Yoga, meditation, and related philosophical and spiritual study

[peacocks]

That's a good idea. Some of my instructors do read passages from books and stuff during savasana, it'd be sweet if they started reading poems and such.

[Em]

One of my teachers read something she wrote at the end of savasana yesterday, about the heart. It was indeed nice. What was not so nice was my inability to tune out the guy who always falls asleep, snores really loudly, and clearly has sleep apnea. I should be able to stay alert but relaxed without, you know, almost laughing because of the uncomfortableness of the situation, but I guess I'm not there yet.

Jeb, I'm really glad you got a lot out of your visit.

This morning before work I went to a group meditation at the yoga studio I go to--first time we've held one, really, and it was kind of instigated jointly in this really nice way--and it was so lovely to have that time to myself but somehow together with others who wanted to find that balance at the beginning of the day just like I did.

cf, the outline of your talk makes it sound like it's gonna be interesting, and I'm sure it will be!

[peacocks]

I did a bit of I Ching today:

Hexagon 45: Accord
The Earth Below
The Marsh Above
------------------------------------
The marsh has risen over the earth.
The superior man puts his weapons in order
and prepares for unforeseen emergencies.

Confer with the great man.
Success
if you keep to your course,
as long as you are willing to pay the price.
Auspicious
no matter what you do.

[Good Intentions]

I used to do the I Ching. Fascinating artefact. 

[peacocks]

Yo, CF have you ever heard of or read the book After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path by Jack Kornfield? He studied Thai Forest Buddhism. A friend/cashier guy handed it to me while I was waiting in line for take out last night. I really liked and identified with what little I read. I'll probably pick it up this week.

[coldforge]

Cocks, I haven't read that book, but Kornfield's the real deal. I don't listen to his talks actively because I find it more useful to approach these things in a holistic way, within the relative orthodoxy of an established tradition, and he's a little more secular—broadly speaking he's a member of the Vipassana movement, which takes a lot of the techniques and principles of Theravada Buddhism (incl. TFF) and deals with them in a way that is designed to be much more broadly appealing and Western-compatible than TFF itself (many very smart people would no doubt take issue with this characterization).

But as you say he takes his principles and he has real training from folks like Ajahn Chah, who is sort of the patriarch of many of the teachers in my tradition. He's very wise and kind and I don't think anybody could go wrong reading his work. If you like him you should check out Gil Fronsdal too. And remember that all of these folks have lots and lots of recorded talks free online. They make for great subway listening. Here's a lot of Jack in one place: http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/85/

[peacocks]

Wow, thank you for that link! I definitely get it being more accessible to westerners. What he says about enlightenment as something you have to continue working for in your daily life is exactly the way I have been raised to think of buddhist practice. The thing I found refreshing about the way he writes is that it doesn't seem as evangelical as a lot of SGI literature tends to, and it doesn't all hinge on just one prayer. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo is always going to be soothing to me but it isn't working for me. I don't mean in the sense that I'm not getting what I want. It's something else. I guess it's what a Christian might feel like when they don't believe in god anymore- except there was never a god for me.

I'm actually going to dinner with one of my best girlfriends who was raised in the SGI and another close SGI friend who I haven't seen in a few years since she moved to Japan and I know that she is going to talk to me about chanting and going to meetings and try to encourage me about it and I don't really know what I'm going to tell her. But actually, she might not, because we have a bunch of other stuff to talk about.

[coldforge]

I would suggest that the more of what we might call a full-featured Buddhist practice that you decide to engage with in your life, the more that one particular chant will regain some resonance for you.

[peacocks]

You're probably right.

[coldforge]

I'm gonna really try to make a habit of meditating in the church across from my work during the day. At least ten minutes, shooting for 20 if I think they can spare me—though I'm a little concerned that all the construction they were doing at this particular moment will be the norm.

[coldforge]

God damn, you can see how effective that shit is when it's sandwiched between two halves of a workday!

[peacocks]

I have to try to do something like this. I've been taking my lunch at my desk more and more when I'm not doing field work and being in front of a computer for 8 whole hours is pretty exhausting.

[coldforge]

Hey gang, not sure if anybody would be interested, but my first quasi-official Dharma Punx is up for public consumption on the DPX podcast site. It's about, like, reality, and stuff, and losing my cell phone.

http://dharmapunxnyc.podbean.com/2012/02/21/zach-d-smith-talk-on-just-this/

[jebreject]

I'm looking forward to hearing this!

How has your practice been going, Zach?

I feel like I've been really good at implementing mindfulness in my daily goings-on and interactions with people, but no so great at meditating for any real length of time. I'd like to work on that.

[elpollodiablo]

So do you guys who approach this from (what I imagine to be) a secular perspective consider yourselves spiritual? I've been thinking about my own putative lack of spirituality lately, not with any intention of "becoming" more spiritual or trying to cultivate anything like that in myself, but in an attempt to understand if there are parts of my character and my interiority that might be equatable with what someone else calls spirituality. After some consideration I wonder if the closest thing I have to what might be characterized as a spiritual belief or faith is my conviction that my own experience of the world is never going to be fully communicable.

