Church of the Churchless

Shunryu Suzuki is a Soto Zen balance to Rinzai's D.T. Suzuki

Having written about D.T. Suzuki's take on Zen Buddhism in a couple of recent posts (here and here), I figured it would be good to balance my Zen scale by re-reading Shunryu Suzuki's wonderful little book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. 

(The book is based on talks by Suzuki. I've written a couple of other blog posts about it here and here.)

They share a name, but D.T. Suzuki leaned strongly in the Rinzai Zen direction while Shunryu Suzuki belonged to the Soto Zen lineage.

Rinzai believes in instant enlightenment through koan study or some other means, like hearing a sound or a Zen master utterance. Soto believes in a gradual approach to enlightenment. I remember this difference by associated Soto with it'll take you so long to be enlightened. 

Of course, Rinzai is no walk in the park, since you've got to put your mind into a Great Doubt and hope that by banging your head against the wall of Zen for months, years, or decades, at some point the wall will instantly dissolve into a warm pool of comfortable enlightenment. 

Personally, I'm more attracted to the Soto way. It just seems to me that most things in life happen gradually, though I did have a Loony Labyrinth Rinzai'ish experience back when I was addicted for a while to playing this early pinball game for the Macintosh computer.

If anyone doubts my claim to instant enlightenment, computer game addiction variety, I offer this description of my satori that I included in a post, "End of spiritual questions is the final answer."

In the early 1990s I had an Apple computer on which I played a pinball game, Loony Labyrinth. I played it a lot. I was addicted to it.

My wife was almost driven crazy by the Loony Labyrinth theme music, especially after I became proficient at making my way through the levels of the game. I could easily play a single game for half an hour.

Eventually I became disturbed by how much time Loony Labyrinth was taking out of my day. I tried to stop playing. But I couldn't. I'd manage a day or two of going pinball cold turkey, but soon I'd be feeding my addiction again.

Until...

I entered the Loony Labyrinth sweet spot, the zone, pinball nirvana. The game began normally. Then I reached levels of Loony Labyrinth'ness never attained before. I couldn't make a mistake. Extra balls and higher levels kept popping up without end.

I think I reached a billion points before the last ball was lost and ecstatic congratulations appeared on my computer monitor. Along with "Play again?"

No thank you. I had zero interest in Loony Labyrinth. My addiction to the game had instantly dropped away without any effort on my part. I never played it again.

Reading U.G.'s "Mind is a Myth" reminded me of how I bounced back and forth between desiring to play Loony Labyrinth, and desiring not to play Loony Labyrinth, until that spontaneous unforced moment came when I simply wasn't interested in Loony Labyrinth.

So, yeah, I've had a profound personal experience of instant enlightenment -- if one defines enlightenment as no longer wanting to play an enticing computer game.

On the other hand, and I have no doubt that Shunryu Suzuki would give me that hand, perhaps via a slap to the side of my ignorant-of-enlightenment head, the short talk he gives near the end of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind in a "Buddha's Enlightenment" chapter argues that if anyone looks upon enlightenment the way I did just now, their Zen is useless.

I am very glad to be here on the day Buddha attained enlightenment under the Bo tree. When he attained enlightenment  under the Bo tree, he said, "It is wonderful to see Buddha nature in everything and in each individual!"

What he meant was that when we practice zazen [meditation] we have Buddha nature, and each of us is Buddha himself. By practice he did not mean just to sit under the Bo tree, or to sit in the cross-legged posture.

It is true that this posture is the basic one or original way for us, but actually what Buddha meant was that mountains, trees, flowing water, flowers and plants -- everything as it is -- is the way Buddha is. It means everything is taking Buddha's activity, each thing in its own way.

But the way each thing exists is not to be understood by itself in its own realm of consciousness. What we see or what we hear is just a part, or a limited idea, of what we actually are. But when we just are -- each just existing in his own way -- we are expressing Buddha himself.

In other words, when we practice something such as zazen, then there is Buddha's way or Buddha nature. When we ask what Buddha nature is, it vanishes; but when we just practice zazen, we have full understanding of it.

The only way to understand Buddha nature is just to practice zazen, just to be here as we are. So what Buddha meant by Buddha nature was to be there as he was, beyond the realm of consciousness. 

Buddha nature is our original nature; we have it before we practice zazen and before we acknowledge it in  terms of consciousness. So in this sense, whatever we do is Buddha's activity. If you want to understand it, you cannot understand it. When you give up trying to understand it, true understanding is always there.

Usually after zazen I give a talk, but the reason people come is not just to listen to my talk, but to practice zazen. We should never forget this point. The reason I talk is to encourage you to practice zazen in Buddha's way.

So we say that although you have Buddha nature, if you are under the idea of doing or not doing zazen, or if you cannot admit that you are Buddha, then you understand neither Buddha nature nor zazen. But when you practice zazen in the same way as Buddha did, you will understand what our way is.

We do not talk so much, but through our activity we communicate with each other, intentionally or unintentionally. We should always be alert enough to communicate with or without words. If this point is lost, we will lose the most important point of Buddhism.

Wherever we go, we should not lose this way of life. That is called "being Buddha," or "being the boss." Wherever you go you should be the master of your surroundings. This means you should not lose your way. So this is called Buddha, because if you exist in this way always, you are Buddha himself.

Without trying to be Buddha you are Buddha. This is how we attain enlightenment. To attain enlightenment is to be always with Buddha. By repeating the same thing over and over, we will acquire this kind of understanding. 

But if you lose this point and take pride in your attainment or become discouraged because of your idealistic effort, your practice will confine you by a thick wall. We should not confine ourselves by a self-built wall.

So when zazen time comes, just to get up, to go and sit with your teacher, and to talk to him and listen to him, and then go home again -- all these procedures are our practice. In this way, without any idea of attainment, you are always Buddha.

This is true practice of zazen. Then you may understand the true meaning of Buddha's first statement, "See Buddha nature in various beings, and in every one of us."

If you're unsure what Buddha nature consists of, join the club, because I feel the same way. But I have some ideas gained from re-reading Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. I'll share them in an upcoming post.

Caste survey in India makes me wonder why castes still exist

Here in the United States we have a lengthy history of discriminating against people based on the color of their skin: Blacks have fared much worse than Whites. 

But this sort of discrimination is easy to understand. Genetics explains the discrimination. 

I find it much more difficult to fathom why caste is still ever-present in India. I realize that caste is based on the Hindu religion. However, Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and other faiths are members of Indian castes.

