Meditation starts with your body: A Buddhadharma discussion

One of the reasons I was first drawn to Tibetan Buddhism over the other traditions is that they seemed to include the body as a necessary part of the path to enlightenment (more than the Theravada tradition, anyway). Perhaps it was a reaction to my Catholic upbringing in which I was taught that they body, indirectly at least, is associated with original sin.

All of that is simply to say that this discussion from Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly on the body in meditation is very cool.

Meditation starts with your body: A Buddhadharma discussion with Phillip Moffit, Cyndi Lee, Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, and Reginald Ray

Too often we think that meditation is only about training the mind, and that can lead to problems in our practice. In the new issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly, four teachers discuss the important role of the body in Buddhist practice.

They also talk about how to relate to one’s own body and engage with it in meditation practice. Read it, along with Anne C. Klein’s introduction, after the jump.

The teachers in this panel discussion are: Phillip Moffit, from the Spirit Rock Meditation Center; Cyndi Lee, yoga teacher and author of Yoga Body, Buddha Mind; Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, a lama in the Bon Dzogchen tradition of Tibet; and Reggie Ray, author of Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body.

The issue goes on newsstands on Tuesday, August 18. But you can read the discussion here, beginning with its introduction, by Anne Carolyn Klein:

When we hear words like “meditation,” “mindfulness,” or “mind training,” we often assume we’re working with our minds alone. But nothing could be further from the way it really is. Meditation, mindfulness, and mind training are full-being enterprises. They involve our whole body and our body’s energies, including how speech expresses those energies, and how mind rides on them.

It’s not surprising that we think about mind training in this way. Since Descartes, Western culture has articulated a chasm-like divide between mind and body, and an analogous one between reason and emotion. But emotions are experienced so strongly through the body that when we leave it out of our meditation equation, we are likely to leave feelings aside as well. And when meditation does not encompass feelings, it is difficult for practice to reorient our lives as deeply as we intend it to do and need it to do.

The discussion here illuminates the body’s importance in several ways. As Phillip Moffitt and Reggie Ray point out, observation of the body helps us overcome the sense of solidity we have superimposed on it. In this way, the body gives us access to our conditioned nature, a teaching central to Buddhist teachings. The more dualistic our sense of mind and body, the more we objectify the body and see it as a tool for our use. This, in turn, reinforces our mistaken sense of the body as a thing. As all students of Buddhism know, moving past the illusion of solidity is vital for removing the further delusion that we are, or have, a self-enclosed independent self. We are not such a self, and we don’t have such a self. Never did.

The panelists note that by beginning with “the part of our minds we call the body,” we find easier access to stabilizing our awareness. As Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche points out, if we work with the body, we can avoid forcing the mind to be quiet. The mind will quiet naturally, because body and mind profoundly affect one another. Focused on the body, our mind is less likely to wander off into our own story lines.

Moreover, through understanding the way coarse and subtle energies move through the body, we can appreciate that our posture directly affects our minds, just as the state of our mind will also affect our body. This is the significance of the different postures and movements of Tibetan and Indian yogic practices.

Through an experience of the conditioned nature of the body, we also begin to approach the unconditioned. The body can bring us to the ultimate in two ways.

First, as noted, we can see through the illusions of permanence, solidity, or independence that we superimpose on our body and everything else, especially our sense of self. Unless we stop to reflect, even our own mind appears to us in that guise: “I’m always angry. I can’t change this.”

Second, the state of enlightenment itself is expressed in what are known as the three bodies, or dimensions. These are purified analogues of our own body. Our “buddha-fied” physical body becomes the emanation body (nirmanakaya), our energy becomes the resplendent body (sambhogakaya), and our genuine mind becomes the truth body (dharmakaya). There is much to understand here at a refined level. At the very least, it is clear we must open deeply to the subtle reality of our own body, speech-energy, and mind-nature to manifest their enlightened potential.

Viewed in these ways, the body is not just something associated with our individual manifestation in the world. When we feel into it more subtly, we can experience what Cyndi Lee calls “the energetic circuitry” that connects people. This is a palpable force in practice, and an important reason why all Buddhist traditions encourage us to practice together, in the same room, or in imagined synchronicity, so that the dedication of our full minds and bodies can support us in the unfolding of practice. As Nagarjuna famously said, through paying attention to the conventional, the conditioned, we will recognize the ultimate, the unconditioned. We recognize it not as some abstract truth, but as our own intimate nature, the ground of the entire mind-body system.

That was just the introduction - go read the discussion.

Tags: Meditation starts with your body, A Buddhadharma discussion, Phillip Moffit, Cyndi Lee, Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Reginald Ray, Buddhism, body, meditation, Buddhadharma, Shambhala Sun Space

Soma siddhas and alchemical enlightenment: Psychedelic mushrooms in Buddhist tradition

Very interesting article I found today courtesy of a link from American Buddhist Net.

I don't know about others, but this is not at all surprising. The indigenous Tibetan religion before Buddhism arrived was deeply shamanic, and it had close ethnographic ties to Siberian shamanic traditions where the use of amanita muscaria was common (and still is).

Soma siddhas and alchemical enlightenment: psychedelic mushrooms in Buddhist tradition

Scott Hajicek-Dobberstein
3322 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94114, USA

Received 6 November 1993; revision received 7 February 1994; accepted 16 February 1995

Citation

Soma siddhas and alchemical enlightenment: psychedelic mushrooms in Buddhist tradition. Hajicek-Dobberstein S. J Ethnopharmacol, 1995; 48(2):99-118.

Abstract

In the legendary biographies of some Buddhist adepts from the 2nd- and 9th-eenturies there are some clues which can be interpreted to reveal that the adepts were consuming psychedelic Amanita muscaria, 'fly agaric', mushrooms to achieve enlightenment. This secret ingredient in the alchemical elixir they used to attain 'realization' was, of course, unnamed, in keeping with their vows to maintain the secrecy of their practices. Its identity was concealed behind a set of symbols, some of which appeared in the Soma symbol system of the Rg Veda, some other symbols possibly passed down from a time of earlier shamanic use of the mushroom in the forests of Northern Eurasia, and some symbols that may be unique to these Buddhist legends. The congruity of these sets of symbols from Northern and Southern Asian traditions will be shown to be reflected in the Germanic tradition in some characteristics of the Oldest God, Odin.

