Meditation - short term craze or long term opportunity for the growth of Buddhism?

Suddenly everybody’s meditating  - from stressed-out film stars and business executives, to senior citizens trying to slow down the effects of ageing. We’re all suffering from information overload, and a favorite way to bring order to the chaos of our minds is to meditate.

Although most of the meditation techniques are based on Buddhist methods, they are usually presented in a secular manner.  The marketing ploy seems to be: ‘Although the Buddhists have by some accident discovered techniques for calming and healing mind and body, let’s forget about their theories and all that religious stuff, and just concentrate on the practical methods for the here and now’. 

But can such secular meditation lead on to spiritual meditation? Can meditation for mundane purposes introduce people to the Buddhadharma?  Is this an opportunity for the growth of Buddhism in the West?

 
Tangled mind 
People are often motivated into taking up meditation by the realisation that their overloaded thought-processes feel like this…
 

Information overload

What they’re hoping to do is to sort them out into something neat and tidy like this....
 

Tidy thoughts

But what they might eventually experience, as they untangle their minds, is something like this, where they become aware of a clear central core to the mind…

The Core of Awareness

 
 


















 
That central core (the 'root mind' or 'pure awareness') is non-physical and continues onwards when all the other strands, threads and processes of the mind have come to an end.   The core of the mind is like an optical fiber - clear and illuminating. It is the clear, pure awareness that is central to other thought processes.

Secular mindfulness meditations allow the meditator to catch a glimpse of this clear core by parting the tangled threads of peripheral thought processes.   However, only more advanced meditations, especially the Tantric-style ones, allow the meditator to actually manipulate this central core and its contents. For like a clear optical fiber, it carries information onwards from the end of this life to all our future lives. 


Mindfulness meditation primes the mind for spiritual experiences
From The Huffington Post 
"The practice of mindfulness dates back at least 2,500 years to early Buddhism, and since then, it's played an important role in a number of spiritual traditions.

While the stillness and connecting with one's inner self cultivated through mindfulness are certainly an important part of a spiritual practice, feelings of wonder and awe -- the amazement we get when faced with incredible vastness -- are also central to the spiritual experience. And according to new research, mindfulness may actually set the stage for awe.

Mindfulness is the key element of the spiritual experience in a number of different religions.

Awe is defined as a feeling of fascination and amazement invoked by an encounter with something larger than ourselves that is beyond our ordinary frameworks of understanding. Previous research has shown that spirituality, nature and art are the most common ways that we experience awe.

"You can't digest [the object of awe] with your cognitive structures -- it's too big for you," University of Groningen psychologist Dr. Brian Ostafin told the Huffington Post. "So there's a need for accommodation, to change your mental structures to understand what that is. This is the key element of the spiritual experience in a number of different religions..."
 

Progressing from secular meditation to the dharma
Mindfulness meditation is probably not a temporary craze, but is here to stay, since information overload is not going to decrease, and our lives or not going to get any less busy. Buddhists need to show that the dharma starts where secular meditation techniques leave off.   It will require skillful presentation to introduce spiritual ideas to an increasingly secular audience, without scaring them off with 'religion', and its associated bad vibes.


Read more at Buddhist Philosophy

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How to meditate on the peaceful clarity of your own mind

Analytical and Placement Meditation

How to meditate
 
Daily Lamrim

What to Meditate on 

Sitting in Meditation 

Preparing for Meditation 

The Meditation Session 

A Meditation Schedule

Meditation Retreat

Kadampa Working Dad 

Kadampa Life

The webcrawler in your mind.

The purpose of this 'mindfulness' meditation is to obtain a glimpse of the formless nature of the mind as pure awareness, and in the process examine the compulsive web of interlinked thoughts that normally dominates our consciousness.


1. Find somewhere quiet and peaceful where you won't be disturbed. Silence your mobile, and if at home take the phone off the hook.

2. There's no need for a classical meditation posture, just sit upright in a chair. Try to keep your back reasonably straight. Avoid the two extremes of slouching  and getting excessively rigid.

3. Observe your breathing. Don't try to control it, just observe the natural rhythm of inhaling and exhaling.

4. Once you've settled into this observational state, but before you've got bored, introduce a small amount of breath control - just pause for a second between the in and the out breaths.

5. Next try a simple silent mental recitation. On the in-breath mentally recite the syllable OM (you don't say it out loud). At the pause between the in-breath and out-breath silently recite the syllable AH  (there is no need to prolong this pause any longer than it takes to mentally recite this syllable). On the out-breath mentally recite the syllable HUM.
 
