think of Western adaptations of Zen oryoki (eating meditation), Theravadan walking meditation, and the Tibetan encouragement to experience “small moments, many times.”

As Joe further pointed out, “We’re navigating five different worlds at once: Traditional Buddhism, traditional Western Buddhism, secular mindfulness, hardcore empiricist neuroscientists, and neuroscientists who are into Buddhism,” each of whom may have different worldviews and operating assumptions.

Those things that have to get done—don’t really have to get done. The dream that you have, which your

The conscience of someone raised vegetarian recoils at the thought of eating meat; a carnivore’s doesn’t. My conscience recoils at eating shrimp, but yours probably doesn’t. The conscience of someone from an older culture might be quite at peace with war and killing in the name of honor, or tribe; yours might not. There is no rhyme or reason to the

Enlightenment does not have to do with being a nice person; it’s about intuitively knowing all things to be totally conditioned and transitory and thus unclingable.

What was it that Nisargadatta, the Vedanta sage, said? “Wisdom tells me I’m nothing. Love tells me I’m everything. In between, my life flows.”

It is true: many if not most of the applications of meditation and mindfulness in the West are, at best, side-paths alongside the main road to liberation. And yet, most of the folks taking them are not interested in “liberation,” and even if they were, they don’t have the kinds of lives conducive to really pursuing it. Which is fine; there are lots

The Hindu sage Ramakrishna once said that the mind is like fabric; it takes the color of the dye it’s soaked in. Soak the mind in a quiet, relaxing environment and it will become quiet and relaxed. Soak it in floods of Facebook and, well.…

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,