Shin Yoga supports social activism
Interesting take on how Shin Yoga supports social activism
Twenty years ago, hardly any of us had cellphones, because they were big, heavy and expensive. Now they're tiny, light and can do lots of things beside make calls. The smartphone is the Swiss army knife of modern life, the device that can replace a dozen other devices like your camera, alarm clock, notepad and more.
If you're tired of your old phone and ready to upgrade, here are ten questions to ask yourself before choosing a new handset—and possibly signing up for a new contract.
What type of phone do you want?
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Technorati Tags: Buddha Buddhist Buddhism Meditation Dharma
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Upekkha, or even-minded love, is the fourth of the series of meditations we're looking at in our 100 Days of Lovingkindness series.
As I discussed in the first post on upekkha, this word has several different meanings, although they're all related.
There's:
Since even-mindedness type 1 is the basis for all the rest, we should take a look at that.
The Buddha talked about there being "two arrows." The first arrow is when we have an experience that is painful in some way. That's an inevitable part of life. But then there follows a second arrow, which consists of our aversive response to pain. So we think "This shouldn't happen to me! It's not fair!" Or we think "It's his fault!" Or we think, "This is horrible, this is how it's going to be for the rest of my life!" Or we think, "This always happens to be. It must show that I'm a bad person, unworthy of being loved. My life sucks!" And all of these responses simply cause us more pain: hence, the second arrow.
And the same kind of dynamic works for pleasant feelings as well, except that the pain usually comes when the pleasant feeling has gone, and we mourn it, or when we find ourselves having been led into unwise actions in pursuit of further pleasure.
So the Buddha's advise is simply to observe feelings as they arise and pass away, and to accept them mindfully without reacting with either craving or aversion. This acceptance of our feelings is equanimity, even-mindedness, or upekkha. We don't ignore any pain or pleasure, and in fact we're more conscious of it than when we're busy reacting to it. We simply notice it as another experience. We lose the judgment. It's not "bad" to experience pain, and it's not "good" to experience pleasure.
And this is important in each of the brahmaviharas. At a very basic level, at the start of a period of lovingkindness, we have to become aware of how we feel, so that we know what we're working with. Now it actually doesn't matter whether we feel good, or feel terrible, or whether we don't know how we feel — it's only important that we're aware of what our experience is. So if you're feeling unhappy, that's OK. To be paradoxical, it's not "bad" to feel bad. You just feel unhappy, you accept the unhappiness, and you start cultivating lovingkindness for yourself. If you're feeling happy, then that's fine to. Same thing: just accept what's there and start cultivating lovingkindness. If you're not sure how you're feeling, this is probably because you're not feeling much. You're experiencing a neutral feeling. And you accept that and start cultivating lovingkindness toward yourself. It's all too common for people to go into a downward spiral when they feel bad or feel neutral. Equanimity prevents this happening. It stabilizes the mind. We neither reject who we are, nor crave to become someone else. We simply accept what's going on, and work patiently with it.
If you benefit from this work, please consider supporting Wildmind. Click here to make a one-time or recurring donation.
And, later in each of these practices, we call to mind people who are friends, people you neither like nor dislike, and people you have a conflicted relationship with. Generally when we think of a friend we'll experience pleasant feelings, a neutral person neutral feelings, and a difficult person unpleasant feelings. So these practices give us the opportunity to develop equanimity. We cultivate the ability to sit mindfully with the three basic "flavors" of feeling. This is a very important part of lovingkindness practice. The more we're able to have equanimity for our painful, pleasant, and neutral feelings, the easier it is to cultivate upekkha.
