The Buddhist Geeks offer up a fascinating discussion with Virginia’s only Buddhist politician, Erik Curren:

Erik Curren is a business leader, community activist, author, Buddhist meditator, and politician—who is running for state legislature in Virginia during the 2010 election period. We were contacted by Erik’s campaign manager, who told us that Erik’s Buddhist background was causing a backlash of religious intolerance from some camps, including his fellow Democrats. We spoke with Erik about the importance of religious freedom in American politics, as well as about the way that the Bodhisattva ideal impacts his work as a politician.

Podcast: Erik Curren – Buddhist Politician

Last week’s  NYTimes.com posted a nice piece by Norman Fischer:

As most people know, a Zen meditation retreat is not a vacation. Despite the silence and the beauty, despite the respite from the busyness, the experience can be grueling. The meditation practice is intense and relentless, the feeling in the hall rigorous and disciplined. We start pretty early in the morning and meditate all day long, into the late evening. It can be uncomfortable physically and emotionally. And some people find it hard not to talk at all for a week. So, what’s in it for them?

Read on…

Douglas Todd, of the Vancouver Sun writes about an important aspect of meditation: it can mask what needs to be exposed.

A recent Vancouver Sun poll conducted by the Mustel Group found one out of three British Columbians, roughly 1.4 million people, have practised meditation. That doesn’t include many more who practise prayer in a contemplative way.

I believe meditation and contemplation are generally positive responses to North America’s culture of busyness.

But can meditation, contemplation and related practices encourage people to detach too effectively from their so-called negative thoughts, leading them to actually detach from life itself?

There is no doubt that meditation and its offering of insight can fix a person at whatever level of interior development they happen to occupy. I’ve seen this happen in the sangha I lead, where practitioners have breakthroughs that then quickly get co-opted by their egos. Their small selves begin, if you will, to see themselves as Big, and this derails the potential for awakening to the Truth beyond name and form.

Stuart Davis offers us a nice piece of writing that confronts what many might see as fundamental flaws in the Rationalist’s arguments against religion.

I just finished reading God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. He’s given us another powerful work in the vein of Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), and Bill Maher (Religulous). Team Rationality is ushering in a long-overdue examination of religion in the modern world. They make a strong case that religion is sick and dehumanizing. I would say more specifically, sick religion is dehumanizing. And we do have a global pandemic of sick religion: billions of believers stuck in low levels of consciousness, riddled with pathologies. ‘S called Samsara where I’m from.

However, reading these best-sellers has inspired me to make a wish-list. Here are five things rational religion-haters should know:

Read on…

Over at +kenwilber.com, Lama Surya Das offers up an interesting post about Twitter:

I believe that technology is pure spirit. It is not just a tool but can be a transformative force. Some experts, such as Ray Kurzweil and Ken Wilber, say that The SingularitY (when computers evolve to reach the level of the human mind and its evolving consciousness) is all but imminent, and that technology will be integrated into all facets of the world, including consciousness. Kurzweil, a noted technology thinker, has extolled the coming of ultrasmart machines, saying they will offer huge advances in life extension and wealth creation. “Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Eric Horvitz of Microsoft has said. “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.” The neuroscience-minded monk and meditation master Dalai Lama of Tibet has suggested that, given the proper conditions, a person could be reborn as a computer (italics added). (“Consciousness could take rebirth with the support of the five elements <—earth, water, fire, air and space—>in the form of a computer; why not?”) This raises the evergreen question of human identity. I feel it’s worth looking at the emergence of this new social networking industry along with the entire realm of instant communications and explore together its potential and possibilities in terms of authentic interbeing and synergy, so we can co-create a more deeply interconnected community, society and world. Education is the silver bullet to alleviate many of our societal ills, and modern media communications exhibit all the various characteristics of both the best and the worst of traditional delivery systems. Like thought, tools are good servants but poor masters. The Singularity that forward thinkers apprehend may very well put such dichotomies to the test.

While I think the Dalai Lama’s words will surely lead to some pretty fun commentary, I think that there is an opportunity for a great spiritual co-mingling as Twitter, and technologies like it, begin to offer avenues of deeper and deeper interconnectivity.

Got Twitter?

The folks over at Integral Life are making a show of things.

Rachel Hiles comments on her twitter reluctance over at Tricycle in a post called  A Buddhist’s Guide to Twitter.

As someone slow to embrace the Twitter phenomenon, I’ve approached the site with great caution, and perhaps a touch of suspicion. I often wondered if I could use Twitter without falling victim to my ego and shamelessly indulging in detailing the ins-and-outs of my day, giving a digital voice to my inner monologue. Determined not to be the last person on earth who wasn’t “tweeting,” I did some research and found the advice of Soren Gordhamer especially helpful. In a recent Huffington Post blog post “If the Buddha Used Twitter…” Gordhamer suggests 5 ways in which the Buddha might have approached Twitter, reminding us that it’s not what we tweet but how we live away from our online worlds that really matters…

Of course you can read on, but make sure you give Gordhamer’s post a read as well.

Bodhipaksa, over at Wildmind has just posted this fascinating article:

People who meditate have bigger brains than those who don’t, say researchers at UCLA.

Using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of meditators and non-meditators, they found that those who meditated showed significantly larger volumes of the hippocampus and areas within the orbito-frontal cortex, the thalamus and the inferior temporal gyrus—all regions known for regulating emotions.

Read on… here.