After a few years of diligent practice with a good teacher, these meditators needed hat help.

I’m seeing a market potential here: meditators may need to totally resupply their hat collections as their noggins increase in size.

New research using MRI scans from UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging shows evidence that meditators have larger brains than a control group of non-meditators. The lead author of the journal article, Eileen Luders summarizes,“We know that people who consistently meditate have a singular ability to cultivate positive emotions, retain emotional stability and engage in mindful behavior…The observed differences in brain anatomy might give us a clue why meditators have these exceptional abilities.”

via One City: A Buddhist Blog for Everyone.

In my experience it is a mistake to equate one’s spiritual path with the pursuit of happiness, as it were. Climbing the mountain of spirit is about becoming increasingly conscious rather than resting in eternal bliss. Mark Vernon writes about this topic in today’s Guardian.

Equating Buddhism with happiness, to stay with that particular association, will dumb it down.

I couldn’t agree more. Equating any authentic path with happiness does the same thing.

Take the Buddhist writer Matthieu Ricard’s book, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill. This French monk, who has spent years living in Nepal, has also written a sophisticated tome on philosophy and a penetrating volume on the interface between science and religion. But his happiness book is a huge disappointment. It trades in the more or less obvious, and seems mostly concerned to align Buddhism with positive psychology, presumably so as to gain from the good PR of the so-called science of happiness.

The concern is that Ricard knows better. Right at the end of his book he explains why the science of happiness actually won’t do. However commendable and altruistic its goals, he explains, it bases its analyses “on a rather fuzzy assessment of the nature of happiness, lumping together superficial pleasures and deep-felt happiness.”

Could it be that happiness is a temporary state that arises spontaneously out of the trait of the ever deepening awareness brought on by meditation? Happiness ebbs and flows, in other words, while consciousness has the potential to perpetually increase.

Contrast Ricard’s book with Stephen Batchelor’s introductory classic, Buddhism Without Beliefs. Batchelor was a monk for many years too. He speaks Tibetan and reads Pali. He is also heavily engaged in bringing Buddhism into the west. So what does his book have to say about happiness? Precisely nothing. The word itself appears exactly once in his text, and then only to dismiss it.

This is a great point. But this isn’t to say that happiness isn’t a byproduct of an authentic spiritual practice. And what is an authentic spiritual practice? It’s a body and mind that are both committed to meeting stillness, over and over again. Results are best when this practice is coupled with a guide who knows the terraign, a map of the terraign, and a group interested in walking the terraign together.

Living in this way, however, is not necessarily, as Vernon asserts, a “pick’n'mix approach” or a “search for the tastiest bits” of Buddhism or other traditional practice. In fact, while often problematic for seekers, traditions can be helpful in familiarizing us with the terraign of practice as much as it can be a hindrance. Furthermore, cherry-picking from traditions as a way of offering tastes of happiness will always keep awakening to the Truth beyond name and form at bay. But there are many valid approaches to deepening our consciousness that have nothing to do with either dumbing down tradition or selling bits and pieces of happiness.

For those interested in enlightenment, their spiritual work can not be about simply seeking happiness. Rather, it must be about seeing what’s true… even if it hurts. Even if the truth isn’t pretty, even if the mess of it all is overwhelming, the serious practitioner knows that facing his or her life with their full attention, without flinching, is the work. Once this process integrates itself with any serious student, they will find that happiness comes and goes while awareness only intensifies. This intensity brings with it something deeper than happiness; something we might call peace. And that peace has the potential to inform all things with the quiet joy that is always present in every moment.

Despite our many differences, I rather like Andrew Cohen. I think his teachings are engaging critical part of the process of awakening. I also think that his most recent work on exploring awakening from a collective context is an critical move that traditions have either confused or missed entirely. As a result, I find that I often root for him despite the fact that our areas of focus and our styles diverge.

