Archive for April 2012
What is your belief about Karma?
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Read MoreRenewal
Five years ago, the results came in: at age 43, I had colon cancer. Let’s explain a bit what that means, because colon cancer runs in my family like The Force through Skywalkers (so far, only one person has laughed at that. It is intended to be funny, so please, laugh if so inclined). My…
Read MoreEpisode 111 :: Myoan Grace Schireson :: Zen Women
Myoan Grace Schireson Our guest Myoan Grace Schireson speaks with us about equality issues in her book Zen Women: Beyond Tea Ladies, Iron Maidens, and Macho Masters. It’s strange, don’t you think, that in our twenty-first century culture we still struggle with an imbalance in our attitudes towards people based on gender. How can this…
Read MoreLoving Kindness Meditation
Starting to meditate, I was taught two practices and I am very grateful for both of them. The first was a meditation on the breath. Not something that we can easily control, all we do is watch it coming in and going out. Sounds simple but once we try we realize that it ain’t.
Read MoreAsking the Wrong Questions, and Letting Go of the Unknowable
Science is the process of asking questions, but not any question. Science is the pursuit of asking the right questions, intelligent inquiry. And there lies the rub . . . What is a wrong question? Here is an example of a wrong question.
Let’s say you went back in time, and found a man staring at the horizon. He asks you, “What happens when you fall off the horizon?”
Since you come from a time when we know that one can never reach the horizon, let alone fall off, you see immediately that you can’t specifically answer his question as he worded it. His question is incorrect. The right question might be, What is the horizon? Or Why does the horizon move away from me as I try to approach it? Can a person ever reach the horizon? You could answer those questions.
Read MoreDependent Origination: How did we get into this mess? (John Peacock)
Dependent origination is vital to our understanding of experience, how our suffering arises, dissatisfaction, disappointment, the causes, etc. In these two talks, John Peacock explains the details of why it’s important to understand, how we benefit, and that it’s easier to understand through practice:
Read MoreReligion and Dukkha
When atheists speak up about the harmful effects of religion, we’re often asked, in effect, what our problem is. How are we so sure we’re right? What about our own dogmatic beliefs? Isn’t it enough for us to reject religion, without actively opposing it? Why are we, as even Stephen Batchelor says, so “humorless’? These charges are even more pointed for those of us who are secular dharma practitioners. When we inveigh against the religious trappings of Buddhist traditions, we are accused of disrespecting the tradition and its teachers, indeed even of threatening the survival of the dharma in the West (see the interview with Tim Olmsted in the Fall 2010 Tricycle for a good example of this). Why don’t we just relinquish this fixed view and be more open-minded?
Read MoreAwareness, Questioning, and the Path of Compassion
This is a wonderful talk by Martine Batchelor about the practice of awareness, questioning, and the path of compassion, and how they all fit together. Secular Buddhist practitioners often ask, So what is the practice? What do I do? Martine does a great job of explaining what we get out of the practice of meditation,…
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