via Psychology Tomorrow
It was 1972, and Gary Weber, a 29-year old materials science PhD student at Penn State University, had a problem with his brain. It kept generating thoughts! – continuously, oppressively – a stream of neurotic concerns about his life, his studies, whatever. While most human beings would consider this par for the course, par for the human condition (cogito ergo sum), Weber wouldn’t accept it. He was a scientist, a systematizer, a process guy. He liked to figure out how things worked, and how they could be tweaked to work more efficiently. And at that moment his brain wasn’t very efficient. It expended a lot of energy going over and over the same anxieties and cravings and storylines. “Most of these thoughts had no purpose,” he said. “They were not going to cure cancer.”
It so happened that shortly after he recognized the problem, in one of those little life coincidences that some people like to call “synchronicities,” Weber picked up a slim volume of poetry on his way out of the library. He sat down on the green grass in front of the University admin building, unpacked his lunch and idly opened the book. He read:
“All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas.”
This is the first line of a famous Zen poem – Song of Zazen – written in the 18th century by the Japanese Buddhist teacher Hakuin Ekaku. Weber knew nothing of Zen. Still, within seconds of reading Ekaku’s words, according to Weber, “the entire world just opened up. I mean it literally opened up. For what must have been thirty or forty minutes, I dropped into this magnificent expansiveness – a vast empty space without any thoughts whatsoever.”
Weber had had what in Zen is called a “kensho” – an awakening, a glimpse into the unconditioned, a mystical phenomenon described in different ways by countless texts and countless teachers in countless traditions. It was a profound experience, but like so many such experiences, it didn’t last. Weber’s thoughts returned – as insistent and clamorous as ever. But now Weber knew another way was possible. He was determined.
For the next 25 years, as Weber finished his PhD, married and raised two kids and made his way through a string of industry jobs – eventually culminating in a senior management position running the R&D operations of big manufacturing business – he got spiritual. He read lots of books, he meditated with Zen teachers, mastered complicated yoga postures, and practiced what is known in Vedic philosophy as “self-enquiry” – a way of directing attention backwards into the center of the mind. To make time for all this, Weber would get up at 4am and put in two hours of spiritual practice before work.
Although he says he never had the sense he was making progress, Weber kept at it anyway. Then, on a morning like any other, something happened. He got into a yoga pose – a pose he had done thousands of times before – and when he moved out of it his thoughts stopped. Permanently.
“That was fourteen years ago,” says Weber. “I entered into a state of complete inner stillness. Except for a few stray thoughts first thing in the morning, and a few more when my blood sugar gets low, my mind is quiet. The old thought-track has never come back.”
Now of course, the fact that Weber is telling this story at all would seem to contradict this rather dramatic claim. Conventional wisdom tells us that talk is the verbal expression of thinking; separating the two makes no sense. And yet, this is the experience Weber reports. And at the time he didn’t care if it was theoretically impossible. What he cared about was that in an hour he needed to go to work, where he was supposed to run four research labs and manage a thousand employees and a quarter of a billion dollar budget, and he had no thoughts. How was that going to work?
“There was no problem at all,” Weber says, which he admits may say more about corporate management than about him. “No one noticed. I’d go into a meeting with nothing prepared, no list of points in my head. I’d just sit there and wait to see what came up. And what came up when I opened my mouth were solutions to problems smarter and more elegant than any I could have developed on my own.”
Over time, Weber figured out that it wasn’t that all his thoughts had disappeared; rather a particular kind of self-referential thinking had cut out, what he calls “the blah blah network.” Scientists now refer to this as the “default mode network” (DMN), that is, the endlessly ruminative story of me: the obsessive list-maker, the anxious scenario planner, the distracted daydreamer. This is the part of the thinking process we default to when not engaged in a specific task.
“What’s fascinating to me,” Weber says, “is I can still reason and problem solve, I just don’t have this ongoing emotionally-charged self-referential narrative gobbling up bandwidth.”
But the real surprise for Weber is what disappeared along with the “me” narrative: any sense of being a separate self, and with it all mental and emotional suffering. He has a theory about this: “If you look at the self-referential narrative it’s all ‘I, me, mine.’ When that cuts out, the ‘I’ goes with it. Now, for me, it’s very quiet and peaceful inside – there’s no sense of wanting things to be other than they are, and no ‘I’ to grab hold of ‘I want, I desire, I lust.’” Although his case is extreme, Weber’s experience is in line with research showing that more DMN activation correlates with more unhappiness – ‘A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind’, as the title of one well-known paper puts it.
Weber has even found the changes have carried over into his emotional life:
“I still get angry, but it’s different now. If someone cuts me off in traffic, I feel the energy come up, but it doesn’t go anyplace. There’s no chasing somebody down the highway. The anger dissipates immediately – it doesn’t carry forward. You don’t lose the typical neural responses – thank goodness – what you lose is the desire leading up to them, and, once the response passes, you don’t make up a story about what happened that you repeat again and again in your head. Those storylines are gone.”
Like other scientists before him who’ve experienced similar transformations – the neuroscientist James Austin, the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, to name two examples – Weber got interested in what was going on his brain. He connected with a neuroscientist at Yale University named Judson Brewer who was studying how the DMN changes in response to meditation. He found, as expected, that experienced meditators had lower DMN activation when meditating. But when Brewer put Weber in the scanner he found the opposite pattern: Weber’s baseline was already a relatively deactivated DMN. Trying to meditate – making any kind of deliberate effort – actually disrupted his peace. In other words, Weber’s normal state was a kind of meditative letting go, something Brewer had only seen a few times previously, and other researchers had until then only reported anecdotally.
