Articles
The Psilocybin Research Team at Johns Hopkins needs your help.
Our friends Roland Griffiths and Katherine MacLean are looking for a bit of help with their research, if anyone would care to participate here’s the information about what they’re looking for. “We’re conducting an anonymous, web-based study to characterize difficult or challenging experiences that people sometimes have on psilocybin mushrooms (i.e. “bad trips,” whether the…
Read MoreJanuary 2013 Practice Challenge
In January of 2013, on a whim we started the Practice Challenge. Every day, we posted on FaceBook something to try, something to think about, or something to encourage everyone in their practice. On the suggestion of our friend Ben Fleury-Steiner, we’ve collected the posts and are sharing them here in one spot. Thanks again…
Read MoreOn Subtracting What You Don't Like
Here’s a tweet I got after mentioning a naturalized Buddhism: Okaaaaay…. couldn’t you do the same with any religion? Subtract the parts you don’t like? It’s a question that deserves more than a 140 character response. Editing Religions A three-character response to that tweet would be simple: yes. Given any religion, one is always free…
Read MorePractice: The Four Strivings
When we practice, we strive to become proficient. The Sanskrit term for meditation, “bhāvana”, actually means “development” or “cultivation”, near synonyms for “practice” itself. Indeed, meditation is central to the Buddhist path: to meditate is to develop wholesome mental states through mindfulness and concentration. In the Cūḷavedalla Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 44.12), the lay follower Visākha…
Read MorePractice: Working with the Hindrances
The first and biggest problems we all have in meditative practice are those constant bothers that the Buddha termed “hindrances”, clouding the clear water of awareness. He counted five, usually translated: sensual desire, ill-will, restlessness, sloth-and-torpor, and doubt. When I first heard these, I wondered, why these five? They sound like a miscellaneous grab-bag of…
Read MoreStrategies of Secular Buddhist Practice
As Ted Meissner and Mark Knickelbine have been emphasizing, practice is an essential part of any Secular Buddhist path. But it took me quite awhile to find my way to a really worthwhile practice. For many years I followed a Zen-based form of what I would term ‘free form’ meditation, oriented around samādhi, or focus…
Read MoreMeditating on the Mud Machine
Ordinarily we begin meditation by focusing on the body, in particular, the breath. This is known as “mindfulness of breathing” and we learn about it at the beginning of the Buddha’s sutta on the Foundations of Mindfulness (Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 10. I use the Ñaṇamoli/Bodhi translation). The Buddha suggests a few other body-oriented meditations,…
Read MoreJan Ford :: Igniting the Human Imagination
Everyone, I would like to share our dear friend and Senior Advisor Jan Ford’s most pressing thoughts and interests for the Secular Buddhist Association, and our mission, prior to his passing. Thanks to Dana Nourie, we have permission to publish this personal message, crafted while Jan was heavily sedated and struggling with the health issues…
Read MoreCrossed Paths in the Dhamma?
An apparent inconsistency lies at the heart of the Buddha’s teachings: his dhamma recommends we follow two paths at the same time, which lead to different destinations. On the one hand, we are to act ethically within the world, so as to build up a kammic bank account which will help us in attaining better…
Read MoreSecular Humanism and Secular Buddhism
Recently I attended a meeting of the Center for Inquiry, a Secular Humanist group, where I got into a discussion about Secular Buddhism. It raised the question of how to distinguish Secular Humanism from its Buddhist counterpart. What were their strengths and weaknesses? What did they each have to learn, and how could they be…
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