I'm actually new to Palelai Buddhist Temple and its Sangha. I was requested by a Dhamma friend to make this announcement. I personally find this a good opportunity to practise Dana, build karmic links with the many distinguished members of Sangha from various countries, and support the Triple Gems when we are still able to. We never know what surprises tomorrow or next moment may bring. It's still kind of early as the event is in Feb 07. (In case you may forget it, note this event in your mobile calendar with alarm on.) I think if I'm still alive then, I might attend this auspicious event too. See you there. :)
~UnawakenOne~
Opening Ceremony Of Phra Maha Chedi Dhammasathit
Greetings to all friends in the Dhamma,
Palelai Buddhist Temple in Singapore has been building the Phra Maha Chedi Dhammasathit since 2004. The building process is expected to be completed by end this year. To mark the official opening of Palelai’s new Chedi building, the Resident monks and executive committee of Palelai Buddhist Temple will be holding a Buddhist ceremony from 24th – 26th February 2007.
Venerable Somdej Phra Yanvarodom from Thailand is our distinguished Guest of Honor for this grand opening ceremony. About 180 Mahayana, Theravada and Vajrayana tradition monks/venerables from Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Thailand are invited to attend and share this auspicious and joyous day in celebration with us. These invited venerables from various Buddhist traditions will be chanting continuously during these three days to consecrate the new Chedi building.
Devotees are welcomed to join us in the three-days celebration and may wish to offer food and requisites to the Venerables during this auspicious celebration. We will also be holding an 8-preceptor retreat during these three days. Devotees interested in taking part in this retreat may register with Palelai Buddhist Temple Administration Office before 28th January 2007. Registration will be based on first come first serve basis as vacancies are limited.
Below is the program for these 3 days’ celebration:
Date Start Time Description of Program
24th February 8:00 a.m. 8 Precepts
10:30 a.m. Food Offerings to Sangha (Venerables)
25th February 7:00 a.m. Invitation of Devas
8:09 a.m. Official opening of Phra Maha Chedi Dhammasathit by Venerable Somdej Yanvadorom from Thailand
9:00 a.m. Offering of food & requisites to the Sangha (Venerables).
11:00 a.m. Offering of food & requisites to the Sangha (Venerables).
1:00 p.m. Meditation / Dhamma Talks
2:00 p.m. Meditation / Dhamma Talks
3:00 p.m. Commencement of 24 hours continuous chanting
26th February 9:00 a.m. Offering of food & requisites to the Sangha (Venerables)
11:00 a.m. Offering of food & requisites to the Sangha (Venerables)
1:00 p.m. Meditation / Dhamma Talks
8:00 p.m. Meditation / Dhamma Talks
10:00 p.m. Relinquishing of 8 precepts
27th February 12:00 a.m. End of continuous chanting & opening ceremony
All friends in the Dhamma are welcomed to join us in this auspicious celebration.
May the triple gems be with you always!
With Metta,
Yours in the Dhamma
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This is a nice contribution, I want to share my reflections and experiences too!
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Thursday, November 30, 2006
Buddhist Community Announcement (Singapore)
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Survival Tactics by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Thanissaro Bhikkhu will be conducting a meditation retreat from 2nd to 9th Dec 2006 at Palelai Buddhist Temple in Singapore. See the retreat program schedule here. A S$20 fees for the entire retreat is applicable. Interested friends can obtain the application forms from me.
Biography
Thanissaro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff) is an American monk of the Thai forest tradition. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1971 with a degree in European Intellectual History, he studied meditation under Ajaan Fuang Jotiko in Thailand, himself a student of the late Ajaan Lee, and ordained in 1976. In 1991 he traveled to the hills of San Diego County, USA, where he helped establish Metta Forest Monastery, where he is the abbot. He is a prolific writer and translator. Many of his works can be found online at www.accesstoinsight.org. (Extracted from www.Audiodharma.org)
(Picture source: www.flickr.com) From Buddhist texts: "The roots of a lotus are in the mud, the stem grows up through the water, and the heavily scented flower lies above the water, basking in the sunlight. This pattern of growth signifies the progress of the soul from the primeval mud of materialism, through the waters of experience, and into the bright sunshine of enlightenment. Though there are other water plants that bloom above the water, it is only the lotus which, owing to the strength of its stem, regularly rises eight to twelve inches above the surface."
Survival Tactics
(Article source: www.mettaforest.org)
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
May 2001
You know the passage where the Buddha says that heedlessness is the path to death? When you’re sloppy and careless, you die. He’s not talking only about physical survival, although that is an important consideration and many people do die because of they’re own carelessness. But here he’s talking more about the survival of the mind, the good qualities in your mind. When you’re careless, the good qualities in your mind die. And when they die, what do you have left? There may be brute survival of the body but it’s not worth all that much.
When we come to practice the Buddha’s teachings, it’s basically survival techniques for the mind, how to keep the mind’s good qualities going strong. Observing the precepts, practicing concentration, developing discernment: those are the tactics. Like the meditation we’re doing right now: that’s a survival tactic for the mind. Both on the everyday level and at the moment of death, the tactics you learn, the techniques you learn while you’re meditating, are going to stand you in good stead.
The steps we have here – focusing on the breath, making it comfortable, spreading it throughout the body, allowing it to grow calm to the point where there’s a sense of ease and rapture – the beginning stages of breath meditation: they aren’t useful only on the cushion or your meditation seat. They’re also useful in daily life. In other words, by focusing on the breath you keep the mind in the present moment to begin with, because that’s an important place to stay. That’s where all your decisions are being made. All your kamma is being created right there in the present moment. If you’re not there, a lot of things get decided on a subconscious level, on a reactive level, while you’re off someplace else. These are the forces that are shaping your life and yet you’re not watching over them.
