This book offers short, stand-alone readings designed to help us cultivate compassion and awareness amid the challenges of daily living. More than a collection of thoughts for the day, Comfortable with Uncertainty offers a progressive program of spiritual study, leading the reader through essential concepts, themes, and practices on the Buddhist path. Comfortable with Uncertainty does not assume prior knowledge of Buddhist thought or practice, making it a perfect introduction to Pema’s teachings on loving-kindness, meditation, mindfulness, “nowness,” letting go, and working with fear and other painful emotions. Through the course of this book, readers will learn practical methods for heightening awareness and overcoming habitual patterns that block compassion.
A collection of short, inspirational readings perfect for daily contemplation or sustained study, designed to help us cultivate compassion and awareness amid the challenges of daily living.
Inspired by the Buddhist tradition of the 108 day retreat and the Seven Points of Training the Mind Lojong text, the book leads the reader through essential concepts, themes, and practices on the Buddhist path. Featuring some of the most important and stirring passages from Pema Chodron`s previous books, this work does not assume prior knowledge of Buddhist thought or practice. It features topics such as loving-kindness, meditation, mindfulness, “nowness”, letting go, and working with fear and painful emotions. Learn practical methods for heightening awareness and overcoming habitual patterns that block compassion.
Comfortable with Uncertainty, like a set of traditional Buddhist prayer beads, strings together 108 gems that will guide and inspire us.
Evolution is evolving from unconscious chance to conscious choice. We are entering the first age of conscious evolution.
Why? Because we obviously affect our own evolution by all the choices we make — from the food we eat, the number of babies we have, the cars we drive and the weapons we build.
Humans have no experience at being responsible for global change at this level. We are facing, as Bruce Lipton and Deepak Chopra recently wrote, the possibility of the collapse of our life support system. Or, I believe, the emergence of something new, something better than we have ever known before.
This shift in evolution began overtly in 1945 when the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on Japan. The signal went out to the world: We now have the power to destroy life on Earth. I was 15 years old. I could see at that time that self-conscious humans, in top-down competitive structures such as nation states, organized religion and global corporations, could not handle this degree of power. We had suddenly gained capacities we used to attribute to our gods. We can blow up worlds, and we can build new worlds in space. We can travel with the speed of light by image; we can create new life forms or destroy our life; we can tap into immense energy or run out of energy.
I began to ask a great question: What is the meaning of our new powers in science and technology that are good, and what are positive images of the future that are equal to our new powers?
I read religion and philosophy as a young girl and found that no one knew the answer. The powers were so new.
I went to Bryn Mawr College and found I could not even ask the question there. There were no subjects on it. My father used to say to me, “Barbara, you are the best in the field… but there is no field!” I went to Paris in 1947 to study at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques. Despair and a sense of the absurdity of life were rampant in Paris after two world wars and the bomb. One day I was having lunch on the Left Bank, and a handsome American walked in and sat down next to me. I asked him my question: “What do you think is the meaning of this new power that is good?” and he responded, “I am an artist, and I am seeking a new image of man commensurate with our powers to shape the future.”
The idea crossed my mind, “I’m going to marry you!” And I did. He told me that when a culture loses its story and its image of the future, it declines. We had clearly lost our story of progress, and the image of humans now portrayed in the arts and theater was of a disintegrating destructive force. Yet I had innate hope and had to find out what I was hopeful about.
I went to see President Eisenhower in 1952, just after he became president. My father was an old colleague of the president. I was taken into the Oval Office. He greeted me kindly: “What can I do for you young lady?”
“Mr. President,” I said, “I have a question: What do you think is the meaning of all our new power that is good?” He looked startled, shook his head and said, “I have no idea.” So it flashed in my mind, “Well, we better find out!”
This has been my life quest, and I believe just now we are discovering the proper response. We do have a new story. It is the universe story. When we place ourselves in this 13.7 billion-universe story we discover the pattern and an evolutionary process of action we can do. We see that our crises are comparable to past evolutionary shift points. The only difference is now we are conscious that we are causing our own extinction. This is what I call “conscious evolution” — the greatest wake up call we have ever had for the human species to grow up!
Here are some lessons we can learn and apply to our own situation:
Problems are evolutionary drivers.