And here we come to a subtle but important difference of opinion between Weber and Brewer. For Weber, true letting go means arriving at a state of “no-thought” where the mind is permanently stilled of any kind of “bandwidth-gobbling” inner monologue. Creative thoughts, planning thoughts – these are fine, and are, according to Weber, in fact served by completely different parts of the brain. The real suffering happens in the endless and exhausting internal monologue. Thus, he argues, working to extinguish these kinds of thoughts should be the explicit goal of practice, something he says other contemplative traditions also emphasize.
By contrast, further study has suggested to Brewer that the thoughts themselves – even a certain amount of the self-referential kind – may not actually be the problem; the real problem is our human tendency to fixate and grip and get “caught up” in these thoughts. Some of his subjects attained dramatic reductions in DMN activity while still thinking in a self-referential way. They just weren’t attached to their ruminations. One subject described watching his thoughts “flow by.” As Buddhists have long argued, you don’t need to eliminate the self-thinking process, you just need to change your relationship to it.
Whatever the exact case, both men agree that a reduction of activity in the DMN is central to the elimination of suffering. That it is being discussed at all marks an important advance in the scientific study of meditation in particular and spiritual practice in general. The Mind and Life conferences, the big NIH grants, the explosion of studies on mindfulness – all have generated enormous insights. They’ve demonstrated how positive emotions can be trained, and reactivity softened, and concentration increased, and attentional clarity boosted. Many researchers have shown unequivocally that stress and suffering can be dramatically reduced by meditation and by mindfulness in life. But they have not yet shown why this is so.
Have Brewer and his colleagues finally found a clue to how the reduction of suffering looks in the brain? Not the activation of a specific region, but a more general deactivation, a neurological letting go that parallels the experiential one? Brewer: “Even in novices we saw a relative deactivation across the brain – like the brain was saying, Oh thank God I can let go. I don’t have to do stuff, I don’t have to do all this high energy maintenance of myself. One interpretation of that – and there are many others – is that the brain knows what it needs to do. It’s a very efficient machine; we just have to stop getting in the way.”
This kind of neurobiological perspective is a movement towards what Brewer calls “evidence-based faith,” where science may be able to help teachers and practitioners fine-tune the approaches they take to practice. Contemplatives may recoil at the idea, but for Brewer, addressing suffering is the priority, a project science can help with. As proof-of-concept, Brewer has just published two studies [here and here] that show how meditators can watch live feedback from their brains inside the fMRI and use it to decrease their DMN activation in real-time. And he’s just received an NIH grant to study how this could work for non-meditators – more quickly, and hopefully, one day, more affordably. “The aim is to see if neurofeedback can give regular folks feedback on subtle aspects of their experience …stuff they wouldn’t notice otherwise,” he says.
Weber agrees, “Right now we can get folks off the street and within one or two runs in the Yale fMRI they can produce this deactivated state. The more glimpses the brain gets, the more time it spends there, the more it can stay there. It’s like riding a bike. With this technology you may not have to spend twenty-five years practicing like I did. It’s much more efficient.”
Like the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths with a psychotherapeutic twist, Weber has it down to a terse progression: “I had suffering, it came from my attachments. My attachments cause me to slip over into the narrator. If I stop that, I lose my suffering. We have the tools to do this. They require no scriptural texts or philosophy. All it takes is persistence and curiosity. The old ego-motivated human existence, our 75,000 year-old operating system with its need to gratify our desires and exploit the environment and have six of this and ten of that – that can all fall away. It’s time for an upgrade.”
Showing posts with label zen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zen. Show all posts
Saturday, July 16, 2016
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Alan Watts Introduces America to Meditation & Eastern Philosophy: Watch the 1960 TV Show, Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life
Alan Watts moved from his native London to New York in 1938, then eventually headed west, to San Francisco in the early 1950s. On the left coast, he started teaching at the Academy of Asian Studies, wrote his bestseller Way of Zen, and began delivering a long-running series of talks about eastern philosophy on KPFA radio in Berkeley. During these years, Watts became one of the foremost popularizers of Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoisim, which made him something of a celebrity, especially when the 60s counterculture movement kicked into gear.
Now, 40 years and change after his death, you can find no shortage of vintage Watts’ media online (including this archive of streaming lectures). And today we’re featuring an episode from a TV series called Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life, which aired in San Francisco circa 1960. “The Silent Mind” runs 28 minutes, and it offered American viewers an introduction to the philosophy and practice of meditation, something still considered exotic at the time. History in the making. You’re watching it happen right here. Find more meditation and Alan Watts resources below.
Related Content:
The Wisdom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Provoking Animations
The Zen Teachings of Alan Watts: A Free Audio Archive of His Enlightening Lectures
Free Guided Meditations From UCLA: Boost Your Awareness & Ease Your Stress
Meditation 101: A Short, Animated Beginner’s Guide
via OpenCulture
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
“If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him”
By Gary McGee
“Like they say in Zen, when you attain Satori, nothing is left for you in that moment than to have a good laugh.” –Alan Watts
The title of this article is a koan attributed to a 1st century Zen Master named Linji Yixuan. It’s obviously not meant to be taken literally, since killing is wrong. It’s a koan with shock-value, meant to jar us awake, a tool meant for self-exploration and self-interrogation. In this article we will attempt to dissect this curious koan and try to bring some clarity to it so that we can use it as a tool toward our own self-development.
