Applying Buddhist Mindfulness to Eating for Slimming by Natural Weight Loss

Mindful Eating

By Miriam Stoppard in The Daily Mirror     

Slim down naturally with mindful eating - Old fashioned idea of eating has a lot in common with the Buddhist discipline

My mum (and my granny) used to tell my sister and I as children to chew each mouthful 20 times, slowly, to enjoy the taste of our food.

This old fashioned idea of eating has a lot in common with the Buddhist discipline, which encourages eating slowly, and sometimes silently for health and tranquillity.

What my mum (and incidentally Buddhism) was attempting to do was to break the habit of wolfing down our food. Instead patiently chew, pause, put down the knife and fork between mouthfuls, take a sip of water, appreciate the flavours, don’t talk (with your mouth full) and certainly don’t spoil the ritual of enjoying food by watching TV at the same time.

Think about the food in your mouth. Examine the flavours. Feel the textures. If you roll the food around your mouth you experience each bite more intensely and more pleasurably.

Welcome to “mindful eating”, the kind that stops you eating too much, too quickly and consuming too many calories, not giving your appetite time to switch off.

With the pace of life speeding up and our speed of eating with it, a nutritionist from Harvard University is advocating mindful eating as a way of stopping you short, asking yourself questions like: Why am I eating this? Do I really need this? Do I feel full yet? Am I eating out of unhappiness? Or because I’m depressed? Eating thoughtfully means we soon realise we don’t need to eat so fast or so much, and that we feel fuller sooner. We give our brains time to tell the stomach we’ve eaten enough.

Nutritionists are excited by mindful eating because it offers a psychological barrier to overeating.

Mindful eating also means we can confront our cravings, take a few deep breaths to deflect them and stop ourselves resorting to reaching for the chocolate biscuits or ice cream.

If all this sounds a touch New Age, wait for this...

Big business corporations are adapting mindful eating in their canteens to lower workplace stress. Businesses like Google now have silent vegetarian lunches once a month.

Start with baby steps. Switching to mindful eating has to be learned, practised and worked towards.

You will gradually discover flavours. You will eat about 25% fewer calories. You will lose weight. Your blood pressure will fall. Your heart will be healthier. You will live longer.

What’s stopping you?

Mindfulness about Food

See also  A Buddhist approach to eating and drinking  

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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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Mind the Gap

From Rational Buddhism

The 'Explanatory Gap', or 'The Hard Problem', is science's inability to demonstrate, by logical chains of cause and effect,  how brain activity produces mental experiences.

The mind/brain gap has been recognized for at least 140 years, and since that time none of the scientific progress in biology, neurology or information science has brought us any nearer to closing it.

If attempting to bridge the gap from the physical side hasn't worked, then maybe we should try from the mental side.

Or perhaps understanding the problem is simply beyond human intellectual abilities. Or maybe the problem is so self-referential that it leads to an infinite recursion.  Or possibly it is a kind of problem for which no discursive description or solution is logically possible.

Read the full article here.

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Symbiotic Mind and Body

Example of symbiosis - Cladonia - a lichen symbiont between fungus and alga

From Rational Buddhism

If Buddhist philosophy wishes to be worthy of rational consideration, it needs to be compatible with evolution.

In particular, it needs to explain 'The Hard Problem' of how non-physical minds have become associated with physical bodies over the course of evolution.

It seems likely that animals above a certain level of development require more than automatic reflexes in order to survive. Advanced organisms need motivation and intention in order to function in complex environments. Motivation and intention are chiefly driven by dukkha - the need to avoid suffering or unsatisfactoriness, and the restless but futile search for lasting happiness.  Dukkha and suffering, unpleasant though they may be for the individual, have survival and evolutionary advantages for the species.  

Mental states such as suffering, unsatisfactoriness and pleasure are qualia. These subjective experiences, which carry strong immediate meanings, do not exist in automata - mechanistic systems such as relay networks or computers.