This seems bizarre to me.

A story in the Washington Post got me thinking about this: "A caste survey in India could upend politics in world's largest democracy." Here's how the story starts out.

PATNA, India — The morning milk had yet to be delivered, but the April heat was already leaving stains on his shirt. Satyadeo Paswan’s brows furrowed as he flipped page after page of 250 caste categories, scanning for the correct code to enter in the crucial yet complicated form in front of him.

Paswan is one of the hundreds of thousands of surveyors tasked with an administratively and politically historic exercise: collecting caste data on every single one of the 126 million people in the state of Bihar.

This mammoth task has taken center stage in India’s politics. A census of caste — the rigid system of inherited social stratification sprouting from Hinduism — could transform the nation’s democratic politics. It puts the governing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in a tight spot: Increased caste identification could dent its electoral supremacy.

Several other states are expressing interest in conducting their own caste surveys and have sought the guidance of Bihar, according to officials here. Nearby Odisha state has begun a version, local reports say. On Thursday, however, Bihar’s high court ordered a temporary stay on releasing the results while it determines if the state government has the power to conduct the survey.

Critics of the current system say that not acknowledging and studying the role of caste in society ignores the pervasive discrimination that flows from it.

At India’s independence in 1947, the constitution outlawed “untouchability” — the most extreme form of marginalization against the lowest castes, known as Dalits. But India continued to witness caste discrimination and the maintenance of boundaries dictating who can marry whom, who can eat with whom and who can do which jobs.

The government has divided the thousands of different castes into three main categories: the Upper Castes; a middle level known as the Other Backward Castes, or OBCs; and the Scheduled Castes, or Dalits, the groups for which India’s first affirmative action programs were created, in an attempt to address their historic marginalization.

“The American society fought against racism, [but] such movements in India have been much rarer,” said Manoj Jha, a member of Parliament from the Rashtriya Janata Dal, a political party that is part of an alliance governing Bihar. “As a result, the structure is dominated by Upper Castes.”

I have no idea why India persists in allowing castes to be used to categorize people. It just seems like an exceedingly backward system rooted in Hindu dogma that has no place in a country that aspires to take its place as a modern 21st century society.

The BBC explained caste, but it still makes no sense to me.

Manusmriti, widely regarded to be the most important and authoritative book on Hindu law and dating back to at least 1,000 years before Christ was born, "acknowledges and justifies the caste system as the basis of order and regularity of society".

The caste system divides Hindus into four main categories - Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and the Shudras. Many believe that the groups originated from Brahma, the Hindu God of creation.

At the top of the hierarchy were the Brahmins who were mainly teachers and intellectuals and are believed to have come from Brahma's head. Then came the Kshatriyas, or the warriors and rulers, supposedly from his arms. The third slot went to the Vaishyas, or the traders, who were created from his thighs. At the bottom of the heap were the Shudras, who came from Brahma's feet and did all the menial jobs.

The main castes were further divided into about 3,000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes, each based on their specific occupation.

Outside of this Hindu caste system were the achhoots - the Dalits or the untouchables.

...Some say the caste system would have disappeared by now if the fires were not regularly fanned by politicians.

At elections, many caste groups still vote as a block and are wooed by politicians looking for electoral gains.

As a result, what was originally meant to be a temporary affirmative action plan to improve the lot of the unprivileged groups has now become a vote-grabbing exercise for many politicians.

The Pew Research Center reported on a survey of Indian attitudes toward caste. It was good to see that most Indians report that they aren't aware of caste discrimination, but attitudes toward marriages between different castes shows that India has a long way to go in this regard.

Caste segregation remains prevalent in India. For example, a substantial share of Brahmins say they would not be willing to accept a person who belongs to a Scheduled Caste as a neighbor. But most Indians do not feel there is a lot of caste discrimination in the country, and two-thirds of those who identify with Scheduled Castes or Tribes say there is not widespread discrimination against their respective groups. This feeling may reflect personal experience: 82% of Indians say they have not personally faced discrimination based on their caste in the year prior to taking the survey.

Still, Indians conduct their social lives largely within caste hierarchies. A majority of Indians say that their close friends are mostly members of their own caste, including roughly one-quarter (24%) who say all their close friends are from their caste. And most people say it is very important to stop both men and women in their community from marrying into other castes, although this view varies widely by region. For example, roughly eight-in-ten Indians in the Central region (82%) say it is very important to stop inter-caste marriages for men, compared with just 35% in the South who feel strongly about stopping such marriages.

A defense of D.T. Suzuki

I was planning to write about a subject other than Zen Buddhism today, but a comment by Appreciative Reader on one of my posts about D.T. Suzuki, a noted author and popularizer of Zen, stimulated me to compose this defense of Suzuki.

Which isn't going to be in my words. I've read three of Suzuki's books, each several times. I consider that this gives me a good feel for both the man and his work. But that's just my opinion. Appreciative Reader has its own, though he admits that he isn't very familiar with Zen, nor with Suzuki. 

What particularly caught my eye was Appreciative Reader's contention that Suzuki was a charlatan who came to the West to make money and a name for himself. That struck me as an odd thing to say, even if someone was deeply familiar with Suzuki and his writings. To just assert that without any evidence struck me as an insult to Suzuki and his legacy.

So I'm requesting that Appreciative Reader read some information about the life of D.T. Suzuki, and consider whether he may be mistaken about him. There's an informative biographical summary of Suzuki on the Association for Asian Studies web site. Here's info on the author:

ERIC CUNNINGHAM is a Professor of East Asian and World History at Gonzaga University. He complements his specialty areas of modern Japanese intellectual history with research in Zen Buddhism, Eastern and Western spirituality, film, and Japanese literature. He is the author of Hallucinating the End of History: Nishida, Zen, and the Psychedelic Eschaton (Academica Press, 2007); Zen Past and Present(AAS, 2011); and over a dozen articles.

The biography is very positive. This is the first (long) paragraph, which I've broken int0 several paragraphs to make it easier to read.

It would be difficult to name any world religious or cultural figure of the twentieth century who did more to transform modern civilization than Zen Buddhist scholar Daisetsu Teitaro (D. T.) Suzuki (1870–1966). While we might look to such luminaries as the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, or Mother Teresa and note the profound changes their lives brought to postwar global consciousness, the influence they exercised was of a different species than Suzuki’s.

