Posted inBuddhism India Religions

Classical Indian philosophy makes little sense to me

Well, I gave it a try. Today Google News, in its Picks For You section, presented me with a link to an Aeon article, "By the light of brahman: Ideas from classical Indian philosophy help illuminate the enigmas of selfhood, consciousness and the nature of reality." I decided to read the article, albeit quickly, because I hoped it would live up to the title by illuminating those enigmas. I did learn something: that classical Indian philosophy makes little sense to me. Of course, since this philosophy is the foundation of Hinduism, it isn't surprising that atheist me would find little…
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Posted inBuddhism

I love this Zen saying, though it’s difficult for me to grasp

I've been reading, and enjoying, Zen literature since my college days about 56 years ago. That explains how I was able to write a blog post in 2005 called "The Supreme Doctrine," thirty-six years overdue.  “The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought” is one of my favorite books. When I checked it out from the San Jose Public Library while I was a San Jose State University student, I couldn’t bear to return it. It’s now thirty-six years overdue. I’m pretty sure I paid the library the $1.65 replacement cost. That’s a heck of a lot cheaper than 5…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

We impose meaningfulness on the world through our stories

Yesterday my increasingly buggy blogging service, Typepad, kept generating a "503" error message all day long, so I wasn't able to write a post for one of my other blogs. I just did that, composing "My fall into a creek shows why doing one thing at a time makes sense."  That post includes a mention of my recent post here about human cognition being amazingly slow, so it's worth a read. You also can see photos of an attractive creek that runs through our rural property. Plus our electricity is off at the moment, owing to some downed power lines…
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Posted inBuddhism Personal/Stories

Theory of mental modules made me feel better about my many failings

I love it when after reading something in a nonfiction book, it doesn't just make sense to me intellectually, but deeply touches me emotionally.  That's how I felt after reading a chapter in Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True book, "How Thoughts Think Themselves." Before describing the wonderful feeling I had, I'll share some of the intellectual side of Wright's message -- which is based on a blend of Buddhist teachings, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience.  He says this about the theory of mental modules in relation to mind wandering: Though the trains of thought that carry you away from direct…
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Posted inBuddhism

For Buddhism, taking the “red pill” means more than just mindfulness

It's been quite a while since I've watched The Matrix. You know, the movie where really real reality is very different from how things appear to those trapped in illusion -- which in this case is being confined in a pod, hallucinating that what you're dreaming is actually true. Robert Wright starts off his Why Buddhism is True book by using the red pill/blue pill choice in The Matrix as a metaphor for what Buddhism seeks: the truth about life. The prison is called the Matrix, but there's no way to explain to Neo what the Matrix ultimately is. The…
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Posted inBuddhism Science

Evolution doesn’t care if feelings are true, just that they are good for us

In a recent post, "No, major religions don't provide a truer picture of reality," I noted that evolution doesn't care about truth, just about whether genes are passed on to the next generation. Of course, this is just a manner of speaking, since evolution isn't about caring or not-caring. This goes against one of the primal facts about evolution: that species prosper not because they possess a greater grasp of reality, but because they are adept at passing on genes, organisms being well suited to the environment in which they find themselves. After writing that, I came across a mention…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Here’s the best description of Zen koans I’ve ever seen

Koans are an aspect of Zen Buddhism that I've always looked upon as wonderfully mysterious, yet unappealing. For in traditional Zen writings I'd read about a student being given a koan like "Does a dog have buddha nature?" Then they struggled to figure out what the answer is, periodically having a get-together with their Zen master for him to see how they're doing, where usually he rejects their lame attempt at a response by hitting them on the head with his staff or screaming at them. Not exactly something that sounds either pleasant or productive to me.  But near the…
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Posted inBuddhism Reality Religions

Science is the best guide to spirituality

Some people believe that science is opposed to spirituality, that these pursuits operate in different realms of reality and an embrace of one implies a distancing from the other. I've never believed this. Even when I was in my most religious frame of mind, the 35 years I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru considered to be God in Human Form, I remained intensely interested in what science has learned about our universe even as I explored the possibility of realms beyond the physical. This is why…
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Posted inBuddhism

It’s great that a Zen master can be an atheist

[Before I get into the subject of this blog post, a note about keeping to the subject in comments on my blog posts. I just had to unpublish a comment on my previous post about the need to choose a religion, as the comment was related 100% to a defense of an outrageous action by the Trump administration that I wrote about last night on my Salem Political Snark blog. I'm fine with some mildly off-topic comments, but not those completely unrelated to the subject of a blog post, as that is highly confusing to anyone reading such a comment.…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

I like the idea that love is akin to spaciousness

Love. What is it? For me, love has been easier to feel than to describe. It seems to have something to do with attraction, since I want to be closer to people and things that I love, while the opposite is true of people and things that I hate or dislike. Every night I say "love you" to my wife before we go to sleep. She says the same to me. It's a ritual that means a lot to me, in part because it makes me feel good to know that if I die in my sleep, those would have…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