It is for this reason that complex animals have evolved neural structures which attract and capture minds. Fundamentally, it is the suffering and grasping of their minds - the need to avoid pain and seek pleasure - that provides the driving force for survival and reproduction of complex animals. The physical body enters into a symbiotic relationship with a non-physical mind.

In Buddhist philosophy, the mind of a sentient being is not a product of biological processes, but something primordial which has existed since beginningless time, and which will be drawn into another body once the present one has died...

Full article here 


- Sean Robsville

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Buddhist statues in local bar are disrespectful

Dharma-burger

Letter to the editor, Stirling Observer.

Feb 15 2012 by Jean Pedder, Stirling Observer Wednesday

"Dear Editor – I have lived in Stirling for nearly seven years and love everything about the area – the friendly people, food, wonderful landscape, etc – but as a Buddhist, originally from Sri Lanka, I am upset and angry that statues which are very similar to the ones in temples across Sri Lanka are being used in bars and clubs, mostly in Glasgow but one has now opened up in Stirling.

I wonder how people would react if someone tried to open a Jesus Bar, Virgin Mary Club, Hindu or Islam Bar. I am sure there would be a public outcry. The bar in question has statues behind the bar, next to bottles of spirits, etc, and also one next to a gaming machine.

Religious statues, images and any other material relating to various religions are sacred to each faith. The use of Buddha statues for unholy purposes, mainly by non-Buddhist business people, might mislead many people (especially people from other religions) to think that Buddhism is associated with alcoholic beverages, gambling and disco music.

Why has Stirling Council’s licensing board allowed this to go ahead? Schools in Stirling promote respect for other faiths to children and young people. Surely the local business community should lead by example.

It is wrong for religious symbols to be used for commercial purposes. I am sure other Buddhists locally and in other parts of Scotland, also people from other religious backgrounds, find this practice in very bad taste."


These are what are known as 'Dharma-burgers' 

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Maldives Muslims Smash Buddhist Statues

They're at it again

Islamized Buddhist Statue at Bamiyan

Buddhist heritage eradicated

From AFP

Trouble in paradise: Maldives and Islamic extremism

By Amal Jayasinghe (AFP) – 10 hours ago 

MALE — At the Maldives' National Museum, smashed Buddhist statues are testament to the rise of Islamic extremism and Taliban-style intolerance in a country famous as a laid-back holiday destination.
On Tuesday, as protesters backed by mutinous police toppled president Mohamed Nasheed, a handful of men stormed the Chinese-built museum and destroyed its display of priceless artefacts from the nation's pre-Islamic era.

"They have effectively erased all evidence of our Buddhist past," a senior museum official told AFP at the now shuttered building in the capital Male, asking not to be named out of fear for his own safety.
"We lost all our 12th century statues. They were made of coral stone and limestone. They are very brittle and there is no way we can restore them," he explained.

"I wept when I heard that the entire display had gone. We are good Muslims and we treated these statues only as part of our heritage. It is not against Islam to display these exhibits," he said.

Five people have since been arrested after they returned the following day to smash the CCTV cameras, he said. The authorities have banned photography of the damage, conscious that vandalism of this kind which echoes the 2001 destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban is damaging for the nation's image. The gates of the two-storeyed grey building, which opened in 2010, are padlocked and an unarmed guard keeps watch.

The Maldives, a collection of more than 1,100 coral-fringed islands surrounded by turquoise seas, is known as a "paradise" holiday destination that draws hundreds of thousands of travellers and honeymooners each year. Visitors' contact with the local population is deliberately kept at bay, however, with most foreigners simply transferring from the main international airport directly to their five-star resorts on outlying islands.
Few have any idea they are visiting a country of 330,000 Muslims with no religious freedom, where women can be flogged for extramarital sex and consuming alcohol is illegal for locals. Islam is the official religion of the Maldives and open practice of any other religion is forbidden and liable to prosecution.