Keywords: Amanita muscaria; Soma; Buddhism; Psychedelic drugs; Odin

Here is a passage on the source materials:

2. Materials
2.1. The hagiographies of Buddhist siddhas

Yet, such references to practitioners of religious rituals actually using the psychedelic mushroom do exist. I have found them in The Stories of the Eighty-Four Siddhas (Skt. Caturasitisiddhapravrtti, Tib. Grub thob brgyad cu rtsa bzhi'i 10 rgyw) which was translated into Tibetan and written down in the late l l th- or early 12th-century C.E. by the monk Smon-grub-shes-rab, as narrated to him in Sanskrit by Abhayadatta. The attribution of author, translator and origin of the text given in its colophon does not mention an original Sanskrit text as a source. This conspicuous omission may suggest derivation from oral tradition. A discussion of the identities of the purported author and translator can be found in Dowman (1985, pp. 384-88).

The most likely sources of the eighty-four thumb-nail biographies that make up this work were the legends of each of the siddhas which were passed down as oral hagiography by his or her disciples and later compiled, possibly by Abhayadatta who did not include a record of his sources.

There are two English translations of this work, Robinson (1979) and Dowman (1985). Both translators worked under the guidance of Tibetan lama advisors. Robinson's translation is very close to the Tibetan text, but Dowman presents a self-described adaption 'from the stilted mnemonic style of the Tibetan manuscript to give a fluent idiomatic rendering into English while maintaining fidelity to the original meaning' (Dowman, 1985,p. xii). At least in the story of the siddha Karnaripa, Dowman and his lama advisors completely missed the 'original meaning'. This story, which reveals the identity of the secret ingredient of the alchemical elixir which brings enlightenment, is interpreted by Dowman simply as a parable of the siddha's humility and modesty! Robinson also fails to reveal the real meaning of the story of Karnaripa, which is not explicitly expressed in the story, but he does not obscure the real meaning with imperceptive, misinformed impressions. I present my own translation of the story of the siddha Karnaripa below. I have tried to keep my translation as close as possible to the literal content of the Tibetan text, so that those who do not read Tibetan can interpret for themselves the imagery and symbolic elements of the story.

Go read the whole article - I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Tags: Buddhism, shamanism, entheogens, Enlightenment, Soma siddhas and alchemical enlightenment: psychedelic mushrooms, Buddhist tradition, Scott Hajicek-Dobberstein, Amanita muscaria, fly agaric, Journal of Ethnopharmacology

Upaya Dharma Poscasts - Neurobiology of We, part 2 of 9

Here is part two of this awesome series of podcasts from Dan Siegel's recent stint at the Upaya Zen Center.

Neurobiology of We part 2 of 9

Speakers: Roshi Joan Halifax, Daniel Siegel, MD

In meditation, begins Roshi, our posture reflects our inner world: present, respectful, connected. These aspects promote stability so that we can perceive reality accurately and respond skillfully. Dan’s definitions of important terms elicit discussion of how we perceive “information” in the world. He goes on to discuss brain anatomy and how information travels to the brain.

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Neurobiology of We part 2 of 9 [81:48m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download [Play]

Tags: Psychology, Buddhism, meditation, Upaya Zen Center, Dharma Poscasts, Neurobiology of We, part 2 of 9, Roshi Joan Halifax, Daniel Siegel, mindfulness, brain, neuroscience

SciAm Mind - Does Language Shape What We Think?

Interesting article - I have long been fascinated by the notion that we cannot conceive of things (at least rationally) for which we have no language.

This compound notion that language allows you to have ideas otherwise un-haveable, and that by extension people who own different words live in different conceptual worlds -- called "Whorfianism" after its academic evangelist, Benjamin Lee Whorf -- is so pervasive in modern thought as to be unremarkable.

Too bad this is not really how it works most of the time. While linguists came to this conclusion through their studies, I came to my own rejection of Whorfianism through meditation. Some things are knowable for which there is no language.

Does Language Shape What We Think?

A new study looks at what happens when a language doesn't have words for numbers

By Joshua Hartshorne

Vladimir Vladimirov

My seventh-grade English teacher exhorted us to study vocabulary with the following: "We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." This compound notion that language allows you to have ideas otherwise un-haveable, and that by extension people who own different words live in different conceptual worlds -- called "Whorfianism" after its academic evangelist, Benjamin Lee Whorf -- is so pervasive in modern thought as to be unremarkable.

Eskimos, as is commonly reported, have myriads of words for snow, affecting how they perceive frozen percipitation. A popular book on English notes that, unlike English, "French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition ... and knowledge that results from understanding." Politicians try to win the rhetorical battle ("pro-life" vs. "anti-abortion"; "estate tax" vs. "death tax") in order to gain the political advantage.

For all its social success, Whorfianism has fared less well scientifically. Careful consideration of the examples above shows why. Try calling dry snow "dax" and wet snow "blicket," and see if you notice a change in how you think about snow. I didn't. The English book's statement assumes that if you don't have a word for something, you can't talk about it ... a claim that the sentence proves false. Finally, calling the law of October 26, 2001 the "USA Patriot Act" may have done as much to stain the word "patriot" as increase enthusiasm for the law.

Oh, and Eskimos don't have all that many words for snow.

In fact, scientists have had so much difficulty demonstrating that language affects thought that in 1994 renown psychologist Steven Pinker called Whorfianism dead. Since then, Whorfianism has undergone a small resurgence. For instance, Lera Boroditsky and colleagues found that speakers of Russian, which treats light blue and dark blue as primary colors, are faster to categorize shades of blue.