Crises precede transformation.
Evolution takes jumps through greater synergy: Separate parts coming together to form a new whole greater than and different from the sum of its parts.
Evolution creates radical newness. Once there was no earth, then earth appeared. Once there was no life, and life appeared.
Evolution raises consciousness and freedom through more complex order. According to Teilhard de Chardin, the great philosopher, the “noosphere,” the mind sphere or the thinking layer of earth, with all our Internet and global intelligence, is about “to get its collective eyes.” We are about to connect center with center and heart with heart.
Empathy is rising. Spirituality is growing. Healings are happening. The Internet is connecting us everywhere. A “wheel of co-creation” is forming in every field and function — innovations in health, education, energy, conscious business and environmental awareness are accelerating and beginning to connect — a whole system breakthrough out of the whole system breakdown.
We need one more conscious effort to connect the positive to make the shift in time — to midwife our own birth toward the next stage of our evolution. We may be one fraction of an evolutionary second from either connecting what is creative and loving and innovative, or devolution and extinction. This situation is dangerous, yet natural.
What do we need to do right now? I believe it is time to rapidly connect what is working in every field and function and communicate through all media as fast as we can our creativity, innovations and capacities to make it through together. We should be calling upon each other, everyone on earth, to know that they have a part in this “birth.” Each of us is given an impulse of evolution within, a heart’s desire to realize our greater potential. Wherever we are, whatever our situation, we are capable of “giving a gift to the shift,” from one phase of evolution to the next.
In 1984, I ran an idea campaign for a “Positive Future” for the vice presidency on the Democratic ticket. I proposed a “peace room” as sophisticated as a war room in the office of the VP to scan for, map, connect and communicate what is working. I was actually the other woman along with Geraldine Ferraro whose name was placed in nomination. In my speech I shared, “It is now in our capacity to destroy civilization as we know it, or to build a world of unprecedented opportunity for all people.”
What we need now is a “peace room” or a “synergy center,” a new social function to connect the positive in time.
Dec. 22, 2012, has been selected as day one to consciously contribute to this process. It is our first Planetary Birth Day to celebrate the coming of the next era of evolution based on what works.
Birth 2012 has been initiated and will be produced by The Shift Network as a convergence of what is working; we will celebrate human creativity and call for the greatest experience of mass coherence and compassion the world has ever known. We will connect with positive innovations, projects, people, artists and musicians — every way we can to converge and emerge together as a newly-born planetary species.
Barbara Marx Hubbard has been called “the voice for Conscious Evolution of our time” by Deepak Chopra and is the subject of Neale Donald Walsch’s new book “The Mother of Invention.” A prolific author, visionary, social innovator, evolutionary thinker and educator, she is co-founder and chairperson of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. She has recently partnered with The Shift Network as a global ambassador for the conscious evolution movement; a shift from evolution by chance towards evolution by choice and is co-producing a global multi-media event entitled, “Birth 2012: Co-Creating a Planetary Shift in Time” on Dec. 22, 2012 — a historic, turning-point event awakening the social, spiritual, scientific, and technological potential of humanity.
I was one of many readers intrigued by a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times about finding out who we really are. Under the title, “In Search of the True Self,” the piece was by an associate professor at Yale, Joshua Knobe, who attempts something very ambitious. He wants to solve the dilemma that humans are divided between our civilized and our animal nature. The question is far from abstract. Sexual drives have brought down governors and congressmen; violence in the form of terrorism obsesses us; and thousands of deaths by gunshot every year are part of the background of American life. So much for the animal side. On the civilized side we have philosophers pushing the value of reason over passion, the doctrine of “know thyself,” and Freud’s argument that civilization cannot exist without paying the price of suppressed unconscious drives, most particularly sex and violence.
Knobe makes the issue more personal by giving the example of a fundamentalist preacher who has devoted himself to a crusade against homosexuality, taking the common position among fundamentalist Christians that gay sex is a sin and the “gay lifestyle” is against God’s commandments. The wrinkle is that this particular preacher is himself gay and has fought against his sexual inclinations his entire life. Thus, for one man the ancient doctrine of “know thyself,” says Knobe, reaches a fork in the road. If the true self is rational, this man is obeying his true self by living according to higher values — his Christianity — instead of giving in to animal drives. (The preacher, who admits that he sometimes loathes his attraction to other men, takes this self-hatred as a good sign, since it is in accord with God’s own attitudes).
