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

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

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

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.

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.

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.”

As Joseph Goldstein put it, the self is like the Big Dipper; it’s a pattern that emerges when you look from one perspective, but of course, it’s not really there.17 Labels of identity, gender, group belonging—are any of these you? Take a look for a few minutes (or hours, or weeks). As a reaction, idea, or emotion arises in the mind, try to notice i

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.”

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

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

As Foucault tried to tell us, any dissemination of information—which the dharma is—is inherently an exercise of power. As such, any claim that “I’ve got the answer” is also a claim of authority, of “listen to me.” Yet for all the venerable guru traditions in Buddhism, I am struck by how different the Buddha himself was when it came to questions of