6. Keep on breathing and silently reciting OM... AH... HUM...  Don't force the breath. Breathe naturally apart from the slight pause long enough to mentally recite the AH between the in and out breaths. You can then extend this pause if it helps you to feel calmer, and you can do so without discomfort. You may like to imagine that you hold the AH sound at your heart during the pause. Concentrate on the syllables and don't let your mind wander.

If the OM AH HUM method  doesn't work for you, then try just breathing naturally and maintaining your awareness of the sensation of the breath in the nostrils as you breathe in and out.

 
7. After a while, the novelty will wear off and your mind will appear to become extremely busy, with all sorts of thoughts competing for your attention.  Your mind will have much more immediate concerns than OM AH HUM or the sensation in the nostrils. -  "Well here I am meditating, not much happening yet -  the phone's off the hook - I wonder if anyone's trying to call -  that reminds me, it's a week since I last phoned my mother -   have I paid my phone bill? -   I haven't checked my  bank balance lately - I guess its bad because I haven't had a raise since my boss put me on a wage freeze -  "due to the recession" he said' - really it's because I'm 48 and not likely to find another job -  Why do I have to work for that creep? - Surely I could branch out on my own - I should have done it years ago - the whole company's gone down the toilet -  Toilet, just remembered, I noticed a crack in the seat this morning - I hope it doesn't collapse while I'm sitting on it  - more than likely since I'm putting on so much weight - comfort eating mostly - craving, isn't that what Buddhism's about - I hope this meditation helps with that  - nothing much happening yet -  did I remember to silence my mobile? - etc, etc..."

8. Welcome to your information-overloaded mind!  Why does meditation make the mind busier? And you thought it was supposed to calm you down. 

Yes ultimately meditation does quieten and clarify the mind, but in the early stages all that happens is that your mind becomes aware of the incessant junk-thoughts circulating in your brain (the first inkling that the mind is more than just the mechanism of the brain.). There's no more going on in your head than usual, it's just that you've become aware of it.
 
So is this incessant parade of trivialities all that there is to your mind?   Who's controlling it - obviously not you!

9. Continue with the OM AH HUM for a little while longer, gently returning your mind to the silent recitation every time it wanders away.

10. Now cease the recitation and examine the constant stream of linked thoughts that your brain is presenting to your mind. But try to distance yourself from these thoughts. Observe them but with a certain amount of disinterest. Pretend you're observing someone else's stream of consciousness rather than stuff which is obviously aimed at you. Don't get involved in this thought stream.  Rather than experience how one thought leads to another, examine what the links are and how each thought arises.

You'll become aware of the web of trivialities in your mind. Each thought is like a webpage with hyperlinks which lead on to another thought, and so on round and round ad infinitum. 

11. As you step back from your thoughts, you'll become aware of the webcrawler in your mind  - the process that follows all these associations and presents them to your awareness. You don't (at present) control this webcrawler. It seems to be able to click the links in your thoughts without, or even in spite of, your attempting to exercise some control.  And you'll notice that the webcrawler has certain preferred types of links, those that lead to objects of anger, fear or desire. It doesn't pay too much attention to bland associations, and there's no family filter on what it dredges up.

You have now begun to understand one of the compulsive systems of the mind. What you still need to experience is pure mind - the actual awareness which is viewing all the trivia which the webcrawler is displaying to it.
 
Convince yourself that your mind is neither the individual scenarios thrown up as the stream of consciousness progresses, nor the mechanism which drives the stream of consciousness. Your mind is pure awareness - non-structured and non-procedural. Occasionally the stream of thoughts will subside into the root mind, and a moment or two of clarity will occur before a new thread of associations emerges. When this happens, attempt to catch a glimpse of the calm, space-like and empty nature of the root mind - like a blue sky rather than one constantly obstructed by a passing procession of clouds. For a moment your mind has stepped outside the system, outside he normal loops and webs of compulsive, self-referential, uncontrolled thoughts.   (This action of 'stepping outside the system' or 'escaping from the loop' occurs repeatedly in different contexts in Buddhist philosophy and practice.)
 
12. Slowly come out of meditation. It may help to mentally recite the OM AH HUM for a brief period.

It is traditional and auspicious at the end of a meditation to silently dedicate any insight that we might have achieved to the happiness and freedom from suffering of all sentient beings.

Read more at Buddhist Philosophy

Buddhism and Terrorism - Meditation on Memes

The Saints of Otranto

Yesterday Pope Francis canonized 800 victims of a religiously-motivated terrorist attack on Otranto, Italy.

