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

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

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.

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.”

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

aporia.

Formations change all the time. The joys they bring—though often wonderful, profound, and amazing—are short-lived. Even when we get exactly what we want, it gets old after a while, and we want something else.

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

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.