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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Posted inBuddhism Consciousness Taoism/Tai Chi

Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself

Though in the past I've dismissed sentiments such as the title of this blog post as being unduly New Age'y, today I changed my mind. I guess it depends on the context of sayings such as Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself.  So here's the context for my newfound positive feeling toward those words. A few days ago I saw a mention in the book I've been writing about recently, The Elephant and the Blind by Thomas Metzinger, of a book by David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry. Since I'm attracted both to Chinese philosophy…
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Posted inBuddhism

Joan Tollifson on the Imaginary Vantage Point. Brilliant observations.

Joan Tollifson reminds me a lot of the best of Alan Watts. Meaning, she communicates profound spiritual insights in a direct, down to earth, and often humorous fashion, but without the sometimes annoying tendency of Watts to make more of himself to an audience than he deserves. Tollifson has more humility. I absolutely loved her chapter, "The Imaginary Vantage Point," in Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues About Non-Duality. The best part was a dialog with someone at her talk who had some questions/opinions about it. This was the central thesis in Tollifson's talk, the absence of a…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

Joan Tollifson on the groundlessness of reality

Tai Chi, which I've practiced for nineteen years, speaks about being rooted. Not in the sense of a plant being attached to the earth, but something similar. Being connected to the floor, or ground, in a way that is stable, secure, capable of being the foundation of productive movement (especially important in a martial or self-defense application). But this root isn't a static thing, because we humans aren't oak trees. It's dynamic, ever-changing, adjusting to circumstances.  Which fits with a recent essay by Joan Tollifson that arrived in my email inbox yesterday. I've shared the first part of it below,…
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Posted inBuddhism Vedanta/Advaita

Here’s some thoughts about thinking (and nonduality) from Joan Tollifson

I've become a big fan of Joan Tollifson. I can't get enough of her take on Zen, Buddhism in general, Advaita, nonduality, and a bunch of other subjects that she talks about in her writings and speaks about in her talks. I sort of feel like a Grateful Dead groupie back in the days when people would travel around the country attending their performances wherever they played. Except, I don't need to go anywhere to get my Tollifson fix.  Her books are delivered to me by Amazon. Her web site has a vast amount of material in the Outpourings section.…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

The endpoint of spirituality is breaking the addiction to spirituality

For a long time, including at this very moment, I've had a feeling that both disturbs and elates me: almost everything that I once thought was true about spirituality actually isn't, which means that what remains when my addiction to spiritual seeking has run its course is what I'm truly looking for. This is sort of akin to the Zen'ish adage, first there is a mountain, then there isn't, then there is. I alluded to this in a 2015 post, "I don't really know what 'spiritual' means anymore." Since I don’t see anything other than naturalistic reality as being, well,…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Two books, a half century apart: old Zen, new Zen

I readily admit that I'm addicted to books. It's both a genetic and learned addiction. I blame, or credit, my mother. She was an avid reader and intellectual who, like me now, had books piled up around her home and made notes about them in blank ending pages. My addiction could help explain why I find myself attracted to books I've owned for a long time, in the example below, over a half century, even though my philosophical tastes have changed quite a bit over the years. Like a literary archaeologist, I can estimate when I first read a book…
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Posted inBuddhism

Zen is largely psychological rather than supernatural, a big plus

Since Zen Buddhism tends to deny that reality can be captured in words or concepts, I guess it isn't surprising that I have difficulty explaining, either to myself or to others, why I've been so enamored of Zen since my college days. That's when I kept the only book I've failed to return to a library (I'm pretty sure I paid the San Jose Public Library for the replacement cost), Hubert Benoit's The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought. I wrote about this back in 2005: "'The Supreme Doctrine', thirty-six years overdue"  Whenever I need another dose of Zen,…
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