D. T. Suzuki did not just hold up a “spiritual” mirror to the modern West to reveal its moral contradictions, nor did he engage in activism of any kind. He was, rather, in his unofficial capacity as Zen’s “apostle to the West,” a spirit-minded scholar who consciously wove his life’s work into the fabric of history, helping a modern global society reconsider its assumptions, aspirations, and mode of operating.

As a mentor to such international culture producers as Carl Jung, Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, Allen Ginsberg, Martin Heidegger, John Cage, and Gary Snyder—to name but a few—Suzuki worked effectively across cultural, social, and generational boundaries to help articulate a new historical consciousness whose full effects have yet to be realized. While he may not have occupied as strong a position in the hearts and minds of the masses as other modern spiritual leaders, Suzuki was indeed unique in his contributions to the world’s religious culture.

I also asked ChatGPT to give me a biography of Suzuki, since I was interested in what an artificial intelligence had to say about him.

Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, more commonly known as D.T. Suzuki, was a Japanese philosopher, author, and scholar who is best known for his pioneering work in bringing Zen Buddhism to the Western world. He was born on October 18, 1870, in Kanazawa, a city on the west coast of Japan.

Suzuki's father was a physician, and his mother came from a family of samurai. From an early age, Suzuki showed an interest in Buddhism and other Eastern religions, and he studied the writings of Confucius and Lao-Tzu as a teenager. He also learned English and began to read Western philosophy.

In 1890, Suzuki enrolled at Tokyo University, where he studied philosophy and Sanskrit. After graduating, he became a lecturer at the same university and began to specialize in the study of Buddhism. He later became a professor of Buddhist philosophy at Otani University in Kyoto, where he taught for many years.

In 1897, Suzuki met the Zen master Shaku Soen, who was then the head of Engakuji temple in Kamakura, Japan. Soen became Suzuki's mentor and introduced him to the practice of Zen meditation. Suzuki became deeply committed to Zen and began to write extensively on the subject, publishing numerous books and articles throughout his career.

Suzuki's work emphasized the practical, experiential nature of Zen, and he emphasized the importance of meditation and direct experience in understanding the teachings of Zen. His most famous book, "An Introduction to Zen Buddhism," was first published in 1934 and is still widely read today.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Suzuki began to travel to the United States and Europe to give lectures and seminars on Zen Buddhism. He became a popular speaker and was widely credited with introducing Zen to the Western world. His work influenced many leading Western philosophers, theologians, and writers, including Martin Heidegger, Thomas Merton, and Jack Kerouac.

Suzuki remained active in teaching and writing throughout his life, and he continued to be a leading figure in the Zen community until his death in 1966 at the age of 95. Today, he is widely regarded as one of the most important Zen masters of the 20th century, and his work continues to be influential in both Eastern and Western philosophy and religion.

Zen is Buddhism stripped down to the spirit

I'm continuing to enjoy re-reading D.T. Suzuki's collection of writings in the 1956 edition of Zen Buddhism, a book that I've had for over 50 years (yeah, I'm old) and wrote about a few days ago in D.T. Suzuki on the Zen Doctrine of No-Mind. 

Suzuki is a pleasingly clear author. He also doesn't mince words, as you'll see below where I share some passages about the difference he sees between Indian and Chinese ways of thinking. The chapter I'm writing about today is "Zen in Relation to Buddhism Generally."

It helped me better understand why Zen considers itself to be the genuine heir to what the Buddha taught. 

The claim of the Zen followers that they are transmitting the essence of Buddhism is based on their belief that Zen takes hold of the enlivening spirit of the Buddha, stripped of all its historical and doctrinal garments.

But Suzuki starts off the chapter with a recognition that Zen can be off-putting.

Superficially, indeed, there is something in Zen so bizarre and even irrational as to frighten the pious literary followers of the so-called primitive Buddhism and to make them declare that Zen is not Buddhism but a Chinese anomaly of it.

I mentioned the seventh century Zen adept, Hui-neng, in my previous post. Suzuki says that he was chosen as the sixth patriarch of Zen because the fifth patriarch observed that of his five hundred followers, four hundred and ninety-nine understand well what Buddhism is, except for Hui-neng. 

This marvelous anecdote shows how different Zen is from other spiritual traditions. Zen practitioners clearly are intelligent and logical, notably including D.T. Suzuki. However, they are after the experience Buddhism offers, not a description of it.

And Zen arose as a reaction to the deification of Buddha after his death. 

The process of deification thus constantly went on until, some centuries after the death of the Master, he became a direct manifestation of the Supreme Being himself -- in fact, he was the Highest One in the flesh, in him there was a divine humanity in perfect realization. He was Son of God or the Buddha and the Redeemer of the world.

...Indeed, the teaching is to be interpreted in the light of the teacher's divine personality. The later now predominates over the whole system; he is the centre whence radiate the rays of Enlightenment, salvation is only possible in believing in him as saviour. 

So Suzuki argues that the simple essence of the Buddha's teachings got covered up by a mass of supernaturalism, dogmatism, and theology. Zen seeks to recover the lost spirit of Buddhism.

When we wish to understand Buddhism thoroughly we must dive deep into its bottom where lies its living spirit. Those that are satisfied with a superficial view of its dogmatical aspect are apt to let go of the spirit which will truly explain the inner life of Buddhism.

This occurred in China, not India. Suzuki explains why.

To understand how the doctrine of Enlightenment or self-realization came to be translated in China as Zen Buddhism, we must first see where the Chinese mind varies from the Indian generally. When this is done, Zen will appear as a most natural product of the Chinese soil, where Buddhism has been successfully transplanted in spite of many adverse conditions. 

Roughly, then, the Chinese are above all a most practical people, while the Indians are visionary and highly speculative. We cannot perhaps judge the Chinese as unimaginative and lacking in the dramatic sense, but when they are compared with the inhabitants of the Buddha's native land they look so grey, so sombre.

Ouch! Guess I should have given a trigger warning to any Chinese readers of this blog post. Suzuki doesn't stop there. It gets worse.

The geographical features of each country are singularly reflected in the people. The tropical luxuriance of imagination so strikingly contrasts with the wintry dreariness of common practicalness. The Indians are subtle in analysis and dazzling in poetic flight; the Chinese are children of earthly life, they plod, they never soar away into the air.

Suzuki finds a lot to like in the Indian mentality, even though it isn't conducive to Zen.

The Indians found quite a novel way of illustrating philosophical truths that cannot be applied to analytical reasoning. They resorted to miracles or supernatural phenomena for their illustration. Thus they made the Buddha a great magician; not only the Buddha but almost all the chief characters appearing in the Mahayana scriptures became magicians.