The religious origins of the Maldivian people are not clearly established, but it is believed that a Buddhist king converted to Islam in the 12th century. Thereafter, the country practised a mostly liberal form of the religion, but more fundamentalist interpretations have spread with the arrival of money and ultra-conservative Salafist preachers from the Middle East. In 2007, following a bombing that wounded a dozen foreign tourists, the former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom banned head-to-toe coverings for women as a sign of his intent to battle conservative Islamic thinking.

At the museum, another official said that fundamentalists had threatened to attack the museum on previous occasions unless it withdrew the Buddhist display.

The country's ultra-conservative Islamic group, the Adhaalath Party, condemned the attack, but said they remained opposed to Nasheed's decision to accept three monuments from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
"Our constitution does not allow idols and that is why we objected to the monuments," General Secretary Mohamed Muizzu said, referring to the gifts to mark a South Asian summit held in November in the Maldives.

The monuments, which included one of pillar featuring Buddhist motifs, and which had been on display in the southernmost island of Addu, have all since been vandalised...   More 

Islamic Symbols - Swords and Koran

Coercion, intimidation, thuggery and outright terrorism are intrinsic and essential features of Islam.

Islam is so intellectually moribund and ethically repulsive that it cannot compete for followers in a free marketplace of ideas, but must eliminate its critics and competitors by whatever means may be necessary.

Even 1000 year old Buddha statues are a threat to Islam.

With the massive growth of extremist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, we can only expect Jihadists attacks on Buddhism and Buddhists to increase, as this recent article from Point de Bascule makes clear

The Muslim Brotherhood and Buddhism

Écrit par Point de Bascule on 08 Septembre 2011. Posted in Articles par Point de Bascule

On September 7, 2011, the Dalai Lama, Tariq Ramadan and other personalities took part to the Second Global Conference on World's Religions after 9/11. It was organized in Montreal with the active cooperation of McGill University and the Université de Montréal.

During the conference a project of Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the World's Religions was discussed. The article 12.4 of the Declaration claims that “Everyone has the right not to have one’s religion denigrated in the media or the academia.”

This push for censorship is part of a wider campaign led by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation representing 56 Muslim-majority countries to silence those who criticize Islam.

While this is happening, several Muslim scholars including many endorsed by Tariq Ramadan and the Muslim Brotherhood describe non-Muslim doctrines in a very denigrating way. We do not suggest that these authors should be censored or banned. We bring up this contradiction to highlight the fact that radical Islamists want it both ways.

Syed Maududi and other renowned Muslim scholars have written that kafirs (derogatory word for non-Muslims) will go to hell. They have claimed that Christianity is a distorted religion. In an Islamic Studies course set up by two Muslim Brotherhood operatives for the Edmonton Public School Board, Yusuf Ali’s Qur’an is being used as a reference book. In this book, Jews are described as “apes and swine” (p. 1742). More examples of anti-Jewish stances found in the book are listed in a FrontPage article that was published after the Los Angeles school board decided to pull all its copies of Yusuf Ali’s Qur’an from the shelves of its libraries.

The depiction of Buddhism in Muslim Brotherhood-endorsed books destined to Muslim audiences is no more positive than that of Christianity and Judaism. In fact, it is worse. Harun Yahya’s book Islam and Buddhism is a good example to illustrate where the Muslim Brotherhood and Tariq Ramadan’s “understanding of Islam” leads.

Harun Yahya is a prolific author promoted by various organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Yahya is a Turkish national born in 1956 whose real name is Adnan Oktar.

Harun Yahya is a frequent contributor to OnIslam, a Muslim Brotherhood news portal closely associated with Youssef Qaradawi. In September 2010, Yahya was identified as a regular OnIslam staff. (GMBDR about OnIslam)

The semi-private library operated by the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at Concordia University in Montreal has 44 books (28 different titles) written by Harun Yahya. The MSA is one of the oldest Muslim Brotherhood organizations in North America. The MSA’s library at Concordia contains books that are endorsed by the Muslim Brotherhood. It has no formal link with the University’s own libraries (catalogue, etc.) but it is operated in Concordia University premises and funded by the Council of Student Life.