In a more vipassana approach (and by that I means simply meditation that focuses on impermanence, non-self, and the unsatisfactoriness of our experiences, rather than the form of meditation taught by Goenka or other teachers as "Vipassana" or "Insight Meditation") we can train ourselves to observe that our feelings come and go. This is something we know, of course. But in paying particular attention to this fact — by observing it in action — we take our feelings less personally. We're not so prone to reacting when we remember the impermanence of our feelings. Also in a vipassana approach we can learn to recognize that because our feelings pass through, they're not ultimately a part of us: "This is not me; this is not mine; I am not this" was the phrase that the Buddha taught. And lastly, in a vipassana approach to feelings, we can recognize that no feeling is capable, fundamentally, either of permanently destroying our wellbeing or of giving lasting happiness. We recognize the dukkha, or unsatisfactory nature of our experiences, and recognize that it's not the contents of our experience that create happiness or lack of happiness, but the way we relate to the contents of our experience.
And the most powerful thing we can do to transform our relationship with the contents of our experience is to allow it to be, with equanimity.
PS. You can see all of our 100 Days of Meditation posts here.
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"There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control," wrote Emperor and Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations. "These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone."
I've described even-minded love (upekkha) as being love with insight. One thing that allows our love to be even-minded, or equanimous, is insight into impermanence.
Even-mindedness is a quality that accompanies all of the other brahmaviharas, which are the four qualities of lovingkindness (metta), compassion (karuna), joyful appreciation (mudita), and even-minded love (upekkha) itself. We need to have even-mindedness accompanying these other states because loving-kindness, compassion, and joyful appreciation each involve desires. Metta is a desire that beings be happy; compassion that they escape suffering; and mudita that they continue to experience the joy and peace that comes from the good qualities they embody.
And the problem is that the things we want aren't necessarily going to happen, or if they do they won't last. We can wish that beings be well, but they're going to experience distress, sickness, and loss. We can wish that beings be free from suffering, but their suffering isn't necessarily going to end. And we can wish that they continue to enjoy the benefits of their skillful qualities, but it's not guaranteed that either the skillful attributes nor the peace and joy that spring from them will endure.
In the brahmavihara meditations, we desire particular outcomes, and yet the things we wish for can never last. And so, in order that we ourselves be at peace, we need to appreciate impermanence.
In order to strengthen our even-mindedness, we can cultivate lovingkindness while bearing in mind that although we wish happiness for beings, they're not necessarily going to find it, and when they do it's not going to last. We can bear in mind their sufferings and develop compassion, wishing that they be free from suffering, and at the same time remember that any freedom from suffering that they experience will be temporary. And we can rejoice in their good qualities and the peace and joy flowing from those qualities, and remember that any peace they may experience is a phenomenon, like every other experience, that arises and passes away.
Non-equanimity is like sitting on the shore, watching waves rising and falling and cheering when the waves rise, mourning when they fall. With equanimity we recognize that the waves are not under our control. They rise, they fall; we watch, with love.
The "love" part of this is important. It's easy to be fooled by words like equanimity and even-mindedness into thinking that upekkha is an emotionless, detached quality. Rather, it's a form of love. It's well-wishing. In upekkha we sincerely love beings and desire that they be well and that they be free from suffering, but we also accept that happiness and suffering are impermanent experiences that arise and fall outside of our control.
This doesn't mean that we don't act on our love, or that acting is pointless. We act with kindness; we seek to relieve compassion where we can; we encourage and rejoice in the good we see in others. But we don't get attached to outcomes. When we do get attached to things turning out in a particular way, we may initially wish beings well or wish to relieve their suffering, but we soon become frustrated or despondent. We try to help them and perhaps they don't want to be helped, and our love turns to aversion. Or we don't have the skill to assist them, and we feel dejected. We act compassionately to help one person, and recognize that there's an immeasurable amount of suffering in the world, and our efforts are just a drop in the ocean, and we feel depressed and hopeless.
This is why equanimity is necessary, and why it pervades the other three brahmaviharas. But it's also cultivated as a quality of even-minded love in its own right, as the fulfillment of love.
In the formal practice, we develop a state of loving equanimity toward ourselves, by wishing ourselves well while bearing in mind that the joy and sorrow we experience is impermanent, and by simply accepting any pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral experiences that may arise.