We are both the mind and the observer of the mind

Recently I read an essay in either the New York Times or Washington Post by someone who spoke about how Thich Nhat Hanh's classic little book, "The Miracle of Mindfulness," had changed his life.  That spurred me to head to Amazon to see if I'd already bought that book. Yes, Amazon told me, you did, in January 2019. Looking through the Buddhism section of my bookcase, there it was, all 139 pages of it. I've been re-reading parts of The Miracle of Mindfulness the past few days. Published 50 years ago, in 1975, the book is wonderfully clear and concise.…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

The goal is our chosen direction, says Zen master Henry Shukman

I think it'd be cool to be a Zen master. However, to do that I would have had to actually practice Zen under the guidance of a Zen master, rather than admire Zen from the outside and practice it in my own idiosyncratic fashion. Henry Shukman, who wrote the book Original Love that I'm reading now, and fashioned The Way app on my iPhone that I've using every morning in a cyberspace form of Zen meditation, is indeed a Zen master. I just checked out the Sanbo Zen International web site and Shukman is listed there along with other masters…
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Posted inBuddhism Science Spiritual practice/meditation

Why general relativity leads me to prefer Zen’ish meditation

Ever eager to cram together two seemingly highly separate subjects into a profound (or pseudo-profound) blog post, here's my take on relativity theory and Zen. I got to pondering the connection after two events in my life today tilted me in that direction.  Event #1 occurred when I read an article in the August 6, 2022 issue of New Scientist that I'd dug out of the bottom of a forgotten pile of unread magazines. In it Chandra Prescod-Weinstein, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire, described why general relativity is known as a background…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Mindfulness

Mindfulness is focused attention plus peripheral awareness

In December 2018, six years ago, I wrote what seems to be my first (and only) post about a book I'd just started reading, The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness. A few days ago something spurred me to pluck the book from a bookshelf where it had been languishing after I'd read about half of the 415 pages, then put it aside. I decided to re-read it, since the book methodically describes ten stages of Buddhist meditation and I wanted to start at the beginning rather than jump right into…
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Posted inBuddhism

Buddhist meditation and psychology can learn from each other

My undergraduate major in college was psychology. I also started to practice daily meditation while in college. So for me, psychology and meditation always have been linked, though not always as closely as they are now. I say this, because for thirty-five years my meditation had an otherworldly emphasis. After being initiated by an Indian guru, my goal was to meditate in a fashion that would enable my soul-consciousness to leave this worldly plane of existence behind and travel to higher regions of supernatural reality. Yeah, right... All that had very little to do with modern psychology. But for about…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

“Right Concentration” is a good book about meditation and the jhanas

As I like to say, it isn't wise to judge a book by its cover, but I've found that it usually makes sense to judge a book by the first twenty pages. For that's enough reading to get a good feel for the author's style and personality, at least as how it's expressed in writing. This morning I got that far in Leigh Brasington's Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas. Brasington clearly has a lot of experience with meditation, Buddhist variety, which is pretty much how I've been meditating for around fifteen years, maybe longer.  I don't consider…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Jhanas are the current meditation craze, says TIME magazine

I've got to get me some jhanas. That was my thought, admittedly not thoroughly spiritual, that came to mind this morning after I read a story in the August 26, 2024 issue of TIME magazine: "The Pursuit of Happiness." It was written by Nina Bajekal, who combined her reporting about a company, Jhourney, that offers training in how to experience jhanas through meditation, with her personal experience of going on a week-long Jhourney retreat. The online version of her story is called "My Week at the Buzzy Meditation Retreat That Promises Bliss on Demand." In case you aren't able to…
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Posted inBuddhism Consciousness

I rediscover Douglas Harding’s “headless” rediscovery of the obvious

Douglas Harding's classic book, On Having No Head, has the subtitle of Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious. Well, as I said in a 2018 post, "'On Having No Head' has a few simple truths," I'd bought the book quite a few years prior, given it away because I wasn't overly impressed with it back then, then bought a revised edition after I heard Sam Harris talk about it on his Waking Up app. The past few days I've been re-re-reading the book that I re-bought and re-read six years ago. That's a lot of "re's" for a book…
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Posted inAwareness Buddhism Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Look without, not within, is the best spiritual advice

For thirty-five years I belonged to a guru-centered religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), whose teachings centered around a meditation approach aimed at "going within."  Through the repetition of a mantra, visualization of the guru, and observation by one's inner senses of theorized divine sound and light, the promise was that realms of reality beyond the physical would be experienced on the road to God-realization. Nice idea. Never happened to me. Nor did it happen to anyone else associated with RSSB who I talked with over those thirty-five years. And believe me, I talked with lots of RSSB initiates.…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Enlightenment is not needing to die a good death

I'm a believer in the Five Minute University equivalent of book reading. If you're not familiar with Father Guido Sarducci's Five Minute University, congratulations. You're nowhere near as old as I am. Sarducci was a thing back in the ancient days of 1970's/80's comedy. His brilliant idea, which is hard to argue with, was to charge $20 for a diploma from his college, which only takes five minutes to graduate from, since five years after someone graduates from a regular college, all they can remember about what they learned could be regurgitated in five minutes. For more details, here's a…
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