The “road” is generally meant to symbolize the path to enlightenment. But it could also be interpreted as our own personal path, or even something as simple as the direction our life is going. The “Buddha” we meet on the path is our idealized image of perfection, whatever that might be. It’s our conception of what absolute enlightenment would look like. One could argue that the Buddha on the path is us, or at least our projection onto the world about what it means to be Buddha. But, and here’s the rub, whatever our conception of the Buddha is, it’s wrong!
Like it says in the opening of the Tao Te Ching, “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” What we’re “killing” is the idea that enlightenment is achievable. If we believe we have achieved enlightenment then we need to “kill” that belief and keep meditating. This is because there is no permanence. Permanence is an illusion. Everything is constantly changing.
Even if we think we have all the answers, those “answers” must still be questioned. This is the urgency inherent within the koan. A true master “achieves” enlightenment, “kills” it, and then keeps meditating. He or she does so in order to keep learning, to keep enlightening. Indeed, to reinforce the journey truly being the thing.
Every master knows that we are all Buddha disguised as the Self. We are all God in hiding. It’s just that some of us are playing the victim and some of us are free. Like Alan Watts asked, “Do you define yourself as a victim of the world, or as the world?” Most of us are walking tragedies, suffering in a cruel world. We all experience pain. We all have scars. But true masters flip the tables on tragedy and choose comedy instead, thus completely altering the power dynamic.
They choose happiness without reason. They choose laughter and joy over anger and spite. They honor their scars rather than resent them. They choose dancing rather than depression.
And this is precisely where the Fool and the Sage merge, where humor and wisdom coalesce. Up until the point we meet “Buddha on the road” we are victims of the world, but once we “kill” the Buddha we become the world. We become sacred clowns.
We become holy fools, with the power to keep the journey going despite wounds or set-backs or even enlightenment itself! This is the wisdom of the Fool/Sage –to fail (or succeed), to let go, to have a good laugh, and then to start all over again with our wisdom in tow.
“You must change in order to find your truest self,” writes Bradford Keeney in The Bushman’s Way of Tracking God. “And keep changing. The false idol is any form that hangs around too long and gets fossilized. It’s worth considering that if your ideas of God don’t change, then your ideas are dead. God is not dead. He simply went elsewhere because you were too boring.” Yes! God is us. Buddha is us. This sacred energy is hiding inside us because we have been too boring. We need to shake ourselves awake. The world is not a frozen thought, but a dynamic feeling, a heroic expression, a comic guffaw. Our bones are too serious inside us. Even our funny bone is serious. We need to loosen up. Let’s not be serious, let’s just be sincere. Shake up your bones. Unloosen the straightjacket that society has strapped around your soul. Let’s hone ourselves into instruments that are sharp enough to cut God. And then let’s have a healthy enough sense of humor to laugh about it afterwards…
…Imagine you are a clown walking down the path toward sacred clownhood. You encounter me standing on one leg. You approach me to get a better look. I am trickster-fabulous with my coyote-throat and crow-tongue, with my Thunderbird wings and smoking-mirror skin. I am whispering unspoken truths to power when you draw near. You ask me my name and I open my moon-eye, keeping my sun-eye closed.
“I am Jester Guru,” I say, laughing and bouncing from foot to foot. “I am Slapstick Soothsayer. I am Wag & Sage. I am Blessed Buffoon. I am Charlatan Shaman. I am the Fool’s Philosopher. I am Prankster Pope. I am Mystic Muppet. I am Elder Funnyman. I AM THE HEYOKA WHO BEFUDDLES ALL HEYOKAS! I am the all singing all dancing Juggernaut Oracle, and I’m here to inform you that you have finally arrived.”
What do you do?!
“Like they say in Zen, when you attain Satori, nothing is left for you in that moment than to have a good laugh.” –Alan Watts
The title of this article is a koan attributed to a 1st century Zen Master named Linji Yixuan. It’s obviously not meant to be taken literally, since killing is wrong. It’s a koan with shock-value, meant to jar us awake, a tool meant for self-exploration and self-interrogation. In this article we will attempt to dissect this curious koan and try to bring some clarity to it so that we can use it as a tool toward our own self-development.
The “road” is generally meant to symbolize the path to enlightenment. But it could also be interpreted as our own personal path, or even something as simple as the direction our life is going. The “Buddha” we meet on the path is our idealized image of perfection, whatever that might be. It’s our conception of what absolute enlightenment would look like. One could argue that the Buddha on the path is us, or at least our projection onto the world about what it means to be Buddha. But, and here’s the rub, whatever our conception of the Buddha is, it’s wrong!
Like it says in the opening of the Tao Te Ching, “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” What we’re “killing” is the idea that enlightenment is achievable. If we believe we have achieved enlightenment then we need to “kill” that belief and keep meditating. This is because there is no permanence. Permanence is an illusion. Everything is constantly changing.