Then we do the same with a neutral person (someone who we neither like nor dislike), then with a person we find difficult, then with a friend. Finally we expand our awareness into the world around us, where happiness and unhappiness rise and fall like waves on the ocean, and we wish all beings well while accepting the impermanence of their joys and sorrows.
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I don't claim to fully understand Tom Pepper's "The Radical Potential of Shin Yoga." But then, I don't claim to fully understand anything.
The vestiges of other-worldly mysticism remaining in my mind have found Pure Land Yoga both utterly unbelievable and also strangely compelling. After all, what's not to like about reciting Namu Amida Butsu and earning a ticket to Nirvana Land?
Sure beats other forms of Yoga that require you to engage in all sorts of arduous practices, including back-breaking, mind-numbing meditation for ever and ever (almost).
But Pepper presents a view of Shin/Shinran Yoga that tosses out its unbelievable aspects and leaves a philosophical system that makes pretty good sense. That said, his essay is sufficiently intellectually dense that I found it difficult to understand much of it on a first reading.
Here, though, are excerpts that will give you the gist of Pepper's activist-friendly take on what Shin Yoga can be all about. A seemingly mostly-compatible view, and much simpler view, of Namu Amida Butsu can be found here.
Read More @ Source The vestiges of other-worldly mysticism remaining in my mind have found Pure Land Yoga both utterly unbelievable and also strangely compelling. After all, what's not to like about reciting Namu Amida Butsu and earning a ticket to Nirvana Land?
Sure beats other forms of Yoga that require you to engage in all sorts of arduous practices, including back-breaking, mind-numbing meditation for ever and ever (almost).
But Pepper presents a view of Shin/Shinran Yoga that tosses out its unbelievable aspects and leaves a philosophical system that makes pretty good sense. That said, his essay is sufficiently intellectually dense that I found it difficult to understand much of it on a first reading.
Here, though, are excerpts that will give you the gist of Pepper's activist-friendly take on what Shin Yoga can be all about. A seemingly mostly-compatible view, and much simpler view, of Namu Amida Butsu can be found here.
What I find in Shinran that I believe is absolutely worth recovering is his insistence that we are all completely dependently arisen, that we are constructed by our culture and our age, and so in any culture in which some members are excluded from achieving liberation, nobody can achieve liberation. We must all achieve liberation together, as a collective, with no exception, or we will only be achieving an illusory liberation, a distorted image of liberation.
The attempt, by any individual, to achieve complete awakening in the midst of a degenerate world cannot succeed, and even the idea of what awakening is will be a false one, defined only by its contrast to the corrupt and oppressive social system it seeks to escape. It will be, that is, only a negative liberation, a negative freedom, the freedom to do nothing at all instead of the freedom to make use of our human potential in the world.
...Shinran's great insight, the universal truth he recovers for Yoga, is that we must accept that we cannot have any true liberation that depends at all on the oppression of others. We must abandon our attempts at self-perfection, which are anyway only attempts at self-perversion, until we produce a world in which everyone has the conditions to achieve full use of all their potential.
Until this time, we must accept our "blind passions," we must accept that we are, as Shin Meditations are fond of saying, "foolish beings." But this is not a matter of being resigned to our flaws, of accepting passively whatever thoughts or actions may occur, as if they were not really our "true selves," as the "mindfulness" crowd would put it; instead, we must recognize that these flaws, these "blind passions," are structurally produced, are the product of the social system we are a part of. The goal is not to suppress these impulses, but to understand their structural causes and work to eliminate those causes, using the very energy of our blind passions to motivate our social activism.
...The goal of dialectical thought, then, is not the Western Meditation goal of suspending all judgment; rather, the goal is to relentlessly make better judgments. We must be judgmental in all things, at all times. I'll come back to this point at the end, with some examples that I hope will make it clearer.
