open Meditation system. This system will be designed to accomplish the following outcomes:

* Hold space in a physical location
* Engage active and conscious awakening of awareness
* Engage internal and external practices that support the awakening of awareness
* Provide internet accessible documentation of all practices
* Provide access to participants to reflect publicly on practices
* Provide practitioners with the opportunity to add information and instruction about practices in an effort to deepen understanding of practices
* Encourage the use and creation of additional networks for participants to share about practices
* Provide potential participants access to a network of active participants for the purpose of exploring the opportunities to practice with specific practitioners

As a practitioner I am not currently aware of systems where these outcomes are all present simultaneously. Through this post I hope to invite and engage other people and the networks of which they are part in understanding how these outcomes can be present in the same system or a combination of systems.

I plan to make myself a part of this project. I will begin posting periodic posts here on my practice, in addition to the Buddhist material and quotes I already post here pretty regularly.

I encourage other Buddhist (or other traditions) practitioners to do likewise, if it feels comfortable. The more we can share our practices, our experiences, and our growth, the better the sense of community we can create among those seeking to make ourselves - and our world - more whole and compassionate.

Tags: Buddhism, Open Practice, meditation, spirituality, ~C4Chaos, Alex Rollin, OpenLocalPractice, community, sangha