[jess]

I do a lot with mindfulness (I practice it, teach it and research it), and I'm not at all spiritual. That said, I feel like my mindfulness practice enables me to get more depth and meaning out of my life and experiences and clarity about myself and my values, and I suspect that those qualities are parallel to what at least some other people get out of being spiritual. I don't consider myself spiritual, because I'm a pretty strict materialist—I think all of my experiences are entirely based in my neurons firing and whatnot, and to me spirituality means I'd be believing in things beyond that, like souls or something else metaphysical. But that's the beauty and utility of mindfulness to me—it works regardless of religion or spirituality and can be used in concert with spiritual beliefs or in the absence of them.

That said, being not spiritual at all is maybe why as of yet, I haven't been that drawn to Buddhist practices and texts much, but prefer doing the entirely secularized mindfulness practices that have been adapted in my field and why that presentation of it is what I feel passionately about. One of my colleagues who was raised Christian and is now an atheist is the opposite—she find the secularized stuff helpful when helping others and something she enjoys researching, but wants something that feels more spiritual when practicing herself, since that's a quality she misses in her life, so she's been getting more into Buddhism.

[coldforge]

I'm having a lot of trouble answering that question. I think mostly because my understanding of 'secular' and 'spiritual' are both pretty fuzzy. I'd say they're fuzzy because I, actually, don't consider my approach to be particularly secular; I consider my approach to be pretty solidly religious. I don't believe in God, but I do consider myself to be a fully-engaged Theravada Buddhist. I guess I know lots of people who have secular- or spiritual-but-not-religious approaches to Buddhist practice, but I consider those to be largely incoherent, for matters that have mostly to do with my understanding of Buddhist doctrine.

Then again there's gajillions of people who use one or another techniques that originally stem from Buddhist and related traditions in a secular context (like Jess, I see in the x-post—though the one area where I'd quibble with her is that I don't think that in order to qualify as a spiritual or even religious person that one needs to BELIEVE in non-material things like souls; I, for instance, do not); there's gajillions of people who meditate but don't have any interest in the actual teachings of the Buddha, for the most obvious example. I am not one and I don't think that Jeb is either, but I imagine that at that point, that practice says absolutely nothing about one's spirituality. I think you're just as likely to meditate to want to relieve stress as you are to get closer to some feeling of transcendence or communion—what I might very sketchily say to be the spiritual-and-not-secular impulses.

In any case the religiousness of a modern Western Buddhist practice, almost necessarily stripped of the folk religion that the original tradition grew up within (we don't spend a lot of time talking about devas and hungry ghosts at dharma punx), is a really, really subtle thing to quantify. I suppose it's really quite easy to see the entirety of practice as an incredibly detailed, exhaustive psychological model. In that case, I guess the paragraph above would stand. One way to view the practice—even my practice, which I've said is for me capital-R Religion—within a rigorously, exclusively materialist viewpoint is just to believe that the Buddha happened to come up with a pitch-perfect, 100% accurate model of human psychology. I mean, at a certain point, what starts happening is that you start to have to account for the inherent human need FOR spiritual/religious experience within that psychological model. And you also start problematizing the question of belief itself.

These things become very slippery, I guess.

At this point I'm just coredumping and hoping something sticks, but I guess one way I might delineate between secular and religious within the context of Buddhist practice is just by observing priorities. I think most 'secular' or even 'spiritual' practitioners of one form or another of Buddhism have life goals roughly equivalent to what I'd call 'householder', and you'd call 'secular humanist' goals—be prosperous, be healthy, have a family, have a good career, enjoy oneself, do some good, be generally happy and be relatively at ease when you die—and I think the one thing that might really distinguish a truly religious approach to the practice is what I would call 'renunciant', and my ex-girlfriend would call 'religious zealot' goals—that is, in my practice, enlightenment, hopefully in this lifetime. And not necessarily any of that other stuff. So in that respect I think it's very possible to have a more-spiritual-than-jess Buddhist practice, still completely in service to those householder goals. I think it's a bit of a waste, but that's just me.

[coldforge]

Pollo, I would argue in general that what we talk about when we talk about the spiritual impulse, or spiritual qualities, is the impulse to create some sense of order or meaning in a world beyond what existence itself offers. That is, and I take a cue from Zapffe here: the world is absurd, and per se fundamentally incapable of presenting a semblance of the meaning and order that we have evolved, physiologically, to constantly seek. Our ability to recognize patterns, our ability to systematize, has resulted in a constant biological drive towards order and coherence. The natural material world is not fully ordered or coherent, thus it will always, per se, frustrate that need. So in this light the spiritual drive is same as the philosophical drive, or the political, or the idealistic; and I don't see any fundamental difference between turning that need towards the construction of religious or mystical systems and, say, the impulse towards nationalism. Or even class consciousness. So I think everybody has that impulse, which we call in certain realizations the spiritual impulse; it's just that other realizations of the same drive are not always recognized as such.