On the other hand, many modern people find such a position abhorrent. They would argue that the preacher’s true self can be found by stripping away the veneer of moral judgments and giving in to the impulses that it takes such effort and self-denial to suppress. If the preacher were out and proud, for example, he would be expressing who he really is. Clearly there is no agreement on the true self, which brings up what philosophers call the Socratic problem. We owe to Socrates, who lived in the age of Pericles in fifth century BCE Athens, our Western admiration for reason.
Faced with a society where each person had his own opinions about everything, Socrates went from citizen to citizen (he would talk to anybody, rich or poor) and asked them basic questions about their beliefs. At first the questions seemed innocent, but by the end of the discussion, Socrates had unearthed the illogical or prejudicial basis of things held to be true. The person could see, by the light of reason that the truth was far different from what he supposed. Socrates’ method was to outwit ignorance by calling on the higher faculty of rationality.
Ever since, up to the triumphant rise of science, enlightenment has been equated with reason and ignorance with unreason. So what is the problem with Socrates? It is that Socrates himself was also a champion of un-reason. He said that he had a mysterious inner voice that told him when he was doing wrong (his daemon), and that this voice had a divine source. Socrates was famous for his traditional worship of the Greek gods. In addition, he revered the inspired state known as divine madness.
Divine madness was something to be valued highly, because it was the source of art, music, love, the imagination and our connection to the soul. How did Socrates balance reason and unreason? He didn’t. Sometimes he speaks from one aspect of himself, sometimes from another. The Socratic problem is that when you look closely, the father of Western philosophy cannot be defined one way or the other.
Prof. Knobe has a novel idea for solving the riddle of the true self. He proposes a new field known as “experimental philosophy” that would do research into tough problems that have plagued philosophy for centuries, such as the riddle of the true self. For example, he and two colleagues at Yale asked 200 subjects a series of questions about their true selves. But a trick was involved.
The questions were weighted toward a liberal and a conservative bias. The point was to see if a person’s value judgments influence his ideas about the true self. Would a conservative approve of fighting against one’s homosexual impulses and a liberal approve of the opposite value? Naturally. Would this give each of them a different idea of which side of human nature was the true side? Yes. People see reality through the lens of their prejudices and social beliefs. The finding isn’t very startling, and I think the whole endeavor may be futile.
If you ask people who they really are, why should their answers mean much? They haven’t undertaken the inner journey that Socrates was pointing toward. “Know thyself” doesn’t mean taking a 30-minute quiz. It means going through a lifelong process of self-reflection, contemplation, and questioning. The point is that when this journey is taken seriously, the opposites within ourselves are resolved.
The war between reason and unreason exists at many levels of the self, but it doesn’t exist at the level of the true self. A river has turbulent currents until you reach the very bottom, where the water is calm and barely flows. This has been the position of the world’s wisdom traditions, and the true self has gone under different names: Atman, spiritus, the soul and many others. A true experimental philosophy, which sounds like a very good idea, would test the proposition that unity lies beyond duality. That is what philosophy has tried to do since the beginning. For a conflicted gay Christian, such a journey seems far more promising that batting him around between various opinions, right and left.
I think that the Socratic problem is the result of confusion. Whether we are speaking of Jesus, Buddha or Socrates, the result of “know thyself” doesn’t end in a muddle. Each of them spoke of a higher reality that could be reached, and as the journey unfolds, reason and unreason each play a part. Reason sorts out contradictions and analyzes what is happening as inner experience shifts. Its chief value is to pierce through self-delusion, just as Socrates did with his Socratic method. Unreason brings intuition and insight.
Its chief purpose is to deepen one’s experience until the presence of the divine is actually real. Rather than warring against each other, these two aspects of the self are allies in the battle against a common enemy: illusion. So the muddle is ours, not Socrates’. By definition an experiment that seeks to find the true self by asking 20 questions is secretly on the side of rationality, as all data collection is. The results are skewed in advance. After all, a subject who said “This is a stupid experiment. I’m outta here” would be just as true to the self as someone who sat still and obediently took the test — maybe he would be even more true. But all such statements are secondary. The true self means little until it jumps off the page of a philosophy textbook and becomes a vocation, a vision and the ultimate goal of life.