First, though, I want to address what I suspect will be the common objection to my explanation of Shin Yoga. Because as Shin became popular in the West, it became popular exactly as a kind of anti-intellectual postmodern ideology of passive acceptance of everything "just as it is," and retreated into thought-free comfort of purely emotional and mindless devotion. I expect that it may appear that my interpretation of Shin is simply the wishful projection of a Western leftist.
...I will begin with Dennis Hirota, a professor of Shin Yoga at Ryukoku University in Kyoto, and the head translator on for the Jodo Shinsu Hongwanji-Ha translation into English of the Collected Works of Shinran. In Asura's Harp: Engagement with Language as Meditation Path, Hirota offers his account of what the practice of Shin Yoga should look like.
As Hirota explains it, "for Shinran, truth might be characterized as a fundamental shift in stance, a transformative event in which the self is dislodged from an absolute standpoint and made aware of its conditionedness." This radical decentering of the self occurs in thought, language, discourse, and practice—it cannot occur in silent introspection, because it depends on the collective nature of subjectivity, on what in Shin terminology is called "Other Power."
...The meaning of saying Namu Amida Butsu, then, is simply the reminder, the acknowledgement, of the possibility of dialectical thought, a possibility that only exists because of the collective nature of the mind, because of Other Power.
The goal of the "Nembutsu Practicer," then, is less the acceptance of certain metaphysical assertions than the nature of the conceptual constructions of the world…[t]he problem is to come to a coherent and intelligible understanding of oneself and the world that ignores neither the historical and emotional boundedness of the self nor the variety and worth of experience…[that] allows for the growth of awareness, which ceases to be repetition of prior attachments and become genuinely creative activity in the world. (121-122, emphases added)
This approach may not be the dominant form of Shin Yoga today, but certainly Hiroata's work demonstrates that it has warrant in Shinran's writing, and that it is understood as a viable interpretation by Japanese scholars of Zen.
...To borrow a metaphor from Marx, the contradiction between the centrifugal force produced by the Earth's momentum and the centripetal force produced by the enormous gravity of the sun is resolved only in a practice, the elliptical orbit that keeps both forces alive and active, and produces, as a result, the capacity of our planet to produce and sustain life.
Contradictions are inevitable, serving as the structuring gap between the abstract universal and the concrete particular which allows us to make sense of the excessive information of the world and to produce potentialities for action, to escape the sheer determination of our natural history and live as human beings.
The problem is that there is always a tendency to reify a particular set of abstract categories or concepts, to mystify a particular contradiction as the eternal and ineffable limit. And when this occurs, it all too often occurs in the service of an ideology which functions to reduce, rather than increase, our capacity for creative interaction with the world. The practice of shinjin is the practice of producing, propagating and strengthening the collective dialectical mind.
...As individuals, we are foolish beings, trapped in ideologies we mistake for natural truths. To reach the Pure Land, then, would consist simply of being born into a culture that does not reify its ideologies, a collective mind already aware of its constructedness and dependent origination.
While Western philosophy has long emphasized the individual achievement of philosophical wisdom, Shin Yoga recognizes that this is only possible as a collective project. Liberation is collective, and the collective mind is Other Power.
Posted: 29 Jun 2013 08:00 AM PDT
Twenty years ago, hardly any of us had cellphones, because they were big, heavy and expensive. Now they're tiny, light and can do lots of things beside make calls. The smartphone is the Swiss army knife of modern life, the device that can replace a dozen other devices like your camera, alarm clock, notepad and more.
If you're tired of your old phone and ready to upgrade, here are ten questions to ask yourself before choosing a new handset—and possibly signing up for a new contract.
What type of phone do you want?
Read More @ Source
Posted: 29 Jun 2013 05:00 AM PDT
"Smile, breathe and go slowly."
~Thich Nhat Hanh
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Posted: 28 Jun 2013 11:00 PM PDT
Upekkha, or even-minded love, is the fourth of the series of meditations we're looking at in our 100 Days of Lovingkindness series. As I discussed in the first post on upekkha, this word has several different meanings, although they're all related.