So the first thing to do is just to bring yourself into the present moment. And then create a sense of ease and wellbeing in the present moment as well, one that helps you stay there but also gives the mind something to feed on. Ultimately, of course, we want to get the mind to a place where it doesn’t have to feed. But in the meantime it has to feed on something. So you give it something good to feed on: the sense of wellbeing you create simply by breathing in in a way that feels good, breathing out in a way that feels good, so your mind doesn’t go off feeding on things outside: what this person said, what that person did. That kind of stuff is junk food. It may be fun to feed on but it doesn’t give the mind any nourishment. It actually saps your strength. Like fast food: it may taste good for a while, but there’s so much cholesterol in it that over the long term it turns to sludge in your arteries and clogs them up.
(Picture source: www.flickr.com)
The normal things the mind tends to feed on in the course of the day – this person’s actions, that person’s words – are junk food for the mind. You find that when the mind has something really good to feed on, right here in the present moment, it doesn’t want to feed outside. Things can pass right by you. You see other people’s words, their actions, and they just go right past you, in the sense that they don’t come in and wound the mind. You see them clearly—it’s not that you’re oblivious to these things—and you can make good choices on what to do when someone else does something wrong, makes a mistake. But it doesn’t wound the mind, because you haven’t taken it in.
Most of us are like little children: anything that gets near your mouth, you just swallow it right down—rocks, bits of glass. And when they wound you, you go and complain about what other people are doing. Well it’s your fault that you went and swallowed the stuff down.
So if you give the mind something good to feed on—like the comfortable sensation of the breath coming in and going out—the mind has a good place to feed. As it gets a taste of comfort, you begin to notice when it’s not comfortable. Many times that discomfort is associated with unskillful states of mind arising: anger, greed, jealousy, fear. These things will cause a change in the breath. If you’re there with the breath and you’re used to having it comfortable, you notice these changes immediately. They’ll alert you to the fact that something’s gone wrong in the mind. Again, for most of us, we’re off someplace else when these things begin to take a foothold in the mind. By the time we realize it, they’ve taken over. They kill off whatever goodness we may have.
That’s why heedlessness is the path to death. You get careless about what’s happening in the mind, and then all sorts of things can start coming in. But when you’re right there, sensitive to the slightest little unpleasantness in the breath, it’s an alert. It alerts you to when things are happening.
And then what do you do? Another one of the steps we practice here: once the breath is comfortable, you let it spread throughout the body. So you breathe through that uncomfortable breath. Breathe in such a way that it loosens up the tension in the body that goes with the anger, with the fear, or whatever.
You then find yourself in a much better position to act on the situation that got you angry in the first place. You can respond reasonably, wisely, with clarity, because you’re not overwhelmed with a sense that you’ve got to get that tension out of your system—for it’s already dissolved out of your system. What’s left is the awareness that something should be done, but you now have the space to decide: should it be done right now or later? You can see much more clearly what the situation is, what the appropriate response is.
So these basic steps in breath meditation are very important for daily survival of the goodness of the mind: keeping you in touch with decisions being made in the mind, keeping you in touch with the emotions that are threatening to overcome the mind, and giving you tools to deal with them so that you’re in charge.
Even more so, when life comes to an end, the fact that you’ve developed these skills is going to be very helpful. Most people are overwhelmed by the process. The body, which always used to seem to work all right, suddenly starts falling apart. The body, which they identified with, which they’ve invested so much time and energy in, starts falling apart. They feel lost and betrayed. And then where do they go? For people who don’t have any training in meditation, that’s a real killer, not only physically but also mentally.
If you’ve got these skills mastered, you’ve got a better place for the mind to be. You can deal with whatever thoughts come up. And all kinds of thoughts are going to come thronging in to your awareness at that point: this regret, that disappointment, this complaint. There’s going to be a lot of negative stuff. But if you’ve got good solid mindfulness and good clear awareness in the present moment, you can just watch these things come and watch them go. You don’t have to grab onto them.
If you’re really skilled in your meditation, you will have found a place where the present moment opens up into the deathless. Then you’re really safe, no matter what happens - the body falls apart, all kinds of things can happen - but there’s that secure place. Ajaan Fuang once said that when you’re practicing meditation, you’re practicing how to die properly. And these skills that we’re working on when we’re sitting right here, they’re your survival skills, both on a day-to-day level and also when the time comes for the mind to separate from the body, to separate from all its mental events, everything associated with this life. If you do it skillfully, the awareness that’s left will separate out, will have nothing to worry about, either in the present or on into the future.
Find other talks by Thanissaro Bhikkhu:
www.Audiodharma.org
www.mettaforest.org
www.accesstoinsight.org
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The Buddha said, "The gift of the Dharma is the highest gift." If you find this beneficial to you, share it with your friends.
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Tuesday, November 28, 2006
A Monk's Response to An Ex-Buddhist Testimony
Buddhist Venerable wrote about this in response to the following question.
Link: http://www.bdms.org.sg/Questions.html
Question : Dear Bhante,
Recently a past president of the Buddhist society at one of the institutes of higher education converted to Christianity and she has now announced her conversion on the internet. Bhante, what do you say about this? Regards/PK
Dear P K,
People convert from one religion to another for many reasons – some of them sensible, others less so. Some people convert to please their boyfriend or girlfriend, their husband or wife. Others convert because they have a crisis and hope that a new religion might improve things. Some people allow themselves to be literally pushed and pressured into converting. Others convert because they have been impressed by what they think is a miraculous happening. I think that intelligent and mature people make all important decisions in their life this way – in a clear-headed manner, after carefully considering the options, asking questions, examining all the issues involved, being cautious of extravagant claims and of course by not rushing into things. We do this before deciding what career to pursue, what university to attend, before taking on a large financial commitment, when choosing a life-partner or deciding who to vote for, so why shouldn’t we do it before choosing a religion? I have seen the wed site of the person you are referring to and she does not mention why she decided to change her religion.