Do you believe that God is a judgmental man in the sky? Is this belief serving you well?
I have learned over my many years of counseling that no one heals without a personal connection to a spiritual source of guidance.
William was struggling with issues of shame and depression. He had struggled with feelings of insecurity and jealousy most of his life, despite years of inner work. While he intellectually knew that he was okay, emotionally he never felt it. This was his first phone session with me.
“William,” I asked, “what is your concept of God or a higher power?”
“Oh, you know, the traditional Judeo-Christian concept — an old dude up in the sky dishing out judgments.”
“Is this old dude anything like your father?”
“Yes, exactly like my father.”
“So you have projected your father onto your concept of God?”
“Yes, I guess I have.”
“William, I wonder if you would be willing to consider a different concept of God.”
“Sure.”
“My experience of God is that it is the spirit of unconditional love, truth, peace and joy. Just as I know that when I take a breath, the air will come into my lungs, I know that God is always here, and I can experience that love and wisdom whenever my heart is open. Just as there is the law of gravity, there is the law of love. Gravity applies to everyone and so does the love that is God.”
“I like that. I never thought of it that way.”
“You use your computer to get online and access all the information on the Internet. You would never try to do research on a subject by just using what is programmed into your computer. I think of my mind like my computer — it is programmed and therefore very limited. But I can use my mind to get online and access the wisdom of the universe. When my intent is to learn about loving myself and others, my heart opens and then I can access the love and wisdom that is always available to all of us. My mind cannot know who I truly am, because it’s been programmed by my parents, teachers, peers and the media. But my spiritual guidance knows who I am.
“One of the reasons you continue to feel shame, insecurity and jealousy is because you are allowing your programmed mind to define you instead of your spiritual guidance. But as long as you believe that God is a judgmental man like your father, you cannot open to the truth that is here for you.
“William, right now, breathe into your heart and open to learning about what the truth is about who you are. Ask your higher self, ‘What is the truth?’”
William does this. “I see a sweet, sensitive and very smart little boy.”
“Is there anything at all wrong with this little boy?”
“No!”
“So it is your limited mind, your programmed ego wounded self who keeps shaming you, telling you that you are not good enough or lovable enough. Do you want to keep defining yourself by your ego, or are you ready to let your higher self define you?”
William was more than ready to open to learning and allow his higher self to define him.
At our next session, William was a different person. He had started to treat himself with love and found that the more he valued himself, the more outgoing and caring he was with others. This was the first week in years that he had not felt depressed.
William was allowing the law of love to define him and express itself through him.
Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is a bestselling author of eight books, a relationship expert, and co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding® process — featured on “The Oprah Show,” and recommended by actress Lindsay Wagner and singer Alanis Morissette. Are you are ready to heal your pain and discover your joy?
Introducing… the Deep Change Spiritual Intelligence Assessment
It’s like GPS for your spiritual journey.
What if you had a tool that could pinpoint where you are in your unique personal development journey? What if it could not only track the progress you’ve already made, but could also suggest your next best steps to becoming more aware, awake, and happy? Would that be helpful?
Too good to be true? Actually, it builds on established developmental assessment models. And it’s here.
First, there was cognitive intelligence (IQ). Remember those long, strange tests, and those hushed conversations in the hallway if a schoolmate scored in the “genius” range? While cognitive intelligence is crucial, researchers now agree that it’s just part of the picture of human intelligence—and often not even the best one for predicting career success or personal happiness.
Some 20 years ago, Daniel Goleman’s concept of “Emotional Intelligence” (EQ) revolutionized our ideas about smarts and how we show up in the world. The idea that how we manage our emotions and get along with others is a distinct, measurable, capacity that can be improved is powerful—and it quickly rippled through business and personal development circles.
