Ask Maya: Corrupting the Dharma? (video)

Maya, Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Seven, Irma Quintero, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly

The Mysterious Disappearance (Tom Tomorrow/thismodernworld.com)

The twin exhibitions in San Francisco (SFAAM) and Pasadena (NS) are deep explorations.

 
Recently, an anonymous reader brought our attention to the destruction of the Dharma in America by capitalist and selfish motives:

The reader draws our attention to something really bothersome. The traditional Dharma -- the authentic Buddhist teachings as laid out by Siddhartha Gautama after his great enlightenment and taught for 45 years -- is being corrupted in America. It is under attack. Why? The specters of money, fame, and power threaten to undermine and overwhelm our spiritual teachings. 

Case in point: there is a website of a supposed "mindfulness" meditation teacher, one Michael Taft, who claims that people saying they learn meditation from Buddhist teachers is unfair. Should we be serene and listen to his point, or let ourselves get furious? (Serenity trumps fury). Are people like this degrading and destroying the Dharma? (Could be. But he says right up front that hat he is "secular and science-based," which is an obvious way to make more sales. What he is calling mindfulness, as so many in the world of science now do, is not Buddhism. It may be Buddhist, but it is stripped of its Buddhism and is just something out there to be used for other ends; it doesn't sound like Taft is promising enlightenment or an end to suffering or even a trip to heaven. It's just the same old stress management approach, and maybe that's fine). What does "mindfulness" mean nowadays?

Mindfulness has existed for millions of years, and anyone who says so is right about that. But, reader, you have a point. What it means in Buddhism is very specific, not just as a general reminder to practice "bare awareness" but as a set of techniques to bring about liberating-insight. Whereas anyone might say, "Pay attention" and we might even pay attention without being reminded, no one but a buddha teaches the insight practices (particularly the causal links of Dependent Origination) but a buddha and the subsequent disciples of such a world teacher. You're right.

This guy is published on the Huffington Post and Scientific American, and he lectures at conferences. Why would anyone listen to him?

They have to listen to someone, reader. The Buddha taught his true disciples well in the Kalama Sutta, not adhering to view but investigating on their quest for truth. And for the intensive practitioners (monastic and lay alike), he advised them be lamps and islands unto themselves taking no other teacher but the Dharma as their guide and themselves (Mahaparinibbana Sutta).

Too often and too quickly we give up our own wisdom for the presumed knowledge of another. We need both. We need discernment when listening, and we need unbiased reflection when considering our own level of right view. Be serene; even if Taft should kill the Dharma singlehandedly -- and it doesn't sound like that is what he is doing -- you could still keep sight of the lamp and the island.

An oversimplification of the message. What the Buddha really asks before teaching the Dharma is, Do these basic things agree with your own experience and observation, your own sense and heart? Are greed, hatred, and delusion harmful or harmless?

 

I am Amatue. Don't stare.

Every teacher, assuming he is even a legitimate teacher and not just a self-seeking individual out to make the rare and precious Dharma a money-making instrument or vehicle to fame. (Elsewhere the Buddha says that a fool seeks fame for things s/he does not possess, whereas a worthy person seeks no notoriety or acclaim for things possessed like enlightenment, insight, or wisdom). So let the foolish be, if they will not be curbed by a kind admonition, as the harm they do is not our responsibility but theirs. And our own faults are ours to see, or to have someone kindly point them out to us. Thank you, reader, for not criticizing us for all of our failings. We sure have them for anyone to point out. Reader, do something to benefit yourself and others. It is easy to criticize and to point fingers at Taft and bad teachers as there are plenty of them, but the True Wheel is hard to find. So this is what we would like to see: Research it and tell us, What is "mindfulness" really as the Buddha taught it?

If you could find that out -- and tell us and all of the other readers -- is would be a mighty help to us, to Taft, and to others who might fall sway to the nonsense many people speak in the name of the Buddha, Dharma, and enlightened community.

When I think of all the centuries of teachers who patiently and selflessly worked to maintain the purity of the Buddha's teaching, against all odds, to have an [donkey] like this...

True, true, it would be a tragedy. But come, friend, do it for the real Buddha, do it for the Dharma. Investigate and report back to us. We will have our editors cross check it and publish it here. Where is the real Dharma to be found, where is there a legitimate teacher? We can tell you, but it would be much more productive if you search and report back. That is what Siddhartha did.