Still, I get curious about the underlying spiritual meaning of quotes like this from his most recent blog posting, The Other Side of the Rainbow:

I spent the first five years as a teacher blowing people’s minds and showing them where God lived. I spent the next ten years trying in every possible way to get them to pay the price to make the radical leap from higher-state experiences to genuine spiritual attainment. Ken Wilber puts it beautifully when he says that the task is to transform “higher states into permanent traits.”

Of course, getting states to settle into traits should be the major reason any of us get into the whole on the teaching end of this work. But teachers can’t cling to any of it less they defile their own teaching. Attaching to any outcome for a student, for a community, or, worst of all, for the teacher himself, radically diminishes our ability to support the spiritual evolution of our students. Plus, for teachers to cling to student outcomes will result in disaster.

I experienced many dark nights of the soul and struggled often with doubt. But then, slowly but surely, what had been up until then only an intuition and an awakened vision that was available to me, started to become available to others.

I appreciate and can relate to what he’s saying here. I’d be lying if I said I’ve never shed tears of anguish and struggled with feeling like I couldn’t communicate the teaching in more helpful ways. But, as yet, the darkness never seems to last. As long as the attachments are fully seen, by teacher and student, Buddhas meet Buddhas.

This really applies to anything: shut up, sit still, watch, respond consciously from this place of surrender. Maybe this is what he means when he says:

Over the last two years, to my deepest relief and inexpressible joy, I find I have been released from the torment of all those years. And the reason is that what I was seeing all that time has now emerged and become stable between enough of us to make all the difference in the universe. We’re not coming and going anymore. We’ve arrived. And the reason this means everything to me is that it means we can finally move forward.

Nice job. But I wonder if we shouldn’t still be very careful about the sense of “I”, wherever it shows up. Perhaps you might call it and “Authentic Self” or something else, but egos love to think that they are awake and communities always do well to keep this tendency in check and take the self, no matter what we call it, out of the work. Second, I wonder if we shouldn’t always beware of things that appear “stable”. Nothing lasts. Nothing. Stability is temporary. To assume otherwise gets us into trouble. Third, be careful that the “us” always sees themselves as “them”. No matter how much anyone believes they’ve arrived, the biases of any ingroup can water down insights like nothing else.

The Guardian’s Ed Halliwell skilfully weighs in on Dawkins’ fundamentalism:

I doubt it was his intention, but in 100 years time Richard Dawkins could be hailed as a prime architect of 21st-century religion. Though strident to the point of comic fundamentalism, the New Atheist diatribe has not only laid bare the irrationalities of believers, but forced those of us who favour scientific-spiritual accommodation to sharpen our arguments. And that can only aid the development of spiritual forms fit for the modern world.

When I first picked up The God Delusion, I was a bit disappointed to find it was rather polite about my own tradition. Right up there in chapter one, Dawkins sensibly suggests that Buddhism might be seen as an ethical or philosophical system rather than a religion, and so not a major focus for his ire. We’ve got off lightly from other anti-religionists too – Sam Harris even goes on Buddhist meditation retreats.

Just out of curiosity I’d enjoy having a conversation with Harris after a retreat.

Elizabeth Debold, senior editor at EnlightenNext magazine, discusses this weekend’s seminar in her most recent blog post.

Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber did their first audio internet-based seminar—bringing the much loved Guru and Pandit dialogues from EnlightenNext magazine live into homes around the world. (There were over 600 who signed up for the seminar, hailing from all over the globe—including New Zealand, Dubai, India, and China.) These two pioneering thinkers worked seamlessly together to open up our understanding of Spirit in the four quadrants of Integral Theory, as the three faces of God, from the ground of Being to the creative thrust of Eros, and across the evolutionary trajectory. It was quite a ride!