This got me thinking about memes again.  Will the most aggressively violent memes inevitably destroy the gentler and more mystical ones by a process of ruthless natural selection, or can peaceful memes somehow inactivate their virulent competitors?

Meme expert Susan Blackmore has suggested that Zen meditation may be able to 'weed-out' these pathological memes.  

Here are some excerpts from her article  Meditation as Meme Weeding 
 
"...American philosopher Daniel Dennett has described the process as the ‘evolutionary algorithm’ – a simple mindless process that once the requisites are in place must happen. If you have heredity, variation and selection then you must get evolution or “Design out of Chaos without the aid of Mind” . It’s as simple as that.

What Dawkins explained, in The Selfish Gene, was that this process is not confined to our most familiar replicator, the gene, but must apply to any information that is copied with variation and selection. All around us, he said, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup of culture, is another replicator. Ideas, habits, skills, stories, technologies, and artistic creations are all copied by a process that may loosely be called imitation. Copying is not perfect, so there is plenty of variation and recombination, and far more copies are made than can possibly survive. So we have a new replicator, a cultural replicator. Taking it from the Greek for ‘that which is imitated’ and abbreviating it to a word that would sound something like ‘gene’ Dawkins called them ‘memes’..."

"...There are many kinds of meme virus. A good example is an email virus. A typical one shouts “Warning, Warning, news just in from IBM (or Bill Gates or …) terrible virus, warn all your friends immediately that if they open a mail called “bla bla” their hard disk will be wiped clean”. This little collection of words can be called a memeplex – shortened from ‘co-adapted meme complex’; in other words, a group of memes that succeeds by hanging out together and getting passed on together. This little memeplex has a very simple structure. I call it C-TaP. It is basically a ‘copy me’ instruction backed up by Threats and Promises. In this case you are told to pass on the message. If you do you will help your friends (the altruism trick), if you don’t they will get their hard disk wiped (using fear to threaten). The memeplex also uses urgency, status (e.g. IBM), and exploits the fact that passing on an email message to lots of people is quick and easy. And so it is that this stupid little bit of text has been copied around and around the world, infecting millions of computers and still going strong after 5 or 6 years. If you doubt the power of memes to change the world then reflect on this silly little memeplex. It has frightened countless people and clogged up whole email systems. A few mindless words have had obvious and serious effects on the physical world. They have even found their way onto this page. This is the power of the memes. Buddhism is a meme.

I began deliberately with a very simple virus but there are far more powerful ones that use exactly the same structure. Dawkins calls them ‘viruses of the mind’; he means religions.

Dawkins used the example of Roman Catholicism; a collection of basic teachings that are passed on in church, by learning the catechism, and through prayer, singing hymns and saying grace. Beautiful cathedrals tempt worshippers inside and lift their hearts, making them want to spread the memes again. Beautiful music and songs carry the words of God and Jesus to more ears and minds. Good Catholics pass on all these ‘truths’ to their children and are encouraged to have lots of children who must, in turn, marry (or convert) a Catholic and bring up their children in the faith. The reward is everlasting life and the punishment – well it’s even worse than having your hard disk wiped..."

"...Being infected with a religion at an early age is no trivial matter. It shapes your mind, affects which memes you will subsequently accept or reject, and affects everyone you come into contact with. Very few people choose their religion, even though most think their religion is the best. Most are infected in childhood and never throw the infection off. We are seeing some of the consequences of these religious memes in the world situation we face today.

"...Our minds, at rest - alert and open - are like a beautifully weeded garden, bare brown earth where anything might grow. And just as the weed seeds are ready to jump into all that bare brown earth, so the memes are ready to jump into our open minds. If weed seeds find a space to grow, off they go, and soon all that open space is a mass of dandelions, speedwells and rosebay willow herb.

It is the same with thoughts. Think about what kinds of thoughts are the most troublesome. I don't believe many people are plagued in meditation by the sounds in the room, or by images of scenery once observed, or images of walking or jumping, or even flying. In other words, it is not our immediate perceptions, nor the things we have learned by ourselves that are troublesome; it is the ones we pick up from other people. It is all words and stories that cause the trouble; all memes.

"...Meditation is the hoe. Meditation is also, of course, a meme. You would never have invented the techniques of Ch’an meditation for yourself. They have been part-invented and part-selected over thousands of years, passing down from person to person in a long evolutionary path. But all of them have this in common - they are ways of defusing the power of other memes."