Tangible, Deep Benefits
Spiritual Intelligence is an innate human capacity. But, like any intelligence (emotional, musical, kinesthetic) it must be developed. The Deep Change SQi Assessment will help you:
* Determine your current level of Spiritual Intelligence or “SQ”
* Discover the 21 specific skills that comprise Spiritual Intelligence
* Identify next steps in your personal, spiritual growth
* Get clear on the best practices for you, right now.
* Boost your confidence, knowing you’re moving in the right direction.
Meet Cindy Wigglesworth
After a decorated academic career, Cindy found herself struggling in the corporate world, over-developed in IQ and under-developed in EQ. So she put her intellect to work in service of emotional growth. She identified EQ skills she lacked, and dedicated herself to practicing and cultivating them. Her career blossomed and her personal life as a parent was enriched, all thanks to her deepened emotional awareness and skills.
But still, Cindy wondered: where did “spirit” fit in her path? She deeply felt her commitment to loving self, family, and the world at large—yet she wasn’t entirely clear on how fully she actually embodied these cherished values. Building on her work in emotional intelligence, Cindy theorized that if there was a thing as spiritual intelligence (SQ), it would contain skills she could learn and practice, just like anything else. She dedicated herself to testing this audacious theory.
The result of Cindy’s work and personal exploration is the Deep Change Spiritual Intelligence Assessment. It’s already found great success in high-level organizations, and now we’re excited to share this valuable tool with the Integral Life community.
One of the most confusing aspects of anyone’s life is the area of relationship. In this vital satsang, Adyashanti offers an expansive view of relating that includes our relationship to all forms of manifestation. He explores how awakening is not just about falling out of our identification with life experiences and discovering our unconditioned nature — it also involves coming back into the world of form and bringing forth a complete intimacy with the totality of existence.
This March I turned 64 — one year away from Medicare, two years away from Social Security. So there it is: I’m a baby boomer, a Buddhist, and one individual face to face with his own aging. But I’m not alone. Each day and every day for the next twenty years, 10,000 boomers will turn 65. This is a fact with enormous implications for our politics, our society — and, I believe, our spiritual life.
Forty years ago, when my Buddhist teacher Shunryu Suzuki was in his mid-sixties and the students around him were mostly in their 20s and 30s, someone asked him, “Why do we meditate?” He replied, “So you can enjoy your old age.” We all laughed and thought he was joking. Now that I am the age he was then, I realize he wasn’t joking at all. Some aspects of growing old can be hard to enjoy, and a spiritual practice can definitely help. This isn’t just theory; the Handbook of Religion and Health by Koenig et al. presents research showing that people who have a regular religious attendance or practice live, on average, 7 years longer than those who do not. That research result is even more significant when we remember that for the first time in human history, people will be living in relative good health into their 70s, 80s, and even 90s. What are we all going to do with that extra gift of time?
For the last several years I have been developing a contemplative approach to growing old and aging well. I have come to believe, as my teacher did, that spiritual practice can help us to age gracefully, and that the last part of life is a fruitful time for spiritual inquiry and practice. As part of my research, I logged on to Amazon, put in the search word “aging” and sorted by descending best-seller. Yes, there were a lot of best-selling books with the word “aging” in the title. But when I looked more closely I could see that most of the titles really weren’t about aging per se, but about postponing, disguising, or reversing aging. It was only when I set aside sales rank as my criterion that I found some good books with a spiritual approach to aging. Two of my favorites are The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully by Benedictine nun Joan Chittister, and Spirituality and Aging by gerontology professor Robert C. Atchley.
What other resources do we have for accepting aging with grace, about learning the lessons of wisdom that aging teaches, about investigating the deep questions of our human life? 2,500 years ago, the Buddha had a lot to say about the inevitability of loss and change. What could all of us aging folks learn from his teaching today?
The Buddha taught that “everything changes,” and many of today’s Buddhists repeat that teaching as a patent truism. But suppose we were to rephrase those words to say, “Everything we love and cherish is going to age, decline, and eventually disappear, including our own precious selves?” Suddenly this “truism” takes on a different coloration and urgency. It’s all going to go, the Buddha is saying, all of it — everything that matters to us. In fact that process is always happening; everything is aging, all the time. How is it that we didn’t notice?