While fascinating and important work, these and other similar results are a bit short of showing that "the more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." The recent study that comes closest is an investigation of number.

Although number words and counting are a fixture of life in most cultures from the time we are old enough to play hide-and-go-seek, some languages have only a handful of number words. In a paper published in 2008, MIT cognitive neuroscientist Michael Frank and colleagues demonstrated that Pirahã, a language spoken by a small Amazonian community, has no number words at all. The research team simply asked Pirahã speakers to count different numbers of batteries, nuts and other common objects. Rather than having a word consistently used to describe "one X" a different word for "two Xs" and yet another word for "three Xs," the Pirahã used hói to describe a small number of objects, hoí to describe a slightly larger number, and baágiso for an even larger number. Basically, these words mean "around one," "some" and "many."

The lack of number words had a profound and surprising effect on what the Pirahã could do. In a series of experiments, the researchers presented Pirahã participants with some number of spools of thread. The participants' task was simply to give the researcher the same number of balloons. If the participants were allowed to line up the balloons next to the spools of thread one-by-one, they did fine. But if they weren't allowed this crutch -- for instance, if the spools of thread were dropped into a bucket one at a time, and then the participant had to produce the same number of balloons -- they failed. Although they were generally able to stay in the ballpark -- if a lot of spools went into the bucket, they produced a lot of balloons; a small number of spools, a small number of balloons -- their responses were basically educated guesses.

Could it be that the Pirahã not understand the concept of "same amount"? That's unlikely. When allowed to match the balloons to spools one-by-one, they succeeded in the task. Instead, it seems that they failed to give the same number of balloons only when they had to rely on memory.

This actually makes a lot of sense. Try to imagine exactly seventeen balloons in your head, but without counting them. It's impossible. Decades of research have shown that people can tell the difference between one object and two or between three objects and four without counting, but such fine distinctions with larger numbers like seventeen versus eighteen requires counting. You wouldn't match seventeen balloons to seventeen spools by sight alone. You would count the spools and then count out the same number of balloons.

But the Pirahã can't count. They don't have number words.

This suggests a different way of thinking about the influence of language on thought: words are very handy mnemonics. We may not be able to remember what seventeen spools looks like, but we can remember the word seventeen. In his landmark The Language of Thought, philosopher Jerry Fodor argued that many words work like acronyms. French students use the acronym bans to remember which adjectives go before nouns ("Beauty, Age, Number, Goodneess, and Size"). Similarly, sometimes its easier to remember a word (calculus, Estonia) than what the word stands for. We use the word, knowing that should it becomes necessary, we can search through our minds -- or an encyclopedia -- and pull up the relevant information (how to calculate an integral; Estonia's population, capital and location on a map). Numbers, it seems, work the same way.

I don't know whether my seventh-grade English teacher would be disappointed. Do more words mean more thoughts? Probably not. But more words do make it easier to remember those thoughts -- and sometimes that's just as important.

~ ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Joshua Hartshorne is a PhD student in the psychology of language at Harvard University. Participate in his experiments at coglanglab.org.

Tags: Psychology, language, culture, Joshua Hartshorne, Scientific American Mind, Does Language Shape What We Think?, Whorfianism, Pirahã, Michael Frank, Steven Pinker

Brains - Should Scientific Methods and Data be Public?

Very cool post from a very cool blog. I especially like his statement at the end on introspection as a public form of data gathering - the #openpractice idea. Introspection - specifically meditation - should be a viable form of data gathering in science of mind research, but in order for it to have any validity, it must be an open form of research, with methods and approaches made available so that others might replicate the research. This is the only way we will ever have a valid first person science.

Should Scientific Methods and Data be Public?

This entry was posted on 8/18/2009 9:44 AM and is filed under Philosophy of Science.

At the last Eastern APA meeting in Philly, I attended an excellent session on The Epistemology of Experimental Practices, with Allan Franklin and Marcel Weber. During the discussion, I asked whether scientific methods and data should be public – that is, whether different investigators applying the same methods to the same questions should get the same data.

Franklin argued that publicity is not necessary, because some experiments might be too difficult or expensive to replicate, and different data analyses by different groups count as different experiments. This seems pretty wrong to me.

For one thing, I got the impression that Franklin didn’t fully understand what method publicity amounts to. Publicity does not require that all experiments be replicated; only that it is possible for different investigators to apply the same methods, and if they did, then they would get the same results. (Of course, much hinges on what we mean by “possible” and who counts as an investigator; for some more details, see here.)

For another thing, it’s better to say that actual replication of experiments is often unnecessary, as Marcel Weber said. Weber pointed out that experimentalists are part of a scientific network that shares techniques and materials, so they often feel they already know what was done. Nevertheless, Weber maintained that publicity is essential to science (and is implemented in the network itself, by the sharing of techniques etc.).

In fact, in his own talk, Allan Franklin listed a number of arguments/reasons for believing the results of experiments, along the lines of those listed in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Experiments in Physics. All of Franklin’s reasons seem to have to do with publicity and the public validation of data.

Does anyone else have opinions on this? Should scientific methods and data be public or is this methodological principle obsolete?

I care about this because there are philosophers who have argued that introspection is a private yet legitimate method of observation, and this shows that method publicity is not necessary for science. I think this view is a disaster. If we reject method publicity, it’s not clear why we should reject all kinds of pseudo-scientific methods.

(And incidentally, I’ve also argued elsewhere that introspection is not a private method of scientific observation; rather, it’s a process of self-measurement by which public data are generated.)

Tags: Brains, Should Scientific Methods and Data be Public?, APA, Gualtiero Piccinini, Psychology, research, meditation, Philosophy

Buddhist Geeks - Episode 134: The Erotic Embrace of Life and Meditation

Interesting discussion. Follow the link below to read the transcript if you would rather read this than listen to it.