Read the full article here

Sudden Jihad Syndrome

Sudden jihad syndrome 
If we accept Churchill's virus analogy - 'as dangerous in a man as rabies in a dog'  -  we will recognise that terrorism isn't a mutant form of 'the Religion of Peace' that is produced by radicalisation. On the contrary, thuggery, hatred and murder are written into the basic DNA of the pathogen, and only need the right conditions to be expressed by any carrier of the disease, see 'Sudden  Jihad Syndrome'.


Kalama Sutra
In complete contrast to other religions, Buddhism had elements of meme-weeding from its very beginning.  In the  Kalama Sutra,   Buddha said that all religious teachings, including his own should...

(1) Not be believed on the basis of religious authority, or 'holy' books, or family/tribal tradition, or even coercion and intimidation by the mob.

BUT INSTEAD ONE SHOULD

(2) Test the methodology by personal experience. Does it do what it says on the box?

(3) Is the philosophy rational? Or does it require you to believe six impossible things before breakfast?

(4) Judge the tree by its fruits. Is it beneficial, or does it tell you to act against your conscience and 'The Golden Rule'.

 

Could meditation on memes prevent terrorism?
If young men from vulnerable cultural and family backgrounds were better informed about memes and memeplexes, perhaps they could resist this jihadist indoctrination and  recognize these malignant memes for the pernicious parasitic processes that they are, before they took over their minds and turned them into robotic killers. 

One interesting question is whether the meme theory is itself a meme ('The Metameme') and whether its spread could block and give immunity to more pernicious memes, much like the harmless cowpox virus can block out the lethal smallpox virus. 

"I have been made victorious with terror!"

If you are a sexually repressed teenager, who suddenly realises that the promise of 72 virgins for killing kuffars is nothing more than a mechanism for a mind-virus to ensure its dominance over competing memes, by eliminating their carriers, then you may be less enthusiastic about blowing yourself and fellow passengers to pieces in a train or bus.



Related posts


Buddhism and Islam - Resources

Were the Boston Bombers mentally ill?

Metameme

Meditation Treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

From the Huffington Post

'Free the Mind' is a new documentary about the brain, neuroscience and meditation, told through the stories of soldiers with PTSD and a young boy with ADHD. What can Buddhist monks and mindfulness teach us about the way our brains process emotions?'





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Cash-strapped healthcare system looks to Buddhism to cut costs

From The Guardian

"Back in 1965, a grad student in molecular biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology stumbled across a class of five people on Zen Buddhism. He'd never heard of Zen and knew nothing of Buddhism. Nearly half a century later, that grad student, Jon Kabat-Zinn, has arguably done more than any other individual to put Buddhism into the mainstream, not just in America, but in dozens of countries around the world. Now, Downing Street policymakers are keen to hear more.

"That first class took the top off my head. I found a sense of largeness beyond my little preoccupations of what would happen to my future, or my relationships," says Kabat-Zinn. "It opened up a new dimension of being which could offer more meaning and enable me to interface more effectively with society in a way which could be healing and transformative."

Kabat-Zinn's enthusiasm for that dramatic breakthrough is still palpable as he talks of how as a scientist he resolved to find a way to bring those benefits to millions of others. What he evolved over the next 15 years was the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme; an eight-week set of meditation and yoga practices in classes and at home, which instil the basics of paying close attention to the current moment.

"I was teaching molecular biology of muscle development in medical school at the time, and began to ask doctors: 'What percentage of your patients do you help?' They thought it was about 15% to 20%."

So Kabat-Zinn set up a clinic to help the untreatable majority. "Patients turned up with all kinds of conditions: hypertension, cancer, anxiety."

As a scientist, Kabat-Zinn knew he needed evidence; anecdotes and testimony were not going to be enough to persuade the American health establishment. "I wrote up the chronic pain results first because they were astonishing." Since then, a steady stream of academic papers, books and, more recently, randomised control trials, have helped pave the way for hundreds of MBSR programmes in hospitals and medical centres across the US.

Kabat-Zinn's work has spawned a cluster of different applications of mindfulness training, including for addiction, the elderly and parenting. In the past couple of decades, Kabat-Zinn has collaborated with psychologists in the UK who have adapted his work for Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which has won recognition from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), as a treatment for depression.

All of which explains why our interview is happening in Westminster, where Kabat-Zinn has a string of meetings with senior politicians before he heads to Downing Street for a session with policy advisers. There are good reasons for the policymakers to be listening closely, as Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues have a compelling proposition: mindfulness has unlimited applicability to almost every healthcare issue we now face – and it's cheap..."  Read it all 



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Recession driving people to meditation

Recession makes people question their values

Recession driving people to meditation, says Croydon Buddhist centre leader
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Croydon Advertiser

MONEY worries are driving a record number of Croydonians to seek security and serenity through meditation, according to a leading Croydon Buddhist.