Hipster haven: an alt to an alt to shout about

No, no, don't laugh. Come forward. What do the poets teach us? Keats says, "When the bad are full of passionate intensity, what do the good do? Complain? Point fingers? But not do a good thing to make the situation better? We're all for complaining, our favorite pastime/wasteoftime. Be we also try to unearth the real Dharma and restore it to the world while bringing attention to corrections and deviations.
 

This desert lawn sucks! - Yeah, where do they get the water? - What, dumb[donkey], I mean Beavis? I didn't mean it sucks water. I mean it sucks... - Oh yeah, huh huh huh huh huh...

  

The way to cool is brands?

QUESTION 2: How was Coachella? Brokechella was much better than returning for Weekend Deux. But Coachella? Bradley explains it best. He was offered a job, two weekends at the big music fest and a VIP all access pass. Late into Saturday night he turned around and suddenly noticed: No one was smiling. They had paid $800 (not including parking, which is $100 more, food, or drinks and stuff), and they were blase. They were having phone-mances, rocking their cellular devices like dates under the remains of the prophetic bloody moon. One would think that having spent all that money and facebooked it and tweeted and instagrammed the h*ck out of it there would be more than this. But you have to ask yourself, whether you're sporting a VIP pass or just a regular radio-chipped (RFID) capital-expenditure-monitoring and policing device,

Is that ALL there is?

Cristina echoes Peggy Lee in asking, Is that all there [f-ing] is? with a twist.

• India's Spiritual Legacy (general tours) will be offered daily at 1:00 to complement the special exhibition Yoga: The Art of Transformation, on view from Feb. 21-Sunday, May 25, 2014. This tour features objects in the Asian Art Museum South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Buddhist Himalayas collections. (Museum blog)
• Korean art at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum
• Roads of Arabia: Archaeology and History of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Oct. 24, 2014-Jan. 18, 2015)
• Is domestic violence kind of SEXY? (cartoon)

Woman able to leave her body at will

Amber Larson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Douglas Main, "The case of the voluntary out-of-body experience," Popular Science, March 6, 2014 (popsci.com)

The "Out of Body Experience" (OOBE) may be as natural for children as sleep and NDE for us.

 

March 2014: Science of Sleep

After a class on out-of-body experiences [like lucid dreaming], a psychology graduate student at the University of Ottawa came forward to researchers to say that she could have these voluntarily, usually before sleep. "She appeared surprised that not everyone could experience this," wrote the scientists in a study describing the case, published in February in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

• Eckankar.org
• Meetups: Astral Projection
• Int'l Academy of Consciousness
• Astral Projection: Anyone can do it
• School for Out of Body Experiences

International Academy of Consciousness (iacworld.org) on the science of "projectiology"

 

OOBE? I thought you said NDE.

Pretty crazy, right? One would think that if you could leave your own body and float above it, you'd be a little more... vocal about it. But since it was a common experience for her -- one she "began performing as a child when bored with 'sleep time' at preschool... moving above her body" instead of napping -- it may have appeared unremarkable. This is way more interesting than what I did, which was indeed napping.

Free book to leave body

The most exciting thing about this case, to me, is "the possibility that this phenomenon may have a significant incidence but [is] unreported because people do not think this is exceptional," as the authors wrote. "Alternatively," they continued, "the ability might be present in infancy but is lost without regular practice.

This would be reminiscent of the discovery and eventual study of synesthesia [confounding colors with sounds] that some researchers now hypothesized is more prevalent in young people or can be developed."

 

Those are fascinating suggestions -- both that these out-of-body experiences may be more common than previously thought, or could be learned during a critical window early in life.

 

But back to the case study. The 24-year-old "continued to perform this experience as she grew up assuming, as mentioned, that 'everyone could do it.'" This is how she described her out-of-body experiences: More

Dr. Moody: Everyone will believe in rebirth

Wisdom Quarterly; Dr. Raymond Moody, M.D., David Randle (LogicOfNonsense.com)

Everyone's "island" is different. So be an island (dipa) unto yourself! (SN 22:43)

 
Near death experience (NDE) researcher Dr. Moody, M.D. has been studying and documenting the reality of rebirth, post mortem consciousness, and the existence of other dimensions. On Jan. 17-18, 2014 he is conducting a seminar and claimed on Coast to Coast that he will reveal a bombshell breakthrough in the scientific study of future and past lives. 