Even if we think we have all the answers, those “answers” must still be questioned. This is the urgency inherent within the koan. A true master “achieves” enlightenment, “kills” it, and then keeps meditating. He or she does so in order to keep learning, to keep enlightening. Indeed, to reinforce the journey truly being the thing.
Every master knows that we are all Buddha disguised as the Self. We are all God in hiding. It’s just that some of us are playing the victim and some of us are free. Like Alan Watts asked, “Do you define yourself as a victim of the world, or as the world?” Most of us are walking tragedies, suffering in a cruel world. We all experience pain. We all have scars. But true masters flip the tables on tragedy and choose comedy instead, thus completely altering the power dynamic.
They choose happiness without reason. They choose laughter and joy over anger and spite. They honor their scars rather than resent them. They choose dancing rather than depression.
And this is precisely where the Fool and the Sage merge, where humor and wisdom coalesce. Up until the point we meet “Buddha on the road” we are victims of the world, but once we “kill” the Buddha we become the world. We become sacred clowns.
We become holy fools, with the power to keep the journey going despite wounds or set-backs or even enlightenment itself! This is the wisdom of the Fool/Sage –to fail (or succeed), to let go, to have a good laugh, and then to start all over again with our wisdom in tow.
“You must change in order to find your truest self,” writes Bradford Keeney in The Bushman’s Way of Tracking God. “And keep changing. The false idol is any form that hangs around too long and gets fossilized. It’s worth considering that if your ideas of God don’t change, then your ideas are dead. God is not dead. He simply went elsewhere because you were too boring.” Yes! God is us. Buddha is us. This sacred energy is hiding inside us because we have been too boring. We need to shake ourselves awake. The world is not a frozen thought, but a dynamic feeling, a heroic expression, a comic guffaw. Our bones are too serious inside us. Even our funny bone is serious. We need to loosen up. Let’s not be serious, let’s just be sincere. Shake up your bones. Unloosen the straightjacket that society has strapped around your soul. Let’s hone ourselves into instruments that are sharp enough to cut God. And then let’s have a healthy enough sense of humor to laugh about it afterwards…
…Imagine you are a clown walking down the path toward sacred clownhood. You encounter me standing on one leg. You approach me to get a better look. I am trickster-fabulous with my coyote-throat and crow-tongue, with my Thunderbird wings and smoking-mirror skin. I am whispering unspoken truths to power when you draw near. You ask me my name and I open my moon-eye, keeping my sun-eye closed.
“I am Jester Guru,” I say, laughing and bouncing from foot to foot. “I am Slapstick Soothsayer. I am Wag & Sage. I am Blessed Buffoon. I am Charlatan Shaman. I am the Fool’s Philosopher. I am Prankster Pope. I am Mystic Muppet. I am Elder Funnyman. I AM THE HEYOKA WHO BEFUDDLES ALL HEYOKAS! I am the all singing all dancing Juggernaut Oracle, and I’m here to inform you that you have finally arrived.”
What do you do?!
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Mindfulness hacks
Mindfulness Hacks & Experiments You can Try Anywhere, Anytime
by Gilbert Ross
Mindfulness is the quintessential meditative practice, the most valuable instrument in your mind’s toolbox and the key to personal development. In other words, it’s the shortest path to actualising your fullest potential – your real You. With so much talk and literature about the subject, it’s easy to get confused on what mindfulness really is or isn’t. Some think of mindfulness as an esoteric eastern practice reserved only to Zen buddhists who have spent years secluded in a monastery away from any cares of the world.
Yes, although mindfulness is very intimately related to Zen meditation, it is certainly not exclusive to such practice. The simplest way it can be explained is not through a formal definition but by real world experiences. Think of a time or situation where you felt really in ‘sync’ with your inner feelings, thoughts and felt collected, centred and ‘in one place’. Your emotions were balanced and your mind was not scattered everywhere. You were simply there. Things were still happening around you but you were totally still, even if only for a short while. Your awareness wasn’t quivering but set on whatever you put your attention on. That was being mindful in its broadest sense.
Now there are many valuable and comprehensive resources about the subject – from metaphysics to practical guides – and a lot of masters in the practice who definitely can shed more insight on the topic than myself. In view of this, I will reserve my article space here to suggest a few mindfulness hacks and experiments that you can carry with you in your everyday situations.
The 3 Breaths Experiment:
As easy as it sounds, your breath is a vehicle to mindfulness. Breathing comes naturally and automatically, whether we want it or not. But putting your awareness to it will ground you to the inner stillness underlying the frenetic stream of thoughts or feelings constantly arising in your waking consciousness. In short, breathing can be used to ‘anchor’ your awareness to a place and stay still. This is of course a very common method for meditation practice. However the purpose of this experiment is to experience the stillness and centre of power that comes from mindfulness. You don’t need to spend an hour in deep meditation to experience this. As Eckhart Tolle suggests in ‘A New Earth’ it only takes the awareness of one single breath to connect to your state of mindfulness and inner peace…well let’s make it three! Do it right now. Take three deep breaths and put your awareness on to it…just your breathing nothing more. Can you feel a sense of stillness and peace even if perhaps subtle for now? Do you sense a shift in awareness and focus, albeit briefly? This is mindfulness. The good news is that it can be practiced anytime, anywhere and extended to how long you feel fits your situation.