When we are young, we don’t notice. In youth, life is full of opportunity, and when things go wrong there are do-overs and second chances. But on the downhill slope of life, we start to notice the worrisome finitude of time. We go to more funerals, we visit more hospitals, we view the daily news with more distance, and we start to feel an autumnal chill in the air. There are joys too, of course — grandchildren, time for travel (if we can afford it!), the pursuit of long-dreamed-of avocations and new beginnings, as well as the energizing impulse to “give back” to community and society.
There is also a fresh opportunity to look to the inner life, to revisit the deep questions that a busy career and family responsibilities might have long pushed into the background. A regular contemplative practice can indeed be a part of this journey, and Buddhism offers rich resources in this area. In my upcoming book Aging as a Spiritual Practice: A Contemplative Guide to Growing Older and Wiser (Gotham Books, January 2012) I offer many such contemplative practices — from traditional meditations on breath, gratitude, and compassion, to more innovative reflections on time, worry, fear, and what I have ecumenically termed “the inner divine.” The last section of the book — “A Day Away” — is a guided personal retreat that uses these contemplative exercises as a way to reflect on aging in all its many dimensions. I use the term “elderhood” to refer to the totality of this effort.
Elderhood is the culminating stage of a life fully lived. When the time comes, we can (although we may not always ) assume the mantle of elderhood as a kind of birthright, and traditional cultures have all honored and supported elderhood, giving their elders specific roles and tasks to do. In today’s wired, youth-oriented world, elders don’t typically garner that same kind of respect. These days, each of us has to imagine and construct our own expression of elderhood, and find ways to bring it forward.
Recently I read an online article which described a group of elderly Japanese who volunteered to help with the cleanup of the damaged nuclear reactors. They vigorously refuted any notions that they were some kind of “suicide squad.” They were just being practical, they said. “I am 72 and on average I probably have 13 to 15 years left to live,”one said. “Even if I were exposed to radiation, cancer could take 20 or 30 years or longer to develop. Therefore us older ones have less chance of getting cancer.” Some might say these elderly Japanese were just expressing a strong cultural value of sacrificing individual well-being for the good of the group. But elderhood is culturally specific; it shows up in different ways in different times and places. Elders are not the same as identified leaders; often elders are invisible, behind the scenes, shining like gold nuggets at the bottom of the stream.
I thought their offer was a particularly courageous expression of elderhood. Elderhood means to take responsibility, to mentor, to offer perspective. The nuclear crisis in Japan is only one of many dire situations the world over that cry out for a mature, seasoned response. I think contemplative practice can give us inner strength and help us develop the resources to assume our elders’ role in a troubled and often rudderless world that needs us, now perhaps more than ever.
When I saw that a book about Transcendental Meditation (TM), written by a scientist, had landed on the New York Times bestseller list, my reaction was to quote the great Yogi of Berra: “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
In 1975, “TM: Discovering Inner Energy and Overcoming Stress” was propelled onto the list when its lead author, psychiatrist Harold Bloomfield, appeared on Merv Griffin’s syndicated TV talk show (the Oprah of its day) with TM founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The book remained a bestseller for six months, and then had a solid run on the paperback list. During that period, Merv devoted a second show to Maharishi, and TM centers could barely keep up with the demand. By the end of 1976, over a million Americans had learned to meditate.
This was the culmination of a remarkable eight-year run that began when the Beatles famously learned TM and sojourned at Maharishi’s ashram in India. Between that watershed moment and the two Merv programs, meditation moved from the counterculture to the mainstream, from weird to respectable, from youthful mind expansion to middle-age stress remedy. Now, the celebrity meditators were not rock stars but Clint Eastwood and Mary Tyler Moore, and you could not get more mainstream than the nation’s big screen hero and its TV sweetheart.
The route from esoteric mystical discipline to respectable relaxation technique was paved by science. It started in the late ’60s when a young meditator named Robert Keith Wallace was persuaded by his guru, Maharishi, to study the physiology of TM. The research became his Ph.D. dissertation, and then a Science magazine article in 1970. Wallace’s follow-up study, conducted with Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson, was published in 1971 in The American Journal of Physiology and Scientific American. The data sparked an avalanche of research. By 1975, a substantial body of evidence had demonstrated the efficacy of meditation on various measures of physical and mental health.