Neverland, Nonsense, Afterlife, Living Wisely

The story of Peter Pan has long been described as a metaphor for childhood and immortality.

Dr. Moody's new and groundbreaking work Nonsense (following Life After Life) shows that Peter Pan's story may also be a metaphor for understanding how nonsense can be a key to creating new language and thinking regarding the afterlife.

Understanding the afterlife offers us wisdom for living now. J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, shared that Neverlands are found in the minds of children. Although they always seem to be more or less an island resembling one another, they are not the same from one child to the next.

For example, John Darling “had a lagoon with flamingos flying over it,” while his little brother Michael “had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it.”  Like Dr. Moody describes in his research on Near Death Experiences... More

  

The Power of Nonsense

Beauty and the bullet, Mona mad for the MIC?

"Nonsense wakes up the brain cells," according to Dr. Seuss. Science has brought humanity a long way during the last 400 years. We have cured [or at least developed profitable "treatments" for] innumerable diseases, mastered human flight, split the atom, and sent humans to the moon. So why do so many of our deepest mysteries remain beyond the reach of reason?

I have discovered a hidden collective cognitive flaw that impairs our ability to think cogently about some very fundamental problems of science, philosophy, and religion.

I am a psychiatrist and professor of philosophy and logic. During my almost 50-year career, I have examined a glitch that is practically built into the way we think. When Aristotle codified logic [for the Western world, having borrowed so much from India] 2,300 years ago, he left a gap, an area of incompleteness that compromises our ability to think rationally about important questions that do not fit easily into the literal frame of... More 

Neverland 
So how does one get to Neverland? Walt Disney popularized the directions to Neverland by giving the nonsensical directions, “Second star to right, straight on til morning.”  In the novel, however, Barrie said the directions were “second to right, straight on til morning.”

This is a great metaphor both for both entering the dream world and dying. One second to the right is the difference between being awake (alive) and being on our way in flight in dreams (death) until we wake up in the morning (make our passage to the new afterlife realm).

  

THE SEMINAR

Prof. Moody is a medical doctor and author

The program will guide participants through a process that awakens an important but forgotten power of the mind. The purpose is to enhance critical, analytical, and creative thinking in a rapid, observable way with three main objectives:

1. Increase critical thinking skills. Democracy depends on citizens' ability to think and debate logically. So this program teaches participants how to think more logically with entertaining exercises that enhance critical thinking skills.
2. Open new possibilities for advances in numerous fields including science, psychology, and advertising. There are direct applications in many fields, widening the scope of the mind in a way that is useful in any profession.
3. To enable us to study mystical states of consciousness including near-death experiences in an entirely new way. A study is in progress using the information in this program to understand the language of dying patients in more depth, which will help improve our care of the terminally ill. More

Science DOESN'T want to take God away

Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly;  Marcelo Gleiser (13.7 Cosmos & Culture, NPR.org)

 
Can science inspire the same level of passion as religion?
I was once invited to give a live interview on a radio station in Brasília, the capital of Brazil.

The interview took place at rush hour in the city's very busy bus terminal, where poor workers come in from rural areas to perform all sorts of jobs in town, from cleaning the streets to working in factories and private homes.
 

The experience would mark me for the rest of my life and set a new professional goal that I had not anticipated early in my career: to bring science to the largest number of people possible.

• Buddhism and the God-idea

(Mauricio Lima/AFP/Getty Images)

The interviewer asked me questions about the scientific take on the end of the world, inspired by a book I had just published called The Prophet and the Astronomer: Apocalyptic Science and the End of the World.

 

There are many ways in which science can address this question. We can see, from the devastating effects of Typhoon Haiyan, that the forces of nature are beyond our control, even if we pride ourselves on "taming" the world around us.

 

But the focus of my book was on cataclysmic celestial events and how they have inspired both religious narratives and scientific research, past and present. In particular, note the many instances that stars and fire and brimstone fall from the sky in the Bible, both in the Old (e.g., Book of Daniel, Sodom and Gomorrah) and the New Testament (e.g., Apocalypse of John), or how the Celts believed that the skies would fall on their heads to mark the end of a time cycle.