And in my view this is one of the most charming features of the Mahayana texts -- this description of supernatural phenomena in connection with the teaching of abstruse doctrine.

...At all events the above references will suffice, I believe, to establish my thesis that the reason for the introduction of supernaturalism into the Mahayana literature of Buddhism was to demonstrate the intellectual impossibility of comprehending spiritual facts.

But the Chinese had a better way. 

The Chinese have no aptitude like Indians for hiding themselves in the clouds of mystery and supernaturalism. Chwang-tzu and Lieh-tzu were the nearest to the Indian type of mind in ancient China, but their mysticism does not begin to approach that of the Indian.

...The Chinese genius was to demonstrate itself in some other way. When they began inwardly to assimilate Buddhism as the doctrine of Enlightenment, the only course that opened to their concrete practical minds was to produce Zen.

When we come to Zen after seeing all the wonderful miracles displayed by the Indian Mahayana writers, and after the highly abstracted speculations of the Madhyamika thinkers, what a change of scenery do we have here?

No rays are issuing from the Buddha's forehead, no retinues of Boddhisattvas reveal themselves before you, there is indeed nothing that would particularly strike your senses as odd or extraordinary, or as beyond intelligence, beyond the ken of logical reasoning.

The people you associate with are all ordinary mortals like yourselves, no abstract ideas, no dialectical subtleties confront you.

Mountains tower high towards the sky, rivers all pour into the ocean. Plants sprout in the spring and flowers bloom in red. When the moon shines serenely , poets grow mildly drunk and sing a song of eternal peace.

How prosaic, how ordinary, we may say! But here was the Chinese soul, and Buddhism came to grow in it.

When a monk asks who is the Buddha, the master points at his image in the Buddha Hall; no explanations are given, no arguments are suggested. When the mind is the subject of discourse, asks a monk, "What is mind, anyway?" "Mind," says the master. "I do not understand, Sir." "Neither do I," quickly comes from the master.

As the chapter draws to a close, Suzuki restates some key points.

The truth has many avenues of approach through which it makes itself known to the human mind. But the choice it makes depends on certain limitations under which it works. The superabundance of Indian imagination issued in supernaturalism and wonderful symbolism, and the Chinese sense of practicalness and its love for the solid everyday facts of life, resulted in Zen Buddhism.

We may be able to understand, though only tentatively by most readers at present, the following definitions of Zen offered by its masters.

When Joshu was asked what Zen was, he answered, "It is cloudy today and I won't answer." 

To the same question, Ummon's reply was: "That's it." On another occasion the master was not at all affirmative, for he said, "Not a word to be predicated." 

These being some of the definitions given to Zen by the masters, in what relationship did they conceive of Zen as standing to the doctrine of Enlightenment taught in the Sutras? Did they conceive it after the manner of the Lankavatara or after that of the Prajna-paramita?

No, Zen had to have its own way; the Chinese mind refused blindly to follow the Indian models.

D.T. Suzuki on the Zen Doctrine of No-Mind

I've had this book for a long time, probably since my college years (1966-71) when I first dived into the deep waters of Zen Buddhism. The copyright date is 1956. The cost is 95 cents. Ah, the days when paperback books with 294 pages cost under a dollar.

I'm not sure what led me to pull the book out of a Buddhism shelf a few days ago. I guess I needed a hit of classic Zen, since D.T. Suzuki, the author, is described on the back cover as "Zen's chief exponent in English." Of course, since the book was published there's been an explosion of interest in Zen.

For good reason. I consider Zen to be the best inspiration for people like me who fall into the spiritual but not religious camp. (I was religious for 35 years, of an Eastern religion variety, but now am not.)

I love how Zen is so completely this-worldly rather than other-worldly. I love that Zen has no need for God or any other supernatural entity. I love the quirky Zen tales and anecdotes, even when I have trouble grasping them. I love how even though "Zen" typically is paired with "Buddhism," Zen Buddhism doesn't take itself as seriously, nor does it pay much attention to esoteric Buddhist notions like karma and rebirth.

And I love how Zen is thoroughly non-dualistic, having no patience for typical religious preoccupations with virtue and vice. Or purification. This separates Zen, and Buddhism in general, from Hindu philosophy where the Atman/Soul is considered to be hidden under layers of mire that prevents us from realizing its connection with Brahman/God.

Below I've shared excerpts from the book's chapter, The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind. They provide a wonderful background for comprehending the unique methods of Zen. I didn't include any excerpts dealing with the rather difficult concepts of Prajna, true understanding of the nature of phenomena.

You'll find a mention of Hui-neng in the initial excerpts. He was a Chinese dude of the seventh century who famously wrote a short poem that according to Suzuki, started Zen as an offshoot of Buddhism. I wrote about him in a 2012 post, "No-self" isn't a spiritual goal, it's what we already are.

I don't claim to fully grasp the following classic Buddhist verses. However, in the past I found the first much more reasonable. Now, the second resonates with me. Here's an excerpt from Mark Epstein's book, "Thoughts Without a Thinker," where he describes some Buddhist seventh-century happenings.

The foremost disciple, Shen-hsiu, who was expecting to assume the role of the master, presented the following.

The body is the Bodhi tree,
The mind is like a clear mirror standing.
Take care to wipe it all the time,
Allow no grain of dust to cling.

A perfectly acceptable resonse, Shen-hsiu's verse made a virtue of the empty and reflecting mind, a recurrent motif in Buddhist literature. But the clear mirror, like the true self, too easily becomes an object of veneration. Such a view merely replaces the concrete self with a more rarefied version that is then thought to be even more real than the original.

An illiterate kitchen boy, Hui-neng, grasped the imperfection of Shen-hsiu's response and presented the following alternative:

The Bodhi is not a tree,
The clear mirror is nowhere standing,
Fundamentally not one thing exists,
Where then is a grain of dust to cling? 

...Hui-neng avoided the common misconception of liberation as a mind emptied of its contents or a body emptied of its emotions. The mind, or self, that we conceive of does not exist in the way we imagine, said Hui-neng; if all things are empty, to what can we cling? If the mind itself is already empty, why should it have to be cleansed? If the emotions are empty, why do they have to be eliminated?

Again, spiritual seekers are faced with some clear (though not always easy to discern) alternatives. Having been a "wipe the mirror" meditation-guy for many, many years, I realize how difficult it is for people who've embraced a self-realization path to recognize the validity of another way.