However, she does say that she was suicidal at one point so we can assume that it was a decision made out, and perhaps as an escape from, confusion, depression and dejection. Perhaps it is important to point out that some students join the Buddhist societies at the institutes of higher education, and even hold office, for social reasons and without necessarily being well-grounded in the Dhamma. I suspect that happened in this case. Maybe the Buddhist societies should try to have more Dhamma education, give their members more psychological and emotional support and focus a little less on ‘fun activities.’
What should our attitude be to those who renounce the Dhamma for another religion? Of course as Buddhists our main concern is that people should be virtuous and happy, not that we ‘win’ converts or ‘outdo’ other religions. Therefore, let us hope that this person has found what she was looking for and that this new step in her spiritual quest leads her to fulfillment, joy and wisdom.
The above question and answer was referring to the following testimony.
From Buddhism to Christianity
(Article source: http://www.everystudent.com.sg/ntu/testimonies/tohaikit)
The former President of the NTU Buddhist Society, Toh Ai Kit received Christ last year. She recounts the story of the amazing change in her life.
Finding life's purpose
Since JC, I was constantly in search of the purpose of life. I felt that life was more than just pure studying. Hence, when I entered university, I joined the Buddhist camps in both NTU and NUS. In a new environment, I felt rather intimidated. But based on the close relationships fostered during the Buddhist camps, I decided to join the society. The mentality I had was that since I was a Buddhist and already made friends there, why not join it? Soon, I became very active in their activities and took up leadership positions in the society.
In Buddhist Society
The major turning point was during my second year. I was cajoled to take up a key leadership position and maybe because of pride or whatever reason, I stood for the elections. But after being elected, I wasn’t happy or excited. Soon, I faced problems such as the loss of identity. I found no meaning and direction in what I was doing. This was worsened by my weak health then. During times when I was really desperate for help, seeking for God’s help came to my mind. However, I had to brush it aside due to the sensitivity of my position in the society. It was difficult to share my problems with others. At times, the accumulation of stress and burdensome problems led to suicidal thoughts. However, whenever that idea crept in, an unknown voice would stop me from thinking about it. (And which is why I’m still able to write this testimony now.)
After my term in office, I felt liberated. At the same time, the idea of going to a church struck me. It was on one unplanned day while waiting for something that I decided to visit a church -- St Andrews Cathedral. I was determined to get into the cathedral despite the drizzle. I decided to read the Bible after doing nothing for 10 minutes. In the end, I stayed in the cathedral for almost an hour. After that, I knew that I had done the right thing and was feeling happy.
Since then, it made me think about what real happiness is. I decided to message my Christian good friend, Shin, who was in UK, to send me those hymns that we sang in secondary school. That significant night when I heard the song “God will make a way”, I cried in front of my computer. I did not know why I cried but I just felt very comforted by it. After sharing with Shin, I asked her to teach me the proper way to pray. And as I was surfing the Christianity websites, I came across one with the sinners’ prayer and I said it on 2 November 2005. That day, I received Christ into my life. =)
Life change
As a new Christian, I am really thankful and touched by the LORD when He spoke and assured me that I was forgiven during one of my church encounters, despite being so negative towards Christians in my earlier university days. Also, the relationship between my brother and I has improved tremendously. I no longer hated him. In fact, he has begun to confide in me about what is happening in his life. It is because of the LORD’s love for me that I can learn to be more appreciative of my family. Thank You God for being so good and not letting me go! =)
Ai Kit went for her first mission trip to Bethany Nursing Home (a local Gen12ii trip) this year.
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This is a nice contribution, I want to share my reflections and experiences too!
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Monday, November 27, 2006
News Article - Buddha on the Brain
Article Source: salon.com.
Ex-monk B. Alan Wallace explains what Buddhism can teach Western scientists, why reincarnation should be taken seriously and what it's like to study meditation with the Dalai Lama.
By Steve Paulson
Nov. 27, 2006 | The debate between science and religion typically gets stuck on the thorny question of God's existence. How do you reconcile an all-powerful God with the mechanistic slog of evolution? Can a rationalist do anything but sneer at the Bible's miracles? But what if another religion -- a nontheistic one -- offered a way out of this impasse? That's the promise that some people hold out for in Buddhism. The Dalai Lama himself is deeply invested in reconciling science and spirituality. He meets regularly with Western scientists, looking for links between Buddhism and the latest research in physics and neuroscience. In his book "The Universe in a Single Atom," he wrote, "If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."
B. Alan Wallace may be the American Buddhist most committed to finding connections between Buddhism and science. An ex-Buddhist monk who went on to get a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford, he once studied under the Dalai Lama, and has acted as one of the Tibetan leader's translators. Wallace, now president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, has written and edited many books, often challenging the conventions of modern science. "The sacred object of its reverence, awe and devotion is not God or spiritual enlightenment but the material universe," he writes. He accuses prominent scientists like E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins of practicing "a modern kind of nature religion."
In his new book, "Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge," Wallace takes on the loaded subject of consciousness. He argues that the long tradition of Buddhist meditation, with its rigorous investigation of the mind, has in effect pioneered a science of consciousness, and that it has much to teach Western scientists. "Subjectivity is the central taboo of scientific materialism," he writes. He considers the Buddhist examination of interior mental states far preferable to what he calls the Western "idolatry of the brain." And he says the modern obsession with brain chemistry has created a false sense of well-being: "It is natural then to view psychopharmaceutical and psychotropic drugs as primary sources of happiness and relief from suffering." Wallace also chastises cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists for assuming the mind is merely the product of the physical mechanics of the brain. And he talks openly about ideas that most scientists would consider laughable, including reincarnation and a transcendent consciousness.
In conversation, Wallace is a fast talker who laughs easily and often gets carried away with his enthusiasm. I spoke with him by phone about the Buddhist theory of consciousness, his critique of both science and Christianity, and why he thinks reincarnation should be studied by scientists.