Another MSA chapter at Memorial University (St John’s, Newfoundland) promotes Harun Yahya’s books and movies at their regular booth on campus premises. (Video)

Muzammil Siddiqi, an important leader of the Muslim Brotherhood operating in the United States has specifically praised one of Harun Yahya’s books. (Letter)

Harun Yahya’s books are sold at conventions organized by Muslim Brotherhood organizations. (p. 8 – ISNA Booth 1002)

Point 4.18 of a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood internal memorandum stresses the importance of “role distribution” among the organization’s activists in order to achieve success. While Tariq Ramadan is trying to take advantage of the Dalai Lama’s reputation to legitimize censoring the critics of the Muslim Brotherhood, Harun Yahya is busy telling Brotherhood’s supporters what they should really think about Buddhism.

In 2004, Harun Yahya and his colleague Tariq Ramadan were the main speakers at a conference that Ramadan describes as the “largest Islamic event in Australia” on his website.

Harun Yahya claims that Buddhists are guilty of “association” and that their accomplishments are “destined for destruction”

In his book Islam and Buddhism, Harun Yahya concludes that Buddhists’ accomplishments are purposeless and that they are “destined for destruction” because their understanding of God and religion is incompatible with Islam. Harun Yahya accuses Buddhists of “associating” false gods with the real one:

To deny the supremacy of God and worship the idols of an ordinary person, as the Buddhists do, is described in the Qur'an as to "associate something with God." In hundreds of places in the Qur'an, God reminds us that this "association" is a very serious sin. For example: “(Qur'an, 4:48) God does not forgive anything being associated with Him, but He forgives whoever He wills for anything other than that. Anyone who associates something with God has committed a terrible crime.

(...) To bow before these invented gods is a terrible crime against God. As stated in the Qur'an (4: 48), God may forgive those who commit every other sin and error, but never one who associates His creatures with Him. (Islam and Buddhism – Chapter 1)

Historically, this so-called crime of “association” has been the pretext invoked by Muslim scholars to justify the destruction and the eradication of the Buddhist civilization from India, Afghanistan and many other parts of Asia.

Ibn Khaldun (1332 - 1406) is one of many scholars endorsed by Tariq Ramadan. In his classic Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun explains why resorting to coercion and violence against Buddhists and non-Muslims in general is justified:

In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the (Muslim) mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.  ...continued

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See   No future for Buddhism in an Islamized World

Alan Turing: A Gay Buddhist

Alan Turing - Buddhist philosopher destroyed for being gay.

Alan Turing is best known for his work in cracking the Nazi codes, which gave the allies a consistent intelligence advantage over the enemy, shortening the war by years and saving millions of lives.  He died at the early age of 41, chemically castrated, mentally destroyed, and hounded to suicide by a viciously homophobic religious establishment.

Richard Dawkins blamed the repressive, religion-influenced laws which drove him to despair for his death, adding that   "Turing arguably made a greater contribution to defeating the Nazis than Eisenhower or Churchill. Thanks to Turing and his 'Ultra' colleagues at Bletchley Park, Allied generals in the field were consistently, over long periods of the war, privy to detailed German plans before the German generals had time to implement them.

"After the war, when Turing's role was no longer top-secret, he should have been knighted and fêted as a saviour of his nation. Instead, this gentle, stammering, eccentric genius was destroyed, for a 'crime', committed in private, which harmed nobody,"

Without Turing, the war would still be raging beyond 1945

Turing, like all homosexuals in pre-1960's Britain, was rejected and hated by the Church of England establishment, and maybe this was why his religious affinities were more with Buddhism than with Christianity.

Although Turing's work as a code-breaker is what is most familiar to the general public, he also made a major contribution to philosophy by defining the boundary between the physical and non-physical aspects of the mind.   Turing’s investigation of artificial intelligence may have been motivated by his young gay lover's untimely death,  as he analysed the relationship between the material and the spiritual.