I urge you, though, to open yourself to the notion that you are not a self. Nor a soul. Nor a drop of the divine ocean. You're as empty of intrinsic being as anything or anyone else in this vast, mysterious cosmos.

Here's some of the passages that I especially resonated with in D.T. Suzuki's The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind chapter. Dhyana basically means meditation.

The dominant idea prevailing up to the time of Hui-neng was that the Buddha-nature with which all beings are endowed is thoroughly pure and undefiled as to its self-being. The business of the Yogin is therefore to bring out his self-nature, which is the Buddha-nature, in its original purity.

But, as I said before, in practice this is apt to lead the Yogin to the conception of something separate which retains its purity behind all the darkness enveloping his individual mind... But serenely reflecting or contemplating on the purity of the Mind has a suicidal effect on life, and Hui-neng vehemently protested against this type of meditation. (p. 159)

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There are as many types of binding as there are types of clinging. When we cling to purity we thereby make a form of it, and we are purity-bound. For the same reason, when we cling to or abide with emptiness, we are emptiness-bound; when we abide with Dhyana or tranquilization, we are Dhyana-bound. 

However excellent are the merits of these spiritual exercises, they inevitably lead us to a state of bondage in one way or another. In this there is no emancipation. The whole system of Zen discipline may thus be said to be nothing but a series of attempts to set us absolutely free from all forms of bondage.

Even when we talk of "seeing into one's self-nature," this seeing has also a binding effect on us if it is construed as having something in it specifically set up; that is, if the seeing is a specific state of consciousness. For this is the "binding." (p. 161)

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That Dhyana has nothing to do with mere sitting cross-legged in meditation, as is generally supposed by outsiders, or as has been maintained by Shen-hsiu and his school ever since the days of Hui-neng, is here asserted in a most unmistakable manner.

Dhyana is not quietism, not is it tranquilization; it is rather acting, moving, performing deeds, seeing, hearing, thinking, remembering. Dhyana is attained where there is, so to speak, no Dhyana practiced. (p. 181)

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Hui-neng's school thus objects to Shen-hsiu's on the ground that those who spend their time in sitting cross-legged in meditation, trying to realize the state of tranquility, are seekers after some tangible attainment; they are upholders of the doctrine of original purity, which they consider to be something intellectually demonstrable; they are gazers at a special object which can be picked up among other relative objects and shown to others as one points at the moon; they cling to this special object as something most precious, forgetting that this clinging degrades the value of their cherished object because it is thereby brought down to the same order of being as themselves; because of this clinging and abiding in it, they cherish a certain definite state of consciousness as the ultimate point they should attain; therefore they are never truly emancipated, they have not cut the last string which keeps them still on this side of existence. (p.195)

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A monk asked Ching-t'sen, of Chang-sha: "What is meant by 'one's everyday thought is the Tao'?"
CHING-T'SEN: "When I feel sleepy, I sleep; when I want to sit, I sit."
MONK: "I fail to follow you."
CHING-T'SEN: "In summer we seek a cool place; when cold we sit by a fire." (p. 207)

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A Vinaya master called Yuan came to Tai-chu Hui-hai, and asked, "When disciplining oneself in the Tao, is there any special way of doing it?"
HUI-HAI: "Yes, there is."
YUAN: "What is that?"
HUI-HAI: "When hungry one eats; when tired, one sleeps."
YUAN: "That is what other people do; is their way the same as yours?"
HUI-HAI: "Not the same."
YUAN: "Why not?"
HUI-HAI: "When they eat, they do not just eat, they conjure up all kinds of imagination; when they sleep, they do not just sleep, they are given up to varieties of idle thoughts. That is why theirs is not my way." (p. 207)

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Both in Te-shan and Huang-po, Zen is taught to be something in direct contact with our daily life; there are no speculations soaring heavenward, no abstractions making one's head reel, and no sentimental sweetness which turns religion into a love-drama. Facts of daily experience are taken as they come to us, and from them a state of no-mind-ness is extracted. (p. 219)

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A monk asked Hsiang-nien: "What is your eye that does not deceive others?" This is a literal translation; the question really demands the expression of the master's genuine, undeceiving attitude of mind which controls all his experiences. 

Our eye is generally found covered with all kinds of dust, and the refraction of light thereby caused fails to give us the correct view of things. The master responded right away, saying: "Look, look, winter is approaching."

Probably this mondo took place in a mountain monastery surrounded with trees, now bare and trembling in the wind, and both were looking at the snow-bearing clouds. The approach of the winter was quite certain; there was no deception about it.

But the monk wondered if there was not something more than that and said: "What is the ultimate meaning of it?" The master was perfectly natural and his answer was: "And then we have the gentle spring breeze."

In this there is no allusion to deep metaphysical concepts, but a plain fact of observation is told in the most ordinary language. 

The monk's question may elicit in the hands of the philosopher or theologian quite a different form of treatment, but the Zen master's eye is always on facts of experience accessible to everybody, and verifiable by him whenever he wants.

Whatever mysticism enveloped the master was not on his side, but on the side of him who looks for it because of his own blindness. (p. 222)

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We always seek something beyond or behind our experience, and forget that this seeking is an endless regression either way, inward or outward, upward or downward. The Zen master is well aware of this, and avoids the complications. (p. 224)

Drugs as an avenue to exploring consciousness

First, I've made some progress in understanding what Sam Harris means when he says "Consciousness is not inside your head," a semi-perplexing statement that I wrote about recently. 

After writing that post, I've listened to a couple of other guided meditations by Harris on his Waking Up app. In one, he talked about how consciousness is akin to the familiar metaphor of waves and the ocean. The waves aren't separate from the ocean, just as consciousness isn't separate from the things that we're conscious of.

In the guided meditation I heard today, Harris made a similar point about being aware of our breathing. He said that we shouldn't feel that we're observing the breath from a conscious vantage point up in our head, since the breath isn't separate from consciousness. It's within consciousness.

Everything is, given that nothing exists for us if we're not conscious of it. So the way I see it (not sure if Harris agrees with this), it's a mistake to look upon consciousness as if it were a thing -- like water or air. Consciousness is better viewed as a process, the brain in action. 

Thus it makes sense to say consciousness is not inside the head, even though the brain is. Consciousness is an emergent process of the brain that allows us to be aware of the world inside and outside of us. When I see a tree, the seeing of leaves, trunk, branches, and such isn't separate from my consciousness that makes seeing possible.