Yes, although mindfulness is very intimately related to Zen meditation, it is certainly not exclusive to such practice. The simplest way it can be explained is not through a formal definition but by real world experiences. Think of a time or situation where you felt really in ‘sync’ with your inner feelings, thoughts and felt collected, centred and ‘in one place’. Your emotions were balanced and your mind was not scattered everywhere. You were simply there. Things were still happening around you but you were totally still, even if only for a short while. Your awareness wasn’t quivering but set on whatever you put your attention on. That was being mindful in its broadest sense.
Now there are many valuable and comprehensive resources about the subject – from metaphysics to practical guides – and a lot of masters in the practice who definitely can shed more insight on the topic than myself. In view of this, I will reserve my article space here to suggest a few mindfulness hacks and experiments that you can carry with you in your everyday situations.
The 3 Breaths Experiment:
As easy as it sounds, your breath is a vehicle to mindfulness. Breathing comes naturally and automatically, whether we want it or not. But putting your awareness to it will ground you to the inner stillness underlying the frenetic stream of thoughts or feelings constantly arising in your waking consciousness. In short, breathing can be used to ‘anchor’ your awareness to a place and stay still. This is of course a very common method for meditation practice. However the purpose of this experiment is to experience the stillness and centre of power that comes from mindfulness. You don’t need to spend an hour in deep meditation to experience this. As Eckhart Tolle suggests in ‘A New Earth’ it only takes the awareness of one single breath to connect to your state of mindfulness and inner peace…well let’s make it three! Do it right now. Take three deep breaths and put your awareness on to it…just your breathing nothing more. Can you feel a sense of stillness and peace even if perhaps subtle for now? Do you sense a shift in awareness and focus, albeit briefly? This is mindfulness. The good news is that it can be practiced anytime, anywhere and extended to how long you feel fits your situation.
The ‘I’ inside my Body:
Another ‘anchoring’ method for meditation in general is being aware of your body – whether your body as a whole, a certain part of your body or else proprioception (the feeling of space and position your body is occupying). Personally for me, my chest area always works as a good anchor. The feeling is that my awareness suddenly ‘locks’ in that area. My sense of ‘I’ (or rather the awareness behind the ‘I’) feels centred and strongest in that place in the body. It can then be extended to other areas even outside the body but that is beyond the purpose of this mindfulness hack.
Like the three breaths, the purpose of this exercise is to access mindfulness briefly from anywhere, anytime. As I mentioned, you can focus on any part of your body but there are areas which are particularly useful to access mindfulness – the guts, stomach, the chest and the throat. These are places where emotions, tension or unresolved issues tend to manifest certain sensations. Not coincidentally these are some of the seven energy centres or chakras in the body. For instance a sense of powerlessness from a difficult relationship will manifest in a feeling of constriction around the chest area (Heart Chakra) or anxiety as ‘butterflies’ around your stomach area (Solar Plexus). Placing our awareness briefly in these major energy centres can help you connect much easier to your inner being which in turn will centre you in a state of inner calm and mindfulness.
For example you are in a coffee shop somewhere watching the world go by around you in a frenzy. Take a few minutes to place your attention to one of these areas. How does it feel? Is it tense or constricted or ‘cramped’? Keep putting your mindful awareness to it – do you feel it opening up and relaxing?
The Lucidity Test:
Let’s stick with the coffee shop scenario. You are there absorbed in something – perhaps chatting with your pal, texting on your smartphone or just engulfed in the experience of the world passing by. Just like in a normal dream, you are not aware it is a dream. You are sucked into its plot and its ‘emotional energy’. You just follow it, unaware it’s all a dream. But then something unexpected happens. Something triggers your conscious awareness to ‘pop’ out and realise you are actually in a dream. You ask yourself ‘am I dreaming?” and then you awake and become lucid – you are lucid dreaming. Back to the coffee shop. You are there going with the flow of whatever you are doing. Then you ask yourself “am I conscious right now or am I following the flow of the ‘dream’?”
This triggers a shift in your attention. You become aware that you were not aware or your awareness was diluted into many things. This triggers lucidity or mindfulness. You awake from the ‘dream’. Suddenly your awareness is in one place. The things which were affecting you – people passing by, chatter, your screen – does not suck you in anymore. You are in a state of mindfulness.
In short, the funny thing is that the lucidity tests or ‘reality checks’ used in lucid dream techniques can be applied to your waking life just as well and as effectively.
Some Helpful Resources:
The above suggestions are meant to ground your awareness and become mindfulness in short time windows wherever you are. This is why I am calling them hacks. Yet mindfulness is, or ought to be, a continuous practice and an extremely beneficial one. Here are some resources you might want to dig into to find out more how you can use mindfulness as part of your personal development.
Teach Yourself Mindfulness Course: A carefully crafted course designed to guide you deeper through mindfulness practice. This is a 10 week course, taught by teachers Benjamin Friedland and Barbara Cunnings. The course comes with ebook and 10 high quality audio files with meditations. Highly recommended.
Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment – When I think of Mindfulness I think of Jon Kabat Zinn, author of this fantastic guide to mindfulness. Kabat-Zinn is a scientist and meditation teacher who was a pioneer in demonstrating the benefits of mindfulness within western mainstream medicine. A must read.
