exploring authentic Buddhist practice in our times

So I started 21awake.com with the instinct that blogging could be a central part of a 21st century contemplative practice.  This hasn’t changed, and if anything it has deepened.  However I realise that in order for the most insightful learning to take place (for both of us), there will be times when I have to duck out from behind the commentary and explore where the practice meets new parts of my life.  So let’s get personal.

As someone with a professional interest in the dynamics of online communities as well as a well-documented susceptibility to flattery, after some friendly encouragement two months or so ago I signed up to an internet dating service.  Around that time, a good friend presciently told me that were I enter into it all with anything like the level of self-awareness and interest with which I pursue the path of meditation then it could be extraordinarily interesting.  He was right.  So I thought I’d share three things that have really stood out for me as I continue my intention to expand practice to include more and more in an authentic way.

The judgemental mind.  We all enjoy animal bodies.  And brains to boot.  I remember Ken Wilber once talking about how perhaps the reason the human birth is considered so precious and such a unique vehicle for liberation is that, from the most heavenly realm to the lowest hell, we’ve got the  potential for the lot - all crammed into this fathom-long body.

An online dating platform is basically a jumped up catalogue and in such a situation, it’s often the most basic of our decision-making mechanisms that tends to lead.  The fact that physical features are the most dominant criteria when ‘choosing a mate’ is certainly not news but what was new was my ability to watch this all happen as an independent observer.  Having been in a wonderful relationship for the same two years that my practice really matured for the first time, this was the first application of my reasonably stable meditative awareness to the dating domain.  And it was both funny and surprising in equal measure.

The vulnerable heart. Any contemplative practitioner will know that it’s in the most vulnerable parts of ourselves that the most insight is often found.  And this of course especially comes into play when you upgrade from online contact to meeting up IRL, since the former is only really an introduction service after all.  When you engage in any sort of dating with any sense of integrity you will constantly making yourself vulnerable and opn to rejection and wow - this particular brand of dukkha is an amazing thing to face with openness.

When looked at individually our lives are mysterious enough.  Introduce another under the pretext of a romantic liason and well then that’s just mystery². What I learnt early on was that when you stop trying to control the other’s experience of you, then expectation relaxes and there are the conditions for joy to arise - whatever the outcome.  From what I have seen, too many people enter dating with an attitude of work as opposed to play, in exactly the same way that meditators can enter the practice with an attitude of striving as opposed to curiosity & exploration.  So the skill of the meditator-dater is perhaps to hold the heart open but with that intention of lightness, be it on the cushion or when dining à deux.

Relationship as practice.  Throughout this whole adventure what I have seen emerging is a craving for relationship that I have never seen before - and this has been the most surprising thing.  My experience with Greg Kramer’s Insight Dialogue course in the summer showed me the value of the interpersonal domain as part of a more integrated and fruitful practice - which is all basically Dhamma jargon to say that relationships can help awakening, and this surely includes those which are romantic.  But what examples do we have in the traditions?  In the Theravada, celibate monastic models loom large and at the other extreme, we have particular Vajrayana schools’ emphasis on the sexual act as practice vehicle and in the middle ground, not a great deal.

What I have therefore experienced is a brand new feeling that my current practice style is incomplete and that there is room for relationship to play a central part. Many people have asked me whether it is necessary for anyone I might see to also be a practitioner but I don’t think this is at all the case…in face I couldn’t imagine anything worse - the pali canon makes such awful pillow talk.  But what I do think is probably  important in any relationship where at least one party is spiritually inclined development is that their partner gets why they bother.  Awakening is a team game after all right?

The adventures continue…

[thank you Scott Armitage for your wonderful cartoonlet]

Suffering has its cause

Am looking forward to Fireworks night next Wednesday for the first time since like…ever.

Thank you to Susan Piver for the banner.

Tonight is a Tuesday so I should be at the central London sitting group that I co-host with a dear friend of mine.  But I’m not.  And the reason I’m not is that I’m allowing myself some space to reflect on what I think is the most important question a practitioner in any contemplative tradition can ask themselves.

So what is that question?  Classic koan-like investigations like “what am I?” or “what the f**k is thing called awareness all about anyway?” are incredibly fruiful lines of enquiry but even before you get into the territory of a formal practice, the one I consider the single most important is:

what do you want?.. and how much do you want it?

[ok so I know that's sort of two questions but cut me some dhamma-slack here]

The 8FP of course starts with samma ditthi or Wise View and while it’s clearly not a fully linear path I don’t think the Buddha was a guy who didn’t think through how he formulated how to present his methodologies.