It's all consciousness, just as waves that can appear very different are all ocean.

I also want to share some thoughts about an article in the April 24/May 1 issue of The New Yorker, The Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century: Long before the hippies, a group of thinkers used substances like cocaine, hashish, and nitrous oxide to uncover the secrets of the mind.
Download The Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century | The New Yorker

The technology of nineteenth-century drug exploration, in both professional scientific circles and amateur intellectual ones, was the self-experiment. Since the seventeenth century, scientists had considered this the best method to understand substances that affected moods and perceptions: trying them on other human subjects was a risk, and animal experiments could provide only external indications of mental changes.

By the end of the eighteenth century, when Davy inhaled his first dose of nitrous oxide, the self-experiment was an established practice, with its own protocols and reporting conventions. Its Achilles’ heel, for some, was the way it mixed competing kinds of observation. As the young Sigmund Freud, investigating cocaine as a medical student in the eighteen-eighties, realized, it involved a self-splitting, an impossible assertion of two types of truth at once—that of the researcher and that of the experimental subject.

This tension defined the psychonauts’ project.

Along with many others, I carried on in this spirit during some of my college years, 1966-1971, at San Jose State College in the San Francisco Bay area. Since San Jose wasn't nearly as cool a city as San Francisco or Berkeley, me and my hippie friends identified more with those locales, which we visited often in various states of drug-induced highness.

I'm not going to claim that we were dedicated to exploring the nature of psychedelic consciousness under the influence of LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin, or the non-psychedelic influence of marijuana (which I'm still engaged in "research" with here in Oregon). Often we were just out to have a good time.

But some of us combined Eastern philosophy with psychedelics. The Tibetan Book of the Dead was a particular favorite, since it described various levels of consciousness experienced by dying or dead people.

I ran into a young guy who was traveling around the country, hoping to be able to enter the light spoken of in the Tibetan Book of the Dead that he'd seen while on a psychedelic trip, yet was reluctant to move toward out of fear of the unknown.

This guy was the friend who accompanied me on a trip to the Santa Cruz mountains where, under the spell of mescaline, we simultaneously concluded that the universe is a paper bag turned inside out.

That experience points to the issue that is talked about in The New Yorker article about nineteenth century drug explorations. It's difficult, if not impossible, to be a dispassionate observer of your psychedelic trip while you're in the midst of doing the "psychonaut" traveling. 

He and I deeply felt the truth of the paper bag turned inside out nature of the universe while we were high. The next day, as now, that notion seems vacuous and meaningless. So which is true? The inspiration while under the influence of a drug, or the later sober assessment of the inspiration? 

I'd say that both are true, since set (one's mindset) and setting (where one is using a drug) combine to produce a certain experience. Here's a pertinent excerpt from The New Yorker article:

To a stubborn handful of psychonauts, though, the most “objective” data about drugs were precisely those culled from experience. Jay foregrounds Jacques-Joseph Moreau, a mid-nineteenth-century French psychiatrist who encountered hashish—the concentrated, hallucinogenic extract of the cannabis plant—while travelling in the Middle East.

Hashish was then known to Westerners mostly secondhand, its effects filtered through the lens of fictions such as “The Arabian Nights.” When Moreau took a strong dose in 1840, however, he found that it was uniquely educative in the psychiatric context.

Each of the effects he experienced could be read as a symptom of mental illness: the nervous excitement, the distortion of space and time, the hallucinatory perceptions. Hashish took him to a place that looked and felt like insanity, then led him, temporarily, inside it. It allowed him to understand his patients with greater nuance: he could now recognize what “the ravings of a madman” were like, having “raved himself.” “Personal experience,” he wrote, “is the criterion of truth here.”

Reading this, I was reminded of my first LSD trip. A college friend who had used LSD before took it with me. However, he wasn't able to handle the situation when I convinced him that the psychedelic experience we were having proved that we were insane.

We talked about what this meant. The best we could come up with was that yes, we now were insane, but being crazy wasn't all that bad. In fact, maybe it was good. We had no conception that our LSD trips were going to end soon and we'd be back to normal.

Oregon, where I live, has become the first state to legalize the therapeutic use of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. The initial class of facilitators graduated recently. Fairly soon it will be possible for people to pay for a supervised psilocybin trip under the guidance of a facilitator. 

Psilocybin offers benefits for those with PTSD, a fatal illness, serious depression, and other problems. I'm unsure if I'd want to use it, but I would seriously consider it. Especially since someone would be there to keep me from thinking that I was insane.

A RSSB initiate expresses some concerns

Below is a message I got yesterday from someone who is a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization with headquarters in India that's led by a guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, which this person refers to as Baba ji. Darshan refers to being in the presence of the guru.

(I belonged to RSSB for thirty-five years, before I broke away from the group.)

The message describes concerns this person has about RSSB and the guru. They end with a request that I share my thoughts about what they said, which I'll do after the message. They also say that they'd like to hear from other like-minded people.

So leave a comment on this post if you want to share some thoughts with this person. Here's what they had to say, followed by my observations.

I have read your blogs about RSSB and I can relate myself to parts of it. I'm an initiate and have been attending satsangs. My concerns are:

 

-- Why two and a half hours of  meditation a day? It is not practical. If you are in a job and you do it continuously, day in and day out. you are not getting enough sleep and it eventually catches up on you. 

 

-- Daiichi vs. Singh brothers. Article comes on RSSB official website and goes off quickly. Was it a decision taken in panic?

 

-- Daiichi vs. Singh brothers. YouTube link to "Fortis tycoon steps down to walk down on the road of spiritualism". It was news that ran on India's mainstream media 7 years ago. Was it part of the financial deal?

 

--  Frequent visits by India's high profile politicians including the prime minister. I am trying to establish the motive. We all have our secrets.

 

-- What is the succession process of masters? Is it at the death of a master or earlier? Looking at the previous line of masters. Nepotism maybe?

 

-- Baba ji is all about simple living. He has had the same pair of trainers for a few years. Well not, when it comes to expensive cars, a charter plane and the helicopter. I am not aware of the other centres, but I know of 2 which have fully furnished houses exclusively for baba ji for his visits. You can imagine the bill if all centres around the world have this arrangement.

 

-- I can't comment on the charitable expenditure of RSSB. But there are a rising number of new centers lately both in India and overseas. Of course, it is creating more sewa opportunities?