There's:
- Even-mindedness where we are able to accept ups and downs (specifically, pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feelings) without being thrown off-balance.
- Even-mindedness in the deep states of meditative absorption called jhana, where the mind is very stable and focused.
- Even-mindedness as one of the four immeasurables (brahmaviharas), where we have even-minded love.
- Even-mindedness as a synonym for the awakened state, or enlightenment, where greed, hatred, and delusion have been unrooted, and so the mind is not thrown off-balance by them.
Since even-mindedness type 1 is the basis for all the rest, we should take a look at that.
The Buddha talked about there being "two arrows." The first arrow is when we have an experience that is painful in some way. That's an inevitable part of life. But then there follows a second arrow, which consists of our aversive response to pain. So we think "This shouldn't happen to me! It's not fair!" Or we think "It's his fault!" Or we think, "This is horrible, this is how it's going to be for the rest of my life!" Or we think, "This always happens to be. It must show that I'm a bad person, unworthy of being loved. My life sucks!" And all of these responses simply cause us more pain: hence, the second arrow.
And the same kind of dynamic works for pleasant feelings as well, except that the pain usually comes when the pleasant feeling has gone, and we mourn it, or when we find ourselves having been led into unwise actions in pursuit of further pleasure.
So the Buddha's advise is simply to observe feelings as they arise and pass away, and to accept them mindfully without reacting with either craving or aversion. This acceptance of our feelings is equanimity, even-mindedness, or upekkha. We don't ignore any pain or pleasure, and in fact we're more conscious of it than when we're busy reacting to it. We simply notice it as another experience. We lose the judgment. It's not "bad" to experience pain, and it's not "good" to experience pleasure.
And this is important in each of the brahmaviharas. At a very basic level, at the start of a period of lovingkindness, we have to become aware of how we feel, so that we know what we're working with. Now it actually doesn't matter whether we feel good, or feel terrible, or whether we don't know how we feel — it's only important that we're aware of what our experience is. So if you're feeling unhappy, that's OK. To be paradoxical, it's not "bad" to feel bad. You just feel unhappy, you accept the unhappiness, and you start cultivating lovingkindness for yourself. If you're feeling happy, then that's fine to. Same thing: just accept what's there and start cultivating lovingkindness. If you're not sure how you're feeling, this is probably because you're not feeling much. You're experiencing a neutral feeling. And you accept that and start cultivating lovingkindness toward yourself. It's all too common for people to go into a downward spiral when they feel bad or feel neutral. Equanimity prevents this happening. It stabilizes the mind. We neither reject who we are, nor crave to become someone else. We simply accept what's going on, and work patiently with it.
If you benefit from this work, please consider supporting Wildmind. Click here to make a one-time or recurring donation. And, later in each of these practices, we call to mind people who are friends, people you neither like nor dislike, and people you have a conflicted relationship with. Generally when we think of a friend we'll experience pleasant feelings, a neutral person neutral feelings, and a difficult person unpleasant feelings. So these practices give us the opportunity to develop equanimity. We cultivate the ability to sit mindfully with the three basic "flavors" of feeling. This is a very important part of lovingkindness practice. The more we're able to have equanimity for our painful, pleasant, and neutral feelings, the easier it is to cultivate upekkha.
In a more vipassana approach (and by that I means simply meditation that focuses on impermanence, non-self, and the unsatisfactoriness of our experiences, rather than the form of meditation taught by Goenka or other teachers as "Vipassana" or "Insight Meditation") we can train ourselves to observe that our feelings come and go. This is something we know, of course. But in paying particular attention to this fact — by observing it in action — we take our feelings less personally. We're not so prone to reacting when we remember the impermanence of our feelings. Also in a vipassana approach we can learn to recognize that because our feelings pass through, they're not ultimately a part of us: "This is not me; this is not mine; I am not this" was the phrase that the Buddha taught. And lastly, in a vipassana approach to feelings, we can recognize that no feeling is capable, fundamentally, either of permanently destroying our wellbeing or of giving lasting happiness. We recognize the dukkha, or unsatisfactory nature of our experiences, and recognize that it's not the contents of our experience that create happiness or lack of happiness, but the way we relate to the contents of our experience.