So what do I want from this thing called the Dhamma?  And how much do I want it?  In my short years of practice I’ve been fortunate enough to have times when I’ve intuitively known the answer to this question but as we all know, the heart is easily obscured.  Therefore the focus of my practice these days is to use silence and reflection to tune back into the heart’s primary frequency - the inclination towards freedom.

Therefore I encourage us all - now that we’re just a week away from a test of American political hearts’ intentions - to take a moment to join me and ask ourselves again (and if needs be again and again) what do we want and how much do we want it?

And if the pollsters say there’s a swing towards liberation, let’s make sure - when it comes down to the crunch -  that that box gets crossed.

[photo-anumodana to Rock Alien, see his/her(?) flickr stream here]

After my first ever vlog post (together with amateurishly angled laptop camera), I had a number of incredibly valuable comments on the wedditation I had drafted for my friends’ wedding ceremony <see their lovely matrimonial mudra above>.

This prompted me to actually start again from scratch and I ended up leading everyone in a classic metta bhavana or loving-kindness meditation but with a twist.

The twist was that in the classic formulation one starts with wishing oneself well and then move out to include more and more people until you get to a sense of universal well-wishing…may all beings be well & happy etc etc.

For the wedditation, I settled people in with some simple body awareness and then invited them to recall a loving memory or funny incident with either the bride or groom or both.  Then once they had felt into that, I then invited them to extend that sense of care and love to themselves, then to the rest of the room and then to everyone and everything in the ten directions.  The bride was also a little bit pregnant so I also couldn’t resist slipping in the lines from the Karaniya Metta Sutta:

Whatever living beings there may be…
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born
May all beings be at ease.

Got some lovely feedback, and from some surprising sources so it certainly seemed to work well…and overall it was an amazing amazing day, and such a privilege to be so intimately involved - to complete my full transformation into a vicar-type character, I even did the vows(!).

YouTube is everyone’s favourite but slightly grainy video-sharing site (Vimeo FTW!) and it does have some amazing pieces from the great 20th century Dhamma teachers.  We’ve already seen a bit of the genius Nisargadatta and here is the man who, from a nowhere village in Thailand, went on to dominate the transmission of Theravadan monasticism in the West.   Heroic.

Many of you will have picked up on the debate earlier this year started by Nick Carr with his Atlantic article Is Google making us stupid?

Much to-in and fro-ing ensued with the retort in the British press that I found most powerful being The Times’ David Aaranovitch’s The Internet shrinks your brain? What rubbish!

This whole issue became a bit of a hot topic at work and as I thought about it, I realised that there was a valuable contribution to be made from a meditative standpoint.

PS below is a rather entertaining clip of Nick Carr’s recent interview on the rather entertaining Colbert Report.  I have the feeling that my proclivity to watch the updated Colbert videos some mornings at 6:30am is making me both more stupid and more informed at the same time:

If 21awake were to have a pantheon, Nova Spivak would most likely enjoy a high seat.  Long time practitioner in the Nyingma/Dzogchen tradition and serial web entrepreneur, Nova’s current professional birth is as CEO of the excellent semantic web service Twine.com.  So when Nova was a guest with Buddhist Geeks earlier this month for a two-part interview, 21awake could hardly contain its (virtual) self.

[Listen to part one (it's killer) - Does the web have buddha-nature?]

[Listen to part two (it's pretty ace too) - Technology makes our delusion more functional]

Nova talks elegantly about a number of ideas in this interview, exploring the connection between web technology and Buddhist practice.  It would perhaps be too expansive a post to fully explore each of the topics covered in this interview so I thought I’d pick out a few which most captured me:

Magical Complexity.  This is a term I hadn’t come across before and now just love.  It is the assumption in artificial or non-human intelligence circles that as the technology improves and improves there will come a tipping point at which sentience will emerge as a property of the system…ie the machine will wake up.  Nova rightly calls the scientists on this one when he states there is no way that by incrementally adding non-intelligent, non-sentient elements to a non-intelligent, non-sentient system anything else could result.  Science fiction fans had better think again.

Global mind.  The opportunity however is that in the near future computing power will be as good as infinite - a point sometimes known as the Singularity - and a symbiotic relationship where the web provides the computational power and humans provide the sentience - also known as transhumanism. Nova then counters the technoptomists with his killer line:

that doesn’t make us any more enlightened - technology just makes our delusion more functional

The future. It is my instinct that Dhamma practice will always be a minority sport - Mara plays hard and his sirens sing sweet.  Opportunities do however and will continue to abound for exciting people about the path of awareness and it’s our job to fulfill our potential as inspiration for others - near and far.  Seen and unseen.  Born and to be born.