 

God's handiwork? The devastating effects of Typhoon Haiyan (fastcompany.com)

  

A priest of the new religion

Back to the interview, I mentioned how the collision with a six-mile-wide asteroid that hit the Yucatan Peninsula of modern-day Mexico had [allegedly] triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

I made a point of explaining how that event changed the history of life on Earth, freeing the small mammals of the time from predator pressure and culminating with the evolution of humans. My point was that there is no need for divine intervention to explain these very essential episodes in our planetary and collective history.

 

It was then that the hand went up. A small man with torn clothes and grease stains on his face asked: "So the doctor wants to take even God away from us?"

 

I froze. The despair in that man's voice was apparent. He felt betrayed. His faith was the only thing he held on to, the only thing that gave him strength to come back to that bus station every day to work for a humiliatingly low minimum wage.

 

Jesus and Vishnu on a cloud ("Family Guy")

If I took God away and put in its place the rational argumentation of science, with its empirical validation, what would that even mean to this man? How would it help him go on with his life? How could science teach him to cope with life in a world without the magic of supernatural belief?

 

I realized then how far scientists are from the needs of most people; how far removed our discourse is from those who do not already seek science for answers, as surely most of you reading this essay already do. And I realized that, in order to reach a larger audience, to bring the wonders of science to a much larger slice of the population, we must... More

"Masters of Sex" (video)

CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Showtime

Well lock the door, for sure, don't make noise, hide the evidence, and no pictures...

WARNING: Scientific "smut," not for prudish temperaments. May be arousing and/or offensive to sensitive viewers. Oh, grow up; this is the Kama Loka!

Sex researchers Dr. William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) were a real life couple whose groundbreaking scientific research helped start an American conversation about sex that ignited a sexual revolution. The series premiere on their lives and seminal work, "Masters of Sex," on cable channel Showtime is September 29, 2013 at 10:00 pm ET/PT. Also starring Beau Bridges.

NSA/Cryptozoology: The Frog Mystery (audio)

Pat Macpherson, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly; Dr. Karl P.N. Shuker (karlshuker.com), radio host George Knapp (coasttocoastam.com, 9-15-13); DisclosureChannelTV2

The NSA and us, crocodile and the frog, South Africa (photography.nationalgeographic.com)

Frog meditation (indervilla.com)

In another as yet unexplained miracle on the planet, there are frequent occasions when living frogs are found living completely encased in rock. How this happens, why this should happen, how they survive, or what they eat are all mysterious. Nevertheless, it happens. And now that it is "1984," we are being illegally spied on by the NSA.

NSA - rogue power in surveillance state

NSA: farming out our national "security" to private corporations like Booz-Allen

  
The National Security Agency is out of control spying on law abiding citizens, breaking encryption codes, making credit card transactions transparent to the NSA as well as thieves (who perpetrate fraud in the billions every year) while never allowing protective steps to become so good that they keep the information secret as promised and intended...

NSA headquarters - a building full of cubicles

(C2C) Charles R. Smith, author of Deception, is a specialist in cyber warfare and technology. He talked with George Knapp last night about shocking NSA revelations and their affect on American society and the tech industry worldwide.
 
"There's panic in the halls of Fort Meade at the moment," as the NSA "would prefer to operate in the darkness...away from the light of the public," Smith declared.
 
The NSA is on damage control with the corporate mainstream press, their political allies in both parties, and they are putting out disinformation about their capabilities to muddle the issue, Smith reveals. Originally established as a secret military agency by the Truman administration, the NSA was all about foreign espionage during the Cold War. Now that has been turned on civilian citizens.
 
Today the NSA is a "bureaucratic behemoth, almost like a dinosaur, or Godzilla that has no brain," he comments, "and it will just continue to lumber on." We need to pull in the reins and dispose of the entire mission of the NSA, which has taken on illegal projects. Years ago the NSA tried to get legislative approval to install a "back door [spying] chip" on all tech equipment, Smith recounts.
 
But when that failed in Congress, the NSA instead covertly managed to spread a wide variety of back doors (secret access points that bypass protective measures) in both software and hardware, including intentional flaws in encryption that can be exploited throughout the tech industry by foreign governments (like China using Windows 8 to spy as easily as if they were the NSA), according to documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. More

• NSA calls iPhone-using citizens "zombies" who pay for their own surveillance! Buy and carry your own "chip" (cell phone) today, available from The Apple Store

Toads in the Hole

Mark Pilkington (The Guardian, 1-19-05)

Toad, frog, amphibians (bookbzzz.com)

Among the wonders on display at London's 1862 Great Exhibition was a lump of coal dug from a seam 300ft below Newport, Monmouthshire. With it was a frog that miners claimed to have found alive, encased in a lump of coal presumably millions of years old.

