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 inDelusions Mindfulness Reality

“The Surprising Allure of Ignorance,” an essay by Mark Lilla

My wife subscribes to the print edition of the Sunday New York Times. As I was taking the discarded December 8 edition to our recycling bin, I noticed an essay in the Opinion section, which was on top of the pile, that looked interesting: "The Surprising Allure of Ignorance," by Mark Lilla. (That's a gift link from my digital New York Times account, so it should be readable by everybody. But I've also copied in Lilla's essay in its entirety below, as it isn't all that long.) Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University and the author of…
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Posted inBooks Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

“The Mindful Geek” is a meditation guide for secular skeptics

Do I really need another book about meditation? No, I've got lots of them at the moment and have read many more over the 55 years I've been engaged in daily meditation. But do I want another book about meditation? Absolutely. That's why Amazon delivered The Mindful Geek by Michael W. Taft to me recently. I was in the mood for a meditation guide that was based on secular non-religious principles that were in accord with modern neuroscience. Taft has a strong background in various sorts of traditions. His first paragraph is: From Zen temples in Japan to yogi caves…
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Posted inAwareness Consciousness Mindfulness

Meditators need to avoid mistaking subtle dullness for meditative joy

As noted in a previous post, I've been re-reading the first part of a book by Culadasa (John Yates), The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness.  I'm almost back to where I stopped my reading about six years ago for a reason I can no longer recall. The book is an amazingly detailed and comprehensive approach to Buddhist meditation. I find it refreshing, because there's hardly any mention of Buddhist scriptures, Buddhist terms, or Buddhist stories.  The whole focus is on guiding the reader through ten stages of meditative practice. So…
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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 inMindfulness Neuroscience

Thinking positively isn’t as important as being emotionally positive

I'm continuing to enjoy James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. As I indicated before, don't be put off by the title, which admittedly sounds a bit New Age'y. With rare exceptions, and I'm approaching the halfway mark in my reading of Mind Magic, so I'm pretty confident that this is true, Doty stays within the bounds of modern psychology and neuroscience in his book. Which isn't surprising, since he's a neuroscientist and neurosurgeon.  What's well known is that what we're consciously aware of is a very small fraction of what the brain…
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Posted inMindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Awareness is more important than peace of mind

Every day I repeat a brief loving kindness meditation. It starts with "May I be happy; may I be safe; may I be healthy; may I be at peace." Then I visualize someone I care about, usually my wife, and say the same things but substituting "you" for "I." After that, I zoom out to visualize the entire planet, and say "all" instead of "I." It's interesting that I have little trouble envisioning myself or someone else being happy, safe, and healthy. But while I enjoy the sentiment, "May ______ be at peace," it's more difficult for me to picture…
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Posted inMindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

How to have less of a distracted mind

As evidenced by the title of the first blog post I wrote six days ago about The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, a book by Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen -- "Why repeating a mantra during daily activities doesn't make much sense" -- I'm interested in the spiritual implications of the book, even though the authors pay zero attention to this. They're concerned with how three modern innovations, the Internet, smart phones, and social media, are screwing up our ability to concentrate, though it isn't as if these innovations are forcing us to obey their whims. For…
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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 inMindfulness Personal/Stories

Pain is a great teacher, though I’d prefer a more pleasant instructor

Back in 2020 was when my sciatica pain started. I don't know why. Often health problems appear mysteriously. Which would be fine if they disappeared just as mysteriously.  But in my case, the extreme pain I had early on, where I'd shed tears uncontrollably while walking the dog or mowing the lawn if I was having an especially bad day, eventually abated. Maybe from time. Maybe from the physical therapy exercises I was given. Who knows? For the next three years, 2021-23, my right leg always had some discomfort. It was manageable, though. I didn't need pain relievers. I was…
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Posted inMindfulness

Mind-body dualism ignores the close connection between mental and physical

Most religions are dualistic. They assume that something ethereal exists within us, or as us, that is separate and distinct from the physical body: mind, soul, spirit, divine energy, and such. To which I say, maybe, since anything is possible. However, there's no convincing evidence that this ethereal something exists, with zero evidence that this something that can't be shown to exist has any observable effects. Today I finished reading Ellen Langer's book, Mindfulness. In a final chapter, this Harvard psychologist has quite a bit to say about mind-body dualism, though not in a religious sense. She starts off by…
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Posted inFundamentalism Mindfulness Politics

Beware of ideologies, even though most of us embrace them

I enjoyed this recent comment on a churchless blog post from "sant64." There's valuable wisdom here. The first paragraph comes from what I said in the post. "This makes sense in many situations. However, when it comes to solid facts, such as the reality of human-caused global warming, 'trying out different perspectives' isn't the right thing to do. In these sorts of cases, reality almost certainly is a certain way." The proper perspective that jibes with "reality" is what? Believing that we're in the end-times because there's little hope we can reverse GW, or believing that GW is manageable and…
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Posted inMindfulness

