Thursday, February 16, 2006

Featured exquisite mind webpage: mental factors

Meditation practice requires work, effort, and persistence. This work can be joyful or arduous depending on the attitudes we bring to practice. Traditionally, there are five mental factors that tip the scale towards more joyous practice. These are faith, wisdom, energy, insight, and concentration. These factors will be explored in this section. These mental factors contribute to the psychological seat we bring to practice. Exquisite Self-Care can also help to provide a solid foundation in which to realize these mental factors. Humans have the unique capacity to consider their own minds. To practice mindfulness meditation is to consider the mind in a deliberate and pointed way. This way, however, is not what we are typically involved with. It is not problem solving, creativity, worrying, regretting, planning, rehearsing, or any of the other possible facets of cognitive activity that we might typically be engaged with. As such, it takes some getting used to, and it takes some time to reorient our brains to be comfortable with what is essentially doing nothing – nothing other than experiencing our experience in the moment. Doing nothing? “That’s downright un-American!” And so, our minds may thusly protest. Faith, wisdom, energy, insight, and concentration will help us to retrain our minds to this unusual and rare activity of considering our own minds as objects of our own minds. Read more ...

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Dies Irae

I am returning to D. H. Lawrence today, with an excerpt from his pansie “Dies Irae”

and we know not how to live wordless
we live an a vast house
full of activities,
and the noise, and the stench, and the dreariness,
  and lack of meaning
madden us, but we don’t know what to do.”

Lawrence might have enjoyed an MBSR course or a vipassana retreat. In 1929, these were scarcely available in the West. He would have needed to travel to India, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, or Ceylon to find such teachings. In fact, Lawrence did travel to Ceylon and spent six weeks there in 1922. Curiously this trip to one of the repositories of Theravadan Buddhism turned him off to Buddhism. He eschewed the opportunity to study and go within himself while there, deciding that it was a bogus inwardness. The Buddha frustrated him and he was known to say upon seeing a seated Buddha statue “Oh I wish he would stand up!” While Buddhism was not his cup of tea, the tantric practices of Hinduism apparently were. I think Lawrence might have enjoyed and connected with vipassana, if he had gotten past his biases. Of course, this is a presumption on my part. Reading the Path to Mindfulness, by Bhante Gunaratana (or Bhante G), reveals the day-to-day monastic life of Buddhists in Ceylon. As is the case currently in Japan with Zen, institutional Buddhism looks very different from the contemplative practice of vipassana. Buddhists in Ceylon go to temple to ask for blessings and to perform rituals. The monks were often engaged in small-mindedness, harsh treatments, and petty power struggles. They do not go to meditate. In fact, Bhante G. had very little meditation practice early in his monastic training. So, the Buddhism D. H. Lawrence was exposed to, was likely this exterior form, which bears little resemblance to what the Buddha actually did himself.