Open your mind and calm your soul
Breathe... Breathe... Relax... Enjoy the silence...
Filed Under (Meditation) by on 06-01-2009
 Many people are happily meditating with our podcast and we hear from so many of you about the wonderful changes happening in your lives. It’s amazing that the experience of meditation gets transmitted in this way on the web and we’ve been inspired to find more ways to bring meditation into peoples’ lives.
We’ve created on Online Meditation Course for those who want a simple, yet effective way to learn meditation online. Not everyone can find or attend a local meditation course. Not everyone gets the hoped for results simply listening to our podcasts and reading the information on our website. Some want more structure and support. So we created a course that distills the essence of the principles of our meditations. Through a systematic sequence of meditations and written materials people can master the basics of meditation. We’ll also be offering very personal support through four email consultations which are part of the course. It’s exciting to see how our work evolves as we connect with people through the internet. Everything that we learned in teaching people in person is reflected in the course.
The course isn’t just for beginners. It’s also for anyone who is already meditating but not satisfied with their practice. Even those who are enjoying our podcasts could benefit from the course if they want to be able to meditate on their own, as could anyone who has struggled in any way with our meditations.
We know some of you will have questions about the course. Please feel free to ask, either in the comments on this post or on our Online Meditation Course page.
Read the rest here:
New Online Meditation Course
Filed Under (Meditation) by on 23-12-2008
I just wanted to wish everyone a merry Christmas. Best wishes to you are your family. I hope that you have a safe and enjoyable break and I will see you all in the new year.
Filed Under (Meditation) by on 18-12-2008
We’ve had more requests for a guided meditation for grief than anything else. It’s taken me some time to come up with something, even though I’ve been a grief counselor and experienced a lot of grief in my life. This latest podcast episode, Guided Meditation for Grief, is what came up as I reflected on my own experiences with loss.
Often the people asking for a grief meditation have lost a loved one through death, but grief is a reaction to many types of losses, large and small. Moving, losing a job or home, divorce, a change in roles — all sorts of changes can cause us to feel grief. Sometimes we even grieve lost opportunities or what “might have been”.
Losing a loved one is one of the most painful things we can ever experience. Not only is it painful, it can shake our whole world. The lyrics to Paul Simon’s Graceland say it so well:
“losing love is like a window into my heart; Everybody sees you’re blow apart…”
It can feel like your life is blown apart and your heart is going to break. Grief can bring up all sorts of emotions, not just profound sadness but anger, guilt and more. Depending on how the loss happened, it can make you question all sorts of things. You can feel confused. It can be hard to concentrate. As much as we would rather not have to experience all these things, however, the only way through grief is to experience these things all the way.
Sometimes people feel alone in their grief making it even more difficult. Some cultures and traditions support the process of mourning better than others. Often here in the US, people are expected to “move on” way before they’re ready. People are unsure of what to do and say around a grieving person and may even withdraw. And yet although no one can grieve for us, it can really help to feel others supporting us as we grieve. When my mother died, I went to a hospice support group and it made a world of difference for me.
This podcast episode is designed to help you feel supported in your loss. We hope it helps!
(You can read about grief on our companion website, Heart of Healing.)
See the rest here:
Grief Guided Meditation Podcast
Filed Under (Meditation) by on 18-12-2008
Tsong khapa tells us that unlike many other Buddhist texts where it is common to find respect paid to Buddhas or Manjushri, Candrakirti chooses to praise compassion instead. The purpose of this is to emphasize the method side of the path to enlightenment such as the first five of the six perfections – generosity, patience, ethics, joyous effort and concentration. Candrakirti also claims that compassion is the root cause of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Hearers and Solitary Realizers.
In the beginning of his treatise Madhyamakavatara we find the following two verses:
Hearers and Solitary Realizers are born from Buddhas.
Buddhas are born from Bodhisattvas.
The mind of compassion, non-dual understanding,
And the altruistic mind of enlightenment
Are the causes of the Children of Conquerors.
Mercy along is seen as the seed
Of a Conqueror’s rich harvest,
As water for its development, and as
Ripening in a state of long enjoyment.
Therefore at the start I praise compassion.