Why do you think Buddhism has an important perspective to add to the science and religion debate?
Buddhism has a lot to add for a number of reasons. Some are simply historical. Especially since the time of Galileo, there has been a sense of unease, if not outright hot war, between religion and science in the West. And Buddhism is coming in as a complete outsider. It's not theistic, as is Christianity. At the same time, it's not just science, as is physics or biology. And there's another reason why Buddhism may bring a fresh perspective. While there's no question that Buddhism has very religious elements to it -- with monks and temples, rituals and prayers -- it does have a broad range of empirical methods for investigating the nature of the mind, for raising hypotheses and putting them to the test.
There's a common assumption that science and religion are entirely separate domains. Science covers the empirical realm of facts and theories about the observable world, while religion deals with ultimate meaning and moral value. But you don't accept that dichotomy, do you?
Not at all. In fact, most religious people don't. This is a notion that's been brought up by Stephen Jay Gould with his whole notion of "non-overlapping magisteria." But it's never been true. All of the great pioneers of the scientific revolution -- Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and on into the 19th century with Gregor Mendel -- they were all Christians. And their whole approach to science was deeply influenced by Christianity. Religion, whether we like it or not, is making many truth claims about the natural world as well as the transcendent world. And now that science is honing in on the nature of the mind and questions of free will, it is definitely invading the turf that used to belong to religion and philosophy.
Many people would acknowledge that Buddhism has some profound insights into the human mind -- why we get depressed, what makes us happy and how we become slaves to our attachments. But what does this have to do with science?
In Buddhism, the very root of suffering and all our mental distress -- what Buddhists call mental afflictions -- is ignorance. The path to liberation, or enlightenment, is knowledge. It's knowing reality as it is. So despite many differences in methodology, both science and Buddhism are after knowledge of the natural world. But what defines the natural world? In modern science, the natural world is often equated with the physical world, and mental phenomena and subjective experiences are regarded as emergent phenomena or simply functions of the brain. But there are many other domains of reality that the physical instruments of science have not yet been able to detect.
But science is as much about method as anything. The scientific method posits hypotheses and theories that can be tested. Is that something Buddhism does as well?
Not in the same way. I wouldn't want to overplay the case that Buddhism has always been a science, with clear hypotheses and complete skepticism. It's too much of a religion, and so there's a lot of vested interest in the Buddhist community not to challenge the statements made by the Buddha and other great patriarchs in the Buddhist tradition. So there are some fundamental differences. At the same time, science is not just science. This very notion that the mind must simply be an emergent property of the brain -- consisting only of physical phenomena and nothing more -- is not a testable hypothesis. Science is based upon a very profound metaphysical foundation. Can you test the statement that there is nothing else going on apart from physical phenomena and their emergent properties? The answer is no.
You're saying we don't know for sure that the physical functions of the brain -- the neural circuits, the electrochemical surges -- are what produce our rich inner lives, what we call the mind?
Cognitive science has plenty of hypotheses that are testable. For instance, is Alzheimer's related to a particular malfunctioning of the brain? More and more, scientists are able to identify the parts and functions of the brain that are necessary to generate specific mental states. So these are scientific issues. But now let's tap into what the philosopher David Chalmers has called "the hard problem" -- the relationship between the physical brain and consciousness. What is it about the brain -- this mass of chemicals and electromagnetic fields -- that enables it to generate any state of subjective experience? If your sole access to the mind is by way of physical phenomena, then you have no way of testing whether all dimensions of the mind are necessarily contingent upon the brain.
But that is certainly the paradigm of the vast majority of neuroscientists and psychologists. The mind is nothing more than the brain, and what happens in the mind is strictly because of the physical mechanics of the brain. I'm sure most of these scientists would say it's absurd to talk about the mind functioning independently of the brain.
Well, when you have no possible means of investigating the mind as it might operate independently of the brain, then to even raise it as an issue is indeed absurd. But there is one avenue of inquiry that's been largely left out or simply repudiated. Right now, you and I have an ability to monitor our own mental states. Can we generate a mental image of an apple? Can we remember our mother's face? Can we recite the opening lines of the Gettysburg Address or some favorite poem? Are these mental images that you generate nothing other than brain states or parts of the brain? At this point, those are not even scientific questions because nobody knows how to tackle them.
You have called for a new field of study, what you call "contemplative science." What would that involve?
Contemplative science must live up to the rigorous standards that neuroscience, cognitive psychology, chemistry and physics have set for us. They've set the bar very high. So I'm a great admirer of the rigor and skepticism of science at its best. But William James, who's one of my intellectual heroes, suggested we have a triadic approach. We should study the mind by way of behavior and brain studies, but, first and foremost, he said, we should study the mind by observing mental phenomena directly. But what he didn't have, and neither did any of his contemporaries, was a rigorous methodology.
Is that what Buddhism offers -- a rigorous methodology?
Yes. I'm not saying we should fuse religion with science. Rather, we should select very specific methodologies from Buddhism and other contemplative traditions where the ability to monitor the mind has been honed over thousands of years -- beginning with the training of attention and then using sophisticated methods for investigating the nature of the mind, feelings and the very nature of consciousness itself during the waking state, the dream state, even during deep sleep. Now, because of the great advances in transportation and communications, we have easy access to the Taoist tradition of China, the Sufi tradition of the Near East, the Buddhist tradition of Tibet and Southeast Asia. I'm convinced this would add much greater depth and breadth to the types of questions that are raised in modern cognitive science.
In science, you have a hypothesis that's tested, and it can be disproved. Does that happen in Buddhism?
On its home turf, frequently not. But I'm also waiting for a neuroscientist to tell me how the hypothesis that mental states are nothing more than neural states will be repudiated. I don't see that as a testable hypothesis. So there's a fair amount of dogma, not in science per se but in the minds of scientists. Likewise, there's plenty of dogma in the minds of Buddhists. But Buddhism at its best -- and we go right back to the teachings of the Buddha himself -- encourages a spirit of skepticism. He said, "Do not take my statements to be true simply out of reverence for me. But rather, put them to the test." Well, if you do that, you should be able to repudiate them as well as confirm them.