Christian orthodoxy in Turing's day

Turing's view of spirituality was not the Christian scheme of heaven and hell, for as an accursed sodomite, he knew he would be condemned to burn for all eternity in a lake of fire.    His belief was the Buddhist teaching on rebirth, which he set out in a letter to the mother of Christopher Morcom, his dead boyfriend: "'when the body dies the 'mechanism' of the body, holding the spirit is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later, perhaps immediately... "     Full article here


See also  Buddhist Philosophy

Related Posts 

Evolution, Emptiness and Delusions of the Darwinian Mind

Queer Dharma and Gay Buddhists: Buddhism for the LGBT  community

Algorithms, Data Structures and Mental Designation 

The Explanatory Gap and the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Richard Dawkins and Buddhism

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Quantum Weirdness.

Over at Rational Buddhism I've been considering the phenomenon of 'Quantum Weirdness', where everyday objective reality breaks down when we examine the tiniest building blocks of matter, with the observer becoming an inextricable part of the system.

Does Quantum Weirdness create the mind out of matter, or does the mind create Quantum Weirdness as part of the process of resolving potential existence into actual reality?

Where does the weirdness come from?  Does it go away at larger scales, or does it just become less obvious?    Why isn't there an infinite regress of ever smaller particles and subparticles?

Full article here

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Buddhist Candlemas

February 2nd is Candlemas Day

Candlemas Pagan Origins

 This article has now been updated here

Creationism Crisis for Christianity = Opportunity for Buddhism?

Crisis in Christianity
From the rationalist's point of view, Christianity is deteriorating rapidly, with a headlong retreat into obscurantism, anti-science and general dumbing-down.

Quotes from a recent article at The Huffington Post:  New Survey of Protestant Pastors Shows Rejection of Human Evolution  by Brandon G. Withrow 

"In a new survey of American Protestant pastors by Lifeway, 73 percent of ministers disagree with the statement "I believe God used evolution to create people." Of that large number, 64 percent strongly disagreed. As you might expect, the numbers were close to the same for the question, "I believe Adam and Eve were literal people," with 74 percent strongly agreeing and only 1 percent not sure."

"The survey of 1,000 ... also found that ministers are almost evenly split on whether the earth is thousands of years old."   - In other words, 50% of pastors reject the entire science of geology, instead  they believe that the earth was created according to the Biblical timescale within the last 10,000 years -  a Christian doctrine known as 'Young Earth." 

"Evangelicals tend to be the least likely category for embracing evolution, and here's why: The acceptance of evolution and potential rejection of Adam and Eve can require more changes than just how one reads Genesis 1; it could result in a rewriting of the idea of original sin. It can affect the evangelical narrative. Without the sinful nature acquired by a real Adam, how does one engage the problem of evil and the necessity of the work of Jesus? Does this nullify the evangelium or "good news" of the Bible?

"But is this slippery-slope warning the only way to approach the conversation? Not all are convinced that past evangelical approaches to the Bible are always the best.

"Peter Enns, author of "The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins," recently wrote on his blog that "Evolution threatens the evangelical narrative. And it's not a joke. The threat is real." [Full disclosure: I am a personal friend of Peter Enns]

"He continued: "It really does come down to the ... Bible: what is it and what does it mean to read it well? The evangelical movement has invested a lot of energy in building thick walls around the Bible, ready to defend it against challenges, real or perceived, that threaten its safety."

"Enns' solution, however, is not to flee the threat, but to learn how to write "new narratives ... where openness to theological change is warranted." Enns believes that Evangelicals need to work on, and improve upon, how they read their Bibles, not reject evolution.

"Young Earth Creationist Ken Ham sees it differently. In reacting to the survey by Lifeway on his blog at Answers in Genesis, he sees the main problem (in terms of priority) as that of an old earth instead of evolution. "For the secularists," writes Ham on his blog, "they have to have millions of years -- without this they can't postulate enough time for evolution." The slippery-slope does not start with Adam; for Ham, it starts with the geological timeline.

"Bottom line - -evolution is really not the problem as much as the age of the earth," says Ham. "Millions of years is the problem in today's world that has resulted in a loss of biblical authority in the church and culture and has led to an increasing loss of generations from the church." The belief that the world is millions of years old is, according to Ham, a "lie of Satan in this present world" that "permeates the church."