Gendun Drup, the first Dalai Lama, in a short commentary to Tsong khapa’s Illumination called A Mirror for the Illumination of the Thought tells us: the realizations of the Hearers (shravakas) and Solitary Realizers (pratyekabuddhas) arise through the practice of dependent origination. The understanding of dependent origination comes from hearing it from a Buddha. Hence, Hearers and Solitary Realizers are born from Buddhas.
One may ask: does it follow that Bodhisattvas must become Hearers before entering into the practices of the Bodhisattvas? Tsong khapa and Gendun Drup are very clear on this point. Buddhas are born from Bodhisattvas in the sense that a Buddha originates from the Bodhisattva with whose personality theirs is continuous. Through practicing the meditations to enlightenment the Bodhisattva and the resultant experience of Buddhahood are causally contiguous.
In Illumination Je Rinpoche raises a possible objection saying: Someone (kha cig) says: isn’t “conqueror child” an epithet for Bodhisattvas? If so, how can a Bodhisattva be the bearer of a Buddha? For it is impossible that the father of a child be the child’s child. Tsong khapa answers this by stating the following: Bodhisattva X is the substantial cause of Buddha Y, that is, the substance or the continuum of the subtle mind of Bodhisattva X becomes the continuum of the subtle mind Buddha Y. Further on he says: “The state of Buddhahood is only attained through one’s formerly having developed the state of a Bodhisattva on the path of learning”.
One may ask: why is Tsong khapa raising this objection here as it seems a straight forward claim that X and Y are causally related. We need to remind ourselves here of Candrakirti’s original intent when composing Madhyamakavatara. In India at that time there was a widely held misconception that the only requirement for a spiritual aspirant to achieve enlightenment was wisdom. That is, meditate on emptiness and enlightenment would ensue. Candrakirti’s treatise explicitly presents the causal relationship between the resultant state of Buddhahood and compassion. Therefore, Tsong khapa, like a masterful chess player setting up the pieces four moves ahead of his opponent, is maneuvering his philosophical arguments in such a way that it will be clear that compassion is the cause of a Bodhisattva, and it therefore follows: compassion is the root cause of enlightenment, not wisdom.
Of course, there is an implicit caveat here: The fully developed compassion spoken of in Buddhist thought is in turn generated from a thorough understand of the conditioned existence that all beings are inflicted by suffering, and this in turn can only be generated by understanding emptiness. For more in this see my essay: Is Wisdom Really Necessary In Order To Generate Compassion?
Gendun Drup in his Mirror for the Illumination of the Thought speaks of this causal relationship thus:
It is fitting for the Glorious Candrakirti to pay homage to compassion at the beginning, for its production is like the excellent harvest of the Victorious ones1. Compassion is important at the beginning of the practice like a seed, it is important in the middle like water for its development, and it is important at the time of the result like enjoyment of its ripening.
This closely follows Candrakirti’s own thoughts in verse 1.2 of Madyamakavatara where it says:
Since mercy itself is accepted as the seed of this excellent harvest
Of the Conquerors, as water for development and
Like the ripening in a state of long enjoyment.
I therefore, praise compassion at the beginning.
The mind of compassion is the root cause of a future Buddha because it is this mind that is the initial motive for one to engage the path. That is to say, by clearly seeing how beings undergo suffering, and by understanding the causes of suffering one thinks: I will free all beings from suffering.
Compassion nurtures ones practice like water, and is the causal link through which one continues to practice the six perfections – generosity, ethics, patience, joyous effort, concentration and wisdom – thereby one’s development of the stages continues stage by stage, in a step by step process underpinned by the compassionate wish to free all beings from conditioned existence.
Because of this compassionate wish one is able to enjoy the fruits of practice, that is, enlightenment. This is true because it is compassion that is the driving force, the rocket fuel for practice that serves as basic motivation for engaging the path. According to many, without compassion one would simply stop at personal nirvana.
However, it is important to understand that Candrakirti and Tsong khapa are not speaking of simple empathy here. The fully developed compassion spoken of in Buddhism is not mere empathy, although empathy is its cause.
In the next article we will enumerate the different types of compassion.
