I think it'd be cool to be a Zen master. However, to do that I would have had to actually practice Zen under the guidance of a Zen master, rather than admire Zen from the outside and practice it in my own idiosyncratic fashion.
Henry Shukman, who wrote the book Original Love that I'm reading now, and fashioned The Way app on my iPhone that I've using every morning in a cyberspace form of Zen meditation, is indeed a Zen master.
I just checked out the Sanbo Zen International web site and Shukman is listed there along with other masters of Sanbo Zen.
Shukman has an appealing way of explaining what meditation is all about. I like these passages from his book.
Becoming a meditator, opening up to a path of meditation, could be viewed as slowing down the car, parking it, getting out of it, and walking -- going through life at a pace where we can experience the sensory details of the trip.
...The problem is that in our pursuit of goals, we tend to get distracted from the richness of our actual life. It's not wrong to have goals and aspirations. It's healthy, and inspires and motivates us. But what if we could let them simply be the valley track we've chosen to walk down?
We're going in a certain direction. Fine. But as we go, we're going to experience each step of the journey -- each moment, this very moment -- so that the goal is our chosen direction, not something we're obsessing about reaching as quickly as possible, to the exclusion of all current experiences here and now.
Otherwise, what will happen once we reach the goal? We'll very likely set another goal, and speed off toward that one as fast as we can. And so on.
By slowing down, by deciding that each moment is worth experiencing for itself, we can broaden our life. It's not that life has no direction. It's that paying attention to what happens along the way makes life richer and fuller.
Even though we're moving in a chosen direction, it actually matters more to us how it is here and now than how it might be down the road. And some even say there is a curious law of nature, by which we'll fulfill our goals sooner and more amply if we savor the journey toward them.
This very moment, right now, as it is -- somehow we start to recognize it as already complete. Already the world is fulfilled. That's not to say there aren't problems and immense challenges -- as well as cruelty and suffering, and injustice and oppression.
We must call out these issues and devote serious, sustained effort to their resolution. At the same time, we can appreciate the wealth given to us in any moment, by the moment itself. And we trust that the positive orientation that appreciation arouses will help us to better play our part in making this world a kinder place.
Shukman says that in early Buddhism the first of four foundations of mindfulness is "mindfulness of body."
This may seem obvious, but in some spiritual, religious, and mystical traditions the body is viewed as the jailhouse of the soul. Our goal supposedly is to break the bonds that tie soul to body so we can rise beyond the crude physicality of this lowest domain of creation and ascend to "heaven."
Such is completely at odds with Buddhism in general, and Zen in particular. Pleasingly, Shukman explains why mindfulness of body is so important from a modern neuroscience perspective.
In a nutshell, our large hominin brains are well equipped for rehearsing future scenarios and for rehashing past events. Some speculate that our thick prefrontal cortex evolved to run simulations -- to model the outcomes of possible courses of action. Apparently, it was also to rerun past events, presumably to learn from them.
When we're involved with outward tasks that occupy our attention, we tend to feel okay. We're engaging what some researchers call the task positive network. When we're having downtime, or "idle time," the default mode network is activated, whereupon we spend more time lost in thoughts of the past and of imagined futures than we do experiencing the moment at hand.
This leads to unhappiness. Why? Because we tend to regret the past and fear the future. Our brains evolved to have a strong negativity bias, meaning they act more powerfully and persistently to perceived threats than to perceived rewards. After all, if we neglect a genuine threat just once, than we might die.
So our brains not only "fire" at threats but also "wire" the threat response more strongly, in order to prompt that response again more readily if necessary. So we have work to do just to get to a more balanced state vis-a-vis the world.
...To tell ourselves not to dwell on the past or future seldom works. The mental habit is too strong, reinforced by a million years of evolution. If we offer our attention an alternative area of focus, then this shift makes it easier to break the spell of rumination.
Hence anytime we shift our attention to our body experience, we are necessarily focusing on the here and now. The body lives in the present tense. It doesn't have the capacity to "live" anywhere else. Only the mind can do that.
I'm not impressed with NotebookLM or weird notions of oneness
I do my best to accept the diversity of opinions expressed by people who leave comments on this blog. Diversity is good. If we all believed in the same things, life would be super boring.
However, I'm also big on coherent conversations. While I understand that it is difficult to accomplish this via blog post comments, there's much more value in comments that can be understood by other people, as understanding is the foundation for agreements or disagreements.
Here's an example.
A few days ago I wrote "Some thoughts about what oneness is, and isn't." It wasn't one of my best blog posts. Adequate, but not more than that. I was hoping that someone else would have something wiser to say about oneness.
Because I've found that Osho Robbins, a regular commenter on this blog, often makes good sense, I did my best to understand what he was getting at in his comments on my oneness post. I failed. Here's quotes from his comments that seem to summarize his position on oneness.
I have not claimed the existence of ONENESS.
What I have done is shown that ONENESS cannot be known or experienced.
ONENESS is non-existent because it ticks all the boxes for a non-existent thing.
ONENESS has NO CHARACTERISTICS hence it does NOT exist.
OK. I can understand those statements. Oneness doesn't exist and, not surprisingly, it can't be known or experienced. What I can't understand is how Robbins says a whole lot of other stuff in his comments that apparently he considers to be related to nonexistent and unknowable oneness.
Look, over the years I've been fond of saying that existence exists, and wow, isn't that amazing, that there's something rather than nothing. I readily admit that in one sense, existence can't be known or experienced, since all we can know or experience are entities that exist.
So when I say that existence exists, I'm not claiming that existence is something that stands apart from what exists. This appears to be similar to Robbins' statement that oneness can't be known or experienced, just the unity of things that can be known or experienced.
However, the difference is that Robbins seems to have a lot of fondness for oneness that doesn't exist. He isn't expressing admiration for love and other manifestations of the unity that undergirds reality, as manifested in universal laws of nature, ecological interconnectedness, and such.
And that's what I don't get. His take on oneness isn't that it is beyond speech, reason, perception, and other human ways of knowing and communicating. That would put oneness in the sphere of Zen. Rather, it is that somehow we should care about oneness even though it doesn't exist in any fashion.
I can understand the appeal of mysticism, even though I've fallen away from embracing it. What I don't understand is talk about oneness that doesn't exist.
I also don't understand the appeal of NotebookLM, which is capable of fashioning "podcasts" from videos, recordings, or writings, creating two personalities from the thoughts communicated by a single person.
Previously I shared a NotebookLM podcast from Osho Robbins. Then Jim Sutherland, another regular commenter on this blog, emailed me about a NotebookLM podcast fashioned from reports of his about a 2017 visit to the Dera, the headquarters of Radha Soami Satsang Beas in India.
I listened to about a third of the 17 minute audio podcast. I guess I have a low tolerance for NotebookLM, because I found the artificial intelligence generated voices so irritating, I wished that Sutherland that simply shared a written version of what the podcast is about, rather than having those reports filtered through Notebook LM.
The way I see it, NotebookLM simply is regurgitating a communication that already exists in a podcast form. Nothing new is added by NotebookLM. It merely fashions a pseudo-dialogue between two AI generated "people," each of whom reflects the content of the original communication.
Sure, I can understand the appeal of having the NotebookLM personalities gush over the wisdom contained in something a person has created, be it a video, audio recording, or document. But for me, the listener/watcher of NotebookLM, I don't see what benefit there is in having the original communication fashioned into a "podcast" with the same content.
If I'm wrong about NotebookLM, I'll be pleased to be corrected. That's just how I see it at the moment.
Posted at 10:10 PM in Comments, Reality | Permalink | Comments (50)
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