And the most powerful thing we can do to transform our relationship with the contents of our experience is to allow it to be, with equanimity.
PS. You can see all of our 100 Days of Meditation posts here.
Read More @ Source
Posted: 28 Jun 2013 10:00 PM PDT
"There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control," wrote Emperor and Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations. "These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone."I've described even-minded love (upekkha) as being love with insight. One thing that allows our love to be even-minded, or equanimous, is insight into impermanence.
Even-mindedness is a quality that accompanies all of the other brahmaviharas, which are the four qualities of lovingkindness (metta), compassion (karuna), joyful appreciation (mudita), and even-minded love (upekkha) itself. We need to have even-mindedness accompanying these other states because loving-kindness, compassion, and joyful appreciation each involve desires. Metta is a desire that beings be happy; compassion that they escape suffering; and mudita that they continue to experience the joy and peace that comes from the good qualities they embody.
And the problem is that the things we want aren't necessarily going to happen, or if they do they won't last. We can wish that beings be well, but they're going to experience distress, sickness, and loss. We can wish that beings be free from suffering, but their suffering isn't necessarily going to end. And we can wish that they continue to enjoy the benefits of their skillful qualities, but it's not guaranteed that either the skillful attributes nor the peace and joy that spring from them will endure.
In the brahmavihara meditations, we desire particular outcomes, and yet the things we wish for can never last. And so, in order that we ourselves be at peace, we need to appreciate impermanence.
In order to strengthen our even-mindedness, we can cultivate lovingkindness while bearing in mind that although we wish happiness for beings, they're not necessarily going to find it, and when they do it's not going to last. We can bear in mind their sufferings and develop compassion, wishing that they be free from suffering, and at the same time remember that any freedom from suffering that they experience will be temporary. And we can rejoice in their good qualities and the peace and joy flowing from those qualities, and remember that any peace they may experience is a phenomenon, like every other experience, that arises and passes away.Non-equanimity is like sitting on the shore, watching waves rising and falling and cheering when the waves rise, mourning when they fall. With equanimity we recognize that the waves are not under our control. They rise, they fall; we watch, with love.
The "love" part of this is important. It's easy to be fooled by words like equanimity and even-mindedness into thinking that upekkha is an emotionless, detached quality. Rather, it's a form of love. It's well-wishing. In upekkha we sincerely love beings and desire that they be well and that they be free from suffering, but we also accept that happiness and suffering are impermanent experiences that arise and fall outside of our control.
This doesn't mean that we don't act on our love, or that acting is pointless. We act with kindness; we seek to relieve compassion where we can; we encourage and rejoice in the good we see in others. But we don't get attached to outcomes. When we do get attached to things turning out in a particular way, we may initially wish beings well or wish to relieve their suffering, but we soon become frustrated or despondent. We try to help them and perhaps they don't want to be helped, and our love turns to aversion. Or we don't have the skill to assist them, and we feel dejected. We act compassionately to help one person, and recognize that there's an immeasurable amount of suffering in the world, and our efforts are just a drop in the ocean, and we feel depressed and hopeless.
This is why equanimity is necessary, and why it pervades the other three brahmaviharas. But it's also cultivated as a quality of even-minded love in its own right, as the fulfillment of love.
In the formal practice, we develop a state of loving equanimity toward ourselves, by wishing ourselves well while bearing in mind that the joy and sorrow we experience is impermanent, and by simply accepting any pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral experiences that may arise.
Then we do the same with a neutral person (someone who we neither like nor dislike), then with a person we find difficult, then with a friend. Finally we expand our awareness into the world around us, where happiness and unhappiness rise and fall like waves on the ocean, and we wish all beings well while accepting the impermanence of their joys and sorrows.
Read More @ Source
