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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
From New Lotus, hat tip Buddhist Art News
"The experience of art often fulfills yearnings similar to the inspiration offered by religion. One more profound relationship between art and religion has historically been how it acts as a vehicle for expressing religious teachings. The worldly appreciation of cultural beauty is infused with a sincere belief that the aesthetic of religious art is not for its own sake, but to transmit ultimate truths.
After the Second World War, the global diaspora of Buddhist traditions meant that the religion itself became marketable as a new, exotic, and enlightened culture. The diffusion of Tibetan Buddhism and Japanese Zen through the West was as much due to Western interest in Tibetan and Japanese culture as much as Japanese and Tibetan religion.
The New York-based avant-garde movement was heavily influenced by Japanese Zen ideas, and on January 12, 1951, Saburo Hasegawa wrote to Isamu Noguchi, proclaiming, 'What used to be done by Religion has to be done alone by Art.' Faith in religious institutions was at one of its lowest ever points, and the God is dead paradigm so touted by Nietzsche seemed to open the way for a human flourishing based on making meaning through culture and art - without religion.
Hasegawa's proclamation proved premature, and the world moved on from the post-war consensus to a post-2008 uncertainty about many things we took for granted. However, the mystifying connection between art and religion has not lost its allure. In the 21st century, the Buddhist teachings are now instantly accessible anywhere in the developed world, and this has meant a loss of mystique and remoteness.
Buddhist studies are available in many universities and colleges, and some teachers have attained the status of minor celebrities in popular culture, such as Thich Nhat Hanh or Matthieu Ricard. We have approached a stage where religious seekers are no longer interested in accepting just one side of the story. We all hunger, justifiably, for a more complete picture about Buddhism.
Hasegawa was incorrect not because art cannot inspire, but because he asserted that it could fulfill the yearnings of humanity without any reference to religion. But Lee Mei Yin, Vice Chairman for Friends of Dunhuang Hong Kong, was correct when she told me in a casual conversation that it is through the arts and culture that Buddhism finds its most effective vehicle of transmission.
Buddhism has touched and informed so much that would seem unrelated, from the fabrics of Tang-era bridal attire to breathtaking sculptures, architecture, and literary genres. We cannot disseminate Buddhist teachings in isolation from the civilizations in which they were developed.
Mrs. Lee was not simply speaking as a representative of a cultural heritage charity. Human society itself was traditionally always a vehicle for sharing the Dharma. Modern Buddhist leaders and writers are learning to co-opt and assimilate the promotion of cultural awareness into the calling of Buddhist dissemination, and in our 2600-year history, this can only be a thing to be encouraged"
From Why Beauty Matters - Roger Scruton
"...Scruton believes that all great art has a 'spiritual' dimension, even if it is not overtly religious. It is this transcendence of the mundane that we recognise as 'beauty'.
A path out of the spiritual desert.
In Buddhist terminology we would say that true art, even when it reflects samsara (the realms of chaos, addiction, squalor and suffering), shows that there is a path out, and often acts as signposts along the path. However most of modern art merely reflects, and often wallows in squalor, without acknowledging any possibility that there may be other states of existence. It has turned its back on beauty and wanders aimlessly in a spiritual desert.
Tantra and art
We could go further and say that great art is a 'tantric' practice in its widest sense, where tantra is the mental transformation of the ordinary environment to the environment of a spiritual being. Scruton emphasised this aspect in the transformation of lust (attachment) into Platonic love, where the energy of carnal desire is channelled into spiritual objectives..."
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