Always one step beyond.  The need to define - articulated in the interview as the losing battle in which Western scientific method searches for answers that can be published in journals - is an extraordinary challenge we actually all face as practitioners.  Relaxing into the unknown is perhaps the greatest skill of the contemplative, trusting absolutely in awareness - rigpa, buddha nature, that which knows.  So we dance, most of the time looking to hold the nondual with a dualistic framework - divide the indivisible - start a war with the love that allows all. But the Dhamma slips through our fingers because its nature is never to be caught.

PS On Wednesday (Oct 1st) Vince and Ryan at Buddhist Geeks HQ will be live-streatming their interview with the extraordinary Ken Wilber.  This will take place at 1pm Mountain Standard Time and can be viewed at their live site here.

Two friends of mine are getting married in two weeks time and have asked me to kick off their ceremony with a short guided meditation. This is my first draft and it’d be great if you could try it out and let me know what you’d like me to add/remove etc.  I have my thoughts of what could be changed but I’m more interested in hearing yours.

Perhaps together we can make something very cool indeed.

So last night saw a world’s first…certainly in my world.  In the true spirit of 21awake, at the Waterloo sitting group that I co-host on Tuesday nights, we ran a session which was remotely taught by Martin Aylward via Skype video calling.  It felt like Martin was just the right teacher to trial this format for as I said last night, any world-class insight meditation teacher who owns an iPhone is alright with me.

When inviting Martin we had particularly requested that he talk about dana, or generosity, as a central part of spritual practice.  We reflected for the majority of this incredibly powerful session on how to explore the practice of generosity with regards to the three major currencies of our lives: time, energy and money.  What are we supporting through our giving of each of these things? is the question that really stood out for me.

Martin also spoke briefly of an aspect of dana that is particularly close to his heart since he feels that through the over-association of the word with financial donations for teachers and centres, the word dana has become too peripheral in modern interpretations of the Dhamma.  Last night he made the clear distinction between dana as core element of practice and financial donations - this seems like a small issue but the more we reflected together on dana and its innumerable manifestations in our lives, this dinstinction felt very valauble indeed and revealed a tension in the insight meditation tradition that is not spoken about enough.

From Martin’s recent essay on the challenges of dana culture:

The transition from a monastic to a lay context, and from an Asian dharma culture built over many generations, to a completely new context in the West, is recent and incomplete. How teachings develop, how dharma is practiced and understood, how generosity is cultivated, is up to us all as the living generation of practitioners. Our primary responsibility to ourselves and our students is the  genuine integration of the dharma we love and the life we live .

How we do this will necessarily have its own flavour and expression, in the way that it has in each culture it has met.  With the particularly ascetic and renunciate form of our Theravada legacy, we need to be vigilant to see where we may be clinging to forms that put us out of step with our culture, curb generosity and limit the resources for teachers and teachings.

I couldn’t agree more.  This whole Dharma thing is ultimately about being alive so let’s keep it that way.

As for the logistics of the session itself, it was very successful indeed.  A simple laptop-to-TV setup with surround sound hook-up allowed Martin to appear in Actual Size, loud and clear.  And when questions were asked, we rotated the laptop’s inbuilt camera so that he could see the speaker.  Martin’s feedback was that it was much trickier for him to focus completely on the people asking questions because of how we had set up the camera so next time we’ll look how to build more intimacy into his experience.

Now that we’ve seen how it works so well, we shall certainly lookto repeat it.  In true geeky style I’ve been wondering how to make it bigger and better.  Ideas include

• taping it all and editing it all together in a nice downloadable or streamable package
• setting it up so people who can’t make the actual session can dial in live from home and participate
• inviting more overseas-based teachers (Martin is based in France) so that we can have access to a teacher set that otherwise we may never meet.  Skype time-delays should be taken into account though

So that’s it.  On the day that the world saw its greatest ever scientific experiment kick off under the Swiss countryside…AND the same week that BuddhistGeeks ran their first live streaming session, 21awake is delighted to declare the sitting group’s own (more modest) experiment a success and would love to hear of any other suggestions in which we can use web technology to create new formats for exploring and sharing these wonderful teachings.

May our lives and the lives of others be filled with generosity.