Twenty five hundred years ago, Gautama Siddhartha, the historical Buddha, had some deep insights and created powerful techniques that would allow major reductions of human suffering. Traditionally the Buddha is said to found a total end to all suffering. Perhaps that’s true, perhaps it’s not. I don’t know, but certainly Buddhist meditation techniques and related [...]
Continue reading about Meditation, Monasticism, Buddhism, Materialism – Preliminary Thoughts
Background: Notes on an event in a 50+ year attempt to learn and benefit from spiritual practices…. For some years now, I have been trying various meditation techniques from many world traditions, particularly techniques which meditation teacher Shinzen Young has modified in various ways to make more sense to and be more doable by modern [...]
Continue reading about Experiences of Peace – or Was It Resting in the Nature of Mind?
Dr. Charles Tart Mindfulness Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Lecture 5, Part 8 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here. CTT: And that’s the problem with concentrative meditation. With concentrative meditation, some people can develop an enormous amount of concentration power, and they can get rid of pain [...]
Dr. Charles Tart Mindfulness Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Lecture 5, Part 8 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here. CTT: This third method, doing Vipassana meditation on unpleasant sensations and going into them, is a very interesting method. I strongly recommend Shinzen Young’s book, Break Through Pain, [...]
Continue reading about Getting Rid of the “Bigger Hammer” Approach
Dr. Charles Tart Mindfulness Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Lecture 5, Part 6 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here. CTT: Now having said that by way of review, let’s try a little Vipassana for a few minutes. I’m going to suggest relaxed Vipassana. You’ve just heard some [...]
(Following is adapted from an item I wrote for the interesting new blog WhatMeditationReallyIs.com. I think it will be of interest here) When I become the Czar of Worldwide Words, I’m going to abolish the word “meditation.” Isn’t that an odd way to start a blog on meditation? Gets your attention, though. I will write [...]
Continue reading about That Word “Meditation:” What Does it Mean?
Once in a while I stop to think about what my spiritual practices are and where they might be going. Not that my conceptions about it are anything final, but just as a guideline to myself, at the moment, and possibly of use to others. So on the Rigpa Fellowship retreat last week, I was [...]
At my San Diego Rigpa Fellowship retreat last week, lama Sogyal Rinpoche, in teaching about the nature of the unenlightened, ordinary mind (sem in Tibetan), mentioned how perception can be distorted, especially by strong emotions like anger. Naturally if you can’t perceive the world accurately, you’re going to do things that will have unintended and [...]
I wrote the following (do they still call it blank verse, or has poetry changed since I was in high school a zillion years ago?) while on a 10-day retreat last week with Sogyal Rinpoche, the Tibetan lama who wrote the best-selling Tibetan Book of Living and Dying a few years ago. My wife and [...]
Listening to some Buddhist teachings for dealing with emotions last night, and to fellow students’ understandings these teachings, I put together a number of things that struck me is saying something about levels of dealing with emotions. The first level, what we might call the level of not particularly dealing with an emotion, is the [...]
Continue reading about Dealing With Emotions: Levels of Practice in Buddhism and Gurdjieff Work