Buddhist Geeks - Episode 134: The Erotic Embrace of Life and Meditation

We're joined today by Vidyuddeva, a young Zen teacher who spent 5 years in monastic training with Zen Master Steve Hagen. Vid is now a teacher in his own right, and teaches with both the iEvolve Practice Community as well as with the Integral Spiritual Center (founded by Ken Wilber).

In this episode, Vid shares with us how he came to the dharma, and how it eventually led to his time as a Zen monastic. He also turns the table on the Geeks and begins questioning us as to what the significance is between meditation and life. Listen in to hear more from this young & dynamic voice of wisdom.

Related Links:

• Support Buddhist Geeks with a Donation
• Free AudioBook Offer for Buddhist Geeks Listeners
• The Official Buddhist Geeks Newsletter
• Dharma Field Zen Center
• iEvolve: Global Practice Community

Tags: Buddhist Geeks, Episode 134, The Erotic Embrace of Life and Meditation, Buddhism, meditation, Vidyuddeva, Vince Horn, Ryan Oelke, Zen, Steve Hagen

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche - There’s No “I” in Happy

Another article from Shambhala Sun's collection on the science of happiness.

There’s No “I” in Happy

By Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

If “What about me?” is the thought that rules our day, says Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, then we are setting ourselves up for a life of fearfulness and struggle. Real happiness comes freom putting others first.

When we wake up in the morning, so often our first thought is some variation of “What about me?” If this thought drives our lives, fear and self-absorption rule us. We are so fixated on our own happiness that our mind begins to shrink, and with it, the possibility of happiness. Our days are full of difficulty because other people are inevitably getting in the way of our plan.

In meditation practice, we begin to notice how we go around and around, continually wanting happiness. Even though we’re intelligent and have made our world technologically sophisticated, most of us are still caught in a cycle. This is the meaning of samsara, the wheel of cyclic existence. We have all kinds of expectations and make all kinds of plans, but we are always setting ourselves up for disappointment.

What would real happiness be? It would be egolessness, the lack of struggle, and a fundamental joy and sense of celebration, not only in our own happiness but also in the happiness of others. When we meditate, we discover this bigger mind. The Buddha taught that fundamentally, our nature is stainless, basically good. Within that goodness is wisdom, compassion, and the ability to care for others. When we experience the truth of that goodness, we feel content, and from that perspective, we automatically notice what is happening with other people. Just like us, they want happiness. Like us, they do not want to suffer.

The crowning jewel of the heart and mind is the ability to extend love and compassion to others. The essence of love is that we want them to experience happiness. The essence of compassion is that we wish for them not to suffer. If we contemplate this attitude—called nyingje in Tibetan, meaning “noble mind and heart”—we will have success in our daily situation. Extending ourselves to others increases our life-force energy, and love and care begin to bind our family, our business, and our life. Considering others is the basis of any spiritual and worldly success, if we define success as having a fulfilled, meaningful, and permanently happy mind. If we help others, we will all find the happiness we want.

We begin to access this potential through meditation, where we get familiar with our inherent strength. We become familiar with love and compassion, resting in a mind that is opening up. The emotional aspect of compassion is a sign of weakness in the ego—some openness has taken place.

At the beginning, sitting within the mind of compassion and love may feel overwhelming. We’ve been doing “What about me?” practice for so long that opening up is scary. We’ve been focusing so hard on ourselves that when we begin to turn it around and think of others, we experience an unfamiliar sense of longing or wanting. But if we start with someone close to us, someone who doesn’t present any threat, we find that it feels natural to hope for that person’s well-being. We can generate those feelings of love, care, gentleness, and kindness.

In the absolute sense, it’s easy to think, “I would like everyone to have the root of happiness, enlightenment.” Then, on a relative level, there is the wish for others to have mundane happiness, to enjoy their lives and feel fulfilled. It is important to include this level of detail in the practice. If we are visualizing someone we don’t like so much, wishing them enjoyment, we may feel jealousy, agitation, and other emotions. The point of the practice is not especially to bring up negativity. However, our negativity may deepen our understanding of samsara and habitual patterns, which will help us feel what others are going through. Everyone suffers in the same way for the same basic reasons. At a certain point we begin to recognize the fundamental condition of the human realm, but not with a sense of one-upmanship, as in, “I see you doing it, too.”

Genuine compassion does not demean others. There’s an element of letting go. Specifically, wishing happiness for people we don’t like can make them easier to deal with. If we have a list of ten people we are angry with, as we work our way through the list, we will find it becoming easier to forgive. Because we’ve practiced, we can let go. Suddenly, we feel a sense of height, which comes from having created a platform of loving-kindness. We begin to see the transparent quality of our grudges and opinions.

Working with our mind continuously has a positive influence on our environment. Waiting in a bus terminal or an airport, we can think, “May all these people be happy. May none of them suffer.” If we can look at people from that point of view, rather than letting our mind chatter away with thoughts like “Get out of my way,” or “What a strange haircut,” we can make our whole day into practice. No matter how much time we’re putting in on the cushion, we will always be practicing.

Contemplative practice is not based on belief, but on intrinsic confidence and understanding. The Tibetan word for confidence is ziji. A person with ziji has dignity, the radiant power of a mind that has relaxed into its own inherent strength. With such a mind we are content, because we trust ourselves. We’re satisfied. Especially in this modern culture, we often feel we don’t have enough; we need more to be complete. But if we haven’t learned what is enough, then even when we have enough, we will not know it. The mind of ziji knows that we have plenty.

In Tibet, we say that the pleasure of a king and a beggar are the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor—the determining factor of success and happiness is contentment. Working with our mind through meditation, and then taking that mindfulness and compassion into the world, doesn’t mean we’re always going to get the perfect parking spot, or that everything will be on sale wherever we go. There are always going to be hassles. But if we start each day with meditation, then we are prepared to face the hassles. We will no longer take suffering as an insult—“Why me?” We will know that we can either crumble beneath unfortunate events, or we can use our powerful mind to rise above them.