Shackled to a corpse?
This insistence on the Biblical creation myth is shackling Christianity to a corpse.   The widespread anti-evolution, anti-geology, anti-rationalism attitudes within  the churches will alienate an increasing number of intelligent people.   The Young Earth doctrine also requires believers to reject...

- Plate tectonics
Plate tectonics is the scientific study of earth movements, which proposes that the continents have not always had their present shapes and locations, but have gradually drifted over the course of millions of years. Many of these movements are still continuing. Where plates slide past one another they give rise to seismically active faults such as the San Andreas fault in California and the Great Glen of Scotland.

- Dating by radioactive decay
When the current isotopic composition and rate of decay of radioactive isotopes in rocks is extrapolated backwards, many samples appear to be  hundreds of millions of years old. The fundamentalist counter-argument is  that the rate of decay was much higher in the early days of the earth.  However, this implies that the background radiation immediately post-creation was hundreds of thousands of times what it is now, which would be severely damaging to the reproductive abilities of all creatures.   Living in the Garden of Eden would be equivalent to sitting on top of Chernobyl.
   

- Cosmology
Many of the galaxies in the Universe are so far away that light has taken millions of years to travel from them. But according to Genesis, God created the stars after the earth, so in theory we shouldn't be able to see them.  The Fundamentalist explanation is that God has constructed a vast planetarium surrounding the solar system, from which He projects the appearance of an old universe towards us in order to tempt sinners into disbelieving the Bible.

- Genetic code
Humans and our nearest primate relatives such as chimpanzees have over 98% of the 'text' of our genetic code in common. The 'alphabet' of the code is identical.  This is totally unacceptable to Christian Fundamentalists and is explained as being a lie spread by secular humanists.

A Teachable Moment for Buddhism? 
As Christianity dumbs down, could Buddhism become more attractive to rational people in search of a religion?  Buddhism does not rely on any particular creation myth, and is philosophically more predisposed to evolution than to creationism.

  

Special Creation and essentialism

Creationists believe that species are unchanging and derive their forms by reference to a divine blueprint. Theology has long been dominated by the ideas of the Greek philosopher Plato, who taught that the species were invariant, deriving their characteristics from reference to 'essences' or 'ideal forms' which were fixed, eternal and inherently existent.

Buddha with cherry blossom

To a Creationist a rose is a rose is a rose, and would smell as sweet by any other name. There is no way a rose bush could fade into a strawberry plant, or a cherry tree, or a tangle of brambles, or a mountain ash, or a raspberry cane, or a hawthorn bush, or an apple tree. These are all totally distinct and immediately recognisable species - separate types of plant with nothing in between. Theologians base their time reckoning on the chronology of the Bible which states that the world and all its species were created in six days of a single week around 4004 BC .

Burnet rose

Evolution and impermanence
Evolutionists believe that species arose by gradual change from simpler forms. Strawberry plants, cherry trees, blackberries, raspberries, hawthorns and apples all have a family likeness because they all arose from a common ancestor, which resembled a primitive rose. Hence botanists call this plant family the Rosaceae.

Strawberry

Similarly, all primates (including humans and apes) have a common ancestor. Going back further, all species of mammals diverged from a common ancestor, and so on into the dim and distant past until we reach one common ancestor of all lifeforms, which originated the DNA coding which is universal for all plants, animals, fungi and bacteria on earth.

Consequently, to evolutionists the biological species concept does not reflect any underlying reality. A species is purely a snapshot of an interbreeding population of organisms at a particular epoch in time, and as time progresses the characteristics of that population will gradually change in response to selective pressures.

From 'Evolution' in Buddhism A to Z

Buddhist philosophy
Buddhist philosophy is evolutionary and thus agrees with the scientists rather than the theologians. Buddha taught that all things are impermanent, constantly arising, becoming, changing and fading . Buddhist philosophers consequently rejected the Platonic idea of production from 'ideal forms' as being the fallacy of 'production from inherently existent other'. 