Well, let me ask you about that. I know there is a tradition, particularly among advanced contemplatives, that you have your meditative experience, and then you talk about it, you analyze it, and your peers critique it. Does that really happen? When someone comes out of meditation, would someone else say, "Sorry. You didn't do it right"?
Absolutely. You know, Buddhism, like any other tradition, is subject to degeneration. So if you and I headed off to India or Nepal or Tibet, we'd find plenty of Buddhist meditators who are simply going through rote ritual, who are just trying to come up with the right answers at the end of the book. But when Buddhism is really thriving, it's exactly what you described. You go into a three-year retreat, where you are meditating eight to 12 hours a day. You're training the mind. You're investigating the nature of the mind. But you're probably not doing that in entire isolation. You're in consultation with a mentor who's going to review your experience and help you deepen your experience. You'll be questioning your insights. So [your] relationship with your mentor is analogous to working on your Ph.D. with a mentor. If at any point your research becomes flaky or not up to snuff, the mentor is there to say, "No, that's a dead end. This is not good research." This happens frequently in the Buddhist contemplative tradition when it's really robust and healthy.
Has that happened to you? You've meditated for decades. And you were a Buddhist monk for 14 years. Did you have your meditative practice analyzed and critiqued?
Definitely.
I can imagine that might be kind of humiliating.
[Laughs] No. Take the first long retreat I did in 1980. I was a monk at the time. I'd just spent the last 10 years in very rigorous theoretical and practical training in India and in a monastery in Switzerland. And then all I wanted to do was go to the lab -- basically, go into a meditation hut and spend eight, 10, 12 hours a day meditating. Well, I had the tremendously good fortune to have the Dalai Lama as my personal mentor. So he guided me in the meditation. I would meet with him every few weeks. I would discuss the practice and he'd give me feedback. I was living in a little hut in the mountains above Dharamsala, India. I went into a five-month solitary retreat. Somebody brought me food once a week. I was meditating 10 hours a day. I was honing my attention skills. And I would consult with the Dalai Lama. I would consult with other yogis up there on the hill about technique and problems that were arising. They would draw from their decades of experience to help me. And I started to adapt some of these methods for myself as a Westerner who grew up in America and Europe, rather than as a nomad at 14,000 [feet] up on the Tibetan plateau.
Did you have profound mystical experiences? Did you have moments of what might be called enlightenment?
Well, the word "enlightenment" has been used in so many different ways, I won't tread on that mine field. Eighteenth century Europe itself went through an Enlightenment, but I'm not sure that would be an enlightenment in my category. So for me to make any claims about enlightenment would be counterproductive. Did I find any transformation of consciousness? Did I find attention skills honed? Did I experience states of consciousness that I'd never experienced before such sustained meditative training? The answer is yes, yes, yes. But what a mature meditator is even more concerned with than those epiphanies -- those moments of revelation or breakthrough -- is the overall impact on the quality of your life, your way of engaging with other people and dealing with adversity. Is it helpful? Does it give you a clearer sense of reality? If it doesn't, then I say meditation is merely a hobby. If it does, then meditation can be something very central to developing greater mental health and clear engagement with reality itself.
I've heard that your father was a Protestant theologian. It does raise the question of why you became a Buddhist. Why has Buddhism resonated with you in a way that Christianity has not?
Well, it's a personal issue. You're quite right. My father was -- and is -- a Christian theologian. We have a loving and very trusting relationship. The fact that he is a Christian theologian definitely had a profound impact on the course my life has taken. As I was growing up, from the age of 13, I had a very clear sense that I wanted to dedicate my life to science. And so I immersed myself in chemistry, biology, physics and calculus. At the same time, my religious background had made a very deep impact on my life. But what really struck me very painfully -- I would say existentially -- was the profound incompatibility between science and the whole worldview of Christianity, with God being the creator, responding to prayer, and human identity being that of an immortal soul. Basically, everything was God saturated in this Judeo-Christian view. On the other hand, in the scientific worldview I was simply a body, an animal. There was no creator. There was no ethics in nature. It was just Darwin. It was a great big machine. And I looked at these two worldviews and said, "Wow, these are incompatible."
So I basically went AWOL from Western civilization for 14 years. I picked up one book on Buddhism when I was 20. It was like a starving man picking up some fragrance of hot baked bread. So I spent a year studying the Tibetan language in Germany, where I was spending a year abroad. And then I bought myself, literally and metaphorically, a one-way ticket to India. I wanted to go live with Tibetans and explore as deeply as I could this Buddhist worldview. It's not just a religion. It's not theistic. It doesn't posit the existence of God as standing outside of creation, governing it, ruling it, punishing the wicked and rewarding the virtuous. It doesn't have any of that. Nor is it materialistic, flattening my very existence to being an epiphenomenon of my brain.
You've suggested that there might be certain functions of the mind, certain aspects of consciousness, that don't have a material foundation.
Yes.
Advanced contemplatives in the Buddhist tradition have talked about tapping into something called the "substrate consciousness." What is that?
Just for a clarification of terms, I've demarcated three whole dimensions of consciousness. There's the psyche. It's the human mind -- the functioning of memory, attention, emotions and so forth. The psyche is contingent upon the brain, the nervous system, and our various sensory faculties. It starts sometime at or following conception, certainly during gestation, and it ends at death. So the psyche has pretty clear bookends. This is what cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists study. They don't study anything more. And they quite reasonably assume that that's all there is to it. But as long as you study the mind only by way of brain states and behavior, you're never going to know whether there's any other dimension because of the limitations of your own methodologies. So here's a hypothesis: The psyche does not emerge from the brain. Mental phenomena do not actually emerge from neuronal configurations. Nobody's ever seen that they do.