I’ll bet it was. I’ve shared my praise and criticism of these two for some time. I’d have loved to have shared in the seminar and would have been especially interested in exploring the following:

One of the points that Ken made at the end of the day really struck me. He said that mainstream liberals (those folks who are reviled by the Right for highjacking our media, among other dastardly deeds) make no distinctions about anything that is pointing beyond the material realm. That means that they paint with the same brush (and, trust me, in a dark color) fundamentalism, more contemporary expressions of the religions, and the transrational expressions of spirit. All of it is seen as flakey, misguided, and…well, not to be too Biblical, but almost downright evil. Ken observed that the fact that materialism is the metaphysics of the majority—and that they do not have the perceptual sensitivity to recognize the subtler dimensions of Being—means that the mouthpieces of our culture dismiss higher levels of development as the same as lower, more rigid and superstitious levels.

This goof, or what Wilber might call a “pre-/trans- misstep”, makes so many things difficult in spiritual practice. Attachment is attachment, no matter what. And clinging to any view gives rise to oppositional thought patterns. Even for Cohen and Wilber.

She goes on to explain:

Andrew kept bringing our attention back, over and over again, to consciousness, the ground of all Being, which is Spirit. How many of us have gone deep enough to discover the living presence of No-thing (which is the perfect opposite of materialism that only values things)? That, Andrew suggested, is the first step. The recognition that the deepest part of the “I” is THAT which existed before time began and grounds all of existence and is not just an individual psychological realm.

I totally agree with this, except that I often see people skip over this crucial part of the process. Students have an “Oh-I-get-it” moment, and in so doing, there is a tendency for the ego to still manage the process of awakening. While enlightened egos are interesting subtle beasts, they are still asleep.

Click HERE, or on the player below, in order to listen to Michael’s talk.
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Of all the driving forces behind an authentic spiritual practice, none is more important than the willingness to go deeper. Rather than meaning that we need to move anywhere, going deeper means that we must continually surrender to the source of our impulse to move. We must constantly face what is arising, in other words, without flinching, and then from this non-avoidance, we deepen and broaden our expanse. From this expanse we spontaneously get beyond those mind states and behaviors that will always prevent us from realization.

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One of the simplest influences on my early practice was a line delivered by a very unassuming Zen priest. She told me that unlike prayer, which was like talking to God, meditation involved nothing other than listening to God.

Listen. Listen with your full mind and you will learn exactly what the Universe is trying to teach.

It wasn’t long after this bit of wisdom was thrown at me that I began to think that the whole idea of prayer was a little odd. Why would God care what I wanted? Why ask God for favors? Besides, wasn’t God infinite, and if so, how could He be separate from me? Talking to God, then, is an act of supreme egocentrism.

Anyway, a national day of prayer is about to be celebrated and Deepak Chopra offers up a nice bit of writing on the subject:

Whether or not a national day of prayer is worthy of the name depends on what prayer is meant to be. In the Bush era, public or group prayer followed the pattern set down by Nixon in the Sixties: it was a validation of conservative values. God was for law and order and against hippies. God was against anyone who didn’t believe in him, a ridiculous position when you think about it. Shouldn’t God, of all beings, not need the approval of others? As long as prayer was simply a shout-out to evangelicals and supporters of the current war, I think it had little value as a national activity.

And I love this question; one so similar to the one I asked all those years ago:

… prayer is one process: consciousness interacting with itself. Religions enforce a division between the one who prays and the one who answers, but why?

Over at the Intent.com, Yumi Sakugawa points out something I’ve noticed for some time in our sangha:

In new research highlighted by an article on the ABC news site today, more and more young Americans are less likely to go to church or identify themselves by any organized religion. According to the article, between 30 to 40 percent of young Americans say they have no religious affiliation.

Considering that the percentage of non-religious people generally fell between 5 to 10 percent in the past, this new data may foreshadow tremendous changes in American politics and culture as more and more of these young non-religious Americans grow up to enter the work force, partcipate in politics annd start raising families of their own. It is highly possible that this trend may continue to increase in the years to come.