The number of people attending classes at the Buddhist Centre Croydon on the High Street has doubled in the past two years.

And sessions have become so popular that the shrine rooms are no longer large enough to hold the meditators.

Buddhist leader Dhammavijaya, 47, of Plough Lane, Purley, has noticed a significant increase in attendees at his meditation and Buddhism classes.

Dhammavijaya, who has been an ordained Buddhist for 23 years, believes people in Croydon are turning to the religion in an attempt to find a more meaningful way of life after the country sunk into recession.

He said: "People are very aware that the things they relied on for security aren't as stable as they thought they were and so are looking for other ways of security that doesn't depend on material things."

Attendance at classes has doubled in the last two years, and they attract a wide range of ages, from 17 to 70.

The most popular class is, in fact, the only one that is completely centred on Buddhist beliefs, and regularly sees more than 30 people attending weekly..."  Read the rest here

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Buddhism Subject Index

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Teens meditate to reduce stress

From Times Online

Pupils at a leading public school are to receive weekly 40-minute classes in meditation and stress relief in a ground-breaking addition to the school curriculum.

Schoolboys aged 14 and 15 at Tonbridge School, in Kent, were given their first lesson yesterday as part of a course designed with psychologists from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

The project — the first to introduce meditation skills as a regular subject on the curriculum — has been designed specifically for adolescents and comes after the success of a pilot study at the school last year.

The “mindfulness” course for Year 10 pupils will last for eight weeks. It is designed to develop skills in concentration and to combat anxiety, showing teenagers the benefits of silence and helping them to identify and escape corrosive mindsets that could lead to mental health problems such as depression, eating disorders and addiction.

The course develops other exercises to help to improve attention — rather than allowing the mind to be “hijacked” by emotional issues, regrets, worries about the past and future and other distractions. This can be done in a number of ways, such as by focusing on breathing, parts of the body or movement.

Mindfulness originated in Eastern meditation traditions such as Buddhism but is now an established secular discipline. A growing body of research supports wider use of the approach to address transient stress and deeper mental health problems, including recommendations from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence that it be offered on the NHS to patients suffering from depression.

The project is a collaboration with staff at Charterhouse and Hampton schools — with both institutions planning similar schemes — as well as the Mindfulness Centre at Oxford and the Wellbeing Institute at Cambridge.

Richard Burnett, a divinity teacher and housemaster at Tonbridge who is leading the course, told The Times that the course demanded a “culture change” in the perceptions of silence for teachers and pupils.

“One of the things about schools is that silence is associated with power — the teacher tells the pupils to be quiet. What you need to do is convey the idea that silence is a positive activity to be savoured and enjoyed,” he said.

He said that while some children involved in the trial had been sceptical, most had embraced the challenge that it posed in the classroom. The pupils said that they hoped to use the mindfulness in the future to help to battle anxieties and to put things in perspective. They also said that they found it helpful for getting to sleep and becoming less nervous about school cricket matches.

Mark Williams, director of the Mindfulness Centre at Oxford, said that Tonbridge was the first school to introduce a full meditation course in a practical rather than academic context.

Professor Williams said: “This is not about converting people to Buddhism, but showing there is scientific evidence that these practices are useful. So why deny them from being used?”

In March Tonbridge is to host a conference, with Professor Williams as a speaker, that aims to encourage mindfulness uptake in schools.

Andrew McCulloch, chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation, said that mindfulness training also offered the chance to take proactive steps to avoid depression and anxiety in later life.

“These problems have their roots in early life, so if you can learn techniques when you are young you might never have a breakdown,” he said.

Staying focused

• The first lesson, being run this week, is described as “puppy training” — comparing the mind with a puppy that needs to learn how to “stay” and focus on one thing, rather than running around in a distracted fashion

• Other stages of the course include establishing calm and concentration; recognising rumination; developing present-moment awareness in the everyday; slowing and savouring activities; stepping back from thoughts that hijack you; allowing, accepting and being with difficult emotions; reflection and making it personal

• It uses figures from popular culture to help to explain the benefits of mindfulness, including rugby player Jonny Wilkinson, who uses meditation techniques to help his concentration when kicking for goal, and Po, a lethargic panda who transforms his attitude in the Dreamworks’ film Kung Fu Panda

• Each class has one 40-minute lesson a week, with a weekly MP3 file of mindfulness exercises that they are encouraged to listen to before evening homework


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