So your hypothesis is just the reverse from what all the neuroscientists think.
Precisely. The psyche is not emerging from the brain, conditioned by the environment. The human psyche is in fact emerging from an individual continuum of consciousness that is conjoined with the brain during the development of the fetus. It can be very hampered if the brain malfunctions or becomes damaged.
But you're saying there are also two other aspects of consciousness?
Yeah. All I'm presenting here is the Buddhist hypothesis. There's another dimension of consciousness, which is called the substrate consciousness. This is not mystical. It's not transcendent in the sense of being divine. The human psyche is emerging from an ongoing continuum of consciousness -- the substrate consciousness -- which kind of looks like a soul. But in the Buddhist view, it is more like an ongoing vacuum state of consciousness. Or here's a good metaphor: Just as we speak of a stem cell, which is not differentiated until it comes into the liver and becomes a liver cell, or into bone marrow and becomes a bone marrow cell, the substrate consciousness is stem consciousness. And at death, the human psyche dissolves back into this continuum.
So this consciousness is not made of any stuff. It's not matter. Is it just unattached and floating through the universe?
Well, this raises such interesting questions about the nature of matter. In the 19th century, you could think of matter as something good and chunky out there. You could count on it as having location and specific momentum and mass and all of that. Frankly, I think the backdrop of this whole conversation has to be 21st century physics, not 19th century physics. And virtually all of neuroscience and all of psychology is based on 19th century physics, which is about as up-to-date as the horse and buggy.
So not everything in the universe can be reducible to matter, to particles?
According to quantum field theory, string theory and quantum cosmology -- cutting-edge fields of 21st century physics -- matter itself is not reducible to matter. And Richard Feynman, the great Nobel laureate in physics, commented very emphatically, "We don't know what energy is." He said it's not stuff out there that has a specific location. It's more like a mathematical abstraction. So matter has been reduced to formations of space. Energy is configurations of space. Space itself is rather mysterious. And so when I introduce this theme of a substrate consciousness, it's not something ethereal that's opposed to matter. Matter is about as ethereal as anything gets. But could there be this continuum of substrate consciousness that's not contingent upon molecules? From the Buddhist perspective, yes. But again, this frankly sounds like one more system of belief.
I have to say, you could put a religious spin on all of this. What you're describing as substrate consciousness sounds a lot like how people talk about God. There is some kind of divine presence that's outside the material world but somehow intervenes in our material lives.
I think we're jumping the gun there. In the Buddhist perspective, the substrate consciousness is individual. It's not some great collective unconscious like Jung talked about. In the Buddhist view, it's an individual continuum of consciousness that carries on from lifetime to lifetime. That's not God. Beyond that is this whole third dimension, the deepest dimension, called "primordial consciousness." This has certain commonalities with Christian mystical notions of God beyond the trinity. It has a thoroughly and deeply transcendent quality to it. And that's way beyond the pale of scientific inquiry. But when I speak of substrate consciousness, I think it would simply be a mistake to say that's God. If you want to relate this to something in Western religions, you might say it's the immortal soul. Christianity really has nothing to say about the existence of your continuum of consciousness prior to your conception. There's nothing in the Bible that says, where was Steve Paulson 70 years ago? Where did your stream of consciousness, your identity, your soul, come from? But Buddhism has a lot to say about this.
Here in the West, we have on the table three large hypotheses about the nature of human consciousness. One of these looks really good from a scientific perspective. Your consciousness is a product of the brain. Damage the brain and your consciousness evaporates into nothing. Now what's the experiment by which you repudiate that hypothesis? Well, all the mental states you're studying are by way of the brain, so the answer is nada. So it's not scientific and it's not testable, at least not yet. We have another major hypothesis. You die and your soul carries on to heaven or hell in the Protestant tradition. You go there and it's forever. Or in the Roman Catholic tradition, you have another couple of options -- limbo and purgatory. But these are all one-way tickets. You can't say, I didn't like it in purgatory and then come back. My point here is the Christian hypothesis is not testable scientifically. It may be true, but it's not a scientific hypothesis.
Of course, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition has reincarnation. Is that testable scientifically?
Well, here's the hypothesis. Your psyche emerged some time while you were in your mother's womb. It's continuing to evolve, and eventually it's going to implode back into the substrate, carry on as a disembodied continuum of consciousness and then reincarnate. There's the theory in a nutshell. Is that one testable? My short answer is yes, I think this is a testable hypothesis, and in principle it really should be able to be repudiated. But we're also looking for positive evidence.
There are two types of studies being done at the University of Virginia. One is by Bruce Greyson. He's got a very good track record of doing rigorous, objective scientific studies of alleged -- I'm choosing my words carefully here -- alleged out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences of patients undergoing surgery. Does it ever happen that a person, while being under general anesthetic, has an out-of-body experience and can actually perceive something, as they hover above, that only the surgeons see? That's an empirically testable question. And Greyson is studying this scientifically.
So basically, the premise here is that consciousness can exist outside the body. I've heard that Greyson has started these tests but so far hasn't come up with any results.
Quite so. As you can imagine, the National Science Foundation is not exactly jumping over itself to fund this type of research. Nor is the NIH [National Institutes of Health]. This is outside the paradigm. They're not interested in providing funding for things that challenge the foundations of materialism. So basically, it's like asking the Catholic Church to pay for research to show that Jesus never lived.
OK, that's one test for out-of-body experiences. What about reincarnation?