Now comes another psychiatrist, Norman E. Rosenthal, with “Transcendence: Healing and Transformation through Transcendental Meditation.” Once again, celebrity endorsements add pizzazz, in this case Mehmet Oz, David Lynch, Martin Scorcese and Russell Simmons, with cameo appearances by the gray eminences, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. And once again science confers credibility. Whereas Bloomfield was fresh out of his Yale residency when Merv Griffin showcased his book, Rosenthal has 30 years of distinguished clinical research and more than 200 scholarly articles under his belt. And by now TM has been the subject of over 300 peer-reviewed articles. The book describes the most recent findings, many of them involving common maladies such as ADHD, PTSD and hypertension, but not limited to medical conditions.
That meditation is good for you is no longer an eye-opening news flash. But the new book’s bestsellerdom suggests that a new generation wants to hear the message. In this era of soaring anxiety, depression and health costs, perhaps the only people who don’t think that’s a good thing are the makers of pharmaceuticals.
As someone who has chronicled the transmission of Eastern spirituality to the West, I hope that this time around we can avoid some of the pitfalls of the past. As the title of Rosenthal’s book “Transcendence,” suggests, meditation is not just a medical intervention. The deeper purpose has always been the development of higher consciousness, as described in the Vedic tradition from which practices like TM derive. But when yogic methods become medicalized and their benefits quantified, they tend to get disconnected from their spiritual roots — a loss for all of us.
Another consequence of the popularization of meditation was the rise of imitation practices. Health experts, self-help mavens and entrepreneurs did everything they could to de-Hinduize and de-Indianize the practice. Recently, we’ve seen a similar tendency as practices derived from Buddhism were secularized as “mindfulness.” The advantage of this adaptation, of course, is that it makes such practices far more accessible. The downside is that something vital can be lost in translation, thereby diminishing their effectiveness. Modernizing the language is one thing, but tinkering with the ingredients of a meditation practice is not unlike changing a medical formula or a food recipe.
Finally, in the past, all forms of meditation were lumped together as if their differences were inconsequential. People who should have known better assumed that the initial TM data could be applied to just about anything that resembled meditation. That techniques practiced differently would produce identical outcomes defies logic, yet the premise was accepted on faith and promoted by both healthcare professionals and New Age promoters. Recent findings have corrected that mistake to a large extent, and current researchers are sorting out which practices produce which results under which circumstances.
The scientific investigation of ancient spiritual practices might be one of the most important advances of the modern era. But we have to proceed with care and discernment, assimilating the methods without obscuring or dishonoring their roots. If we get careless, we can dilute them, corrupt them and otherwise fail to harness their full potential. It’s happened to some extent already, and it’s happening as we speak in the trendy world of yoga studios, where complex and profound teachings are being reduced to fitness exercises. Rudyard Kipling’s assertion that “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” turned out to be mistaken, to our everlasting benefit. But we have to make sure that East does not become West.
Ancient Secrets for Super-Rejuvination: How to Effortlessly Re-Charge Your Body and Mind for Maximum Healing and Regeneration! David Wolfe LIVE at the Longevity Now® Conference 2011
With stories from her travels to five continents, environmentalist, activist, and author Joanna Macy invites her readers to a new way of seeing the world and their place in it. She tells of encounters with individuals who share very personal stories of sudden awakening, unexpected awareness, and the co-mingling of joy and pain. These stories give testament to Macy’s belief that even in the darkest moments of despair, hope and change are possible. A celebration of possibility, community, and imagination.
co-philosopher and best-selling author Joanna Macy shares five stories from her more than 30 years of studying and practicing Buddhism and deep ecology. Gathered on her travels to India, Russia, Australia, and Tibet, these stories testify to Joanna Macy’s belief that either humankind awakens to a new and deeper understanding of our interconnectedness with its planet or risks loosing it. Pass it On tells of encounters with individuals who share very personal stories of sudden awakening, unexpected awareness, and the co-mingling of joy and pain. Each story is imbued with the specific cultural flavor of the places where the stories originate, but all show how each individual counts in the global need for change and awakening.
