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

But, for example, the preliminaries in Tibetan Buddhism? This is about the fact that you’re going to die and you have to come to terms with it, not how to be relaxed and less stressed. It may be that you’ll become more stressed.

to understand, intuitively and deeply, that what Buddhists call “conditioned formations”—i.e., stuff, ideas, people, emotions, and everything else—are incapable of providing lasting, deep happiness.

Every desire, every identification, every place where your ego is hiding out and saying “I’m this.” Let go, let go, let go, and keep on falling—because there ain’t no place to land. Yet this falling, I am here to tell you, is the same as flight. Because, third, the states are not the point. As Joseph Goldstein put it, “one week [on retreat] gives t

More broadly, here are some of the things mindfulness has been shown to do: • Cut the relapse rate in half for patients suffering from depression7 • Reduce loneliness among elderly people8 • Quadruple the speed of healing from psoriasis9 • Improve overall immune function10 • Lower the rate of relapse among recovering addicts11 • Improve attention,

For the Buddha of the Pali Canon, the goal is liberation: the cessation of suffering, the end of the endless hamster-wheel of dependent origination, of mental formations leading to desire leading to clinging leading to suffering and so on. Nibbana, or nirvana, was not originally conceived as some magical heavenly world, or even a permanent altered

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

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.

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.

So won’t a serious mindfulness disrupt this ferkokte system, which depends on lives out of balance? After all, as Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”