Well, lo and behold, at the same university -- they have some chutzpah over there -- the University of Virginia, Ian Stevenson is now retired from the psych department. He's not a Buddhist, he wasn't a Hindu, and he didn't believe in reincarnation. Forty years ago he heard anecdotes of children maintaining that this wasn't their first life and giving detailed accounts of their alleged memories of past life experiences. So he started studying it. On a shoestring budget, he and a team of researchers did this for about 40 years. And about halfway through, he wrote a book called "Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation." He scanned thousands of accounts of children, throwing out most of them because they were either false or the child could have heard about it from parents, relatives, television and so forth. He then selected 20 cases where the accounts given by the child wound up being true when they were subjected to objective corroboration. He couldn't see any way the child could have known this information. But he also said in that book, "I don't believe in reincarnation. But I don't know what else to do with these twenty cases because I can't see any other way to explain them."
And then he did another 20 years of research and wrote another book, "Where Biology and Reincarnation Intersect." It showed the empirical findings of more cases of children giving these very detailed accounts of past life experiences. And usually they were not glorified, like I was Cleopatra or Einstein or somebody spectacular. No, [it was like,] I was a philanderer, and one of the husbands of the wives I had sex with shot me dead because I cuckolded him. So that's not very glamorous, but that was the recollection of one of these children. This is empirical evidence. It should be scrutinized rigorously, but not thrown out dogmatically.
This raises some interesting questions about Buddhism. Is Buddhism a religion or is it something else? Because there are some people in the West who say we should strip Buddhism of any vestiges of the religious or the transcendental. For instance, Stephen Batchelor, in his book "Buddhism Without Beliefs," writes, "The Buddha was not a mystic. His awakening was not a shattering insight into a transcendental truth that revealed to him the mysteries of God. He did not claim to have had an experience that granted him privileged, esoteric knowledge of how the universe ticks." Is Stephen Batchelor right?
[Laughs] I've known Stephen Batchelor for almost 35 years. We were monks together for years, both in India and in Switzerland. To come up with this picture of the Buddha, you have to bring out a carving knife and chop off great sections of the most authentic accounts we have of the Buddha's own teachings. You simply have to ignore and pretend he never said an enormous number of things he did say. I think Stephen, my dear friend, has recast the Buddha in his own image as an English skeptic who was raised in an agnostic background, who really doesn't believe in anything nonphysical.
So we should forget trying to strip Buddhism of its transcendentalism. You haven't quite come out and said it, but you're suggesting we should stop saying Buddhism is not a religion.
Well, we have to be very cautious when we take these Western categories -- religion, science, philosophy -- which are deeply and inextricably embedded in our Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman heritage. But I have to add a footnote to our conversation about reincarnation research. The Buddhists have been looking at this critically and empirically for 2,500 years. They're not waiting with bated breath to see what the people at the University of Virginia come up with. They, unlike psychologists and neuroscientists, have been exploring mental phenomena directly. And they have specific strategies for going into a deep meditative state, directing your attention backward beyond the scope of this lifetime, directing it back to past lifetimes and coming up with memories. So you have a template here.
This could be studied, together with skeptics. Train very advanced contemplatives to tap into this substrate consciousness -- this storehouse of memories from past lives, if it in fact exists -- and do this in conjunction with neuroscientists and psychologists. If I had unlimited funds, I'd say this is one of the most important questions we can ask. Make this a 20-year research project, well funded, with all the skepticism of science. Make sure you have some hardcore atheists involved, but ones who are open-minded and not just knee-jerk dogmatists. And then put it to the test. In 20 years, I think you could come up with something that could repudiate or validate a startling, truly astonishing hypothesis that there is such a substrate consciousness.
-- By Steve Paulson
Read the many comments and letters written in response to the above article.
More on Buddhism & Science:
Interesting Old News - Phenomenon of reincarnation still mystifies modern scientists
Buddhism and Science - Ajahn Brahmavamso
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Researchers: Meditation may increase alertness
Meditation may increase alertness
(Article source: The Daily Targum
Kevin Gengler/Contributing Writer 11/7/06
A study conducted by University of Kentucky researchers found that meditation might be as effective as sleep in raising a person's level of alertness, and members of the University say they agree with the finding.
According to a report of the study published in The New York Times, meditation might improve alertness and even serve as an equivalent of sleep.
The researchers, led by Prashant Kaul of the University of Kentucky, found that one area in which meditation is more effective than other methods is improving one's reaction time.
The study tested students before and after 40 minutes of meditation, napping or exercising or consuming caffeine.
Patricia Whelan, who teaches a non-credit meditation course at the College Avenue Gym, said she agreed with the study's results.
"Absolutely, I've noticed there's a correlation between meditating and one's level of alertness," she said.
"Meditation allows one to have more control over their thoughts," Whelan said, which leads to increased focus and alertness. "It also helps keep outside stimulants to a minimum, which also helps you stay more focused."
The study also reported that subjects who skipped a night of sleep and then took the test after meditation performed even better than their counterparts who had slept. This suggests meditation could be used as an alternative to sleep.
Rutgers College first-year student Brian Shlosberg said while he hasn't been sleeping any less since he began meditation, he has found it effective in curing mild insomnia. "I fall asleep so much more easily since I began," he said.
Shlosberg also said he experienced a higher level of alertness. "Ever since I began meditating, I have become more alert to otherwise forgettable things," he said.
Shlosberg said he views meditation as a type of medicine, and he believes it will be extremely helpful in his future.
"I feel meditation will cure any and all psychological or social problems I will face in the future," he said.
In addition to increased alertness and focus, Whelan said other benefits of meditation include reduced stress, a lower and more stable blood pressure and a decrease in brain wave patterns.
According to other studies, experienced meditators may be able to intervene before a fight or flight response takes over, and may even be able to redirect anxiety into more constructive or positive feelings. Studies also link meditation to increased activity in the left prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is associated with concentration, planning and positive feelings.
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Interesting Old News - Phenomenon of reincarnation still mystifies modern scientists
Phenomenon of reincarnation still mystifies modern scientists
22.03.2005
Clinical death is one of the biggest mysteries that modern science still cannot solve
Some people say they remember their previous lives and can describe what they saw and did when they were having other bodies hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Vladimir Zatovka, head of the reanimation department in the Kaliningrad regional hospital revealed many astonishing facts about life and death when journalists interviewed him several years ago. The experienced doctor believes that clinical death is one of the biggest mysteries that modern science still cannot solve. Indeed, patients who revive after clinical death say they get some mysterious information and learn new things. Journalists were slightly shocked to hear the doctor saying the soul actually exists and lives its individual life.