Their claim enraged the naturalist Frank Buckland, who demanded in the Times that the frog be removed from display. As a result, Professor Richard Owen, then superintendent of the British Museum's natural history department, received so many specimens of toads and frogs found in rocks that he appointed his wife to deal with them.

Using tools, umbrella (onebigphoto.com)

Written records of animals, predominantly amphibians, found encased in solid rock date back to at least the 16th century. The usual story is that workmen digging in a quarry or mine find the creatures inhabiting a cavity roughly their own size. Whether they fell down a crack which was then sealed over, were dropped, flowed or blown there as frogspawn, as was once thought, or even placed into the cracks by humans is anyone's guess.

 

Of course, in some cases, their discoverers may have made a leap of judgment on finding the creatures hopping around as they struck a particular stone. More recent reports describe creatures living in concrete. More

• The Frog in the Stone (Skeptoid 4223)
• Animals Sealed in Stone (Paranormal)
• How can frogs or toads live in solid rock?
• Entombed Animals (The UnMuseum)

Zoology 2013 and Beyond

Mirabilis: A Carnival of Cryptozoology

Zoologist, media consultant, and non-fiction science writer Dr. Karl Shuker knows the bizarre. There are anomalous creatures of every conceivable kind (and many more inconceivable ones). He explores them in his mirabilis book Mirabilis.

 

The menagerie is composed of what science calls "cryptozoological" specimens. For the time being, they are "mysteries." Until science finds them, it does not matter who else does. Many creatures are known to ethnic populations long before a Western trained, usually "white male" scientist certifies their existence to the Western world. Why believe the "barbarians"?

One such creature, which Shuker dubbed Trunko, was reportedly a huge tusked animal that had elements of both an elephant and a bear. However, its habitat was curious: It was said to battle whales off the coast of South Africa in the 1920s. Shuker later determined that Trunko was actually a misidentified "globster," when a gelatinous sack of it washed ashore -- a dead whale with connective tissue that looked like long white hair.

The mysteries and myths of the forest

Some ancient mythological creatures, such as the Kraken, are described as tentacled sea monsters, some as large as an island (in Buddhism referred to as nagas, or enormous sea serpents). These were likely based on the giant squid, which was not discovered by scientists until the 1800s. It is no surprise that science is so late to the game; it did not find the megamouth shark until the 1970s when one was unintentionally caught using an anchor as a hook.

Shuker knows of a mysterious mammal called the Sukotyro, which was described as having huge tusks emerging from near its eyes. He noted a similarity to a wild pig called the babirusas known to live on Java. For some strange as yet unexplained reason many creatures have a Sumatra/Indonesia connection, whether they be Komodo dragons, Asian bigfoot (or Wild Man of the Forest, a long sought after and often spotted bipedal primate), or something connected to the epicenter of massive quakes and tsunamis as secret-science tinkers with time travel attempts and other anomalous manipulations as were once common in Montauk, New York, until those efforts nearly killed the researchers.

In search of the lost frog of Colombia (Lucy Cooke/telegraph.co.uk)

 

Shuker also speaks of enormous turtles, frogs living encased in solid rock, gigantic spiders (the size of monkeys), as well as the North American Bigfoot, Asian Yeti (Abominable Snowman of Tibetan Buddhist lore), and Thunderbirds of the Southwest United States (which Shuker classifies into two kinds -- eagle-type birds and others said to resemble presumably extinct pterodactyls). The coelocanth, the jungle men, shapeshifters, and so on.

• The Beasts that Hide from Man
• The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals
• The Journal of Cryptozoology: Volume One
• Deception

• I-Team: The Fight to Save Natural Darkness
• Not-So-Total Recall: Selectively Erasing Unwanted Memories
• Uri Geller mystified by letterbox on Thames Sonning Bridge
• The Final Nail in the Jurassic Park Coffin?
• Extreme Life Forms: Life Found in the Sediments of an Antarctic Subglacial Lake
• Happy Anniversary Lehman Brothers, and What We Haven't Learned About Wall Street Over the Past Five Years