Excerpt:
From Chapter 1 – A Look at Our Time from the Future
When we think seven generations into the future and then look back at our era from their perspective, what will we see? How will it touch us to know that there was a time before ours in which the people created an economic and social order that viewed the accumulation of money – capital – as the greatest value? That this allowed them to treat the earth like one big self-service store because they did not realize that the earth is alive? That this was a world order that granted the right to unconditional exploitation of “raw materials” – living beings and people – to anyone who has enough capital? That their ideology viewed the planet as inexhaustible and convinced people to believe that human beings could only survive with constantly increasing sales of goods? That it was a human race that managed to deposit vast amounts of harmful, toxic, radiating, and otherwise life-destroying substances on the earth, in the earth, in the bodies of water, and in the air where they will be distributed sooner or later throughout all cycles of life?
Yes, they will tell stories about this time. About us, the people of that era, their ancestors, their forebears, who refused to go along with this. Of those who – despite the initial feeling of being completely alone or just one of very few, despite the vehement defense mechanisms of the old system – followed their inner impulses and their intuitive sense for the intelligence of life and have not allowed themselves to be led astray. Who said to themselves and others: “Something is wrong” or “No, that can’t be healthy.” Those who risked questioning the unassailable voices of the experts. Who said out loud that the blood of the baby seals still sticks to the fur coats, even if it has already been washed off one hundred times. Who understood that nuclear power plants were only safe if they would run completely without errors; but that human beings make errors and need them to learn. Not to even mention the completely unresolved storage of nuclear substances for more than 250,000 years. Those whose stomachs turned in queasiness and felt a stitch in their hearts when they learned that grass-eating ruminants – cows and sheep – had been fed the finely-ground remains of their own species members as carcass meal – until BSE made the consequences of such actions visible for all people. Who did not approve that it was possible to offer sweatshirts and jeans so cheaply in the high-gloss department stores and super-supermarkets because people were treated like slaves at sweatshops in the Philippines or China and had to work for salaries of less than one dollar per day.
It is not necessary to continue this list. Anyone who lives in this age and wants to see and know is familiar with enough of these types of examples from the close and more extended living environment. Without much searching, we can all add dozens – if not hundreds – of stories. At the same time, the tales of horror are just one side of the coin. We could perhaps call the other side the stories of hope:
Despite the opposite prognoses, the elm tree – the Elm Dance named after it plays an important role in the second story – is still not completely extinct in Central Europe. The foresters assume that some of the trees have survived so long because they developed a resistance. They could form the gene pool for a renewed spreading of this fine tree in Europe and perhaps even in North America.
The Rhine River now once again has 42 species of fish living in it. Its water is cleaner than it has been in more than 30 years. When Joanna Macy brought her work to Germany in November 1986, so many toxins had just entered the river with the water for fire-fighting due to the recent major fire at Sandoz in Switzerland that it was practically dead from Basle to Karlsruhe. This is now 22 years ago. Today it is alive.
In the high north of Scotland, the vision of one single man was the impetus for the reforestation project of Trees for Life!, in which 150,000 Scottish pine trees have been newly planted since the mid-1980s. This species of tree had previously had such an old population – with most specimens ranging between 70 and 100 years – that it were threatened by extinction without the active cultivation of young trees. Close to 500 hectares of forest have once again grown here, composed solely of original native plants and including the now rare aspen. More than 1,000 voluntary helpers achieved this through their committed participation. Another area of forest – the subtropical rainforest in Australia that was saved from logging – plays an important role in the fourth story.
Small and large, sad and hopeful stories such as these allow us to design a picture of The Great Turning – of our era. Not a complete, all-encompassing picture. It’s more like a piece of the puzzle. But the more the pieces are put together, the more complete the portrayal is as a result. Only this fragmentary depiction of what is happening at this very moment is available to us today. Just the little events are the ones that we can report about. They inspire us and can serve as the guiding principle on the path into the future. This is why we tell stories in this book. They are about the events, the encounters with people, and the life of Joanna Macy. They are stories that have changed her life and her world. She has told them time and again in many of her seminars. So these stories have also changed the lives of other people and their world. They have become the stories of The Great Turning. These are exactly the ones that we can already tell today. Because we cannot yet tell the entire, complete story of The Great Change yet. After all, we are all still in the middle of it.