One of the doctor's patients, Irina Lakoba was in coma for about a month after she seriously suffered in a traffic accident. She recovered from coma and turned out to be quite a different person. Before the accident, the woman worked as an engineer at a large fish company for twenty years. But when she regained consciousness after the coma, the woman said she saw herself being a little girl standing on the bank of some south river and even began speaking some strange language. Experts from the philology department of the Kaliningrad University stated that was one of Swahili dialects. Later, the woman began composing verses in this dialect and even translated them into Russian, English and French, the languages that she had never learnt before the accident.
Shortly before Irina recovered from coma, the doctor talked to her husband. They met in a room two floors above the ward where the patient stayed. But when the woman recovered, she told precisely what both men were talking about during that meeting. What is more, she described things which she could not see and hear when she was in coma. She said she had seen and heard everything because she could walk about the hospital. At that, she said she was watching her body staying in bed and was shocked to see it was old and ugly. She said she was a little healthy girl while walking about the hospital.
This is real reincarnation, the doctor says. Followers of esoteric doctrines, Hinduists and Buddhists never hesitate that there is no death at all; they believe the soul reincarnates endlessly. But people brought up according to the Orthodox traditions and scientific atheism can hardly believe it is so. It was a couple of decades ago that reincarnation was considered a myth, but now it is forming a scientific conception that is winning an increasing number of supporters.
It took American reanimatologist Raymond Moody thirty years within which he wrote several books about the after-life phenomenon before he managed to convince majority of his readers that cardiac arrest and cessation of brain activity do not mean the end. Those patients who revived from the dead told the doctor similar stories about the light they saw at the end of a long tunnel, about dead relatives who came to tell about new life coming and about a better world. Moody and his followers collected thousands of evidence of this sort; all stories told by patients coincide in every particular detail, which means these stories cannot be a forgery.
The conclusions made by Moody give people some hope for immortality; but at the same time they have already won lots of opponents. Famous psychiatrist Stanislav Grof is the most competent critic of Moody's conclusions. He conducted experiments with those patients who revived after clinical death. During the experiment, Stanislav Grof arrived at a conclusion that the tunnel many people see during their clinical death is in fact an impression of a baby going through the long and narrow birth canal. Thus, the bright light they see at the end of the tunnel is in fact an obstetrics ward where babies are delivered. As it turned out, even people who never went through clinical death see the same tunnel when put under hypnosis.
Other opponents to Moody, physician Paul Kurtz, physiologist Jack Kowan and neurobiologist Elizabeth Clark state that the vision of a tunnel is produced with those parts of the dying cerebral cortex that controls vision. This happens because of oxygen deficit in dying cells; as a result, stimulation waves form concentric circles. We can see such circles after we dive and stay under water too long or hang with the head down. The dying consciousness sees the circles as forming a tunnel. Materialist researchers are sure that all the rest are fancies and dreams that people have in an unconscious state.
However, even these experts cannot explain why even patients whose brain no longer functions still see the tunnel, the bright light and dead relatives. Russian neurophysiologist Natalya Bekhtereva wrote about the thought and its origin in her works. She said that human brain is the greatest mystery, and it will take incredibly much time before scientists study it.
The lack of oxygen in tissues and organs is not the reason why people experiencing clinical death see their bodies lifeless on an operating table or in a reanimation ward and hear what doctors or other patients say.
Researcher from Holland Van Lommel studied the phenomenon while working with patients and arrived at a conclusion that dying people see visions at the moment when their central nervous system cuts off. This in its turn proves that consciousness is not a brain function. Doctors verified clinical death of one of Lommel's patients. A tube for mechanical ventilation of lungs was inserted into the patient's larynx. For that, the patient's denture was taken out. In an hour and a half, the man's heart started beating; in a week the patient came to his senses and asked to give him his denture. But doctors could not remember where they put the denture. Then, the patient said he saw where doctors had put the denture, as he was soaring above the body when the doctors were saving his life.
French woman Annel Besier living in Moscow says she can recollect her previous lives. She wrote a book about her previous reincarnations. Annel is sure that it is not necessary to die to experience reincarnation. The author does not remember the exact number of her reincarnations. According to the karma doctrine, each of us has had thousands of reincarnations, and our soul does not always reincarnate into the human body, it may also belong to an animal.
There are many people who remember their previous lives. Muscovite Olga Kuleshova, 37, knows perfectly well that before her birth 37 years ago she was a violinist living in England (she has partially retained the skills although she never learnt to play the violin). Before that, she served in the house of a rich magnate in India. Olga says that 200 years ago she was a concubine of a Turkish sultan and also that in Medieval Italy Michelangelo was her tutor in painting. Indeed, Olga can draw resembling the Michelangelo style and speaks the old Italian language (she says she never learnt the language). May this be true? There is no opportunity to verify this.
Academician with the Russian Academy of Sciences Vlail Kaznacheyev says the reincarnation phenomenon is undoubted, as it has been given much confirmation. However, none of the hypotheses currently existing as concerning the issue can actually explain the phenomenon. Unfortunately, there is no scientific theory of reincarnation.
But is not it better to be unaware of what is going to happen after we die? Nothing, immortality or endless reincarnation? Each of us hopes there is no end to life, but we never think that this eternity may be even worse than death. Academician Kaznacheyev is sure that life we are having now and here is the only undoubted wonder.
Natalia Leskova
(Article source: http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/377/15151_reincarnation.html)
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Saturday, November 25, 2006
Buddhism and Science - Ajahn Brahmavamso
BUDDHISM AND SCIENCE