According to most schools of Buddhism there is nothing whatsoever that is inherently or independently existent.

The two main creationist objections to evolution are:
1 Disagreement with Genesis
2 Blurring of the theological distinction between human and animal

Neither of these pose any threat to Buddhist philosophy. The first objection is based on the need to maintain the truth of a particular creation story in order to preserve the underlying basis for all Biblical truth. This is not a worry to Buddhists because there is no corresponding Buddhist creation myth, and Buddhist philosophers have always accepted that the universe is many hundreds of millions of years old.

The second theological objection is that evolution states that there is a continuum between ape and man, i.e. human and animal.(A favourite anti-evolutionary slogan is 'Don't let them make a Monkey of You!). 

This is not a problem for Buddhists, who believe that both humans and animals possess sentient minds which survive death.  However, it is a major problem for theologians. The church has always taught that only humans have immortal souls, whereas animals are automata whose minds cease at death.

Christians believe that humans and animals were created separately and hence are totally different types of being. But if there was a gradual transition between animal and man, as the evolutionists claim, then such theological beliefs fall apart.

The theologians are left with three alternative unpalatable viewpoints:

- Both humans and animals are and always have been automata (the materialist's position).
- Both humans and animals are sentient beings whose minds survive death (the Buddhist position)
- At some arbitrary date in the past, the apemen were suddenly equipped with souls.

The undermining of the doctrine of the distinction of human from animals is probably an even greater threat to the theological viewpoint than doubt about the literal truth of Genesis.

Conclusion
Buddhism could attract increasing numbers of adherents by emphasizing its compatibility with science, in contrast with the increasing irrationalism and intellectual degeneracy of both Christianity and Islam.



Read more at Buddhist Philosophy

Geek week - nurturing your inner nerd.

Can computer analogies help with
understanding Buddhist Philosophy?

Rational Buddhism is celebrating Geek Week, with three articles dedicated to all dharma dweebs, nerds, techies and code-freaks.   The common theme is how computer analogies can be used to illustrate the more obscure aspects of Buddhist philosophy.

Celebrating Geek Week

'Algorithmic compression and the three modes of existential dependence in Buddhism' (how's that for a catchy title!)  looks at how the way things exist can,  up to a point, be modelled by algorithms and datastructures.  But the model breaks down when it comes to understanding the meaning of computer variables, and we are left to contemplate that ultimate Geek Goddess, the mysterious Mother of all Algorithms...

Homage to the Mother of All Algorithms

'Mereology and Buddhism: Mereological Dependence in Buddhist Philosophy ' 
This article introduces the word 'Mereology', which every dweeb should use frequently to maximize geek-cred.  As well as that, the article looks at how relational database concepts can more accurately reflect the 'basis of designation'  than traditional western philosophical terminology.    Bonus topics include isomers, enantiomers, engineering subcomponents and hierarchical bills of materials.

This guy's got Geek-cred

'The dumbing down of computer literacy and decline of programming in education'  examines how the removal of programming from the school curriculum in favor of the Micro Soft-option is making the traditional code-freak into an endangered geek subspecies. 

Endangered species

The replacement of coding skills by 'applications' such as MS Word and Excel has the knock-on effects of general dumbing down, and in particular in reducing the relevance of computer illustrations of dharma topics for the generation currently passing through college.

However the situation may change thanks to a $25 raspberry pi.

Contemplating interconnectedness

Finally, The Metameme  - could the principles of antivirus software be used to destroy terrorist memes within the minds of Jihadists? 

 

- Sean Robsville

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Prayer versus meditation? They’re more alike than we realize

Tao Hong's Lofty Mountains and Flowing Water

(Photo: Gong Rui/GT)

From the Vancouver Sun 

'You could call it a religious war of words, with the West Coast serving as one of its most intense battlegrounds.

The bid to win hearts and minds pits Buddhist meditation against Christian prayer, with meditation, especially so-called “mindfulness,” seeming to be gaining ground.