The above suggestions are meant to ground your awareness and become mindfulness in short time windows wherever you are. This is why I am calling them hacks. Yet mindfulness is, or ought to be, a continuous practice and an extremely beneficial one. Here are some resources you might want to dig into to find out more how you can use mindfulness as part of your personal development.
Teach Yourself Mindfulness Course: A carefully crafted course designed to guide you deeper through mindfulness practice. This is a 10 week course, taught by teachers Benjamin Friedland and Barbara Cunnings. The course comes with ebook and 10 high quality audio files with meditations. Highly recommended.
Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment – When I think of Mindfulness I think of Jon Kabat Zinn, author of this fantastic guide to mindfulness. Kabat-Zinn is a scientist and meditation teacher who was a pioneer in demonstrating the benefits of mindfulness within western mainstream medicine. A must read.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy
Zen aims at a perfection of personhood. To this end, sitting meditation called “za-zen” is employed as a foundational method of prāxis across the different schools of this Buddha-Way, through which the Zen practitioner attempts to embody non-discriminatory wisdom vis-à-vis the meditational experience known as “satori” (enlightenment). A process of discovering wisdom culminates in the experiential dimension in which the equality of thing-events is apprehended in discerning them. The most distinguishing feature of this school of the Buddha-Way is seen in its contention that wisdom, accompanied by compassion, is expressed in the everyday “life-world” when associating with one's self, people, and nature. The everyday “life-world” for most people is an evanescent transforming stage in which living is consumed, philosophically speaking, by an either-or, ego-logical, dualistic paradigm of thinking with its attendant psychological states such as stress and anxiety. Zen demands an overcoming of this paradigm by practically achieving an holistic perspective in cognition, so that the Zen practitioner can celebrate, with a stillness of mind, a life of tending toward the concrete thing-events of everyday life and nature. For this reason, the Zen practitioner is required to embody freedom expressive of the original human nature. Generally speaking, Zen cherishes simplicity and straightforwardness in grasping reality and acting on it “here and now,” for it believes that a thing-event that is immediately presencing before one's eyes or under one's foot is no other than an expression of suchness, i.e., it is such that it is showing its primordial mode of being. It also understands a specificity of thing-event to be a recapitulation of the whole; parts and the whole are to be lived in an inseparable relationship through an exercise of nondiscriminatory wisdom, without prioritizing the visible over the invisible, the explicit over the implicit, and vice versa. As such, Zen maintains a stance of “not one” and “not two,” i.e., “positionless position,” where “not two” signals a negation of the stance that divides the whole into two parts, i.e., dualism, while “not one” designates a negation of this stance when the Zen practitioner dwells in the whole as one, while suspending judgment in meditation, i.e., non-dualism. Free, bilateral movement between “not one” and “not two” characterizes Zen's achievement of a personhood with a third perspective that cannot, however, be confined to either dualism or non-dualism (i.e., neither “not one” nor “not two”)...
Complete text at Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy:
Complete text at Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy:
Sunday, February 15, 2015
12 Tools for More Mindful Living
from http://www.fastcompany.com/3023459/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/12-tools-for-more-mindful-living
Living a more mindful life is worth the effort, but remembering to focus and keep your mind in the moment is difficult. Here is a toolset designed to help you achieve your goals.
By Leo Babauta
The focus of my life in recent months has been living mindfully, and while I don’t always remember to do that, I have learned a few things worth sharing.
The first is a mindful life is worth the effort. It’s a life where we awaken from the dream state we’re most often submerged in—the state of having your mind anywhere but the present moment, locked in thoughts about what you’re going to do later, about something someone else said, about something you’re stressing about or angry about. The state of mind where we’re lost in our smartphones and social media.
It’s worth the effort, because being awake means we’re not missing life as we walk through it. Being awake means we’re conscious of what’s going on inside us, as it happens, and so can make more conscious choices rather than acting on our impulses all the time.
The second thing I’ve learned is that we forget. We forget, over and over, to be awake. And that’s okay. Being mindful is a process of forgetting, and then remembering. Repeatedly. Just as breathing is a process of exhaling, and then inhaling, repeatedly.
The third is that mindful living isn’t just one thing. It’s not just meditation. Nor is it just focusing on the sensations around you, right now in this moment. I’ve found mindful living to be a set of very related tools, perhaps all different ways of getting at the same thing, but each useful in its own regard.
The Toolset
1. Meditation. Meditation is where mindful living starts. And it’s not complicated: you can sit still for even just one minute a day to start with (work up to three to five minutes after a week), and turn your attention to your body and then your breath. Notice when your thoughts wander from your breath, and gently return to the breath. Repeat until the minute is up.
2. Be Awake. Meditation is practice for being awake, which is not being in the dream state (mind wandering into a train of thought, getting lost in the online world, thinking about past offenses, stressing about the future, etc.) but being awake to the present, to what is. Being awake is something you can do throughout the day, all the time, if you remember. Remembering is the trick.
3. Watch Urges. When I quit smoking in 2005, the most useful tool I learned was watching my urges to smoke. I would sit there and watch the urge rise and fall, until it was gone, without acting on it. It taught me that I am not my urges, that I don’t have to act on my urges, and this helped me change all my other habits. Watch your urge to check email or social media, to eat something sweet or fried, to drink alcohol, to watch TV, to be distracted, to procrastinate. These urges will come and go, and you don’t have to act on them.