 

-- Baba ji's satsang sessions are more like counseling sessions. Replies are standard, not going into details. Q & A sessions, I wonder why no one has raised the question of personal wealth yet. (Quite honestly, I'd be intimidated asking that myself.)

 

When I got initiated, I used to feel special and thought I am set for life. Just do my bit everyday and I will come out stronger and better. Whenever I had a chance to do darshan, I was thinking he could see my soul and was able to hear my prayers.

 

But that's all changed now. I feel that I am not special but just an ordinary, back to square one with no direction.

 

Thanks for listening and your thoughts please. I would like to hear from like minded people as well.

 

I agree with you about the vow to do 2 1/2 hours of meditation a day. Few RSSB initiates do this much meditation. It's a vow that is broken by almost everybody, likely including the guru himself. The RSSB guru who initiated me in 1971, Charan Singh, said that ten minutes of concentrated meditation is better than hours of distracted meditation. So I wouldn't worry about the quantity of meditation, just the quality.

 

Yes, the RSSB website did have links to articles about the guru and the Singh brothers' financial problems. The links were deleted in 2019. I wrote a blog post about this: RSSB deletes financial fraud stories from website. 

 

In 2018 I wrote a post, Gurinder Singh's billionaire nephew rumored to succeed him as RSSB guru. But in 2019 I wrote a post, Shivinder Singh lied about becoming a full-time RSSB sevadar [volunteer]. It does seem that Shivinder did this to get out of contempt proceedings.

 

I don't know much about politics in the Punjab. I suspect politicians like to visit Gurinder Singh because this helps them get votes from RSSB initiates, along with the guru's political support.

 

It is indeed strange that out of the billions of people in the world, the successor to a RSSB guru sometimes is a relative of the previous guru. Like you said, this looks like nepotism. 

 

Gurinder Singh does have a taste for the good life. Well, more than a taste. A full-blown diet. 

 

Back in Charan Singh's time as RSSB guru, he expressed no interest in building overseas centers, saying that meditation should be our main concern. Gurinder Singh changed that as you said, building expensive centers all over the world.

 

If Gurinder Singh is acting as a counselor, sometimes he does a poor job of offering advice. I wrote about one example of this in Why a guru shouldn't give mental health advice. There are other examples.

 

I think it's great that you're asking such good questions. I also really liked your statement that now you feel ordinary, not special. That's a sign of genuine spiritual progress. I say that as someone who also no longer feels religiously special -- though  I admit that I'm pleased and proud about my non-specialness, which shows that I have a ways to go before I feel truly ordinary. 

 

Sam Harris says "consciousness is not inside your head." Huh?

Today I heard Sam Harris say on a guided meditation on his Waking Up app, "Consciousness is not inside your head. Everything is just appearing."

I've heard Harris say this many times. I don't understand that notion. 

The brain is inside the head. The brain generates consciousness. If you doubt that, have general anesthesia. Have someone hit you on the head with a baseball bat, hard. Have your brain surgically removed.

No brain, no consciousness. But we can lose an arm, a leg, or some other non-essential organ and still be conscious. 

If someone can make a good argument for how consciousness is not inside the head, leave a comment about this. Maybe you can convince me Harris is right and I'm wrong.

I found a post on Quora that could explain what Harris really means by this, which makes a lot of sense.

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Marcus Geduld

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Studied at School of Theatre at Ohio UniversityUpdated 1y

He is speaking metaphorically. He’s a neuroscientist. He knows the brain generates consciousness*, and he knows that the brain is an organ inside the skull.

But he’s trying to help you cut through a persistent illusion: that when you look at a tree, that tree is outside of you and you are a few feet away from it, observing it from a spot just above your nose.

He’s not saying there’s no tree. There is a tree. But you can’t directly perceive it. Data about it enters your brain via your sense organs, chiefly your eyes in this case, but what you’re actually “seeing” is a mental model, built by your brain. It’s a simulation of some sort of external reality.

So is the little bit of your nose that maybe you can see in your peripheral vision. You’re not actually seeing it. It’s just another part of that same mental model as the tree. So is the sight of your hand, if you look down at it or bring it up to your face. So is your sense that you’re breathing. So is your pain when you have a headache.

Your brain has built a simulation—based on real data—that includes the tree, your nose, your breaths, the feeling of your feet on the ground, your ideas, and so on. All are existing in the same “space,” which is consciousness.

So maybe Harris could have said “Everything is in your head,” but what he’s trying to do is get you to see that this sense of yourself being a separate object from the stuff you see “all around you” is an illusion.

The problem with “Everything is in your head” is it creates an image, at least of me, of this normal-sized head with lots of little things inside it. Even if that’s kind of what’s going on, it doesn’t create the visceral feeling that the stuff you see over there is part of consciousness.

If you’re inside a room right now, imagine consciousness as a space wrapping around it, wrapping around the entire room. And that thing in the center of the room that seems to be “you” is just one part of consciousness. It’s just as much inside the wrapper as everything else in the room, as the room itself.

In the real world, there is a separation. There’s you and a tree, two distinct things, but in your consciousness, they’re all part of the same thing—the same simulation. And that tree “over there” is just as much a part of you as that hand “over here.”

Really, when you’re looking at a tree, you’re not seeing a tree, you’re seeing colors and shapes. “Tree” is a concept you’re laying on top of that. (And that concept is also part of the simulation.) And the same is true with “your” hand. When you look at it, you’re seeing shapes and colors. When you look in general, you’re seeing a bunch of shapes and colors, and your brain is layering the concept “tree” on some of them and “hand” on others. But they’re all part of consciousness. Equally.

Imagine a character in a movie suddenly realizing the truth. “Oh my God! I’m in a movie. That car over there is part of a movie. It’s just pixels. That building … pixels! There’s no difference between them. They’re all just colored pixels!”

He’s forgetting one thing, right? He too is just colored pixels. He’s making a false separation between himself and the car, himself and the building. All are part of the same movie. (When the movie was shot, cameras were pointed at actual things, but now what’s being projected is pixels.)

I’m not trying to say nothing is real or it’s all an illusion. And I don’t believe Harris is saying that either. He’s a materialist. I’m saying that when you look around the room, everything you see is equally inside your head and equally close to you. That thing “across the room” is just as close to you as your fingernails, because everything you see and sense is “just pixels,” which is to just your brain’s representation of what’s actually out there.