If our mind and heart are fully present in whatever we are doing, our lives have meaning. There’s a sense of fulfillment. But if, at the end of the day, we lack a sense of internal satisfaction, life feels empty. At those times when we feel that there is no meaning, what has really happened is that our growth and curiosity have stopped. We’ve forgotten about love and compassion. Learning to balance the worldly with the spiritual has nothing to do with vocation and everything to do with intention.

Can we feel comfortable in our own mind and heart? Every morning, we need to contemplate what we’re going to do in our life today and how we will grow by benefiting those around us. We need to give ourselves the opportunity to foster a sense of love and care. Compassion and love are not simply a feeble response to hard times. If we have compassion and love for everyone—all beings—beyond the notion of friend and enemy, all our wishes will be fulfilled. With this kind of confidence, the basis of true happiness is ours.


~ Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche is spiritual director of Shambhala international, An international network of meditation and retreat centers. He is the author of Turning Your Mind into an Ally and Ruling Your World.

There's No "I" in Happy, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Shambhala Sun, March 2007.

Tags: Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, There’s No “I” in Happy, Buddhism, Shambhala Sun, happiness, meditation

Ode Magazine - How laughter can keep you on your spiritual path

Nice article - laughter is not only good medicine, it's good for your soul.

How laughter can keep you on your spiritual path

Carmel Wroth | August 2009 issue

Known as the “hugging saint,” Amma might just as well be called the laughing saint.

Photograph: Money Sharma/EPA/Corbis

A few years ago, I traveled throughout India looking for spiritual inspiration. Naturally, I wasn’t the first person to have done this. At all the temples, ashrams and holy mountains, I found crowds of Westerners looking for something as well, and presumably it wasn’t the bedbugs, diesel fumes and diarrhea. It was easy to identify the seekers in a crowd. While regular tourists wore shorts or khakis or brightly colored Indian shirts, spiritual tourists wore a lot of white. They walked across temple courtyards, a slow-motion blur of white drapes and scarves, their faces a vision of sobriety and introspection.

Inside the shrines, they sat perfectly still, unfazed by the heat, various itches and their gurgling tummies. They sat in full lotus or Zen kneeling positions. Their eyes were sublimely closed. Rarely did they smile, and when they did, it was more of a knowing smile.

Their manner perplexed me, especially when I walked out of a shrine into the chaos of color, sound and personality that is India. Everywhere I turned, Indians were smiling, shoving food in my hands, cracking jokes, playing with kids—theirs or a stranger’s. And when I met a real-life Indian guru, she seemed to be laughing most of the time. Amma is known as "the hugging saint" because she gives affectionate embraces to the thousands of devotees who line up to see her everywhere she goes.

A petite, plump woman with a perfectly round face, warm dark eyes and a beaming smile, Amma could also have been called the laughing saint. One of my clearest memories is of her squinting her eyes closed, leaning her head back and breaking into peals of laughter.

If the very gurus the seekers come to see are laughing, why are the seekers themselves so serious? I decided I wanted to learn something about laughter’s ability to unlock the spirit. After all, as James Baraz, a Buddhist meditation teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California, told me, "It’s called enlightenment for a reason. Lighten up!" I went in search of some lighthearted tips on the spirit.

Why don’t Buddhists vacuum in the corners? Because they have no attachments.

Baraz didn’t always have such a merry outlook. He’s been a serious—dead serious—student of Zen since 1974. For a number of years, he says, he interpreted Buddhist teachings on the illusory nature of sense perception as an instruction to regard everything with a kind of gloomy existential detachment. "The Buddha started taking on a very stern look to me," he recalls. "I somehow mixed up [the Buddhist concept of] the end of suffering with the end of living."

The spell was broken in 1990 when he met H.W.L. Poonja, better known as "Poonjaji," an Indian teacher of advaita vedanta, or non-dual, philosophy. Poonjaji was a jovial man who loved to laugh, even while explaining that enlightenment means awaking to the realization that your true nature is indistinguishable from the indefinable source of the universe, or what Baraz calls emptiness. Baraz remembers asking, "Poonjaji, why is your emptiness so much more fun than mine?" To this the irrepresible guru replied, "My emptiness rejects nothing. It includes stillness and activity and sorrow and joy, laughter and tears." And then he burst out laughing.

From that time on, Baraz understood Buddhist teachings differently. He reread the scriptures and discovered that joy was one of the seven factors of enlightenment. Now in his Awakening to Joy workshops, he teaches students to smile and laugh, to cultivate wholesome, happy emotions, to celebrate. Even the physical effects of laughter have a spiritual component, he says: "Sometimes, just changing your face and your body language can create more space in your mind. Laughter is a real aid to bring about that spaciousness."

A rabbi, a Lutheran pastor and a Zen monk walk into a bar. "Hey, what is this, some kind of joke?" the bartender asks.

Bernie Glassman likes to inject a little humor into his Zen teaching, too. People at Buddhist retreats tend to ask "really heavy, serious questions, like, What is life? Who am I?" Glassman says. His answer: He slips on an imaginary banana peel or knocks down a shelf of books, skills he learned from professional clown Moshe Cohen.

"My clown actions will arise out of bearing witness to the situation, and that’s what Zen training is all about," he says. "The basic principle of Zen is ‘not knowing.’ It’s to not be fixed to any idea or concept, to not be attached to them." If you start thinking ‘my way is the way’—that’s when Glassman gets out his clown nose.

One of the founders of American Zen, Glassman, 70, received the title "sensei" (which means teacher) in 1967 from revered Japanese master Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi and Glassman earned the title "roshi" (or master) in 1995. But Glassman is fond of another title he gave himself: Bernie, the Boobysattva. A Bodhisattva is an enlightened soul who voluntarily enters the world to spread compassion and grace; the Boobysattva—as Glassman lives the role—is one who voluntarily spreads laughter and mirth.

With inspiration from 1960s icon Wavy Gravy and help from Michel Dobbs, who runs a Zen center on Long Island, New York, Glassman formed the Order of Disorder (OD or "odd" for short), a loose alliance of Zen practitioners who know enough clowning skills to get any group of overly serious monks laughing.