Footnotes:
Filed Under (Meditation) by on 15-12-2008
The invention and rapid expansion of the internet and World Wide Web over the last several decades stands as a watershed moment in human history, transforming human communication and, ipso facto, leaving its impress on virtually every area of culture in the industrialized world. There can be little question, then, that human knowledge itself (or more precisely, the way we popularly understand human knowledge) will change in profound and irreversible ways—many of which will not become apparent until long after they have occurred. We need only look back upon other such watershed moments in human communication to see that this is true.
One such moment in the West occurred in ancient Greece in the 8th century B.C., when writing was re-discovered. This event was obviously of monumental significance for Greek and Western culture. Among other things, the subsequent spread of writing throughout ancient Greece brought about a shift of prominence from one form of speech to another–from mythos to logos—thus sounding a death-knell for the oral culture in which the epic poets and their bards flourished. Gradually, knowledge became less and less a matter of what was collectively preserved and re-iterated through memory and oral recitation in a communal space. As a result, the legends, sagas, and myths that depended upon formulaic speech, poetic innovation, and public audiences for their life-blood no longer stood as living insights into the cosmic order, the nature of the gods, or the origins of society, but became artifacts of the past (preserved in textual form, to be sure). Since the writing of texts facilitated the careful pursuit of inquiry (historia), and the meticulous construction of accounts (logoi), knowledge became more and more a matter of theory, argumentation, and analysis, as well as the disciplines that developed from and depended on these forms of speech and thought. Thus, the Golden Age of Greece, an “age of reason” that saw tremendous intellectual achievements, arguably could not have taken place without the development of writing.
Another such watershed moment in human communication occurred with the invention of the movable type press by Gutenberg in the 15th century, an invention that Mark Twain once called the “greatest event in the history of the world.” The printing press enabled high-brow texts and ideas to circulate among the masses, with the result that the language of learning eventually shifted away from Latin to the vernacular languages, the places of learning shifted away from monasteries and scriptoria to universities, libraries, and presses, and the communities of learning shifted away from the feudal aristocracies and clergy to scholars and even to ordinary folk. The Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, and later, Enlightenment–these are but a few of the major developments in human culture and knowledge that have been traced to the printing press. In fact, the development of the scientific method itself, as well as the philosophical schools of empiricism and rationalism, could not have developed without the emergence of new criteria for truth and knowledge—all of which can be plausibly tied to the legacy of the printing press. A new “age of reason,” we might say, was brought about by this second transformation in human communication.
And so we turn to the legacy of the internet, about which it would be foolhardy to make determinate proclamations at this early date (it may take hundreds of years to gain the necessary perspective). We can, however, pose some questions. For example, how will the development and proliferation of electronic communication change the way we conceive of knowledge? There is no question that it has enabled us to transmit, store and retrieve knowledge more efficiently—but what kinds of knowledge? What kinds of knowledge flourish with the globalization of Google, Wikipedia, electronic databases, search engines, and web-logs? Is it merely “information?” If so, has the popular appreciation for reasoned argumentation and analysis been fundamentally diminished by the explosion of information and the proliferation of opinions in electronic media? Indeed, what forms of learning will be left behind, as printed monographs, books and newspapers arguably fall by the way?
In a related fashion, we might inquire: who will be the new learned? Will those with prodigious memories become even less important now that Google is but a click away? Will those capable of reasoned argument or careful empirical observation become obsolete in the face of those who can “process” information more efficiently? Though it seems hardly inconceivable, the rapid proliferation of electronic communities of learning suggest that, one day, the silicon tower will eventually supplant the ivory tower as the loci for intellectual discourse. If so, we can only wonder about the security of our knowledge as its surety is guaranteed not by human memory, or the scroll or printed page, but by computer chips and bytes.
Of course, there is no question that the developments in human communication bring great blessings to humankind. However, one wonders whether all these drastic changes in the appearance of knowledge, what it is, how we learn, who it is that knows, and where knowledge gets transmitted, change the epistemic fundamentals regarding the mind’s relation to the world and the importance of face-to-face human contact in the transmission of knowledge. As for me, though I become increasingly dependent upon electronic media and on-line communities for the development of my own thought, I find that part of me cannot help longing for what has been left behind—for the days of archaic Greece when story-telling was a meaningful community (and educational) experience, or the days of Medieval Europe when reasoned argumentation guided by faith was seen by all to be a worthy exercise of learning. And I wonder what good things we are in the process of leaving behind now.
Continued here:
The Changing Face of Knowledge
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