If that thing over there is a simulation inside your head, it’s not really “over there.” The thing it’s a simulation of might be over there, but you can’t directly perceive that thing. What you’re seeing is a part of you and you’re a part of it.

The data which is telling you that “the thing thing is across the room from you” may be very useful data. It may help guide your actions, if you want to experience going to it and picking it up, but that doesn’t stop everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and otherwise sense from all appearing in the same space, along with your thoughts and feelings.

All of this can be sophomoric, dorm-room “Oh, wow! Trippy,” but mindfulness meditation can gradually train you to have a visceral sense of it. Over time, you learn to see consciousness as a “space” in which all sorts of things appear, and they’re all equally items-in-consciousness: tree, sense of self, sad feeling, memory of yesterday, solution to problem, sound, sense of distance, etc.

—

* The truth is more nuanced. Turns out, Harris is agnostic about the relationship between the brain and consciousness. Thank you, User-11317941740410993461 for correcting my errors. For more info, see the videos in the exchange between me and Benjamin, below.

 

It's fine to be content with who you are: flawed and imperfect

There's nothing wrong with self-improvement. Unless you don't feel like improving your self.

As this letter to the editor in the March 23, 2023 issue of New Scientist says, there's good reason to simply accept yourself as the imperfect person that you are (nobody's perfect, for sure), whose life is marked by some stupid decisions and screwups.

Fed up with the desire to spin our lives in this way
7 January, p 33
From Caroline Deforche,
Lichterveide, Belgium

According to your guide to being your own hero, psychologists say we should spin our memories "into a well-told life narrative" to "help us achieve our aspirations for self-improvement."

Why always this pressure to perform better, because that is what it comes down to (which isn't the same as saying that unhealthy behaviour shouldn't be changed)?

Why don't psychologists give a message about being content with who we are and accepting what we have done so far? Control over everything is an illusion.

What I found most useful were psychologist Kate McLean's reflections.

Indeed, we don't have to look for silver linings everywhere. Some events just suck and some choices we made were just stupid, or we simply had bad luck. Why not admit this and live with it? Why should we have to sugarcoat our story?

No one is completely the author of their own destiny and no one can mould themselves into the perfect shape.

I like these sentiments.

For most of my life I thought that I was supposed to work on making myself a better person. However, that attitude puts us on a hamster-wheel sort of path where we continually put in effort to arrive at a desired place, yet never arrive there, since it's always possible to be an even better person. 

At some point I believe we have to reach a state of mind of This is as good as it gets.

In my experience, that requires a wisdom that comes with aging. Not just growing older -- everybody does that from the moment of their birth -- but reaching an age, for me it's 74, where you recognize that as the letter-writer said, no one can control life or form themselves into a perfect shape.

The best we can do is be as kind as possible to ourselves and others; try to make the world a bit better than it already is, or at least not worse; laugh when we're happy and cry when we're sad; accept that, as my 4th grade teacher liked to say, Do your best; angels can do no better; and flow with the unpredictable currents of life (not that we have any choice in this).

Slow deep breathing and smiling -- two ways to feel better fast

Recently I listened to a guided meditation by Tamara Levitt on my Calm iPhone app where she led listeners through an interesting exercise that taught me something new about breathing.

First Levitt had me breathe for a minute, using my usual breathing. I recall that no counting was done with this first exercise. Then she asked listeners to breathe more slowly, and to count those breaths for a minute that she timed. I had six in and out breaths during that minute.

Then Levitt said to breathe slowly again, but to extend the duration of each in breath by inhaling more deeply when it seemed that no more air could be taken in, and also to extend the duration of each out breath by exhaling more deeply when it seemed that no more air could be expelled.

She timed that minute also. I had four in and out breaths during that minute.

Levitt then talked about how deep breathing of this sort activates a relaxation response in the brain. So she recommended using the extra-deep-breathing technique if someone is anxious about a doctor visit, presentation at work, or whatever.

I've been experimenting with this in my own life and it does seem to work, seemingly for two reasons.

One is that the body does respond to slow deep breathing by relaxing, since fast shallow breathing is associated with a stress response, as when you're worried about being attacked by a stranger on a dark deserted sidewalk.

The other reason is that slow deep breathing, where I inhale and exhale more air past the point where I usually think I've done a full inhalation and exhalation, requires me to concentrate on my breath -- which means my mind isn't full of thoughts about a situation that is making me anxious. 

This is different from merely following my breath, something I've been doing for a long time in my mindfulness and meditation practice. A BBC story (registration may be required), Why slowing your breathing helps you relax, talks about this difference.

Recent scientific research has shown that while quick, shallow and unfocused breathing may contribute to a host of problems, including anxiety, depression and high blood pressure, cultivating greater control over our lungs can bring many benefits to our mental and physical health. Intriguingly, scientists are finding that a particular frequency of breath – at around six exhalations a minute – can be especially restorative, triggering a “relaxation response” in the brain and body.

...Indeed, you may be forgiven for wondering whether breathwork is simply another name for mindfulness, given that many meditation courses already encourage participants to focus their attention on their inhalation and exhalation.

Mindfulness, however, tends to involve passive observation – “watching the breath” – whereas breathwork requires you to actively change the way you breathe. This includes ensuring that you breathe with your diaphragm (rather than the movement of your chest) so that you can fill your lungs with more air, while consciously slowing the pace of your breathing from your resting average.

According to practitioners, those slow, deep breaths set off a cascade of physiological responses that accelerate your descent into a more complete state of relaxation, compared to more passive mindfulness exercises.

“It acts as a speed ramp into the meditation practice, helping to calm the mind quicker so that you get more bang for your buck while meditating,” explains Richie Bostock, a breathwork coach based in London whose book, Exhale, will be published later this year. “In fact, I call some of the routines I teach ‘Meditation on Rocket Fuel’ because of the profound effect it has on calming the mind quickly and getting you to that place of no-thought.”

I just ordered Bostock's book, so will have more to say about this subject after I try the breathing exercises he recommends. Here's another article from Harvard Health Publishing to peruse, Relaxation techniques: Breath control helps quell errant stress response. 

This is a great example of how the mind and body are intimately related. We are physical beings having a physical experience, not the oft-quoted and misleading We are spiritual beings having a physical experience. That way leads to some serious pitfalls, including a dissociation between our mind and body.

Smiling is an even easier thing to do than control the breath. Research shows that smiling can trick your brain into feeling happier, something that seems true when I try it. Here's another story that makes the same point: Forcing a Smile May Improve Your Mood, Study Suggests.