Read the rest of the article.

Tags: Spirituality, humor, personal growth, Buddhism, Bernie Glassman, James Baraz, Amaa, hugging saint, Ode Magazine, How laughter can keep you on your spiritual path, Carmel Wroth, laughter

Upaya Dharma Podcasts - Neurobiology of We part 1 of 9

Great stuff - looking forward to the whole series. Dan Siegel is one of my favorite dudes, a neuroscientist looking at mediation both from the 3rd person and 1st person perspectives. Not too many people doing that.

Neurobiology of We part 1 of 9

Speakers: Roshi Joan Halifax, Natalie Goldberg, Daniel Siegel, MD

Roshi Joan reminds us that when the Buddha awakened, he said, “I and all beings have realized the Way.” It is delusional to say there is any separation, and it is delusional to repress compassion for one another. Natalie Goldberg opens her part of the evening with simple instructions for the writing exercises, and Dan Siegel opens with questions about brain vs. mind. He asks us to consider the relationship between information flow and energy; he also asks us to consider the relationship between the subjective and the objective.

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Tags: Roshi Joan Halifax, Natalie Goldberg, Daniel Siegel, Upaya Zen Center, Dharma Podcasts, Neurobiology of We, part 1 of 9, Buddhism, meditation, Psychology, brain

Thich Nhat Hanh - This Silence is Called Great Joy

This article is from a collection of old and new articles at Shambhala Sun on the science of happiness.

This Silence is Called Great Joy

By Thich Nhat Hanh

A new teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh on the truth beyond our usual truths.

There are two kinds of truth, conventional truth and absolute truth, but they are not opposites. They are part of a continuum. There is a classic Buddhist gatha:

All formations are impermanent.
They are subject to birth and death.
But remove the notions of birth and death,
and this silence is called great joy.

This beautiful poem has only twenty-six words, but it sums up all of the Buddha’s teaching. It is one of greatest poems of humanity. If you are a composer, please put it to music and make it into a song. The last two lines should sound like thundering silence, the silencing of all speculation, of all philosophies, of all notions and ideas.

The gatha begins in the realm of conventional truth and ends in the realm of absolute truth. The first line describes reality as we usually perceive it. “All formations are impermanent.” This is something concrete that we notice as soon as we start paying attention. The five elements that make up our sense of personhood—form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, consciousness—all are flowing and changing day and night. We can feel their impermanence and so we are tempted to say that the first two lines of this gatha are true.

But the danger of this statement is that we may believe that formations are real and impermanence is an absolute truth. And we may use that kind of truth as a weapon in order to fight against those who don’t agree with our ideas. “Formations” is a notion, an idea. “Impermanence” is another notion. Neither is more true than the other. When you say, “All formations are impermanent,” you are indirectly confirming their permanence. When you confirm the existence of something, you are also implying the existence of its opposite. When you say the right exists, you have to accept the existence of the left. When you confirm that something is “high,” you’re saying something else is “low.” Impermanence becomes a notion that opposes the notion of permanence. So though perhaps it tried to escape, the first two lines of the gatha are still in the realm of conventional, relative truth.

To reach the absolute truth, the ultimate truth, you need to release the conventional truth found there. There’s a Chinese term that means halfway truths and another that means all-the-way, hitting-the-bottom truths. The first two lines are a halfway truth and the third and fourth lines try to remove what we learned in the first two.

When the notions are removed, then the perfect silence, the extinction of all notions, the destruction of all pairs of opposites, is called great joy. That is the teaching of absolute truth, of nirvana. What does nirvana mean? It is absolute happiness. It’s not a place you can go; it’s a fruit that you can have wherever you are. It’s already inside us. The wave doesn’t have to seek out the water. Water is what the wave has to realize as her own foundation of being.

If you have come from a Jewish or Christian background, you may like to compare the idea of nirvana, great bliss, with the idea of God. Because our idea of God may be only that, an idea. We have to overcome the idea in order to really touch God as a reality. Nirvana can also be merely the idea of nirvana. Buddha also can be just an idea. But it’s not the idea that we need; we need the ultimate reality.

The first two lines of the gatha dwell in the realm of opposites: birth and death; permanence and impermanence; being and nonbeing. In God, in nirvana, opposites no longer exist. If you say God exists, that’s wrong. If you say God doesn’t exist, that’s equally wrong. Because God cannot be described in terms of being and nonbeing. To be or not to be, that is not the question. The notions of being and nonbeing are obstacles that you have to remove in order for ultimate reality to manifest.

In classical Chinese, the third line of the gatha literally says, “But when both birth and death die.” What does it mean by “death dying”? It means you have to kill your notions of birth and death. As someone who practices the way of the Buddha, you have the sword of the Bodhisattva Manjushri, which is sharp enough to remove wrong perceptions and cut through all notions, including those of birth and death.

The true practitioner understands real rebirth, real continuation. There are two views concerning life after death. Quite a number of people, including scientists, believe that after we die, there’ll be nothing left. From being we become non-being. They don’t believe that there is something that continues after you die. That view is called nihilism. In this view, either there is no soul or the soul completely dies. After death, our body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness are completely gone. The opposite view, eternalism, is that after we die, we are still here and we will continue forever. Our soul is immortal. While our physical body may die, our soul continues forever, whether in paradise or in hell. The Buddha called these two views just another pair of opposites.

Before you can answer the question, “What will happen to me after I die?” you need to answer another question, “What is happening to me in the present moment?” Examining this question is the essence of meditation. If we don’t know how to look deeply to what is happening to us in the here and the now, how can we know what will happen to us when we are dead?