It’s been the focus of more than 60 recent scholarly studies. It’s being embraced by hundreds of psychotherapists, who increasingly offer Buddhist mindfulness to clients dealing with depression and anxiety. It’s been on the cover of Time magazine.

Even though polls show there are 10 times more Christians in the Pacific Northwest than Buddhists, the forms of meditation associated with those on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean are rising to the fore in North America.

Buddhist meditators, who tend to think of themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” claim what they do is not “religious.” That’s part of the appeal of mindfulness. Such meditators complain that Christian (as well as Jewish and Muslim) prayer over-emphasizes pleading with, confessing to or praising a God.

But meditation, Western Buddhists maintain, is simply a “practice.” It’s “secular,” with no traditional God, even while it may also be “spiritual.”

It turns out, however, that the gap between Buddhist meditation and Christian prayer might not be so huge. Indeed, some forms seem almost identical.

Still, the many well-educated, well-off Westerners who have been drawn to Buddhism, including famous Vancouver spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, have scored some important points when they criticize Christian prayer for being too busy, too noisy and too focused on soliciting otherworldly aid.

Indeed, Rev. Ellen Clark-King, the archdeacon of Christ Church (Anglican) Cathedral in downtown Vancouver, is among many who acknowledge Western Buddhists may have been doing Christians an indirect favour.

She does, however, go out of her way to cite the dangers inherent in claiming one form of spiritual practice is superior. There are many paths to the holy, she points out.

In her new book, The Path to Our Door: Approaches to Christian Spirituality (Continuum), she suggests the popularity of Buddhist meditation has prodded many Christians to re-discover some of the tradition’s less well-known meditative and contemplative methods.

“When considering silence as prayer many people’s first thought is of the Eastern, especially the Buddhist, tradition rather than the Christian,” writes Clark-King.

“Buddhism is seen as the natural home of contemplation while Christian prayer is believed by many to focus almost exclusively on intercession, confession and praise – all three very wordy ways of praying. However, this is to ignore a crucial – and central – component of the Christian spiritual path.”

Why has it taken so long for many Christians to seize on to their tradition’s contemplative practices? Clark-King speculates it is hard for anyone, whether Christian or Buddhist, to face the “emptiness” of solitude, which many equate with loneliness. It takes away our distractions and leaves us with only ourselves and, as she says, God.


SIMILARITIES BETWEEN MEDITATION AND PRAYER

Silent Christian prayer is closer to Buddhist meditation than many realize

It can be revealing to discover the similarities of Buddhist mindfulness and Christian prayer. The noted Buddhist magazine, The Shambhala Sun, is just one of thousands of sources on mindfulness.

In a how-to article, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche tells those who want to learn mindfulness to first get into a comfortable position and then note when thoughts arise.

Just monitor your thoughts and feelings without getting stuck on them, teaches Sakyong Mipham. “Say to yourself: ‘That may be a really important issue in my life, but right now is not the time to think about it. Now I’m practising meditation.’”

By labelling one’s “wild” thoughts and feelings, Sakyong Mipham says, mindfulness practitioners begin to recognize the mind’s discursiveness. “We notice that we have been lost in thought, we mentally label it . without judgment.” The ultimate goal, Sakyong Mipham says, is to keep noticing one’s breath, to reach tranquillity.

Even though Clark-King is not arguing that Buddhist mindfulness and Christian prayer are exactly the same, it is fascinating to note how similar her language is to that of Sakyong Mipham when she describes at least two forms of Christian contemplation.

The first form is set out in The Cloud of Unknowing, a classic book writ-ten anonymously in the 14th century, probably by an English monk.

The Cloud of Unknowing calls for a kind of contemplation that requires radical “openness” to a non-controlling God, Clark-King writes. “All that the pray-er does is keep silence as far as is possible, surrendering every thought as soon as it occurs without paying any attention to it whatsoever...

Read it all at http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2012/01/15/prayer-versus-meditation-theyre-closer-than-most-realize/

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Buddhism Subject Index

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