Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism, and the Next Generation of Enlightenment

My tastes, preferences, styles, and self-identifications all are cultural constructions. So, too, every notion that you have, about politics, justice, identity, music, love, whatever, is a meme, constituted outside of “you” and replicated in sophisticated ways.

In the famous Zen ox-herding sequence, the process of gaining enlightenment is analogized to finding and taming a wild ox. As is well known, the final stage of that process is not nothingness, not pure transcendence, but returning to the marketplace with the ox. The ultimate stages of the contemplative path are, finally, a return to where it began.

You don’t escape from being human, even if you do get enlightened. You may think you do—you may enter into some exalted states, gain psychic powers, and attract followers who think you’re an avatar of the Divine. But that is just delusion.

Adam Bucko, founder of the Reciprocity Foundation, which provides disadvantaged young adults with “programs that combine contemplative, therapeutic, and creative tools for personal transformation with business skills,” found that the circular, consent-based, and process-oriented nature of the Occupy movement transformed some of its participants, pa

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personality” is just a label atop an amalgamation of behaviors and preferences, each of which is wholly caused by other things. The learned behavior of playing, the desire for companionship, the physical act of chasing the stick—the dog was doing just what it had to do. There was really no dog there—just all those conditions.

I often come back to the five basic precepts: not harming, not stealing, not committing sexual misconduct, not lying, and not being too intoxicated to care.

Can I really remember, over and over again, that, contrary to all indications, fulfilling my desires will not be as satisfying as lessening them? Simple, but not easy.

It’s only in the last century that folks have been told that meditation alone will make them kinder and more generous. (On the contrary, meditation has been taught in Japan to help warriors and businessmen be more ruthless.)