Expedition: Shamatha

DAVID BROOKS TO MALCOLM GLADWELL: 'CONTROL OF ATTENTION IS THE ULTIMATE INDIVIDUAL POWER'

Before we dive back into full-time practice (and off the internet) for a good long while, I thought I'd post David Brooks' Op-Ed, "Lost in the Crowd," a response to Gladwell's book, Outliers.  While Gladwell notes how social forces determine our destiny, Brooks argues that individual will is

Century-old NYT Op-Ed predicts 20th Century Buddhist "Renaissance"

Check out this remarkable NYT Op-Ed ... from 1900! (Download NYT Op-Ed from 1900)  It's conclusion:

It cannot be denied that there are certain points in the Buddhist view of life that are likely to influence, and to influence widely, with increasing intensity, the views of life, of philosophy, of ethics, as held now in the West.... The present results have been brought about by knowledge of Buddhism professed by a few isolated students.

The Shamatha Project - answering a few questions

Hello all, we're taking a brief semi-break from retreat, before we dive back in (and offline) for a good part of 2009.  Wishing everyone the best.

People have been expressing interest in the project - so let me try to answer some of the questions that have been coming up.

The Neural Buddhists - by David Brooks

Here's a link to the first foray by a major op-ed columnist into the convergence of science and Buddhism, from the New York Times.  Plenty to quibble with here (which I won't b/c this is a rare & brief moment online), including Brooks' comment that cognitive neuroscience will "challenge faith in the Bible," but the fact that Brooks chose to write on this topic is pretty interesting.

The article's concluding paragraphs:

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other ... We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

And Brooks gives a nice reading list: Andrew Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser.

Here's a link to the full article.

Selected books by the authors above:

The Mindful Brain
Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief
Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique
The Ethical Brain
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

And a related book, while we're at it, by Tal Ben-Shahar, a professor who teaches the most popular undergrad course at Harvard:

Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment

What's your day like?

A number of people have asked about what our days are like in retreat.

Ideally, the question'd be what's your day like - not what're your days like.  When things are going well and there are few distractions, every day's pretty much the same - no difference between weekdays and weekends.  It's basically meditation all day, every day, except for breaks to eat and do chores (during which you're trying to maintain an ongoing flow of mindfulness, so the practice is always at the forefront).  I'm practicing 10 hrs a day, sometimes more; Michelle's more like 12 hours.  To be more specific: I'll get 1-3 hours of practice in before breakfast, at 7:30.  Then I'll walk the dog and check in on our greenhouse (we're growing most of our own veggies, year round).  Then practice 3 hours or more before lunch.  Make a quick, simple lunch - soup and a sandwich or something - and do chores - batch cooking, vacuuming, laundry, pay bills once a month, chopping wood, etc.  Then back to practice, until dinner.  Then, you guessed it, about two hours of practice after dinner.  I'll also exercise almost every day - walks through the mountains, or visits to a tiny gym nearby (usually I'm the only one there - so it's not distracting) -- that's a nice way to break up the longer sits when restlessness kicks in.

I started this by saying "when things are going well."  We've found that there are nice long patches without distraction -- weeks at at time -- but when the distractions hit, they seem to come in waves.  The importance of "ruthless simplicity" is a lesson we've learned the hard way. Even a seemingly insignificant interaction with 'ordinary life' has a way of spiralling out into much more complication than you intended.  For example, you feel like you need a printer, to make certain tasks easier.  So you go online, to find a good, cheap one.  Maybe you get distracted, because there's a startling headline that pops up.  You buy the printer.  It doesn't arrive, so you have to track it down - FedEx accidentally dropped it off at your neighbor's house.  You get the printer.  Two months later, it breaks down, so you're trying to figure out how to fix it.  Then it's a call to the service center, and so on.

We started this retreat in a lodge at The Shambhala Mountain Center, with the other participants.  There, we had a staff cooking for us, taking care of issues like plumbing or electricity problems, etc.  Here, we don't have this kind of support, so we feel a bit like dolphins - we'll dive down into retreat for extended periods of time, then something will pull us up to the surface for a short period, then we'll dive back in for as long as we can ... When we first got to Crestone, we had a fixed idea of being fully in retreat, as we had been at the Shambhala Mountain Center, and we'd get frustrated when we kept getting pulled out of retreat.  After some time, we recognized that this was the rhythm of self-directed retreat, and that these distractions were in fact excellent exercises for bringing the heart-opening and mindfulness-enhancing practices off the cushion and out in the ordinary life - and for letting go of those distractions when it was time to come back to the cushion.

The Lojong trainings (see the right hand column) were invaluable!