4. Watch Ideals. We all have ideals, all the time. We have an ideal that our day will go perfectly, that people will be kind and respectful to us, that we will be perfect, that we’ll ace an exam or important meeting, that we’ll never fail. Of course, we know from experience that those ideals are not real, that they don’t come true, that they aren’t realistic. But we still have them, and they cause our stress and fears and grief over something/someone we’ve lost. By letting go of ideals, we can let go of our suffering.
5. Accept People and Life As They Are. When I stopped trying to change a loved one, and accepted him for who he was, I was able to just be with him and enjoy my time with him. This acceptance has the same effect for anything you do—accept a co-worker, a child, a spouse, but also accept a "bad" situation, an unpleasant feeling, an annoying sound. When we stop trying to fight the way things are, when we accept what is, we are much more at peace.
6. Let Go of Expectations. This is really the same thing as the previous two items, but I’ve found it useful nonetheless. It’s useful to watch your expectations with an upcoming situation, with a new project or business, and see that it’s not real and that it’s causing you stress and disappointment. We cause our own pain, and we can relieve it by letting go of the expectations that are causing it. Toss your expectations into the ocean.
7. Become okay with Discomfort. The fear of discomfort is huge—it causes people to be stuck in their old bad habits, to not start the business they want to start, to be stuck in a job they don’t really like, because we tend to stick to the known and comfortable rather than try something unknown and uncomfortable. It’s why many people don’t eat vegetables or exercise, why they eat junk, why they don’t start something new. But we can be okay with discomfort, with practice. Start with things that are a little uncomfortable, and keep expanding your comfort zone.
8. Watch Your Resistance. When you try to do something uncomfortable, or try to give up something you like or are used to, you’ll find resistance. But you can just watch the resistance, and be curious about it. Watch your resistance to things that annoy you—a loud sound that interrupts your concentration, for example. It’s not the sound that’s the problem, it’s your resistance to the sound. The same is true of resistance to food we don’t like, to being too cold or hot, to being hungry. The problem isn’t the sensation of the food, cold, heat or hunger—it’s our resistance to them. Watch the resistance, and feel it melt. This resistance, by the way, is why I’m doing my Year of Living Without.
9. Be Curious. Too often we are stuck in our ways, and think we know how things should be, how people are. Instead, be curious. Find out. Experiment. Let go of what you think you know. When you start a new project or venture, if you feel the fear of failure, instead of thinking, "Oh no, I’m going to fail" or "Oh no, I don’t know how this will turn out", try thinking, "Let’s see. Let’s find out." And then there isn’t the fear of failure, but the joy of being curious and finding out. Learn to be okay with not knowing.
10. Be Grateful. We complain about everything. But life is a miracle. Find something to be grateful about in everything you do. Be grateful when you’re doing a new habit, and you’ll stick to it longer. Be grateful when you’re with someone, and you’ll be happier with them. Life is amazing, if you learn to appreciate it.
11. Let Go of Control. We often think we control things, but that’s only an illusion. Our obsession with organization and goals and productivity, for example, are rooted in the illusion that we can control life. But life is uncontrollable, and just when we think we have things under control, something unexpected comes up to disrupt everything. And then we’re frustrated because things didn’t go the way we wanted. Instead, practice letting go of control, and learn to flow.
12. Be Compassionate. This sounds trite, but compassion for others can change the way you feel about the world, on a day-to-day basis. And compassion for yourself is life-changing. These two things need remembering, though, so mindful living is about remembering to be compassionate after you forget.
That seems like a lot to digest and remember, and I often forget all of this stuff, but then I remember, and say, "Ah, I was doing it again!" And then I practice again.
And then I forget, but I reflect, and I learn, and I practice again.
This is the process of learning mindfulness. It’s forgetting, and then remembering, again and again.
This post originally appeared in ZenHabits and is reprinted with permission.
Living a more mindful life is worth the effort, but remembering to focus and keep your mind in the moment is difficult. Here is a toolset designed to help you achieve your goals.
By Leo Babauta
The focus of my life in recent months has been living mindfully, and while I don’t always remember to do that, I have learned a few things worth sharing.
The first is a mindful life is worth the effort. It’s a life where we awaken from the dream state we’re most often submerged in—the state of having your mind anywhere but the present moment, locked in thoughts about what you’re going to do later, about something someone else said, about something you’re stressing about or angry about. The state of mind where we’re lost in our smartphones and social media.
It’s worth the effort, because being awake means we’re not missing life as we walk through it. Being awake means we’re conscious of what’s going on inside us, as it happens, and so can make more conscious choices rather than acting on our impulses all the time.
The second thing I’ve learned is that we forget. We forget, over and over, to be awake. And that’s okay. Being mindful is a process of forgetting, and then remembering. Repeatedly. Just as breathing is a process of exhaling, and then inhaling, repeatedly.
The third is that mindful living isn’t just one thing. It’s not just meditation. Nor is it just focusing on the sensations around you, right now in this moment. I’ve found mindful living to be a set of very related tools, perhaps all different ways of getting at the same thing, but each useful in its own regard.
The Toolset
1. Meditation. Meditation is where mindful living starts. And it’s not complicated: you can sit still for even just one minute a day to start with (work up to three to five minutes after a week), and turn your attention to your body and then your breath. Notice when your thoughts wander from your breath, and gently return to the breath. Repeat until the minute is up.