When we look at a candle, we say that the candle is radiating light, heat, and fragrance. The light is one kind of energy it emits, the heat is another, and the fragrance is a third kind of energy it can offer us in the here and the now. If we are truly alive, we can see that we aren’t very different from the candle. We are offering our insight, our breath, our views right now. Every moment you have a view, whether about yourself, the world, or how to be happy, and you emit that view. You produce thought and your thought carries your views. You are continued by your views and your thinking. Those are the children you give birth to every moment. And that is your true continuation.

So it is crucial to look deeply at your thoughts and your views. What are you holding on to? Whether you are an artist or a businessperson, a parent or a teacher, you have your views about how to live your life, how to help other people, how to make your country prosperous, and so on. When you are attached to these views, to the idea of right and wrong, then you may be get caught. When your thinking is caught in these views, then you create misunderstanding, anger, and violence. That is what you are becoming in this very moment.

When you are mindful of this and can look deeply, you can produce thoughts that are full of love and understanding. You can make yourself and the world around you suffer less.

You are not static. You are the life that you are becoming. Because “to be” means to be something: happy, unhappy, light or heavy, sky or earth. We have to learn to see being as becoming. The quality of your being depends on the object of your being. That is why when you hear Rene Descartes’ famous statement “I think, therefore I am,” you have to ask, “You are what?” Of course you are your own thinking—and your happiness or your sorrow depends very much on the quality of your thinking. So you are your view, you are your thinking, you are your speech, you are your action, and these things are your continuation. You are becoming now, you are being reborn now in every second. You don’t need to come to death in order to be reborn. You are reborn in every moment; you have to see your continuation in the here and the now.

I don’t care at all what happens to me when I die. That’s why I have a lot of time to care about what is happening to me in the here and the now. When I walk, I want to enjoy every step I take. I want freedom and peace and joy in every step. So joy and peace and lightness are what I produce in that moment. I have inherited it and I pass it on to other people. If someone sees me walking this way and decides to walk mindfully for him or herself, then I am reborn in him or in her right away—that’s my continuation. That’s what is happening to me in the here and the now. And if I know what is happening to me in the here and the now, I don’t need to ask the question, “What will happen to me after this body disintegrates?” There is no “before” and “after,” just as there is no birth and death. We can be free of these notions in this very moment, filled with the great joyful silence of all that is.


© Unified Buddhist Church. Used with permission of Parallax Press.

This Silence is Called Great Joy, Thich Nhat Hanh, Shambhala Sun, September 2007.

Click here for more articles by Thich Nhat Hanh

Tags: This Silence is Called Great Joy, Thich Nhat Hanh, Shambhala Sun, Buddhism, happiness, conventional truth, absolute truth, impermanence, form

Upaya Dharma Podcasts - Insight Dialog

Nice presentation.

Insight Dialog

August 12th, 2009

Speaker: Gregory Kramer

How can we meet our experience with awareness? As in our practice on the cushion, in our practice in relationship we trust emergence. We relinquish the small sense of “I” and open to others, knowing that the wisdom and compassion of the body-mind will emerge.

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Tags: Upaya Zen Center, Dharma Podcasts, Insight Dialog, Gregory Kramer, Buddhism, Roshi Joan Halifax

Neuroscience Sheds New Light on Creativity

Nice article from Fast Company on the neuroscience of how we generate creative new ideas.

Neuroscience Sheds New Light on Creativity

By: Gregory Berns
Wed Sep 17, 2008 at 1:30 AM

What neuroscience reveals about how to come up with new ideas.

Close your eyes and visualize the sun setting over a beach.

How detailed was your image? Did you envision a bland orb sinking below calm waters, or did you call up an image filled with activity -- palm trees swaying gently, waves lapping at your feet, perhaps a loved one holding your hand?

Now imagine you're standing on the surface of Pluto. What would a sunset look like from there? Notice how hard you had to work to imagine this

scene. Did you picture a featureless ball of ice with the sun a speck of light barely brighter than a star along the horizon? Did you envision frozen lakes of exotic chemicals or icy fjords glimmering in the starlight?

What you conjured illuminates how our brains work, why it can be so hard to come up with new ideas -- and how you can rewire your mind to open up the holy grail of creativity. Recent advances in neuroscience, driven by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that lets scientists watch brain activity as never before, have changed what we know about key attributes of creativity. These advances, for example, have swept away the idea that there is a pleasure center in the brain that somehow acts as an accelerator to the engine of human behavior. Rather, chemicals such as dopamine shuttle between neurons in ways that look remarkably like the calculations modern robots perform.

Creativity and imagination begin with perception. Neuroscientists have come to realize that how you perceive something isn't simply a product of what your eyes and ears transmit to your brain. It's a product of your brain itself. And iconoclasts, a class of people I define as those who do something that others say can't be done -- think Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, or Florence Nightingale -- see things differently. Literally. Some iconoclasts are born that way, but we all can learn how to see things not for what they are, but for what they might be.

Perception and imagination are linked because the brain uses the same neural circuits for both functions. Imagination is like running perception in reverse. The reason it's so difficult to imagine truly novel ideas has to do with how the brain interprets signals from your eyes. The images that strike your retina do not, by themselves, tell you with certainty what you are seeing. Visual perception is largely a result of statistical expectations, the brain's way of explaining ambiguous visual signals in the most likely way. And the likelihood of these explanations is a direct result of past experience.

Entire books have been written about learning, but the important elements for creative thinkers can be boiled down to this: Experience modifies the connections between neurons so that they become more efficient at processing information. Neuroscientists have observed that while an entire network of neurons might process a stimulus initially, by about the sixth presentation, the heavy lifting is performed by only a subset of neurons. Because fewer neurons are being used, the network becomes more efficient in carrying out its function.

The brain is fundamentally a lazy piece of meat. It doesn't want to waste energy. That's why there is a striking lack of imagination in most people's visualization of a beach sunset. It's an iconic image, so your brain simply takes the path of least resistance and reactivates neurons that have been optimized to process this sort of scene. If you imagine something that you have never actually seen, like a Pluto sunset, the possibilities for creative thinking become much greater because the brain can no longer rely on connections shaped by past experience.