I prefer the Eastern, rather than Western, approach to mindfulness

Since I enjoyed psychologist Ellen Langer's most recent book so much (The Mindful Body), I figured that I'd also enjoy what may have been her first book, or at least an early book, Mindfulness.  Actually, not so much. As Langer says in a section called "Mindfulness East and West," she takes a decidedly Western approach to mindfulness. The definitions of mindfulness in this chapter, especially the process orientation just discussed, will remind many readers of various concepts of mindfulness found in Eastern religion... While there are many similarities, the differences in the historical and cultural background from which they are…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Meditation isn’t about doing it right. It’s about trusting yourself.

TIME magazine rarely has stories about meditation. So it was a pleasure to turn a page of the February 12, 2024 issue and see a title: "The noises in my head at a silent retreat." I could relate to those words. For after starting to meditate every day in 1971, during the past fifty-three years my meditation has involved a lot of noises inside my own head.  Thoughts. Emotions. Cravings. Things to do. Cosmic conceptions. Crude desires. You know, everything that's going through my mind outside of meditation. It's just more obvious when I'm sitting still, usually with eyes closed,…
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Posted inMindfulness

Pain is a good example of how mind and body are united

I'm intimately familiar with pain. All of us are, of course, since everyone experiences pain -- aside from the unfortunate people who don't feel it at all, which isn't a good thing, because they usually suffer serious injuries or even death from not recognizing when something is dangerous, like a fire burning their skin. Often pain becomes a more familiar companion the older we get. That's true of me. I was mostly pain free until early in 2020 when, at the age of 71, I developed sciatica in my right leg.  Because this coincided with the beginning of the Covid…
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Posted inMindfulness

Great observations about life in “The Mindful Body”

It was kind of a strange way for me to learn about a book. I usually ignore emails from Strong Towns, an organization devoted to making cities and towns more livable, but this one featured messages from staff members about what they're finding interesting in books, film, and such. I saw that a woman spoke highly of Ellen Langer's book, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. Since I'm big on mindfulness, and also liked the creative mention of "chronic health," I ordered the book after reading some laudatory reviews on Amazon. The cover copy says that Langer,…
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Posted inMindfulness

Joan Tollifson’s “awakening” seems to be mindfulness, basically

I'm continuing to enjoy Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp. As noted before, she has an approach to spirituality, and life, that resonates with me. Simple. Clear. Non-dogmatic.  But I'm coming to believe that as distinctive as her views are, they seem to boil down to a familiar subject: mindfulness. Since Tollifson doesn't use this term in her writing and speaking -- at least, I haven't come across it yet -- at first I thought that her worldview was founded in the disciplines mentioned on the back cover of Nothing to Grasp in an "About the Author" section:  Joan Tollifson…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

Here’s a good description of what Buddhist mindfulness is all about

There's lots of ways to look upon mindfulness. Mostly I view mindfulness as a practice that doesn't require a grounding in Buddhism. However, I enjoy reading about how Buddhist practitioners view mindfulness, or vipassana insight meditation.  A concluding chapter of Mindfulness in Plain English, by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, a Buddhist monk, contains a description of what mindfulness can lead to that I found clear and mostly convincing, though I have some doubts about whether the supposedly unconditioned state of nibbana/nirvana actually can be achieved. Enjoy. As you continue to observe these changes and you see how it all fits together,…
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Posted inMindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation Vedanta/Advaita

If we’re only happy when life has no problems, we’ll never be happy

After recommending a conversation between Sam Harris and André Duqum after listening to only ten minutes of it, now I can really recommend the conversation after listening to two hours of the 2:20 talk between them. Harris is in fine form here. Having been an avid user of his Waking Up app, I've heard quite a few talks between Harris and some other spiritually inclined person. He tells some of the same stories in the Duqum conversation but much of what Harris says is new to me. I haven't been taking any notes, so will simply relate what I remember…
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Posted inConsciousness Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Don’t watch yourself. Be yourself. In meditation, and in everything.

I usually listen to a daily guided meditation on Sam Harris' Waking Up app. But sometimes I enjoy other offerings on the app, which includes a section called Theory. There's also Practice and Life. Now and then Harris correctly says in his guided meditations that listening to a conversation in the Theory section can be just as valuable of meditating. After all, meditation is about paying attention to what's happening in the present moment. If that thing is an interesting conversation between Harris and someone else, and I'm paying close attention to it, then, hey, that's a form of meditation.…
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