That is, you and I both have a 'spiritual' dimension; that I decided to go into religion and you decided to go into academia, or political consciousness, or whatever it is that scratches that itch for you, is a matter—as we say in the computing community—of implementation.

[Em]

Excited to hear your podcast, coldforge. Have many thoughts on secular vs. spiritual, will think on how to put it.

Edit: But the short answer is, yes, spiritual.

[elpollodiablo]

Thanks for the thoughtful answers, guys! I especially dug what jess said about her own materialism (that definitely describes me, as well) and your last post there, coldie. While I'm at least a bit hesitant to fully subscribe to the idea of a physiological need for order or pattern, I appreciate the argument.

[fishjim]

Me too, em. I've got a busy day but will be listening to CF.

My spiritual profile, so to speak, is more Christ- than Buddha-centric, so I'm curious to learn more. Mainly I seem to seek the transcendence CF talks about in music, not meditation.

[Em]

In the meantime I'm now sitting to meditate for 45 minutes every morning alone, plus I have a 45-minute group Wednesday before work and an hour-long group on Sunday nights. I feel like the work I do alone is useful, but there's something really great about the groups that somehow makes it easier to focus. And as a combination yogi/growing-into-Buddhism meditator, I do sometimes dedicate my meditation practice to an intention, purpose, or person (as one would do with asana practice) so the supportive atmosphere is good for that, too.

[elpollodiablo]

Part of the reason I doubt my capacity for "spirituality" in the sense of an apprehension of or connection to something beyond our experience is that I've never once felt/sensed/experienced anything that I think could be described as "transcendence" in relation to art--or anything else, for that matter. I spend a great deal of my time studying, reading, thinking, discussing, writing about art, and have never experienced anything in a piece of art that suggested to me something beyond my ability to apprehend, given enough time, patience, education, thought, etc. But maybe that's not what people mean when they say they have a transcendent experience of art (largely I doubt that they mean anything beyond the fact that it elicits some intense emotion in them, which, yes, sure).

xpost to fish

[elpollodiablo]

Sorry to go on and on (feel free to ask me to step off the meditation thread with all this ish), but just wanted to make clear that all of this doesn't stem from some anti-theistic ideology of rationality (which isn't to say it doesn't stem from some kind of ideology, ultimately). I'm not a "militant atheist" or whatever other silly epithet people use; I have just never felt any affinity for any spiritual practice or religious dogma. It doesn't enter into my experience of the world. For a long time I thought that if I were to be spiritual or religious, there would be some sort of ineffable sensation or inscrutable extra component to my experience of reality that would incite it, but now I'm not so sure. I'm intrigued by the idea of a purposeful, ritualistic religiosity as a way of structuring thought, but it seems like there's always some metanarrative at the heart of it of which I'd be innately suspicious, like the notion that any group of teachings could present a 100% accurate model of human psychology.

[coldforge]

I don't think that ineffable, mystic sensation that you're imagining is a universal feature of spiritual or any other kind of humans. I'm not sure I've ever felt it—and if I did, more to the point, my religion strongly encourages me to err on the side of 'neurons firing in a weird way' as opposed to 'touched fingertips with the universal divine oneness'. When I say transcendence, I mean satisfaction to that gnawing sensation, that gnawing question of, 'is this all there is?' We're born, we eat and fuck for 70 years, then we die? We work ourselves to the bone in pursuit of some goal—to be the first to do this, to be the best at that field, to fuck this woman or as many women as possible—and 1, or 5, or 30 years out, or on our deathbeds, those concerns seem so infinitesimally petty and silly. We are at certain times and places more acutely aware of the emptiness that seems to pervade the conventions and goals that one can spend many lifetimes living within.

What I mean by transcendence, then, is the realization of some goal or priority or belonging or selfhood that transcends these everyday concerns. Salvation, enlightenment, The Nation, punk rock, black metal, art, poetry, to be part (as they say) of something bigger than ourselves—these are all vehicles to transcend to material facts of our everyday existence, that feel, at some level, meaningless and useless to us. Now mind you, I'm not saying that they ARE meaningless, any more than salvation or punk rock are meaningless—but that that quality of meaninglessness pursues us constantly. It's an inherent feature, if you ask me, of our psychological makeup, an evolutionary maladaptation that is expressed to a greater or lesser degree in all human beings. So as a byproduct of our mental capacities, we seek something to satisfy that itch, and build religions and ideologies and art—all vehicles of transcendence—just as we seek sex and somatic comfort.

NOW THEN it so happens that my conception of Buddhist practice dovetails with my articulation of the religious impulse. I identify that endlessly self-perpetuating meaninglessness generator with dukkha, or suffering; I think the Buddha and Zapffe were talking about the same thing. They propose vastly different remedies to it; I figure if Buddhism doesn't pan out I'll go mountaineering until I die of exposure. But all this in the last paragraph is just my personal take.