In order to think creatively, you must develop new neural pathways and break out of the cycle of experience-dependent categorization. As Mark Twain said, "Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned." For most people, this does not come naturally. Often, the harder you try to think differently, the more rigid the categories become.

Most corporate off-sites, for example, are ineffective idea generators, because they're scheduled rather than organic; the brain has time to predict the future, which means the potential novelty will be diminished. Transplanting the same mix of people to a different location, even an exotic one, then dropping them into a conference room much like the one back home doesn't create an environment that leads to new insights. No, new insights come from new people and new environments -- any circumstance in which the brain has a hard time predicting what will happen next.

Fortunately, the networks that govern both perception and imagination can be reprogrammed. By deploying your attention differently, the frontal cortex, which contains rules for decision making, can reconfigure neural networks so that you can see things that you didn't see before. You need a novel stimulus -- either a new piece of information or an unfamiliar environment -- to jolt attentional systems awake. The more radical the change, the greater the likelihood of fresh insights.

Some of the most startling breakthroughs have had their origins in exactly these types of novel circumstances. Chemist Kary Mullis came up with the basic principle of the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR -- the fundamental technology that makes genetic tests possible -- not hunched over his lab bench, but on a spring evening while he was driving up the northern California coast. Walt Disney was a decent illustrator, but he didn't imagine the possibilities of animation until he saw his advertising illustrations projected onto the screen in a movie theater. In an extreme example, the preeminent glass artist Dale Chihuly didn't discover his sculptural genius until a car accident led to the loss of an eye and literally forced him to see the world differently. Only when the brain is confronted with stimuli that it has not encountered before does it start to reorganize perception. The surest way to provoke the imagination, then, is to seek out environments you have no experience with. They may have nothing to do with your area of expertise. It doesn't matter. Because the same systems in the brain carry out both perception and imagination, there will be cross talk.

Novel experiences are so effective at unleashing the imagination because they force the perceptual system out of categorization, the tendency of the brain to take shortcuts. You have to confront these categories directly. Try this: When your brain is categorizing a person or an idea, just jot down the categories that come to mind. Use analogies. You will find that you naturally fall back on the things you are familiar with. Then allow yourself the freedom to write down gut feelings, even if they're vague or visceral, such as "stupid" or "hot." Only when you consciously confront your brain's shortcuts will you be able to imagine outside of its boundaries.

Adapted from the book Iconoclast, by Gregory Berns, by permission of Harvard Business Press. Copyright 2008 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. All Rights Reserved.

Tags: Neuroscience Sheds New Light on Creativity, Fast Company, Psychology, creativity, brain, neuroscience, Iconoclast, Gregory Berns, new ideas

Article Review: Polytraumatization and psychological symptoms in children and adolescents

This is a brief article review I did for my current class - but it deals with the difference between Big-T traumas and small-t traumas. We are beginning to learn that an accumulation of small traumas, especially interpersonal traumas, can be more problematic than a single large trauma or repeated trauma.

[I copied this in from Word, so the formatting is funky.]

Article Review: Polytraumatization and psychological symptoms in children and adolescents

In their article, “Polytraumatization and psychological symptoms in children and adolescents,” Per E. Gustafsson, Doris Nilsson, and Carl Goran Svedin (2009) looked at the impact of multiple traumas from a variety of sources on the prevalence of psychological symptoms in children and adolescents.

The authors suggest that the traditional model of looking only at a specific form of trauma, or repeated exposure to single type of trauma, has failed in at least three ways. First, looking only at specific traumas in specific populations does not allow an understanding of the “frequency and severity” of trauma in the population at large. Second, such studies ignore the finding that traumatic events tend to co-occur, and then fail to adequately represent the overall prevalence of trauma. Finally, failing to see the multiplicity of traumatic events may result in “overestimation of the impact of the single measured trauma type.”

The authors cite studies that show that the cumulative impact of many traumatic events produces more psychological symptoms than a single critical event, for example, an accident or a natural disaster, and also more than a prolonged exposure to a single type of trauma. They call their model the “polytraumatization model.”

"The polytraumatization model, which considers non-specificity of experiences and effects, may be viewed as complementary to the stressor-outcome specificity model [21], which may identify certain traumas to have particularly harmful consequences [8]. The separation of non-specificity and specificity in considering the effects of traumatic experiences is an important field of study that may yield a better understanding of the complex pathways to adjustment and maladjustment following trauma."

The present study was part of a larger look at the impact of trauma on mental health in children and adolescents.

The study found that traumatic events were common in the children [63% (n = 170)] and even more common in the adolescents [89.5% (n = 357)]. What follows are some bullet points summarizing their findings:

• The impact of polytraumatization was greater than the impact of a singular event in both age groups
• The lower incidence reporting in the younger children likely resulted from the lesser ratings of the impact of trauma and its symptoms by the parents, although some measures were more likely to occur with teens than younger children
• Interpersonal traumatic events were more strongly correlated with psychological symptoms than were non-interpersonal traumatic events:
  

  “This importance of interpersonal events could possibly be explained by viewing the betrayal of one human being by another as a traumatic experience that the child has to cope with in addition to the threat of the event itself.”

• The connection between polytraumatization and symptoms was stronger in boys than in girls in the children, but the connection was stronger in girls in the adolescent sample
• Cause and effect is inferred, but it is acknowledged that the likelihood of suffering from traumatic events is “influenced by the mental health of the child”

This study suggests that the multiplicity of traumatic experiences, polytraumatization, and the occurrence of interpersonal trauma are particularly problematic for both children and adolescents. In addition, it seems that gender is a determinant of the impact in the trauma, possibly due to differences in developmental vulnerability.

Reference

Gustafsson, P. E., Nilsson, D., & Svedin, C. G. (2009). Polytraumatization and psychological symptoms in children and adolescents. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 18, 274–283.

Tags: children, trauma, Psychology, Article Review, Polytraumatization, psychological symptoms, adolescents