2. Be Awake. Meditation is practice for being awake, which is not being in the dream state (mind wandering into a train of thought, getting lost in the online world, thinking about past offenses, stressing about the future, etc.) but being awake to the present, to what is. Being awake is something you can do throughout the day, all the time, if you remember. Remembering is the trick.
3. Watch Urges. When I quit smoking in 2005, the most useful tool I learned was watching my urges to smoke. I would sit there and watch the urge rise and fall, until it was gone, without acting on it. It taught me that I am not my urges, that I don’t have to act on my urges, and this helped me change all my other habits. Watch your urge to check email or social media, to eat something sweet or fried, to drink alcohol, to watch TV, to be distracted, to procrastinate. These urges will come and go, and you don’t have to act on them.
4. Watch Ideals. We all have ideals, all the time. We have an ideal that our day will go perfectly, that people will be kind and respectful to us, that we will be perfect, that we’ll ace an exam or important meeting, that we’ll never fail. Of course, we know from experience that those ideals are not real, that they don’t come true, that they aren’t realistic. But we still have them, and they cause our stress and fears and grief over something/someone we’ve lost. By letting go of ideals, we can let go of our suffering.
5. Accept People and Life As They Are. When I stopped trying to change a loved one, and accepted him for who he was, I was able to just be with him and enjoy my time with him. This acceptance has the same effect for anything you do—accept a co-worker, a child, a spouse, but also accept a "bad" situation, an unpleasant feeling, an annoying sound. When we stop trying to fight the way things are, when we accept what is, we are much more at peace.
6. Let Go of Expectations. This is really the same thing as the previous two items, but I’ve found it useful nonetheless. It’s useful to watch your expectations with an upcoming situation, with a new project or business, and see that it’s not real and that it’s causing you stress and disappointment. We cause our own pain, and we can relieve it by letting go of the expectations that are causing it. Toss your expectations into the ocean.
7. Become okay with Discomfort. The fear of discomfort is huge—it causes people to be stuck in their old bad habits, to not start the business they want to start, to be stuck in a job they don’t really like, because we tend to stick to the known and comfortable rather than try something unknown and uncomfortable. It’s why many people don’t eat vegetables or exercise, why they eat junk, why they don’t start something new. But we can be okay with discomfort, with practice. Start with things that are a little uncomfortable, and keep expanding your comfort zone.
8. Watch Your Resistance. When you try to do something uncomfortable, or try to give up something you like or are used to, you’ll find resistance. But you can just watch the resistance, and be curious about it. Watch your resistance to things that annoy you—a loud sound that interrupts your concentration, for example. It’s not the sound that’s the problem, it’s your resistance to the sound. The same is true of resistance to food we don’t like, to being too cold or hot, to being hungry. The problem isn’t the sensation of the food, cold, heat or hunger—it’s our resistance to them. Watch the resistance, and feel it melt. This resistance, by the way, is why I’m doing my Year of Living Without.
9. Be Curious. Too often we are stuck in our ways, and think we know how things should be, how people are. Instead, be curious. Find out. Experiment. Let go of what you think you know. When you start a new project or venture, if you feel the fear of failure, instead of thinking, "Oh no, I’m going to fail" or "Oh no, I don’t know how this will turn out", try thinking, "Let’s see. Let’s find out." And then there isn’t the fear of failure, but the joy of being curious and finding out. Learn to be okay with not knowing.
10. Be Grateful. We complain about everything. But life is a miracle. Find something to be grateful about in everything you do. Be grateful when you’re doing a new habit, and you’ll stick to it longer. Be grateful when you’re with someone, and you’ll be happier with them. Life is amazing, if you learn to appreciate it.
11. Let Go of Control. We often think we control things, but that’s only an illusion. Our obsession with organization and goals and productivity, for example, are rooted in the illusion that we can control life. But life is uncontrollable, and just when we think we have things under control, something unexpected comes up to disrupt everything. And then we’re frustrated because things didn’t go the way we wanted. Instead, practice letting go of control, and learn to flow.
12. Be Compassionate. This sounds trite, but compassion for others can change the way you feel about the world, on a day-to-day basis. And compassion for yourself is life-changing. These two things need remembering, though, so mindful living is about remembering to be compassionate after you forget.
That seems like a lot to digest and remember, and I often forget all of this stuff, but then I remember, and say, "Ah, I was doing it again!" And then I practice again.
And then I forget, but I reflect, and I learn, and I practice again.
This is the process of learning mindfulness. It’s forgetting, and then remembering, again and again.
This post originally appeared in ZenHabits and is reprinted with permission.
The Shōbōgenzō free download
A new translation of a Zen classic... The Shōbōgenzō is the recognized spiritual masterpiece by the thirteenth century Japanese Sōtō Zen Master Eihei Dōgen. It is comprised of discourses that he gave to his disciples, in person or in writing, at various times between 1231 and his death twenty-two years later at age fifty-three. These discourses cover a wide range of topics pertinent to those in monastic life though often also relevant to those training in lay life. He discusses matters of daily behavior and religious ceremonial as well as issues involving the Master-disciple relationship. He also explores the deeper meaning that informs the so-called Zen kōan stories, which often puzzle readers by their seeming illogicality and contrary nature.
http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma12/shobo.html
http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma12/shobo.html
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